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The door to the master bedroom was half shut. Jason used his left hand to push the door wide, and hit the smell of death like a wall. It stopped him in his tracks. His stomach rose in protest. He swallowed down the sickness and turned on the wall light.
The gleam through frosted globes in an overhead ceiling fan light was cozy and soft, revealing nothing sinister.
The bed was empty. The navy-blue bedspread was slightly crooked, but otherwise undisturbed. Shipka’s clothes and belongings were strewn around, but it didn’t look like a search so much as Shipka making himself at home. Jason was vaguely aware of lighthouse-shaped lamps on the nightstands flanking the bed, a white rattan chair beside a sliding glass door which led out onto a rain-wet deck.
Nor was there a body on the floor. Jason looked to the closed bathroom door, then noticed the sled tracks of blood across the jute carpet that led all the way to the closed louvered closet doors. He stared at those unmoving white doors.
He could stop right here. Back out and phone Cape Vincent Police Department, or the sheriff’s department, or the state police, or whoever was responsible for this godforsaken neck of the woods. He could say he hadn’t wanted to contaminate the crime scene. That he had already known it was too late by then. The smell. The blood loss. The total and complete silence. Too late.
But. He still felt that tiny niggle of doubt. Hope? Suppose it wasn’t Shipka? Suppose Shipka was more closely involved—with what?—suppose this was not what it seemed?
Anyway, it seemed like the least you could do for someone you’d been with was not turn away from them in their…extremity. Shipka had died alone and horribly. He had died as no one should ever die. And as much as Jason didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know, he felt like it was his duty not to abandon Shipka now.
He crossed the final stretch of carpet, careful not to step in the blood trail, and opened the doors.
The bloody, meaty mass slumped against the side of the closet was all that was left of Chris Shipka. Jason recognized the gore-soaked jeans and shirt and tennis shoes as Shipka’s. That was all he recognized. All he tried to recognize. The rest…he didn’t want to see, would try to forget.
The rest would haunt his dreams. The rest was the stuff of nightmares.
“Why…” Jason wasn’t even sure what he was asking.
Why would someone think this was necessary?
Why didn’t you tell me everything you knew?
He gently closed the closet door, sat down on the side of the mattress, and pulled out his phone.
Chapter Sixteen
“I don’t have to be in the FBI to know you’re not telling me everything you know about this homicide,” Detective O’Neill was saying.
Jason said wearily, “I’ve told you what I know.”
Well, sort of. They had been at this since Jason had been taken into custody by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department the previous evening. It was now eight in the morning. He had not been questioned the whole time. Following the initial interview, he’d been left in a holding cell several hours for “p
rocessing.”
He was familiar with the tactic. He had not been charged, and he did not believe he would be charged, though technically there was probably enough evidence to build some kind of case against him. And more would turn up if they ran forensics on his bedroom at the lodge. Whatever O’Neill thought, his sergeant was not jumping to any conclusions; a lot of the hostile attitude stemmed from indignation that the FBI had been investigating in their own backyard without so much as a by-your-leave.
“Bullshit,” O’Neill said. “What did you do with Shipka’s laptop?”
He was probably a little younger than Jason. Dark-haired, handsome, sure of himself. No doubt a rising star in the Detective Unit. Jason recognized the breed, being the same kind of bird dog.
Unlike Jason, O’Neill had had a couple of hours’ sleep, a decent breakfast, and plenty of coffee. He was bristling with antagonism and energy and looking forward to cutting the “Big Initials”—and Jason—down to size.
“The laptop had been removed by the time I arrived on scene,” Jason repeated for the fourth—or was it the fifth?—time. “Shipka and I were following different avenues of investigation. I was on the island to interview Barnaby Durrand about allegations of fraud and larceny. Shipka was looking into an old missing person case.”
“You’re lying!”
“I’m not lying.”
This was old-school interrogation. A lot of yelling and pounding of tabletops, coupled with the implicit threat of incarceration. Jason could put an end to it by insisting they either charge him or let him go, but that could backfire. O’Neill was irate enough to charge him, even if he still believed Jason’s ultimate sin was obstruction of justice. They were not seriously looking at him as a suspect in Shipka’s homicide. Not yet, anyway. That could change at any moment, but he couldn’t let himself be rattled into yelling for a lawyer. If he lawyered up, they would take another, closer, look. That, he did not want. Could not afford. Much better to stick to their script, that this was an interagency pissing match, a game of the thrones, with adversarial LEO agencies squaring off against each other.
But the clock was ticking.
Jason had used his phone call to notify George, and George had instructed him to hang tight. That had been over six hours ago, and Jason’s anxiety had ratcheted up several notches. He knew the Bureau would be working behind the scenes to secure his release, but they would also take pains to be completely transparent and cooperative in their interactions with the Sheriff’s Office. That was how these situations—not that there were so many of these situations—were handled. The proper channels would be followed. There could be no appearance of throwing the weight of the federal government around.
Intellectually, Jason understood all that. But he was still exhausted and emotionally wrung out. He told himself he was not worried, but he knew innocent people did sometimes get charged, convicted, and imprisoned. He was hoping this was not one of those times.
