Silent Mercy

FORTY-NINE

“GET on the phone to the Coast Guard. We’re going to need their help to get to the island,” I said, adjusting the rearview mirror as I made the U-turn to take us south to the tip of the Cape. “And don’t let them send a chopper up yet. We don’t want to let him know we’re coming.”

“Penikese is a smart guess, Coop. A bit of a wild card, but smart. I just don’t want to jump the gun. I’m not ready to pull any cops off Reverend Portland’s detail yet on the theory that our perp knows about this little island.”

“Here’s what you do. Call Peterson and ask him to get the feds moving. They’ll bring in the Coast Guard. Then you call the captain in Providence. I blew Oksana off when she was talking to me about Fyodor and his reform school. Have him ask her where it was. I bet she and Yuri were old enough at the time to remember.”

“How long till we get to Woods Hole?”

“With any luck and no roadkill, I’d say we’re there in less than half an hour. And the local cops—”

“How many are there? Two?”

“Off-season like this, maybe four,” I was only half joking. I had no idea what their resources might be, but Mike and I would need backup. “They’ve got to start scouring the town for an Angus truck.”

“Doesn’t really give me a lot of time to rally the troops. There’s a slew of places to dump a truck, aren’t there?”

“Ferry parking lots, marinas, residential areas, and plenty of woods that surround the little town. Get on it.”

“You like giving me orders, Coop?” Mike asked as he got on the phone.

“I love being in the driver’s seat. Get used to it.”

“I’m allergic to the idea. Brake going into these curves, will you?”

“You don’t know how many times I’ve raced this road to catch the last boat over. Stop whining and tighten your seat belt.”

“Don’t steal my lines, Coop. You’re the whiner,” Mike said as he waited for Lieutenant Peterson to answer. “You know this is going to get worse before it gets better, don’t you?”

Every trace of my smile disappeared. “I’m well aware of that.”

“I’m in charge once we get where we’re going. There’s one gun, and I’ve got it. When we get to town, you’re no longer the dominatrix. Am I understood?”

I swerved to avoid a raccoon — his beady eyes reflecting in our headlights as he lumbered across the road.

“Loo? We got a change in plans. Coop’s brain is on double-overtime. Don’t ask me to explain, Boss, just go with it and put some pressure on the locals,” Mike said, and then answered the question Peterson asked him, winking at me as I looked up from the road. “Yeah, I do trust her. Just go with it.”

“Thanks for that,” I said.

“Eyes on the road. Tell me first what Mercer said about Zukov’s diagnosis. And then you’ve got about twelve minutes to make me an expert on every inch of this little island.”

“I’ll start with the disease.”

“Shoot.”

“Zukov saw a doc in Atlanta after he dropped the girl during their trapeze act. Admitted to him — but not to his family — that he’d lost sensation in his hands from time to time. That fact, combined with the lesions on his face, caused the physician to send him to New York.”

“In December?”

“Exactly. The diagnosis was made at the Bellevue clinic, one of the few in the country that specializes in the disease. Mercer read me the notes.”

“How was it diagnosed? How advanced is it?”

“To begin with, the germ that causes leprosy attacks the skin and the nerves. The skin lesions developed first, a couple of years ago. They were small initially, then became larger and larger — festered and blistered. But because of the tendency for Fyodor to use makeup for performances, he was able to cover it up.”

“He must have been in complete denial. That — and the fact that nobody thinks about leprosy today, except in third-world countries.”

“Mercer says Bellevue’s got five hundred people in their program, right in New York City.”

“And Fyodor Zukov is one of them?”

“No. They wanted him to be treated, but he was so devastated by the diagnosis that he didn’t come back. Not until the day that Naomi Gersh disappeared.”

“Why then?” Mike asked.

“For pain medication.”

“Shit. And they gave it to him?”

“Yes, he promised to enroll in the program, and they gave him a scrip for pain meds,” I said, thinking of the drugged and drowsy voice of Chat Grant. “Oxycodone. A two-week supply.”

“It’s a narcotic and a painkiller, right?”

“Oh, yeah. It would do the job on our vics.”

“But if they were offering to treat him, why would he skip out?”

“The nurse who talked to Mercer interpreted the doctor’s notes. The disease has progressed pretty aggressively. Even though Fyodor couldn’t face telling his siblings — and certainly not circus management — he’d never be able to work again. The sensory impairment of his nerves — nerve paralysis, in fact — has already caused permanent deformities.”

“Where?”

“In addition to the weakness in his wrists, his fingers have begun to claw.”

“That’s what it’s called?” Mike asked.

“Irreversible clawing, yes, of the fingers and toes. It’s no wonder he dropped his partner,” I said. “The infection eventually invades the bones and destroys them. Without treatment, he’ll lose his extremities.”

“I’d be pretty devastated too.”

“The other thing was his eyebrows. Remember Faith telling us he had no eyebrows?”

“Yeah.”

“Classic symptom of leprosy.”

“But he’s got a full head of hair,” Mike said.

“That’s ’cause the head is warm. The bacteria invade the eyebrows because they’re much cooler than head hair.”

The road had narrowed from four lanes to two. Fog was settling in over the treetops and I could smell the saltwater as we neared the shoreline.

“Let me tell you about Penikese.”

It was hard to see the pavement for the thickening fog, and I slowed my pace briefly. I centered the car on the yellow line in the middle of the road and pressed down on the pedal.

“It’s one of the Elizabeth Islands, just north of Cuttyhunk. It’s only seventy-five acres.”

“The whole thing? Central Park’s more than eight hundred acres. You’re right about tiny,” Mike said. “You’ve been there?”

“Scores of times, mostly as a kid.” I could see Cuttyhunk and its three sister islands from the deck of my Vineyard bedroom. Penikese was out of sight, on the far north side of Cuttyhunk.

“There’s a ferry?”

“No ferry. No regular service at all.”

“Great. You planning a swim?”

“No. There’ll be something moving in the harbor,” I said. “My father kept his sailboat on the Vineyard. A Herreshoff — a twenty-eight-foot ketch. My brothers and I spent a lot of time exploring the islands. Then I fell in love with Adam, and he was a sailor too. Penikese held a fascination for him ’cause he was a medical student, so the diseased history of the place and its tragic sadness drew him there. But it somehow terrified me.”

“Why?”

“It’s jinxed — it’s always been that way. It’s got a miserably sad past.”

“How so?”

“Leprosy is one of the most dreaded conditions of humankind,” I said. “Until very recently, people believed it was contagious. Incurable and contagious.”

“It’s not?”

“Very rarely. There’s a genetic susceptibility.”

“So Zukov’s siblings might be in line?”

“It’s possible. Ninety-five percent of all people are immune to the bacillus. But in the old days, lepers were sent off to live in quarantine.”

“Leper colonies.”

“Isolated from their communities. And islands were the ideal solution. There was one in the East River, another off the coast of San Francisco, and the infamous colony on Molokai. People were shipped off forever, separated from their families, to live the rest of their lives — and to die — among strangers suffering with the same affliction. There was no coming back.”

“Penikese was one of them?”

“In 1905, Massachusetts created the Penikese Island Hospital on this lonely rock in the middle of the bay. Two doctors volunteered to staff it, and five patients — ripped from their homes and their children — were forced to be sent there.”

“How did they live?”

“The patients had to build their own shacks — small, wooden ones. They don’t exist anymore. Fishing boats would drop off fresh food from the mainland, once a week, depositing it at the end of the dock. Letters from home, that sort of thing. One-way service only.”

“And no one ever returned?”

“Not a single soul. The tombstones and crosses are proof of that. Most of the wooden markers have rotted away.”

“What scared you there, Coop?”

“As a kid it was the idea of plague pits. My older brothers would tie up the boat and we’d sneak ashore. I was afraid to go with them, and more afraid to wait alone. Everyone says the island has ghosts. Even a haunted mansion, way back in time.”

“Mansion? In a leper colony.”

“No, no. Before the state took it over. Long gone, but my brothers used to play in the old shafts and tunnels beneath it. That didn’t worry me — I was just too claustrophobic to go down into them — but the sad stories of the lepers really got to me.”

“Sounds like it.”

“The boys used to taunt me — tell me that if I stepped on one of the graves, the ghost of the leper would rise up and, well — kill me. When I was ten, eleven — I believed that.”

“You’ve been to ghost islands before.”

“Not so full of death as Penikese. Not with such a painful past. It’s one of the loneliest little outposts in the world.”

“How long did the hospital last?”

“Only about fifteen years. The government built a leprosarium in Louisiana. This pitiful place went out of business pretty fast after that. Then, about thirty years ago, someone had the idea to use the desolate setting as a school for delinquent boys — really dangerous ones. Kids who needed complete isolation to attempt to resocialize them. The success rate has been less than enviable.”

I could make out fog lights on the road ahead and I braked again, getting over to the right to avoid a pickup truck coming the opposite way. When I reached the traffic light in Falmouth, I could see that no one was approaching the intersection and I ran through the red signal. There was only one more stop sign between where we were and the harbor, then a twelve-mile boat run to Penikese Island.

“It’s biblical, you know,” Mike said. “Leprosy, I mean. Maybe that’s what’s haunting our killer.”

“It was considered a mark of God, wasn’t it? A sign to the priests that the leper was someone who had sinned.”

“Your boy Moses started the whole phobia, Coop.”

“I guess so. I remember in Leviticus, he directed the Israelites to exile lepers, to exile all those who had offended their God.”

Mike knew as much of the Old Testament as the New. “ ‘ Whosoever shall be defiled with the leprosy and is separated by the judgment of the priest… shall dwell alone without the camp.’ ”

“Father Bernard might smile on you after all.”

The fog swirled around the car as we crested the hill that overlooked the Woods Hole ferry terminal. The sturdy old Islander was sheltered in its dock below us, dark and still, out of service until the first run of the morning.

Off to the right, in Quissett Harbor, the red bubble atop a police cruiser was spinning in the haze, setting off an eerie glow.

“There,” Mike said. “Head for that patrol car.”

“I see it,” I said, nosing the car past the row of stores and restaurants, beyond the scattered buildings of the Oceanographic Institute.

A solo officer was pacing the sidewalk at the end of the dock, talking to someone on his radio, when he saw us get out of the Rhode Island trooper’s car.

The device squawked as he waited for a reply. “You the New Yorkers?”

“Yeah,” Mike answered.

I walked beyond them to the shiny white truck that had been backed into a parking space, blocked from the view of traffic by a large RV that stuck out into the street.

“I was just calling this in to my office,” the cop said. “It’s the stolen vehicle from New Jersey. Got the broadcast a couple of hours ago.”

“How long ago was it ditched?”

“It wasn’t here at eleven, when I came on duty. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“Get Crime Scene on it,” Mike said. “Bust it open. We got things to do.”

The cop gave a halfhearted laugh. “I maybe can get you Crime Scene in a day or two.”

“Then make it a locksmith or a safecracker. Break it open. We’re looking for a woman who’s probably been locked inside there for twenty-four hours.”

The cop seemed shell-shocked by the orders Mike was directing at him.

“We can’t take the chance that Zukov has left Chat behind in there,” I said. “He’s always staged his bodies at a far more dramatic setting. I don’t want to wait till they get this open. We can’t afford to do that if she’s still alive.”

Mike pounded his fist on the side of the truck repeatedly. If Chat was inside it, she wasn’t capable of sending a signal back to him.

He walked to the other side of the truck and called Chat’s name, then turned back to the cop. “Seen anyone around the docks this evening? People you don’t know?”

“Just the regulars. A few old guys fishing for squid off the end. Only thing unusual I saw was a big black duffel bag out on the walkway leading to the dock as I drove through. But by the time I cruised the street and turned around, it was gone. Figured someone was picking it up off his boat.”

Mike looked at me. “Didn’t Luther’s friend — what’s his name?. .”

“Shaquille.”

“Didn’t Shaquille tell us the killer at Mount Neboh had the body in a large sack, like a duffel bag?”

“Sure he did. I’m telling you, Zukov’s on the move with Chat.”

“I think you’re right.”

“How about boats?” I asked the cop. “You know the harbor well enough to tell me if anything is missing?”

“There’s a twenty-two-foot Grady-White sits right over there most of the time,” he said, pointing to an empty space on the dock between two other motor boats. “She belongs to the guy who owns the liquor store, but he’s not usually on the water at this hour. The Phantom Flyer, he calls it.”

“Put out an APB for that one,” Mike said. “You got a gun I can borrow for an hour or two?”

The cop shook his head. “We don’t patrol with guns.”

“Then you’d better rouse all the help you can get. We’re going over to Penikese.”