An Honest Man

by Michael Koryta

Genres: Legal Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Wish Me Dead: The murder of several politicians at sea has shattering implications for a local lobsterman and a young boy in this action-packed thriller.

Israel Pike was a killer, and he was an honest man. They were not mutually exclusive.

After discovering seven men murdered aboard their yacht – including two Senate rivals – Israel Pike is regarded as a prime suspect. A troubled man infamous on Salvation Point Island for killing his own father a decade before, Israel has few options, no friends, and a life-threatening secret.

Elsewhere on the island, 12-year-old Lyman Rankin seeks shelter from his alcoholic father in an abandoned house only to discover that he is not alone. A mysterious woman greets him with a hatchet and a promise: “Make a sound and I’ll kill you.”

As the investigation barrels forward, Lyman, Israel, and the fate of the case collide in immutable ways. Written with mounting suspense, stirring emotion, and deep understanding of character, Koryta continues to prove why Stephen King has called him “a master” and Michael Connelly has deemed him “one of the best of the best, plain and simple.”

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 416

Sample

1

The yacht appeared nine weeks after Israel returned to his father’s house, and even from a distance and under the squeezed red sun of dawn, he could see that the vessel was in trouble. Adrift, rudderless, a possession of the sea rather than a partner of it.

Like anyone who’d grown up on an island off the coast of Maine, he’d seen boats adrift before—five of them, he would later recall for investigators—and in four of those circumstances, the boats had been empty. In the fifth, a child had been aboard, alone after cutting the lines at a dock and letting the tide take him. The boy’s goal had been to teach his parents a lesson, and Israel supposed he’d succeeded, because the boat was in the rocks before they got to it.

So five times he had watched the meandering, listless behavior of a boat without a human hand to direct it, that drunkard’s drift, and five times no one had been hurt. The sixth time would be different.

Why? What was so different about this one? the investigators would ask.

He told them the obvious things—the size of the craft, the knowledge that there would be a crew aboard, the lack of response to his shouts. What he didn’t tell them was the way the stillness of the yacht contrasted with the ceaseless energy of the sea and made him think of stories his grandfather had told him in the old Pike and Sons Shipyard, cigar tucked in his mouth, twinkle in his eyes, tales of ghost ships, of frigates washed ashore with skeletons in the hold. Israel spoke instead of the ship’s path toward the rocks that ringed Salvation Point and how he felt like he needed to get out there in a hurry or the damage would be swift and severe.

He crossed the channel in his skiff. He’d had two months of daily rowing by then, and he could make the little boat move when he needed to. That morning, he put everything he had into it.

The yacht was at least a hundred feet long, maybe a hundred and twenty-five, and it was hard to anticipate the rudderless craft’s motions. Israel came in from the port side, where he had protection from the wind. The yacht had turned in almost a full circle, as if fighting to point south again, to head back home. He put fenders off the sides of the skiff, aligned his path with the yacht’s stern, then rode the waves down and into the stern, the contact jarring even with the fenders down. He got hold of a stanchion and tied the skiff off. When he stood, the yacht’s superstructure towered above him, its bulbous radar antennas reaching skyward. The vessel’s name was scripted in gold across deep blue paint on the stern: Mereo.

It was not a pretty name. The word felt harsh, sharp-edged.

Mereo.

He waited out another wave and then stepped off the skiff and onto the ladder. He was halfway up to the deck when it occurred to him that he hadn’t even attempted to call out or get the attention of anyone aboard.

Sometimes you knew.

He shouted a “Hello” then. Got nothing back. He hoped, all the way up the ladder and over the stern rail onto the deck, that they’d abandoned ship, although he could not imagine why they would have. He kept that hope even though the yacht tender that would have been used for shore transport still hung from its lift and the gulls rode the wind at a distance. Later that day he asked people about the birds—tentatively, because he didn’t wish to describe the scene yet again, but diligently, because he needed to know. No one could explain it. Gulls were not repelled by blood, the detectives told him. They should have been drawn to it.

All Israel Pike knew was that on the morning he’d boarded the Mereo, they had not been.

The yacht was a Ferretti 1000, which meant nothing to him. There were stairs with glass-and-steel railings leading up to the raised pilothouse with a flybridge to his left, and just beyond them, the door to the salon, its interior murky behind tinted windows. He should have gone up to the pilothouse first, but the door to the salon was open, so he did what you do when confronted with an open door—he walked right on through.

Sometimes, the person who benefits most from a closed door is the one outside it.

Inside the salon was a full bar flanked by U-shaped settees in white leather. The mahogany accents gleamed. When the investigators asked him what he was thinking in this moment, he answered honestly: He was thinking that he had seen wood like that only once in his life, when he’d helped prep a vacation home on Islesboro for painting. The wood in that house had been cherry, not mahogany, but it had shone like a bride on her wedding day. He’d never seen anything like it before and had not again until he entered the salon in the yacht called Mereo.

The first body was slumped beside the dining table—a man in a black polo shirt and olive pants, shot in the head. The corpse should have commanded Israel’s attention instantly, but instead he focused on the white carpet, once bright as fresh snow, now ruined by blood. Ruby sprinkles mixed with jets so dark they looked like motor oil. There would be no fixing that rug. People had died here, and yet for one long moment the only question in Israel’s mind was: Who in the hell put a white rug on a boat? Then reality rode in on the red tide of shock and he focused on the dead man.

He was muscular, with close-cropped blond hair, probably about forty. Hard to tell with so much of his head missing. The bullet that had killed him had been fired at close range.

Beyond him, across that ruined carpet, armchairs and couches sat beside marble end tables, each with a drawer pull shaped like a lion holding a chrome ring in its jaws. High-backed chairs bordered a table set with china and crystal, four glasses at each place. Israel asked about this later. For water and three wines, he was told—white, red, and champagne.

The glasses were all different shapes, he said.

That’s right, sir. They are.

Who knew?

He stepped over the body. At the far end of the opulent salon were stairs with polished railings above mahogany steps leading down to the staterooms belowdecks. He crossed the salon, walking on the white portions of the rug and avoiding the blood, like a child determined not to step on a crack in a sidewalk.

Why did you proceed after you saw the first corpse? the investigators asked him.

To count, he answered.

They’d been puzzled by that. They’d been thinking that he’d say something like To search for survivors or simply Because I was in shock.

The latter might have been true, but the former was not. His mind had accepted what his body already knew: There was no one alive on the Mereo.

He’d come to count the dead.

He found two murdered men in a stateroom; given the blood trails, Israel thought they’d been killed somewhere else and dragged there. They were naked, their flaccid cocks pale against bloodstained thighs. Gutshot, both of them. A man wearing a pale pink polo shirt, pants at his ankles, lay in a hallway. He’d been shot in the chest. Streaks of dried blood meandered across the floor like lazy mop strokes.

Four dead men.

So far.

Israel thought most of the shooting had happened between the salon and the stairs. It was hard to tell for sure. It was hard to breathe, let alone think about how the place had looked when the men were among the living. Even with the spaciousness and the wide windows granting the view of the bright blue sea, Israel felt claustrophobic, trapped, a sensation he hadn’t known since he’d left prison. That was probably why it took him some time to find the dead man in the shower; he hadn’t anticipated how the rooms wound on, with curves and corridors, all of this in a boat.

The man in the shower had been shot in the head, the tiled walls now rinsed in red. He was fully clothed. Hiding in the shower, probably. It hadn’t worked.

Five dead.

He found the crew’s cabins—small, spartan, with bunks instead of king-size beds—but they were empty. He went out to the deck and saw another victim slumped against a stanchion. No more than thirty, dark-skinned and dressed in a crew member’s uniform, he’d been shot in the ribs and back. His blood trail suggested that he’d been fleeing from the salon.

Six dead.

Israel went up to the raised pilothouse. There he found one more, this man also in uniform, shot in the side of the neck, the wound drained of blood so that it showed white ribbons of tendons. The radio microphone was still in his hand.

Seven dead.

He walked through once more to make sure. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

So much death.

The gulls circled high and at a distance. They didn’t even shriek or caw. The first sound he heard other than the water on the hull was the bullhorn from the Coast Guard boat. He hadn’t heard the engine as it approached. They asked him about that: How did you not hear a boat arriving on a calm morning?

Israel Pike didn’t have an answer for that one.

They kept him all that day. Moved him from ship to shore to town police station to state police station. So many questions, so few answers. As he was waiting on the arrival of an FBI agent, he asked the desk sergeant if he could borrow her computer for one minute, one Google search. She had declined to let him sit at the desk and use the police computer but offered to search for whatever he needed so badly.

He told her that he wanted to know what that name meant. Mereo.

It was Latin, according to Google, and meant “something earned, deserved, or won, usually by a soldier.” The word probably derived from ancient Greek, from an idea of receiving a due portion or allocation from service. It was also related to a Hittite word meaning “to divide a sacrifice.”

Before the FBI agent arrived, Israel Pike decided that the Hittites had it right. He did not tell this to the FBI agent, of course. It was not his role to volunteer information. All he had to do was answer questions honestly. He did that.

He would tell them no lies.

It was not up to him to make sure they asked the right questions.

2

They released him that evening and returned to talk to him again the next morning. This time it was a cop Israel knew—Sterling Pike had been the lone sheriff’s deputy assigned to Salvation Point Island for more than twenty years.

He was also Israel’s late father’s brother.

They were not close.

Sterling was accompanied by a woman who looked like she ran marathons without breaking a sweat. She had raven-dark hair and wore jeans and a charcoal waist-length jacket over a startlingly bright white shirt, no uniform, no insignia. Whipcord build, dark eyes that fixed on you like interrogation lamps. Israel’s uncle Sterling was a tall man, well over six feet, but stooped, his back bowed and his head cocked forward as if he were always facing a strong headwind. Not an ounce of fat, all lean muscle, weather-lined skin, gray hair, gray eyes, a perpetual squint.

“Hello, Iz,” Sterling said. “This is Jenn Salazar. State police, major crimes. Lieutenant.”

It was a backward way of identifying his superior, but that was Sterling. Rank didn’t matter to him. Sterling didn’t see himself as the community’s deputy so much as its emperor. He made friends and cut them deals or he made enemies and didn’t. You fell in line or you were lined up in the crosshairs. Either way, Sterling was used to deciding how the law was enforced—or ignored—on the handful of tiny islands he policed off the coast of Maine, and the presence of a detective from Augusta wasn’t going to rattle him.

“Hello, Lieutenant,” Israel said, looking at Salazar as if he’d never met her before. She did the same to him. Even as they gazed at each other without recognition, he thought of the prison-visitation logs. Nobody would check those, would they? Surely not. Surely Israel Pike’s prison visitors would be of no interest in this case.

“Mr. Pike,” she said.

“Jenn is helping out,” Sterling said. “A task force is coming together, you know, get everyone rowing in the same direction here. We got county, state, feds, friggin’ Coast Guard involved. I’m kind of running point on the island because of my familiarity.”

“Your familiarity,” Israel echoed, and smiled. “Right.”

Sterling Pike did not smile. “I’ve briefed Jenn on my conflict of interest.”

“Then why are you here?”

“As a liaison.”

“A liaison. That’s a good one, Uncle.”

“You can call me Deputy or you can call me Sterling.”

“Sure thing.” Israel looked at Salazar. “You’re comfortable with his conflicted old ass being here? Seems like trouble to me.”

“I’m comfortable,” she said. “You’ll know if I’m not. You want him to leave, say so.”

“He can stay. Been a while since I had a family reunion. Mind my asking why you’re here to see me, though? I explained myself about six times yesterday, on the record. I didn’t suddenly remember new things overnight.”

Sterling said, “You’re the witness, Iz.”

“That’s Israel.”

“You’re the witness, Israel.”

“I don’t think that’s the right term,” Israel said. “A witness is someone who sees what happened. I am not that person. I found the bodies, is all. What happened was already done. If anyone witnessed that, it wasn’t me.”

“You were the first on scene, let’s call it that.”

“Are you familiar with the victims?” Salazar asked.

Israel knew the lineup by then, just as most of America did—it was not common for two candidates competing for one of the only swing seats in the Senate to share a pleasure cruise together, let alone die on it. Richard Hosmer, a federal judge who’d had the misfortune of boarding the Mereo on its last voyage, was a popular candidate everywhere except on Salvation Point Island. One of his signature rulings had had an enormous impact on the island—he’d upheld a federal ban on commercial lobster fishing in a thousand-square-mile area now called the Lost Zone, waters that had been subject to countless lawsuits, ranging from territorial disputes to endangered-species protection, before being closed in a bilateral agreement with Canada. Hosmer hadn’t made the decision, but he’d been one of three judges who’d upheld it, and he was from Maine, so he received both credit and blame in his home state. His level of popularity in Kennebunkport was very different than it was in Salvation Point.

Hosmer’s private security consultant, a man named Jay Nash, had been murdered too. Why a bodyguard had been on board was not clear. Considering that everyone on the yacht had been killed, the bodyguard’s résumé would have taken a hit even if he’d survived.

The second Senate candidate on the yacht was Paul Gardner, the attorney general of the state of Maine. With him had been Morgan West, a division chief within the AG’s office, currently one of Gardner’s top lieutenants, formerly a law-school classmate.

Drew Gardner, Paul’s older brother, had owned the yacht. He was a hedge-fund guy who also liked to dabble in movies. Although his cinematic efforts had been disasters, he’d backed a sitcom about cowboy brothers in Montana who’d patented a meatless burger, and that show practically printed its own currency.

There had been a captain and a crew member killed in the slaughter as well, but nobody talked much about them, not with all the lawyers and politics and money in the mix.

“I know the names,” Israel said, “and what they all did. The basics, I guess.”

“How’d you come by that information?” Sterling asked, as if the story were not national news, as if the victims’ identities were secrets.

“I learned about them from Steve Inskeep this morning.”

Sterling frowned. “Inskeep. Is he the guy who owns the lumberyard west of Rockland?”

“He’s a radio host,” Salazar said, sounding faintly exhausted. “On NPR.”

Sterling grunted with what might have been disapproval.

“Steve explained most of it to me,” Israel said, “and Rachel Martin filled in the blanks.”

Sterling looked at Salazar. She nodded. “Another one,” she said. “Same show.”

Sterling turned to Israel. “So the point you’re trying to make is that you didn’t know the victims personally?”

“Not trying to make any point. Just answering the question.”

“Uh-huh. Look, may we come inside, Iz—Israel?” Sterling said. “Get out of this wind?”

This wind was a lovely light summer breeze.

“Sure,” Israel said. “Out of this wind.”

They came in. Israel closed the door, walked into the kitchen, sat at the table. Sterling and Salazar took chairs across from him. Sterling got out a digital recorder and set it on the table, and Salazar got out a notebook and a pen. Israel Pike looked at the recorder and the notebook and reminded himself that he’d done nothing wrong—not on that yacht, at least. That was the only thing that mattered. There was no one on God’s green earth who would believe that Israel Pike had ventured out to a luxury yacht and gunned down seven men. Still, his heart was hammering.

“Don’t want to make you do this on a loop, telling the same story over and over, like yesterday,” Salazar said.

“I think you’ve already got it all on video, but I guess I will tell it again.”

“This guy, he’s a pro with police,” Sterling said to Salazar.

Israel kept his eyes on Salazar. “What he probably means by that is that I did fifteen years at the state prison. I was charged with murder, pleaded guilty to manslaughter. I suspect you’re aware of all that.”

“Fifteen years is a lot for manslaughter.”

“Felt like it.”

“What added the time?”

“Had a few fights,” Israel said. “Those things happen in prison.”

“Happen more frequently to people with anger-management problems,” Sterling said. “I heard you broke one man’s leg in three places. Hell of a way to fight.”

Israel didn’t bother to look at him, didn’t bother to say that three men had come at him that night, one armed with a knife, the other two with pieces of an aluminum mop handle that they’d sharpened into spears.

“Who did you kill?” Salazar asked, looking at him with a steady gaze as if she didn’t know the answer.

“My father. Sterling’s brother. That’s the tiny conflict of interest he referenced. In a community with more than one cop, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to play liaison.”

Salazar didn’t react. “Did you grow up here?”

“I did. My mother died the year I was born. I didn’t know her. My grandparents did the work of raising me because my father was on the water so much. I basically grew up around my grandfather’s boatyard. That was a big industry on this island once. Boatyard’s closed now, like most things here, but you can still see the building.”

“When did you leave?”

“Moved to the mainland when I was eighteen.”

“Why?”

“They’d closed the Lost Zone up here, and that meant the fishing as an industry was dying out. Then my grandfather died…after that, I wanted to see a different lifestyle, I guess.”

“And how did that go?” Sterling asked.

Israel looked at him. “What’s the point of that question?”

“Answer it and I’ll tell you.”

Israel turned back to Salazar. “I struggled with some things. Drinking, drugs. I didn’t want to be on the island but I didn’t know how to be anywhere else. I’d been raised in a different culture, and—”

“Culture,” Sterling interrupted. “So that was the problem. I never knew who to blame. Turns out it was the culture. Fascinating.”

Israel did not take his eyes off Salazar. “I came back here with my father for a summer alone and then we had a fight and I hit him and he died. Sterling arrested me and I went to prison. I guess he thinks it’s fun to make me go through all that again, but I don’t see how it will help you find out what happened to those people on the yacht.”

Salazar tapped her pen on the notepad. Studied him. Said, “Mind if I turn on a light?”

The kitchen window faced west, missing the morning sun, leaving the room dimly lit. “I don’t have one,” Israel said.

“You haven’t turned the electricity on?” Sterling asked, incredulous.

“Not yet.”

“You’ve been back, what, three months?”

“Close to it.”

“Thought you were listening to the radio this morning, though.” Sterling looked like a cat who’d just pounced.

“There are these things that hold electricity right inside their own little compartments,” Israel said, outlining a small square with his hands. “Called batteries. Keep your ear to the ground on those, they’re going to catch on.”

“Witty guy.”

Israel rose, removed the globe from a kerosene lamp, lit the wick with a match, then replaced the glass globe over the wick. It threw bright but unsteady light.

“You got heat out here?” Sterling asked.

“It’s July. You cold?”

Sterling gazed around the house with fresh eyes, taking inventory of Israel’s life. It was the look of a cocky bull searching your cell, a sense of authority so absolute that it was dehumanizing, and Israel had to take a breath and glance away as the urge to slap his uncle out of his chair rose in him.

“Thank you for the light,” Jenn Salazar said. “I didn’t realize you were off the grid.” Saying it in a neutral tone, as if it didn’t matter to her one way or the other. She was very good, and Israel needed to be as good. That would have been easier if she’d come here with anyone other than Sterling. That wasn’t her choice, of course.

“Not really off the grid,” he said. “The boatyard has power, has a shower, has a galley kitchen. I don’t intend to keep the electricity off forever. I don’t have much need for it in the summer, that’s all. I thought you came out here to ask about the Mereo, not my utility bill.”

“That’s right,” Salazar said. “I’d appreciate hearing how you found them.”

“Have you heard it already?”

She didn’t blink. “Yes.”

“Watched the video or listened to it?”

“Both.”

Israel nodded.

“One of the police you talked to mentioned you were out taking pictures yesterday morning,” Sterling said. “Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“You do that often? Take pictures?”

“Yes. I’m a photographer. Amateur, but…” He shrugged.

“Good deal,” Sterling said as if he were truly impressed. “That’s a real skill. Where’d you pick that up?”

“In prison.”

“Oh yeah? They offer photography classes?”

“Yes. I earned college credits.”

“That’s great. Really, the opportunities in a modern prison, they’re bountiful.”

“Bountiful,” Israel echoed. “Sure. How about you turn the recorder on, because I’d like to tell this story just once more and get on with my day.”

Sterling hesitated, spoiling for a fight, then punched a button on the recorder. Israel waited until he saw the red LED light that promised the device was recording and then said, “Should I have a lawyer here, guys?”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Sterling said, “You’ve obviously got the right to counsel, you know that, but do you feel a need for one? As you said, you just found the bodies.”

Do you feel a need for one? There was no winning answer to that question. There was a right answer, and that was probably Yes, I do, but there was no winning answer. No matter which one you picked, you could get in trouble.

“I’m fine,” Israel said. “Let’s get to it.”

His eyes stayed on the tiny red LED light on Sterling’s recorder when he began to explain how he had found himself on the yacht, counting the dead.

3

Israel said it all again, said it the way he’d said it before.

They let him speak, watching him with those matching squints. Sometimes Salazar tapped the pen against the notepad and sometimes she didn’t. She never wrote anything on the pad. The red light on the recorder always glowed.

When he was done, and only when he was done, Salazar asked her first question.

“You rowed out to the yacht?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’ve got a boat with a motor, yes?”

“The skiff’s easier.”

Salazar looked at Sterling, then leaned forward, bracing her slim arms on Israel’s kitchen table. She wore one simple silver bracelet that glinted against her olive skin. It slid down her forearm and jingled against the table and reminded Israel of a handcuff.

“How often do you use the big boat, Mr. Pike?” Her eyes shone in the lamplight.

“Not much,” he said. “It runs, though. It was an option, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“No,” Salazar said. “That’s not it. I’m just curious…you’re a lobsterman by trade, but you don’t use your own lobster boat. Why not use a boat that has power?”

“I don’t like the sound of engines.”

“When did this start?”

“I can’t say I ever liked the sound of an engine,” Israel said. “I like the sound of an ocean. One gets in the way of the other.”

Sterling said, “As for her question, though, about when it started, I don’t think she was asking when you decided you liked the sound of the water better than the motor. I think she meant when did you start fishing that way, out of the rowboat? Is that fair, Jenn?”

“That’s fair.”

Israel looked at Sterling with flat eyes and said, “With my father.”

“Charlie used the big boat most of the time.”

“Sure. It made sense then. You could still fish in the Lost Zone.”

Sterling’s eyes brightened. “Did that matter to you? The law change?”

“No.”

“Why not? In this community, it mattered to everyone.”

“You telling me or asking me?”

“Asking.”

“Same answer: It did not matter to me.”

“Same question: Why not?”

“Because it felt inevitable.”

“Not to everyone.”

“Thought you were asking me specifically.”

“What’s the goal with the rowboat?” Salazar interjected.

Israel turned to her. “The goal?”

“You really just trying to avoid the sound of an engine?”

Israel took a breath, tried to keep his attention on her, tried to forget Sterling was in the room. “The goal was to connect with a way of life that existed out here once. How my grandfather lived. It was a hard way but it was a clean way. It was just you and the sea and your body and the world’s body. And we’re killing that world…” He paused, thinking that killing was the wrong word. “We invent all kinds of poison and we call that progress, and some of it is good, sure, but all of it comes with a cost, right? Maybe the worst of those poisons is distraction. A lack of attention to the right things. When I came out of prison, I wanted the peace out here.”

“You needed to find that calm,” Sterling threw in. “Sure.”

Needed to find that calm. As if Israel usually didn’t have it. What was the opposite of calm? Tumultuous, wild, enraged. Crazy.

How someone would have to be in order to gun down seven men on a yacht.

He watched Salazar. Tried to breathe in her calm, her confidence. How was she doing it? How did you look that steady when seven people were dead?

“But you keep the big boat,” Salazar said. “Why not sell it?”

“These answers are going to tell you who killed those seven people on that yacht?”

There was a beat, Sterling squinting at him and Salazar leaning back, that silver bracelet like a handcuff sliding from her wrist up her forearm, the blank notepad sitting before her. The red light on the recorder glowed.

“My grandfather built that boat,” Israel said. “One of the last ones he made at a boatyard that was pretty famous in its day. It belonged in the family.”

His uncle’s jaw tightened at that.

“For the memories?” Salazar asked.

There was a pulse behind Israel’s eyes. He made himself flatten his hands, pressed his palms against his knees. “Sure. The memories.”

“So you got out, came back to the island, and you wanted the quiet,” Salazar said. “The calm.”

Israel looked at the red light. “You don’t have much to go on, do you?”

“What’s that?”

“Seven people butchered on that yacht like the friggin’ Manson Family stopped by, and…” Israel spread his hands. “You’re talking to a lobsterman.”

“We’ve. . .