“Yeah, sis and I were in negotiations. Profit-sharing and all that.”
“How’d Robbie find out?”
Jake sighed. “One too many of Pedro’s beers. On both our parts. Robbie boasts about his charters, so I say been thinking about that myself, so Robbie says he won’t let no damn Keasling horn in on his new gig. So he inks my dock, warning me off. End of big squid war.”
“In one sense,” Walter said. “In another sense, one could say the squid war ended with Mr. Donie missing and his boat adrift.”
Jake shrugged.
“I heard through the grapevine,” Tolliver said, “something about the Sea Spray’s engine getting damaged. About a month ago. Any chance that was Robbie?”
Jake shrugged.
Tolliver locked eyes with Jake. “Here’s a theory. Robbie warned off you and Sandy, made you think twice about using the Sea Spray to compete with the Outcast. So how about you retaliated? How about you got on board his boat this last Saturday night, maybe to dump some ink, maybe do a little damage. And things got out of hand. Or maybe you, or you and Sandy, took the Sea Spray out to intercept him, squid-hunting. And things got out of hand.”
I thought, and both boats encountered that mysterious something that left iron-embedded scrapes on their rub rails.
Jake belched. “Here’s my theory. Hunting Humboldts is dangerous. Robbie thought he was the man—superstitious as hell but thought he could fish anything. The dumbshit probably took a stupid risk out there and that’s how the story ends. Accident.”
“I truly hope so,” Tolliver said.
“We done here? I should be getting to work.” Jake toed a tangled hose. “Coil the hose or something.”
“As soon as my geologists get their samples, we’re done.”
“You don't need a search warrant or something? It's my little beach.”
“Your little beach is public property, Jake.”
Jake shrugged—no big deal—but his coppery eyes fixed on me, piercing.
As Walter and I started down the ramp to the thin beach I thought, Jake Keasling plays the slacker but he sure is interested in what we turn up in the case of Robbie Donie's disappearance.
CHAPTER 9
After a full day of Keaslings yesterday, we turned to the geology.
Tolliver had driven us back to the Shoreline Motel and we’d set to work. Take-out deli sandwiches for dinner, careful not to contaminate the evidence with crumbs. We’d worked until nearly midnight and then started again this morning. Omelets again for breakfast at the place across the street, of which Walter had already grown fond. And then we put our noses back to the scopes and worked into the afternoon, skipping lunch.
As we worked, two things vexed me.
I pushed back from the dinette-table workbench and stared out the sliding glass door.
It was a bright afternoon. The sun was at last blessedly shining and the sand was gold and the water was blue and a brown sea lion frolicked just offshore. It was the view I’d wished for.
And yet I shivered. What was going on out there?
Not knowing, not understanding, vexed me.
I spotted another color in the tide pool, beneath a rock ledge, a red so vibrant I sucked in a breath.
Walter looked up from his microscope. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“I know that sound you make. It’s never nothing.”
“It’s just a color.” I pointed. “That red. It got me thinking but it’s probably nothing.”
Walter looked out the glass door, taking a moment, because at first all you see beneath the rock ledge is that vibrant red and only after examination do you make it out to be the curled-up wedge of a starfish.
“A starfish,” he said.
“Yes but you have to really look. And I didn’t have time to really look, on the Sea Spray yesterday—there was something in the diver's mesh bag. I just glimpsed the color, a starfish red.” As I stared now at the starfish beneath the ledge I could make out its shape, a fat bat-like shape. “The thing in the bag was cylindrical. I think.”
“A pony bottle, perhaps?”
We'd learned about pony bottles in Belize—spare tanks some divers carried in case of emergency. “Could be,” I said. “About the right length, I think. Color was different, like I said. Red, instead of the yellow pony bottles we saw in Belize.” And now my memory morphed the cylinder in the mesh bag to a red pony bottle. “I don't know. What I do know is that the bag was empty on the dock. Whatever was in there had disappeared.”
“Like the diver.”
“Yeah.”
Tolliver had phoned this morning with the news that the diver fled the hospital, without paying or checking out. Tolliver was monumentally pissed, and had an officer looking into it.
Walter said, “Maybe the diver went looking for that missing something—although I can't see how he'd know what happened to his gear, since he was unconscious.”
“It’s not the diver I’m wondering about, to be honest.”
Walter waited.
“Lanny was handling the diver’s gear on the boat.”
Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Are you suggesting that Lanny took the red something from the dive bag?”
“I don’t know. It was just a glimpse. And everybody was crowding and jostling on the boat.”
“But you wonder what happened out there.”
“Right now,” I said, “there’s a whole lot to wonder about out there.”
***
We took a break. Walter started another pot of coffee in our kitchenette. I took another look at the photograph of Birdshit Rock.
In the photograph, the crabs did not move.
Yesterday, out at Birdshit, they’d been moving all right. They’d been hauling ass out of the sea.
When Tolliver phoned this morning with the news about the diver, he’d also said he found us a marine scientist. She was based at a college in San Luis Obispo, about a half-hour drive. We decided to pay her a visit when we got the chance, but meanwhile it made no sense to speculate about the strange behavior of the crabs. It made sense to do the geology.
We had done an eyeball ID from the photo and called the whitish rock sandstone.
No discernible reddish iron-oxide tint to it. No obvious explanation there for the hematite particles embedded in the Outcast and the Sea Spray. In any case, if either boat had come close enough to collide with Birdshit Rock, the damage would have been grievous.
We’d nailed the hematite ID of the grains we’d taken from both boats. The grains were a match under the X-ray diffractometer. What we could reasonably say was that both boats acquired their grains in the same manner. Encountering the same phenomenon.
If not at Birdshit, where?
***
Waiting for the coffee to brew, I moved from the photo to the bathymetric map we’d printed and spread out on the coffee table.
What looked almost featureless beyond our glass door—the flat expanse of blue ocean reaching to the horizon—looked wildly different below the water.
At least, on the map.
It was a rugged world down there.
It was a submerged world of plains and cliffs and basins and pinnacles and canyons, and the part of this undersea world that extended from the shoreline was called the continental shelf. Here, off the central California coast, the shelf was narrow, sloping gently westward until it reached a break, and then dropping abruptly down into deeper waters.
It had not been mapped in the landlubber manner.
It had been mapped by sonar pinging the underwater landscape to show the topography. Backscatter data and sediment samples showed the geologic character of the seafloor.
It was, I thought, deeply cool. I thought of the ancient mariners whose maps marked the edge of the known seas with the caption Here There Be Dragons. I wondered what caption they’d give to the unknown and unknowable seafloor.
No longer unknowable.
Walter joined me. “Ah,” he said, handing me
a mug of coffee, “there’s the neighborhood.”
Yup, there it was. About two miles out from shore there was a long chain of plateaus and canyons and reefs and pinnacles. It was named Cochrane Bank.
An ocean bank was different turf from the surrounding seafloor. It had its own geology and with its vertical nature and rocky surfaces it created its own knotty habitat for sea life. It was a high-rise city, more lively than the surrounding sandy silty suburbs.
One high spot on Cochrane Bank actually broke the surface—Birdshit Rock, more politely labeled on the map as Bird Rock—but the remainder of the bank was at depths ranging from ten feet to well below one hundred.
I said, “Good fishing out there in the ‘hood, I’d think.”
Walter nodded. “Robbie Donie evidently thought so.”
I pictured Donie out there in the ‘hood, at night, with gang of jumbo squid and perhaps a companion with lethal intentions. I rather liked one of the Keaslings for it right now. Well, Jake or Sandy. Certainly not Lanny, no matter what he did or did not take from the diver’s mesh bag.
“That is,” Walter said, “if the pebble in the kelp holdfast came from the site where Donie anchored.”
“I’ll buy that.”
According to the aerial survey kelp map we’d downloaded, Cochrane Bank had isolated forests of giant kelp.
Indeed, the bank sported a number of likely sites. Its bedrocks were sandstone and a chaotic mix of rocks known as the Franciscan Complex. Included in that melange were fine-grained volcanic rocks that had been heavily metamorphosed.
According to the ID we’d made of our pebble, it was of volcanic origin, a basalt of the Franciscan Complex. It was a dark gray, very fine-grained with a few microscopic quartz crystals.
It could have originated on one of the many volcanic reefs or pinnacles on Cochrane Bank.
We’d found what looked like the neighborhood. What we needed were samples from the target spots, to analyze trace elements that might differentiate one from another.
Good luck with that.
There were a lot of targets.
I said, “If this was on land we could just traipse from likely prospect to likely prospect and sample and do the geology.”
Walter said, “Sampling these will require diving.”
I nodded. Well, we'd been in the water before.
“Meanwhile,” Walter said, “we have other evidence to analyze.”
I managed a guilty smile of relief. “Time to get beachy.”
Time to get to the evidence Tolliver had gotten antsy about: the sand from Robbie Donie’s duffel pack.
***
Ten minutes later we could say with certainty that the duffel sand did not come from the tiny beach beneath Captain Kayak’s dock. We’d made quick work of it—the mineralogy was unlike the sand from the duffel.
Another cardinal rule of ours: in forensic comparison, if a possible match can be promptly excluded, by God exclude it.
Which led to the next question.
If the duffel sand didn’t come from Jake Keasling’s beach, where then?
CHAPTER 10
“Gone?” Sandy Keasling pressed her cell phone to her ear, thinking she hadn’t heard right.
“Gone,” the twit on the other end repeated. “Left the building.”
She couldn’t believe this. John Silva had been semi-conscious when they took him to the hospital yesterday. She knew. She’d phoned last night. And if he’d improved this morning, wouldn’t the hospital keep him there awhile longer? Run tests. Run up a bill.
“When was he discharged?” she asked.
Twit asked in turn, “What was your name?”
She stood on her dock, squinting through the bright afternoon sunshine at the passengers boarding the Sea Spray. Wishing Silva back out at sea where he’d come from. Wishing she’d never found him. She said to the twit, “Where’d Mr. Silva go?”
“I can’t give out that information.”
“I’m his aunt.”
Twit said, “Then you should know where he went.”
“I’m from out of town. I just heard.” Sandy decided to put some spin on it. “I left early this morning. I’ve been driving for hours.” Driving, that was true enough—although it was driving the whale-watching bird-watching bucket out to sea and back on its morning run. “Just tell me where my nephew John went. I'm worried. He still living at... Oh for Pete's sake, I’m dead tired and I can’t recall the street name.”
A silence, and then Twit said, “He skipped out. Flew the coop. Delirious when they checked him in, so no records. No insurance. No billing address. How about, Auntie No-name, you come in and arrange for payment of his bill and we’ll see about helping you track him down. Or maybe you should talk to the cops. Or the other ‘relative’ who called. Last night, this morning, he's really worried, too.”
She hung up.
What other relative?
***
When she returned from the afternoon bucket-run she had an idea where to start looking for John Silva. She'd thought it over, what she knew about him. Name, occupation, and something a whole lot more useful.
It took her awhile to get the location.
A long shot, but not too long of a drive.
She drove her old Dodge pickup along the highway and took the turnoff inland, following the two-lane road through the coastal oaks until she came to the little village in the clearing. Not even that. Couple dozen houses, couple businesses. Mostly bushes and trees. Pretty. Perfect, if you wanted privacy. Perfect, if you spoke Portuguese and had nowhere else to go.
If she was an illegal, she’d be living in the back of nowhere, too.
She parked outside the Café Oporto. She pulled her ball cap low and slumped in the seat. Raised a newspaper to hide her face. Feeling like a damn fool.
A woman was approaching on the sidewalk. Middle-aged, cropped dark hair, jeans and sweatshirt. Sandy was slightly disappointed. But what had she expected—ruffled blouse and peasant skirt, like they wore at the Portuguese Festival? Sandy had been a kid when she went. She'd wanted her own ruffled blouse and peasant skirt, for about a week.
At least she'd learned a few words of Portuguese, in that week.
And the memory had brought her here, now.
The woman peered in the car as she passed. Sandy slumped lower.
Three more people passed by. None of them John Silva. Maybe she’d have to start asking around. Yeah, and people here were going to tell an outsider where John Silva could be found? But ten minutes later she spotted him coming up the sidewalk and she didn’t feel so foolish.
She got out and headed his way.
He was a short wiry man in the jeans/sweatshirt uniform. He had curly blond hair, a lot tamer than her own bushy curls. A lot blonder—from the sun, not the bottle, she guessed. Squarish face, set jaw, hideous red welt crawling up his cheek. He moved slowly but at least he was functioning. He saw her coming. He stopped, deer in the headlights, then turned and headed the other way.
She went after him. “You’re John Silva.”
He picked up his halting pace.
She easily matched him. “Joao?” she tried.
He glanced her way then snapped his look to the sidewalk.
“Do you speak English?”
“No English,” he muttered. He suddenly veered across the street. No crosswalk. No traffic either.
She came along. “I can say a couple things in Portuguese. Learned at the Festival when I was a kid, eating sopas.” Boiled meat and cabbage poured over a slab of bread. “Boa comida.” Good food.
It worked. He smiled.
She seized the chance. “I’m Sandy Keasling. Captain of the Sea Spray. I’m the one who pulled you out of the ocean yesterday.”
He gave a shudder. He said, finally, “Thanks you.”
“No English?”
“Little English.”
They’d nearly stopped. There was a park just ahead, a patch of grass with kiddie swings and picnic tables. She po
inted. “Can we sit?” She angled off the sidewalk, onto the park path, throwing him a look. “Please? Por favor?” Shit—that was Spanish.
Well, good enough. He came along with her and sat on the bench opposite her, arms folded on the table. If she was reading his body English right, he thought he owed her for the rescue but he didn’t trust her.
She said, “What happened to you out there?”
He sat silent.
She touched her cheek.
He reddened. The welt itself purpled.
“Jellyfish,” she said. No clue how to say that in Portuguese. She cupped her hands and wiggled her fingers like tentacles.
He nodded. Face suddenly going pale.
“One of those purple-stripe jellies?” she asked.
He stared at her.
She looked around the park. Nothing purple. Not that she expected a purple wildflower here, now.
He said, almost a whisper, “Grande.”
She figured ‘grande’ meant big, just like in Spanish. Purple-stripes were big, all right. She’d seen them with bells up to two feet across. She nodded. “Grande.”
He whispered, “Enorme.”
“You saying enormous? Okay, I got it. Big.” If she had the language—or the mime skills—she’d ask him if he came across any Humboldt squid, or any whacked-out fish, anything like she’d seen yesterday out at Birdshit. On today’s runs, both morning and afternoon, she’d avoided the rock. No reason to rile the passengers. Yesterday’s load had been so freaked they didn’t leave tips. Eh, no reason to think Mr. Joao Silva came anywhere near Birdshit yesterday. But then where did he come from?
She said, “Where? How far away?” She flung her head back, flung out her arms, treading water. Body Portuguese, she hoped, for you were floating in the water half-dead. She straightened. “How far from where I found you?”
He shrugged. Universal body language.
“What happened to your boat?”
He shrugged.
“What were you doing? Why were you diving?”
He smiled, helpless.
“You had a dive bag. You had something in the bag. It was red.” Now she looked around for something colored red to point to but everything in this damn park was brown and green, except the swings and they were kiddie-pool blue. She held out her hands and shaped a bag. Mimed opening it, putting something into it.
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