Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “With you on board? Almost certainly.” She didn’t waste time in effusive thanks, but, lost in calculation, began to pace in front of her bubbling tanks. “This is exactly what I’ve needed. Something I can hold up as an emblem of investor confidence. It’ll make a world of difference. When can we finalize?”

  Peter’s lips twitched. “You’re welcome, Hannah.”

  “Oh, Peter—you must know I’m grateful beyond words. You’ve given me lifeblood. I won’t forget it.”

  She moved to him swiftly and kissed him full on the mouth. He stiffened, and took a slight step backward.

  Behind the glasses, Hannah’s gray eyes turned suddenly mocking. “Don’t worry. I won’t scare you away. Or try to compete with the little cop. I value your … patronage … too much.”

  “Thank you.” A host of long-forgotten images—scenes from a summer ten years ago when he had toyed with the notion of Hannah Moore—flooded into his brain. She had always valued patronage over love; it was her most chilling quality.

  “I’ll call my lawyer,” she said. “Could you meet with him tomorrow?”

  “Provided you can resolve one difficulty.”

  “Yes?”

  Peter walked over to the hut’s window and gazed out at the storm. Marsh grass bent double by a vicious wind, waves churning like molten iron on the blackened shore. The sort of afternoon best spent indoors, with a book and some sherry for company. And Meredith, of course. Where was she now? Consumed with the disaster that had overtaken the police force? Peter had watched the newscasts. Thursday’s edition of the Inky would be all over it. And much as Merry had disliked Matt Bailey, Peter knew that she would be anguished at his violent death—the unnecessary ugliness of it. She would sleep badly, eat little, and spend her waking hours silently obsessed with the details of the case. He had lived through these things before. His usual role was to listen—to feed her soup, and make her laugh; to hand her stolen comfort that invariably made her feel guilty.

  Only this time, she had not called.

  “What difficulty?” Hannah asked him.

  He turned away from the window. “I talked to Charles this morning. At his real estate office.”

  She gripped the back of her desk chair with both hands. “What could you possibly have to say to Charles?”

  “He owns this estate. I wanted to know whether he intended to keep it.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That he plans to put the place on the market this spring.”

  “This spring.”

  “After Easter. It’s the best time to list a house, he says.”

  “Easter.” She was repeating his words as though they were a French lesson, and she a very bad student. “He can’t.”

  “Hannah—” Peter took a step toward her. “You must understand my position. Ill back you in your present circumstances, but not with the prospect of the lab’s closure in a matter of months. I can’t agree to any commitment until the matter of AquaVital’s future is decided. That’s something you and Charles have to discuss.”

  She released the desk chair, and clenched her hands into fists. “These threats. Like a chain around my neck.”

  “It didn’t sound like a threat to me,” Peter said gently. “It sounded like a promise.”

  Jack Winslow turned away from the storm filling the hospital window and gazed down at his sleeping son. He felt all the terrible burden of tenderness that dreaming children—regardless of their age—invariably provoke in a watchful parent. Jack had held his love for Paul at bay for so many months, in the belief that only a determined hardness would shake the boy from disaster; and now that he had let go—had admitted how precious Paul was, how irreplaceable—he felt weak and old. He wanted to take the thin body in his arms and cradle it, as he had done so many years ago. He wanted the boy’s young face to turn against his own in sleep, and lie there, gently breathing and certain, an eternal two-year-old.

  Paul’s eyelids fluttered and opened. For an instant, before comprehension returned, they were filled with a nameless fear.

  “Hey, buddy,” Jack said quietly, and touched his shoulder.

  Paul thrust himself upward against his pillow, yawned hugely, and shook his head. “Hi, Dad. What’s up?”

  “We’ve got the word to go.”

  “You mean, I can leave?”

  Jack nodded. “You’re coming home. They’ve given me some medication. Then tomorrow we’ll fly to the mainland.”

  “I’m going to the clinic?” The fringe of sleep dissipated and was gone. “What about the cops?”

  “They left a half hour ago.”

  Paul shuddered uncontrollably, pulled the sheet tight around his body, and stared at the empty doorway. “Shit,” he muttered.

  Jack’s brow furrowed. “I thought you’d be happy.”

  “Could you leave me alone for a minute, Dad? I’ve got to make a call.”

  His father hesitated.

  “A minute, max. Then I’ll get dressed and we can go.”

  “Okay. I’ll be outside in the hall.”

  Paul waited until the door had closed behind Jack Winslow. Then he reached for the phone.

  Four unanswered rings, and a forwarding to dispatch.

  “Police.”

  “I’d like to speak to Detective Folger.” Paul’s heart was racing, and his mouth felt dry—sensations to which he was well accustomed, although rarely in the absence of drugs.

  “She’s out of the office. May I take a message?”

  Paul thought for a moment. “No,” he said, and hung up.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “You mean Winslow’s been released?” John Folger cried in outrage late that afternoon.

  Dr. Barry Cohen drew himself up to his full five feet eight inches. At Cottage Hospital, doctors were king—and police chief, too, if it came to that. “We released Mr. Winslow into the custody of his father, who will be admitting him tomorrow to a state-approved rehabilitation center in the Berkshires. It was all perfectly in order, I assure you.”

  “Why weren’t we notified?”

  “But you were” Cohen made a play of consulting his clipboard. “At noon today. We understood that Detective Folger—your daughter, I believe—was in charge of Paul Winslow’s case. She was duly consulted, and referred us to the state police. It was they who authorized the patient’s release.”

  John glanced at the anonymous clock face high on the hospital walls. After four, and Winslow could be anywhere. He closed his eyes in frustration. “Give me the kid’s phone number. And his home address.”

  • • •

  The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Quisset Campus was an impressive grouping of low-storied buildings fronting Vineyard Sound. There was a bicycle path running along the water, and a decorative pond set like a jewel in a small garden, now bleakly dormant. Under the present veil of storm the campus looked depressed, as though it wished to be left alone; Merry felt vaguely guilty as she mentioned Melrose Taylor’s name at the security gate, and progressed in splendid isolation down the sweep of tree-shrouded drive.

  Taylor’s lab was located in the Rinehart Coastal Research Center, a mere stone’s throw from the bike path and ornamental pond. He was a small, bird-headed man with a shock of white hair, peering intently through an electron microscope at the mitochondria of some unfortunate sea creature’s cell. When his assistant announced Merry’s presence in the hushed tones appropriate to a chapel, Taylor ignored her just long enough to shoot a micrograph of whatever he was seeing.

  “That’s it,” he said, pushing his lab stool away from the scope’s controls. “Develop it and file it with the others, Lori, before I leave.”

  “What about the tissue?”

  “File it.” Taylor cocked his head and smiled at Merry. What was visible of his body was tanned, she noticed, as though he had recently been in the tropics; and although he was probably around her father’s age, he gave the impression of greater youth.

  “Mel Tayl
or,” he said, rising and extending his hand.

  “Meredith Folger.”

  “Detective Meredith Folger.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  He laughed, and motioned her to follow him through the jungle of test tubes, Bunsen burners, and saltwater tanks, to a minuscule office where journals and computer printouts were stacked shoulder-high. “Find a seat, if you can.”

  “Thanks,” Merry said, glancing about ineffectually. She set her purse on the floor and perched on the edge of a file cabinet.

  “This stuff has been here for years,” Taylor explained apologetically. “Long before my time. Like the mountain, it waits for Mohammed. And we’re happy to come.”

  Merry reached for her notebook and half-glasses. “This must be something like Mecca, I suppose, to a marine biologist.”

  “Yes. Although my own degree is in the aquatic sciences—a slightly different emphasis.”

  “How so?”

  “Civil engineering, rather than biology. I studied at MIT before Harvard deigned to hire me.”

  “I see,” Merry said uncomprehendingly.

  “No you don’t!” Taylor said roguishly. “And it doesn’t really matter. I’ve never really done anything like civil engineering in my life. I study the physiological and genetic regulation of dinoflagellates—their patterns of growth and migration worldwide. It’s partly geography, partly a desire to muck about in boats, and mostly a yen to cut things up and paste them back together. What can I do for you?”

  “Tell me about Jay.”

  Taylor’s jocularity instantly fled. It was followed by an expression of such sadness that the little man seemed to age before Merry’s eyes. “Poor kid,” he said. “Was it really heroin?”

  “How did you ever get that idea?” Merry asked, astonished at the rapidity with which investigative theory traveled.

  “Owen Harley called me over the weekend to tell me about Jay’s death. He said he’d heard Jay was on drugs when he went into the water. I couldn’t believe it.” The scientist shook his head. “I absolutely could not believe it.”

  “The autopsy results have pretty much ruled out heroin,” Merry told him. “If that’s any comfort.”

  “Then what was it? Alcohol?”

  “No. Actually, Doctor, the confusion surrounding Jay’s death is largely why I’m here. I hoped you could tell me why he visited you the day before he died.”

  Taylor frowned. “I thought that visit was something of a secret.”

  “I found a piece of paper in Jay’s room that had your name on it.” Merry reached in a manila envelope she had brought with her from Nantucket and retrieved the paper. “Do those words mean anything to you?”

  Taylor scanned the two lines. “The Albatross IV is the Fisheries Service research vessel. I did a stint on it a few weeks ago—as Jay was aware. He met the boat when it docked last Wednesday. I was surprised, not to mention pleased. Jay is—was—one of my favorite students at Harvard.”

  “You hadn’t expected to see him.”

  “No. But he came on a matter of some urgency.”

  “Larval tigers?”

  Taylor smiled. “Jay asked me to look at a scallop under the electron microscope. The tigerback. He’d found it in a Nantucket lab, and thought it might be a sport.”

  “A what?” Merry said.

  “An organism genetically different from its parents. A mutated offspring. Anyway, we looked at it under the EM, and failed to discover much that was striking. So I ran a liquified sample through our mass spectrometer and compared the results to a control sample of common bay scallop.”

  Merry reached in her purse and withdrew the image of colored bars Jay had left with Margot St. John before his death. “Is this the spectrogram that resulted?”

  “Yes. That’s the tigerback.”

  “But what does it tell you, exactly?”

  “The chemical composition of the tigerback’s tissues. As represented by bands on the graph.” Taylor gestured vaguely toward a machine dominating one counter of the room beyond the small office. “The mass spectrometer is a remarkable bit of junk, Detective. There are about ten million organic chemicals in the world, and an infinite number of combinations of them in nature. The spectrometer tells us which chemicals are present in a sample, in what configuration—and the spectrogram gives us a molecular footprint, as it were. An identifiable signature. You must have run across the spectrometer before—it’s used quite often in police work.”

  “By the FBI, and the state crime lab,” Merry observed. “Not by small island police departments. So this graph is the scallop’s footprint?”

  Taylor nodded. “Did you find it in jay’s room, too?”

  “He left it with a friend the night he died. The friend was murdered a few days later.”

  Taylor’s frown deepened. “And you think they were both killed because of this?”

  “I have no idea. But the fact that Jay’s death followed hard on the heels of his visit to you is one reason I’m here today. Is there anything in this graph, Dr. Taylor, that’s worth the taking of a life?”

  He sat back and stared at her. “Not in this image, per se. But perhaps in the mutation it documents.”

  “You’ll have to explain that, I’m afraid.”

  “You’ve heard of the tigerback scallop?”

  Merry nodded. “It was bred in the AquaVital lab on Nantucket.”

  “By Hannah Moore.”

  “Are you acquainted with her?”

  “Only by reputation.”

  A circumspect answer—but the very fact of Taylor’s discretion told Merry more about Hannah’s reputation than a more direct answer might have done.

  “Dr. Moore,” he continued, “has taken the genetic engineering of the bay scallop remarkably far, I must say. The tigerback represented in this image has been fundamentally altered in a manner that could revolutionize shellfish farming and, indeed, solve one of the major problems associated with it—the destruction by brown tide of bivalve grounds up and down the East Coast. You can’t pinpoint it under a microscope, but the evidence is in the tissue.”

  “Brown tide.” Merry clutched at the single phrase she remembered from her first conversation with Owen Harley. “That’s the algae that thrives on nitrogen.”

  “One of them, yes. There are millions of different algae, Detective—diatoms, dinoflagellates, prymnesiophytes, or chloromonads.” He hesitated, and then smiled faintly. “But you don’t need to know all that. The point is this: brown tide phytoplankton—aureococcus anophagefferens chokes the feeding systems of bivalves. That includes scallops. Hannah Moore changed the genetic structure of the tigerback in such a way that it can now digest the algae that used to kill it.”

  “She told me that herself,” Merry said. “I see how it could revolutionize the scallop problem. But where’s the danger?”

  Taylor stood up. “Let me show you something. I’ve only been sure of it today.”

  He led her to a saltwater tank sitting near a window. Beyond it, rain lashed in great sheets against the docks, turning the pilings black and sodden. “These are some adult tigerbacks. Jay brought them over in a plastic bag last Wednesday.”

  Merry peered into the water and saw the familiar scallop shape, its dusky brown shell ribboned with streaks of orange and yellow. “Striking,” she said.

  “And unique to Nantucket. They’re tagged as island produce by the fact of their shells. Deciding to mutate these was a brilliant marketing move on Dr. Moore’s part. And it may eventually help us eradicate the problem she’s created. We can find her monsters and destroy them.”

  “Destroy them?”

  The scientists bird-like head tilted at her speculatively. He gestured to a neighboring tank. “This, Detective, is aureococcus anophagefferens,.”

  “It looks like muddy water.”

  “Exactly. The algae turns the tank opaque. In certain places—the bends of Coatue, for example—the bottom of your harbor looks exactly like this.”

&nb
sp; Merry grimaced.

  “I’ve been feeding the tigerbacks this brown tide algae for the past week,” Taylor said. “Their feeding systems show no sign of suffocation.”

  “So it works!”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “Exactly what Jay suspected. An unforeseen eventuality. Once successfully ingested, aureococcus anophagefferens interacts with a bacteria present in the cells of the scallop itself, and produces a neurotoxin. We’ve never observed this particular phenomenon before, because the scallops usually died in the act of ingesting the algae.”

  “And now they’re dying afterward?”

  Taylor shook his head. “The toxin has no effect on the tigerback itself. That’s fairly usual when a bivalve feeds on toxic algae. There are any number of them adrift in the seas, Detective, and scallops have been ingesting them for millennia. But the toxins do remain stored in the scallop’s tissues. I found the brown tide neurotoxin there just this morning, in significant quantities, when I ran the scallop tissue through the spectrometer.”

  “And?” Merry prompted, her mind racing.

  “The toxin can be passed on to any organism that eats it. You must have heard of paralytic shellfish poisoning—when someone gets a really bad clam?”

  Merry nodded.

  “PSP, as it’s known, is fairly rare in these waters. It comes in the wake of what’s called a red tide—a toxic algal bloom—and if it’s observed, shellfish beds are usually closed to fishing.”

  Red tide. She did remember the term vaguely. “There was something on the Georges Bank once, I think.”

  “In 1990. A group of fishermen ate toxic mussels.” Taylor turned away from the saltwater tanks. “The first documented outbreak was in ‘72, along the Massachusetts coast. More incidents have occurred since—in California, Turkey, Alaska, Asia.”

  “Is the damage to the beds permanent?”

  “No. Once the algal bloom subsides, the shellfish gradually shed the toxins. The beds can reopen.”

  “And this is happening,” Merry attempted, “because of increased nitrogen runoff.”