Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  Will said nothing, but he already knew what she would find. There were few if any scallops in the dredges; the lines had told him as much.

  They hoisted one dredge after the other and tossed their contents onto the culling board amidships. Eelgrass, stones, an outraged crab. One scallop, too junior to be legally taken by a waterman, and not one of Hannah’s tigerbacks.

  They moved on. Another mile of harbor, the chop growing stronger across the bow; and another mile, and another. An hour passed. They were close to the Horseshed, where Paul Winslow was supposed to be dredging in his beat-up twenty-footer, but not a craft was in sight.

  “Maybe he hit his limit early,” Jorie said hopefully.

  On their seventh test tow, they finally found scallops. Out of the twelve in the dredges, three were Hannah’s tigerbacks, two-inch juniors without a growth ring. Jorie was pleased as punch as she swept them off the culling board and back into the sea. Will moved the boat perhaps a hundred feet, and they tossed out the dredges again. His hand on the controls, he eased the boat forward, shading his eyes and studying the harbor jetties. The starboard breakwater was quite near now, and rain-spattered waves churned whitely against its massive rocks. Will imagined a body tossed like a log, sodden and defenseless, while the prow of the M/V Eagle sliced coldly through the channel.

  “Grab this,” Jorie ordered, and started the winch.

  Will reached for the dredge as it came up over the side, lowered it to the board, and upended the contents. More tigerbacks. More eelgrass. A crumpled can that had once been a Budweiser, probably off a transient power boat. And at the last, a slick plastic bag spilling out like a defunct jellyfish.

  Jorie counted the scallops and rubbed the screen of brown algae from their shells. “Eight in this one, five in the other.”

  “Tigerbacks?”

  She shook her head. “Just four of those.”

  Will picked up the plastic bag and frowned. Someone had weighted it to sink with several smooth brown stones the size of ostrich eggs—stones found on most of the island’s beaches. He tore open one end of the bag and looked closely at what it held.

  A crumpled pair of latex gloves. A small black oblong that upon examination revealed itself as a tape cassette. And at the bottom, fouled in the plastic, the spine of a hypodermic.

  Chapter Eight

  Elsewhere on the island that same morning, Merry Folger thrust her legs out of bed and deep into the sheepskin covering the bare wood floor. She had no need to glance out the window; the dim light filtering through her roman shade declared that the storm had settled down over Nantucket for the weekend. The weather had been bleak for the past year, in fact—raw summer giving way to a howling fall—as though Merry’s internal depression must be echoed in the upper atmosphere. She longed for a clearing trend.

  She glanced at the clock and saw that it was nearly eight. Peter was probably already back from his morning run, with a knife handle deep in a peanut butter jar. Perhaps he was wondering how she was. Thinking of calling, even.

  And if he did? What would she say?

  I gave up my vacation, Peter, for what looks like an accidental drowning. And yes, I did it to win my dad’s approval. He actually called me stupid last night.

  She fumbled her way toward the kitchen and her coffee-maker, wishing profoundly that she could spend the day indoors by the fire at Mason Farms, with a good dog and a good book for company. It was fortunate that Peter was off-island, Merry told herself; a holiday spent working in the miserable wet was somewhat more bearable without an enticing alternative.

  The thought had no sooner formed itself in her mind than she knew it for a lie. On-island or off, Peter would always be preferable to work of any kind. But she had somehow failed to convince him of that. If he ever decided to get back in touch, she had some apologies to make and some habits to mend.

  If he ever got back in touch. Her eyes strayed to the silent phone at her bedside, then slid away. Good thing she had a date with the Cottage Hospital morgue. Otherwise, she’d be waiting for his call for the rest of the day.

  “Good marnin’, Marradith.” Clarence Strangerfield leaned against the wall of the hospital corridor, a cup of coffee in his hand. Just beyond him was the door to the small room that served as the island’s morgue—a temporary berth at best, with a swift dispatching to the Cape or Boston. “I din’ expect to see ya back heyah so soon.”

  “Me neither. What’s your opinion of this mess?”

  Clarence shrugged. “Sad set o’ circumstances all ‘round, don’cha think?”

  “Ayeh.” Merry fell into Clarence’s comfortable way of speech, as familiar as the island’s weathered shingles. “Dad tells me you’re flying to Boston. Attending the autopsy.”

  “Orduhs o’ Dan Peterson. Old Dan wants everthin’ done by the book, case it’s not just a drownin’.”

  Dan Peterson was the DA in Barnstable under whose jurisdiction the various law enforcement branches of the Cape and Islands fell. He rarely allowed the local force to handle a murder, preferring to let the state police take over; but in a probable drowning, why not give the locals a little fun? In the DA’s estimation, the Nantucket force was just about capable of witnessing an autopsy, Merry thought irritably—no matter how many cases they had managed to close for him. Peterson was still smarting over her insertion in the Osborne investigation last spring—justifiably, Merry thought. And because of her incompetence, the DA would be unlikely to let the Nantucket police within a nautical mile of another murder.

  “Have you seen the corpse yet?” she asked Clarence.

  “O’ cahrse. I came ovuh yestiddy with Dr. John. Missed the scene, but Howie handled that. He’s learnin’ fast, is Howie.”

  “Do you mind if I go in?”

  “I figgared yah din’ come all the way out heyah just to wave goodbye, Marradith.” Clarence crumpled the coffee cup and tossed it in a trash bin. “But I’ll wahrn yah—he’s not a pretty sight. Wait a minute while I get a nurse.”

  Merry waited. The nurse—a gangly young man with a shaved head—ambled over genially enough and fumbled with a set of keys.

  “Who ID’d him?” Merry asked Clarence in a subdued tone.

  “One o’ the roommates. The doctah fellah.”

  She did a mental review of Seitz’s notes—Cohen, wasn’t it?—and turned to the man unlocking the morgue. “Is Dr. Cohen around?”

  “Sorry. Went home at six.” The nurse flipped on the fluorescent lights and waved her through the door.

  Jay Santorski, as Clarence said, was not a pretty sight. The bluish tinge to his skin was unsettling. A single eye stared blankly at the ceiling; the other socket showed gorily hollow.

  “Why didn’t somebody close his eyelids?” Merry asked irritably.

  “Couldn’t,” the male nurse volunteered. “They’re stuck that way.”

  “Rigor?”

  “Nope. Rigor’s passed off. This is some sort of paralysis. Dr. Cohen has never seen anything like it, he says.”

  Merry leaned over Jay Santorski’s body to stare straight into his remaining eye. “Clare,” she said slowly, “the pupil is dilated.”

  “So?”

  “So, if he’d shot up heroin or even cocaine, you’d expect it to be a pinpoint. Score one for Howie.”

  “But look at the color of his skin, Marradith. I’ve seen that in overdoses befarh.”

  So had Merry. Santorski’s skin was almost luminescent, as though a cold hard light—his soul, perhaps—was struggling to break free of his body. Heroin worked as a depressant on the central nervous system, creating transient euphoria—and in fatal cases respiratory collapse. Deprived of oxygen, the extremities grew cold and lost the flush of life. Breathing became shallow, and eventually ceased altogether. Nothing about Jay Santorski’s appearance was at variance with a death from heroin.

  Except his dilated pupil.

  Merry scanned the left arm, looking for telltale marks, and frowned slightly. “Where are those needle tracks, Clare?
”

  “Above and to the right of the crease. Yah have to look pretty hahrd. Doctah John wasn’t sure what they were until he pulled out his magnifyin’ glass.”

  She peered more closely, and saw what might have been an enlarged pore, slightly reddened. And another. Maybe four in all, scattered around the shadow of a vein. Had Merry been the investigating officer, she would have missed the needle marks entirely. So, she thought, would Howie Seitz.

  “Good thing Fairborn had that magnifying glass,” she said dryly. “Although I don’t remember him examining a corpse with one before.”

  Clarence grinned. “I suspect it had somethin’ to do with yahr fathah, Marradith, and the good doctah not wantin’ to appear slipshod. The Chief saw the mahrks furst, yah see, and made poor Fairborn look foolish. So he whips out his little glass and makes a production o’ the business.”

  It was as though her father had been expecting needle marks, Merry thought, from the moment he saw the body. Didn’t Clarence think it strange? Was she the only critical eye in the entire station?

  Last night’s uneasiness returned with a vengeance. To quell its insistent voice, Merry resumed her study of the corpse. Forensic observations, as her father had rightly pointed out, could not be taken once Santorski was flown across the Sound. If he had been killed outright by a malevolent hand, his corpse might share the secret.

  “There’s chafing at the wrists,” she said abruptly, “as though his hands were bound. Dad mentioned that, but he never said how obvious it looked.”

  “It’s on the ankles, too,” Clarence told her, “but remembah, Marradith, he came out o’ the watah neah the jetties. His clothes were tahrn in places from the rocks. You can see a scratch on the side of his thigh, if you come ovah heyah. Cut clean through his pants.”

  She looked, and was forced to agree. The mounting chop of yesterday’s nor’easter must have slammed the corpse repeatedly against the rocky breakwater, while the direction of the gale would probably have kept the current from carrying Santorski out to sea.

  “Hard to say whethah the cuts are death-trauma or posthumous, what with the watah cleaning the wounds,” Clarence added.

  “Let’s ask the state crime lab to check the wrists and ankles for fibers, all the same,” she countered. “I want to be able to rule out … coercion.”

  “You mean murdah, dontcha?”

  “I suppose I do.” She paused, considering. “You think I’m making more of this than I should?”

  Clarence shrugged. “Stands to reason. Yahr fahther gets all hot undah the collah and drags yah home. Yah want it to be fer somethin’ more than an accident.”

  “Why do you think Dad is hot under the collar, Clare?”

  His honest brown eyes held hers for a fraction of second, then slid away. “Holiday weekend, maybe. Bodies in the harbah have got to be bad for business. And there’s the mattah of needle mahrks, don’t forget.”

  The needle marks. Which nobody should have seen.

  “What I’d like to know, Marradith,” Clarence continued, “is where the ropes went. If this fellah was tied up.”

  “If he was bound,” Merry said thoughtfully, “it was probably so that somebody could inject him with an overdose of heroin, in the hope of making his death look like a stupid mistake. For that to seem plausible, he’d have to be untied before he was dumped in the Easy Street Basin.”

  “Followed by his bike.”

  “But why would anybody do that to a young scalloper?”

  “And who would do such a thing?” Clarence added.

  “A heroin dealer, maybe?—Who was afraid of Santorski for some reason?” Merry shook her head. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Clare. We need to know more about this guy’s life, before we can speculate about his death.”

  “Shouldn’t be too long, Marradith, with the autopsy scheduled for this aftahnoon.”

  “How soon do you think we can get the bloodwork results?”

  Clarence’s lips moved soundlessly as he surveyed his mental calendar. “Wednesday, maybe?”

  Merry took a last critical look at what had once been Jay Santorski. His body was as perfect and lifeless as a Michelangelo. “He took care of himself,” she couldn’t help saying.

  “Up to a point,” Clarence amended.

  “But he must have worked out. He’s got the body of an athlete.”

  “Athletes have died of overdoses befarh.”

  “Oh, Clare,” she said. “He had his whole life ahead of him. What a goddamn waste.”

  They stood in silence under the fluorescent glare. Then Merry nodded to the nurse, who leaned against the room’s sole windowsill. His eyes were focused on a gull pacing the unpaved Mill Hill Lane, a soggy french fry clamped firmly in its beak. “Thank you. We’re done here.”

  As if by mutual consent, she and Clarence stopped in the corridor outside the morgue’s door. “Did you find anything unusual among his effects?”

  “Wallet, keys, couple o’ packs of matches—phone numbahs on those, hard to make out. They’re so waterlogged, the ink is as good as gone. Ah’ve got ‘em down to the station drying. When I get back from the autopsy tonight, I’ll turn some infrared on ‘em and see what I can find.”

  He grinned, and Merry smiled back. Clarence loved what he called “the Sherlock end o’ the business.” He’d probably spend the bulk of Christmas Stroll in his small evidence room, pipe between his teeth and lights turned on Jay Santorski’s matchbook covers.

  Her own weekend would be a little more diffuse. There were the victim’s roommates to interview, his room to search, his last moments to relive. Anything was preferable, Merry reflected, to waiting for a phone call that never came.

  Margot St. John set her coffee mug on Paul’s plain pine kitchen table, then pressed her fingers against her eyes. The buoyant tide of poison had receded, leaving her like so much driftwood on the rainy shore.

  She was twenty-two years old this morning, although only her parents were left to remember that. It was months since they had known where she was.

  And this morning, like last night, Jay was still dead.

  In the uncompromising glare of eight A.M., Margot looked both defenseless and old. Her skin was chilled, and raked with the occasional shudder; her lips had a bluish cast. Dark shadows smudged the transparent skin beneath her eyes. The faintest web of lines had begun to map the terrain of her face, branching like veins from the corners of her mouth, the creases near her sherry-colored eyes, across the plane of her brow. An idle observer might have thought she laughed too much. Her friends knew otherwise.

  The kitchen smelled of mildew. Margot clenched her fingers, drew the terry-cloth robe more tightly about her body, and then turned to retch in the sink. Painful dry heaving—there was nothing, after all, in her stomach but a little sour coffee. She doubled over, arms folded across her abdomen, and let the tears slip down her cheeks.

  She felt Paul’s hand in the small of her back. “You need some food.”

  “I can’t eat.”

  “Neither can I, but we ought to try.” He leaned closer, supporting her. “I’ve decided to quit, Margot. Starting today. I need food to do it.”

  “Oh, right.” She stared at him from under the curtain of her hair, her gaze as dark as death. Paul looked this morning like what he was—a kid with a nasty habit. “Have you got any money?”

  “Some. Get your dress on. Well walk into town, have some bacon and eggs at Fog Island. Then I’ll drive you home.”

  She could almost smell the overripe interior of a close-packed restaurant on a winter morning—bacon grease, the spat of frying, the funk of wet dogs fresh from a run on Jetties Beach. Promiscuous air, unshaven faces. The vision induced more retching.

  “Come on, Margot. I should do some work this weekend.”

  “I can’t face eggs.”

  “Toast, then,” Paul said gently. “Tea and toast. Maybe you could quit, too.”

  And despite everything, laughter bubbled in her throat. It was not
a joyous sound.

  Chapter Nine

  “Low-pressure systems,” Dr. Barry Cohen said, as though that explained everything in life, and took a sip of his coffee. “They induce labor. Look into any hospital on a stormy night, and you’ll find the maternity ward filled to overflowing. I haven’t slept in two days.”

  The doctor, if Merry judged rightly, had been attempting to amend that situation when she had blasted his dreams with a ring of the front doorbell. He had hardly been pleased at the disturbance—a repeat of Howie Seitz’s the previous morning—but when he saw that Merry was female, he summoned politeness. This was perhaps more insulting than undisguised annoyance; it suggested hypocrisy to Merry, and a latent sexism, and above all, a habit of disguising feeling.

  “What’s really going on?” Barry had asked, his eyes bleary and one hand fixed firmly on the door handle. He was short and spare, a wisp of a man with shoulders hunched like a question mark; his hairline was receding. She had difficulty thinking of him as Dr. Cohen; he was younger than she, and that fact alone destroyed his authority. “I thought Jay drowned.”

  “He probably did. But there’s a possibility of a drug overdose.”

  Barry had whistled, and gestured her inside.

  Like so much of the new construction in Surf side, the place where Jay Santorski had lived was an upside-down house—bedrooms on the ground floor, kitchen and living room located above, where it was possible to glimpse the Atlantic. Merry had followed the doctor, who was barefoot and still dressed in teal-blue hospital scrubs, upstairs to his waiting coffeepot. Presumably the scrubs served Barry as pajamas; but Merry would not have been surprised to learn that he had fallen from the emergency room straight into his bedsheets the previous evening. He wore the hollow-eyed grimness of the sleep-deprived like a POW insignia.

  “So Jay was using,” Barry said. He was standing now in his kitchen, seemingly held upright only by the vertical force of his tile-topped counters. “I gotta say I’m surprised. And then again, I’m not. He hung with a strange crowd. Scallopers. Musicians. Blue-collar grunge.”