She’d accused me of being no different from all the leering men she met at the restaurant, as if somehow my desire to save her was just a deluded manifestation of lust. Looking at her portrait again, feeling the effect her smile had on my heart and groin, I found I couldn’t totally deny the accusation.
My dinner consisted of a rubbery Big Mac, served with some wilted lettuce, too much special sauce, and a side order of oversalted fries. To compensate for the empty calories, I ordered a Diet Coke, as if that would make any difference. I settled down in a corner booth and watched a party of intoxicated young people nervously watching me. A hulking kid with his back to me was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan
YOU AIN’T HAVING FUN TILL THEY DIAL 9-1-1.
Was that Barney Beal? I contemplated going over to speak with him. But then one of the giggling girls leaned over to kiss him, and I saw that it was just another pimple-faced lunk.
Poor Prester. I wasn’t sure how often he’d been getting laid before-he looked handsome enough on his driver’s license-but having a nose was usually the minimum requirement to lure a woman into bed. I needed to remind myself what the sheriff had told me: As pathetic as he now seemed, he and Randall Cates had been dealers in deadly narcotics. At least one person, a young woman, had died from ingesting the poison they’d peddled. Wasn’t there poetic justice in the idea of a man who’d traded in snortable drugs losing his nose? The sheriff, I was certain, would say yes.
My brief encounter with Roberta Rhine led me to believe that Dunbar might be headed for an extended stay in the doghouse if the sheriff got wind of what had happened at the hospital. For the first time, I began to wonder how my own sergeant would react when he learned I’d showed up in the med-surg unit with the sister of a murder suspect. And here I’d been so pleased with my professional development as a law-enforcement officer. My old reckless self was still lurking in the shadows, ready to jump out and say “Boo!” as soon as I turned my head.
When we’d first arrived, Dunbar had made a cryptic remark, but in the ensuing chaos I’d forgotten to pursue the matter with him: “What is it with this guy? How many times do I have to tell people he can’t be disturbed?” The comment suggested that someone else had shown up, asking after Prester.
What the hell had happened out in the Heath? It seemed impossible for someone so distraught, so emotionally naked, to lie about his innocence with such skill. Unless he’d killed his friend in some sort of irrational state brought on by severe hypothermia and could no longer remember his actions, it meant that someone else had suffocated Cates.
When I was busing my plastic tray, I realized that the drunken teenagers had slipped out without my seeing them. What are the odds, I wondered, of my being summoned in a few short hours to scrape their dead bodies off the road?
Instead, I received a call from Detective Zanadakis. I glanced at the automated clock on the BlackBerry screen. It was 10:30. I was half an hour late for my interview.
“Is there a problem?”
I apologized and told him I was on my way.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Department occupied one wing of a sprawling brick building in a neighborhood of handsome houses and venerable maples in downtown Machias. On one side was the county courthouse; on the other was the jail. Yard-long icicles hung from the eaves above the concrete front steps. I eyed them cautiously, thinking about swords hanging over unwitting heads and other metaphors of impending doom.
Whenever I entered the sheriff’s office, I had the sensation of having blundered into the sitting room of someone’s run-down, albeit historic home. On my first tour of the building, a deputy had told me that in bygone days the sheriff used to live in these very suites and that his wife would cook for the prisoners. The current sheriff lived with her female partner in a fancy house on the water in Machiasport, and the guy who cooked for the prisoners was a taciturn fellow who went by the nickname “Chef” and tended to reduce all solid food to mush because he himself was missing most of his teeth.
Rhine and Zanadakis were waiting for me in a parlor with a bricked-up fireplace and tall windows that dated from Edith Wharton’s girlhood. On either side of the mantel stood flags in stands, the Stars and Stripes to the left and the Maine state flag to the right. The sheriff’s Nike gym bag was wedged into the bookcase, below a shelfful of heavy legal tomes. A white-muzzled golden retriever sprawled on the hooked rug. The dog snored soundly, drawing deep and even breaths. It reminded me of Doc’s old mutt, Duchess.
A man was seated in a black leatherette chair across the desk from the sheriff. He wore a pigeon-gray sport coat over a black button-down shirt and a knotted wool tie. Faded black jeans and scuffed wing tips completed his outfit. His dark hair was tacky from some sort of hair product, and his skin had a bronze glow that, in this season, was either the residue of a Caribbean vacation or a tanning booth.
“We were just talking about you,” the sheriff said. “Have you met Lieutenant Zanadakis?”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
The detective and I shook hands. He made a point of making steady eye contact the whole time, as if testing whether I would look away. I didn’t.
“Thanks for coming in,” he said.
“Glad to help.”
“Have a seat,” said the sheriff. She was wearing an unflattering khaki uniform shirt, which was tucked into black polyester pants. She had clipped her star-shaped badge to her belt. Aside from her signature turquoise ring, the badge was her only fashion accessory.
“We were discussing your report just now,” said Zanadakis. “Sounds like you had quite a night.”
“It was certainly a long one.”
There was a knock at the door behind me. Chief Deputy Corbett, the balding blond officer I’d met at the Sprague house, leaned against the lintel. His jowls were red, and he wore his familiar black fleece vest with the star on the breast. “Mind if I sit in?” he asked the sheriff.
Rhine turned to the detective for his assent. Zanadakis’s shrug indicated he didn’t have a problem.
Corbett took a step into the room and leaned against the wall. I couldn’t see him there when I turned to face the sheriff and the detective, but I felt his presence the way you do in the forest when a crow is watching you from a tree.
“I’m going to take some notes.” Zanadakis removed a reporter’s notebook and pen from his blazer. “These are just for my own reference.”
“Where do you want me to begin?” I asked.
“At the vet’s house,” said the detective. “You were there for some sort of dinner party. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” I said. “Dr. Larrabee had invited me to his house for dinner. We were joined by Professor Kevin Kendrick from the University of Maine.”
“I need to ask if you consumed any alcoholic beverages while you were there.”
“No,” I said. “Just coffee.”
The detective made a note of this. “Did Larrabee or Kendrick?”
“Yes. I don’t know how much they had before I arrived, but while I was there, they split a bottle of wine and had a couple of glasses of whiskey. They were talking about having cordials when I left. That was one of the reasons Doc-”
Zanadakis looked up. “You mean Larrabee?”
“Sorry, yes. One of the reasons Dr. Larrabee asked me to drive him to the Sprague house was that he felt unfit to operate a motor vehicle.”
“Was he impaired?”
“In my judgment, yes.”
“What about Kendrick?”
“Possibly. He showed no outward signs of intoxication, but he consumed quite a lot of alcohol in my presence.”