Breakwater (7 page)

She caught sight of an osprey high in the sky.

“The osprey will kill me.”

Had Alicia had a premonition of her own death?

Or had her fears and delusions lured her out onto the bay at a dangerous time and become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Quinn forced herself to pull her gaze from the osprey.

She could feel where the frigid, wet sand had rubbed her winter-tender feet raw, but at least they were warm now. After the police had arrived, Huck Boone had taken her back to her cottage and insisted she find dry socks.

She came to the small local motel that marked the halfway point of her usual waterfront walk. Instead of continuing, she sat on a bench, listening to the steady rhythm of the tide. A lone gull perched on a post of the motel’s rickety dock and turned to her, staring at her. Quinn shivered, wondering if it was one of the gulls from that morning, if it recognized her somehow.

It flew off, and its cry into the empty sky seemed to echo her mix of sadness and loneliness.

Alicia had come to her for help, and now she was dead.

A shadow fell over her, and a dark, drop-dead-handsome man handed her a tissue. “Thank you,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I happened to have a tissue?”

She managed a smile. “How?”

“My mother. She said a man should carry tissues in case a pretty woman needs one.”

“That’s very old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

“It was her way of getting a fourteen-year-old to be prepared. If she said I should keep tissues in case I needed them for myself-” He shrugged. “I’d have told her that’s what shirtsleeves are for.”

Quinn laughed, sniffling. “I’m Quinn Harlowe, by the way.”

“Diego Clemente. I’m staying here at the motel.”

“I hear they serve good breakfast.”

He made a face. “Two kinds of sugary cereal, stale Danish and bananas a monkey would throw back.”

“How can you screw up a banana?”

“I don’t know. Ask them.” He nodded toward the hotel. “It’s not a picky clientele. How’re you doing? Feeling better?”

She nodded. “Thanks.” When she rose, her knees wobbled under her, but Diego Clemente had the grace to give her a moment to steady herself. “Have the police been by here?”

“The police?”

“A woman-there was-” Not normally at a loss for words, Quinn couldn’t seem to focus. “A woman drowned. She was probably out on a kayak yesterday. A red kayak. I was wondering if the police asked anyone out here if they saw her.”

Diego had narrowed his dark eyes on her. “I didn’t see anything.”

“I wasn’t suggesting-” She pulled up her quilt, which had drooped to the ground. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“The woman was your friend?”

“Yes.”

“Stinks, losing a friend that way.” He tugged on an edge of her quilt. “What, you don’t own a coat?”

“I just grabbed the quilt…”

He frowned at her. “Your cottage is on that dead-end road out by the cove? You’re not going to make it that far.”

“The walk will do me good. Thanks for the tissue.”

“Sure.”

Quinn took a few steps back down the road, but stopped and turned back to him. “By the way, have you seen an abandoned dark blue BMW around here anywhere? Alicia-my friend who died this morning. Her car’s missing.”

His gaze held hers. “I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

“Thanks.”

Twenty yards from the motel, Quinn tripped over her quilt and almost went flying, but rearranged it quickly, glancing back toward the dock in case Diego Clemente wanted to say he’d told her so. But he’d disappeared, and she wondered if he’d already forgotten their conversation.

She made it the rest of her way back to her cottage without tripping or crying. The walk and the chilly air had helped her appetite, and she got the crab stew out of the refrigerator and set it on the stove. While it heated, she checked her cell phone for messages. Gerard Lattimore and Steve Eisenhardt had called. Lattimore asked her to call him back. Steve left it up to her. He seemed to understand that they didn’t know each other well enough for her to want to talk to him after such a day.

When she tried Lattimore’s number, she got his assistant. He was in a meeting.

Thank God, Quinn thought, dipping up a bowl of the steaming crab stew and taking it into the living room with her. She wrapped back up in her quilt and sat on the sofa, a yard-sale find that she’d covered in a sea-green plaid herself.

The Scanlons were good cooks, and the stew was wonderful.

But Quinn took two bites and set the bowl down on a side table, assaulted by images of Alicia paddling in the storm, trying to keep her kayak from overturning in the swells and failing, capsizing, drowning.

And no life vest, no emergency whistle in case she got into trouble.

Either might have saved her life.

Quinn sank back against the soft couch and could almost feel Huck Boone’s arm around her as he’d walked with her back to the cottage.

Heck of a name, Huck Boone. Was it real? How many guys working private security changed their names?

Probably a lot.

She thought of Diego Clemente and his tissue, and his neutral expression when she’d mentioned Alicia’s car. Maybe too neutral? Had he seen something yesterday and didn’t want to get involved?

You’re exhausted.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows, so startling her that she almost fell off the couch.

She got up and ran through the cottage, making sure all the windows were locked, checking the porch door and the side door. If she felt unsafe, she could call Kowalski. But what would he do? And he’d meant truly unsafe, as in killers were on her doorstep, not the wind rattling the windows and unnerving her.

Again, Quinn thought of Huck Boone’s thick arm around her.

Not good.

She collapsed back on the couch, rolling up in her quilt and listening to another gust of wind come at the cottage, concentrating on it, trying to push back more images.

But there she was at the University of Virginia, on a warm spring day among the dogwood, she and Alicia falling onto their backs in the soft grass and laughing hysterically over something that had just happened. Quinn couldn’t remember what, but the laughter was clear in her mind and all she wanted was to reach back in time and warn Alicia not ever to move to Washington, tell her that a job at the Justice Department wasn’t worth the cost-wasn’t worth her life. Even if her work-her friendship with Quinn-hadn’t caused her death, if Alicia had taken a different route and stayed in Chicago, maybe she’d still be alive.

Despite her many years as a nurse, Maura Scanlon couldn’t stop thinking about what pretty Alicia Miller must have looked like when Quinn had found her dead, drowned, on the beach.

Thank heavens I didn’t have to see her.

Maura rubbed lotion into her hands, rough from her work in the garden. Unable to eat supper, she’d gone into the backyard and divided daylilies, not wearing gloves, relishing the feel of the dirt-letting it remind her of life, not death. She’d had to use a brush to get the dirt out from under her nails. She hadn’t gotten all of it.

“Quinn Harlowe hasn’t gone back to Washington yet,” Don said, joining his wife in the kitchen. “I thought she might head back tonight, but her car’s still in the driveway.”

“She’ll probably rest tonight and leave in the morning. She should go back to her work, her friends. There’s nothing for her here.”

Maura sat at the round oak table that had belonged to her mother. Alexandria, where she and Don had lived their entire lives, suddenly seemed so far away. She rubbed a long-existing crack in the table as if it were some kind of genie lamp. Three wishes. If only I’d be granted three wishes. Right here, right now, I’d bring that poor girl back to life.

“Can I get you anything?” Don asked.

“No, thanks.”

They had cleaned up the supper dishes. Don had eaten very little, his appetite, too, curtailed by the trauma of the day. Maura looked out the window by the table, but it was dark now and she only saw her reflection. She and her husband enjoyed the simplicity of their lives in Yorkville. They didn’t care about riches or a jam-packed social life. Taking their coffee onto the porch on a warm morning and watching the bay was enough to satisfy them.

“Do you suppose it’ll ever be the same here?” Maura asked, hearing the haunted tone in her voice.

“Of course it will.”

“The FBI-Don, we were interrogated by the FBI.”

He tried to smile. “‘Interrogated’ is a bit strong, don’t you think? It’ll get better with time, Maura. The shock of what happened today will ease.”

“If only we’d been here-”

“There still might have been nothing we could have done. The water’s cold. Even if we’d seen Alicia out on the bay in the storm, once she fell in, she wouldn’t have lasted long. As a nurse, you know that.”

“No one’s suggested she died of hypothermia-she drowned.” Although, as Maura well knew, hypothermia could have contributed to her drowning.

“We weren’t there. We couldn’t have saved her.” Don pulled out a chair and sat down heavily, his gentle eyes troubled. “And if she was intent upon killing herself…”

“You don’t believe her death was an accident?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Maura pumped out more of the pink lotion she’d bought on sale in a bottle big enough to last through summer. “Should we have told the authorities about her and Oliver Crawford?”

“Special Agent Kowalski never asked-”

“He asked us if there was anything we could think of that might help them understand what happened. So did the local police.”

Don shook his head. “I see no reasonable purpose served by spreading gossip. We don’t know for a fact that Oliver Crawford and Alicia Miller were having an affair.”

“We know he visited her at the cottage.”

“We don’t know if he ever stayed the night.”

Maura squirted another dab of lotion into her palm and rubbed it in, then pushed the bottle into the center of the table. “Neither of us likes spying on the neighbors.”

“Oh, Maura, we weren’t spying-”

“It feels like spying when we know such things. If Oliver Crawford had wanted people to know he was visiting Alicia, he wouldn’t have been so sneaky about it.”

“Perhaps he saw it as being discreet, not sneaky.” As always, her husband kept his tone even. “He’s friends with Gerard Lattimore, and he’s-he was Alicia’s boss. They could have been discussing something about him. A surprise birthday party, maybe.”

“A surprise birthday party?” Maura laughed. “That’s rich, Don. I don’t like Crawford or Lattimore. I saw their type often enough at the hospital. Their hunger for power and ambition goes right to their pores. Neither holds any interest for me, even less so as I get older.”

Don smiled, taking her hand. “A good thing, because I’ve never been powerful or particularly ambitious. Maura-”

She set her jaw. “I still think Oliver Crawford and Alicia were having an affair, but I agree we shouldn’t be spreading rumors and gossip. If her death were a homicide, that would be one thing.”

“Even if you’re right about the affair, if Alicia committed suicide, it wasn’t Crawford’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

Including mine, Maura thought. But she’d seen the signs of depression in Alicia, worsening in the weeks since she’d starting coming to Yorkville-and over the weekend, the increased agitation.

“I knew something was wrong,” she whispered. “I should have taken her to the hospital myself and insist she get checked out. Accident or not, she wouldn’t have taken such a risk in those conditions if she’d had her head screwed on straight.”

“We’ll take a long walk tomorrow. It’ll help.”

Maura knew he was right. Self-recriminations and speculation would get them nowhere, and they had their own lives to lead.

Just after dark, Special Agent Kowalski knocked on Quinn’s porch door. She’d spotted his car pull up in front of her cottage, but still her heart pounded when she saw him through the door’s window. She had difficulty unlocking the door, her fingers stiff from the cold air and her long, difficult day. When she let him in, a breeze stung her face, her skin raw from crying. Another time, she might not have wanted an FBI agent-anyone-to see her in such a state, but tonight she didn’t care.

“Are you spending the night in Yorkville?” she asked him as he walked past her into the small living room. “It’s getting late.”

“I live in Spotsylvania. It’s not too far from here.” His expression suggested he hadn’t come for chitchat. “We found Alicia Miller’s car.”

“How-where?”

“We received an anonymous tip. It was out by an old boathouse on the waterfront, about two miles up the loop road from here. It’s closer by water. Apparently it’s a favorite spot for kayakers to launch.”

“I know it well. It’s an easy paddle over to the wildlife refuge from there. But Alicia must have headed back this way, since she ended up in the marsh.” Quinn’s voice caught. Had Kowalski hoped to catch her off guard? She noticed her quilt on the couch, her running shoes under the coffee table, her bowl of cold crab stew, but stayed focused on what he’d just told her. “When did you get this anonymous tip?”

“I didn’t. The local police did, maybe an hour ago.”

An hour. Had Diego Clemente recognized her description of Alicia’s car and phoned in the information anonymously, not wanting to use his name and have to answer questions?

“Quinn?”

“If Alicia had her head together enough to drive out to the boathouse to launch, don’t you think she’d have checked the weather? At least worn a life vest?”

“Happens all the time. People don’t pay attention.”

“But she must have just arrived back from Washington -”

“If she’d been agitated, then stuck in a car for three or four hours, she could have cut corners in her rush to get out on the water,” Kowalski reasoned.

Quinn sat on a 1950s wooden-armed chair, its cushions covered in a flowered fabric that went with the plaid on the couch. Alicia had helped her pick it out. “Alicia always wore a life vest. I insist anyone using one of my kayaks wear one. I keep several sizes in the shed. It’s not like her to go without.”

Kowalski didn’t respond right away. “Have you had anything to eat?”

His question took her by surprise. “Crab stew-”

“Uh-uh.” He pointed to her bowl, still on the side table. “You’ve had, what, three bites?”

Not even that much. She didn’t answer him. “Does Huck Boone know you found Alicia’s car? He was with me this morning-”

“I know. I can’t discuss the details of an ongoing investigation with you.”

“The black sedan that picked Alicia up in Washington -it hasn’t turned up?”

Kowalski sighed at Quinn. “You are tenacious, aren’t you? Why didn’t you sign up for the FBI? What are you now-thirty?”

“Thirty-two.”

“You still could. You’ve got four years. Then you can run an investigation and ask people questions.”

“If I weren’t a former Justice Department employee-”

“I treat everyone the same.”

She snorted. “Ha.”

“I know a couple guys planning to sit in on your workshop at the academy.”

“If you tell me things you’re not supposed to, I’ll give them A’s.”

That got him to crack a smile. “Good to see you have your sense of humor. It’ll help you in the coming days.”

But she sensed he was trying to tell her something more. “And?”

“And leave the investigation into your friend’s death to law enforcement. Don’t meddle.”

“What makes you think I’ve meddled?”

“Good night, Miss Harlowe.”

“A minute ago it was Quinn.”

He leaned toward her. “Eat. Get some sleep. Go back to Washington in the morning and make up a hard test for my friends.” But he sighed, shaking his head. “I know it’s been a rough day for you. I’m truly sorry about your loss.”

“Thank you.”

After Kowalski left, Quinn took her crab stew to the kitchen and popped the bowl in her ancient microwave. If she had something to eat, she thought, she might be able to figure out how T.J. Kowalski had discovered that his anonymous tipster was Diego Clemente and she’d asked him about Alicia’s car, because obviously he had. Otherwise why read her the riot act about minding her own business?

Kowalski must have gone to the waterfront motel himself and asked people hanging around if they saw anything. Ordinary legwork. He’d talked to Clemente and figured out he’d provided the tip about Alicia’s car. Had Clemente actually told him that Quinn had been asking questions?

The microwave dinged. The stew was bubbling hot, but she didn’t think it had come to a boil. She opened another sleeve of saltines and sat at the table, and after three spoonfuls of the rich, flavorful stew, she knew what she was doing and why Kowalski had warned her off. She was grasping at straws and looking for distractions-meddling in a law enforcement investigation-in order to alleviate her own guilt, to take her mind off her shock and grief and, even for a few moments, the image of Alicia in the marsh.

However she’d died, she was gone, and Quinn didn’t want to accept that reality.

T.J. Kowalski hadn’t made the effort to come to her cottage and tell her in person about the discovery out of any sympathy for her, or because he’d needed to ask her more questions.

He’d wanted to tell her to butt out.

Message delivered, message received.

Quinn stared at her crab stew. It had turned gloppy, and she had lost any urge to eat. She forced herself to take a few more bites, but couldn’t really taste anything. Finally, she gave up and, as she washed out her bowl, she wondered what T.J. Kowalski knew that he wasn’t telling her. Or was she just grasping at more straws?

She thought of Huck Boone. He worked for Breakwater Security-he could have his own read on the investigation.

Maybe she’d look him up tomorrow and ask him what he thought.

Feeling better, Quinn fell back onto the couch and wrapped up in her quilt, listening to the wind and the tide and trying not to think.