The Edge, page 9
Harper waved this query off. “Small town, she would have heard from someone. Maybe Pat told her.”
“How did she appear, other than the crying?” asked Fuss. “Did you speak to her?”
He gave a shorthand account of their conversation, leaving out Alex’s comment about her perhaps not-so-wonderful sister. But he did tell them how she had put him in his place.
“Yeah, that sounds like Alex,” proclaimed Fuss.
Harper said, “Shall we get to the search?”
“Do you have the keys to her rental?” asked Devine.
“They were in the cottage. I made a quick check before I secured it,” replied Harper.
They did the rental vehicle first. It had a new car smell, and there was not a single thing of Jenny’s in it. And they pulled up the liner in the trunk, looked under the car, in the wheel wells and under the floorboards and seats, and even in the engine compartment and tailpipe.
“Let’s head inside,” said Harper. Devine was grateful to get out of the cold.
The chief cut the police tape and unlocked the door with the one-pound slug key. Devine asked if the key had been found on Jenny’s body.
“No,” said Harper. “But Pat gave me this master key. Well, let’s get to it.”
They found a small carry-on roller next to the bed. It contained only clothes and a pair of sneakers. The bathroom had her toiletry bag with some of the items laid out neatly on the sink. She had been here only the one day, arriving early, so the bed had not been slept in. There was no briefcase. They did find her purse with her wallet in it. But no laptop or phone.
“You have the clothes she was found in?” asked Devine.
“Back in the evidence locker at the station,” said Fuss.
“Got a list on you?”
She pulled out her phone and clicked through some screens. She held it out to him.
He read off, “Parka, jeans, sweater, boots, socks, underwear.” He looked up. “Personal effects?”
“Just the two rings, necklace, and the Breitling watch I mentioned before. And now that we found her purse and wallet here we can definitely rule out robbery.”
“What about a phone? Everyone carries a phone.”
“We found no phone on her person,” said Fuss.
“So since it’s not here presumably someone took it?”
“Or it got washed away when she fell onto the rocks,” said Harper. “Like we told you, by the time we got there she was damn near floating.”
Devine didn’t buy this but didn’t comment.
Harper looked around. “Well, there’s nothing much here. We’ll bag and tag what is.”
“You don’t want to call in a forensics team?” said Devine.
“The closest one I know of that’s any good is at least two hours away,” Fuss pointed out. “And this is not the crime scene. If we had found something obvious—blood or signs of a struggle, for example—we would call them in. But this isn’t the big city, Devine. No CSI here. Resources are limited and police budgets are tiny. We can’t snap our fingers and these folks suddenly appear, even for a priority case like this. Everyone’s busy, and they already sent extra people out on it.”
“That much crime around here?”
“You’d be surprised. It’s just spread over a wide area. There are fewer and fewer jobs, fentanyl use is through the roof. People are just fed up with being crapped on and everyone around here has guns, lots of them. Not a good combo.”
“Putnam looks like it’s doing okay.”
“A few nice shops and a new bar and some fancy restaurants do not make for a paradise for everybody,” interjected Harper. “Fishing still drives this part of Maine, and the fishing lately has not been all that good and it’s only expected to get more challenging.”
The two officers proceeded to methodically collect the woman’s personal possessions.
Devine watched them for a bit and then walked around the cottage. He was pretending it was part of an enclave of mud shacks outside of Kabul where they’d found a meticulously hidden IED processing operation. Or twenty clicks to the north of Dohuk, where an entire rural village had banded together to hide a top leader of ISIS. A thorough search had rooted him out and a shoot-out had followed, the intensity of which Devine had seldom seen. Every villager, even grandmothers and kids, had produced a variety of weapons, from old Soviet AK-47 assault rifles to Stechkin machine pistols, and opened fire. Devine’s team leader had had to call in reinforcements to eventually win the battle. And the ISIS leader had been killed in the ensuing melee, so they got no intel from him. And the confrontation had cost two American soldiers their lives, along with four kids and three elderly women.
Devine had thrown up after seeing the torn-apart bodies of the children and women. And he had not been alone.
He eyed the small desk set against the window, a duplicate of the one in his room. Bright sunlight was streaming in through the glass, and he stood directly in its path to gain some warmth. When he looked down at the desktop he saw it.
A slight dust pattern. The shape sure looked like the size of a laptop.
He ran the possibilities through in his head: Had Jenny taken it with her? Had her killer taken it from her? Or had her killer come here and taken it after she was dead, as he had speculated the previous night?
If they had taken her laptop and phone, he knew the security on each would be pretty much unbeatable.
But if they somehow got the passwords from her before they killed her?
There was up to several hours between Silkwell’s last being seen alive and her death occurring. A lot could have happened during that time.
Guillaume didn’t mention any traces of torture in the postmortem, but still. If our enemies now possess what she had on her laptop or phone?
He knew there were strict protocols and procedures for keeping classified information on government devices. And just like the private sector, much of it was stored in the cloud. But he also knew that some government employees took shortcuts, or didn’t always adhere strictly to the protocols.
He glanced over to see Fuss eyeing him cagily where he stood in the sunlight.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Just trying to stay warm.”
Fuss scoffed. “Try coming here in January.” She went back to work.
And Devine stared back down at a dust pattern that was making his gut churn.
CHAPTER
16
AFTER PARTING COMPANY WITH THE local police, Devine walked to his cottage, where he composed and sent off a long email to Campbell, filling him in on everything that had happened since they last communicated, including Silkwell’s laptop possibly having been taken and there being no sign of her phone. As Devine wrote it all out, he could see that it was a lot to report, in a short period of time. And his instincts were telling him that there was a lot more to come.
He got into the Tahoe and drove along the coast highway. He had the dinner with Dak tonight, but he’d decided he’d first have a follow-up meeting with his sister, though the initial encounter had hardly been a meeting. He checked his watch and noted that Dak would have been at his tattoo shop for a couple of hours.
Devine arrived at Jocelyn Point and headed up the cracked and pitted asphalt driveway, past landscaping that had once been elegant and substantial but now was just a ruinous mass as nature reclaimed its territory. He parked in front of the house and took in the structure.
It was not in as bad a shape as he had expected. Parts of the exterior, while grungy and ill-used by the elements, looked like they had been power-washed fairly recently. The front entrance foundation’s veneer had some new stone and fresh mortar, and the wooden columns holding up the pitched roof over the front door looked new.
The glass in some of the windows seemed to have been replaced. And though the lawn was now dormant, the sod looked to maybe have been put in during the fall. He eyed one of the tall brick chimney stacks and saw smoke curling out of it.
Directly behind the house was a large clapboard structure with a high-pitched cedar shake roof and a large skylight set in each plane of the shakes. There were windows lining the sidewalls and a large exhaust pipe coming out of the rear wall. He peered inside one of the windows and saw that it was set up as an art studio: easels with works in process on them; long worktables with cans of brushes and small bottles of paint lined up, along with sketchpads, jars of drawing pencils and charcoal sticks, and large and small paint-smeared palettes. In one corner was a potting wheel, and in another corner stood a small kiln. There were also large metal tanks next to what looked to be welding equipment, and a large work sink, and a metal tub set on wooden sawhorses.
He tried the door but it was securely locked.
He looked to his left, and far down the property line he could see some of the ancillary buildings he had glimpsed last night.
He walked over to the coastline. He found it was quite elevated as he looked over the edge to the rocks below, though there was a path down that looked well used. Some of the boulders were nearly as large as an Abrams tank. The surf pounded against them, sending a drenching spray halfway up from where Devine stood.
He knew that Maine had a long coastline, the fourth longest of all the states, longer even than California’s, because of all the jagged clusters of coves and inlets. And out of all that shoreline, in the middle of the night in a downpour, Earl Palmer walked through a forest of trees to the exact spot where Jenny Silkwell lay dead on the rocks below? The odds of that happening were enormous. No, they were beyond impossible.
I need to talk to that man, and sooner rather than later.
He turned and walked back around to the front of the main house and knocked.
No answer. He knocked again and then pounded on the wood.
“Go away,” called out Alex Silkwell.
“It’s Travis Devine. We met last night.”
“Then go away faster. I have nothing to say to you.”
Devine stared at the weathered door and imagined Silkwell standing just on the other side of it, all defiant and ticked off. He needed to talk to her, but he didn’t have a warrant and so there was really nothing he could do.
“I’m leaving my card under the doormat.”
Silence greeted this statement, and Devine couldn’t really imagine any scenario where she would be phoning him voluntarily.
He walked back to his car and drove off. He reached the coast road, turned left, and hit the gas. Once around a bend, he pulled off, parked his car, and hoofed it back to Jocelyn Point.
He took up a surveillance point behind a stand of white pines, which were bracketed by some leafless ash, birch, and maples. Using his optics, he kept an eye on the main house and also the art studio.
Thirty minutes later his patience was rewarded as Alex, carrying a cup of something, hurried out to the studio, unlocked the door, and went inside.
Devine put his optics away and marched over to the studio. He peered in one window and saw Alex slipping off her coat. Underneath she had on jean overalls and a long-sleeved thermal undershirt. Her hair was piled loosely on top of her head and secured there with some pins and braids.
She picked up a large palette, loaded it with fresh paint from a variety of tubes, and headed over to one of the canvases set on an easel.
Devine slipped to the door and tried the knob. It turned easily. For some reason he was more nervous than when he had been about to breach places in the Middle East where he knew men inside were waiting to kill him. But he actually knew why.
I trained long and hard for the latter scenario. Not so much for what I’m about to do.
He opened the door and walked in.
CHAPTER
17
HE EXPECTED HER TO START screaming, or maybe throw something at him, or fire up the blowtorch on her welding kit and come at him for a personal charcoaling session.
But Alex just stood there in front of her painting, her palette in one hand and a slender brush in the other. “You’re persistent.”
“My job sort of requires that.” He looked around. “So this is where the magic happens?”
“It’s not so much magic as just hard work, luck, and a dash of creativity and talent thrown in.”
He looked around at paintings in oil, acrylic, and watercolor along with clay sculptures all in various stages of completion. Bronze and other metallic figures bent and curved by heat and pressure into fascinating shapes were arrayed around the perimeter of the space.
“I think it’s more than a dash of talent. I can barely draw a straight line. This… this is really impressive, Ms. Silkwell.”
His frankness seemed to draw down whatever anger she might have been feeling at his intrusion. “I’m Alex. I’ve never been Miss anything.”
“And I’m Travis.”
“From Homeland Security keeping us all safe and the American Dream possible? I think you all need to step up your game.”
On that she turned back to her work.
He came to stand behind her and took it in.
While some of the works displayed in the studio were portraits of people, landscapes, and animals, this one was clearly more impressionistic. A yellow ball erupting out of an orange flame that, in turn, devolved into a blue wave that was about to descend, seemingly violently, on what he took to be roofs and a jagged church steeple reaching disproportionately far into the sky.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What I see in my head every morning when I wake up,” she replied as she added some shadowing to the flame.
“And what does it represent to you?”
She glanced at him. “More importantly, what does it represent to you?”
He was taken aback by her swift counterattack. “I… I’m not sure. It looks sort of like Armageddon.”
“And here I thought I was being subtle.”
Devine looked around, and something occurred to him. “You knew I was coming back. You knew I would see you coming in here. And that’s why you began working on this painting.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But her cheeks flushed and she wouldn’t look at him.
“This work looks finished, while you have lots of others in far earlier stages. So what’s so important about this piece that you wanted me to see you working on it? I take it you believe Armageddon is coming to Putnam?”
“What a vivid imagination you have. You might want to consider a career in fiction.”
“Okay, what does it mean to you, the painting? And why do you see that scene in your head every morning?”
“That is my business and no concern of yours. And didn’t you come here to ask me questions about my sister?”
Her phone buzzed. She put her brush down, slipped it from her pocket, and glanced at the screen. “Give me a minute,” she said and started thumbing a response.
Devine took the time to look around some more. That was when he saw the large framed, finished painting. It looked to be a white dress with a large red spot dead on the center. The way it had been painted, it seemed like the red spot was perpetually growing; a neat optical illusion, he thought. Then he saw a brass plate tacked onto the frame that read, HER FIRST PERIOD.
Okay, didn’t see that one coming.
In another corner he spotted something that also gave him considerable pause.
He bent down to peer closer.
Damn.
It was a bronze sculpture that looked like a heavily veined, erect penis that was looped with a chain. And down below, around the testicles, were… handcuffs.
“Want to buy it? I’ll give you a good price. I bet it would look great in your living room.”
He turned to see her staring at him as she slipped her phone back into her pocket.
“I can guess at the symbolism,” he said.
“Can you now?” She perched on the edge of a worktable and crossed one long leg over the other. “Please share?”
“Without being too graphic, I suppose it’s to shackle, or at least push back against a man’s… baser impulses.”
“In that regard life does not imitate art, because there is no way to really do that.”
“Some things are changing, hopefully for the better.”
“Some would say the change is happening far too slowly. It can be depressing.” She looked around her space. “But some of the greatest artists were depressed all the time. They used that to power their creativity.”
“I can understand that.”
“You can? Really?”
“I served with a guy who drew these big designs in the sand when we were in the Middle East during some pretty heavy fighting. We were losing guys every day, and we were having to kill people every day, and not just soldiers on the other side, because lots of different sorts of people were fighting against us. After every mission, he’d come back, hang up his gear, pull out this wooden paddle he’d whittled, and mark out, well, what I guess you’d call artwork in the sand. They never lasted because a wind storm would come through and they’d be gone. But he kept at it. I could never figure out what his designs meant and he never said, but they were pretty intricate.”
“Did you ask him why he did it?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“What’d he say?” she asked, with what seemed genuine interest.
“He said it was either do that or blow his brains out.”
“I’ve never killed anyone, but I think I can understand what your friend meant.” She slowly returned to her painting and started adding brushstrokes to it.
“I was told that you turned down some great art schools.”
She glanced at him in annoyance. “The timing was not right.”
“And now?”
“And now I don’t need them, do I? I educated myself. We have a wonderful library here in Putnam filled with books about everything I would want to know about from writers all around the world.”
“And I guess you didn’t need any formal art instruction.”
“I actually had an excellent teacher and mentor right here.”
