Skeleton Sea

by Dwiggins, Toni

  SKELETON SEA

  Toni Dwiggins

  __________

  The Forensic Geology Series, Book 4

  All books in the series are stand-alone and can be read in any order.

  Digital Edition. © 2015 by Toni Dwiggins. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other, except for brief quotations in printed reviews—without prior permission of the publisher.

  All characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. Certain geographical features have been altered. If there are factual errors in Skeleton Sea, they are mine alone.

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  ** Cover art **

  Joe Simmons

  ** Maps are located at the end of the book **

  MAPS

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAPS

  EPIGRAPH

  “The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”

  — Jacques-Yves Cousteau, oceanographer

  ***

  “No water, no life. No blue, no green.”

  — Sylvia Earle, oceanographer

  CHAPTER 1

  When the detective phoned to enlist our services he characterized the case as a mystery at sea.

  Thirty-eight hours later we got our first look at the ghost boat.

  It had been found adrift and deserted.

  It looked ghostly enough right now, docked in the fog at the end of the pier.

  Fog eclipsed the horizon. Best I could tell, the pier jutted into a channel near the mouth of a harbor. I strained to see farther but I could not find the ocean beyond. Best I could do was taste its salt and smell its kelp and hear its waves.

  Walter and I stepped onto the ramp that led down to the pier where a man in a Morro Bay Police Department parka awaited us. He was tall and lean with graphite-gray hair worn in a spiky pompadour. He looked to be in his forties or fifties—younger than Walter's sixties-ish, as Walter liked to phrase it, older than my straight-up thirty—in any case, experienced.

  The detective greeted us first. “I'm Doug Tolliver, and if I'm not mistaken you'll be Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws of Sierra Geoforensics.”

  I smiled. “You're not mistaken.”

  Walter said, “We're pleased to meet you.”

  “I'm pleased you two agreed to come on such short notice.”

  “You were in luck,” Walter said, “we'd just wrapped up a case.”

  “Let's hope that luck holds.” Tolliver gave us a probing look. “Because this one's damn strange.”

  Walter's eyebrows lifted and then he smiled, face seaming like a layered seabed.

  I shivered.

  Wished I'd worn a warm scarf.

  Or perhaps it was a shiver of anticipation. I had to admit that the detective had hooked me, too. I felt curiosity kindling, the imperative to find out what happened to that boat, out there at sea.

  Tolliver directed us down the pier. “Welcome to my patch of ocean.”

  ***

  Early this morning we'd left our home base in the California mountain town of Bishop, embarking on the four-hundred-mile drive to the California central coast town of Morro Bay. Bananas and donuts and thermos of coffee on the road for breakfast, In-N-Out burgers for lunch, vowing to eat vegetarian for dinner. We took turns driving and reading aloud—Walter, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; me, Boats for Dummies. We arrived here at the edge of the sea in the early afternoon.

  Tired, buzzed on caffeine, happy to stretch our legs, ready to collect the evidence.

  ***

  As we moved down the pier the fog shifted and the boat gained definition. It was about twenty-five feet long, stacked with a wheelhouse and a mast and antennae and wires and lines that I hadn't yet learned about. The wheelhouse was at the front and on the open deck behind there was a big drum wrapped in netting.

  The name painted on the white hull in red block letters was Outcast.

  We halted beside the boat.

  Tolliver asked, “You want the whole nine yards before we talk evidence?”

  Walter nodded. “On the phone, you said the fisherman disappeared.”

  “Uh-huh.” Tolliver folded his arms. “Here’s everything we know. It’s not a helluva lot. The Outcast turns up adrift, yesterday morning, not far outside the harbor. Nobody aboard. Had her running lights on, for night fishing. She belongs to an anchovy fisherman named Robbie Donie. No sign of Donie, or his body—the Coast Guard did a tide-currents-wind grid check. We assume he went out fishing the night before, Saturday—it's usually a nighttime job. Nobody saw him leave the harbor on that trip. Donie runs a small-scale operation. The fellow who crews for him is visiting family back in Pennsylvania, and he has an alibi. Nobody home at Donie’s place. He lives alone, divorced. There's an aunt in Bakersfield who never sees him and doesn’t much care. Not many friends. Nobody reported him missing. Hell, just see what he named his boat. Outcast.”

  “Are you thinking homicide?” Walter asked.

  “I’m looking into it—the logbook’s missing and the GPS is broken. That raises the question. But if we go the homicide route, we need a better motive than somebody thought Donie was disagreeable. I thought so myself.”

  “Any prints?”

  “Donie’s of course, and half a dozen unidentified sets. One set will be from Jim Horowitz, he’s the crew. We also collected hairs and fibers. Old stuff, new stuff, we’ll have to see.” Tolliver glanced toward the sea. “Other side of the coin is, could be an accident. Fishing is a damn dangerous operation. And if that’s what it was, that’s sorrowful enough, but it happens.”

  “Cassie and I will shed some light.”

  Tolliver slowly nodded.

  I said, “Endeavor to.”

  “Endeavor. Please. I've got three things I want you to shed light on. First is this damage on the stern rub rail.”

  The boat was angled so that the Outcast's stern butted up to the pier. I'd read the relevant section in Boats for Dummies so I immediately ID'
d the rub rail here: a vinyl strip protected the seam where the hull met the deck. There was room for only one of us so I took my hand lens from the field kit and moved in. A long scrape marred the rub rail and it was encrusted with tiny mineral grains. I put my lens to a large-ish grain. It came into twenty-power magnification. Size, somewhere around seventy microns. Shape, angular. Color, reddish. I used tweezers to pluck out the grain. Walter passed me a specimen dish.

  Tolliver hovered. “What do you think?”

  I said, “An oxide of iron.” I passed the dish to Walter and he grunted in agreement.

  Tolliver said, “I thought maybe the boat collided with something, maybe a rusting buoy. Or it got scraped by some kind of debris, tossed up there by turbulence. But it sure doesn't look like an impact gouge.”

  “Is the seafloor around here heavy in iron?”

  “Despite claims to the contrary from boaters who’ve run aground, the seafloor doesn’t just jump up and hit a boat.”

  I smiled. “I was thinking more along the lines of a...sand bar or something.”

  Walter said, “You did mention sand evidence, Detective.”

  “Make it Doug. Yeah, I did. There was sand in a duffel pack lying on the deck near the drum roller. The drawstring top was wide open. Looked like somebody ransacked the thing. Found what he was after, or it wasn't there to begin with. All we found was a bit of sand.” Tolliver took a zippered baggie from his pocket and held it up.

  We peered. Not much sand in there. A pinch.

  Enough.

  I said, “And the third thing?”

  “Over here.” Tolliver led us to a plastic bin, and opened it.

  Smelled like brine. Smelled like the sea.

  Inside was a rubbery stalk of brownish kelp with leafy fronds and fat bulbs, attached to a tangled root ball.

  “We found that entangled in the anchor chain,” Tolliver said. “It's giant kelp, grows in coastal waters. I'm looking at the idea that Donie anchored in a kelp bed night before last. And then pulled up anchor. And then went overboard. And then the boat went adrift.”

  Walter said, “Mightn’t he have caught that kelp on a previous trip?”

  “Not likely. No experienced fisherman is gonna leave kelp tangled in his anchor chain.”

  I said, “And our evidence?”

  “In there.” Tolliver indicated the thick tangle of reddish roots at the base of the stalk. “That's the holdfast—a chunk of it, anyway. It anchors the kelp on rocky surfaces. All kinds of critters live in holdfasts—anemones, sponges, crabs, what have you—but you'll be interested in the pebble caught inside. The holdfast has been to the lab and the techs got what they wanted. Thought you’d want to extract the pebble yourselves.”

  We both nodded. Grateful for a cop who recognized rocks as evidence, who treated them with the same respect given to fingerprints or cigarette butts or bloodstains or what have you.

  “I'll have you sign off on the chain of evidence and you can take this stuff with you. Oh, and, we'll be moving the Outcast to our storage dock so if you need another look, let me know.” Tolliver ran a hand through his hair, spiking it even more. “I'm real eager to know what happened to her out there.”

  I peered through the fog, which had thinned enough to reveal the general lay of the land. Of the water. Tolliver's pier stuck out into a narrow channel, which extended southward into the mist. The pier was at the northern end of the channel, which bent westward and opened up into a harbor. At the harbor’s mouth was a mammoth rock, a fog-hung ghost whose shape and height I could not clearly discern. Big. I looked past the ghost rock, out to open sea, just visible now as a gray rolling field beyond the mouth of the harbor. The sea was an inhospitable-looking place. Had been inhospitable, certainly, to the Outcast.

  I turned back to Tolliver. “Are you sure Donie was aboard? Could the tie line have come undone and the boat went adrift? Or someone cut the line?”

  “Let me show you something that says the Outcast didn’t just goddamn wander off.”

  He moved to the ladder that was braced on the pier, rising to the railing at the stern. He looked back at us. “Come on, it's aboard.”

  We joined him.

  He started up the ladder. “Here's where it gets even stranger.”

  ***

  At first, as I stepped over the railing, I thought blood has been spilled. And then I saw I was wrong. There were stains sprayed across the deck in thick teardrops like projectile blood spatters. But blood dries brown. These stains were blue-black.

  “Feel free,” Tolliver said. “My techs have already sampled.”

  Walter approached the nearest stain. Squatted. Took out his hand lens.

  Tolliver said, “You need a magnifying glass to tell you that’s ink?”

  Walter stood. “I’m not a mariner—much as I might have wished it. I see black viscous stains on a boat and the first thing I think is engine oil.”

  “Ink from what?” I asked. “Octopus? All this?”

  “Squid,” Tolliver said.

  “You said Donie fished for anchovies.”

  “That’s right. But he was also doing a little moonlighting, taking sport fishers out. My town’s got two businesses—a working fishing port, and tourists. We get a lot of sport fishers, real hotshots. About a month ago, we got an invasion of squid.”

  “Invasion?”

  “I’m not talking market squid, the kind on your plate. I’m talking jumbo.” Tolliver lifted his arm above his head, as if holding up a trophy catch. “Man-size.”

  I thought, holy shit.

  “Invasion from where?” Walter asked.

  “From southern waters, coming up from the Humboldt Current. They’re called Humboldt squid.”

  “Why are they coming?”

  “Hunting—the fish they eat are moving north, something to do with warmer waters moving north.” Tolliver shrugged. “Supposedly.”

  I looked again at the deck, at the length and breadth of the spray, the sheer quantity of black teardrops. “You think...”

  “I think hunting Humboldts is a whole new ballgame.” Tolliver pointed out a big smear of ink near the stern rail. There was a heel print in the ink. “Rubber boot. Slippery deck.”

  “I see why you think he went overboard.”

  “It happens.”

  “And the sport fisher?”

  “We're checking missing persons reports. Still, if Donie was out squid jigging by himself... Risky business.”

  Walter cast a glance at the thick net wrapped around the drum roller.

  “That’s how you take anchovies,” Tolliver said. “Here’s how you take Humboldts.”

  Tolliver led us to an open fiberglass gear locker. We looked inside. Reels of heavy-duty fishing line. Foot-long tubes that looked like glowsticks, ringed by multi-spiked hooks.

  “Humboldts hunt in packs, like a damn gang. They often come up at night—and light attracts them. Attach that jig to your line, bait the hooks, put the jig in the water. If they're around, they hit it.”

  Walter gestured to the ink. “And get caught.”

  “There were no squid in the hold,” Tolliver said. “So I assume the one that got caught was used as chum. Humboldts are cannibalistic.”

  I said, “It sounds a little dangerous.”

  “Like starting a bar-room brawl.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Detective Tolliver was right,” I said. “It is strange.”

  Walter looked up from his scope. “Tell me.”

  He'd been examining the pebble from the kelp holdfast. I'd been examining the iron oxide scraping from the Outcast rub rail.

  I said, “I've got hematite. Just hematite.”

  He considered that a moment. “Puzzling, certainly.”

  I gazed out the sliding-glass door at the sea. Strange, puzzling, certainly a mystery right now. Something out there had left its hematite mark on the rail—but hematite all on its lonesome was not what I'd expected.

  “Perhaps another look?” Walter said
.

  I shot him a look. Very tactful. He meant, perhaps I'd missed something.

  Perhaps I had.

  We'd just gotten started.

  We'd only just returned from the cafe across the street, our bellies full on Mexican omelets.

  Last night—Monday evening, after finishing our evidence collection—we’d set up base at a motel just outside town that Tolliver had arranged. The Shoreline was a sturdy block of beachfront rooms, no frills but well-kept, white paint and blue trim. A nod to the nautical but no plastic seagulls, no kitsch. Practical and no-nonsense. Like Tolliver. There was that handy cafe across the street and, even better, sand and ocean right outside the sliding-glass door. We would not normally have chosen a beachfront place because Walter always kept an accountant’s eye on our travel budget but Tolliver’s cousin owned the motel and cut us a deal.

  We had a suite at the end of the block, two rooms with a kitchenette common room in between. We stocked the tiny kitchen with coffee and the bag of leftover donuts and made the common room our lab.

  Our portable lab had taken up the cargo section of Walter’s Explorer, and it now filled this room to the walls. White walls, no dings, one large seascape of boats in the sunset. Ikea knock-off dinette set, which served as our workbench.

  On my half of the dinette workbench sat a specimen dish of reddish grains and the X-ray diffractometer—a nifty piece of equipment that shows the pattern of atoms and tells you what you have.

  I had hematite, no doubt.

  But there should be something further.

  I put another few grains through the XRD and got the same result.

  “Okay,” I said, “Straight hematite. I'm officially calling it strange.”

  “Are you officially abandoning the rusty buoy hypothesis?”

  “I'm sure not in love with it.” Rust, in a seawater environment, normally consisted of several products—hematite, yes, but also other iron oxides along with trace amounts of metals from the buoy. “Still, given that the transfer occurred up high, on that rub rail, a rusty buoy would be nice.”

  “We can't always get what would be nice.” Walter put his eyes back to his scope.

  I got up and went to the open door and stared out at the gray sand and gray tide pool boulders and gray sea beyond. Nothing to see out there. No inspiration to be found. Just fog. It was August, for pity’s sake. Summer should be bright. The sand should be gold and the sea blue. In truth, when this case popped up we both had reason to jump at the chance to head for the ocean, to get away from our home town, which had been our home town for only half a year. Our real home town—the one I grew up in, the one Walter settled in as a young man—no longer existed. Obliterated by a volcanic eruption. That, and the death of loved ones, had left us stunned. We'd relocated to another mountain town, nice enough but not home. Maybe someday it would be. Meanwhile, we put our noses to our work and slowly healed. And now we had gotten away. An intriguing case, a mystery at sea. The chance to reset, renew. If only the damn sun would come out.