Hawk’s muffled chewing. Stanton had grown so good at waiting Anna scarcely even felt him there.
Twins and lovers. Denny knew. Denny was their employer, protector. Denny understood. They had risked imprisonment to give him the burial he had wanted.
Stanton caught her eye. She smiled. “Sorry to drag you all the way down here. I just wondered if the autopsy report had come back.”
The FBI man’s look of expectancy evaporated. “Ah. Well. Meet me in Ralph’s office.” Looking crestfallen, a disappointed child, he rose from the table.
Anna felt a stab of guilt. “There are some things I’d like to talk over with you.” He brightened. Anna wondered what technique he used on other people. Whatever worked, probably. “An hour okay?” She looked at her watch. “Around two-thirty?”
“Two-thirty it is.” For a moment he hovered near the table. “You going to eat that sandwich?” he said finally.
“It’s all yours.” Anna pushed the plate toward him and he shoveled the entire sandwich onto one flat palm and wandered out, eating as he walked.
Hawk stopped chewing as abruptly as he had begun but remained staring down at his plate. “I’m sorry, Anna. We were so young. We never knew better. Then we knew better and we tried to quit. Holly broke hearts. I made a lot of women hate me. Holly and I cried and fought. I drank. Holly did coke. We’d sit across the room from each other at parties, some pretty boy panting over her, some bimbo hanging on me. It was sick, Anna, sicker a hundred times more than anything we could ever do together. Denny hired us. Out on the lake days at a time, the world kind of fades. Old rules seem like nonsense. We made new rules. Our parents are dead. We’ll never have kids. New rules for a new world. Who were we hurting?”
“Denny knew?”
“Denny was our friend.”
“Jo?”
“Nobody. Just Denny.”
“Now me.” A number of stock phrases marched across the tip of Anna’s tongue: How could you? You lied to me. You used me. But he hadn’t lied and she had used him. And to the same ends: to forget, for a moment, a love that had come to hurt more than it healed. “It’s okay,” she said.
“Is it really?” Hawk sounded as if her answer genuinely mattered to him.
“ ‘Okay’ is relative, I guess,” Anna said. “But yeah.”
EIGHTEEN
Frederick was in Ralph’s chair, tilted back, his ankles crossed atop the clutter on the desk. In the cheap suit he presented a perfect parody of the 1930 shamus. Anna couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not.
She finished her story: “So they dressed Denny in his favorite clothes, stuck him in the engine room, and left him to his eternal rest.”
“That was two days before those divers-Whosis and Bozo-discovered the body.”
“Two days.”
Stanton picked up a blue For Your Eyes Only envelope and tapped it without showing the contents to Anna. “The autopsy says Denny died the day before that.”
“Four? Four days before the Canadians found him?”
“Yup. Nobody reported him missing? Nobody wondered where he was?”
“He was on his honeymoon,” Anna replied a little defensively. “You expect people to disappear on their honeymoon.”
“Three days.”
“He died on his wedding night!” Anna realized aloud.
“You’d think the bride would have noticed,” Stanton said.
Jo was camped up on Lake Richie just southwest of Moskey Basin, working on her freshwater quality study. When Denny died, the NPS had offered her any length of leave she required to settle personal business. Jo had taken just enough time to finalize the plans for planting Denny’s body deep in Michigan’s soil where, as Holly put it one bitter evening, he could never drift away from her.
Within a couple of days Jo had been back on Isle Royale working. Anna understood. It was what she would have done. Had done, once she’d sobered up.
Jo’s camp was a two-mile hike in. The trail was muddy. Blackflies, tiny airborne carnivores called “all-jaws” by the local Michigan children, bit without warning. Mosquitoes and Frederick Stanton whined.
“Tell me about the autopsy report,” Anna said, hoping to distract him. Or hoping the bugs would’ve distracted him enough he’d accidentally tell her something worth knowing.
“Good of you to come along, Anna. Oh, ish!”
Anna looked back. Stanton was staring ruefully at one black leather shoe, brown now with mud. She laughed. “If you’re for real, you’re scary.”
He looked the offended innocent.
“The autopsy…” she led in.
“Dead since the seventeenth of June, four days before the Canadians discovered the body. Cause of death: drowning.”
“Drowning? With his tank nearly full?”
Stanton chuckled. “The corpse wasn’t wearing a tank.”
Anna made no comment. She walked on, listening for the rest of the report. “What about the bruises?” she asked when nothing more was forthcoming.
“You knew about that, too? Jeez, Anna. Why ask? You tell me.”
“There was a bruise across his shoulder where his harness would’ve been. He was in dive gear when he died. That’s my guess anyway.”
“Wow.” Stanton sounded genuinely impressed. “Gee, you think?”
“Occasionally.” Anna was losing patience.
“Remind me not to deal drugs in your park.”
“You don’t buy that anymore.”
Stanton neither agreed nor disagreed.
Anna stopped, turned. “Do you want to work together, or do you want to keep dicking around?”
Stanton looked at his shoes, at the canopy of aspen closing overhead. He grinned, he shrugged, he shuffled.
Anna was unimpressed. “You never bought it, did you? You just hoped by threatening to impound the
“I swear by local talent,” he said at last. “They know where the bodies are buried, who’s sleeping with whom.”
“Help me then.”
Stanton seemed to weigh the efficacy of interagency cooperation. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Castle drowned. Water was in his lungs. If you’re right about the bruise being caused by his harness, he drowned with plenty of breathing air on him. Too weird for me.”
Anna told him about the knife. If there’d been any kind of struggle at that depth, Denny could have blacked out. His assailant could have pulled off his mouthpiece.
“Left him to wake up dead?”
“That’s what crossed my mind,” Anna said.
“Why?”
“Beats me.” She turned and began walking again, the moisture-laden thimbleberry branches slapping dark patterns on her trousers.
