Death in the Family Read online

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Tessa Wegert

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wegert, Tessa, author.

  Title: Death in the family / Tessa Wegert.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2020. | Series: A Shana Merchant novel; book 1

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019026827 | ISBN 9780593097892 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593097908 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.E422656 D43 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026827

  First Edition: February 2020

  Cover art: Isle with house on lake © Michael Trevillion

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman

  Title page photograph: Shutterstock/Sarah Mika

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my family, who gave this story life

  Acknowledgments

  There are many brilliant and generous people without whom this book would not exist, and while I can’t name them all here, I hold them in my heart. Thank you, Marlene Stringer and Grace House, for your inestimable contributions, and for loving this story as much as I do. To Sheriff Colleen O’Neill, thank you for allowing me to pick your brain about life as a BCI senior investigator. Thank you to Martin Karlow, Dorinda Bonanno, and Michelle Sowden for reading, and also to John and Carol Repsher, for introducing me to the Thousand Islands all those years ago. To Karl, Leila, and Karel Wegert, your encouragement means more to me than I could ever express. Finally, thank you to Remi and Schafer for your boundless enthusiasm (never give up!), and above all, to Grant. I couldn’t have done it without you.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  It was late September, the kind of morning that turns orange when you close your eyes, weather so sweet everyone on the sidewalk gulps fresh air like kids drinking soda. I got off the subway at Woodhaven Boulevard eager for my share, but as I made my way up the avenue it wasn’t the incandescent day I saw but weeds pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk, ugly blotches where spilled coffee defaced the pavement. In spite of its flaws, Queens was drenched in autumn beauty.

  It all looked cheerless to me.

  My plan was to tolerate him. I figured it was the best I could do. Like my walk to 1 Lefrak City Plaza, though, the man I came to meet was confounding. With his sky-blue shirt and recent trim, his neck still ruddy from the clippers, he looked the part, yet the socks peeking out from the cuffs of his pants were patterned in spectacled kittens, and he smelled like he’d been cooking with sage though it was 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. When we made our introductions his tone oozed pity like I knew it would, but his folksy accent—Rhode Island or Mass was my guess—softened the blow.

  “So,” Dr. Carson Gates said as we took our seats. He folded his hands. “You’re here. That’s good.”

  “Is it?” My own hands were clasped in an impenetrable ball. It was the only way I could keep them from twitching.

  “I bet there are a dozen places you’d rather be. The DMV. A dentist’s office, needle hovering above your gums.” He shivered, not just for effect. “But you came. So yeah, it’s a good start.”

  It’s a requirement, I thought, indignant, but I didn’t hate this guy with the clear eyes and wacky socks. For what it was worth, the delicate fern on his desk appeared to be thriving. Go through the motions, I told myself. Give him what he wants and you can go home. At the same time, I felt like my head was filled with bees. Talking was easy, except when it wasn’t.

  “You don’t think I can help,” said Carson. “No, it’s okay—I get that a lot. I want you to know something, though.” He leaned in, studying me. “I won’t give up on you, Shana. You can do this. Start at the beginning. Just take it slow.”

  The beginning. Where was that, exactly? Nowhere I wanted to take a stranger, even if he did smell nice. But maybe I could go back partway, just far enough to make him happy. Back to a limestone building on East Fifth Street, and a day that grabbed me by the throat and still hasn’t let go.

  * * *

  —

  I was shoulder-deep in a fatal hit-and-run when my NCO supervisor called me into his office and told me to brace myself. Change of plans, he said. This has you written all over it, Shana. I figured he was talking about my investigative method—upending people like stones in a garden to find what’s lurking underneath is kind of my thing—but that wasn’t it. They needed me, and me alone, in a way I could never have imagined.

  The guys from the Seventh Precinct were investigating a series of murders below Houston. Another body had turned up, this time in the East Village—my domain. They knew some things about their suspect already, and it was their latest intel that made the sergeant yank me from my desk and send me down to Pitt Street, where the case was laid out like a map on a table: in the span of four months, three murders, all women. Becca Wolkwitz. Lanie Miner, Jess Lowenthal. There was no evidence of abusive relationships, no history of drugs or run-ins with bad crowds to explain why they’d been plucked from the street and turned into statistics. The only common thread was all three women used the same dating app, and all had dated a man named Blake Bram.

  Bram’s profile picture, I exp
lained to Carson Gates, showed a Caucasian male in his midthirties with dark hair and blue eyes. Hair dye, colored contact lenses, and photo filters were a given; it’s witness-based composite sketches, not manipulated photos, that tend to get us our guy. Still, something about his picture tugged at my gut. His face evoked a memory, dog-eared and soft from use but long ago misplaced. I’d seen Bram before, but couldn’t say where.

  The guy’s bio claimed he liked airport novels and Bill Murray movies. More lies. Historical data from the app’s administrators told us he updated his profile often, no doubt trying various combinations to see what stuck. There was just one constant among the write-ups, a line of text present every time. Blake Bram was from a town called Swanton, Vermont.

  “Swanton. Sounds pretty as a picture, right?” I said as Carson listened with parted lips. “Back in the sixties, the Queen of England gifted Swanton with a pair of Royal Swans, and swans still swim in the town’s Village Green Park. To the west, you’ll find Lake Champlain; to the north, Canada. The 2010 census put the population of Swanton at 6,427. I know this because Swanton is where I grew up.”

  There it was. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to go on. “When I heard the killer claimed to be from my hometown, I understood why the sergeant asked me to drop everything for this case. There was a two-week time span between the disappearances, and no reason to think Bram’s spree was done. We were roughly the same age, he and I, and six thousand people wasn’t a lot.”

  Carson waited, cupping the back of his baby-smooth neck with both hands.

  “They were hoping I could ID the guy,” I went on. “Surely you know him, they said.”

  What I didn’t tell Carson, or anyone else, is that they were right.

  ONE

  Thirteen months later

  Murder,” I repeated, the word clumsy on my tongue. The last time I spoke it, I was in another world.

  Tim rocked his office chair, testing the bounce on springs sticky with dust, and raised his empty coffee mug. “Murder on an island,” he said. “If it didn’t make me a heartless creep, I’d call this your lucky day, Shane.”

  It was a nickname I hated, but I was still trying to reconcile Tim’s news with the water coursing down the window behind him, so I let it slide. Shane! Tim said my first day on the job. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Shane! Old western movie? Gunfighter with a mysterious past? Get it? I didn’t, hated westerns with their drama and dust, but Tim was convinced it was funny.

  That morning, no one was laughing. Tim took the transfer call from dispatch while I was putting a second pot on to brew, listening to the thunder rattle the panes and expecting nothing more from the Saturday than dry skin from the electric heat. As much as I wished the call was a joke, too—Tim needling “the new guy” or a prank by some bored townies—I knew it wasn’t, for three reasons. The first was Tim’s face. He had cartoonish eyebrows, so wide and straight they might have been drawn with a Sharpie. I’m not saying I’m perfect. Most people, when they look at me, see only my scar. But I wondered if in spite of Tim’s athletic build, perps saw him as a hapless clown with no sway. As I watched him ask the routine questions on the phone and scribble notes on a lined yellow pad, Tim’s face got hard as stone. It was an entirely new look on him. At least, it was new to me.

  The second reason was the timing. I’d been told prank calls in the fall were unicorns, rare enough to be the stuff of legend. We were smack in the middle of October and the exodus was nearly complete. The majority of the seasonal residents, even the stragglers who tried to eke out a few more days of summer, had packed up their water trampolines and put their garish red-and-yellow cigarette boats in storage. The short-term tourists were back where they’d come from, too: Manhattan, Toronto, Montreal. This was the off-season in the Thousand Islands of upstate New York, nobody left but the locals. Just us.

  Above all, though, I knew the call was legit because of the rain, sideways and lashing at that window by Tim’s desk. On the morning news the local weather guy—Bob? Ben?—said it was a nor’easter. The storm had started the previous day with lethal-looking green clouds that plunged the village of Alexandria Bay into premature darkness. It dumped freezing water on us all night and was expected to last forty-eight hours in all. Nobody wanted to be out in that weather, helping to dock a police boat. I couldn’t imagine anyone setting foot outside if they had a choice.

  No, this call was the real deal. It was my first murder case in over a year, since the one that convinced me to trade Manhattan for total obscurity. I glanced around me. We weren’t the only investigators working out of our station, but we were the only ones present today, and now, somehow, I had to get to an island. “Grab your coat,” I said, watching Tim’s eyebrows inch upward. “We’re going for a ride.”

  * * *

  —

  I used to think of boats differently, which is to say I rarely thought of them at all. A ferry to Ellis Island when my parents were in town and wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. A dinner cruise a few years back that ended with my date vomiting his shrimp cocktail into the East River. That was it for getting my sea legs. I hoped my inexperience wouldn’t be an issue today, but I knew it probably would.

  It was a three-minute drive from the station to Keewaydin State Park, a straight shot up Route 12. I relished the warmth of the cruiser, savored the feel of my dry clothes while I had the chance. “What do we know?” I asked, flexing my fingers on the wheel. They were tucked into gloves I wished I’d thought to make toasty on the heaters before we left the station.

  “That we’d rather be back inside with that coffee?”

  I doled out half a smile. The coffee would’ve gurgled to the top of the pot by now. I could picture it steaming in the break room. By the time I saw it again, it would be cold, pungent sludge. “Besides that,” I said.

  “White male age twenty-six, gone missing from a summer house. He was up from the city. It was the estate’s caretaker who called it in, noticed the guy’s absence first thing this morning.”

  “Whoa,” I said, swiveling my head. “Missing? I thought you said murder.” Those weren’t the same thing at all. Had Tim been playing me in the office? Joke’s on Shane?

  “Murder’s what the family wants to call it.” Tim shrugged, making it clear he didn’t put much stock in that claim. “There’s no body,” he admitted, way too late for my liking. “The man’s just gone.”

  A missing persons case that may or may not involve a murder. Suddenly my hands were too hot. I peeled off the gloves, jammed them in the center console. “Name?”

  “That’s where this gets interesting.”

  “It’s interesting already.”

  Tim grinned. “The guy? He’s Jasper Sinclair.”

  I gave him a blank look.

  “The Sinclairs are a New York family. In the fashion industry, I think,” he said. “They’re kind of a big deal. And this morning Jasper’s girlfriend woke up to an empty bed and the sheets soaked with blood.”

  “But no body,” I said. “Huh, that’s . . . different.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So they’re pointing the finger at her?”

  “Not clear on that,” Tim said. “I don’t see how a young woman could transport a grown man’s body through a house full of sleeping people without waking anyone up.”

  “Trapdoor in the floor?”

  He laughed. “Maybe so.”

  “That’s assuming the attacker worked alone.”

  “Attacker,” Tim repeated and winced.

  I knew what he was thinking. Murder on Tim’s turf was a personal affront. “How many people in the house?” I asked.

  “Eight, including the girlfriend. The missing man made nine. They all slept through the night, so the caretaker says, despite the storm.”

  I squinted at him. “And it’s all family over there?” No crime was easy to stomach, whether the body w
as on-site or not, but family stuff? That was the worst. I’ve seen the terrible things fathers, mothers, brothers, cousins are capable of. Blood ties can be bloody.

  “Family, the caretaker, the girlfriend, and a couple significant others. Like I said, full house. No sign of an intruder, apparently, but the caretaker seemed a little funny on that point.”

  “Funny how?”

  “Like maybe he was holding something back.”

  We took a left off the highway and sailed through a puddle the size of a lily pond. The dock and slips were just ahead.

  “I asked them if they’ve done a search,” Tim went on. “Figured there was a good chance the guy’s licking his wounds in the bathroom or a cupboard under the stairs. A big house like that, you never know.”

  “How do you know the house is big?”

  “They all are, Shane.” He tacked on an eye roll. “But this place is really something. I used to dream about living there when my dad would take me fishing nearby as a kid. No sign of Jasper, though. Not yet.”

  “Other than his blood, that is.” I tapped my fingers on the wheel. “We’ll have to do a proper search. If it’s an island, there could be cliffs and stuff, right?”

  “Plenty of places where people could tumble into the river in the dark,” Tim agreed.

  “We’ll need forensics, too. For the blood.” It was worth pointing out. This was A-Bay after all, and I couldn’t be sure what I’d get. There were six investigators in my unit, and the region had twenty troopers—plus Sheriff McIntyre and the deputies in Watertown overseeing all of Jefferson County. That was sufficient manpower for a hundred thousand law-abiding citizens. The issue was the island. I noticed Tim didn’t question my decision to bring him along. BCI Investigators, even senior ones like me, largely worked alone, but if ever this job warranted a partner, it was today.

  “’Course we will,” Tim said, sounding offended. “With island crimes, it’s closest car—or in this case, closest boat—but the others will be along. I’m sure they’ll all want a look. This kind of thing doesn’t happen much. Nobody around here even locks their doors. This isn’t New York City.”