Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “I don’t know, Mere.” Howie shook his head. “It’s pretty speculative. Jay’s body didn’t look bruised, as it would have if he fought. He wasn’t knocked unconscious with anything.”

  “But Harley’s protecting something, Seitz. He quite obviously didn’t want to discuss the nature of his late-night visitor. And every time I tried to probe his feelings for Jay, I got a polite and distant whitewash.”

  “Did you happen to mention drugs?”

  “Yes. Harley insisted Jay showed no signs of heroin abuse while working on his boat.”

  Howie did not reply, and as they turned into Water Street, his eyes were fixed firmly on his shoes. Merry glanced at him, saw the morose expression on his face.

  “What is it, Seitz? Tell me.”

  “You probably scared the hell out of him, Merry. The girl he loves is a heroin addict, and you just told him Jay died of an overdose—Jay, who most of us are certain never used drugs before. Where else would he have gotten the stuff, but from Margot St. John? That’s whom Harley is protecting.”

  “Wait a minute.” Merry shaded her eyes with her hand, as though the gesture might aid her comprehension. “You knew Margot was taking drugs, and you never charged her with possession?”

  Howie looked away.

  “You’re as bad as Tim Potts, Seitz! What do you think law enforcement is—an occasional hobby?”

  “Are you always oh duty, Merry?” he asked brusquely. “When you quit work for the day and leave the station, do you pull out the Explorer’s lights and haul over every speeding driver between here and Mason Farms? Or do you let it slide and keep going?”

  “A speeding ticket is hardly heroin, Seitz.”

  “What do you do?” he insisted.

  Merry sighed. “That depends. If the driver is just enjoying the call of the open road, and I’m on my way to Peter’s for a Friday night dinner, I’d probably ignore it and speed along with him. If he’s weaving uncontrollably and looks like he’s about to run head-on into the opposite lane, I’d probably pull him over. You know how many DUIs we charge on this island. Particularly in the off-season. It’s our most common violation.”

  Howie raked a hand through his black curls in frustration and looked unconvinced.

  “If someone is endangering another person, I have to intervene,” Merry added gently. “But I agree that it’s no fun to feel like the perpetual Enforcer. Okay? Does that help?”

  “A little.” Howie shrugged, still unwilling to meet her eyes. “It’s just kind of hard to adjust. I mean, if I’m out at a party with somebody, and I see something, do I necessarily have to report it? Maybe according to the book—but how does anybody live by the book, anymore?”

  “You don’t want to be playing swing at a club and have everybody say, ‘See the bass player? He’s a cop. So watch what you do and say around him,’”

  “Exactly.” Howie looked relieved. “I’m barely twenty-five myself. Margot’s even younger. It’s like tattling to your parents about a kid sister.”

  “It’s nothing like that at all, Seitz,” Merry countered without hesitation. “This is heroin we’re talking about. And your parents are giving you a paycheck to stop its distribution and general social destruction.”

  “You’re very sure of yourself, Merry.”

  “I have to be. I’ve lived with the same problem for years.”

  “You don’t seem to find it too hard.”

  “Actually, I find it tougher than you ever will.” She turned away from him and walked the last few feet to the station entrance. “You didn’t have to go through high school branded as the police chief’s daughter. Do you know how many parties I wasn’t invited to? And you didn’t have to start policing your neighbors a few years out of the Academy. I hated that part of it for a long time. There are always going to be people who assume a mask when you’re only fifty feet away, and who never feel comfortable in your presence.”

  “So how do you deal with it?”

  “I have fewer friends. I stick with the real ones—the ones who stuck with me.”

  “But that’s just it, Mere!” he protested. “I don’t have many friends here! It’s really hard to make them, sometimes, when you’ve got this badge on your chest. Particularly off-season, when the island only seems to get smaller. Harley’s band has been the one thing I could count on.”

  “It’ll get easier, Seitz.”

  “It better,” he muttered, “or I’m heading back to the mainland.”

  “A different place won’t give you a different life.”

  “What will?”

  “Growing up,” she said, and pulled open the door.

  Chapter Twelve

  As he paced the edge of Burnham Dell field that Saturday afternoon, Rafe da Silva looked like he was braced against the pervasive chill of early December. He certainly felt the edge of the vanishing nor’easter through his windbreaker; but the real reason for his crossed arms and stony look was an almost painful exhilaration. Will Starbuck, the boy Rafe loved, was suited up and in formation at the most critical game of his senior year.

  Any other day, Will would have warmed the bench and thumped the backs of his teammates at the game’s end, hiding his disappointment behind a wider grin. But the Whalers had bobbled their first possession of the super-bowl game, and watched Boston English score on the turnover. Rafe cared nothing for who won or lost at this exact moment—what mattered to him was that Jason Eppley, the first-string punt returner who normally edged out Will, had twisted his ankle thirty seconds into the day. Coach Victor (as the venerable Nantucket football god was known) had sent Will into the fray with a wordless nod and a clap on the back.

  Rafe paced a bit and wished that Tess were here. Any other game, she would have stood with the rest of the island’s parents and cheered the Whalers on; but this was Christmas Stroll weekend, and she couldn’t leave the Greengage. Thirty plucked geese were even now drooping on various prep tables in the restaurant’s kitchen, their chest cavities stuffed with sage and oysters.

  At least a thousand or two people were crowding the sidelines today, blocking Rafe’s view. He craned on tiptoe to look for Will, and caught a distant flash of helmeted head. Impossible to read anything of his stepson’s expression—but Rafe saw that Will was poised like a runner at the start of a race, eyes riveted on the Boston English kicker, his taped fingers flexing. Rafe could feel the boy’s nervy anguish as though it were his own.

  The Bulldogs punted. The ball soared high, a purposeful bird rocketing through the damp air, then plummeted toward Will. He stepped back, waiting, and leaped to meet its fall. Raced perhaps eight yards, or ten, to the thirty-two-yard line, before a Bulldog brought him down with a tackle to the legs. He rolled away as though nothing had even hit him, and shook his head slightly—that head, that had once been damaged enough to require physical therapy. Craning again, Rafe saw his boy’s wide-mouthed grin, saw him fuss with his jersey in embarrassed triumph. Unable to restrain himself, Rafe cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted Will’s number, twenty-nine, with every particle of his being. Will looked over his shoulder at Rafe, then turned away. Like every other eighteen-year-old embarrassed by a father’s pride.

  “Hey, buddy,” Merry Folger said at his elbow.

  Rafe lifted her off the ground with his hug. “Wasn’t that great, Mere? Wasn’t it just incredible? Did you see that play?”

  “Missed it,” she replied. “Did we score?”

  “Will just returned a punt!”

  “Yeah? Hey. That’s wonderful, Rafe.”

  “I can never get over it, Mere, the way the kid always bounces back. When we had to fly him out to Mass Gen a couple of years ago—” Rafe stopped. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were on vacation for ten days. Is Pete back, too?”

  “No.” Merry zipped her parka, shivering, and Rafe was suddenly aware of the cold. “I’m here because a scalloper drowned in the boat basin yesterday, and Dad thought I should handle it.”

 
“That drowning? You gave up the Mason Family Weekend for a drowning?”

  “I know, I know. Peter was not amused.”

  She said it lightly, but Rafe read the truth in her expression. Wisely, he kept silent.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know the assistant football coach by sight, would you?”

  “Dave Haddenfield? He’s just beyond the bench, by the Gatorade cooler. Tall guy with glasses.”

  Merry looked in the direction Rafe pointed, her black eyebrows furrowing slightly. “Thanks.”

  “No problem, Girl Scout. Listen—”

  “Yeah?”

  She managed to smile at the familiar childhood nickname, but Rafe wasn’t convinced. For months, Merry had been laboring under a cloud. Her shadowed eyes, the strain about her mouth, betrayed another sleepless night; and if she had agreed to investigate this drowning, it wouldn’t be the last. What the girl needed was time off. Couldn’t her father understand that? And where was Peter Mason, when Merry needed him most?

  The thought of Peter recalled the reason for Merry’s trip to the mainland—those Boston depositions. Rafe considered asking her how they had gone, then decided against it.

  “If you aren’t doing anything tomorrow after dinner,” he said quickly, “come by the Greengage. Tess is having a closing party for a few friends. She’d love to see you.”

  “Great,” Merry said. “I’ll be there.”

  Dr. Barry Cohen had described his tenant Dave Haddenfield as an overgrown Labrador puppy—a type unlikely to shed much light on Jay Santorski’s character. Merry privately thought she was certain to learn more from the reporter, Sue Morningstar; but since the high school fell right in the middle of Merry’s route back to town, efficiency dictated she stop.

  The lean, professorial figure Merry finally located at the far end of the Whalers’ sideline looked nothing like the enthusiastic ball-chaser Cohen’s description had promised. Haddenfield was more of a whippet than a Labrador, with a skittish, hungry look to his bony frame. He was well over six feet. His nose was sharp and his wrists protruded bonily from his team jacket. He swayed slightly as he followed the action of the game.

  Merry edged around a knot of second-string players and tried to attract the coach’s attention. “Dave Haddenfield?”

  He looked down at her through his tortoiseshell glasses as though she might be a Football Mother, come to plead for her son’s chances in the game.

  She held out her badge. “I’m Detective Meredith Folger of the Nantucket Police. I know this isn’t the best place to talk about your roommate, Jay Santorski—”

  Haddenfield lost his distracted look immediately. “God, yes,” he said. “You’re here about Jay?”

  “That’s right. Could you spare a few minutes at halftime?”

  “I guess—that is … Coach Victor will expect me to talk to the guys … and we need to go over stats—”

  “Would after the game be better?”

  “Yes.” Palpable relief.

  “I’ll look for you in the gym, okay? We could sit on the bleachers and talk there.”

  A roar went up from the surging home crowd, and Merry completely lost Dave Haddenfield’s attention.

  “Touchdown!”

  He jumped skyward, fist in the air, and came down pounding the back of anyone within reach. He was shouting something incomprehensible, a guttural rush, every line of his body straining. A man transformed by joy, or a similar violence. Merry drew a deep breath and stepped backward.

  “Dave!”

  Coach Victor, shouting from his position twenty feet down the line. “Where’s our kicker, for crying out loud! What a time to visit the John!”

  The fierce exultation died abruptly from Haddenfield’s face. He looked around for the hapless kicker. A flushed-faced boy, his helmet tucked under his arm, sped mortified to the coach’s side. Only then did Haddenfield relax, and remember Merry.

  “I’m sorry—what were you saying?”

  “When would you like to talk?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Let’s say, four o’clock. The post-game should be over by then, but the party isn’t until six. Do you know the school?”

  “I graduated from it.”

  “A few years ago, I’d guess.” Haddenfield grinned. “There’s a coaching office now that wasn’t around in your time. In the corridor behind the gym.”

  “I’ll see you around four.”

  Will was standing next to Rafe when Merry struggled back up the sideline. The boy had traded his helmet for a Whalers baseball cap with an impeccably rounded brim. Although the rain had ended, he had draped a poncho carelessly over his uniform. Merry had no idea who he was until she was almost upon him; and this, more than any transformation of height or voice, told her how much Will Starbuck had grown in the past few months. The uncertain kid was gone, and in his place was a too-thin, too-tall teenager on the edge of being a man.

  He stood with his arms crossed, unconsciously mimicking his stepfather, and his eyes were riveted on the game. Since his fortuitous return of the Bulldogs’ punt, the Nantucket team had crushed the despairing English. The superbowl was turning into a rout.

  “Great play, Will,” Merry said, and kissed his cheek.

  “You saw it?”

  “Yep,” she lied. “I was very impressed.”

  He grinned and went uncharacteristically red. Then his eyes strayed to a ponytailed girl in a torn pair of jeans who sat in the stands a few yards away. She smiled, great doe eyes crinkling at the corners, and gave a little wave. The sleeves of her ribbed polo were pulled down over her fingertips for warmth. She was huddled against none other than Paul Winslow, who must have finally finished his dredging of the Easy Street Basin; and Merry felt a stab of worry as she looked from the pair to Will Starbuck.

  “I should get back,” Will said hurriedly. His eyes dragged unwillingly away from the ponytailed girl. “We’re not supposed to leave Coach during game time. I just came to ask Rafe to catch you if he saw you again.”

  “Me?” Merry asked, surprised. “What do you need?”

  “I found something in the harbor this morning. Dad thought you might want to see it.”

  Dad. Merry had never heard Will use that word for Rafe—it had belonged for too long to the dead Dan Starbuck—but from the effortless way the boy now tossed it out, Rafe had clearly earned it. She smiled.

  “You go on,” Rafe told Will, with a little push. “We don’t want to get you in trouble. I’ll take Merry to the truck.”

  Will nodded briefly and looked suddenly stern, as though he had no desire to enter the game again and would never burn with hope for a second chance at glory. Then he shoved his way through the crowd of Whaler fans. They parted for him with glances both affectionate and proud.

  “So let’s go, Girl Scout.” Rafe was staring after his boy. “Will seems to think this is important.”

  Merry thought it was pretty important, too, when Rafe pulled the damp plastic bag from the bed of his old truck. She stifled an exclamation and ran hurriedly to her car for a pair of latex gloves, just in case. Then, holding the bag aloft like a kid with a carnival goldfish, she checked each end. One had been torn open, then knotted shut.

  “Did Will do this? Or did he find it that way?”

  “He opened it. Sorry. When he saw the needle, he got more careful. But by that time it was too late.”

  Natural, in a boy who had no reason to find anything sinister about a bunch of trash; but it meant two sets of fingerprints to exclude if necessary—Rafe’s and his stepson’s. Merry flattened the bag with her fingertips and stared at the things it held. A thimbleful of translucent ocean, a few grains of sand, an olive-green tendril of seaweed drifting on a lost current.

  Latex gloves and a microtape.

  And the hypodermic needle, of course.

  Her green eyes flicked up to Rafe’s sober brown ones. “Do you know where he found this?”

  “Somewhere off the jetties, I think. The actual jetties, mind—not the
beach.”

  “Right.” Where Jay Santorski’s body had been pulled from the harbor, as Will and Rafe probably knew. Bad news traveled like the Spanish flu around the island off-season. Did they know, as well, that the scalloper was familiar with hypodermic needles? Or had they made a lucky guess? One thing Rafe did understand, Merry thought, was that the strangest things turned out to be important—turned out to be evidence, even, in a serious crime. Years ago in New Bedford, lack of evidence had nearly killed him.

  “Will said there were a couple of fair-sized pebbles weighting the bag. So it would sink.” Rafe emphasized the last to convey what Merry already knew—that someone had hoped this bag would never be found. “He threw the pebbles back. Hell, he might’ve thrown the whole thing away. It wasn’t until he showed it to me that we thought of you.”

  “I’m glad you did, although I have no idea whether it’s important.”

  Rafe eyed the microcassette showing darkly through the clouded plastic. “For that, you might need a tape recorder.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  A tape recorder Merry certainly had—buried deep in a miscellany of Post-it notes, rubber bands, paper clips, and half-empty packets of gum that lived forgotten in the middle drawer of her desk. The voice-activated microrecorder was a standard police item, easy to conceal, for use in delicate situations. But before it could be of any use, the waterlogged tape from the harbor bottom would have to be thoroughly dried. Still wearing gloves, Merry carried the cassette and Will’s interesting plastic bag downstairs to Clarence’s evidence room.

  It was empty. Even if the crime scene chief returned from the Boston autopsy that evening, he was unlikely to report to the station until Monday morning. But Clarence Strangerfield was a man of method. He had strung a length of clean, new fishing line from one gray filing cabinet to another; and clipped neatly to the line were two match-books, blotched and crinkled with seawater. Jay Santorski’s matchbooks. Completely dry, by this time. Merry peered at them idly. Nothing but chicken scratches and a blur of faded ink.