Big Bad, page 13
4
The younger officer caught her as she was about to get into the back seat of Guppy’s taxi. “Ms. Shane… Emma.”
She turned around. “Yes?”
“I’m Officer Highmore… Jim Highmore.” He stuck out his hand, and then his eyes fell on Emma’s bandage. “Oh, sorry.”
Guppy rolled the window down a crack. “Hi, Jim. Don’t hassle my fare. She’s a nice lady.”
Jim bent to a half bow. “Hey, Gup.”
Guppy snickered and rolled up the window.
“Did he send you out here to arrest me for disagreeing with him?” Emma said.
Jim laughed, warming his already kind face. “Uh, no. Not here to arrest you. I wanted to talk, that’s all.”
“About what?”
“About Molly.”
“You knew her?”
“A little.” Jim glanced down, then back up. “Well enough to ask you to talk about her, I guess.”
“Okay,” Emma said, rubbing her fingers across her forehead. A headache was starting to build behind her eyes. “Now, or did you want to go somewhere else?”
As badly as she wanted to go back to her hotel room and lie down, she knew this could be the inroad she needed to start digging around about her sister. He definitely wasn’t the ideal person, given that Jim Highmore was on the very same police force she suspected wasn’t showing all their cards, but she did think that he had something honest about him. Or perhaps it wasn’t honesty, but rather innocence.
“I get off around six,” Jim said. “You have anyplace you have to be this evening?”
“I was planning on being in bed, sleeping off a hangover,” Emma said. It’d been a joke in her mind, but it had come out and landed as an honest statement.
“Oh. Rough night?”
“Rough morning.”
Jim’s brow wrinkled, and he shook his head good-humoredly. “Must be a real clinger. Where’re you staying while you’re here?”
“The Lamplighter.”
“Love that place. Great nachos,” Jim said, and nodded.
“You want to meet there? Is that what you’re getting to?” Emma said tiredly.
“Around seven work for you?” He paused. “If you don’t feel up to it, I can get in touch with you tomorrow. But I think this’ll interest you. First round’s on me. Whaddaya say?”
“How do you know what’ll interest me?”
“Just a hunch.” Jim looked over his shoulder, then back to her. “That, and, uh, I was eavesdropping on your conversation back inside. You know, you look just like her. I pegged you as her sister the second you walked in.”
Emma cleared her throat, scratched her nose, and glanced around the station parking lot. Then her gaze landed on Officer Highmore, and she regarded him a moment as he stood there, fiddling nervously with the band of his watch.
“Seven’s good,” she said.
“Okay. Yeah. Seven, then. See you there.”
Emma ducked into the car and shut the door.
Jim put his hands on his hips and remained beside the taxi a moment, looking a bit unsure of what to do next. Then, with a little flat-lipped nod, he turned and walked toward an SUV cruiser and got in.
“We have more errands to run?” Guppy asked, turning off the radio.
Emma looked away from Officer Highmore, who had begun backing his cruiser out of his spot in front of the station. “You know where I can find a doctor named Frederick Lang?”
“We got a small hospital on the island. He’s usually there. That where we’re headed?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure thing.” Guppy pulled out of the parking lot and took them away. When they hit the first intersection a mile up the road, he said, “So how’d it go?”
Emma rested her head against the cool glass of the window. “It went great,” she said sarcastically.
“Sorry to hear that.” Guppy paused a second or two, then added: “You knew how it’d go, though, so…”
“So… what?” Emma asked.
Guppy rubbed the back of his neck. “So nothing lost then, huh?”
“No,” she said, distracted. “Nothing lost, and nothing gained.” Then, gathering her focus: “You know that guy back there? Officer Highmore?”
“Jim? Oh sure, yeah, I know him.”
“Who is he?”
“Who is he?” Guppy laughed. “That’s a hard question. Who is anybody?”
“I don’t mean existentially speaking.”
“Oh. Was that existential? I don’t think I really know what exiswhatsis means.”
Emma smirked. “Somehow I doubt that. But to be fair, I don’t know, either. I just meant, what type of guy is he?”
“Ah, o’course, o’course. Well, he’s a local kid—a nice fella. Morally speaking, he’s one of the good guys, I’d say.”
“Do you like him?” Emma asked.
“Sure, I like him.” Guppy looked at her in the rearview, grinning with his eyes. “Why… do you like him? I don’t think he’s married.” He winked.
“I prefer the music.”
“Ah, you like jazz, now, do you?” Guppy laughed.
“No more than I did an hour ago.”
Guppy stopped at the next intersection, looked both ways, then in a more genuine tone he said, “You’re asking if you should trust him? That what you wanna know?”
“Should I?” Emma asked.
“Well, who can you really trust? But he might be a good friend to make.”
“Okay.”
Guppy turned the radio back on. It was an advertisement for laser hair removal. The enthusiastic woman on the radio promised: No more bumps, stubble, or irritation!
“Hey, just what I need,” Guppy said, and began to whistle along softly with the ad’s music. He’d heard the little jingle before. Probably many times.
5
Guppy pulled around to the empty parking lot, and Emma got out and walked up the wheelchair ramp and through the main entrance. He had been telling the truth: the hospital was small. With its weathered shingles and white trim, it looked more like a long cape-style house than a medical facility. If not for the large ramp and the sign above the door that read ROCKCLIFFE HOUSE HOSPITAL she might’ve thought it was someone’s home. Inside, a pleasant nurse greeted her and, after a brief exchange, led her down a short hallway that smelled of antiseptic, until they reached an office at the back of the hospital. Fred Lang was at his desk, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and halfway through what looked to be a tuna salad sandwich on a toasted English muffin. He was an old man in an olive-green cardigan. Emma placed him somewhere in his late seventies. Maybe even early eighties. He had a head shaped like a sideways lemon and watery eyes. His perfectly combed cotton-white hair looked like it had been poured straight from a cake mold.
He pushed his black-rimmed glasses up from the end of his nose when Emma came in. Even with the aid of the thick lenses, he still had to squint, deepening the already-deep lines wandering away from the corners of his eyes.
“What can I do for you?” he said, wiping his fingers on a crumpled napkin, then dragging it across his thin liver-colored lips.
His movements were slow and steady, but he had something uncertain about him. He looked like the kind of guy she might be nervous to see getting behind the wheel of an automobile. The kind of person who backs up without looking because they’ve been doing it for so long without incident and they’re just willing to keep playing the odds as they continue to stack up in their favor. She suspected Molly might have been a casualty of that.
Emma sat down in the chair in front of his desk. She considered the delicate route, and decided she wasn’t in the mood to pussyfoot around. She was exhausted, her nerves like a bunch of exposed, frayed wires. “Why didn’t you do an autopsy on Molly Rifkin?” she asked.
His eyebrows went up. “And who are you?”
“Her sister.”
His how-can-I-help-you face changed at once to a look of concerned naivety—the look of an Alzheimer’s patient who’d just been told the person he’d been talking to for the last hour was in fact his son, not just some stranger. “Oh dear. Molly Rifkin. The suicide. What a sad thing that was.”
He pushed his sandwich farther away from him, as if his appetite had suddenly flown the coop.
“You’re the island’s medical examiner, aren’t you? The chief of police showed me the report,” Emma said. “You’re supposed to conduct your own investigation. Why didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t aware I didn’t.”
Emma narrowed one eye and cocked her head to the side. “Really?”
He puffed out his cheeks and sighed. After a brief pause and a quick flash of something that might’ve been shame, he said, “I do believe I did, yes. I may be getting along in years, but it’s hard to forget a thing like that. I take it you have an opposing view? Is that what this is?”
“On the report it said you ruled it a suicide based on the police’s investigation. No foul play at the scene. Did you actually go to the scene?”
He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. “I’m afraid that night there was a nasty blizzard blowing over the island. Worst one in ten years.”
“I don’t think I asked for a weather report,” Emma said.
“Ah. Well, no, I didn’t go,” Dr. Lang said. “It wasn’t necessary.”
He didn’t seem affected by her anger. She supposed he’d probably seen it all before. People who dealt with death often saw people at their worst.
“Why not?” she asked.
“I’ve known Leslie Bayard almost forty years. I trust his judgment, and I trust him. He gave me his report over the phone, then gave a signed statement later. He had no doubt it was a suicide, so I granted him permission to move the body. I examined it the next day at the morgue. Found nothing remarkable, so I released it for cremation. It was a clear-cut suicide, just as he’d said.”
“Just as he said,” Emma repeated back in a low voice. “So you let him do your job for you.”
He gave a little half-shrug. “It’s a team effort, I guess. Small island like this, there’s a lot of team efforts.”
“Protocols exist for a reason,” Emma said.
“So you’d trust me to rule on your sister’s cause of death so long as I’d done it completely by the book. You just don’t believe I have the capacity to judge the character of someone I’ve known nearly four decades. That it?” He made a series of mm-hmm sounds after he spoke.
“It should’ve been handled correctly,” Emma said.
Dr. Lang leaned forward and clasped his hands atop his cluttered desk. “I reached out to her therapist in Boston, who disclosed her file. Not that I’m supposed to tell you—against protocol, as you said—but your sister had a history of depression. And according to Chief Bayard’s interview of her husband, she had recently stopped taking her medication for it. Combine that with her being found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit that was in her name and… well, everything was consistent with suicide. It lined up.”
“What about toxicology?”
He sighed. “Again, there was no need. According to the police, there were no signs of drugs being involved.”
“And what if the police are lying?”
Dr. Lang’s face flashed surprise, as if he’d been struck. “Deary, just what exactly are you trying to say?”
“There’s something wrong with her death. Something wrong with all of this.”
“Of course there is,” Lang said genuinely. “She killed herself. If that’s not wrong, I don’t know what is.”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s suspicious.”
“Not to me, it wasn’t.” He took off his glasses, squeezed the sides of his nose, then reset them. “If there was anything, it would be that I thought it was a little odd that she’d go all the way to a storage unit in the middle of a snowstorm to do it. My guess is she just didn’t want her family to have to find her. But that’s not uncommon. The police said she’d been paying for the unit in cash since October. So it sounds to me like this was something she might’ve been planning for a little while, keeping it secret until the time came. For whatever reason, the blizzard felt to her like that time.” He nodded, as if agreeing with something internal. “Deary, I won’t pretend to understand a suicidal mind, but I do know that most depressives don’t want to kill themselves. It’s just that the alternative seems that much worse to them. The same reason people jump fifty stories from a burning building. The idea of the flames and burning alive is just more terrifying. The lesser of two evils, as they say. And this time of year, something about being isolated on an island in the winter, I think, it just hits some folks worse than others. We’ve had… oh, I’d say… five or six suicides I can think of over the last thirty years or so, and they always seem to happen in the winter months, when the days are short and the nights are long.”
Emma saw no sense in arguing with him. She could tell he’d already been fed the story he was supposed to know, and nothing would change his mind now. If there had been anything for him to find, it would’ve been at the scene. That was where, if someone had tried to stage a murder as a suicide, the inconsistencies would’ve shown themselves. Maybe he’d even seen pictures, but that wasn’t the same as actually being there and getting the chance to see everything up close. All it took was one tiny little detail to change the narrative. And considering the thickness of his glasses, she had a feeling Frederick Lang had stopped seeing the finer details in things long ago.
Emma stood up and thanked him for his time. There wasn’t much enthusiasm in it, but the doctor seemed to appreciate it just the same. She found her way out of the hospital on her own, then walked back down the wheelchair ramp in the cold afternoon. Guppy had pulled into a parking space. She went to the cab and got in.
Guppy found her eyes in the rearview. “Back to the hotel?”
“Back to the hotel,” she said.
They drove.
6
Emma went downstairs to the Lamplighter’s tavern—which was aptly named The Watchman’s Quarters—at ten minutes to seven and found a booth near the back. Officer Highmore hadn’t shown yet, but she had come a little early. The place was dimly lit, with warm wood paneling on the walls and deep-green carpeting covering every inch of the floor. In the middle of the room, separating the bar from the larger dining area, a round pass-through fireplace made of granite kept a simmering fire. The room smelled pleasantly of smoke. It was a cozy place.
She scanned the room as she sat. For a restaurant on a Friday night, it wasn’t terribly busy. Although she supposed this was more of a tourists’ bar than one for locals. Most of them probably had their own watering holes: places where everybody knew your name, where the prices were better, and where the barstools were much more familiar with the asses that crowned them.
After a moment, a late-twentysomething waitress in a black polo and black pants came over to the table. She was skinny, with high cheekbones, a smoker’s complexion, a breastless chest, and dark hair that she’d pulled back into a tight ponytail. Her forearm sported a large, colorful tattoo of a dragonfly, its tail trailing a word Emma couldn’t make out. What she could make out, however, was the girl’s name tag: KATE.
“How’re you tonight?” Kate said. She had a tired, hoarse voice.
“Fine, thanks.” Emma adjusted the green cloth napkin in front of her so that the bottom ran squarely along the edge of the table.
“You planning on drinks and food?”
Emma contemplated a beer but decided against it at the thought of sitting through her sister’s service in the morning hungover. “Just a root beer.”
“That it?”
“For now.”
“No problem,” Kate said, turning away and heading toward the bar, absently scratching at a raw-looking patch of skin in the crook of her arm.
“Emma?”
She looked up to see Officer Highmore dressed in a hooded gray sweatshirt and jeans, standing beside the table. He had a backpack slung over his shoulder. He tossed it into the open booth and slid in after it.
“Officer Highmore,” she said, and sat up straighter.
“Jim. Just Jim,” he said.
“I ordered you the nachos,” Emma said.
His face flashed surprise. “Really? Oh, great, I’m starving—”
“I’m kidding.”
“Oh. Wait… you serious?”
Emma flattened her lips and nodded regretfully, not quite making eye contact.
Jim laughed in astonishment. “Wow. Weird. That might be the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me.”
“Sorry,” Emma said. “I don’t know why I said that. Bad joke.” She wondered if she had been trying to flirt.
“Well, I’m gonna order some food.” He leaned forward on his elbows, looked over toward the waitress, and held up a finger. She acknowledged him. “You hungry?” he said.
“I’m all set,” she said.
When Kate started back over to the table with her root beer, Jim turned back to Emma. “Still nursing that hangovah?” He added an extra-thick New England accent to the last word.
She yawned, using the back of her wrapped hand to cover her mouth. The ACE bandage had the sterile smell of a hospital room. “A little. It’ll be an early night.”
“What happened?” He waited a beat before adding, “To your hand, I mean.”
“Hurt it. What’d you want to talk about?”
“Hold on a sec.”
Kate approached and set the root beer down. “Need a menu?” she asked Jim.
“No, thanks. I know what I’ll have. A Miller Lite and an order of nachos. No black olives. Side of chili.”
Kate jotted it down on her pad. “Draft or bottle?”
“Make it a draft. And do you have any Tabasco kickin around?”
“I can find some.” Kate turned to Emma. “And you’re good?”
“I’m fine,” Emma said.
When Kate was gone, a more serious look fell over Jim’s face. He leaned in closer and began to speak in a low voice. “So… short answer: I wanted to talk about what Bayard wouldn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I heard what you were saying to him… only parts of it, but enough. And I agree—I have from the start. I think there’s more to Molly’s death than he’s willing to consider. None of it adds up. And you don’t even know that half of it. You just know the parts he decided to put on the reports. The”—he hooked his fingers into air quotes—“‘official’ story.”
