The Kind to Kill, page 4
‘If the phone was in the water, there wouldn’t be a signal,’ Tim said as I slowed down the boat. We were in the vicinity of the icon on Hearst’s map, and there was nothing around us but river. Shoals were common in the St Lawrence, but not here in the channel, which served as a seaway for freighter ships traveling to the Great Lakes, sometimes all the way from Europe and Asia.
‘Gorecki said the same thing at the station. But the signal’s going strong. The phone has to be close.’ I gestured to the device in Tim’s hand, which we’d borrowed from Godfrey Hearst before heading out on the boat, and together we looked from left to right, studying the land on either side of us as our boat nodded in the water. The shore was crammed with houses, each with its own weather-worn dock extending into the river. The water was gloomy here, navy even in the daylight.
‘So what are we thinking?’ Tim asked, fingers gripping the bar of the T-top. The sleeve of his State Police jacket whispered in the breeze. ‘The phone’s around here somewhere, and she threw it from the bridge?’
Bracing myself against the pilot seat, I leaned my head back and gazed skyward. The underside of the bridge was so high I couldn’t make out a single detail. It was an expanse of solid darkness above us. A highway in the night.
‘Wouldn’t be the craziest idea,’ I said, ‘if she was afraid of her husband.’ But that was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t quite fit, no matter how much force I used to mash it into place. People didn’t like to part with their phones. If she was like most, Rebecca’s cell was her lifeline, the chain that linked her to family, friends, coworkers and everyone in between. Studies showed going a single day without a mobile phone could make people anxious, and the younger their age, the more connected they were to their device. It would take a lot for someone like Rebecca to give hers up.
‘It has to be here,’ I said, eyes on the water once more. ‘But where?’
Tim said, ‘Head over to that island.’
To the left of us was Wellesley Island, one of the largest in the area and home to several residential communities, multiple golf courses and two popular state parks. Tim was pointing toward the mainland from which we’d come, opposite the river from Wellesley. There was an island there too, this one smaller, just off New York State’s northern shore.
With a nod I swung the boat around, my own unzipped jacket flapping like a flag. As I drove, I tried to remember the island’s name, but it was too small to stand out in my mind. Home to nothing more than a summer cottage that faced the channel, perched atop rocky terrain. I would need to look it up, though, because as we approached, I caught sight of an object gleaming at the edge of the shore.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Tim said when I’d pulled parallel to the island. There, on a patch of scraggly grass an arm’s length from the water, its screen glinting in the sun, was a smartphone.
FIVE
I docked at the island and Tim jumped out, crossing the lawn in seconds flat. Hearst had given us a description of the item we were looking for – an iPhone 11 with a purple case. The phone on the grass had a splintered screen, but otherwise matched it to a tee.
Tim looked from the phone to the bridge and back again. ‘Well. This is interesting.’
It certainly was. ‘If her goal was to dispose of the thing,’ I said, ‘she would have aimed for the water. The river’s a big target. Hard to miss.’
Tim was holding the phone with the hem of his shirt, and it lit up in his hand. The battery was low, but the fact that the damaged device was still working was a huge win when it came to tracking down our missing woman. ‘The grass is pretty mossy here. Spongy.’ Tim bounced a little on the balls of his feet. ‘Whatever she was aiming for, it got a soft landing.’
‘Maybe she didn’t toss it. The screen could have gotten cracked some other way. Could she have been here, on this island? Maybe she knows the owner.’
‘Hearst said this was their first visit to the area.’
‘His, maybe. It’s possible she came pre-marriage and didn’t tell him.’ I tapped a fingernail against my teeth. ‘Let’s talk to the homeowners. See what they know.’
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I noticed a woman hurrying across the lawn. Her hands were clad in gardening gloves – which explained the flowers. A lush bed of red petunias encircled the house and ran along the edge of the entire island.
‘Hello!’ she called. ‘What’s going on?’ Up close, the woman – early-fifties, disheveled bun, soil smudged across her cheek – looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She introduced herself as Allison Novak, and we divulged what little information we were willing to share about how we came to be on her property.
‘Do you know how this phone got here, Mrs Novak?’ I asked.
‘That’s a question for my girls, but they’re still sleeping. My daughters had a party out here last night. It must belong to one of their friends.’
‘How old are your kids, Mrs Novak?’ said Tim.
‘Twenty-one. They’re identical twins, juniors in college. One’s at Ohio State and the other’s at UConn. They’re legal,’ she reminded us, because she could see that I’d spotted the fire pit at the side of the house. The colorful Adirondack chairs that encircled it, and the empty beer cans littering the grass.
‘How many people were here last night?’
‘Six, I think,’ she said. ‘My two, and a few local friends.’
The odds that Rebecca Hearst from Utica, age twenty-nine and married, would somehow hook up with a group of college kids seemed unlikely. But then, finding her phone out here had seemed unlikely, too. ‘Does the name Rebecca Hearst mean anything to you?’ I asked.
‘Rebecca?’ She shook her head, bun bobbing. ‘No. I know all the kids my girls hang out with here. No Rebeccas.’ I watched as she processed what that meant. ‘This Rebecca,’ she said slowly, ‘she was here last night?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ said Tim.
‘Who is she?’
I said, ‘We’re just gathering information right now. Any idea when the party started last night? How long it lasted?’
‘Ugh, late. We sleep with the windows open. No A/C,’ she explained. ‘They didn’t even get here until ten, and they were carrying on until almost three. Rick and I – that’s my husband – we barely slept.’
Three o’clock. The text Hearst received from his wife had a time stamp of 2:04 a.m. If she was here, on this island, Novak’s children and their friends would surely have seen her. The island would have been crowded with trees, once, but it had long since been clearcut. Aside from the small cottage, where the Novaks had lain awake fuming, there was no place to hide. Could Rebecca have texted her husband from somewhere else and come to the island after the college kids dispersed?
‘Did you talk to your girls before they went to bed last night?’ I asked.
‘One of them, just briefly.’
‘No mention of a stranger in your yard? African-American woman in her late twenties?’
She shook her head. ‘This woman.’ Novak looked wary now, and she plucked at the cuff of her teal Bermuda shorts as she spoke. ‘You’re trying to find her?’
‘We’re going to need to talk to your daughters,’ I said.
As Tim and I waited for the woman to wake our potential witnesses, I let my gaze trail back to the river. The current moved so swiftly in the channel that it was visible to the naked eye, a rippling strip on the surface that swept past the island and upriver. If Rebecca was here last night, she had to have come by water, but aside from our police boat there was just one vessel tied up at the island’s dock. Its name, painted along the side in the exact shade of red as the petunias, was A Perfect Match.
Tim’s mouth was a tight line across his face, his eyebrows graded toward his nose. ‘Why would Rebecca come here?’
The words were out before I could stop myself. ‘Maybe it wasn’t by choice.’
A year ago, before I joined the State Police, homicide would have been the farthest theory from any A-Bay investigator’s mind. It wasn’t that murder was unheard of in these parts, but it was definitely uncommon. Then came the Sinclairs. My first big case on the new job had been brutal; it was as if the Thousand Islands had saved up its horrors for decades and unleashed the reserve onto me. There was more violent crime to follow, culminating in Bram’s death. I’d been no stranger to homicides back in New York. My mind was preconditioned to expect murder and mayhem.
Tim Wellington’s mind was another story.
‘Those girls could come out here in a minute and tell us they met Rebecca Hearst in town and brought her to their party,’ he said. ‘Right now, from where I’m standing, there’s no evidence of foul play here.’ For a second I was back on Tern Island, mouth agape as Tim tried to convince me that, with blood on the scene and a half-dozen motives aside, the Sinclair family’s prodigal son had skipped town of his own volition. No matter how many atrocities befell his long-time home, Tim would never give credence to the cruelest of theories about his fellow man unless he had no other choice. I used to wonder if, as a detective, that was a knock against him, but I’d long since come to realize it was a plus. Because he was disinclined to jump to the blackest of conclusions, Tim’s investigative methods were especially thoughtful. ‘I hate to say it,’ he went on, ‘but there might be another explanation for what happened to Rebecca Hearst.’
High above us, the blare of a car horn resounded from the road. I dragged my gaze up to the bridge.
‘She and her husband hadn’t been getting along,’ Tim said. ‘From the sound of it, they fought a lot. And didn’t the night clerk tell you he overheard Rebecca saying Godfrey isolated her from her friends? Her last message to him was “I’m sorry,” no punctuation, no explanation.’
I’m sorry. There was a finality to the text that I found disturbing. ‘You think she jumped,’ I said.
Tim’s eyebrows, dense as a thatch of grass, drew together. Like me, he couldn’t keep his eyes off that impossibly high crest of green metal in the sky. He said, ‘It would explain the phone’s location and cracked screen. The Novaks’ island is close to the bridge. Hitting it would be a long shot, but not impossible.’
‘You’re saying she dropped the phone while she was falling.’
‘Or threw it in a panic.’
‘When was the last time someone jumped off this thing?’
‘It hasn’t happened since I’ve been with the BCI,’ he said. ‘But it has happened. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a bridge in the country that hasn’t enticed some poor sod having a dark night of the soul. I read somewhere that someone jumps off the Golden Gate every two weeks.’
I’d read that, too.
‘Suicide,’ I said, contemplating the idea. And by some stroke of luck – I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad – the phone hadn’t made the plunge with her.
Like a flash bulb igniting, something Tim said on Tern Island last fall came back to me. ‘I know you’re used to crazy cases in the city. Around here, the explanation’s usually pretty simple.’
Except this time, where Rebecca Hearst was concerned, the simplest of possibilities was almost as terrible as the worst-case scenario Tim wished he could ignore.
SIX
A marine patrol vessel cruised soundlessly down the channel, its fractured blue lights glittering on the black water. On board, one of the two officers operated a military-grade searchlight that skimmed over the river’s surface and penetrated the shadowy trees on the shore. To anyone watching, every movement the beam of light made would have looked like a wink, as if the boat was transmitting a message in Morse code. If any island residents noticed the boat that night, repeatedly snaking its way up and down that stretch of the river, we didn’t know it. Back at the barracks, all hell had broken loose.
The vanishing of Rebecca Hearst had made the lead on Tuesday’s five o’clock TV news, her photo stamped with the words ‘Tourist Missing’ in bold black type. The BCI often relied on the media’s help when it came to cases like this one, but there were times when that felt less like a helpful strategy and more like a necessary evil. In this case, that had a lot to do with Godfrey Hearst. I had no desire to terrify the public with talk of foul play, especially if this was a suicide, but Hearst was quick to don a fresh shirt, pose for the cameras, and throw around words like ‘thin air’ and ‘without a trace.’ I’d seen glimmers of real grief at the A-Bay PD. Now, Hearst’s demeanor smacked of defiance.
‘She didn’t kill herself,’ he said when Tim and I called him to the barracks, the sentiment punctuated by a fist slamming down on the table. Our intention had been to prod him for more information about Rebecca’s state of mind, work in the questions that were used to screen for suicide risk, but Godfrey caught on and flew into a rage. He liked what we had to say next even less.
When Allison Novak’s daughters emerged from the house bleary-eyed and still stinking of booze, they assured us there was no way they could have missed a stranger on the small island. That had left us with the Thousand Islands Bridge. As a border bridge it had webcams, the footage from which Tim and I were able to obtain and review. While there was no evidence of a jumper, there were a couple of blind spots, and it was feasible Rebecca could have occupied one of them. Erring on the side of caution, I’d sent Bogle and Sol back out in the boat to do a more thorough search of the shoreline.
They found it floating next to the dock at the Price Chopper, where islanders tie up their boats while shopping for groceries. A woman’s flip-flop, sunny pineapples embroidered on the pink strap. It matched the description I’d taken from Godfrey Hearst back at the A-Bay station.
The shoe belonged to Rebecca Hearst.
Things moved quickly after that.
The day had dawned clear again, a bluebird morning so scorching hot even the air above the water wiggled, and the underarms of my button-down were soaked through by eight a.m. Summer was my least favorite season. That had a lot to do with my job. Sure, there were the boat rides and glasses of Sauvignon Blanc sipped in angled Adirondack chairs designed to enforce lounging. In the North Country, lawns were shorn within an inch of their lives, but they abutted fields of yellow and purple wildflowers so vibrant they seemed unreal, and the river – cold, fresh, wild – always beckoned. Those things, I’d come to enjoy, but I had never gotten over the trauma of summers spent in the city, navigating streams of garbage soup and trying not to think about what fattened up the flies now big as bumblebees, their bodies meat-hungry and hairy. To me, at least to some extent, summer still meant needing to find the dead as fast as possible so they didn’t have to rot alone in the merciless sun.
That Wednesday morning, daybreak brought not just blue and bird calls but the thwack-thwack of chopper blades reverberating across the water. The helicopter was the new Bell UH-1 Huey added to our North Country fleet, painted navy, white and gold. It looked completely out of place against the natural beauty of the river. So did the police boats with divers on board. This was nothing like that covert night search. Calls flooded in from the islands up and down the channel when they arrived, first to the PD and then, when the dispatcher remained tight-lipped, to the Thousand Islands Sun. The whole of Alexandria Bay was abuzz with talk of the missing tourist.
The divers were muscled and tattooed and wore grim expressions, all business as they yanked wetsuits over their sturdy bare torsos with a smack. ‘Hell of a job,’ Tim muttered under his breath as we watched. If we were lucky – the word made me cringe – the men in their dive masks wouldn’t leave this place empty-handed.
While they readied themselves for the plunge, my gaze drifted to the nearest island. Four adults and a gaggle of kids had gathered on its shore, an extended family with their eyes on the divers. One of the women took out her cell phone and held it steady, videoing the scene on her doorstep. It wasn’t so unlike rubbernecking a car crash, considering the unusual activity on the river, but the sight of that phone and the kids pointing excitedly at the chopper above sickened me all the same. I kept staring, and eventually the lady with the phone noticed me out on the boat. We locked eyes. She lowered her arm. Turning swiftly away from the water, she ushered the children inside.
What would happen if one of those children discovered a corpse today, broken and bloated, hideous in every way? The current ran downriver from the bridge, the St Lawrence wending its way around rocky shorelines and under docks gray with age. We’d found Rebecca’s shoe next to just such a dock, and Tim had told me other things tended to get stuck under them, too. Fallen branches. Beach balls. The troopers had checked the docks nearest to the bridge and found nothing, but I was still on edge.
All morning long the calls kept coming, not viable tips that might lead us to our victim but inquiries about the helicopter, a rare and curious sight. Some of the callers asked if they were witnessing a training exercise. Only those watching closely, like the woman on the island or any residents who might have seen that boat in the night, knew the truth. Helicopters and divers and search boats like ours had only two jobs, and this was no training mission.
It was a mission to recover a body.
SEVEN
It was late morning by the time we got back to the barracks, and someone was waiting for me in the lobby, chatting up the uniform sergeant who manned the phone line to the dispatch center in Oneida. The man’s eyes lit up when he saw me. ‘Got a second?’ he asked, standing too close. ‘It’s about all this fuss with the missing tourist.’
