Mortar and Murder (17 page)

He glanced down at me, eyebrows tilted. “Why would he do that?”

“You said he made his fortune smuggling in the years before the Revolution, didn’t you? Tea, I guess?”

“And molasses and sugar and wool, among other things.”

“But he didn’t build the houses until after the Revolutionary War. Don’t you think he might have wanted to make sure there was somewhere safe to store stuff, just in case he’d have to go back to smuggling? Or one of his descendants might?”

Derek shrugged, putting an arm around my back to guide me across the street and onto the pier. “It’s worth looking into, I guess. Where would you start?”

“No idea,” I said cheerfully. “Look for trap doors in the floors and secret panels in the . . . um . . . paneling, I guess.”

“Shades of Scooby-Doo,” Derek said with a grin. He kept his arm around me as we navigated the uneven and slippery boards of the pier, where the paramedics had wheeled their gurney with its grisly burden just a few days ago. The air smelled salty and briny. Boats bobbed in the water on either side of us, thick ropes groaning as they stretched, and underlying it all was the sound of the water lapping against the piles holding the walkway up, and in the distance, seagulls squawking and boats chugging.

The sun was breaking through the haze, the day looked like it would turn out to be crisp and clear, and everything was lovely. Until Derek stopped dead, dropped his arm from around me, and breathed a very bad word.

I stopped, too, a step or two ahead, where my momentum had carried me, and turned to him. “What? Did you forget something?”

He shook his head, his face grim. “In the water.”

“What?” I looked around. It took a few seconds, and a nod from Derek, to see what he’d seen. And then I breathed the same bad word myself. “Not another one?”

“I’m afraid so,” Derek said, looking around. “Call Wayne. I’ll get a boat hook and see if I can snag her. I’m afraid you’ll have to help me get her up on the pier.”

“No problem.” I swallowed and reached for my phone.

It took Wayne a moment to respond to the announcement that we’d just discovered the body of another woman floating in the water. I imagined him pinching the bridge of his nose to ward off what was surely an oncoming headache. Then he said he would be with us in five minutes and so would the ambulance crew. I closed my cell phone and rejoined Derek, who had managed to find a boat hook, and who was in the process of dragging the body toward a ladder halfway down the pier, where he’d be able to climb down and get to her.

“Wayne says to leave her in the water until he gets here,” I told him. “He or the paramedics will help you get her out.”

He glanced at me. “I want to make sure she’s really dead first.”

“Is there a chance she might not be?”

He shook his head, grimly. “Not much of one, no. The ME will have to make the final determination, but it looks like her head is bashed in.”

“Yow.” My stomach swooped. Derek gave me a narrow look but seemed to determine that I was OK on my own and that the corpse needed him more.

“Here,” he said, “hold her still.”

He grabbed my hand and wrapped it around the end of the boat hook. I followed with the other; not because I wanted to, but because I had to, to keep the body steady. I could feel it—or more likely the tide—pulling on the hook, and it took both hands to resist. I planted my feet and held on.

Meanwhile, Derek swung himself over the side of the pier and fumbled for a foothold on the slippery ladder. I leaned over the railing, watching the top of his ruffled head descend.

Below in the water floated the young woman. Derek had hooked one of the belt loops of her jeans—Lee, not Gloria—and she was just bobbing there, like one of the boats. Swallowing, I forced myself to take a closer look.

Like the other woman, she was floating facedown, but unlike our previous victim, she was dressed for the weather this time of year. She wore stout shoes with thick soles, and above the snug jeans was what looked like a corduroy jacket. Her hair was short and dark, not long and fair, and I could see what Derek had been talking about: the back of her head wasn’t smooth and round, but kind of caved in. That thought gave me the heebie-jeebies, so I averted my eyes to watch what Derek was doing instead.

“Move a couple steps to your left, Avery,” he said. “I can’t reach a pulse point.”

I obeyed, stepping sideways and towing the body along. One of her hands hit against the ladder where Derek was perched, and he reached down and grabbed it, wrapping his fingers around the pale wrist. I counted along with him. Silently. Ten seconds. Twenty.

“Nothing.” He dropped the hand back in the water and wiped the water off his own hand on his jeans. “Damn. I feel guilty leaving her there.”

“It’s not for long,” I reminded him, gripping the pole. My knuckles were white, I noticed, not so much from the strain of holding the hook and the body as from the whole situation. “And if there’s nothing you can do for her . . .”

“I can get her out of the water!”

“Right. Well, Wayne will be here soon. In fact”—I risked a glance over my shoulder—“here’s the ambulance now. The paramedics will be on top of us in a minute. Maybe you’d better come back up on the pier. This pole is a little heavy for me.”

It wasn’t, really, but the suggestion that I needed him brought him back up the ladder, just as I intended. He really is incapable of turning down anyone who asks for his help.

The paramedics arrived, the same two guys as last time, and while Derek held the body steady and I watched, wincing, they were able to get the woman up out of the water and onto the gurney. By then, Wayne had also arrived, and he let out an expletive when he got a good look at her.

From the front, I could tell she was a little older than our other victim, although she was still a year or two younger than me, I thought. Right around thirty, at a guess. Her short, dark hair started curling as soon as it got out of the water, and her eyes were dark brown and startled. It was Derek who reached out and closed them. I shuddered but continued looking.

She was tallish and lean and looked like she’d have been in pretty good physical shape. Under the black corduroy jacket, she was wearing a turtleneck in the same color. There were small silver hoops in her ears, and the water hadn’t completely managed to eradicate what had to be waterproof eye makeup. It was smeared but still there. Before Wayne let loose with his four-letter word, I already suspected we were not dealing with the same sort of situation as last time, and the crack on the head was only one of the clues.

“Who is she?” Derek asked, his voice soft. He must have come to the same conclusion I had.

Wayne glanced at him, his face grim. “This is Lori Trent.”

“The ICE agent?” I turned back to her, my eyes wide.

“Afraid so. Damn.” He reached for his phone.

Derek put his arm around me, and I realized I was shaking. “I’m OK,” I tried, but he didn’t let go, and I was glad. The warmth of his body through the wool sweater felt good. I snuggled in closer, slipping a hand into the back pocket of his jeans.

“What happened?” Wayne asked when he had completed his phone calls; one to Brandon asking for backup, and one to Dr. Lawrence the medical examiner, telling her to expect a new delivery. I guessed he would wait to make the unpleasant call to ICE until he was on his own.

We went over the story again. Not that there was much to tell; we’d just been on our way to our boat when we’d noticed the body in the water below.

“Getting a late start this morning, aren’t you? Any particular reason?”

“The whoopie pie from yesterday,” Derek said.

The tight set of Wayne’s lips loosened a little. “Right.”

“And then we stopped by the Fraser House on the way. To pick up some information about our house on the island. Where’s the folder?” I looked around for it.

“You must have put it down somewhere,” Derek said, “when I asked you to take the pole. Over there.” He pointed. I could see the pale square of the manila folder on the worn planks of the pier a few yards away. We’d only planned to work a half day today—it was Saturday—so there was no lunch basket beside it.

“Can’t lose that. Miss Barnes will have my head.” I didn’t make a move toward it, though. Didn’t want to miss anything Wayne might say.

“Did she contact either one of you yesterday?”

Derek and I exchanged a glance. “Agent Trent? Of course not.” And especially not after nine P.M., which was when we’d left Kate and Wayne at the restaurant. If we’d heard from the ICE agent before then, we would have mentioned it last night.

“Why?” I added. “What would she want to talk to us about?”

“Can’t imagine.” Wayne grunted. He turned away to give the paramedics instructions for the body; the same instructions as last time. I watched them wheel the gurney down the pier toward the ambulance with an unpleasant sense of déjà vu.

“What happened?” I said, more to myself than to the two men. Both of them looked at me.

“Guessing,” Derek said, “she discovered something she shouldn’t have.”

“Or something someone didn’t want her to discover,” Wayne added.

Obviously. That wasn’t really what I’d meant, though. “Does this have to do with the other body? The probably Russian girl? Or something else?”

The two men exchanged a glance. “Could be either,” Wayne said. “She was in Waterfield to look into that, but she could have stumbled onto something else while she was here. Or into someone she knew from before.”

“Could even be personal,” Derek added. “You never know.”

The chief of police nodded.

“I suppose you’ll have to talk to Irina about what the two of them discussed yesterday.” I made it something of a question, although it wasn’t really.

Wayne nodded. “Guess I’d better. See if I can track Miss Trent’s movements yesterday. I’m sure I’ll have help in that.” He grimaced.

“The ICE?”

“They’ll be crawling all over everything in a couple hours, I’m sure. And that reminds me . . . you two are free to go. I know where to find you if I need you. I’m gonna wait here for Brandon and make my phone call to ICE.”

“Good luck with that.” I left the comfort of Derek’s arm to go pick up my manila folder. Derek gave Wayne a sympathetic clap on the shoulder before he followed. By the time we were in the boat and chugging out to sea, Brandon’s squad car had arrived at the entrance to the pier, tires squealing, and Brandon was on his way out to meet Wayne at a good clip.

“I’m not sure I can concentrate on working today,” I told Derek. We’d both been quiet so far; this second discovery had been an unpleasant surprise for both of us. I mean, what are the chances?

Then again, the two situations were totally different, really. The young Russian woman had died accidentally, either from going or falling in the water and getting hypothermia before she could get back out. Agent Trent had been deliberately killed, or so it seemed to me. But maybe I was wrong.

“Could it have been an accident, do you think?”

Derek glanced at me over his shoulder. As usual, he was steering the boat and I was sitting on one of the seats farther back, after cranking up the outboard motor. “The knock on the back of the head, you mean?”

I nodded.

“Anything’s possible.”

“But maybe not likely?”

Derek shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to examine her,” he said, his words coming back to me on the wind. “I just saw the back of her head from a few feet away. It looked like she was hit with something smooth and round, not too big around.”

“Broom handle?”

“Not big enough. A boom, maybe. Although I don’t quite understand . . .”

“What’s a boom?”

Another flash of blue eyes. “The beam that holds the bottom edge of a sail on a sailboat. It swings. Sometimes people get knocked overboard when the wind shifts.”

“And that could have cracked her skull that way?” My stomach was objecting to the subject matter, but I pushed on.

“It oughtn’t to have hit her on the head at all, unless she was kneeling. Would have gotten her in the middle of the back instead, and sort of swooped her into the water.”

“So that’s something that might have happened to the other dead girl. The Russian. Or the one we think is Russian. She could have been on a sailboat and been hit by the boom and swept overboard. If she were alone, no one may have realized it.”

Derek nodded. “Someone would have noticed the boat adrift, though, probably.”

“That’s true. What about Agent Trent? She could have been kneeling, couldn’t she? And the boom hit her on the back of the head? And then she lost consciousness and fell in the water?”

“But again, either she was with someone, who ought to have reported her missing, or she was alone, and we would have found the boat.”

We traveled in silence another few minutes.