Something Fishy (23 page)

“I'd have figured that out eventually. Why would it matter?”

“Because you've been looking at me, suspiciously.”

“This isn't helping you,” she said. “Look, I'm willing to forget this if you let me go, and let me be the judge of your evidence.”

“I can't do that. Not now.”

Anton, the sophisticate, had lost it. Condemned himself with his behaviour. What did she have to lose? An accusation might bring a confession.

“You killed Viola.”

“No, Newton did. I'll show you why.”

Turning her and holding her arms behind her back, he pushed her toward the desk, the light of his flashlight bouncing off the walls, making Jamieson dizzy, distracted, and unable to think. At least she was free of his body pressing into hers.

He sat her down at the desk, and used her handcuffs to secure her to the chair.

Even though she was in a vulnerable position, she kept up the pressure.

“You killed Fiona.”

“No.”

“Newton. You killed him, by pushing him off the tower.”

A spark of interest in his eyes.

“Oh, is he dead? How unfortunate. Then he won't suffer from being branded a killer.”

“No.” A long silence.

“Are you going to kill me, too? That would be very foolish.”

He gazed around the curved roof of the dome. “Should go up in seconds. And you'll go down as a cop who shouldn't have been here, searching the place without a warrant.”

“I do have a warrant.” Technically, she did.

“Show it to me then.” He smiled, meanly.

“You know I can't do that.” She tugged at the handcuffs.

“I won't let you die without satisfying your curiosity.” He opened the third drawer and pulled out what he'd placed in there.

The Journal of Viola Featherstonehaugh.

I feel as if I am carrying a parasite inside my body. Sucking the life out of me. Claiming my blood for his own. I see now I was not meant to be a mother, but is there no way out?

The baby kicked today, for the first time. Am I to put up with this for another four months? It makes me sick, sick to the bone. I want it out, out, out.

Anton flipped the pages for her, to the most significant passages. All of it she had read at the hospital.

“Do you know what happened next?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Did Newton ever see this?”

“I don't know.”

“By planting it here, you hoped to suggest he had, to cast suspicion on him. Away from you.”

Anton said nothing.

“If he had seen it, he might have killed Viola and spared you the trouble.”

“If she had known he would kill her, she'd have made sure to kill him in the womb. But she didn't. And look what happens. Matricide. Offends the sensibilities.”

“Murder – of any kind – offends mine.”

“Anyway, you have the general idea. A motive to kill his mother.”

“There's nothing he didn't know in here.”

“He didn't know it was his mother who wrote those awful things. Viola. But he did in the end.”

“How?”

“I told him. Up on the tower. Before he jumped. I told you I didn't push him.”

“Not physically.”

“I don't believe you can commit a murder mentally.”

“I do.”

Anton had been leaning over Jamieson's shoulder. Now he stood straight.

“You can't deny it anymore. Besides, there's no point if you're going to kill me.”

“What?”

“Admit that you killed Viola…”

The flashing eyes burned with malevolence. The ingratiating smile disappeared altogether, twisting into an ugly shape, full of hate. She'd correctly gauged his pride and his anger.

“Stupid bitch and her bloody fish. She was lucky to have someone like me catering to her every whim.”

“For money.”

“Yes, for money. If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else.”

“Who used her? Or who killed her? How did you do it?”

“I didn't do it. Not really. It was just luck. I knew there was too much saffron in that rice. I took a chance on serving it to her and the others. She was old and frail. There was a good chance she'd snuff it.”

“She did, laughing all the way to the bank.”

He frowned.

“It was now or never. She'd either changed her will or not. A fifty-fifty chance that I'd inherit. If I didn't, at least she'd be dead. You couldn't really call it murder.”

“I could. And I'm pretty sure you murdered Fiona, too.”

“Stupid bitch and her bloody fudge. Wallowing in Newton and her own self-importance as a business-owner on the cape. I didn't mean to kill her, you may not believe that.”

“I don't.”

He shrugged. “We were arguing about what I owed her, about the land, about the ugly trailer, and her harassment of me and my guests. She went for me. I defended myself. She went over.”

“And the rock jumped down and followed her.”

“I may have given it a push.”

“Like Newton. You might have given him a push, too.”

He didn't say anything.

He flashed one of his brilliant smiles. “So a few people died in unusual ways. That doesn't make me a murderer.”

“So you say. And me? What are your plans for me?”

“Oh, I won't kill you either. I'm not a murderer, in spite of what you may think.”

Deluded. He was deluded. The walking crazy. Acting – mostly – normal. Except at killing time. Jamieson wondered if he'd killed before.

“I'm going to give you a fighting chance.”

He held up the key to the handcuffs. He slipped it into her breast pocket, and patted her breast.

She shuddered and quickly began scheming about how she might use the key to unlock the cuffs. Impossible.

“I'm afraid I have to leave, after performing a slight function.”

He made it sound as if he were going to pee.

Of course that wasn't what he was going to do. He was going to do something much worse than that.

She thought of the ring of batteries around the dome. The acrid smell of smoke floated through the dome. It began to thicken.

Fire. Her nemesis. It was a fear she had overcome that had once paralyzed her, frozen her to the spot. Jamieson was working her mouth around the button on the shirt, not knowing what she would do if she got the key, but unable to sit there, a passive victim.

The smoke was billowing from all directions, insinuating into her lungs, though she tried not to breathe, taking in the bare minimum to live. How long, before an agonizing death?

Whoosh.
She heard the flames take hold of oxygen. It came from Hy, opening the door.

Thank God. Thank God for McAllister's incessant interference.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Jamieson,” Hy called out. She ran across the room as the flames rose and smoke billowed.

“The key's in my pocket,” Jamieson shouted. Hy fumbled to open the lock on the handcuffs, her fumbling fueled by Jamieson's impatience.

The fire roared, taking on new and more deadly life.

The handcuffs dropped to the floor.

“Get on the ground,” Hy ordered. She knew of Jamieson's history with fire, so she kept talking and moving her along, hoping she wouldn't freeze, or worse, despair.

The smoke was thick and full of another stench, the chemicals from the batteries. When they got to the door, Hy hauled Jamieson up off the floor, and put an arm around her to help her balance as they fled the dome. A surge of fire followed them through the door, leaping at them, licking and flaring with a new feed of oxygen.

From a distance, they turned to look back. The dome was fast becoming an inferno, flames leaping up its centre, like sound rising to reach the highest point, its shape seeming to embrace the fire.

“Anton,” whispered Jamieson.

“He's in there?” Hy leapt forward, but Jamieson grabbed her by the arm.

“I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Let it be. He's a damn murderer. You're not going to die for him.”

“A murderer?”

“He as much as admitted it in there. He was certainly trying
to kill me.”

“But I thought…”

“So did we all. Newton. He had lots of reasons, lots of sound psychological reasons, but he was a victim.”

“Was?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“So I was wrong.” Hy felt as if she had mounted a vendetta against an innocent man, labeling him a murderer in the last hours of his life.

Jamieson clasped her arm.

“
We
were wrong.” Solidarity. “It was a tough call, McAllister, a tough call. But we know who it was. You don't always get that. If Paradis is dead, so much the better. If he got away, he'll live a lifetime of knowing I'm tracking him down. Even if I never catch him, he'll always be looking over his shoulder.”

Anton. Had he been too easy to suspect because of the false notes he naturally struck? The flashing smile, his flirtatious insinuations. Too despicable to be a killer. No, as it turned out, just despicable enough.

Ten pick-up trucks belonging to volunteer firefighters, including Nathan, Ben, and Murdo, drove onto the cape. Ian had phoned when he saw the flames licking the dome, and he had told Nathan, more than once, not to put water on the fire.

“It won't do much to staunch the fire,” he had said, “and it will create a toxic runoff.”

How to fight a fire without water?

They didn't have the dry chemical it would require. Even if it were available in Charlottetown or at the wind research station in North Cape, it would be too late by the time it got here. It was too late already.

They could see that it was hopeless. The dome was going down as fast as it had gone up.

Gus had a ringside seat, but was containing her glee that the eyesore would soon be gone until she was sure no one had been hurt.

“There was no one in there, anyroad,” she called out to Abel as he came in for the night, the screen door of the side porch slamming behind him.

He didn't answer.

Gus heaved herself out of the chair. It was getting harder every day.

“Cuppa tea?” she called out, as she had every night of their sixty-year married life. Every night, he didn't answer. She didn't like to stop asking, in case one day he changed his mind. She couldn't imagine not wanting a cup of tea.

She shuffled over to the side porch. He wasn't there. Must be in the basement then. She returned to her seat to watch the flames, flashing orange light on the tower of the turbine, casting shadows across it.

Evil
, the word came unbidden into Gus's mind. It did look evil, with those flames flickering across it, licking at it, casting shadows that changed its shape and size. The dancing light made it look as if the tower were moving. Moving forward.

Gus shuddered, and turned away from the window.

She'd lost her taste for watching – at least for tonight.

“Anyone inside?” Nathan asked.

“Possibly,” said Jamieson. It was then she realized that she was holding on to the journal, which she'd grabbed, unthinking, when Hy freed her.

Hy noticed at the same time. The two women looked at each other.

“I'm not even going to ask what happened with this.”

Hy gave a half-smile.

“And I'm not going to charge you. Not this time, anyway.”

They both knew it was because Hy had saved Jamieson's life, not for the first time. That shouldn't matter, according to strict police protocol, but things were different now at The Shores.

Ian had taken a tour around the dome, assessing what might have happened. He came up to Hy and Jamieson and put his arms around both of them, guiding them away from the fire.

“You shouldn't be breathing that stuff in. It's toxic.” He yelled out to the firefighters. “Move back, it's not good to breathe that in.”

Fortunately, it was summer and the prevailing wind was from the southwest. It was blowing the toxic smoke out to sea, or there might have been an environmental disaster.

“He must have tampered with a battery, set a fire going in both directions, pretty easy to do. The fire quickly engulfed the dome and may have trapped him. He'd have no way out in either direction.”

“So he won't have survived.”

“I doubt it. Damn Anton to hell,” said Ian, still holding on to Hy and Jamieson. Neither resisted. Hy melted into him, and Jamieson very nearly did.

“I expect that's where he is,” said Jamieson.

The three of them stood there for a long time, saying nothing, transfixed by the fire.

Murdo came over as the fire was dying down, nothing more to feed on.

“Five hundred years,” he said. “It was supposed to last five hundred years. It didn't even last five.”

Jamieson gave him a pale smile.

“Go,” he said. “I'll take care of things here.”

By “things” he meant Anton. There would have to be a search for the body as soon as the heat of the fire cooled down. No one stuck in that inferno could possibly have survived. Murdo didn't want Jamieson to have to deal with it. There had been enough deaths at her door.

Jamieson got a lift with Hy, and Ian followed in his truck. They stopped at Ian's; Jamieson came in and, for the first time ever, accepted a glass of wine.

Only after she'd had a sip did she say, “Fanshaw's done.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. But he went to hell before he died.”

She thought of him, lying immobile in the body cast, blank eyes staring up at the ceiling, aware of the loss of his capacities, imprisoned, truly imprisoned. He had been trapped all his life. Expelled from a womb he didn't want to leave, a womb that had thrust him into a world he didn't belong in, a world he wasn't meant to be a part of. A rejected fetus, come to full term.

She was wrong. It wasn't hell for Newton. The prelude to death was the most pleasant time he'd had in his life.

Jamieson drank too much that night – a surprise to Ian and Hy, who'd never seen her drink at all. Since they'd all been drinking, and she was a cop, they walked her home, Ian and Hy, one on each side of her, propping her up as she shuffled along.

And then the greatest surprise of all. Saying good-bye, Jamieson hugged, actually hugged, Hy. She turned to Ian and kissed him full on the lips.

As soon as Jamieson was inside her door, Hy burst out
laughing. Ian merely looked flustered. He touched his lips. He stroked a hand across his thinning hair.

Hy hooked her arm in his, and they weaved down the middle of the road.

When they got to Ian's door, they stopped, still arm in arm.

“Should I say good-bye the way Jamieson did?” Hy tilted her head.

“You could try.” He took her in his arms. “But I don't think it would be good-bye.”

Jamieson saw the long lingering kiss from the police house. She saw them break apart and come together again. She saw them stumbling into the house. Together.

Moira saw it, too, from her upstairs bedroom. It looked as if what had been off again was on again.

She gripped her nightly glass of water so tightly in her hand that she broke the glass. Not all of the liquid spilling onto the floor was water. A tear chased down Moira's face and plopped into the puddle at her feet.

Her marriage unresolved, she was still single, and still longing for Ian.

Anton had taken off his shoes and belt, and tossed them into the inferno. He removed his Rolex, put it back on, took it off again and tossed it in, too. He lifted the reproduction of a Roman coin, in solid 24-carat gold, from around his neck, a hard-won trophy from another life, stroked it, and threw it in. He must escape The Shores. He hoped to make it appear that he had died in the fire, but he didn't know if he'd succeeded. He'd have to check the newspapers and the web when he got to civilization to see if he'd been successful. He'd never worked with fire before.

He hadn't expected to be taking off tonight, but he was prepared, because he had always known that the time would come when he would have to move quickly. When he left the dome, he had slipped down to the shore, and had walked in bare feet along the edge of the water, the waves licking at his pants, rolled up to his calves. He was headed for Big Bay, the pick-up point. He had made the call on his cell – and the boat would meet him there.

It was a long walk in a moonless night, the sound of the ocean his only company. And his thoughts. His thoughts were coming rapidly. He'd get to Martha's Vineyard, and from there –

From there, perhaps he'd sign on as a chef on an ocean-going yacht. He had contacts who'd swing that for him. It was easy to get lost at sea, lost to the authorities, and that's what he needed for a time. Change his name. Too bad, he had liked Anton Paradis.

But he was used to shifting his identity. He'd done it more than once. He'd killed before, too.

He might again.

It's what he knew how to do to get what he needed, or wanted. Usually from rich old women. No big loss to anyone. Too bad about that Mountie. She'd have been a satisfying bedmate, even if she didn't like it. Maybe especially if she didn't like it. Ahead he saw a blinking light bobbing on the water, and he picked up his pace. He straightened and held his head proudly, shucking off Anton as he hurried to the small boat that would take him to a larger one and to his new life. New identity papers, new hairstyle and colour, new contacts for new eyes, a nose job, Botox to plump up the mid-facial degradation.

A new man. As soon as he found a woman to fund it.

It was a beautiful day, the kind in which, at dawn, the gulf slipped tiny foam-capped waves up on the shore, their sound magnified many times, so that the ocean thundered on gentle waves.

It was an odd backdrop to the devastation of the night before. You couldn't look to the shore without seeing the wreckage marring the cape. The trailer was gone, and all that was left was the ruin of the dome and that monster of a wind turbine sticking up above the shoreline.

All that was left of Newton. Jamieson hadn't liked him, but would not have wished his fate on anyone.

The case was cracked, black-and-white like real murder was supposed to be. Wrong and right. No half-measures, skewed motivation. An evil killer.

She had it this time. Most of it. She had the answer, but not the perpetrator. Anton was nowhere to be found. The firefighters told her that a preliminary investigation showed no sign of human remains, but that they were hard to detect. There were a number of items – a watch, a necklace – that might have been his.

Jamieson was sure they were. She'd only need a glance at the necklace to know. She'd seen it nestled in the curly mass of his thick black chest hair.

That didn't mean he'd died. She was almost sure about that, too. How to prove it? That he'd sacrificed these valuable items to save something more valuable – his neck.

Jamieson had experience with how far the justice system was prepared to pursue a criminal. She'd had to do the pursuing in the past on her own time. She'd do it this time, if she had to. Detachment was making the usual noises, issuing the standard warrants for a province-wide manhunt, but that was another thing she knew. Anton was not on Red Island any more. Not if he was as cunning as he appeared. He was on his way to losing his identity somewhere, and she was powerless to pursue him.

The case was over, but not for her. As long as Anton was free, he was vulnerable. Someone who was so determined to make a mark on the world was unlikely to stay undercover for long. As soon as he lifted his head, she'd be there, waiting.

Right now she wanted to wash it all away. She took a long shower, until the hot water began to feel cool and she had scrubbed her skin raw in places. She was erasing Anton and his insinuations; she was trying to erase the thought that
Newton had been living in agony while she conducted a
police investigation. No one had said it, but she'd suspected they might have hooked him up and kept him alive while they could – for her convenience and the benefit of the police investigation.

She pulled out the dress she'd bought in Winterside at the beginning of the summer. She hadn't known when she'd wear it – at the Harvest festival maybe. Suddenly, she didn't want to wait that long.

She pulled it out of the closet. Stroked it. She hadn't worn a dress since she was twelve. She slipped into the cream concoction, with tight bodice and full skirt, and twirled in front of the bathroom mirror.

She could only see herself in the mirror from the waist up, but she enjoyed the rustle of the skirt around her legs. She slipped her feet into a pair of espadrilles she'd bought to go with the dress.