Death in the Family Read online

  “You’ve all met my colleague. I’m BCI Senior Investigator Shana Merchant,” I said. “I’ve had a chance to take a look at Jasper’s room.”

  Slowly, their stalled energy sputtered to life. They were interested in what I had to tell them, at least. That was something. “Let me start by saying we appreciate your cooperation. Based on the evidence I’ve been able to gather so far, it appears Jasper was attacked.” A sloppy sob erupted from Abella, and the man by the window rushed to her side. From her settee the other woman shot them both a look of loathing. “I can’t tell you more than that right now, but please know we’re doing everything we can,” I went on. “This is a tough situation, but with any luck we’ll find Jasper safe and sound.”

  “Situation?” Camilla repeated. “You saw that bed. Someone tried to kill my grandson.”

  “I assure you, we’re all on the same page about that.”

  The lounging woman snorted. “I sincerely doubt we’re on the same page about anything. My grandmother is very upset. Who do I need to call to get someone from the city out here?”

  To this elegant woman, mainland towns like Alexandria Bay had nothing in common with Tern. Owning an island was like erecting a sweeping, vine-draped manor in the sticks of Arkansas. The river served as a convenient barrier between the haves and the have-nots, and a public reminder of the Sinclair family’s worth. Tim and I didn’t meet their standards, not by a long shot. I smiled at her, sweet as candy-shop fudge, and said, “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Barbara Sinclair—Bebe. Jasper’s my brother.”

  Not was, but is. Her choice of words didn’t mean she knew he was alive, or even that she believed it, but it was interesting all the same. Past tense can be hard for people; I know parents of children lost decades ago who still can’t bring themselves to use it. I’ve also seen it give murderers away. Other than parents most people are quick to adjust, while criminals tend to overthink it. They play the part of the suffering martyr, thinking they know what grief looks like. They don’t, though. Until fear and sorrow smother you like a burial shroud, you have no idea how you’re going to react, can’t understand that you’re powerless to change it.

  “This isn’t going to be easy, on any of you,” I said. “I won’t pretend otherwise. What I will do is promise not to make it more painful than it needs to be. As you can see”—I shot a sideways glance at Tim—“it’s just the two of us here right now. We’ve got other troopers on the way, but with the weather like this I can’t say when they’ll arrive. In the meantime, there are some things that have to happen, things that can’t be delayed.”

  In the hearth, a log shifted with a thump and the scent of woodsmoke swirled through the air. All eyes stayed on me. The dark-skinned man was busy stroking Abella’s hand, but his eyebrows hovered expectantly. Our witnesses could sense it coming, a request they wouldn’t be able to refuse.

  “I’m going to interview each of you about what happened here last night,” I said. “I want you to tell me everything you remember, no matter how insignificant it may seem. This is going to take some time. As Wellington already explained, we’re asking that you turn off your mobile devices and refrain from contacting anyone outside this room.”

  “But why?”

  How is it that teen girls are capable of infusing two small words with so much loathing? The kid on the couch looked at me like I’d just told her she wasn’t allowed to breathe.

  “For one thing,” I said, “we’re still trying to determine what happened. It’s in nobody’s best interest to start a gossip chain that could spread false information to your neighbors and friends. For another, there may come a time when we need to take a look at those devices. We won’t do that unless we suspect they contain evidence related to this investigation, but until then, we need the information on them to remain untouched and intact.”

  Slowly, the people in the room came to a consensus and there were small nods of agreement all around. Arms folded defiantly over her chest, the teenager continued to seethe, but she didn’t fight back. My appeal made sense to them, or they were willing to pretend it did. I didn’t tell them they had every right to use their phones if they wanted to. Under the circumstances, I felt I’d be forgiven for taking a few liberties with the law.

  “While I’m speaking with you individually,” I said without delay, because this was the tough part, the part they’d hate, “I’d like you to stay right here in this room. Wellington will be with you until the state police troopers arrive. Until then, stay put.”

  There was a beat of silence, and then everyone spoke at once. I caught snippets of what they were saying, all of it standard-issue outrage. I was accused of treating them like naughty children sent to their rooms. The elegant parlor was likened to a jail cell. Somebody threatened to contact a reporter. Someone else—the man in glasses, the teenager’s dad—pointed out he was a lawyer and prepared to act.

  I didn’t respond, didn’t say one damn word, and eventually the clamor died down. Only when they were all red-faced and deflated did I go on. “I’m not saying you can’t get up to use the bathroom. I’m not cuffing you to a chair. We’re here to find out what happened, and this is how we do it. But I want to remind you of something, too. While I haven’t seen any evidence of an intruder—no broken windows or busted locks—we can’t rule that possibility out. You need to understand whoever did this might still be here, on the island. Your comfort and convenience is not my priority. My priority is to keep the rest of you safe.”

  The wind blew harder and the house gave a shudder. Against the windows the rain mimicked the sound of a million pebbles falling from a great height. A log split open with a crack like a gunshot, and this time I felt everyone tense. Abella drew in a ragged breath. Bebe Sinclair’s jaw hung slack. Her skin reminded me of rubber; there was a shiny, overplumped quality to it that smacked of Botox. A new smell filled the air, mingling with the wood smoke. Fear. “Now,” I said. “Who are we missing?”

  It was the man next to Abella who answered. “Flynn,” he said. “We’re missing Flynn.”

  “Flynn Sinclair. Jasper’s older brother,” Tim told me, blushing hard as he stared down at his boots. “Thanks, Ned,” he said, then, back to me, “Sorry. I should have mentioned that.”

  We were new to it still, to each other, but Tim and I were slowly learning to play the game, and the seamlessness of our exchange thrilled me. Tim, as it turned out, could act. He wore an abashed expression that wasn’t lost on the others. Bebe watched with interest and the tiniest of smirks, while Camilla looked slightly offended by Tim’s apparent misstep. Her eyes crinkled in a way that implied disappointment. Unlike Bebe, Camilla took us for consummate professionals. Tim had let her down.

  I sighed and jutted out my chin in the direction of the hallway. It gave our witnesses a good look at the colorless crease that slashed across my cheek, stretching from my earlobe all the way to the corner of my mouth. The only benefit of having a scar like mine is related to my work. People assume I’m tough. Good. Let them. Tim didn’t look up as he followed me out of the room.

  “The apology was a nice touch,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “You sure you want to talk to this guy alone?” Gone was the face of a cop who’d messed up, the face of a performer. Now Tim looked uneasy. I could hear the others conferring, and I couldn’t shake the image of the blood on the bed. I’d made our objectives, mine and Tim’s, clear. If the Sinclair family had something to hide and hadn’t made a desperate, slapdash attempt at collusion already, they didn’t have much time left. We had to move fast.

  “I’ll call you if I need help,” I said. I had no reason to fear Flynn Sinclair, not yet. Tim was just being cautious. But my lungs felt like they were in a vise and my palms were starting to sweat.

  “I still think Jasper skipped town,” he said. “But there’s something strange going on here. Is it me, or does it seem like Camilla and
Abella are the only ones sad to see that Jasper’s gone? Maybe not everybody goes berserk when a loved one disappears, I’ll give you that—but what does it say about these people that they don’t look remotely upset?” His eyebrows got straighter. “I don’t like it. Watch yourself, okay?”

  My gaze traveled back to the seven people in the parlor. This island was their territory, and I felt like an intruder. I didn’t know what awaited me upstairs, or around the corner, or even in the parlor itself.

  “Yeah,” I said as I twisted my body to face the stairs. “You too.”

  FIVE

  I didn’t like him. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t met him yet. The eldest Sinclair sibling hadn’t bothered to come downstairs to hear what we had to say about his brother’s disappearance, and that transported me back to the police boat. It made me feel queasy and ill at ease.

  This time when I knocked on the locked door, I got a reply. “Come in,” Flynn said at once. I was about to argue—it’s locked, don’t you know it’s locked?—but when I tried the knob it turned easily in my moist hand.

  He sat on the edge of a four-poster bed all the way across the room. When had Flynn unlocked the door? For a moment I wondered if I’d been wrong. Maybe it was just jammed, or sticky with age. Maybe it was never locked at all. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d imagined a locked door. Usually, though, it was me on the other side.

  Flynn Sinclair looked nothing like his name, which had a Peter Pan quality, elfish and light on its feet. He was a large man with simian features, a seventies-style mustache, and dense dark hair. From the shape of his shoulders and upper arms, contained by a gray cashmere sweater like you’d wear to Sunday brunch, I could see there was muscle under his mass. My guess was he played football in college and was killing himself fighting the middle-age spread. Flynn didn’t get up to greet me. But he did ask about Jasper.

  “We haven’t found him yet. We’re working on it,” I said. There was a needlepoint pillow in Flynn’s lap that he held against his stomach like a compress. It made the big man look more vulnerable. I’m sure that was his intent. “We need you downstairs. But let’s talk a minute first.”

  “You saw it? The blood?” He clutched the pillow tighter. “Philip wouldn’t let me in there. What happened to my brother?”

  I had trouble imagining stubby Norton taking on Flynn. If Flynn wanted to see that room, he’d have done it. “We’re still trying to figure that out,” I said. “Hopefully we’ll know more when the forens—”

  Flynn flinched. It was that word; too much crime TV makes the public associate forensic science with death. “When the rest of our team gets here,” I said, backpedaling, “we may have more information about the nature of the injury and crime.”

  “You’ve got to have a theory. People don’t just disappear.”

  You’re wrong, I wanted to tell him. People disappear all the time. Instead, I said, “Not every day, no.”

  “Did you talk to her? She’s the one you should be talking to, not me.”

  “You’re referring to his girlfriend.” I took out my notebook. “That would be Abella Beaudry?”

  “Obviously. Christ.”

  “I do plan to speak with her. But right now, I’m with you. Do you mind if I sit down?”

  A muscle rolled across Flynn’s jaw. I couldn’t tell if he was suppressing anger or pain. He jerked his chin in the direction of a chair and I took some time getting there, seizing my chance to study the room.

  The curtains on the windows were open. Rain beat against the glass. This side of the house was closer to the trees, and they blocked most of the dull daylight in a way that made the room feel cold. Some coins and a set of house keys were scattered across the surface of the dresser. Flynn had emptied his pockets of the things one didn’t need on a private island. Must be nice, I thought, to have the luxury of sloughing off the burdens of the outside world. Beside the items, he’d placed his billfold-style wallet. But no, that was wrong. There wasn’t one wallet, but two.

  “Mind if I take some notes?” I adjusted myself on the stiff ladder-back chair. Like the parlor, Flynn’s bedroom was sparsely decorated with antique furniture and Adirondack flare. I was pleased to find sitting across from someone with notepad and pen in hand still came easily, as if each step of the interview process was ingrained. It emboldened me; I took it as a good sign. Flynn hadn’t answered my question, but it didn’t matter. I was taking notes regardless.

  “Okay, so. First question. Are you and Jasper close?”

  “Of course we’re close. He’s my brother.”

  “There’s a pretty big age difference between you.” I thought of Jasper’s photo as I looked at Flynn, whose skin was rough and had succumbed to decades of gravity. His heavy jowls made me think of melting wax. “Ten years?”

  “Twelve.”

  “You were almost a teenager when he was born.”

  A shadow passed across his face. “What’s your point?”

  “Not making a point, I just wonder how well you know him—now, I mean. A lot of siblings grow apart as they get older.”

  “That didn’t happen to us.”

  “Fair enough. So, Flynn. Why don’t you tell me what happened last night?”

  That muscle again. It slid beneath the surface of his skin like an eel in shallow water. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like the guy for hiding up here while the rest of his family was downstairs. Something about Flynn’s body language made me edgy. “If I knew,” he said coolly, “you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Why don’t you walk me through yesterday and we’ll see what we can turn up?”

  “My brother’s been gone for hours. There’s a goddamn hurricane outside. It’s fucking freezing, and Jasper’s jacket and shoes are sitting in the mudroom downstairs. You’re wasting time. She’s right downstairs.” To make his point Flynn slammed the sole of his shoe against the floor. It was an oil-tanned leather moccasin dyed navy, fine, and out of season. No wonder he’d opted to join the search party that stayed indoors.

  I’d been with Flynn ten minutes and already the ridges of my ears were tingling. He hadn’t relinquished the pillow, but the vulnerability I witnessed when I entered the room had been replaced with an aggression so intense it radiated from his body in waves. In my academy days, when we were learning to use our firearms, we’d compete to see who was the quickest draw. We would stand back-to-back, western-movie style, while an instructor manned the stopwatch, tapping his foot in wait. He was deadly serious about our reaction time on those drills—in the city, the fastest draw is the one who survives—but we had other motives for winning. Fastest draw was bragging rights, and bragging rights were currency in the academy. Plenty of times it was me who was flush.

  It isn’t that Flynn’s hostility had me worried. I could be on my feet with my weapon trained on his chest in just over a second. What worried me was that this shifty witness would go to scratch his nose and I’d instinctively put a bullet in his big, hairy head. I was jumpier now than I used to be back in the academy. Before Bram.

  Like my instructor during those drills, I tapped my foot, and waited. I figured Flynn for a hothead. He’d lash out, lean on his strength to get his way. But he didn’t. His shoulders began to relax.

  “I was working yesterday,” he said at last. “I’m always working. I barely saw Jas at all.”

  “Walk me through it anyway. The whole day. Give me every detail you remember.”

  I crossed my legs and leaned back in the chair to make it clear I expected a long story. Flynn glared at me, sighed, then started to talk.

  Interviewing a witness effectively hinges on a series of questions designed to draw out the who, what, where, when, and why of a crime. I let them do most of the talking and keep interruptions to a minimum. Some people call that free recall. It’s a good way to tap a person’s memory of the time frame in question, a kind of stream-of-conscio
usness exercise that helps me extract the details I need with as much accuracy as possible.

  Cooperative witnesses do well with this, and I usually come out with answers. But here’s the problem—I didn’t yet know if Flynn was a witness or a suspect in his brother’s disappearance. Everything he told me could be a truthful recollection of the events that might help us find Jasper.

  On the other hand, the entire story I was about to hear—every word of it—could be an expertly crafted lie.

  SIX

  By the time Flynn Sinclair arrived at Tern Island on Friday, October 20, his brother was already there. As Norton pulled the skiff up to the flooded dock, Flynn spotted Jasper on the shore. Jasper’s arm was around a woman. She was Jasper’s height, but her nonverbal cues made her look small. Like a girl with something to hide, Flynn said.

  It was Jasper’s idea to come to the island. He and Abella had been dating only a few months, but he was eager to introduce her to Camilla. Camilla, in turn, insisted the rest of the family come, too, and what would have been a quiet weekend morphed into a huge family affair.

  Abella delivered a practiced smile as Flynn climbed out of the boat. There was a stranger in the boathouse dressed in camouflage, but since getting up in age, Norton sometimes brought on help for the labor-intensive jobs around the island, so Flynn ignored it and offered to help dock the boat.

  “I’m heading back to the mainland,” Norton said. “One last run to the market before the weather turns.”

  As he revved the engine and raced off across the water, Flynn clapped his younger brother on the back.

  “The elusive Abella, at last,” Flynn said as he shook the woman’s hand for the first time.

  “Call me Abby,” she replied with a weak smile.