With Deadly Intent (3 page)

She recorded the time, the weather conditions, and made a sketch of the terrain. Basic
requirements out of the way, she lay a ruler alongside the track and snapped several
pictures. Wind had hastened evaporation, causing sand particles to sift lazily back and
forth within the confines of the footprint.

A metal restraining frame she thrust into damp soil walled in the print. Dental stone
mixed with bottled water produced a thick soup that she poured gently into the
indentations. Before the cast set rock hard, she scratched the date, her initials and a
number in the buff-colored medium.

She flagged the area with bright orange plastic ribbon and trudged over the dunes with an
escort of shrieking gulls. On her left, the ravine gradually diminished to a shallow
basin overgrown with salal and tall Rose Bay bushes.

Beyond them, she could see a bit of the beach cottage through a stand of Sitka spruce.
Ebony-hued, with bark resembling alligator skin, the stunted, wind-twisted conifers
straggled downhill. Like hairy-fingered hands, they spread out in wavery lines until
they reached a thirty-foot embankment.

Her route led her to the embankment's base. She bypassed their supply shack and moved
onto the beach of Otter Inlet. Anchored far out to avoid going aground, Sea King, their
two-masted, forty-two foot ketch, rode the swells.

Farther along the beach, in hard-packed sand, she found several faint footprints to cast.
As she worked, she tried not to dwell on Oren's reasons for coming to the inlet. Yet,
all the while, she knew the direction the prints headed and what lay around a rocky
projection blocking her view. The dingy had to be at the usual tie-up—it just had to be.
But it wasn't.

The small, wooden craft she had dubbed Rosinante, after Don Quixote's horse, had been
tied up at that particular spot for a number of years—a fact Oren knew well.

She slumped down on a piece of driftwood, kneaded a stiff muscle in her back and began to
theorize. If a person had intended to use the ketch and couldn't because of the storm,
would he be foolish enough to brave the sea in a rowboat? She shivered—a desperate man
would.

With her satchel in hand, she ascended wooden steps leading up the embankment and headed
north along sandstone cliffs fringed with Scotch broom and gnarled pine. She knew the
ocean currents surrounding the island, and where a body would likely wash ashore. Each
time she peered over the edge, she dreaded what she might see below.

The area to the north proved unrewarding. Wisps of fog tagging her weary feet, she
retraced her steps and started south. The roar of surf grew quieter at Orca Narrows.
Here, the sea swept into a broad channel created by a series of colossal sea stacks
called Satan's Boot. When the tide poured through, the water became a mass of eddies and
choppy, froth-tipped waves.

Along the rim of the bluff, she stooped to examine broken Rose Bay twigs and crushed
patches of bush lupine. In some sandy areas, fleshy-leafed succulents had been mashed to
a pulpy greenish-gray mass. She studied them thoughtfully for a moment, then chose a
more circuitous route.

Brush-clad hillocks made traveling difficult and the weight of the satchel made her
shoulder feel as if her arm might pull from the socket.

She checked her watch and groaned. In another hour, daylight would be gone, and only a
fool ventured along the cliffs at night. Damn! This whole day had been one frustration
after another—this senseless search included. The dinghy might not have any connection
with Elise's disappearance. Besides, it had probably come loose all on its own and been
swept out to sea. She braced herself on a jagged boulder and took a half-hearted look
over the edge.

The boat! She dashed along the verge until she found a slope. Slipping, sliding,
snatching shrubbery to slow her descent, she made her way to the bottom and scrambled
atop a pile of driftwood. At her noisy approach, a pair of tattlers gave a flute-like
call and skittered away on yellow, matchstick legs.

Forty feet away, waves lashed the shingle, grinding black rock against black rock in a
gigantic tumbler. Down the beach a couple dozen yards, good old Rosinante perched high
and dry.

Her pulse beating loudly in her ears, she unslung her camera and took several distance
shots. Nothing must be overlooked. By tomorrow the sand could be swept clean.

Choosing a half-buried cedar log that extended past the rowboat's resting place, she
walked along its broad top. Dry mouthed, she jerked her head from side to side, peering
into all the places where a body might—She grimaced and booted a chunk of wood out of
her way. Murder took on a whole new meaning when it got close to home.

She studied odd striations between the log where she stood and the dinghy. Frowning, she
knelt and snapped a number of views, then scooped sand samples into labeled vials. In
the shelter of a rock, she discovered a saucer-sized patch of fine lines undisturbed by
the wind. She poured a cast and inched closer to her main objective.

By some fortunate happenstance, when the sea had disgorged Rosinante she'd snagged her
bow on a hunk of tree root. Bottom side up, she tilted at a precarious forty-five degree
angle, but aside from an ugly two-foot gouge in the hull, she appeared sea worthy. Amy
set down her satchel, lay her camera on top, and got down on all fours to peer into the
boat's shadowy interior.

“It can't be,” she whispered. She closed her eyes for an instant to adjust her pupils to
the darkness and opened them quickly to take a better look. No, she hadn't been
mistaken. Brown spots trailed across the rowing thwart and spattered the bleached hull.

She swore, adjusted her camera for a time shot, and fetched a spray bottle of Luminol
from her bag. If the stains were blood, they'd glow in the dark. Taking the camera
control in one hand, she worked the spray pump with the other, aiming a tiny squirt at
an isolated brown splotch.

As the chemical reacted with the stain and became luminescent, she let out a groan and
triggered the camera. Damn the luck. While she stowed her supplies, her mind grasped at
her last fragment of hope. The stains may be blood, but the boards would have to be
sawed out and taken to the lab for more sophisticated tests before they'd know if the
blood came from a human. Until then, she'd pray that Elise showed up alive.

The plaintive moan of the fog horn at Devil's Point startled her. She swiveled her head.
Thick, vaporous clouds billowed toward her from each end of the narrows. She snatched up
her things and labored up the slope.

By the time she reached the pathway, leading to her cottage, her arm ached from the load
she carried. Quickly she removed a flashlight from a zippered compartment, stashed the
bag under low hanging spruce branches, and hurried on. Her father always covered a crime
scene with exacting thoroughness so she figured he and the sheriff would still be at
work in the lane.

Instead of taking the roundabout route via Otter Inlet, she chose a short cut and
scrambled down through foot-snagging roots to the bottom of the ravine. A bulwark of
thorny blackberry vines stopped her from clambering up the opposite incline to the lane
above as she had intended. Since she didn't want to backtrack, no other choice remained
but to travel the boulder-strewn ravine floor.

In the fog-shrouded darkness, her flashlight scarcely penetrated the gloom. Damp strings
of moss hanging from ghostly alder branches clung to her face making her heart lurch. A
few steps farther on, she vaulted a shallow stream and sank into mud over her shoe tops.
Would this horrible day never end?

Lunging to solid ground, she plodded on. As she pushed through a willow thicket, her
bobbing light picked out something white in the brambles on the steep slope.

She halted, her heart beating in hard, painful thumps. She took a step, then another
before pausing to stare at the sight before her. An ash rose area rug had been tossed
from the byway above. As the rug unrolled and flattened out over the briar patch, a
blood-stained sheet had tumbled out.

Trembling so violently she could scarcely hold the flashlight, she lowered the beam bit
by bit until it shone on the ground. Her body went cold and her breath snagged in her
aching chest. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Unable to stop herself, she kept murmuring the
words over and over.

On a patch of dead leaves, a few feet in front of her lay a knife: Not just any knife.
This one had a shaped stag-horn handle, a polished nickel silver bolster, and a
five-inch, blood-smeared blade.

Oren's hunting knife.

Monday, October 24

Amy flexed tense shoulder muscles and frowned at the flock of white-coated forensic
scientists milling around the crime lab. As a rule, they worked in an atmosphere of
quiet, purposeful concentration—except on Monday. Then the hubbub brought back memories
of her high school science class. Actually, except for this department's more
sophisticated equipment, the two places even resembled each other.

However, the similarity ended with appearance. At this facility, each individual, who
stood beside one of the analytical machines fringing the room's perimeter, or who bent
over the microscopes crowding the long table where she sat, qualified as an expert in
his or her field. Chemical, drug, evidence, and body-fluid analysts—all worked in this
room or one of the other eight rooms that made up the Western Washington State Crime
Laboratory on the second floor of Seattle's Public Safety Building.

Since starting work here, she'd learned to dread the beginning of the week. The mass of
material gathered over the weekend by the lab's mobile unit and the fire department's
arson squad wrecked everyone's schedule.

She bowed her head over the stereomicroscope once more and peered through the lens. As
she tried to center her attention on the wool fragment under the objective, the three
dimensional image blurred. In its place, she saw the knife she'd found in the ravine on
Saturday. A knife she'd given Oren on his seventeenth birthday. Now the gift had become
damning, irrefutable evidence.

She sighed wearily. So much had gone on during the weekend she hadn't even gotten a
chance to visit her Aunt Helen. Saturday night she'd scarcely slept. On Sunday, a gang
of men had fanned out in a long line and searched the headlands for Elise's body.
Meanwhile, Amy and her father had rowed out to the Sea King in a borrowed skiff to see
if anyone had been aboard—no one had.

At mid-morning, the sheriff took them to Orca Narrows in his motor launch. No one
discovered any new evidence so they loaded battered old Rosinante aboard and the sheriff
headed for Faircliff. The dinghy would have to be cut into bits so the boards could be
analyzed.

She pressed her fingers against the ache in her forehead. What rotten, rotten luck. With
all her expertise, she had only helped to further incriminate Oren.

Taking a tissue from the pocket of her lab coat, she cleaned her glasses, and focused on
the scrap of yarn under the microscope. If she expected to live up to the lab's credo of
maximum production and maximum accuracy, she'd have to keep her mind on her work.

“Psst.” Her friend and fellow employee, Gail Wong, swiveled her lab stool farther to the
right and cupped a hand around her mouth. Her eyes glinted with humor and a dimple
appeared in one cheek as she grinned. “Who's the enticing VEEP?”

Amy glanced over her shoulder. At a far door, their white jacketed director stood talking
to a man who looked to be in his early thirties. Amy shrugged. “Must have pull to wangle
his way past our tight security.” She went back to her microscope.

“Geez, Amy. Have you gone blind?”

Amy turned slowly. “Not that I'm aware of. Why?”

Gail flipped her short, wavy bob and frowned. “When are you going to wake up and rejoin
the living? That is one beautiful hunk of man and you didn't even give him a second
glance.”

Amy smiled, swung around on her stool, and started going through the basics of a police
description. “The subject is approximately six-feet tall with medium build. Ruddy
complexion, thick, auburn-colored hair, with eyebrows to match. Nose—straight, but a
trifle large. Wide mouth with a genial upturn at the corners.”

She paused to seriously scrutinize the man for the first time, and something fluttered in
her chest.
Such a gentle looking mouth.
She filed the errant thought under “N”
for nonsense and faced Gail. “I suppose he'll do.”

The young woman shook her head. “You're hopeless.”

“Yep, I guess I am.”
But not completely.
She'd felt a flicker of interest, hadn't
she? For her, that in itself signified progress. Dismissing the man from her thoughts,
she concentrated on the material she'd been trying to study before Gail's interruption.

After noting her findings, she mounted two strands of hair on a slide and moved to a
comparison microscope. Soon she became totally absorbed and started when she heard the
director's voice.

“Here's the young lady you should interview,” he said. “She's determined to become
proficient in all of the forensic sciences and she's almost achieved her goal.” He
touched her shoulder. “Amy...”

Irritated at the interruption, she pivoted on her stool. “Yes ... ?” The director's stern
countenance cut off the protest she wanted to make.

“I'd like you to meet Simon Kittredge, investigative reporter for
Global News
Magazine.
Simon, this is Dr. Amy Prescott.”

She gave a curt nod. “Mr. Kittredge.”

The man's deep-set hazel eyes met hers in a steady, thoughtful gaze. “Read the article
about your cousin. Damn shame. Oren's a good man.”

She tensed. The morning
Times
had printed the news of Oren's arrest in two-inch
headlines. She'd expected reporters to track her down, but not this soon.