He got out of the car, cut across the street, and went through one of the public parking lots to a walking path that wound along the Megunticook River and followed it past a series of short waterfalls and toward the sea. The harbor was only beginning to pack in boats, a few dozen at mooring floats now. By July there would be a few hundred. The waiting list for a mooring in Camden Harbor was long—it took years to work your way to the top.
Liz’s mooring had belonged to her father, and it was prime real estate, central to the harbor. A lot of people used dinghies with small outboards to reach the moorings, but she always rowed to it. Her ancient but beautifully maintained dinghy was tied up at the wharf, oars stowed, which meant either she wasn’t on the sailboat or she’d grabbed a ride to it from someone else in the harbor so Barrett could use her boat.
He stepped down into the boat and fitted the oars into the oarlocks and then cast off from the dock and started out. Liz rowed with practiced grace, each stroke a study of economic muscle movement, whereas Barrett always felt as if he were fighting the wind and water. As he got closer to her sailboat, he saw absolutely no light, and he began to worry, this journey joining with memories of his trip to find Kimberly. Then Liz’s voice floated out of the darkness.
“I wasn’t sure it was you until you started rowing,” she said. “You’ve still got that seagull-with-a-broken-wing style.”
“Hilarious,” he said, his fear evaporating into relief at the sound of her voice.
She stepped out of the shadows and tossed him a line, which he missed, naturally. It landed in the bottom of the boat and he found it and pulled the rowboat in and she tied him off. Then he climbed up into the sailboat and faced her. She was wearing dark jeans and a black top, blending with the darkness, and he didn’t think that was by accident.
“You think someone’s watching you?”
“It wouldn’t be surprising. Not after the runs they took by my house today. Nobody followed me down here, but…” She shrugged and cast a speculative eye back toward the harbor.
“Where’s your car?” he asked, thinking of the tracker that had been on his own.
“Back at the office. I figured I’d rather take a long walk than leave it anywhere that pointed out here.”
“You’d make a hell of an FBI agent.”
“I hear there’s a shortage of good ones around here,” she said, and then she pulled him close to her in a fierce hug. He squeezed her tight against him. After a long time, she took a deep breath and stepped back.
“Let’s go below. Can you make it down in the dark without breaking your land legs?”
“We’ll see.”
The sailboat was a forty-two-foot, wooden-hulled beast with a cutter rig, originally built in the 1920s in England as a lifeboat designed for rescue missions in heavy seas. She’d had a sleek, fiberglass-hulled sloop when her father died off the coast of Halifax. The wooden lifeboat was more work and less fun, but Barrett suspected its history of pulling lost sailors from hostile oceans meant more to her than she’d ever say.
He followed her below deck, and she closed the hatch and turned on a dim battery lantern. All of the curtains were closed. There was a knife and a can of pepper spray on the table.
“Who put the scare into you, Liz?”
“You. Kimberly. Everyone I talked to today.” She sat down on one of the cushioned benches that ran the length of the table. “You’re circling something that I don’t understand—and I don’t think you understand it either. But it’s getting people killed.”
“Who told you about the devil cat name?”
“Theresa—the medical examiner who’s my source. I asked if she’d heard of the other two, and she said no, but she’d heard of devil cat. Heroin mixed with fentanyl, she thought.”
“Fentanyl or carfentanil?”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe,” he said. “You met my friend Vizquel from the DEA, right?”
“Yeah. He was looking for you.”
“That’s all? No questions about Kimberly, Mathias, anything else?”
She shook her head. “All they want is you, Rob. Three different agencies, all asking me one thing—where’s Rob Barrett? FBI, DEA, and Maine State Police. Oh, guess who showed up from the staties? Emily Broward. She was all business, and all she wanted was a way to contact you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re knocking the hornet’s nest around, I’d assume.”
“There’s more to it than that,” he said. “They’re looking at some level of a case that I never saw, never even heard rumors about. The DEA guy, Vizquel, made it patently clear that he does not care about Mathias Burke or Kimberly Crepeaux. So what do they understand that I’m still missing?”
She laid her hand on his arm, and only then did he realize his voice was rising with frustration.
“You made one good guess, at least,” she said. “The same drug killed Cass Odom and J. R. Millinock.” She slid a pair of manila folders across the table to him. “Theresa gave me these. I can’t get any details on Molly Quickery. They never ran the toxicology there. Just settled for the fact that a known drug abuser and alcoholic passed out and ended up in the ocean, evidently. The coroner’s office seemed a little embarrassed about that, but, and I quote, ‘There were so damn many of them last summer.’”
Almost exactly what Kimberly had told him during her confession.
He started with Cass Odom’s file, though he’d already seen it. He’d reviewed it more than a year ago, when she was first mentioned as an acquaintance of Mathias Burke. The medical examiner’s report hadn’t been completed until four months after her death, a typical delay for an overdose report lately.
In Odom’s death, the toxicology report had shown the presence of both synthetic heroin and carfentanil. The first time he’d seen this, it hadn’t given him much pause—opioid overdoses were epidemic. Now, though, he was left to consider the question he’d asked Howard Pelletier: What if you knew exactly what drug you had? Users were expecting euphoria on the other side, not death. If the provider knew the reality of the drug and the user did not, then it became murder.
And if your victims were known drug users, it became murder that was likely to escape investigation. Family and friends of opioid abusers treated the news of an overdose death as believable, if tragic. Some of them treated it as inevitable. Very few responded with suspicion of foul play.
He closed Cass Odom’s file and moved on to J. R. Millinock’s. Five months after J.R. had been buried, the toxicology analysis, conducted in a Pennsylvania lab, showed a perfect match to the drug cocktail that had killed Cass Odom.
“Well,” Barrett said, “I could tell Nick Vizquel that much, at least. I don’t know where Cass got her final fix, but Millinock’s came from Jeffrey Girard.”
“Are you going to call Vizquel?”
“I guess I should. I’d like to stay in front of him, but if I’m honest, I need to admit that I’m already way behind. The guy rubbed me the wrong way, though. He was a little too emphatic in telling me that Jackie and Ian were small ball. People like Kimberly don’t matter to him. People like these.”
He moved the toxicology report aside and pointed at the death-scene photographs of Cass Odom. There were only two for her, and three for Millinock. Neither police nor coroners treated cases like these as crimes, because they knew them so well by now. A drug overdose, one more on the scoreboard, take a few photos, take the body out, let the lab in Pennsylvania confirm, and move on to the next one. There was always a next one.
“I want them to matter to him,” Barrett said. “I know the distribution network is critical, but I want him to care about the victims too.” He tapped the photo.
Even in death, J. R. Millinock looked strong, his shoulders thick and rounded, his arms layered with muscle. He no doubt would have felt invincible when the needle went in. He might not have even had time to feel vulnerable before he died. In a strange way, Barrett hoped that was true.
He l
ooked at Millinock and thought of Kimberly, curled up in bed, cell phone at her ear, syringe at her side.
“Did they both inject?” he asked Liz.
“Yes.” She reached past him and flipped to the next photograph, a close-up of the syringe. There was nothing unique about it. Just another hypodermic, one of a million, and its contents had been in the dead man’s blood by the time of the photo.
“I wish I’d taken her phone,” Barrett said. “Just so she couldn’t have made the call to whatever dealer she found. But you can’t keep the phone out of her hand forever, can you? She’d have found another, or just walked down the right street and…”
When his voice trailed off, Liz said, “Rob?”
He didn’t answer. He just pointed at the bottom corner of the photograph. Beside the syringe, there was a bottle of vodka resting on a plastic bag on a cluttered coffee table.
“What does that look like to you?”
She leaned close. “You mean the baggie?”
“Yeah. What’s on it?”
“It’s like something was drawn on it with a Sharpie, maybe?”
“Yes. What was drawn on it?”
She tilted her head. Her hair fell across her face and she pushed it back, tucked it behind the row of small silver hoops in her left ear. Her eyes narrowed as she pulled the photo closer to her. Then they widened as the image registered.
“It’s a cat.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“It’s a cat with its back arched. Like a—”
“Halloween cat,” he finished.
She looked up at him. “Like she described on the truck.”
Barrett nodded, feeling a prickle of gooseflesh along his neck. He stared at the photo and thought of Bobby Girard pressure-washing that paint off while Barrett timed him.
Less than five minutes.
He’d painted the hood real bright white, and then in the center there was this black cat, a bad drawing of one, like a little kid would do of a Halloween cat, you know? Kimberly Crepeaux had said. Fur sticking out, back arched, tail up. All these black squiggles.
Barrett pulled the photo close, squinted at it, then shook his head. “It’s too small and it’s catching some shadow off the bottle.”
“What are you trying to see?”
“Whether there’s any red on the eyes.”
“You think that matters?”
“It might matter a lot.”
“Why would someone have drawn anything like that?”
“Street value is determined by quality. People tag drugs with a logo or a color or initials. Then buyers know they’re getting what they paid for, and if dealers learn that someone is selling something that isn’t tagged…that’s when people tend to get killed.”
He set the photo down and sat back, feeling an adrenaline buzz that left him both energized and light-headed, as if he’d had a few too many drinks too quickly.
“The medical examiner who called it devil cat—did she mention a logo, a stamp? Or just the name?”
“Just the name. But it made me think of Kimmy’s story, of course. Do you think maybe she saw that…” She pointed at the image on the baggie. “And then, once the drugs were working on her, she hallucinated the same thing on the truck or something? Or maybe there was a bag inside, on the dash. Would a reflection of it have confused her if she was drunk and high?”
“I don’t think she imagined it. I think it was painted on that truck. That’s what Bobby Girard wanted to show me—how it could be put on and taken off easily and quickly. I think it was on the hood that night, and it was supposed to mean something to someone. But I don’t know what or to who.”
The boat rocked lightly beneath them, and above them the rigging creaked in the wind. They regarded each other in silence for a moment.
“What are you thinking?” Liz asked.
“I’m remembering the parties that Kimberly talked about.”
“The ones Ian threw at the house?”
“Those, and the bonfires on the beach, yeah. We know people were using heroin down there. Never determined the source. It was just around, Kimberly would say, and then she’d shrug. It was no big thing to her. But if Mathias painted his truck like that, he did it for a reason. And ever since her confession, I’ve been working off the theory that Jackie was an accident, and Ian was collateral damage, a witness removed.”
“You think Mathias was coming for them?”
“Everything he did seemed choreographed. Not the result of panic, but planning. When I look at it like that…” He nodded. “Maybe. Coming for one of them, at least.”
“He’d have had to be in communication with one of them, then.”
“Why?”
“Because they were on a rural road at sunrise, and nobody but Jackie knew Ian was coming to Maine, let alone where they were going.”
She was right, and it was a damn good point. Still, the logo on that baggie bothered him. Kimberly’s wild fabrication suddenly had a place in reality.
“I need digital copies of these photos,” he said. “I need to see that blown up. Do you know who took them? Coroner or cop?”
“No.”
“It depends on the area, but around here, they’re usually not sending out a death investigator or deputy coroner. It would be the police.” He flipped through the file, looking for the initial incident report. “The on-scene officer was…” When he saw the name, he lost his voice.
The on-scene officer was Lieutenant Don Johansson of the Maine State Police.
46
In full summer, there’d be a few bars open late onshore and maybe a few boats with parties in the harbor, but it was a weekday in May and the night air was cold and the harbor was silent when they went above deck to sit together in the darkness. The wind had freshened and it whined through the rigging cables, and the mooring line creaked.
“He either didn’t notice the cat logo to begin with, or he didn’t remember it later,” Liz said at length. “It seems critical to us now, but to him back then, Millinock would have been just another overdose call, and he probably never even looked at the photos. By the time Kimmy told her story about the truck, he wouldn’t have remembered.”
“The truck was the first thing she ever described,” Barrett said. “Johansson worked those leads, and he worked the Millinock family, but he didn’t remember that one of them had died that summer, even though he was at the scene? No way. He’s too smart of a cop and it’s too small of a community.”
“Maybe he just didn’t see the overlap.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t buy it.”
“I’d like to.”
“But you don’t.”
The clouds had peeled back and the sky was a mist of starlight that seemed determined to reach the mountains.
“I asked him about J. R. Millinock, and he acted like he’d never heard of him,” Barrett said.
“Maybe he forgot him. If he’s as strung out as you say—”
“No.” Barrett shook his head. “He would not have forgotten Mark Millinock’s nephew. He was the one working leads at the Harpoon. He was seeing Mark on a regular basis. Now he is again, although the circumstances are different.” He shrugged. “Or maybe they’re the same. I don’t know when he started on the pills. I’d like to give him a chance to tell me, though.”
Her silence told him she didn’t love the idea.
“He was my partner on this case,” Barrett said. “Closest thing I had to one, at least. And it’s torn his life apart, Liz. I’d like to see him alone before I make any calls.”
The wind rose in a long gust and blew Liz’s hair across his cheek. They were sitting in the stern, down on the decking with their backs against the bench seats. The moon gave the bay an ethereal light that seemed to come up from within the water instead of down to it. The boat rocked steadily and gently and he wanted to hang on to the night.
“I wish she’d stayed,” Liz said suddenly.
“Who?”
“She was going to leave. You couldn’t have kept her there.”
“Maybe not. You can’t say that for sure.”
He couldn’t say it for sure, so he didn’t say anything at all. He rubbed her shoulder and tried not to think of how small Kimberly had looked in the tousled sheets of the child’s bed on which she’d died.
“When will you go see Don?” she asked.
“Morning. I’ve got a few calls I need to make first, a few things to run down before I see him, but I want to be off the boat before first light.”
“DEA could be watching him.”
“Could be.”
It went silent again.
“Howard claims he’s going fishing tomorrow, but I’m worried about him,” Barrett said. “Any chance you can check on him? Just see that he’s actually out there hauling traps? I don’t want to lose track of Howard for long. He’s supposed to wait on me, but I don’t know that I trust his patience.”
“Wait on you for what?”
“I said some crazy things, that’s all. I’d just seen Kimberly and…and things got away from me a little.”
“Said some crazy things,” she echoed. “Such as?”
He didn’t answer.
“You should have stayed in Montana,” Liz said. “You were safer from yourself there.”
He looked at her in the darkness, but she was facing away from him. He leaned back to stare up at the mountains. “Do they still put the star up on Battie in the winter?”
When they were kids, there was always a massive Christmas star placed on the summit of Mount Battie in December. You could see it from well out in the bay if you were on a boat and the skies were clear. When they were dating, he and Liz always made one frigid night sail to see the star from the water.
How It Happened Page 25