Tara Thompson was the detective assigned to the case. Tara was on lone from Portland. There wasn’t much demand for detectives in a small town like Berlin. They hadn’t had one in decades. Back in Portland, which in the minds of its residents was a suburb of Boston, she’d seen a thing or two, things she wished she’d never had to, but this Kate Meadows business, this was something else.
Of the working theories, whether Bishop or Malkovich, or any of the four kidnapping victims from decades earlier, as someone in the local force had been screaming about, madly…Tara just couldn’t see it. The crime scene had been bizarre, staged, exactly as reported, the “ripped blade,” pulled out of some noir novel, theatrical. She would have to cast a wide net, look beyond the area. She supposed it was just as well that she came from away.
One of the first things she did was ask about the FBI, if they were involved, and she was told, for the moment, no. So that was the first wall placed in front of her own theory. She did interview Dixon, Hargraves, Shelton, Salazar. Most of them just wanted to leave what had happened to them in the past. Salazar came off as aggressive, which made Tara suspicious enough to go digging a little deeper. He was the only one of the four who hadn’t been a local, who’d come to Berlin as a consultant for a firm intending to limit the kind of fishing operations that had been the lifeblood of the community for generations, which also accounted for the instinct to put further doubt on him.
But she found him on a fishing boat. He was retired. All he wanted was to cast his bait.
Tara looked into the neighbor, Matt White, the mother-in-law, Priscilla Foster, who’d done much of the agitating, who kept pointing the fingers, who had been harassing Salazar for years. But Foster was serving time in Warren. The skeletons in the closet were thick. She’d been professing her innocence for years, a bit of a local legend herself, something Mainers talked about in their idle time, but there she was. But someone had killed Kate’s dad, and then someone had killed Kate, and the second one couldn’t have been Foster. And it couldn’t have been Salazar who murdered the patriarch. He hadn’t been in town yet. Or, Tara had to suppose, maybe he’d done it and settled in Berlin to keep a watchful eye.
Killers were clever, after all.
But the evidence was inconclusive. The blade used to commit the murder, Kate had found it herself, and there was still no clear explanation as to how it’d gotten there, and no plausible explanation about why Bishop would’ve gifted it to her. By all accounts he had led a thoroughly unimaginative life. Malkovich, the homebody, full of his own eccentricities, never seemed to have dabbled in things quite of that nature. No, his ties turned out to come out of the Boston mafia scene, and nobody there bothered with gimmicks like that blade.
No, everyone in town was guilty of conspiracy, all right, just not of the kind that led to whatever had happened to Kate Meadows.
Tara had to confess she found herself stymied.
So far, so good.
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