Last to Die (32 page)

The scanned image glowed on Frost’s computer screen, a photo of guests dressed in party clothes, some seated, some standing, most with a drink in hand. The central figures in the tableau were Erskine Ward and Nicholas Clock, who stood facing each other, but with their faces partly turned to the camera, as though someone had just called out: “Smile, gentlemen!” Will’s mother, Olivia, stood in the periphery beside another woman, but her gaze was turned toward Erskine Ward. Jane scanned the other faces, searching for the spouses of these three, but did not spot them amid the well-heeled and clearly well-lubricated gathering.

“That,” said Frost, pointing to Olivia, “is the expression of a woman who has the hots for Ward.”

“That’s what you see in her face?”

“Not that anyone ever looks at me like that.”

“It could be just the look of an old friend. Someone who knows him well.”

“Then it’s funny we can’t find anything else to tie Olivia and Erskine together. If they knew each other that well.”

Jane leaned back in her chair and stretched the kinks from her neck. It was nearly midnight, and everyone else in the homicide unit had left the building for the night. So should we, she thought, but these scanned photos, which Maura emailed to Boston PD, had kept Jane and Frost at their desks for the last hour. Maura had sent eight photos from the Ward family album, images of barbecues and black-tie parties, of gatherings indoors and outdoors. In none of the other photos had Jane spotted either Olivia Yablonski or Nicholas Clock; this was the only image where the two appeared along with Erskine Ward. A Fourth of July party, year unspecified, in a room with at least a dozen other people visible in the shot.

Where and when had this photo been taken?

Frost clicked through the other seven images and stopped at a photo of the Ward family, seated on a white sofa. Claire looked about eight years old. They were dressed in their best, Erskine in a gray suit, Isabel in a well-cut dress and blazer. Behind them was an elaborately decorated Christmas tree.

“This is the same room as the cocktail party,” said Frost. “See the hearth there, on the right? It’s in the other photo as well. And here …” He zoomed in on a corner of the room. “Does that look like the same crown molding?”

“Yeah, it does,” said Jane. She squinted to read the handwritten caption from the album:
OUR LAST CHRISTMAS IN GEORGETOWN. LONDON, HERE WE COME
! She looked at Frost. “This was taken in DC.”

“So that’s where the cocktail party was. The question is, why did Nicholas Clock and Olivia Yablonski get invited to a diplomat’s party? Nicholas was in finance. Olivia was a medical equipment sales rep. How and where did these three people meet?”

“Go back to the other photo,” she said.

Frost pulled up the image of the cocktail party, which they now knew was in Washington.

“They look younger here,” said Jane. She swiveled around to grab the Ward family’s file from her desk and flipped it open to Erskine Ward’s curriculum vitae. “Foreign service officer, served in Rome for fourteen years, Washington for five. Then stationed in London, where he was killed a year later.”

“So this cocktail party was held sometime during the Wards’ five-year stay in DC.”

“Right.” She closed the file. “How did these three meet? It must have been in Washington. Or …” She looked at Frost just as the same thought seemed to spring into his head.

“Rome,” said Frost, and he sat up straight in excitement. “Remember what that guy at NASA told us? Neil and Olivia were looking forward to their trip to Rome—where they first met each other.”

Jane swiveled around to grab her file on the Yablonskis. “All this time, we’ve focused on Neil and
his
job. Kept chasing that stupid NASA and aliens shit, when it was
Olivia
we should have been looking at.” Bland Olivia with the boring job, who stood around looking lost at her husband’s NASA gatherings. Olivia, who regularly traveled overseas to sell medical equipment.
What were you really selling, Olivia?

Jane found the page she was searching for. “Here it is. Date of marriage, Olivia and Neil Yablonski. Fifteen years ago. She met her future husband in Rome, which would place her there during the same time Erskine Ward was working at the embassy.”

“What about this guy?” Frost pointed at Teddy’s father, Nicholas Clock, who cut a striking and athletic figure, a man confident enough in his own skin to drink beer when everyone else was sipping wine, to sport Dockers and a golf shirt among a jacket-and-tie crowd. “Can we place Nicholas Clock in Rome around that same time? Were all three of them there?”

Jane flipped through the file. “We don’t know enough about Clock. Most of what we’ve got is what the Saint Thomas police sent us.”

“He was just a tourist in Saint Thomas. Down there, no one would know him.”

“But they would know him in Providence, where he worked.” She paged through the file. “Here. Financial consultant at Jarvis and McCrane, Chapman Street.” She looked up. “Our next stop.”

I DIDN’T WANT
to go to quebec anyway
.

Claire sulked in the courtyard as she watched her excited classmates climb aboard the field trip bus. She had told Will she didn’t want to be stuck on any bus for hours, but this was a sleek new bus, not some ratty yellow clunker like most schools used. Bruno added insult to injury by shouting out the bus window, announcing all the onboard luxuries.

“Hey, everyone, it’s got TVs! Headphones! WiFi!”

Now Briana and the princesses came out of the building, wheeling their cute little carry-ons, which they rolled across the cobblestones in a royal procession. As they passed her, Claire heard one of them sneer, under her breath:
Night Crawler
.

“Loser,” Claire shot back.

Briana wheeled around. “I’m just going to say it right here, loud and clear, so everyone hears it. My room is
locked
. If I find anything missing when I get back—
anything
—we’ll all know who did it.”

“Get on the bus, Briana,” Ms. Saul said with a sigh as she and Ms. Duplessis tried to shepherd their students aboard. “We have to get going now if we want to make it there by lunchtime.”

Briana shot a poisonous glance at Claire and climbed aboard the bus.

“Are you okay, Claire?” Ms. Saul asked gently.

Of all the teachers at Evensong, Ms. Saul was her favorite, because she looked at you as if she really saw you, and cared. And what she saw now must be obvious: that as much as Claire denied wanting to go with them, she hated being left behind.

“It’s only because you’re still so new to Evensong,” said Ms. Saul. “You’ll get to go on our next trip. And won’t it be nice this weekend, just the four of you, having the whole school to yourselves.”

“I guess,” moped Claire.

“Mr. Roman’s set up the hay bales for you, if you want to shoot a few arrows. You’ll be an expert archer by the time we get back.”

Aren’t you afraid I’ll kill another chicken?
was what Claire thought, but she kept her mouth shut as Ms. Saul climbed aboard and the doors closed. With a puff of diesel smoke, the bus pulled away and drove under the stone archway. She heard barking behind her, saw a flash of black fur as Julian’s dog shot past, chasing after the bus.

“Bear!” Claire yelled. “Come back here!”

The dog ignored her and tore out of the courtyard. Claire followed him all the way to the edge of the lake where he suddenly halted, his nose lifted to the air. No longer did he seem interested in the bus, which continued driving down the road and disappeared around the bend. Instead Bear turned and took off in a different direction.

“Now where are you going?” she called out. With a sigh, she followed him around the building, toward the trail that led up the ridge. Already he was picking his way through the scrub, moving faster now, so fast that she had to scramble to keep up. “Bear, come
back here
,” she commanded. Watched in frustration as he slipped away into the underbrush. So much for obedience; she couldn’t get even a dog to show her any respect.

Halfway up the ridge, she gave up chasing him and plopped down on a boulder. From here, she could just look over the school’s rooftop. It was not as spectacular a view as up at the Jackals’ Den, but this was good enough, especially on this bright morning, with the sun glittering on the lake. By now the bus would be out of the gate and on its way to Quebec. By noon, they’d be eating at some fancy French restaurant—that’s what Briana had bragged about, anyway—and there’d be a trip to the Quebec Experience museum, and a ride on an outdoor elevator that went up a cliff.

Meanwhile, I get to sit on this stupid rock
.

She broke off a chip of lichen and tossed it over the edge. Wondered if Will and Teddy were finished with breakfast yet. Maybe they’d want to shoot arrows with her. But instead of heading back down the ridge, she flopped onto her back, stretching out like a snake warming itself on the boulder, and closed her eyes. Heard a dog’s whine and felt Bear brush up against her jeans. She stroked his back, taking comfort from the touch of his fur. What was it that made a dog’s company so comforting? Maybe the fact you never had to hide your feelings from them, never had to fake a smile for their benefit.

“Good old Bear,” she murmured, and opened her eyes to look at him. “What did you bring back for me?”

The dog had something in his mouth, something he did not seem willing to surrender. Only when she gave a tug on it did he finally let it drop. It was a leather glove, black. Where in these woods had Bear found a glove? It smelled bad, and it glistened with the dog’s saliva.

Grimacing, she picked it up and felt a heaviness to it. Peeking inside, she saw something white gleaming within. She turned the glove upside down, gave it a hard shake. What came tumbling out made her scream and scramble backward, away from the object that lay stinking on the boulder.

A hand.

“It’s always the dogs that find them,” said Dr. Emma Owen.

Maura and the Maine medical examiner stood in the dappled shade of the woods, insects buzzing around their faces, the air thick with the stench of cadaver. Maura thought of other bodies she’d examined over the years, also unearthed by dogs, whose noses are always on the alert for such ripe treasures. Although these remains were hundreds of yards up the slope, Bear had caught the scent and tracked it to this thicket, where dense underbrush partially concealed the body. The man, who appeared to be well muscled and fit, was dressed in camouflage cargo pants, a dark green windbreaker, a T-shirt, and hiking boots. A serrated knife was still strapped to his ankle, and a rifle with a telescopic sight was perched on a nearby boulder. He lay on his left side, exposing his right face and neck to the elements. Scavengers had been at work, greedily stripping away the scalp and face, gnawing at nasal cartilage, and digging into the right orbit, which now gaped empty, the socket scooped clean. Canids, thought Maura, noting the teeth marks on the remaining skin, the punctures in the thin orbital bone. Coyotes most likely. Or, in this remote area, perhaps wolves. Even in this tangle of vines, the cause of death was easy to spot: an aluminum arrow, its tip em bedded deep in the left eye, its tail feathers dyed a deep green.

Under other circumstances, Maura might have assumed this was just an unlucky hunter, brought down in the woods by another hunter’s carelessness. But this man had been trespassing on Evensong property, and from the boulder where his rifle was positioned, he would have had a commanding view of the valley and the school below. He could have observed who arrived on the property, and who departed.

Inured as she was to foul smells, Maura had to turn away as the body was rolled onto a plastic sheet, stirring up a stench so foul that Maura gagged and lifted her arm over her nose. Dr. Owen’s staff was fully garbed and masked but Maura, standing here as a mere observer, had settled for gloves and shoe covers, the big-city ME trying to prove she was too seasoned to let a rotting corpse defeat her.

Dr. Owen crouched down over the body. “There’s barely persistent rigor mortis here,” she said, testing the limbs for range of motion.

“It was fifty-one degrees last night,” one of the state police detectives said. “Balmy.”

The medical examiner lifted the edge of the victim’s T-shirt to expose the abdomen. The changes from autolysis were obvious even from where Maura stood. Death sets off a cascade of changes in soft tissues as leaking enzymes digest proteins and disintegrate membranes. Blood cells break apart and leak through vessel walls, and in that soup of nutrients, bacteria feast, filling the abdomen with gases. Braving the stench, Maura crouched down beside Dr. Owen. She saw blue veins marbling the bloated belly and knew that if they rolled down the pants, they would find the scrotum swollen with those same gases.

“Forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” said Dr. Owen. “You agree?”

Maura nodded. “Based on the relatively minor amount of damage by scavengers, I’d favor the lower end of that postmortem interval. The attacks are confined to the head and neck and …” Maura paused, glancing at the bony stump poking from the jacket sleeve. “… the hand. The wrist must have been exposed. That’s how they got at it.” She wondered if Bear had sampled a taste before bringing his putrid prize to Claire.
A friendly lick won’t be so welcome after this
.