Death in A Mood Indigo, page 16
“In effect,” John Folger added, “we’ll be working for Dana, along with Bill and Dave here, liaising on this part of the entire case.” He nodded to the state police, who looked down at the cups of coffee and swiveled their pens between awkward fingers.
Merry glanced from Dana Stevens to her father, then reached a quick hand to shake the FBI agent’s extended one. There might be some good to be found, Merry decided, from a situation that forced her father to work for a woman.
The FBI had certainly descended on the island in what, to Merry’s unaccustomed eyes, looked like force. Besides Enright and Agent Stevens, two forensics guys had attended the meeting, and their assistants were still working out at the landfill, sifting through the garbage surrounding the area where the corpse had been discovered. Even the sofa on which Roxanne Teasdale was found had been bagged in plastic, for shipment to Washington.
“They might as well do us all a fayvah,” Clarence Strangerfield observed as he settled into a chair in Merry’s office, “and take the landfill itself.” Despite her oppression of spirits, Merry smiled. Clarence was partly in awe of the FBI, she knew. She guessed he would be spending much of the day looking over their shoulders and assessing the equipment they used so effortlessly. He had already witnessed one operation Merry was certain he was itching to try at home—the attempt to lift fingerprints from Roxanne Teasdale’s cooling body.
Unlike the previous five victims, Roxanne had been dead only about an hour when Casey Ambrose picked up her tortured form in his truck’s headlights just after eight P.M. The marks of her killer’s hands were still vivid upon her neck, as Merry had observed in the photograph of the scene. Latent prints could be retrieved from human skin for up to twelve hours after an attack, and the FBI forensics team, seizing the opportunity, made it from Boston to the island by midnight. Clarence had told Merry what had happened next: every inch of the dead woman’s exposed skin was examined with a magnifying glass as she lay, still sprawled on the shabby couch, under the police lights. The forensics team concentrated on areas of her body that appeared to be chafed or bruised—her hips, thighs, upper arms, rib cage, and neck—assuming that her killer had touched her there. Then they applied small squares of photographic paper firmly to the spots. When the squares were lifted from the skin, the FBI dusted them—revealing a disappointing array of blurred markings. The killer had, of course, worn gloves.
And now, Clarence confided, they were searching the surrounding landfill for the gloves themselves, in the faint hope that the killer had tossed them aside when his work was done. It was nothing to the FBI to lift prints from the interior of a latex glove; and then, the crime-scene chief told Merry grimly, they might just have him.
“I wish it were that simple,” Tucker Enright said from the office doorway. “He probably threw them into the sea. This is not a stupid person we’re dealing with.”
“Hello, Doctor,” Merry said.
“Am I interrupting? Or do you have a moment?”
“I should be getting out to the landfill anyway, Marradith.” Clarence rose creakily to his feet. “I’ll just offer up my chair.”
“Thanks.” Enright watched Clarence amble down the hallway. “Nice guy, isn’t he?” he asked Merry.
“The best,” she said fondly. “A Nantucketer through and through. And he’s an institution on the force. What can I do for you?”
Enright hesitated, then slid into the chair before her desk. “I wanted to apologize, I guess. For upsetting you.”
“Don’t bother.” Merry shifted uncomfortably and looked down at the pen she was turning in her fingers. Before the influx of guests she had been editing her notes from Jack Osborne’s interview. All that seemed remarkably trivial now. “My dad says I have a tendency to be overly emotional. I guess I just proved it. My behavior wasn’t entirely professional.”
“Well,” Enright said with an effort of lightness, “you did warn me at lunch the other day that violence was not one of your favorite things.”
“So what were you supposed to do? Shield me?” Merry flung her pen down in disgust. “I think I’ve had enough shielding, Doctor.”
“I asked you to call me Tucker,” he said quietly.
There was a fractional pause. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea, now that you’re here on a case.”
“Too … unprofessional?”
“Something like that.”
“I see.” Enright sighed. “I see all too well. How unfortunate. I enjoyed our conversation very much, you know. I don’t connect that way with people at the drop of a hat. I thought of nothing but you all weekend.”
Embarrassment swept over Merry in a wave. She attempted to ignore it. “And did I improve your golf game?”
“Not in the slightest,” Enright replied cheerfully. “It’s beyond improvement. But I hope you spent your time better. I gather you were on vacation.”
“Not exactly.” Merry thought guiltily of Peter. “I just got back from Boston, but that was work. The Sconset bones.”
“Really? Can you tell me about it?”
“We have an identification. I was breaking the news to the husband.”
“Who lives in Boston.”
“Back Bay.”
He seemed about to inquire further; and then something—a natural delicacy an awareness that he might be invading her case—persuaded him otherwise. He said only, “Congratulations. Now you have to solve the murder.”
Merry smiled faintly. “Not very important, in light of what happened while I was away.”
“No,” Enright said. “I suppose not. Although why one woman’s strangulation should seem more awful than another’s is beyond my understanding.” His eyes flickered over her face with the same gentle concern. “I just wanted you to know that I’m not entirely a monster. I understand that this is troubling for you.”
“In a way that it’s not for the FBI?”
“Right. We’ve become inured to this sort of thing. The flip charts and the photographs tend to obscure the lives involved. I realize that.”
“But you must feel something—outrage, anger.”
He stood up, his lips compressed. “I learned long ago that if I didn’t push the anger out of my mind, it might threaten to take over. Jen taught me that.”
Merry had no words to answer this.
“And, too,” Enright added, “you knew this girl. That would have to make a difference.”
“Not the girl,” Merry corrected. “Her grandmother. And I know her only slightly, of course. But it’s enough to make me feel horrible. This—obscenity—should never have happened to Emily.”
“Dana’s heading out to interview her,” Enright said casually. “Maybe you should go along.”
Merry’s head came up. “You think? She wouldn’t mind?”
“She’d be a fool not to find it helpful. And Dana’s no fool.” He smiled and turned toward the hall.
“Thanks, Doctor,” Merry called after him; and at his offhand wave she felt her heart skip a beat.
Chapter Thirteen
“Enright’s a remarkable guy,” Dana Stevens said. Her face was turned toward the passenger window, seemingly absorbed in the passing landscape. “Most people burn out on the sort of stuff he has to handle every day. En-right just keeps going. Its his passion, I think. What everybody else finds completely draining is his reason to exist.”
“You’ve known him a while?”
“Eleven years. Since I first joined the Bureau. He taught part of the forensics unit at Quantico when I was in training.” She laughed suddenly. “All the women idolized him. And he knew it.”
“And yet,” Merry said carefully, “he lives alone. Or so he said when we had lunch the other day.”
Dana studied her narrowly. “Don’t tell me the famous Enright charm is already at work! Be careful—he’s a pro!”
“Don’t be silly,” Merry said, more abruptly than she had intended. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, the good doctor excites a lot of curiosity,” Dana Stevens observed. “Probably because he’s so visibly alone. How can a man do what he does without a safety valve at home? It defies understanding, in a way. That he could be so self-sufficient. But, you know, despite the eleven years I can’t really tell you much about him.” She paused, considering. “He shuttles wherever a case takes him, hovers on the edge of investigations, watches everything without saying much—until the chips are down and the perp is caught. Then he’s the one person you can count on to put a real creep away. If you’ve got to have an expert witness, it better be Enright, and your side better be paying him.”
“So I’ve heard,” Merry said. “This is Madaket, by the way.”
The two women were on their way to Emily Teasdale’s cottage; and though Merry had elected to accompany Dana Stevens, she frankly dreaded the interview. Emily was in her seventies, a widow. The loss of her granddaughter would be devastating, and Merry hesitated to intrude on the woman’s grief so soon after Roxanne’s murder. It was Dana, however, who would do the questioning. Merry’s role in the FBI—state police investigation appeared to be limited to ferrying members of both forces to various points around the island.
“How big is Nantucket?” Dana asked. “I thought we were driving away from the water, and yet here it is again.”
“It’s about fifteen miles long by four miles wide.”
“That small? How do you stand it?”
Merry looked sideways at the FBI agent. “Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“State or city?”
“Both. Born in Westchester, lived in Manhattan, and stationed now in the FBI’s Boston field office.”
“A city girl.”
“Yep. Don’t get me wrong—I’d love to come out here for the weekend. But it’s so isolated. What’s it like in February?”
“Gray. Gray sky, gray sea, gray-shingled houses. Gray car,” she said, patting the Explorer’s wheel. “I wear a lot of bright colors in February.” Involuntarily, Merry thought of the fire in Peters sitting room, and the comfort of the hand-loomed throw wrapped around her legs as she settled into his sofa with a good book. “There’s a perpetual wind roaring over the moors that makes you hunker down inside. It can be absolutely wonderful in winter. And very far from anywhere else.”
“These are the moors?” Dana tilted her head toward the window.
Merry nodded. “The only native North American heath. More of it is going under the construction knife every year. I don’t know what people are thinking of, when they throw up those plywood palaces. Or how they talk their way past the building inspector and the zoning commission.”
Dana studied the massive summer “cottages,” gabled and shingled and dotted with fake Palladian windows, that sat grandly on the rolling hills of scrub pine and beach plum, and nodded slowly. “This is really your home, isn’t it?”
“It’s my country,” Merry said quietly, and sped up as they passed the landfill, its barricaded entrance lost in a knot of reporters and screaming with yellow tape.
Emily Teasdale’s house sat on Smith Point, at the far end of unpaved Massachusetts Avenue, so Merry abandoned the Madaket road and crossed over Hither Creek, sparing a glance for the boats moored quietly in its marshy pools. The Teasdale house looked south, toward the Atlantic, rather than east to Tuckernuck Island. It was a lonely view of choppy green water made bleaker by the cloudy day. Like Sconset, Madaket was very much a summer community, and those who hugged the island’s extremities in all seasons were a hardy breed. Emily Teasdale was no exception, as Merry tried to explain to Dana Stevens.
“She’s lived here forever,” she said, “which is unusual for an off-islander.”
“You still call her that?” Dana asked, amused.
“Of course. She’s from New York originally. Came up here in the summers while her husband was alive, and when he died, she sold the New York house and took up residence. It still surprises me when an off-islander does that, although more and more of them do.”
“So only people born here are real islanders.”
“Well,” Merry said with a smile, “it depends who you ask. You asked me. My ancestor was one of the first to settle Nantucket in the 1670s, so I take a somewhat longer view of things.”
“Understandably,” Dana said, smiling back at her.
Merry pulled up before Emily Teasdale’s door. “I’d like to hear more about Enright,” she told the other woman, “when you have the time.”
“Sure.” Dana grabbed her briefcase and pushed open the car door. “Has he mentioned his sister’s murder yet? That’s one of his sure-fire openers. It establishes his credentials as a caring guy.”
Somewhat unsettled by this last remark, Merry led the way to Emily Teasdale’s front door.
She was waiting for them behind the screen, and at the sight of Merry her soft, wrinkled face crumpled and became featureless with grief, the way a full-blown rose will dissolve at a fingertip’s touch. To Merry’s surprise Emily threw wide the door and enfolded her fiercely in her arms, as though the touch of another young woman was necessary to fill Roxanne’s void. She said nothing; and if she wept, she wept in silence. There was something terrible about that stillness, and Merry’s throat constricted even as she looked her apology to Dana over Emily’s sweatered shoulder.
“Merry Folger,” Emily said, releasing her at last. “The very person I wanted to see. You’ll find vicious man. You will. For my Roxie. I know it.”
“We’ll do our best, Mrs. Teasdale,” Merry said gently. “This is Special Agent Dana Stevens, from the FBI. She flew in from Boston this morning to help.”
Emily Teasdale may have moved into the very maw of grief, but she had hardly taken leave of her senses. She looked at Dana shrewdly. “Why is the FBI interested in Roxanne?” she demanded.
“That’s what we’d like to talk to you about,” Dana Stevens replied. “May we come in, Mrs. Teasdale?”
“I thought the worst moment was hearing about it, last night, from that policeman.” Emily was holding Roxanne’s picture, which probably dated from the girl’s senior year in high school, and her eyes were on it, bright with grief, as she spoke. “They figured out who she was when they found her purse lying somewhere in that landfill. He left her there—did you know that, Detective? Like she was garbage. My Roxie. But I was wrong.” At this she glanced up and away from them, out the window to the sea. “The worst moment was looking at her at three o’clock in the morning, at the hospital, once those police had finished with her. Saying her name out loud, and knowing she would never hear. Because then I knew there was absolutely no mistake. It wasn’t someone else’s girl they’d found. Until I went into that room, and they lifted the sheet away from her face, there was always a chance.”
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Teasdale,” Merry said, and felt immediately and profoundly inadequate.
“Did you expect Roxanne home at any particular time last night?” Dana Stevens asked.
Emily nodded. “Yes. I thought she’d be back around eight or so. She was working on the third grade’s spring pageant after school—making scenery and so forth—and called to say she was having dinner with Lily. When the doorbell rang, I thought maybe Roxie’d lost her key, you see. That she was standing on the doorstep. But instead it was the police.”
A shudder racked her narrow body. She covered her face with her hands.
“Whom did you say she had dinner with, Mrs. Teas-dale?” Dana asked.
Emily searched distractedly in her pockets for a tissue. Merry reached in her purse and pulled out a packet of them. She pressed it into Emily’s hand. “Here. Keep it.”
“Oh, thank you, dear.” Emily blew her nose tidily and tucked the used tissue into her sleeve. “She was going to the Brotherhood with Lily Olszewski. Lily teaches the fourth grade. The two classes were sharing the skit, you see, and most of it was Lily’s idea. She’s a little older than Roxie, maybe twenty-four, and has been at the school longer.”
“I understand. Do you know where we could reach Ms. Olszewski?”
“At the school, I guess—though I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t go in today. I called her this morning and told her about—about Roxie. Lily was quite devastated, poor girl. Well, she should be. You all should be,” Emily finished, looking sharply from Merry to Dana. “Someone out there is preying on young women, and none of you is safe. I never thought I would live to see the day such things happened on Nantucket. I still can’t believe it.”
“I can’t either,” Merry said grimly. “Mrs. Teasdale, did you notice any strangers in the Madaket area in the past week?”
“Looking in the windows to see who’s home and who’s not?” the woman replied. “No, can’t say as I have. But the summer folks are starting to trickle back—ever since Daffodil Weekend—and sometimes a stranger’s nothing more than a new neighbor. You know how that is.”
“And you saw nothing unusual yesterday?” Dana asked.
Emily shook her head. “I was in town myself until about six. I volunteer at the Atheneum.”
“The library,” Merry supplied sotto voce to the benighted Dana.
“I came home, let myself in, took Roxie’s message off that fool machine”—Emily gestured emphatically toward a distant room. “I hate it, you know, but she brought it with her and insists on using it. Personally, I hang up whenever one answers my calls. If someone won’t take the time to answer, why should I take the trouble to leave a message? But there was her dear voice. Her dear voice. Just as happy and carefree—she never knew. Of course not. Never knew what was in store for her.” Emily’s hands gripped one another so fiercely, the knuckles shone white beneath the skin. She met Merry’s eyes steadily. “You’ve lived too long when you’ve seen as much death as I have, Meredith.”
Merry reached out and took Emily’s hand between her own.
“How long has your granddaughter lived with you, Mrs. Teasdale?” Dana asked.
“Almost a year now.” Emily’s gaze shifted to the FBI agent. “She came out in June and did some waitressing before the start of the school year. She’d been out the previous spring, of course, to interview when the third-grade spot went vacant.”
