The Chill of Night (5 page)

He strapped on his service weapon, a heavy Smith & Wesson 4506. The PPD was changing over to Glock 17s. Lighter. More accurate. In McCabe’s mind a better choice. Though he hadn’t made the switch yet. He pulled the sweater down over the gun. He considered his choice of outerwear. Either a lined army field jacket. Warm, but it’d look ridiculous over the sport coat. Or the old black cashmere that’d come with him from New York. Not warm enough for this kind of winter, but it’d have to do. Next year, if it was cold again, maybe he’d trade it in on a fleece-lined parka. Maybe not. He still preferred dressing like a grown-up.

Frigid air smacked him full in the face as he stepped out of his condo. Even so, he decided to walk the mile and some to the North Space Gallery on Free Street. The snow wasn’t supposed to start until after midnight, and the idea of being picked up for drunk driving wasn’t appealing. He didn’t feel like messing with a cab. Besides, a good dose of cold fresh air might be the best way to clear the buzz in his brain. He didn’t want to look the clown for Kyra’s opening. Even if he might be. If he walked fast enough, maybe he wouldn’t succumb to frostbite.

A steady wind was blowing in off the bay.
Force five or six on the Beaufort scale.
McCabe’s mind played with the words. He didn’t have a clue what the Beaufort scale was, but he always liked the sound of it. It was the kind of thing David Niven might say before sending a squadron of Spitfires out to confront the filthy Hun. McCabe sometimes wondered if his own secret life might be a little too much like Walter Mitty’s. Is that why he became a cop? To live out his fantasies?
Freeze, asshole!
Easy to do in this weather.

McCabe turned right and headed down the Prom, pulling the coat more tightly around himself. Dating back to his early days on the NYPD, it looked and felt its age. Worn elbows. Fraying cuffs. Maybe Kyra’d take him shopping to Boston again. He turned right on Vesper. The wind was at his back now, which felt better. He passed a couple of dog walkers, identities and gender hidden under heavy hooded parkas and boots. Great night for a mugging.
What did the mugger look like, ma’am? Well, Officer, he was wearing this heavy parka with a furry hood out front.
Nanooks of the North. More than ready to tackle the tundra. He remembered reading
Endurance.
The British explorer Shackleton spent a winter on an Antarctic ice floe with only a lined Burberry for warmth. Stiff upper lip? Absolutely. Not because Shackleton was British. The lip was just frozen in place. He turned left on Congress and headed west down Munjoy Hill. In spite of a decade of gentrification, the Hill still retained the look and feel of its working-class roots. Smallish wood-frame houses built sometime around 1900. Most divided into apartments. Tonight they were all closed up tight, curtains drawn. He continued down the hill, passing a few couples heading for one or another of the bars and restaurants that were sprouting like weeds. The Front Room, the Blue Spoon, Bar Lola – and, of course, his home away from home, Tallulah’s. All crowded on a Friday night. Each with a few intrepid twenty-somethings hanging out front, desperate enough to brave the cold just to suck up their daily ration of nicotine.

His mind went back to Kyra. To the fight, if that’s what it was. Why was he so hot to marry again? His marriage to Sandy had been a disaster. Except, of course, that it produced Casey, who was, without question, the best thing that ever happened to him. Amazing how such a great kid could ever have come out of that selfish bitch’s body. All she said after nine hours of labor was ‘Never again.’ Didn’t even want to hold her new daughter. Breastfeed? Not on your life.

So why go through the marriage thing again? Well, for one thing, Kyra wasn’t Sandy. They were about as different as two gorgeous, sexy women could be. Okay, so why not just enjoy his relationship with the gorgeous, sexy Kyra and leave marriage out of the equation? That’s what any therapist would want to know. He’d have to think about the answer.

By the time McCabe passed Washington Avenue, the cold was getting to him. His ears and toes were starting to go numb, and, drunk or not, he was beginning to regret the decision to walk. He figured he was sobering up, but not fast enough. He passed a new place called the Frost Line Café, coffee bar by day, open mike cabaret by night. He stopped and peered through the windows. They were all misted up from the body heat inside.

He went in and worked his way through the noisy crowd to the bar and ordered a small cup of coffee from a large, heavily pierced young woman wearing so much makeup that she looked to McCabe like a refugee from the set of Ernst Lubitsch’s
Gypsy Blood.
Probably was. Just couldn’t find her castanets. Incongruously, in spite of the getup, her accent was pure Downeast. She handed him an earthenware mug big enough to double as a soup tureen and pointed to a row of insulated pots on the far side. Told him to help himself. He did, adding a generous dollop of milk to the strong brew. He hadn’t eaten in a while and figured he could use the nutrition.

On the far side of the room, a tinny-voiced girl singer was belting out her version of the Dixie Chicks’ ‘Not Ready to Make Nice’ to a crowd that seemed more interested in talking than listening. Natalie Maines had nothing to worry about. McCabe was scanning the room for a place to park himself and his mega cup when he felt his cell vibrate. By the time he fished it out from under three layers of wool, the line had gone dead. The call was from Maggie. McCabe was tempted not to call back. It couldn’t be anything good, and he needed to be with Kyra right now. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t an option. If something was going on, he needed to know what it was. He headed for the men’s room, where he figured he could hear Maggie, stay warm, and have some privacy all at the same time. He closed and locked the door. The sound of the Dixie Chick wannabe receded. He punched in Maggie’s number.

‘Where are you, McCabe?’

‘At the moment? In a men’s room on Congress Street.’

‘Fine. Whatever it is you’re doing there, when you finish, would you please get your ass down to the Fish Pier. The far end by the water. Seems we’ve got a little problem.’

This wasn’t great timing. ‘What kind of problem?’ he asked.

‘The murder kind,’ Maggie replied.

Maggie – Detective Margaret Savage – was McCabe’s number two in the PPD’s Crimes Against People unit. They’d been working cases together ever since Chief Shockley bucked the unions and brought McCabe in from New York four years ago. In spite of a long Portland PD tradition of supervisors supervising and detectives working cases, McCabe liked getting into the weeds, especially when it came to homicide, and Maggie was always his partner of choice.

‘Anything I oughta know?’

‘I don’t know much myself. A uniform discovered the body during a routine check. No positive ID yet. Young female Caucasian. Stuffed into the trunk of a car, possibly her own, parked illegally on the pier. She’s dead, naked, and frozen solid.’

The frozen part was no big surprise if she’d been in the trunk a while. Unfortunately, a frozen body meant there’d be no decomposition. No decomposition meant there’d be no way to establish time of death. No time of death meant no way to check alibis. Somebody knocked on the restroom door. ‘Be right out,’ McCabe shouted to the knocker. He faced away from the door and turned on the taps to drown out the sound of his voice. ‘Anything else?’

‘Only that the car’s a brand-new BMW convertible. Registered to an Elaine Elizabeth Goff of Portland. A marine insurance guy who works on the pier spotted it yesterday morning, parked where it shouldn’t be. He didn’t call it in until today. About an hour ago.’

‘You call Fortier?’

‘Yeah. Told him what I just told you. He said he’d brief Shockley.’ Chief Shockley wanted to be kept up to the minute on any homicides. There weren’t many murders in Portland, and when they happened he hated to look dumb in front of reporters. Especially the one he was sleeping with.

The knocker knocked again. ‘Just a damned minute,’ McCabe yelled at the door. Then he said into the phone, ‘Okay, Mag, I’ll be right there.’ He hit end call and exited the men’s room. The knocker gave McCabe what he figured was supposed to be a withering look. McCabe smiled back sweetly. ‘All yours.’ He threaded his way through the crowd and out the door. He called Kyra from the street.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I can guess. You’re not coming.’ She sounded more disappointed than angry.

‘No, I’m not, but not for the reason you think. I was on my way to the gallery when Maggie called. They found a dead body dumped on one of the piers.’

‘Murder?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Me, too. About everything. I want you to know that. And I want you to know I want to be there. How’s the turnout?’

‘Great, considering the weather.’

‘Any reaction from the
other
major Maine artists?’

‘Actually, Marta Einhorn’s being very gracious. The others haven’t said much. Oh, and Joe Kleinerman from the
Press Herald
–’

‘The arts critic?’

‘Yeah. He wants to do a piece about my work.’

McCabe spotted a PPD black-and-white unit heading east on Congress. He stepped into the middle of the street and flagged it down. ‘That’s great. Listen, I’ve got to go now. I love you. I wanted you to know that as well.’

‘Yeah. Me, too.’

McCabe hung up. A young Asian patrol officer pulled up. McCabe leaned in and flashed his shield in case the guy didn’t recognize him. It wasn’t necessary. The Lucas Kane case last year had made McCabe a minor celebrity, not just in the department but pretty much all over the city. He’d even gotten some press in New York. ‘Hiya, Sergeant. What do you need?’

The cop’s name tag identified him as T. Ly. Probably the shortest last name in the history of the department. Cambodian, McCabe guessed. There were quite a few Cambodians living in Portland. Most resettled as refugees back in the nineties.

‘Ly?’ McCabe asked, pronouncing it Lee. ‘Right pronunciation?’

The man nodded. ‘It’ll do.’

‘Can you get me to the Fish Pier? Like fast?’

Three

McCabe squeezed into the front seat, space made tight by the unit’s onboard computer. Ly flipped on lights and siren, pulled a U-turn on Congress, and took off. It took less than two minutes to reach the Fish Pier. A sprawling waterfront complex off Commercial Street, the Portland Fish Pier was home to businesses serving the city’s working waterfront, especially its struggling groundfish industry. A PPD unit blocked their way. Ly cut the siren and rolled down the window. The wind was howling even louder than before. A cop leaned in. ‘Hiya, Sergeant. Go on down to the end of the pier.’ He pointed. ‘You’ll see a bunch of units pulled in by the Vessel Services building. Can’t miss ’em.’

Ly followed the road that looped around to the end of the pier. On their left, McCabe noted the boxy silhouette of the Portland Fish Exchange. A few years ago it would have been lit up and busy. Tonight it loomed dark and empty. A once thriving auction market where trawlers working out of Portland and a handful of other Maine ports sold their catches, the exchange had fallen on hard times. Federal regulations aimed at replenishing fish stocks cut trawlers’ days at sea to a bare minimum. Catches and income were way down. Adding insult to injury, McCabe remembered reading, legislation backed by Maine’s powerful lobstermen’s lobby was keeping the fishermen from making a few extra bucks by selling the lobsters they snared in their nets. They had to throw them back. Or sneak them home to share with friends.

Without enough fish coming in, the Fish Exchange auctions, once held daily at noon, had become intermittent. Half the time they didn’t happen at all. Some longtime Portland fishing families were being squeezed out of the business. Others moved down the coast to Gloucester, where selling stray lobsters was allowed. The captains who remained weren’t happy.

Near the end of the pier, McCabe could see a pack of PPD units, light bars flashing. They were clustered next to the Vessel Services facility. Behind them yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the far end of the pier. Ly joined them. Half a dozen cold cops, clouds of breath streaming from their mouths, were stamping their feet, clapping their hands, or just moving around to keep warm. Two had positioned themselves by the tape to keep unauthorized visitors out of the active crime scene area. The others were keeping them company. A MedCU unit was just leaving. A dead body meant there was nothing for the paramedics to do.

‘Hey.’ Maggie Savage greeted McCabe as he emerged from the car. She was bundled in a dark blue Gore-Tex parka, hands in her pockets, a wool watch cap pulled down around her ears, her shield pinned to the outside.

‘Hey, yourself. What’s going on?’ McCabe borrowed Ly’s Maglite, and they headed toward a bronze BMW convertible parked facing in toward the city from the far end of the pier. Its driver’s side door and trunk lid gaped open. Senior evidence tech Bill Jacobi and one of his guys were busy taking their pictures and measurements, drawing their diagrams, and writing their notes. The car was elegantly framed at a three-quarter angle between two concrete arms that poked out from the end of the pier into the Fore River, the tidal estuary that formed the far end of Portland harbor. Its rear wheels were two or three feet from the edge, leaving just enough room for the techs to walk behind the car without falling in. McCabe could see reflections of ambient light from nearby buildings as well as the more distant Casco Bay Bridge bouncing off the showroom-shiny fenders. Like an ad in a glossy magazine, the damned thing practically shouted,
Hey, look at me! Ain’t I sexy?
To McCabe, it seemed too artfully placed for it to have been accidental. Someone wanted the car to be noticed.

As they stood there, Maggie handed him a plastic box of Tic-Tacs. ‘Here. Before you breathe on anyone else, you might want to suck on a couple of these.’

‘That bad, huh?’

‘Not for anyone who appreciates the finer qualities of single malt. I just don’t think it’s something you want Jacobi noticing. Or the uniforms either, for that matter. Big night on the town?’