Relentless

associated injuries around thepuncture, arguably sustained in an altercation with Cora, did not allow him to say with certainty that this was an injection site.
    No determination of guilt had been made. The case file remained open, perhaps largely through the efforts of Detective Knowles.
    Although John Clitherow claimed his wife, Margaret, and their two daughters, were also killed, I could find no mention of their deaths, by murder or otherwise. If John told me the truth—and I believed he did—he withheld something that would explain why their murders had gone unreported.
    Reading about Tony and Cora further unnerved me. Grim scenarios played through my mind.
    Agitated, I got up from the laptop and went to the glass wall in the family room, hoping the harbor panorama would soothe me.
    The view had worked its magic on Penny. She slept soundly on the sofa, in what gray light the pregnant sky allowed.
    Imagine that Tony had been entirely sober, with a gun to his head, and had been forced to pilot the boat while aware that his wife was being dragged and drowned in its wake.
    Imagine that only
after
Cora’s death was alcohol administered to Tony and an air bubble injected. Imagine his horror, his anguish, and the relief with which he might have accepted his own murder.
    Imagination can be either a feathered or a scaly thing, flying to castles in the air or slithering down into a gelid darkness that suffocates all hope.
    Many questions remained. How did Waxx board the boat and how did he depart? How did he overpower them and manage the awkward details of Cora’s attachment to the windlass cable?
    If even a thousand questions occurred to me, I would not begin to doubt that Waxx killed them, just as he mutilated Jeanette and Melanie Landulf while Thomas Landulf, their husband and father, was forced to watch before being set afire.
    The signature of the murderer was the same for each crime: a singular cruelty, an incapacity for pity, a desire to humiliate as well as to kill the victims, and in each instance a determination to make the ultimate victim witness the suffering and degradation of whoever was murdered before him.
    In a sudden flare of great dark wings, an immense blue heron, tall as a man, flew up from the nearer shore, glided low over water mottled taupe-zinc-cinder-slate, turning fully 360 degrees across the width of the nearer and smaller channel, before passing between the hulls of the vessels at the public moorings and dwindling across the farther channel toward the mainland.
    Although I needed only an instant to identify the bird, my heart knocked as if I stood witness to something unearthly, to a creature as dark in its intentions as in its coloration.
    My point of focus pulled back from the receding heron to the craft at the moorings. The standing rigging on the sailboats quivered in a light breeze. A man worked at some task on the deck of a sloop. Cabin lights glowed at the windows of a few of the motor cruisers.
    The scene was a maritime pastoral, picturesque and potentially tranquilizing—and yet I felt uneasy.
    My cell phone rang—not the disposable one that I had left on a kitchen counter, but the one in my shirt pocket, which was listed in my name. For reasons I did not fully understand, John Clitherow had warned me not to use it. I brought it with me, however, because it was the only number at which he could reach me if he decided he must speak to me again.
    I answered the call, and Hud Jacklight said worriedly, “Cubby?”
    “That’s me.”
    “Are you alive?”
    “Yes, I am, Hud.”
    “Your house. It blew up. You know?”
    “I know. Listen, let me call you right back on another line.”
    I didn’t wait for his reply, but terminated the call.
    Because I did not want to wake Penny, who looked so peaceful on the nearby sofa, I left her and Milo in the family room with Lassie and retreated through the dining room to the living room, where the floor-to-ceiling glass presented a slightly different view of the harbor.

   Gazing at a picturesque and tranquil harborscape while talking to Hud Jacklight did not make his conversation seem more eloquent, more enlightened, or less absurd.
    “You’re alive? Really?” he asked.
    “No. I’m speaking to you from”—I quoted Longfellow—“‘the great world of light, that lies behind all human destinies.’”
    After a moment of silence, he said, “You’re scaring me, Cubbo.”
    “I don’t want to do that, Hud. I’m fine. Penny and