Legacy of the Highlands (2 page)

“Ma’am? Mrs. Cameron? I need to ask you some
questions,” the detective said after giving her a few minutes to
compose herself, but Alex was incapable of acknowledging him.
Through the fog that surrounded her brain, she heard him say that
Will had been killed just one street away from their luxurious
condo in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. A young couple out walking
their dogs discovered his body in an alley when the animals began
to howl in alarm.

Police really do say, “Is there someone we
should call, ma’am?” after delivering a life-shattering
coupe de
grâce
. The only person Alex wanted at that moment was Will, but
she whispered her best friend Francie’s phone number instead.

Alex was oblivious to the routine questions O’Shea
continued to ask. He’d just begun another attempt when Francie
pushed past the young cop who’d answered the door and burst into
the living room. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt turned inside out.
There were slippers on her feet instead of shoes, her dark, curly
hair was sleep rumpled and she was panting. “I need a minute to
catch my breath. I ran here.”

A moment later the diminutive whirlwind known
as Francesca Sandburg glared at the detective as she wrapped her
arms around Alex and uttered soothing sounds in her friend’s ear.
“Don’t you have a heart? Leave her alone! Stop badgering her!”

“You want whoever did this to be caught,
right?” the frustrated detective argued as he paced from one end of
the large room to the other. “The first twenty-four hours after a
crime are critical and Mrs. Cameron might provide us with the lead
that we need to catch the bas…the person who did this.”

“Besides, we need to bring her to Mass
General. That’s where they took Mr. Cameron. Next of kin must
identify the body, ma’am, and then we can connect her with people
who are trained to deal with this sort of thing,” the young cop
added.

“Don’t the two of you dare gang up on me,”
Francie warned. “You won’t win. You obviously know who ‘the body’
is or you wouldn’t have come here in the middle of the night to
tell Alex that Will is…is…” Francie’s face flushed and her gray
eyes filled with tears. She ignored the tissue O’Shea offered and
swiped at the wetness with the back of her hand. “You said that you
found Will’s driver’s license in his wallet. His picture is on it.
Isn’t that enough?”

“No, ma’am. We know this isn’t easy, but
regulations require a formal identification.”

“Fuck the regulations,” Francie muttered.
“Give me a minute to think, all right?” she snapped knowing the cop
was just trying to do his job. She took a breath in an attempt to
calm down. “How about this? My husband is Will’s lawyer. He can
identity him. Or Will’s parents can do it. They live near here on
Beacon Hill, right on Louisburg Square. Call Anne and John Cameron.
You need to notify them about this anyway, right?”

“No!” Alex shrieked, finally connecting to
the conversation around her. “If I go with them I can prove that
they’ve made a mistake. The man they found can’t be Will. Someone
must have stolen his wallet and then that person was murdered.
That’s why they think it’s Will. I know it’s not true. I won’t let
it be.”

O’Shea took Francie aside. “Look, I know this
is rough, but I’ve been through this enough times to know that it
will help your friend come to grips with the reality of what
happened if she sees her husband’s body.” He didn’t wait for an
answer. “Get her into some warm clothes. The morgue’s kept at about
40 degrees.”

“All right, all right,” Francie conceded and
clutched Alex’s hand as she led her to the bedroom where she helped
her dazed friend change into jeans and two heavy sweaters for the
ride to the hospital in O’Shea‘s unmarked car.

Alex and Francie had their arms around each other as
the detective guided them through the hospital’s chaotic emergency
department to the deathly hush of the morgue. At his signal, an
unsmiling attendant wheeled a gurney toward them. The shape that
rested on it was covered in a sheet so white that it gleamed like
fresh snow under the room’s harsh lights.

“There’s no blood on it. I thought there’d be
blood,” Alex whispered. The smell of disinfectant and other
unidentifiable substances made Francie clutch her stomach. The two
women tightened their hold on each other, then Francie nodded and
the attendant gently lifted a corner of the sheet to reveal Will’s
expressionless face, his skin devoid of its usual ruddy color.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God. Please, God — no,”
Alex begged and gripped the table as her knees gave way. The hand
that reached toward her dead husband trembled as if she’d had one
cup of coffee too many. Will’s body had always responded to her
touch and she hoped that maybe, just like in a fairy tale, she’d
miraculously be able to wake him from his slumber. She brushed a
strand of silky dark hair off his forehead and began to stroke his
face as she whispered his name over and over, while a stream of
tears ran silently down hers.

“He’s not going to wake up, is he?” she
finally murmured.

“No sweetie, he’s not. Maybe we should go,”
Francie said, but Alex ignored her. “This is all my fault. I told
him about a shortcut through that alley. I wanted him to get home
faster so we could, we could…it must have been so dark. He should
never have gone out for ice cream in the middle of the night. If
only he’d stayed in bed…oh, Francie,” she sobbed, “I’ll never
forgive myself.”

“Shhh, shhh. You didn’t force Will to do
anything he didn’t want to do. Terrible things just happen
sometimes, that’s all.” Francie wasn’t sure that Alex had even
heard her.

“His face is so pale and he’s cold. Where are
his clothes?” She scanned the room without moving, and when she
didn’t see Will’s clothes she told Francie that they had to find a
blanket for him. Her friend just nodded. Alex’s hand glided from
his face to a muscular shoulder and then to his chest. “His heart’s
not beating! I can’t feel his heart!” Her own began to pound as a
part of her slowly began to accept what she was seeing. “It’s
because he’s really dead, isn’t it?” She wondered how skin that had
been blazing hot when they’d made love just hours ago could now be
as icy as a statue. Was that even possible? “This is Will’s body,
but it isn’t him. It can’t be true Francie, can it?”

Alex continued to stare at her husband’s
lifeless form. Finally, she gently cradled his face and kissed his
forehead, his eyelids and then his lips. She lingered there before
she abruptly straightened her shoulders, turned, and resolutely
walked away.

“I thought...I thought...that...that…if I
didn’t see it, it couldn’t be real. That’s not so strange, is it?”
she stammered before her throat closed again. With a lifetime of
Catholic guilt, she assumed that God had taken her
thirty-four-year-old husband from her as punishment for some
transgression. What mortal sin had she committed to deserve this
damnation? Wasn’t it enough that He’d already stolen both of her
parents? Now the greedy bastard had to have her husband too? Was
her love somehow toxic, carrying with it a sentence of death?

No matter how hard Alex tried to keep her brain
enveloped in a shroud of protective mist, investigators continued
to mine her memory for potential clues in the days following Will’s
murder. “Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Mr.
Cameron? Did he have any enemies? Was he having an affair? Money
troubles? Was he a gambler? How about his family or business
associates?”

She was tempted to scream, “He’s dead because
of me! I wanted some fucking ice cream and he was in a hurry to get
back so we could continue to screw our brains out. And I told him
about the shortcut through that goddamn alley. That’s why he’s
dead.” She wished for a do-over with the same determination she’d
had since she’d been a little girl in her attempt to get it,
whatever “it” was, right, but death didn’t come with do-overs.

“Why don’t they just shut up and go away?”
she asked Francie’s husband, David, as she stalked out of the
living room after yet another round of questions. “They’re never
going to find the murderer anyway.”

No witnesses had come forward, although the
attack occurred steps away from a street filled with trendy
restaurants, sidewalk cafes and designer shops. The police knew
that Will had never reached the store. No ice cream container was
found at the scene and the convenience store’s security camera
confirmed that he’d never arrived there. “We’ve ruled out robbery
as a motive because your husband’s wallet, watch and wedding ring
were untouched. Whoever did this either got spooked and ran before
he could take anything, or wanted us to know the killing was
deliberate,” Detective O’Shea told her. She begged the cop to give
her Will’s ring and sobbed in frustration when she was told it was
being held as evidence.

The only clue to what was starting to seem
like the perfect crime was the Scottish dagger, a
sgian dubh
— Gaelic for “black knife,” — found beside Will’s body. Kilted
Scots traditionally tuck a
sgian dubh
in one of their heavy
socks. Legend has it that once the knife is drawn, it must taste
blood before it’s returned to its sheath, but forensics quickly
ruled out this particular knife as the murder weapon. Investigators
theorized that the dagger was left as a signature, although a
search of international crime databases turned up no murders with
the same distinctive marker. The knife itself was the kind that
could be found in any shop that sold Scottish souvenirs so there
was little chance it could be traced back to its source. But as the
only clue, police doggedly pursued it.

“What was your husband’s connection to
Scotland?”

“We spent a week there as tourists last
year,” Alex answered in a monotone as she nervously picked at a
hangnail. She’d already bitten her nails to stubs, a habit she’d
broken as a teenager. The compulsion to do something with her hands
was overwhelming and she’d started to crave cigarettes, another
habit she’d fought with Will’s help. But he was gone so what did it
matter? Maybe she could bum a smoke from one of the ever-present
cops.

“Why did the two of you go to Scotland? What
did you do? Who did you meet? Was it your husband’s idea or
yours?”

She thought they must be really desperate to
try to connect Will’s murder to an eventless vacation, but she had
no strength to argue and there was that dagger to consider. “We’d
spent some time visiting friends in London and on a whim decided to
drive up to the Highlands since neither of us had ever been. Will
likes — liked — single malt so we stopped at a couple of whiskey
distilleries, went to Loch Ness...we didn’t see the monster, “ she
added sarcastically, “hiked up to the castle in Edinburgh and spent
a few days in Inverness. It rained a lot.”

“Was there anything, anything at all Mrs.
Cameron, that seemed odd or unusual during your visit?”

“No, nothing. I’ve already told you that Will
was excited to discover that Cameron is a Scottish clan name. He
bought a few souvenirs. Other than that, it was just a chance for
us to get away together.”

“Are they ever going to stop asking me about
Scotland?” Alex groaned in frustration to Francie after yet another
round of questions. “Millions of people visit the damn country and
none of them end up murdered because of a stupid vacation.”

In a brick townhouse on Beacon Hill’s
ultra-exclusive Louisburg Square, Will’s mother, Anne Cameron,
raged at her husband, John.

“You should have warned him! Goddamn it to
hell, John, you and your asinine Scottish ancestors. Why didn’t you
tell him?” she shrieked, hurling the words like razor-sharp spears.
Angry red splotches marred her carefully tended porcelain skin and
her voice cracked as her airway tightened with grief.

“Anne, Anne,” John Cameron whispered, his own
tears blending with hers as he tried to console this woman who he
loved desperately, to somehow ease his own grief by comforting her.
Repulsed, she shoved him away, her delicate features contorted by
anguished fury.

“Please listen to me, Anne. What do I have to
do to make you believe me? Tell me and I’ll do it,” he begged with
growing exasperation. He turned his back to her as he propped his
hands against the wall, leaned into it and lowered his head. When
he spoke again, his tone was calmer. “Don’t you know that I would
have done anything…anything, if I had the slightest suspicion that
there was danger? I would never have left Will defenseless. He was
our child, I’ve lost my son too.”

“You had a choice! But no, you had to
continue your cursed father’s quest for Scottish independence and
turn a blind eye to the risk of being involved with those blasted
tartan terrorists. Tell me, John, how could an intelligent man be
so stupid?” Anne couldn’t even look at the man she’d once loved.
The moment they’d been told that a Scottish dagger was found next
to Will’s body, a white-hot poker tore through her gut. “You have
to go to the police and tell them everything.”

“You know I can’t do that.” John collapsed
into a chair, braced his elbows on his knees and cradled his head
in his palms. He didn’t look up when his wife said in a voice
softer than a whisper, “I’m just as guilty as you. If only I’d been
strong enough to stop you or to warn Will to be careful. And now
I’m too frightened to turn you in.”

Only an occasional sob broke the hushed
silence as each parent dealt with unfathomable sorrow alone. Anne
curled her lean body into a ball on their bed and gazed at the logs
that blazed in the marble-framed fireplace of their opulent
bedroom. She tugged a thick down comforter around her shoulders,
but it did nothing to thaw the block of ice where her heart used to
be. Blind fury was a new emotion for Anne, and she aimed it
directly at her husband and the blood feuds that Scots continued
for centuries.