Hatchet Island (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) by Paul Doiron

Author:Paul Doiron [Doiron, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781250235138
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“How sure are you?” he asked after he’d rowed back to the island.

“One hundred percent.”

“I don’t know, Mike. Is it possible you’re saying you recognize the sound because you want it to be true?”

“The way I see it, Maeve being anchored off Spruce last night raises more questions than it answers.”

“Care to name them?”

“One: Why would McLeary anchor off Spruce Island when Baker was just two miles away? Two: Assuming it was because of the rainstorm, why would she have left the mainland, or wherever she’d been, at all? Three: Why did she run off when Stacey and I called for help?”

His brow furrowed. “But you said the boat was anchored off Spruce when you heard the gunshot. That undermines your treating her as a potential suspect.”

“Except we can’t be sure the shot was Kendra firing at the intruder.”

“I won’t mislead the attorney general. That’s a line I will never cross even if you’re comfortable treating it like a jump rope.”

Again, I found it hard to be insulted when he knew me so well.

“What I want to know is where she was before she landed at Spruce Island.”

“How is that pertinent?”

“Because I’m stuck on the question of why the intruder chose last night to commit the murders. The storm would have made everything ten times more difficult. I refuse to believe the timing was random. He either acted because he believed McLeary was back on Baker or because he knew she wasn’t.”

Off the island a seal had raised his gray-spotted head from underwater and was watching us as if captivated by our ethical debate.

Klesko was not the kind of man to sigh, but he made the face of a person doing just that. “You read a lot of detective fiction as a kid. Didn’t you, Mike?”

“You know I did.”

“Then maybe you remember this quote: ‘Imagination is a good servant and a bad master.’”

“I never pictured you as a reader of Agatha Christie, Steve.”

“I wasn’t. But Wayne Soctomah, who trained me, loved those books. Soctomah was the one who taught me not to come to conclusions too quickly when investigating a crime. Not unless time was of the essence.”

“What makes you think time isn’t of the essence here?”

He had no answer for that one.

“I’m going to call the AG and confer with him about getting her sat phone records,” he said. “Kitteridge will be giving us time of death soon, and if the Selkie was at Spruce Island when the women were killed, it definitely rules her out as a suspect—unless someone else was using the boat.”

After Klesko wandered off, I retrieved my cell where I’d plugged it into the power bank the police had brought along. Then I took advantage of their signal booster to call Stacey. I had been procrastinating for the past hour, telling myself I needed to prepare to tell her about McLeary. But really, I’d been summoning my courage.

“Stacey,” I said. “Something’s happened here.”

“It’s about Maeve, isn’t it?”

I’d stopped bothering to ask how she sensed these things.

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