Lanny seemed to be trying to shrink himself, take up as little space as possible, his arms drawn into his sides and his feet tucked under the bench.
Walter patted Lanny's arm.
Lanny did not respond.
I turned to look at the sea, at the sky. The fog was trying to lift. The sun was trying to break through. I didn't care—fog, sunlight, anything the sky cared to throw at us—we were back in our element and I relished the wind in my face and the air free for the breathing.
I wished I could forget the face down in the cavern, Flynn's mouth open like he had become a water breather.
We sped across the water, circling the algal bloom. I spotted a big wake of a boat in the distance. I focused on the boats up ahead, at the edge of the bloom.
Walter lifted his hand again, at the ready, offering Lanny the human touch.
Lanny drew himself into an even tighter space.
I wished I had something to offer him.
CHAPTER 47
Tolliver parked the Breaker perpendicular to the Sea Spray, which was roped to the Destiny.
I did not know where to look—at Jake Keasling lounging on the Sea Spray, or at Sandy Keasling standing like a flagpole at the rail of the Destiny.
Sandy settled it, calling out to us, “It's about time.”
Tolliver looked from Sandy to Jake and back to Sandy again. It took him a moment to speak, and then he said, wearily, “You want to explain all this, Sandy?”
The shifting fog had opened above the Destiny and Sandy was sunlit, inflaming her orange-blond hair. But her face was pale as the fog. She gazed from her lofty perch down at us. She said, “Lanny.” She shook her head. “Looks like you landed on your feet. Again.”
Lanny looked up.
“What the hell happened down there?” she demanded.
Tolliver said, “First you tell us what the hell happened up here.”
She looped her arms over the rail. “What happened, Doug, is my brothers and I arrived here to find your boat. With your dive flag up. So I told Lanny looks like the brass has things under control and we can go home, but he said he had a job to do.”
Again, it took Tolliver time to respond. He shook his head. He said, at last, “You arrived here on your boat?” He nodded at the Sea Spray. “You're standing on Oscar Flynn's boat. You want to explain that?”
She glanced at silent Lanny and then at silent Jake. “Eh, what's new, I get to do cleanup. Just so you know, I'm patching some of this together from what Lanny said. From what Oscar Flynn said. So, this morning, he followed Lanny—his boat has some radar-jamming stealth shit. Seems he figured, no surprise, that Lanny might screw up. And Lanny obliged. He detoured to bring me on board and then we detoured and had a little mishap—which reminds me, we were on the Outcast, and Lanny can fill you in on all that. Anyway, I didn't know the Destiny was standing off in the fog during our mishap so I ended up calling Jake for help. And that's why we arrived here on my boat. And then, like I said, Lanny went diving. And then the Destiny sneaked in, surprising the hell out of me.” She paused. “You with me so far, Doug?”
Tolliver just nodded.
“Now, Flynn. He shows up real unhappy about your boat being here, Doug. It seems when he set out this morning he hadn't been expecting you. Seems he picked your boat up on his radar someplace along the way, so when he arrived here he was pissed and suited up to dive.”
Lanny, beside me, flinched.
“Oh, one more thing. Flynn had company on the Destiny—Fred Stavis was also aboard. You just missed him. He's on a Coastie medic boat now.” She waved in the direction of shore. “Got shot.”
We just listened. It was too much. Tolliver opened his mouth to speak and then just shook his head.
“No need to give me that look, Doug. Fred's stable. I got aboard here fast as I could.” Sandy indicated the dive platform and ladder at the stern. “Did first aid, that's all I do, then I phoned the Coasties. And your people. Assume they'll be along soon.”
Tolliver finally spoke. “How did Fred get shot?”
Sandy jerked a thumb at the Sea Spray. “Ask the idiot who shot him.”
The four of us turned to look at Jake. He lounged on the bench at the stern, the bench where Walter and I had sat a week ago preparing to go whale watching, where I'd been sitting when I got my first look at Jake Keasling on the neighboring dock. He looked much the same now, breezy, although his green hair had grown out to show the blond roots.
Jake tipped his head to look up at Sandy. “This idiot saved your life.” Jake shifted to face us. “Never did trust those dudes. Especially after that diver got poisoned—on our beach. I figured if you could prove it was one of the dudes you'd arrest him. Since you didn't I figured it was up to Keaslings to watch out for Keaslings. And that's what this Keasling did. Flynn's on the ladder going down to the dive platform and Sandy's shouting she's gonna call the Coast Guard and then Fred pulls a gun. What else could I do? Self defense.” Jake put his hands in the air. They trembled.
“Jake.” Tolliver struggled to find more words. “Where's the firearm now?”
Jake slowly lowered his hands and picked up a mesh dive bag.
I stared across the water at the mesh bag, sagging with the weight of its cargo. I couldn't tell, from here, that it held a gun. I flashed back to Joao Silva's dive bag on Sandy's boat, a week ago. I hadn't been able to tell, then, what the bag held. Just something colored red. Some kind of weird synchronicity, I thought. Mesh dive bags holding trouble.
I shivered.
Walter was shivering. He said, “I propose that we head back to shore and Doug can continue his questions in a warm office.”
“Works for me.” Jake lifted his hand and splayed his fingers and shook his wrist, giving some sort of okay sign. “You good, Bro?”
Lanny, beside me, was shivering.
I had to speak. “Jake, you're lucky to still have a brother.” It hurt to speak. My throat was raw; breathing canned air; swallowing fear. Swallowing guilt. I looked up at Sandy, still leaning on the Destiny's rail. “And you, Sandy. If you'd shared information instead of building a wall around your castle you might have saved us all a lot of grief.”
Sandy leveled a long look at me, at the four of us on the Breaker, and she said, “I'll live with it.”
***
We headed back to harbor, Sandy piloting the Destiny and Jake piloting his sister's boat and Tolliver driving the Breaker, throttle opened wide.
Walter and Lanny and I rode in silence, drained to the core.
CHAPTER 48
Back at the pier, as we began to ferry gear off the boat, Lanny asked Tolliver, “Are you going to arrest me?”
We stopped in our tracks.
Lanny clutched his swim fins, one in each hand. His knuckles were white.
Tolliver finally answered. “For what?”
“For helping Mr. Flynn.”
“Son, I'm going to have a lot of questions but now isn't the time to....”
“Yes please I want to say it now.”
Tolliver shrugged, and set down the tank he'd been carrying.
Walter and I set down our gear.
Lanny licked his lips. He faced us all. “I thought the iron seed thing was hurting the ocean so I tried to shut it off and that messed up the big gate in the cavern and then Mr. Flynn told me that a lot of those big jellyfish got out—and I didn't even know about the gates and the jellyfish—so Mr. Flynn told me all about the project and then he said I betrayed him...” Lanny's voice rose, “...and then he said I could fix what I broke and he said the big gate wasn't open that long and it shut again, that's called fail secure, and he said good thing the little gate didn't open and he said he would forgive me if I went back down to put in new numbers to be sure the little gate always stayed closed so the little jellyfish couldn't ever get out. Only Mr. Flynn...” Lanny stopped.
Walter said, very gently, “Mr. Flynn was trying to kill you.”
Lanny said, “I know.”
&nbs
p; “You sabotaged his project—and you knew too much—so he sent you to open the gate. You would have been the one to get swarmed.”
“I know.”
I still didn't get it. “What did he tell you about the project?”
“It was going to be good.”
“Good?”
Lanny's eyes pleaded. “Mr. Flynn was going to be a hero and I was going to help him.”
“Didn't you understand what kind of man you were working for?”
He shook his head.
“Lanny.” I had to take in a deep breath. If I'd still been underwater my bubble trail would be off the charts. “Those creatures down there...what part of that was good?”
“That wasn't good.”
“Then what? The devil moons?”
“No that wasn't good, I didn't know that was going to happen, I just knew Mr. Flynn liked to call them devil moons.”
“Then what, Lanny? What could possibly be good about Oscar Flynn's project?”
“He was going to make sick people well.”
CHAPTER 49
Lanny got it half-right. Oscar Flynn was aiming to be a hero.
The other half: he was well on the way to being a devil.
***
The little cubozoan looked familiar. If I'd run into it in the sea—and I wasn't busy freaking out—I might think I'd encountered it before. But I hadn't. The tank's label said Chironex fleckeri and its occupant bore the reputation of the most lethal jellyfish in the world.
I moved on to the cubozoan in the second tank. It looked so familiar I would swear I'd encountered it before. But I hadn't. The second tank's label said Carybdea marsupialis. Native Californian. Compared to its cousin in the first tank, C. marsupialis was something of a wimp. At least according to Dr. Violet Russell and Wikipedia.
I moved on to the third tank, where the cubozoan I knew floated like a dandelion. It looked a good deal like the little cube in the second tank. It looked exactly like the glassy cubes I'd seen six hours ago in Oscar Flynn's aquarium in the cavern on Cochrane Bank. Here, now, in Flynn's lab, it was confined to a tank as small as a lunch box and thankfully I did not share the same water with it.
I'd hoped to never lay eyes upon such a thing again.
The label on the third tank was a cryptic laboratory notation: CF/CM.3.2. The tank should bear a clearer warning: here is something new, a box jellyfish native to California waters, carrying the enhanced toxin of the most lethal jellyfish in the world. This jellyfish—Oscar Flynn's genetically-tweaked cross between cousins—had cause to usurp C. fleckeri's reputation. Flynn's creation was twice as venomous, at least according to his lab notes. Certainly, according to what we'd witnessed down in the sea.
If I were to slap a warning label on the third tank I'd write: here is something that should not exist.
But it does.
“He was an evil genius.”
I turned to see Violet Russell just behind me, tapping keys on Flynn's laptop.
She added, “And that's about as theatrical a statement as I'm ever likely to make without a strong whiskey or two.”
She looked anything but theatrical. She wore the plain field clothes she'd worn yesterday, at Diablo Canyon. She looked nearly as haggard as we did. Tolliver had phoned her from the pier, urgently requesting that she meet us at Flynn's house on the hillside.
The house was now officially a crime scene and Tolliver's people were examining every corner.
Tolliver himself was on the phone again, slumped in the chair at Flynn's black-laminate desk.
I went over to join Walter, who was bracing himself on the table that held the Aurelia aurita tanks. We were silent, hollowed. We gazed like rubberneckers at the succession of tanks, the moon jellyfish in each tank looking nearly identical. But the labels said otherwise. The label on the fourth tank said CF/AA.2.
Something new, something else that should not exist, a genetic mashup of a box and a moon, Chironex and Aurelia.
“An intermediary,” Russell said, joining us. “Flynn was toying at this point.”
Tolliver came over, shutting his phone. “Toying? Yesterday at the Morro beach wasn't child's play.”
“My bad, Detective. Poor word choice. I'm in somewhat of a daze. As for toying, I'm speaking of the progression in the recombinant venom proteins. The moons were simply one step along the way.” She swept a hand, indicating the entire lab. “He was nothing if not thorough.”
I nodded. His lab was nothing if not premium. This was not the lab we'd seen last week but it was equally impressive. The paint job was glossy and blindingly white and the instruments on the workbenches gleamed stainless steel state-of-the-art, and beyond. The tanks were numerous and spotless, containing jellyfish in stages from polyps to medusae. Specimens at the ready for genetic manipulation in the lab. End products marked for real-world tests in the sea, testing to determine if his cross-bred genetically-manipulated creatures could adapt to these waters.
And adapt, they could.
Tolliver eyed the laptop in Dr. Russell's hand. “Finding documentation in his notes?”
“Chapter and verse, if you like.” She swiped a finger across the screen. “Here's the provisional patent, which references identification, cloning, sequencing, and recombination of venom proteins for pharmaceutical applications. All for the greater good—adapt the jellies' chemical weaponry to combat human diseases. Cancer, chronic pain, heart disease...”
“Uh-huh, right, he was gonna get rich saving lives.” Tolliver flipped a hand. “How about the other? Find anything indictable?”
“Downright evil.” She swiped her finger. “We have pages of correspondence with a certain organization that doesn't adhere to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. Ongoing funding to adapt the jellies' chemical weaponry for next-generation bioweapons. Already profitable.”
“Already delivered?”
“Contracted for. You'll want to follow up on that, Detective.”
“I'm a small-town cop, Dr. Russell. I'll pass this on to the feds.”
She strode over to the workbench that held stoppered sample bottles of murky water. “Pass this on, as well. Tinkering with domoic acid to develop toxic weaponry.”
I regarded the container labeled DA.2.4. Domoic acid, product of an iron-seeded algal bloom. Poisoner of sea lions and Joao Silva.
“Speaking of harmful algal blooms....” Russell paused. “I fear that when you examine his computer files you'll find articles I sent him, on that subject.”
“Hey, you thought it was part of his work with the rescue group,” Tolliver said. “How could you know what he was up to?”
Russell snapped Flynn's laptop shut. Sound like a gunshot.
Tolliver said, “Hindsight's worth what you pay for it.”
I said, “It wasn't just about the money. I mean, for Oscar Flynn.”
I moved to the biggest tank in the room. The label said Nemopilema nomurai. No laboratory notation for cross breeding. This species, it seemed, stood on its own. There were five jellyfish in this tank and it was beginning to get crowded. They were about the size of basketballs. Just big enough to make an impression. To make me recoil at the memory of a touch, of a monster's shove. I assessed the smaller versions, here. Must be juveniles. That sure explained how Flynn could have ferried the monsters to the cavern. They weren't quite monsters, at that point. They were small enough to transfer, in a big bucket. And then, once situated in their new home in Flynn's aquarium of the deep, they grew to full size. His big boys.
His pets.
I wondered where they were, now. Perhaps still caught in the eddy that swirled around the bowl at Target Red. Eventually, though, they'd get swept away in the complexity of currents. Of course, they could be tracked. Flynn's notes described the implantation of microchips. Fish 'n chips, he'd called it—the only joke he'd ever made, I'd wager.
Walter and Russell and Tolliver joined me.
We all stood enraptured by the juvenile monsters in the tank.
; And then Walter cleared his throat. “You mentioned the money.”
I managed a smile. That's Walter. Finance is his middle name. He watches our pennies, he balances our books.
And certainly Flynn had a compelling monetary motive here. If the pharmaceutical toxins panned out, big bucks. Even if they didn't, he'd already enlisted the bioweapon rogues. Bigger bucks.
I said, “The money, sure. But that's not what fed his soul.” At least what passed for a soul. I figured I'd experienced enough of his soul to pass judgment. When I'd helped shut the gate on him, down in the cavern, it was in defense—of us, of the sea. Certainly a final judgment. I wore that responsibility like he wore his cloak of cubozoans. I said, “I think it was about the creation. Something new, that never existed before. Something that nobody would forget. Something terrible—I think that was part of it—something that would set Flynn above the commonplace, wielding these terrible weapons. I mean, he was trying to release his new box jellyfish into our sea.” I shot a look across the room at the Aurelia aurita tank. “And we saw what happened when he released those moons, tweaked to lethal. I think he wanted to see them in action. He wanted to test their stings. I mean, we're talking commonplace moon jellyfish—nobody worries when they hook one on a kayak paddle. Or sees one swimming by, on a day at the beach. They don't carry much of a sting. They're just pretty little moons.” A hard knot formed in my gut. “Except, when they're genetically engineered into pretty little devil moons.”
Russell said, “A rogue wave.”
Yeah. That about summed up Oscar Flynn. He sure had the unpredictability of a rogue wave. The strength. He nearly swept us off our feet, swept us under. Well I had my balance now. Stable enough. In fact, nearly rooted in place. Leaden.
“I don't doubt that motivation,” Walter said. “But let's not forget that putting his moons in action was exquisitely timed. He'd just found us at his site, at Cochrane. He'd heard Doug promise that his divers would return the next day, Monday. So let's calculate the timing and the tides. He visits the new Morro Bay aquarium Sunday night and engineers the release. Aurelia is a nearshore species so he can assume that's where his moon army will deploy. That's where attention will be focused.”
Skeleton Sea Page 27
