For a long moment, her death filled every interstice of awareness until finally, as if from a far distance, the sound of an outboard motor penetrated my ears and I turned to see a small dinghy headed for a boat moored a few hundred feet out in the channel.
The
Benumbed, I watched Lev Schuster secure a line and pull himself aboard. He glanced back and seemed to hesitate upon seeing me there on the dock. At this distance, I wasn’t sure if he could recognize me; but whether or not he did, he quickly disappeared below. At the moment there seemed to be no other boats in the immediate vicinity, but I suppose the expanse of marshy hummocks that lay between Lennox Point and Harkers Island could have concealed whole fleets of small skiffs or dories.
Footsteps thudded down the dock behind me. Midge Pope’s baby-sitter.
“Is she—?”
“Go back,” I said sharply. “It’s too late to help her. Just stay there at the end and don’t let anyone out here. I’m going to call the police.”
He was too young to argue with me and I hurried past and into the sunroom where I remembered seeing a phone during the party on Tuesday.
I got through to Quig Smith almost immediately.
“Hey there!” he said jovially. “Our desk officer bet me I’d be gone ‘fore you called again. You’re just lucky my new ecology journal that came in today had an article on estuarine pollution and fish nurseries or I’d be—”
I cut through and he listened in silence to what I had to say. When I’d finished, he said, “How ‘bout you make sure the door’s unlocked so we can get in, then go on back out and keep a watch. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Out in the hallway, Midge Pope had blacked out and was lying curled in a fetal position around the cordless phone. No need to shift him since he was no longer blocking the entrance. I left the door on the latch and hurried back down to the dock, where the young man stood with a sick expression on his face.
“Not much longer,” I told him. “I’m Deborah Knott, and you’re—”
“Simon McGuire. What happened here, ma’am?”
“Don’t
“No, ma’am,” he said, shaking a thatch of reddish-brown hair that was still rumpled from his stolen nap. “She said some judge was coming and for me to keep Midge—Mr. Pope—in his room. I finally got him to bed and I just lay down to rest a couple of minutes myself and the next thing I knew, there you were.”
He had a pronounced lantern jaw, square shoulders, and a dazed expression on his open face. In his jeans and sneakers, he looked no more than twenty or twenty-one and could be any student from East Carolina or Carteret Community College.
Before I could ask him when he’d last seen Linville alive, I saw that Lev was back in his dinghy and heading straight across the water toward us.
“Stay here,” I told McGuire and went down to the end of the pier.
As Lev cut the motor of his dinghy and readied a line to tie up, I called, “Stay back. Linville Pope’s been shot.”
“I know.” He looped the line around a post. “I found her.”
“You might be destroying evidence.”
“I told you—I tied up here ten minutes ago. This won’t make any difference.”
He secured the boat and stepped up onto the dock. “I called nine-one-one and they’re sending someone.”
“Called?”
“Cellular phone on the boat,” he explained.
“Why didn’t you call from the house?”
“The doors were locked and I thought it’d be quicker to call from the boat than try to hunt up the neighbors. God, this is awful! That poor woman.” He moved restlessly from one side of the dock to the other.
I’d forgotten what a pacer Lev was. Whenever something upset him, whenever he was working out the elements of a complex case—it’s as if his brain can’t function under stress without his legs moving. He paced now, back and forth, with that old familiar urgency.
I drew back at the sight of a blood smear on his khakis and said, “Who shot her, Lev?”
He followed my eyes and brushed at the smear. “When I tried to get a pulse, I must have—” He gave me a sharp look, then in a level voice said, “I don’t know, Red. She was like that when I got here just a few minutes ago.”
I was puzzled as to why he’d even be here since Linville had invited me and she hadn’t struck me as someone who invited confrontations. “Was she expecting you?”
“Not really. She marked some places on my chart along the straits back of Harkers Island for me to look at today.” He gestured vaguely across the marshes toward the east. “I was on my way back to Beaufort, and thought I’d swing by here to ask if she could show me one of the properties tomorrow. When I first saw her—”
His eyes were snagged by movement behind me. I turned and saw Quig Smith striding across the terrace, accompanied by another detective and a couple of uniformed Carteret County sheriff’s deputies.
“That was quick,” said Lev.
I glanced at my watch. Smith had said ten minutes.
It had only been eight.
