On Fire

“We just got word from the medical examiner. He won’t have final results for a while, but his preliminary exam suggests our John Doe took a blow to the head.”

Straker went still. “Accident?”

“CID’s treating it as a suspicious death. We need to know what role the head injury played in his death, did he take the hit before he was in the water, after—maybe when he washed in on the rocks.”

“I don’t know how he could have washed ashore, with the tide and the currents out here. Doesn’t make sense.”

Dorrman frowned. He’d gone to school with Straker’s father, had once dated Straker’s mother. “You have any visitors out here the past few days? Besides Riley.”

“Christ, Lou, if I offed someone, I wouldn’t dump his body on the rocks for Riley St. Joe to find.”

“Answer the question.”

“No. No visitors. And if our John Doe had spent any time on the island, I’d have known about it.”

“He wouldn’t have anything to do with one of your FBI cases?”

“If he did,” Straker said pointedly, “I wouldn’t be sitting on my porch eating a bowl of stew.”

Dorrman didn’t back down. “I wish you’d picked somewhere else to sit around for six months. You’re a burr on my butt, Straker. See to it we can find you if we have more questions.”

Straker eyed him, took in the red face, the unusual level of aggravation, even for Lou Dorrman. “What else?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

“Something else is eating at you.”

The sheriff huffed and gazed out at the water a moment. “I can’t find Emile.”

“Hell.”

“I checked his cottage, I checked the preserve. His boat’s gone, his car’s gone.” Dorrman shifted his back to Straker. “I don’t like it. A dead body turns up on Labreque Island one day, Emile disappears the next.”

“Did you check inside his cottage?”

“I can’t do that without a warrant.”

Straker could. “Give me a lift?”

Twenty minutes later, they put in at Emile’s dock. Straker didn’t wait for Dorrman. He headed up to the old man’s cottage, mounted the steps and tried the door. Locked. He held the doorknob, leaned his shoulder against the door and, putting his weight into it, pushed hard.

The door came on the second push. Piece of cake.

“Christ,” Dorrman said from the bottom of the stairs, “I don’t believe you.”

“I’m his friend. This is what he’d expect. I’ll be out in two minutes.”

Emile’s cottage was more cheap old man than world-famous oceanographer. He’d left most of his old life behind. The only remnants were copies of his books and documentaries on a shelf in the main room and a few pictures of his family aboard the Encounter. He’d taken out the trash, left a mug in the dish drainer, unplugged the coffeepot. Straker checked the downstairs bedroom. A tidy sailor to the last, Emile had made his bed, too.

Straker took the steep, ladderlike stairs up to the loft and came across a red bra, size 34B, under a creaky twin bed. It provided no clues as to Emile and his whereabouts. It did, however, provide fresh insight into Riley. She’d never been neat, but Straker wouldn’t have expected her to favor red underwear.

Best to keep his mind on the task at hand.

He joined Dorrman back outside. “He cleared out.”

“Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Not my job to wonder. I’m going to take a drive down to Boston.” A sudden wind gusted off the bay; he was thinking up his plan as he went along, knowing already he’d regret it. He should go back to Labreque Island and reheat his stew. “I’ll let you know if I run into him.”

“You do that. Keep in touch.”

“You want to bug my car, make sure I don’t take off to Alaska?”

Dorrman sucked in a breath, controlling his irritation. “If it were up to me, Straker, you’d be hauling in lobsters with your old man. You’re not fit to be an officer of the law. Never have been.”

“Does that mean if I’d been killed instead of wounded six months ago you wouldn’t have marched in my funeral parade?”

Dorrman’s mouth stretched into a thin, mean grin. “There’d have been a fucking brawl over who got to lead that parade.”

Straker took no offense. Louis Dorrman didn’t like him. A lot of people didn’t like him. But Straker had friends, and he had people he trusted—and he did his job. He’d never been the most popular guy around. It didn’t worry him. What worried him were the dead body Riley St. Joe had found on his island and where Emile had taken himself off to.

The sheriff grudgingly gave him a ride back to the island and waited while Straker packed up, grabbed his car keys and rinsed out his stew bowl. He didn’t need to come back to find the place overrun with ants.

He climbed back into Dorrman’s boat. “My car’s at my folks’ place.”

“I know,” the sheriff said, as if to remind Straker he knew everything that went on in his town. He was the one who’d stayed, who hadn’t gone off and joined the FBI. Dorrman gunned the engine and sped across the bay.

Riley picked up eggplant parmesan from her favorite Porter Square deli on her way home from work, where, mercifully, no one had heard about what had happened yesterday on Schoodic Peninsula. She kept the news to herself. When she’d left Mount Desert Island, she’d said only that she was taking a long weekend. She hadn’t mentioned going to visit Emile.

With any luck, there’d be a message from the police on her answering machine telling her the man she’d found had been identified, he’d died in a tragic accident, end of story.

She had a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a triple decker just off Porter Square in Cambridge. There was no message from the police on her machine. There was one from her mother, asking her if she was all right. Nothing from Richard St. Joe. Her father was in Bath, checking on the Encounter II, the state-of-the-art, ecologically friendly research vessel the center was having built. He would be back tomorrow.

She heated her eggplant parmesan in the microwave and whisked a bit of balsamic vinegar and olive oil together for her salad. It felt good to reacquaint herself with her routines. After dinner, she’d put in a load of laundry and clean out her fridge.

Her telephone rang, and she grabbed the portable out from under a newspaper on her kitchen table.

“What would you do if I told you I was on the curb outside your apartment?”

Straker. Her stomach knotted. “You have a sick sense of humor, Straker. You’re not on my curb. You live on a deserted island. You hate people. You wouldn’t traipse all the way to Boston just to aggravate me.”

“You wouldn’t invite me in?”

She tightened her grip on the phone. He sounded close. She remembered he didn’t have a phone on the island. She took her portable into the front room, knelt on her futon couch, leaned over and pulled back the blinds so she could peer down at the street.

It was dark, but she could make out a beat-up, rusting gray Subaru station wagon with Maine plates.

“Damn it, Straker, you are on my curb!”