Cape Refuge (5 page)

 

C
ade wiped the sweat from his brow and tried to remain objective as the medical examiner studied Thelma Owens's wound. Her head rolled back; her chin and neck and chest were covered with blood, and her eyes were open, frozen in some silent horror. He couldn't be emotional now. He had to stay focused.

A metal pin protruded from the back of her neck, straight out her throat. “That's a bulletnose point,” Cade said. “From a speargun.”

The examiner nodded. “Looks like it. Hit him from the front.” He started to turn Wayne over, and Cade turned away. He needed some air, he thought. He walked to the side door, opposite the one where Jonathan, Morgan, and Blair had been sitting, and stepped out onto the wharf.

Billy followed him out. “You okay, Chief?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Look, I need to get somebody out to confiscate all the spearguns on the island, so we can determine if they were the murder weapon. There're thirty members in the diving club, including me.” He swallowed, tried to steady his breathing. “Only about five who spearfish.”

“Know who they are off the top of your head?” Billy asked.

Cade nodded. “I'm one. Also Jonathan, Sam Sullivan, Marty Roberts, and Cliff Cash. There may be others, but those are the ones I know about. Go get Sam, Marty, and Cliff, and collect their spearguns. Treat them as evidence. See if there's blood on any of them, if any are missing, what kind of points they use. Bring those guys to the station for questioning.”

“Yes, sir.” Billy headed out, and Cade wiped his face on his sleeve. He looked out over the water, trying to think through the men he'd just named. They were all good friends, and two or three times a year they headed down to the Florida Keys and went diving and fishing together. None of those men could have killed Thelma and Wayne.

But it was all he had.

Something clicked against the post beneath his feet, and he looked down through the boards. Something that looked like a brown pole floated in the water there. He got down on his stomach and looked under the wharf.

He recognized it immediately. It wasn't a pole, it was a speargun.

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to grab the narrow end of it and pull it out. “McCormick!” he yelled.

Joe came through the door, then froze at the sight of the gun dripping in Cade's hands. “The murder weapon,” he said.

“That's it,” Cade said and got back up. “It's a Magnum Blue Water.” The words lodged in his throat as he realized what that meant. There was only one person he knew who had a Blue Water gun.

“The killer must have panicked and gotten rid of it,” Joe said. “May have even had to swim away to avoid being seen.”

Cade looked through the door across the building. Blair had bent over the water and was throwing up, and Jonathan had gone to help her.

“I have Billy going to round up everybody who spearfishes,” he said. “He's collecting their guns.”

“Well, if one of them is missing, we've got our man.”

Cade wished he could turn the clock back two hours, when his biggest concern was the car that had been stolen from the Goodfellows parking lot. His mouth was dry, but he managed to get the words out. “I know whose gun this is. I recognize it. I was with him when he bought it.”

“Who?” Joe asked.

Cade's eyes were fixed on the three just outside the warehouse. Jonathan had lowered Blair to her knees and was holding her hair back as she retched into the river.

“Cade, tell me whose it is.”

Cade tore his eyes from the scene and looked hard at his balding colleague. “This gun belongs to Jonathan Cleary,” he said.

 

J
onathan sat back as Morgan fell to Blair's side and pulled her into a hug. The two women clung to each other.

“Jonathan,” a voice called. Jonathan looked up. Cade was standing in the door to the warehouse. “I need to talk to you,” Cade said. “You may want to come out front.”

“No!” Morgan let go of her sister and looked up at him. “I want to hear. Talk to him right here.”

Cade looked down. His black hair flapped in the breeze over a face tight with strain. “I came by Crickets for breakfast this morning after you'd had your fight with Thelma and Wayne. Everybody was talking about it.”

Jonathan wished he had the morning to do over. He wished he hadn't left on an angry note, wished he hadn't threatened to take their daughter and leave. . . .

“Were you here this afternoon? Did you come by here before going home?”

“No,” he said.

“Did you notice if their car was here then?”

“It wasn't. I looked for it, because I wanted to talk to them. They weren't home, either.”

“And did you go straight home when you left your boat?”

“Yes, straight home. I had the meeting to go to, and Morgan was waiting.”

Cade looked even more somber than he had when he brought Morgan and Blair here. He set his foot up on the empty bench. Rubbing the sun creases in his face, he said, “Jonathan, where's your speargun?”

Jonathan frowned. This wasn't the time to talk about spearfishing, so he knew that Cade had a purpose for asking. “In the toolshed behind the house,” he said. “Why?”

“Because I just found a Magnum Blue Water gun floating in the water on the other side of the warehouse.”

“What?”
Jonathan gasped. “Was that the murder weapon?”

Cade looked down at Blair, who gaped up at him, one side of her face pale, the other dark pink. “Jonathan, let's talk out front,” he said.

“Answer him, Cade,” Blair said, getting back to her feet. “Were my parents killed with a speargun?”

He rubbed his face and looked away. “They were each hit with a bulletnose point to the neck or throat, which explains why no one heard gunshots.”

“The throat?” Morgan choked out. “Oh, dear God . . .”

Jonathan's face twisted, and he took a step toward Cade. “Who besides me has a Blue Water gun?”

Cade shook his head and kept his eyes on Jonathan's face. “You're the only one in our diving group, Jonathan.”

Jonathan stood there a moment, staring at his old friend. “There could be others,” he said. “Tourists, or someone not in our group. They're not that expensive.”

“I'm just asking you where it is,” Cade said.

Jonathan let go of Morgan. She looked up at Cade, waiting for the point to his question. Her face was wet, and mascara ran under her eyes. “It's in the storage shed behind the house where I've always kept it,” Jonathan said. “Come with me and I'll show you.”

“I'll send McCormick to get it,” he said. “Got a key?”

Jonathan nodded and pulled his key chain out. His hands were still trembling as he worked the toolshed key off the chain.

“Tell me about your fight this morning,” Cade said.

Jonathan tried to shift gears and think, but the memory crushed him. His mouth trembled with the force of his emotion. “Man, I wish I could take it all back.”

“Take what back?” Cade asked.

“The fight. I lost my temper, said things I shouldn't have said. . . . It ended badly. If I'd known it was going to be the last time I saw them . . .”

“What was the fight about, Jonathan?” Blair demanded. “Everybody on this island seems to know but me.”

“It was about Gus Hampton. I don't trust him, and I didn't want Morgan around him.”

He watched Blair get up, her eyes intense as she grabbed Cade's arm. “Cade, maybe Gus did it. Maybe he's the one. Maybe
he
did this to Mama and Pop.” Her voice quivered as her body straightened with purpose. “If he did, so help me, I'll kill him myself. I'm gonna go find out.” She started toward the parking lot again.

“Where are you going?” Cade asked.

“To talk to Gus Hampton,” she said. The color was starting to return to her face.

“No, you can't go,” Cade said. “Blair, you need to stay here.”

“Why?” she asked, swinging around. “Am I under arrest?”

“Of course not,” he said. “But you're interfering with an investigation. I already have officers looking for Gus. He shouldn't be that hard to find. But when they find him,
they'll
be interviewing him, not you.” He caught up to her, touched her shoulder, and leaned down to look into her face. “Blair, I promise you, we're going to find who did this. But you'll have to let us do it, without getting in our way.”

“Well, I don't let things rest, Cade,” she said.

“I know you don't,” he said.

Jonathan put his arm around Morgan. “Cade, I want to see that gun.”

“I'm sorry, Jonathan. It's evidence in a homicide case.”

“Well, then I'm going with McCormick to show him where mine is. I'll take Morgan with me.”

“You can't go, Jonathan,” Cade said.

Jonathan gaped at him. “What do you mean, I can't go?”

“I need you here,” he said. “We may need to ask you more questions.”

“You know where to find me,” Jonathan told him. “You can call me at home and ask me.”

“Jonathan, you're not going anywhere.”

“Why not?” Jonathan asked again. “Cade, what're you saying?”

Cade stood eye to eye with him, unmoving. “I'm saying that if you try to leave, I'll have to arrest you.”

He went back into the warehouse, and Jonathan stood there, his mouth open—feeling as if nothing in his world made sense any more.

 

 

I
t wasn't long before McCormick was back at the warehouse with the news. The door to the toolshed was wide open, and Jonathan Cleary's speargun wasn't there.

That wasn't what Cade wanted to hear. He had hoped McCormick would tell him that the gun was right where Jonathan kept it. He'd already heard back from Billy Caldwell, who was at the station with the other three spearfishermen. He'd found each of their guns and brought them in with them. Another officer had checked with every sports store in town. Only one sold spearguns, mostly through catalog orders. He hadn't sold any Blue Water Magnums.

Jonathan's was still the only one they knew of on the island.

“Want me to read him his rights?” McCormick asked.

Cade couldn't conceive of locking up his friend. He tried to think through the possibilities. Someone had taken the gun out of the shed and used it to kill Thelma and Wayne. Then they had left it at the scene so the police would find it. Maybe they wanted it to look like Jonathan had done it.

Or maybe there was someone else on the island who had one, or one of the transient seamen, or a psychotic tourist. . . .

Maybe Jonathan had just misplaced his gun. . . .

Or maybe the most obvious possibility was the truth—that Jonathan had gotten so angry at them that he had acted in a fit of rage, hardly knowing what he was doing. . . .

But Cade had known Jonathan for years, had grown up with him, played baseball and football with him. They had gone to college together, and Cade had been best man in Jonathan's wedding. He knew his friend to be a good person, one who didn't have murder in his heart. Could some set of circumstances have conspired to push Jonathan into a lethal rage?

If there was a possibility, even a remote one, that Jonathan might have done this, Cade had to lock him up. He had no choice.

For the first time since his uncle, the mayor, had appointed him chief of police, he wished he had found another vocation.

“Tell me what to do, and I'll do it,” McCormick said.

“I'll take care of it,” Cade said. He looked across the warehouse to the open door. Through it, he could see Blair, sitting out on that bench, looking so strong and angry, when inside he knew she was falling apart. And sweet Morgan, still clinging to her husband, shivering from the shock. She would accuse Cade of using Jonathan as a scapegoat. She would claim that he was trying to look effective by making an arrest—any arrest—so the people of the town wouldn't panic. Would she be right?

But Jonathan owned the murder weapon, and he'd had that fight with his in-laws earlier that day. He was a hothead, always had been. He flew off the handle at the slightest thing. Maybe today he'd gotten too angry . . . gone too far . . .

If he could just get Jonathan away from Morgan and Blair, maybe he could soften the blow for them. Maybe Jonathan would come willingly and wouldn't make him cuff him. Or even better, maybe he'd have an explanation for everything, one that made sense and cleared him as a suspect.

He crossed the warehouse, his steps shaking the hardwood floor. Jonathan met his eyes as he stepped outside. “Jonathan, your speargun wasn't in the toolshed.”

Jonathan seemed to process that for a moment, and his face changed. “Gus. He . . . or any of the other tenants . . . could have gotten it out. The key is hanging right there on a hook in the kitchen.”

“I have somebody still looking for Gus,” he said. “But meanwhile, I'm going to have to take you in.”

“Now?”

“Now.” Cade looked out over the water. It looked like a storm was brewing in the south, and the water on the river was growing restless. He wished he could get into his boat, ride the river out to the sea, and watch that angry sky open up around him. It would be better to face that storm than the one raging inside him.

Jonathan gaped at him, confused. “Cade, you don't have to take me to the station to talk to me. I don't want to leave my wife right now. She needs me. I have to take her home.” He pulled Morgan up and put his arms around her shoulders. “When you get through here, you can come over to Hanover House, and we'll check out the toolshed. If my gun is gone, then that's a crime scene too. There might be evidence there.”

“I intend to check out the toolshed,” Cade said. “McCormick put one of my men on it. But in the meantime, Jonathan, I got to tell you—you're the prime suspect. And as I see it, I have no choice but to arrest you for the murder of Thelma and Wayne Owens.”

“What?”
Morgan asked, her voice hollow with grief. She was shivering so badly that she needed a blanket. “Cade, you can't!” she cried. “This is crazy.”

Jonathan got that wild look in his eyes, the one he used to get when their team was behind.
“My
family has just been gutted, and you're arresting
me?
What are you?
Crazy?”

“I'm doing my job, Jonathan,” Cade said. “You have the right to remain silent—”

“Well, you can do your job on somebody else!”

“You have the right to an attorney . . .” Cade pulled the cuffs off his belt as he spoke, but Jonathan backed away.

“Cade, don't be stupid. People don't take you seriously as it is. They're really going to mock you when they hear about this. They'll ride you out of town.”

“Jonathan, I'm asking you to come willingly, without the cuffs. I don't want to make this ugly.”

Morgan cried out and clung harder to her husband. “Please, Cade. No! Not now.”

Cade had to turn away and look out over that water again. His eyes stung, and a lifetime of history reeled in fast-forward through his mind. His friendship with Jonathan, his affection for Morgan, his love for her parents . . .

And Blair.

He forced himself to look at her. Blair was staring at Jonathan, her face twisted and stunned. “Jonathan, how did your gun kill Mama and Pop?”

“I want to know that too,” Jonathan said. “Cade, you're not taking me anywhere. I'm taking my wife home, and I'm going to look in that toolshed, and I'm going to get right in the face of every one of our tenants. I'll see it in their eyes if one of them did this. And when I do, you can arrest me then, because that's when I'll be guilty of murder.”

Cade snapped a cuff on Jonathan's wrist. Jonathan tried to pull away from him, but Cade wrestled him to the ground.

Sobbing, Morgan threw herself at Cade.
“What are you doing? Cade, stop it!”

Cade snapped the other cuff and pulled Jonathan up. He kept the thought of those bleeding bodies at the forefront of his mind as he forced Jonathan across the parking lot and into the back of his squad car.