On Fire

He sighed. Damned if he needed that. “Bathroom’s in there.”

“I know where the damned—”

She interrupted herself with a curse and lurched across the linoleum floor to the short hall that led straight to the bathroom. It was in an ell tacked onto the cottage. In the old days, there’d just been an outhouse. Straker had locked her into it once when she was eight or nine and especially on his nerves. Emile hadn’t been too pleased with him. Riley, the little snot, had screamed and carried on far more than was necessary. Straker had it in the back of his mind that was what she was doing now. Exaggerating, going for the drama.

He followed her, although not with great speed or enthusiasm. Still, if she choked on her tongue or something it was a long trek to an emergency room.

Between moaning and swearing at him, she got rid of the contents of her stomach. She managed fine. Straker, leaning in the doorway, found himself noticing the shape of her behind as she bent over the tank. He grimaced. He’d been out on his deserted island longer than he’d thought.

Leaving that realization for later pondering, he went out to the kitchen and checked the kettle he kept on the woodstove. The water was bubbling. He got down a restaurant-style mug Emile had probably lifted from a local diner a million years ago, dangled a tea bag in it and poured in the hot water.

Riley staggered back into the main room. She was trembling visibly and had a wet washcloth pressed to her forehead. Her color had improved, if only from the blood rushing to her head from pitching her cookies.

“It was the brownie,” she said, dropping onto an ancient wooden folding chair at the table.

Straker shoved the mug in front of her. The table was in front of a big picture window overlooking the bay, still enveloped in fog. “I thought it was the dead body.”

“I wouldn’t have thrown up if I hadn’t eaten the brownie.”

But she didn’t smile. There was no spark in her dark, almond-shaped eyes.

“I don’t have a phone,” he said. “We can use the radio on my boat to notify the police. I’ll go have a look, make sure you weren’t seeing things.”

“I’ll go with you.” She tried a sip of the tea, the tea bag still dangling. “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

“If the guy’s dead, he’s not going to come crawling in here.”

That rallied her. She pushed her chair back so forcefully it almost tipped over. She was still trembling, but she squared her shoulders. “Just let’s go.”

She took a couple more quick sips of tea, wiped at her face once more with the wet washcloth and pushed past him to the door. She looked a little wobbly, but Straker kept his mouth shut. Riley wasn’t one to like having her weaknesses pointed out to her. He wondered if this was her first dead human. Her job put her in contact with stranded whales and dolphins.

Then he remembered last year’s tragedy. Five dead, a narrow escape with her own life. She hadn’t retreated to a deserted island to lick her wounds. Physically unharmed, she’d returned to her work at the Boston Center for Oceanographic Studies. Straker doubted she’d acknowledge any mental scars from her ordeal.

He followed her along a wet, winding path. She pushed hard, although her head had to be pounding and her energy drained from being sick. The fog continued to hang in, thick, damp and cold, reducing visibility to just a few feet despite the sun’s attempts to burn through.

Straker felt the familiar tightness in his chest and incipient sense of panic that had nothing to do with following Riley St. Joe to a corpse. Fog had come to make him feel claustrophobic, as if his soul had spilled out of him and claimed the rest of the world.

Maybe he should have picked a cabin in the Arizona desert.

“There.” Riley stood on a rock ledge and pointed toward the water, which Straker could smell but not see. But he knew this stretch of coastline, knew the rocks, the tide pools, the currents. She turned to him. Her skin, hair, eyes had all taken on the milky grayness of the fog. “He’s caught on the rocks. The tide must have brought him in. He might go out again with high tide, but I don’t think so. I can show you—”

“I’ll find him.”

Straker charged down the rocks. He’d grown up on this coast, was comfortable jumping from rock to rock in any weather. And his physical wounds were long healed. He was in better shape now than he’d been in the past two or three years. But he wasn’t ready to go back to work. He trusted his instincts, his training, his experience. It wasn’t that. He just didn’t have much use for people. In the past six months, he’d grown accustomed to life alone.

Now a body had washed onto his deserted island. Maybe it was an omen. If he didn’t go back to work, work would come to him.

Of course, Riley had said nothing about murder. It was probably some poor bastard who’d taken a header off his boat.

The tide had moved out, and he made his way over barnacles and slick seaweed. He came to the water, just a few inches deep now. A giant hunk of granite loomed to his right. Riley would have been up there, he reasoned, looking down at the water.

Gravelly sand shifted under him. He stepped up onto a flat brown boulder, still wet from the receding tide. Not far ahead, waves slapped gently against rocks and sand.

He sensed the body before he saw it. His muscles tensed as he called upon the discipline and professionalism his work had instilled in him. He’d seen dead bodies before. He knew what to do.

This one was still, bloated, soaked. He’d put on jeans and a red polo shirt for his final day. He was about five feet off, facedown, as if he’d tripped and fallen running in from the water.

The gulls had been at him.

Straker turned away.

Riley materialized a few yards behind him. “You found him?”

“Go to my boat. Radio the police. I’ll wait here.”

“Why? If he’s dead—”

He looked at her. She was ghostlike, smaller than he remembered. “I’ll fight off the gulls.”

Two

L ou Dorrman tied up his boat and tossed Riley’s pink kayak onto Emile’s dock. She thanked him, hoping he’d make short work of dropping her off, then head back to the island. But he climbed out onto the dock after her. He was the local sheriff, a paunchy, gray-haired, no-nonsense cop who’d said for years that John Straker would come to a bad end. Someone was bound to shoot him, run him over or beat him senseless. That a body had turned up on the island where he was recuperating was no surprise to Lou Dorrman.

That Riley was there, too, obviously troubled him. He glowered at her. “What’re you doing hanging around John Straker?”

Her teeth chattered. The fog had burned off, leaving behind a warm, sunny afternoon, but she couldn’t stop shivering. It was nerves and dehydration—and the lingering, horrible image of the man she’d found on the rocks. Straker had made her put on an overshirt after the police had arrived. She’d had to roll up the sleeves about six times to get them to her wrists. The heavyweight chamois smelled of sawdust and salt water.

“I was having a picnic,” she said.

Dorrman nodded without understanding. “Hell of a picnic.”

“Do you have any clues about the body—who it was—”

“Not yet. There was no identification on him. The medical examiner will do an autopsy. We should know more soon.”

Riley thought she saw something in his eyes. “What is it, Sheriff?”

“Nothing. We have to do this one step at a time.” He shifted, eyeing her with a measure of sympathy. “You going to be okay? I imagine Emile’s out and about somewhere. I’ll have to round him up before too long, seeing how that’s his island.”

Last summer, it was Bennett Granger and four members of the Encounter crew. This summer…a dead body on Labreque Island. Riley pushed back the nightmare, the familiar sense of unease. “I’ll be fine on my own, thanks.” She still couldn’t stop shivering. “Sheriff, you don’t think Straker had anything to do with this, do you? I know he was shot six months ago—Emile said it had to do with domestic terrorism.”

“Domestic terrorism. Hell, that’s FBI talk. Let’s just take this one step at a time, okay? You’ll be around awhile?”

“I’m supposed to head back to Boston tonight. I have to be at work tomorrow. I was planning to visit my mother and sister in Camden on the way. I gave your deputy numbers where you can reach me.”

“All right. Go ahead. I’ll let you know if CID has any other ideas.” CID was the Criminal Investigation Division of the Maine State Police; Straker had already explained they’d handle the investigation. Dorrman cuffed her on the shoulder. “Rough day, kid. Put it behind you.”

While he sped back across the bay, Riley half carried, half dragged her kayak up to Emile’s cottage, its dark-stained wood blending into the surrounding spruce-fir forest. This was his home now, not just his periodic getaway. It hadn’t changed in years. She welcomed the familiarity of the smells and sounds, even the exposed pine roots in the path as she returned the kayak to the attached shed.