A Dredging in Swann

by Tim Garvin

  Then he needed to calm, get his heart rate down so he could think. In a few hours there would be guys all over the campsite, guys that would definitely be thinking, picking up bits of this and that and sending it to labs. So search. Hurry, but take the time. With his beam on high he began a sand-kicking, baby-stepping grid search, found a few tent pegs, which they could have maybe traced to the surplus store, where they could have gotten his father on a video, who knows these days, found the matchbox he had tucked under the tent, found the paperback he was reading, some thriller from his sister’s house. With his sister’s fucking name in it. Found a Venus flytrap, right there on the sand, the one he had been fooling with and had tucked under the tent beside the matches. Which would have been like saying, over here, guys, it’s Cody Cooper, the Venus flytrap poacher recently nabbed in Brunswick County.

  He finished the search, then sank to his knees to breathe, trying to calm. Then he grid-searched once more and found nothing. Footprints though, fuck! He fished the Ka-Bar from the front pocket of his jeans, unsheathed it, hacked off a four-foot branch of leafy scrub, and started brushing sand. He had come from the boat to the tent site, then to the water and waded, and that was it. No, he scouted the island. But that was before the rain, so the footprints would be washed out. So boat to the tent, tent to the water. He brushed and brushed, one-handed, using the flashlight, backing right to the boat, getting every last single mark.

  He stepped into the boat and shoved off with an oar. He was stoned, goddammit. What was he forgetting? He set the motor into the water, pulled the cord, once, twice, set the choke, pulled, and the motor kicked into its purr.

  Two minutes later he was entering the inlet—and realized he had forgotten the fucking missiles. He turned around, nosed back into the creek, cruised to the trailer snag, and loaded two of the three missiles into the bottom of the boat, then realized, good Christ, fingerprints! He stripped off his T-shirt and spent ten furious minutes rubbing every surface he could find, once, then twice, then three times. He loaded the third missile and sat for a moment, trying to think. Nothing came. One thing for sure, if he hadn’t forgotten the missiles, he wouldn’t have remembered about fingerprints. Wild-ass fate.

  Precious Box

  Seb came awake to a knuckle rap on the driver’s window. He switched on the key and hit the window toggle. Kate Jersey, the crime scene tech, leaned down. Her tan one-piece was streaked with mud.

  “We’re signing out, Seb.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Getting toward dawn.”

  “You get anything?”

  “Fingerprints. Couple of crappy footprints in the hole. Rain washed everything up top.”

  “The phone?”

  “No phone, and no prints on the selfie stick. But here’s a good clue. No fingerprints on the top of the ladder either, where you have to grab it going up or down.”

  “Wiped?”

  “Maybe wiped. But he had a pair of gloves down in the hole, so maybe just gloves.”

  “What about the middle part of the ladder?”

  “What a detective. Yep, lots of fingerprints there. Also, not certain about this, but my impression is the ground was smoothed before the rain. Not even any contours. But that’s a guess.”

  “Anything in the truck? Like a phone?”

  “Nothing. A box of Kleenex.”

  “So maybe we got one, maybe not.”

  “That’s it. We finished the house, and the stable back there. It’s full of old firewood. The TV vans are come and gone. Doug Baker kept them away from you at great personal cost, so you owe him big-time.”

  “What do you hear about the chopper crash?”

  “Twenty-one dead.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know it.”

  “Anything else in the hole?”

  “Just mud. We probed for the phone and did not hit the top of a treasure chest.”

  “How deep did you go?”

  “Two feet about.”

  “Where’s Randall?”

  “He’s in his cruiser, failing to stay awake.”

  “Okay, Kate. When will I hear from you?”

  “This afternoon. I’m going home to get a nap. You look nicely rested.”

  He met her eyes. “I’m going to be investigated.”

  “I know. I was careful with my report, Seb. I think you’ll be good. The sheriff left you on this case, right?”

  “That might be bad though. Start the SBI thinking favoritism.”

  “Start the reporters thinking, is what I thought. Look, me and Ernie are out of here. We’ll come back for the gear.”

  She joined a tall man carrying two evidence cases. He handed her one, and they crossed to separate cars.

  Seb spoke into his radio.

  “This is Seb. Who copies?”

  A man’s voice came back. “This is Bob, Seb. What’s up?”

  “I need a deputy out here to relieve Randall.”

  “On the way.”

  Randall’s cruiser was still parked near the lawn, and beyond it, on the grass, two silver tripods of lights had been switched off. The ladder and grass and dark of the hole had begun to emerge in dawn. Randall, still wearing his rain slicker, was slumped onto the wheel in the front seat. Seb rapped him awake. Randall sat up and snugged his cap, then got out and leaned against a fender, waking more. The radio murmured hip-hop.

  Seb said, “Go home, man. Good job tonight. I called for your relief. Just leave me the logbook, and I’ll hand it off. I’m going to do the house again.”

  “If you need me, I’m fine.”

  “No, man. Go home and sleep. First thing tomorrow, I want you to start a canvass, all the farms, all the homesteads, all the trailers, except leave Coopertown to me. And leave Cooper Farms to me too. I know Squint Cooper, and I’ll see him tonight. From you, I want any traffic—foot, bikes, cars. Call me when you’re halfway done and report. Sleep four hours then up and going again, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Seb waved him out of the lot. The scene had widened in the gray light—the pine forest at the edge of tall grass, the bulk of the log lodge and its wide lap of gravel, lines of white and pink azaleas on the brick walks. Death and darkness again disappearing into life and light. The routine submergence. In two hours, he would appear before Mia, who would ask, what is your job? He would say, I am the sandman. I put the past to sleep.

  After Stinson and Morris left, Seb conferred with Barb and Marty and handed out assignments. In the morning, Barb would start the court order for phone records. Marty, still play-griping, would contact the prison system for records and a list of Sackler’s associates. Seb would start with the daughter. Stinson had rescheduled the morning briefing for eleven-­thirty. Since the scene was isolated, and there was no witness canvass to perform, when CSI arrived, Barb and Marty left for home.

  Seb had walked the house already and walked it again with the techs. When grogginess took his concentration, he retreated to his car to sleep. It was unlikely to be a forensic solve anyway. It would be a whodunit dig. If it was murder. Before he slept, he browsed databases for the Sackler name. The oldest child, Virginia, whom he would interview today, worked at the Amboise town hall. Her brother, Marshall, was doing federal narcotics time. Raymond Charles, Virginia’s husband, was an addict and had disappeared. All three fell into the who-benefits category.

  He crossed to the pine porch that ran a hundred feet along the entire front of the lodge. A row of knee-high red clay pots were lined against the log wall. At the end of the row, fifty-odd topsoil and cow-manure bags were neatly stacked. The ornate handles of the double doors were hazed with whitish fingerprint dust. He laid the logbook on the entranceway decking, then fished a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket and slipped them on. He slid on a pair of Tyvek booties from the crime tech box and pushed through into the cav
ernous great room.

  A balcony crowned three sides. Hallways led to the wings on both floors. A fireplace and stone wall rose to the vaulted roof, and beside it a wide stairway curved upstairs to the balconies. The fireplace, he noted, was clean of ash.

  The room was filled with a jumble of furniture—couches, chairs, dressers, tables, beds—some still in cartons. Three bicycles were propped against a wall. Fingerprint dust lay like mildew over likely surfaces, the mantel, wooden accents on the furniture, a single beer bottle on an end table.

  He stopped beside the fireplace and closed his eyes for a moment to see if he could tell what he thought. He thought murder but couldn’t tell whether it was hunch or the love of chase that pulled. Both probably.

  He browsed the halls, circled through each empty room. In the kitchen, he opened the empty refrigerator, then opened the freezer side and found several packets of seeds—spinach, lettuce, tomato, watermelon, cantaloupe. Through the kitchen window he noticed the stable Kate had mentioned.

  He left his booties beside the back door and crossed the overgrown lawn on a stone walk. The stable was a single-slope open-front wooden building with four stalls. In one, a new lawn tractor was parked out of the rain. The others were halfway filled with dusty stacks of firewood. The left wall had a built-in shelf filled with odds and ends, a few lamps, a rusted cross-cut saw, ancient-looking wrenches and hammers, empty picture frames, a tin Phineas Brothers tobacco box. The box’s top was ornate and colorful and embossed with a large pb. It was dusted with fingerprint powder, and, unlike the other items on the shelf, it was not covered with natural dust. He held the base of the box and popped open the hinged lid. It was empty.

  As he closed the lid, he saw the white edge of the photograph protruding from a crack where the shelf met the wall. He lifted it free. It was a small, crisply focused black-and-white shot of a middle-aged black man and boy in a skiff, both smiling at the camera, the boy self-consciously, the man benignly. Seb placed the photo in a plastic bag and slid it into his jacket pocket.

  He started away, then turned. There was an oddity. The flooring of the stable was dusty gray boards, rough cut in one-foot widths, and covered with the debris of time—pebbles of clod, brown leaf pieces, bits of bark. The board nearest the back wall was shorter and the smattering of its detritus cover had shifted, so that one side was clearer than the other. He found a handleless sawblade on the shelf, slipped it between a crack, twisted the teeth into the edge, and pulled. The board came up, revealing a hole. On its bottom lay a dirty white towel. He lifted it free, shook it open, and draped it across the woodpile. He inspected the hole with his phone’s flashlight. It was empty, but just deep and long enough for the tobacco box. He took a photograph with his phone. The murder hunch strengthened.

  Cat Island

  Cody had started down the inlet, heading toward his sister’s dock, then thought, what the fuck, haul the launcher back to my trailer, stow it in the bedroom, tell my sister not to go in there?

  He needed to stash it. He needed to bury it. He needed a fucking shovel. He could bury it on a beach though, just with his Ka-Bar to cut sand, the way he built his sand chair. Sites flashed through—the island with the Civil War fort, or Cat Island, or just any unnamed island in the marshes—but they would see the boat track and his footprints, or if he branch-brushed it, still it would leave a disturbance. Who came ashore here, our missile thief? Then an idea came, and he swung the boat around and headed back down the inlet toward the ocean.

  Ten minutes later he was nosing up Cat Island slough. He had passed a couple of flounder skiffs back in the creek mouths, one with two guys, a poler and a guy in the bow gigging with a lantern, the other with one guy doing both jobs. If investigators found them on the inlet in the morning—unlikely anyway, since most giggers had jobs—they could report, yeah, we saw a skiff, so what? Some gigger changing water, so what?

  A hundred and fifty yards in, his high beam picked up the timbers of the Cat Island wharf, stuck into the beach like giant black and gray splinters. Back before the war, when the island was still private, somebody had built a fishing resort and boat dock. After the resort folded and the island was gifted to the state, hurricanes blew the buildings off, and the wharf had been nibbled to sticks. There was still a broken pier section sticking out toward the water and a place under it where high school kids made fires, drank beer, and smoked dope, which fifteen years ago Cody himself had done. And always a confusion of footprints.

  He nosed in, locked the motor up, then hopped out and tugged the boat firm. He shouldered the case and trotted up the beach, spraying light ahead of him. The sand was bumpy with rained-on footprints, and directly under the wharf overhang were two firepits, each circled with stone, no doubt ferried in by enterprising kids. Between them the sand was sodden and melted-looking, but nicely disturbed, so just right. He positioned himself between the firepits and began to cut with his Ka-Bar. In ten minutes he had made a six-foot-long, foot-and-a-half-deep trench. Cody tipped in the case, rubbed it into place, then ran for the missiles and carried all three to the trench in an arm cradle.

  He arranged the missiles in the hole, covered them with his sleeping bag, then pushed sand across them, thinking—too late—that sand in the delicate works could make them inoperable. But it was hurry hurry.

  Then, as he was pouring water over the sand with the plastic bailing pitcher, a cold feeling swept through him. He thought, what does it matter if they are inoperable? What am I going to do with them? He stopped and straightened his aching spine to his six-four height. The grass had worn off, and the world seemed ordinary and dull. He combed sandy hands through his thinning hair, and thought, fuck, fuck, fuck, I stole three Stinger missiles.

  A Song for

  Leo Sackler

  Seb saved the master bedroom for last. It contained a single sheet-covered bed with a light blanket neatly folded in front of two pillows, a floor lamp, three cardboard boxes with clean clothes, jeans, T-shirts, a sweatshirt, underwear, socks. A fourth box contained dirty clothes. He dumped it out and felt the empty pockets of the single pair of jeans. Three car magazines, each swollen with dog-ears, lay beside the bed.

  An old rolltop desk sat against a bay window, half blocking the view of the gray-green inlet. The cover was up and the drawer pulls and desktop had been dusted. In one of the desk’s folder slots, Seb found a torn-open ten-pack of manila folders, and beside it three folders with contents. In each folder he found a printed CSI form noting that the contents had been scanned into electronic case file 05172017-02.

  One folder contained a single sheet, a prison form documenting Sackler’s release from Carteret Correctional Facility on May 3, 2017. The second held papers related to the purchase, for $26,400, of a 1954 Ford pickup from Brawlie’s Antique Cars. It was red-stamped with paid. The third contained receipts with date and time printed. Which meant they could pull security video. Seb paged through them—Lowe’s for the pots and soil, Sears for the furniture, bicycles, clothes, riding mower, and a few kitchen items. The last receipt was from Verizon. Sackler had opened an account the day after his release and purchased two new iPhones.

  Seb turned, glanced around the room for electrical outlets. There were several, but none charging a phone. He crossed the room and swept his hand behind the bed. He felt the receptacle and charger cube and followed the wire to a phone that had been slipped under the mattress. He bagged it, then swiped it through the plastic and found it was unlocked. He surfed to the camera and opened the stored items. There were no pictures but several videos. He opened the last one. After some blurred camera shaking—Leo getting the selfie stick positioned—the picture stilled and showed the well and ladder descending into the dark. An off-camera voice said, “Down buckets. Down buckets.” Three white plastic buckets tumbled into the picture with a drumming racket, their nylon ropes trailing into the murk. Leo’s feet appeared at the side of the frame and he began to descend the ladder rung b
y rung. He wore jeans and a dirt-stained white T-shirt. Seb noted he gripped the ladder sides and was not wearing gloves.

  Leo stopped halfway down and looked up at the camera. His face gleamed with sweat. He kicked one leg to the side, then the other. He said, “Nothing in my hands, little friend. Nothing up my sleeve.” He continued down. At the bottom, his white-topped head began a rhythmic dipping and weaving. The sound of shoveling was heard.

  Seb closed the video and surfed back seven files to the first video. It opened again with blurred shaking as Leo positioned the phone on the selfie stick. The picture again showed the top of the well, then the buckets cascading into the darkness. Leo’s voice started off-screen and continued as he entered the frame and began to descend the ladder. Again he stopped halfway down and gazed upward. He said, “You got to go on and on like an ant. An ant don’t think about the hole he’s digging. He just thinking about that little bit of earth he got. Just hoist it up and carry it up and lay it on the pile and go back down and get his self another one. Don’t think an inch ahead. He’s digging his self a home.” He paused, then nodded, looking intently at the camera. “That’s what I’m doing, little friend. I’m digging my home, just like a little ant.” He descended into the murk and sounds of digging were heard. Seb swiped the video forward. More sounds of digging. Seb blanked the screen and tucked the phone into his jacket pocket. Crime scene would have to watch every minute of every video.