by James Hayman
‘Anybody out searching the island?’
‘Just getting started,’ said Bowman. ‘The other cop on duty tonight, a guy named Sonny Cates, is out organizing a search party. Mostly people who work city services plus some of the volunteer firefighters. Planning to round up eight or ten in all.’ The island was only a little over two square miles. McCabe figured ten locals could cover it quickly and effectively without bringing in outside resources.
‘We’ll find her,’ Bowman said flatly.
McCabe stared in the dark at the back of Bowman’s head. It was as if Bowman could sense frustration pouring across from the backseat. ‘Listen, McCabe,’ he said, turning around, ‘we handled this right. I handled it right.’
‘You don’t think you did anything wrong?’
‘No. I don’t.’
McCabe nodded and climbed out of the vehicle. The others followed. He threw an arm around Daniels’s shoulder. ‘Why don’t you go on inside,’ he said softly. ‘Detective Savage and I need to have a private chat with Officer Bowman.’
Daniels looked from face to face, probably feeling like the kid being sent out of the room so the grown-ups could talk. Still, he didn’t object. He just walked to the station, unlocked the door, flicked on the lights, and went inside. McCabe waited until the door swung shut, then turned to Bowman. ‘You had a witness to a murder sitting right in your lap.’
The cop’s eyes narrowed. ‘No. I didn’t,’ he hissed. ‘What I had was a psychotic nutcase jumping around my station, screaming her fuckin’ head off.’
McCabe kept his own rising anger under tight control. ‘Abby Quinn may be a psychotic nutcase,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about that. What I do know is that, even agitated and probably terrified, she was cogent enough to provide an accurate description of, one, the murder weapon, two, the MO, and, three, the victim. Details nobody else knows anything about. And what do you do? Nothing. You assume she’s gone off her meds and let her slip through your hands. You’re an experienced cop, Bowman, with what, twenty years in the department? And you didn’t even bother getting her the medical attention you told Detective Savage you thought she needed. If you’d done that, at least we’d have her in a safe place. Instead, you just drove her home. The very first place the bad guy would go looking. Let’s just hope we find her before he does, if he hasn’t already. Shit, Bowman, I’ll bet you didn’t even record what she said, did you?’
Bowman said nothing, so McCabe continued. ‘That’s what I figured. So now, four days later, not only do we not have any idea where our witness is, we don’t even have an accurate record of what she said. In fact, thanks to you, we don’t have bupkis. In case you haven’t been to New York lately, that’s Yiddish for goat-shit.’
Bowman stood facing McCabe on the cold, empty village street, his eyes slits, his hands clenched into fists, the distant glow of a streetlamp accenting his features in an irregular pattern of light and shadow. Two alpha males, facing off, with nothing between them but the whoosh of an icy wind sweeping in off the bay.
Bowman blinked first. ‘We’ll find her,’ he said again. ‘If she’s still on the island, we’ll find her.’
McCabe remembered the ferry they passed on the way in. ‘Let’s hope she is,’ he said, ‘and let’s hope we do. Because if she’s not, she could be anywhere. Like stuffed into the trunk of a fancy car. Stabbed, stripped naked, and frozen solid.’ McCabe felt Maggie’s hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently, bringing him down, urging him toward the building.
‘Let’s go inside,’ she said, ‘or we’ll all be frozen solid.’
Eleven
McCabe had never seen the Harts Island cop shop before. There wasn’t much to it. Up front was a small office space outfitted with a desk, a couple of chairs, a police radio, an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machine, and a pair of computers. One was an aging desktop model, the other the sort of silver laptop usually found mounted in PPD units. Daniels was sucking on a Coke, his butt planted on one end of the desk. Behind him, through an open doorway, McCabe could see a second room. He walked over and glanced in at a small, sparsely furnished break room, dominated by a grubby-looking brown couch with worn, nearly threadbare arms, a pair of puke green vinyl chairs, and a circular coffee table, littered with out-of-date magazines and a few paperbacks. A wooden staircase rose against the wall to the left. McCabe knew the island cops kept cots upstairs so they could catch some sleep during their long twenty-four-hour shifts. There was an office-sized fridge topped with a coffee setup under the stairs. To his right, a fuzzy-looking Red Sox game flickered away on a TV in the corner. Had to be a replay. The Sox didn’t play in January.
As McCabe turned back from the doorway, he spotted a small stack of color photos lying on the desk. ‘Quinn?’ he asked, picking them up.
‘That’s her,’ said Daniels. ‘We found them at her mother’s house.’
McCabe studied the pictures, three in all. In the first, Abby was standing on the rocks by the shore, smiling at the camera, a big, healthy-looking girl with a generous figure and a face full of freckles. Probably still a teenager when the shot was taken. Waves crashed behind her, and the wind was sweeping her long reddish brown hair down over one eye in an unruly mass. McCabe never would have called Abby pretty, but she was still appealing in that open, outdoorsy way so common in Maine. She wore a sweatshirt with a picture of a strong-looking woman flexing a muscular right arm. Under the picture were the words GRRRRL POWER! McCabe smiled. A Harts Island feminist.
The second photo showed Abby standing in the stern of a lobster boat. She was clowning for the photographer, who must have taken the shot from the end of a pier or maybe from a second boat a little ways away. She wore a plaid flannel shirt and a pair of the orange waterproof overalls that seemed mandatory for anyone lobstering in Maine. She was holding a big lobster, maybe a five-pounder, by the tail and pretending to be frightened by the creature writhing at the end of her arm.
‘How old is she?’ McCabe asked.
‘My age,’ said Daniels. ‘Twenty-four or twenty-five. Like I said, we graduated Portland High the same year.’
‘Were you friends?’ asked Maggie.
‘Not particularly. The island kids mostly hung together. My folks lived in Portland, so I wasn’t part of their crowd. But I do know that Abby in high school was a totally different person from who she is today.’
In the third picture, she did indeed look like a different person. So different the photo might have been used as the ‘after’ shot in a before-and-after demonstration of the toll mental illness takes on the human spirit. She looked thirty, maybe forty pounds heavier and at least ten years older. Her hair hung lank and lifeless. Her eyes were clouded by a joyless empty expression, and there were dark circles under them. Her skin looked pasty and almost gray. One hand was up, trying to shield her face, as if to say, Please don’t take a picture of me. Not like this.
‘Is this recent?’ McCabe asked, holding it up, before handing the stack to Maggie.
Daniels shook his head. ‘No. Probably taken after her last stay at Winter Haven. About a year ago. That’s her mother’s cottage in the background. I’ve got a feeling Gracie didn’t have enough sense or sensitivity not to take a picture of Abby looking like that.’
‘Is it how she looks now?’ he asked.
‘Well, she’s not as fat now – twenty, thirty pounds less – and she’s washing her hair. Looks more normal. Chubby but normal. The last time I saw Abby was about a week ago going in to work at the Nest. She looked almost happy.’
McCabe slipped the photos into his breast pocket. ‘You don’t mind if I borrow these?’ he asked. Nobody did. He glanced over at Bowman, who was sitting in a swivel chair, his eyes locked on McCabe’s, one leg mounted on the desk. A few chunks of ice had fallen from his boot and were melting into small pools on the fake wood surface. ‘You know out there?’ he said. ‘If you were worrying that your killer’s gonna hunt Quinn down to eliminate a witness, you can relax. I don’t think that’s likely
.’
‘Really?’ McCabe studied him. ‘Any reason for that? Or just your natural optimism bubbling to the surface?’
Bowman ignored the sarcasm. ‘A couple of reasons. Starting with your assumption Quinn actually saw the murder take place –’
‘Not a bad assumption, Scotty,’ Maggie interjected. She was leaning against the door, arms folded across her chest, the photos of Quinn still in one hand. ‘A knife to the back of the neck is a pretty specific detail.’
‘It is, Detective Savage.’ Bowman laced the last two words with a heavy dose of his own sarcasm. ‘But isn’t it at least possible Quinn only saw the body after the fact? A naked woman. Dead. With a small wound in her neck. Don’t you think seeing that might’ve freaked her out enough to push her into making up the rest? Hallucinating it. Or imagining it. Or whatever the hell else you call what schizophrenics do when they’re stressed.’ Bowman looked pleased with his hypothesis.
McCabe shrugged. ‘Slightly tortured logic, but I suppose it’s possible.’
‘Oh yeah? Tortured in what way?’
‘Well, if that’s how it happened, where, exactly, is the killer while your schizophrenic is discovering the body? Hiding in a closet? Wandering around outside in the cold, waiting for her to finish freaking out so he can go back up and collect the remains? Or maybe he’s just over at the Crow’s Nest having a beer? Like I said, possible. Just not very likely.’
Bowman sighed in reluctant agreement. ‘Okay. But even if we assume Abby did catch the killer in the act, even then he probably didn’t see her face.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Maggie. ‘She saw his face. Why wouldn’t he see hers?’
‘Because,’ Bowman announced, ‘she was wearing a mask.’ He smiled with grim satisfaction, like an athlete savoring a meaningless point scored in the last seconds of a losing effort.
Maggie gave him a questioning look. ‘What kind of mask?’
‘A cold weather ski mask. Y’know, the kind that covers your face with holes cut out for the eyes, nose, and mouth. It was blue. Sort of an imitation Spider-Man design. She was still wearing it when she came to the station.’
What if Quinn was wearing a mask? McCabe thought about the implications of that as Maggie and Bowman continued their back-and-forth.
‘She was wearing this mask because …?’ asked Maggie.
‘She was out jogging that night. The winds on the backshore can be brutal on bare skin, and I guess it was part of her gear. Anyway, when she passed the Markhams’ cottage –’
‘That’s the crime scene?’
‘Yeah. As she passed she saw candlelight in one of the windows. Since it’s one of her houses –’
‘What do you mean, her houses?’
‘Abby makes a few bucks keeping an eye on some of the summer cottages for the owners. She has keys to all of them. This was one of them. According to Lori Sparks at the Nest, she takes the responsibility seriously. I guess that’s why she went in to investigate.’
McCabe’s eyes, narrowed almost to slits, bored in on Bowman. ‘Wouldn’t she have taken the mask off when she went inside?’
‘I don’t think so. She had it on when she got here, and she kept it on. I couldn’t tell who she was, and I had to ask her twice to take it off. She finally did, but only reluctantly, and even then she wouldn’t let go of it. I think she saw it as some kind of whatchamacallit, a talisman or something.’
McCabe’s mind played with the possibilities. If Abby was wearing a mask when she saw the murder, if the killer couldn’t see her face, as Bowman suggested, it changed the dynamic of what they were doing. ‘You’re sure Sonny Cates didn’t tell the searchers why they were looking for Quinn?’ he asked. ‘He didn’t say anything about her witnessing a murder?’
‘No,’ said Bowman. ‘He couldn’t have. Like I told you, he didn’t know that himself. All I told Cates was that Quinn was missing and we needed to find her. In fact, that’s all Daniels knew till we went to pick you up off the boat.’
Okay, that was good. ‘How about her mother and the people at the Crow’s Nest?’
‘Same thing. I just asked them if they knew where Abby was, they said no. Travis Garmin told me to try her cell number. He knew it by heart. We did. Got no answer.’
McCabe walked to the window and peered out at the dark street. Snow was beginning to fall. Small hard flakes, not the fat fluffy ones he preferred. He let the idea of the mask perk around in his brain for a minute or two. Clearly they had to find Quinn ASAP, either here or on the mainland. At the same time, they didn’t want to put Quinn’s life in danger by letting the killer know who it was who had barged in on the murder. He thought about classifying Abby as a confidential police informant, a CI. That way they could legally keep her identity secret pretty much indefinitely, or at least until the discovery phase of a trial, if this thing ever got that far.
McCabe’s only problem was that this particular CI was missing, and it was going to be a hell of a lot harder to find her if they couldn’t tell anyone who they were looking for. No. Formal CI status wouldn’t work. They had to play it both ways. Tell people who they were looking for when they had to, but under no circumstances tell anyone why. At least Bowman hadn’t screwed that up yet.
McCabe took out his cell and tapped in Starbucks’s number. The PPD’s resident computer brain, Starbucks’s real name was Aden Yusuf Hassan. A Somali kid, he’d arrived in Portland back in 2000, in the city’s first wave of Sudanese and Somali refugees fleeing genocide in their own lands. When he started working for the department a couple of years later, the cops dubbed him Starbucks because of his addiction to strong coffee. The name stuck. Starbucks had never touched a computer in his native country, but he learned fast. He was a natural. One of the best McCabe had ever seen.
His mother picked up on the third ring. ‘I’m afraid Aden is not at home, Sergeant,’ she said in heavily accented English. ‘He’s out for the evening with a friend.’
McCabe thanked her, said he hoped he hadn’t woken her up, and tried Starbucks’s cell. ‘Yes, Sergeant.’ Starbucks was shouting over loud music. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Sorry to break up your night on the town,’ McCabe shouted, ‘but I need you to get over to 109 now.’
‘Oh.’ Disappointment in his voice. ‘Okay.’ Pause. ‘That’s fine.’ The voice brightened up. ‘I’ll have to apologize to my friend and take her home first.’
‘Apologize for me, too.’
‘I will, but not to worry, Sergeant, the job comes first. What can I do for you?’
‘I’m having three photos of a woman e-mailed to you. When you get to the office, take the one where she looks old and fat. Photoshop about thirty pounds off of her. Then take the other two and add maybe five years. Could you hear all of that?’
‘Yes, Sergeant,’ Starbucks shouted back. ‘I hear you very well.’
‘Good. When you’re done, send the photos to Cleary’s computer.’
‘Is he at 109?’
‘He will be soon.’
Maggie started to ask a question. McCabe held up a finger, signaling her to wait. He called Cleary.
‘Hey, boss, you solve the murder yet?’ Nearly one in the morning and Cleary was still full of beans and ready to take on the world. That was good. McCabe needed somebody aggressive on this.
‘Not yet,’ McCabe told him. ‘The canvass turn up any results?’
‘Not yet either. We’re still working it.’
‘Tell Tommy I’m pulling you off.’
‘Yeah?’ Cleary sounded surprised. ‘Why? Whaddaya need?’
McCabe filled him in on everything they had learned so far, including the fact that Quinn couldn’t identify the killer and that the killer might not be able to identify Quinn.
‘Does the bad guy know she couldn’t ID him?’
‘No. Which is why we need to find her before he does. As quick as we can. Without letting people know why we’re looking, and without using her name any more than we have to. Othe
rwise we could have another corpse on our hands.’
‘Jesus,’ said Cleary, ‘this is all kinda weird.’
‘Yeah, kinda. Anyway, Starbucks is working on some pictures. By the time he’s done with them they ought to be pretty good likenesses. I want you to send out a confidential ATL to all of our units plus every other department in Maine, plus the staties both here and in New Hampshire. Get someone to check with all the taxi companies in town. And cover the train and bus terminals. She might head there. Trailways has a 3:15 A.M. departure to Boston.’
‘Who goes to Boston at three in the morning?’
‘I don’t know. Just make sure Quinn’s not one of them. Also check for early departures out of the Jetport.’
‘Nothing’s gonna be flying out of there for a while. Not with this snow coming in.’
‘Probably not, but tell our guys to keep an eye open anyway. If I were Quinn I’d be running as far and fast as I could.’
‘Yeah, but you’re not crazy. She have a car?’
‘I don’t know. Check that, too. See if there’s one registered in her name. Or maybe her mother’s. Grace Quinn. Same Harts Island address.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yeah. Call my cell when you’re done.’
McCabe hung up.
‘You know, McCabe,’ Bowman snorted, ‘you’re tryin’ to keep this so damn hush-hush – but what about Quinn herself?’
‘What about her?’
‘Your witness has no control over her own mouth. She’s probably out there right now blabbing her head off.’
McCabe shrugged. ‘Yeah. She might be. Nothing we can do about that. But hey, maybe nobody’ll believe her. You know. The rantings of a psychotic nutcase and all? Now I’d like you to stop worrying about that and take me through the rest of what happened Tuesday night.’
‘You pretty much know it all. She came here. She ranted. She raved. Then I took her home. End of story.’
‘You visited the crime scene afterward? Isn’t that right?’ he asked.