30 #3
“Mystic. I’ve already left him a message,” Kate said. “He always has music on when he works, and he might not have heard the phone. I’ll head over now. It’s not far. You keep going on the tracings.”
Conor was silent. Kate felt her heart beating hard. She knew he might be taking this as a rejection. She didn’t mean it that way, but she was upset about Maeve and wanted to get to the bottom of what she was doing.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Positive,” Kate said. “Everything’s okay. I’ll call you as soon as I talk to him. I’m sure he’s in his studio, oblivious to all this. I know there’s an explanation about Maeve.”
“The way things are going, I wonder,” Conor said. “And even if there is one, will it make any sense?”
Her phone beeped, indicating another call.
“Maybe this is Maeve or Fernando,” she said. She hung up quickly and answered, but not in time. She glanced at her phone screen to see who had called. She didn’t recognize the number. She tried dialing it back, but the call went straight to voicemail with the default standard greeting.
Glancing around, she saw Dermot and asked him to get her Volvo.
She texted Conor back to let him know that she missed the call and told him she’d be back by lunchtime.
She thanked Dermot for her car and the bottle of water he handed her, and she drove west, toward Mystic, Connecticut, on her way to find Maeve.
Tuesday, July 6; 9:15 a.m.
Conor watched his brother at the computer terminal in the USCG Bay Street office. Tom had transmitted the photos of the window writing to Joe and Garrett, and now he downloaded them from his iPhone onto his work computer. Using an advanced enhancement program, he was able to clarify the tracings.
“Tell me about the diamond rings,” Tom said.
“Some of the girls at Langtry Academy had them.”
“High school girls? Isn’t that a little young to be engaged?” Tom asked. “Who gives a girl that age a diamond?”
“They were mostly heirlooms, passed down through their families.”
“And the girls used them to write on the glass?”
“Some did,” Conor said. “Mostly they scratched their initials, and some dates—going back into the 1800s. The school was founded in 1843.”
“And you were solving an almost two-hundred-year-old murder?”
“No,” Conor said. “It was five years ago. There were two roommates, and one killed the other in their senior year. They had been best friends even before boarding school and had roomed together for two of the four years.”
“What happened?” Tom asked.
“No one had any idea. They had seemed close, with no problems that anyone at the school could see. We interviewed students, faculty, and family members. Every person we spoke to was shocked. I went back to their room a week after the murder, and it was just like on the boat. The light was different. I glanced at one of the windows and saw something traced in the glass—the letters ‘NW.’”
“Northwest?” Tom asked.
“We didn’t know at first. I didn’t know if it had any bearing on the case, and I had no idea who had written it and how they’d done it.
I assumed a glass cutter. But the writing could have been done anytime during the last two centuries, so even though it piqued my interest, I didn’t really think of it as evidence. At first.”
“But it was?”
“Yes,” Conor said. “Abby Jenkins—the victim—was wearing a diamond ring when she died. It was the middle finger of her right hand, so apparently not an engagement ring. I asked her parents where she had gotten it, and they didn’t know—they had never seen it before.
It didn’t come from the family. Helen Wagner, the roommate . . .”
“And suspect?” Tom asked.
Conor nodded. “She wasn’t talking to us.
Her father was a lawyer in Hartford, and he’d immediately gotten her a top defense attorney.
The murder was so brutal, the prosecutor had requested no bail.
I was in court the day of her bail hearing, and I noticed a clear hostility between Helen and her father.
Helen practically spit at him when he leaned toward the defense table to talk to her. ”
“So that caught your attention,” Tom said.
“Yes. It was extreme. It was more than ‘if looks could kill.’ Another thing—her mother was there but not sitting with her father. I checked, and they were not divorced, but they had recently separated. Like a week before. And Helen wanted her mother—that was obvious. She was crying, reaching out her arms toward her as the marshals led her out of the courtroom.”
“Did you talk to the mother?” Tom asked.
“Tried to, but she wouldn’t see me at first. A few weeks went by.
I had gone back to the girls’ dorm room and seen the scratched glass.
I’d reexamined everything we’d collected from the room, including schoolbooks, papers, letters, clothes, everything.
Abby had a book of poems by Pablo Neruda—it was called Love Poems. Inside the front flap was an inscription: For you, always. Nicholas.”
“N from NW on the window?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. It took me a while to put it together. I kept thinking about that family dynamic in the courtroom, the way Helen had been toward her parents. And I’d found out about a big fight they had all had a few weeks earlier—very loud and public, at parents’ weekend.
Helen’s mother had started screaming at Abby. ”
“What did Abby do?”
“It was more like, what did Helen’s father do?
His name was Nicholas Wagner, and he had been having a sexual relationship with Abby for over a year.
He gave her a diamond ring that had belonged to his grandmother, and she’d worn it all that time.
It had been in a safe-deposit box, and Helen had never seen it, but when his wife went to parents’ weekend, she spotted Abby wearing it. ”
“And she flipped out.”
“Yep. It was a bad scene. After the parents left, Helen confronted Abby in their room, and Abby admitted it. Helen saw her family breaking apart, blamed Abby for it, and she killed her. Hit her over and over with a crystal paperweight,” Conor said, remembering the trail of blood from where Abby had tried to crawl away.
“Abby was just a kid, though,” Tom said. “It wasn’t her fault. That ‘relationship’ was sexual assault.”
“Yes, it was. And we charged Nicholas with it. Meanwhile, Abby had thought it was love. He had convinced her it was. Now Abby is dead, and Helen is serving a sentence for first-degree manslaughter,” Conor said.
“I don’t know if I’d have solved it if Abby hadn’t used the ring to scratch his initials in the window glass. NW.”
“Wow,” Tom said. “So she was in love, but she wound up leaving a clue that revealed who her killer was.”
“Unwittingly, yes,” Conor said.
Tom leaned closer to the computer screen. “Do you think we have something similar here? A victim writing something that might identify her killer?”
“That’s a possibility,” Conor said.
“And what, he gave her a diamond ring before chaining her up?”
“It tracks with the part of him that wants to treat her like a queen.”
“I’m starting to see double,” Tom said, rubbing his eyes and pushing his desk chair back. “You take a look.”
Conor was glad to, anything to take his mind off Kate heading to Mystic without him.
They were independent, they had always done their own things.
As much as they loved being together, they each had work and separate interests.
Kate knew that he was investigating the violence on Psyche, and it made sense for him to stick with it and for her to go there alone.
He was thinking of Kate, but as he stared at the window markings, he suddenly saw clearly, and letters came into focus.
“Hey,” he said, pointing.
“What?” Tom asked.
“There’s a word,” he said. “Or at least some letters.” Some of them had been written backward, but the closest Conor could get was Sfalon.
He typed it into the search engine, but nothing came up.
“What does it sound like to you?” Tom asked.
“S. Falon? Could that be a name?” Conor kept staring. “Or is that 5? 5Falon. A license plate number?”
“Or a letter-number combination,” Tom said. “To a mailbox? Or a keyless lock?”
Conor texted Joe:
Can you check RI DMV for this registration? Sfalon or 5Falon.
Will do. What’s up?
Conor didn’t reply right away. He was already accessing the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, noting the fact that there was no such registration number in his state.
Nothing, Joe texted back at the same time Conor was coming up empty on the CT DMV site. Why you ask?
Written on the boat glass. Can you see it?
Negative.
Look again—Sfalon.
And now that Conor had told Joe what to look for, the scrawl was legible, and Joe shot back:
Got it. But still no plate coming up. Must be something else. Where are you now?
Tom’s office, Bay Street.
Conor waited for a reply, but before he received one, he heard Tom answer a call on his desk phone.
“Where?” Tom asked. “Do you have an ID?”
Conor froze at the sharpness in Tom’s voice and the look in his eyes when he disconnected the call.
“What is it?” Conor asked.
“A fisherman just found a woman’s body,” Tom said. “My crew got the call.”
“Who is it?” Conor asked, thinking immediately of Maeve.
“They haven’t identified her yet,” Tom said. “They’re transporting her body to our dock in Galilee. Come on, let’s go.”