His story about how his wife liked to take a drive in the evening to clear her head was pure fiction. Wedmore wanted to know why a cop, who should be smart enough to spot inconsistencies at a crime scene, was willing to accept his wife died in an accident when so many clues pointed to suspicious circumstances.
Of course, Darren Slocum’s attitude made perfect sense if he was the one who’d killed her.
Wedmore knew the stories about Officer Darren Slocum. The allegations that he’d helped himself to some drug money. Stories of extreme force during arrests. The guy was a loose cannon. Everyone knew his wife ran an off-the-books business, and that he helped her with it.
He could have done it. He had no solid alibi. He could have slipped out of the house while his daughter slept. But suspecting it and proving it were two entirely different things. There were the life insurance policies the two had taken out on each other. That provided a decent motive, especially when they were having financial problems, but it wasn’t enough to nail the guy.
As for Slocum’s first wife, Wedmore had confirmed that she really had died of cancer. Rona kicked herself for that one. She should have known the facts before raising the issue. Felt like a bit of a shit, too.
She stood there in the cold night air, looking out over the Sound, as though the answers to her questions might magically wash ashore. She sighed and was walking back toward her car when she noticed the light.
It was coming from a moored cabin cruiser. She could see shadows moving back and forth behind the windows.
Wedmore strode out onto the dock, the heels of her boots echoing off the wood planks. As she came up alongside the boat she could hear muffled talking inside. She leaned out over the water, rapped on the hull, and called out, “Hello? Hello?”
The talking stopped, and then the door to the cabin opened. A thin man in his late sixties or early seventies, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and reading glasses, emerged.
“Yeah?”
“Hi!” Wedmore called out. She identified herself as a detective with the Milford department. She thought, What’s the phrase? “Permission to come aboard?”
He waved her on, extended a hand to help her but she managed on her own. He invited her into the cabin, where a white-haired woman was seated at a table, sipping on a cup of hot chocolate. The smell of cocoa filled the cabin.
“This is a police detective,” the man said, and the woman brightened, as though this was the most interesting thing that had happened in quite some time.
They introduced themselves as Elliot and Gwyn Teale. When they retired, they sold their house in Stratford and decided to live on their boat full-time.
“Even in the winter?” Wedmore asked.
“Sure,” Elliot said. “We’ve got a heater, we’ve got water, it’s not so hard.”
“I love it,” Gwyn said. “I hated the upkeep with a house. This is so much easier.”
“When we need groceries or to do the laundry, we get a taxi and run our errands,” Elliot said. “It’s close quarters, I’ll give you that, but we have everything we need. And it means when our kids want to come visit, they have to take a hotel. There’s a lot to be said for that.”
Wedmore was impressed. She had no idea anyone could live here year-round, and doubted any officers who’d been down here investigating Ann Slocum’s death would have thought to look for anyone.
“I wanted to ask you about the woman who died here the other night.”
“What woman was that?” Elliot asked.
“Just over there? Friday night? A woman fell off the pier. Struck her head, drowned. Her body was found there later that night when an officer noticed her car sitting there, the door open, the motor running.”
“That’s a new one on us,” Gwyn said. “But we don’t have a TV, or listen to the radio much, and we don’t get a paper. And we sure don’t have a computer here, so we’re not on the Internet. Christ Himself could rent a boat here and we wouldn’t know about it.”
“That’s the truth,” Elliot agreed.
“So you didn’t see the police early Saturday?”
“I did notice a couple of police cars,” Elliot said. “But it didn’t seem to be any of our business, so we stayed on the boat.”
Wedmore sighed. If they hadn’t been curious enough to check out a swarm of police cars, it wasn’t likely they’d noticed much of anything going on around here.
“I don’t suppose you saw anything out of the ordinary late Friday night, early Saturday morning, then?”
The two looked at each other. “Just those cars that drove down, wouldn’t you say, hon?” Gwyn asked Elliot.
“Just that,” he said.
“Cars?” Wedmore asked. “When was this?”
“You see, when anyone drives down that ramp there toward the pier,” Gwyn explained, “their lights flash right into our bedroom.” She smiled, then pointed to the forward hatch, where Wedmore could make out a bed that tapered toward the bow. “It’s not much of a bedroom, but there are some very small windows in there. And I guess it was around ten or eleven, something like that.”
“Did you notice anything else?”
