“Yes, yes … and then the currents at various levels … oh, posh,” Dr. Light said, slamming his book shut. “I’m not sure we could get a good match.”
“I’d be happy with a rough estimate.”
The professor look relieved, calculated the average velocity of the currents in the summer in that area, scratched a number down on a piece of paper. “Try this,” he said.
Kit started to leave.
“You’ve checked with the Coast Guard, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So then you know about IOOS.”
Kit stopped in her tracks. She turned around.
“The Integrated Ocean Observing System. Coast Guard uses it, along with NOAA. It tracks ocean currents by high-frequency radar. Invaluable for search and rescue, oil spills … gives quite a bit of data. Real interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“Is it operational in the Mid-Atlantic?”
“Sure! MARACOOS, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System, collects data for the whole area, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras.”
“So like, if something is in the water, they could predict its drift?”
“That’s right.”
“Do they keep historical data?”
“Oh, yes. What I gave you there,” he nodded toward the paper, “is an average of currents in the area. But they’ll give you specifics for the date in question. You said you talked to the Coast Guard. Didn’t they tell you?”
Why hadn’t Rick mentioned IOOS? Surely he knew about it! Kit jabbed her key into her car ignition.
Fuming, she called the administrative assistant for her squad, and got her to track down the Coast Guard’s Mid-Atlantic Search and Rescue Unit which, it turns out, was in Norfolk. Kit went to that office, and within thirty minutes, had the probable range of latitudes and longitudes from which the child had been dropped, based on the ME’s estimate of the time of his death, and the speed of the currents in the area within that time frame.
Of course, that area now was empty ocean.
And Rick? She’d confront him later. Why hadn’t he told her about IOOS?
As Kit drove over the causeway leading to Chincoteague, she tried to spot her grandmother’s house, a game she’d played since childhood. The buildings on the island’s Main Street were stretched out like pearls on a necklace in the distance, far across the channel. Kit had found if she could find the large, barn-red house and count two to the left, that would be her grandmother’s.
When she finally nabbed it, she saw the sun glinting off some object next to the house. Curious, when she got to the island, she turned down Main Street. What she saw when she got to the house made her jerk to the side of the street and jump out of her car.
“What are you doing?” she said, approaching the ladder leaned up against the siding.
David O’Connor had his iPod going and didn’t even look down. Kit tapped on the ladder, then shook it. That got his attention. “Hey!” he said, climbing down, paintbrush in hand. He pulled his earbuds out.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Her face felt hot.
He looked at the house, then back to her. “Painting?”
“Blue? Blue? You can’t do that!”
He smiled like an amused parent. “OK,” he said. “But you tell the owner.”
“It’s always been white!”
“I think you’ll like it. It’s almost the color of your eyes.”
Kit flipped open her cell phone, turned her back on David, and called Connie.
“That’s what the owner wanted,” she told Kit. “Look, honey, David’s doing a lot of work on the house in exchange for reduced rent. He’s going to save that house, Kit.”
Kit snapped her phone shut, her jaw still tight.
“Everything OK?” David said.
She raised her chin. She couldn’t meet his eyes. “It’s been a long day.”
He glanced at his watch. “You want to go to dinner? I’m starving.”
“No, thanks.”
He shifted his jaw. “I’d like to talk to you … about your case.”
“I don’t discuss investigations.”
“I’ve got some information I’d like to pass on to you.”
“You can tell me here.”
“I’d like to take you to dinner.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“You almost throw me to my death and now you won’t eat with me?” His eyes were brown, and right now they were sparkling with humor. The declining sun played off the golden highlights in his hair and illuminated the light stubble of his beard. His mouth bowed upward in a slight smile.
Kit took a deep breath.
He took her hesitation as a cue. “How about Rita’s in forty-five minutes?”
Rita’s Restaurant on the east side of the island had one table overlooking the Assateague Channel left when they got there. “Lucky us,” Kit said, but David just smiled and the look in his eyes told her he’d called ahead. How annoying!
He also knew the waitress, and when Kit said she’d have the flounder stuffed with crab meat he ordered the same thing. “That’s good,” he said. “I’ve had it before.”
A pool of reserve kept Kit quiet. How should she take this man? She found him attractive and off-putting at the same time. His confidence disarmed her, but she couldn’t figure him out. She sensed an undercurrent about him that she couldn’t quite identify. Her ability to read character was pretty good; but then, if he was a cop, his was as well. What was he thinking about her?
“OK, so you seem to know these birds around here. What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the bright white bird that had just landed nearby.
“Cattle egret,” she said.
“And those?” He pointed off to the right.
“Terns. And a fishing gull.”
“And those little guys?”
“Swallows. They’re actually eating mosquitoes as they fly. So we like them.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked, smiling.
“I’ve been coming here a long time.”
“Couldn’t have been that long. How old are you?”
“I’m thirty-two. But I’ve been coming here for twenty-five years.”
David whistled softly. “Twenty-five years is a pretty long time. I take back what I said.” He smiled softly. “So what’s Kit short for?”
“Katherine. Katherine Anne.”
He nodded. “That’s a good name.”
Kit toyed with her fork. Her father’s pet name for her growing up was Kitty.
“How long were you married?”
Her eyes opened wide in surprise.
“You keep touching your ring finger,” David said, demonstrating. “I’m guessing your wedding band hasn’t been gone for long.”
Kit felt the heat of embarrassment in her face. “What do you do for the Metropolitan Police?”
“I’m a detective,” he said.
“Homicide?”
He shifted his jaw. “Yes.”
“So you could tell the boy had been killed?”
“I saw the ligature marks on his neck.” He stretched back in his chair.
“How’d you know I’m in law enforcement?”
“How many women carry a gun bag on the beach?”
“It looks like a regular fanny pack!” she said defensively.
“Not if you know what a gun bag looks like.”
Kit toyed with her silverware and debated her next move. “So how is it you can take six months off?”
David smiled softly. “I wanted to quit. My boss wouldn’t let me. He pretty much made me take a break instead.”
“Something happened?”
He shrugged. “You know how it goes.” He shifted in his chair. “How long have you been an agent?”
“Five years. So what happened? Shooting incident?”
He ignored her question. “You like it? Being an agent?”
“I have a passion for justice.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“Sometimes it gets me in trouble.”
“I thought the FBI was all about justice. How could that get you in trouble?”
The lamp in the middle of the table flickered, forming shadows on the white tablecloth. “Politics,” she said. “I pursued a lead in a case that wasn’t politically correct.”
The food came, interrupting their conversation and dissipating the tension. Kit felt like she’d just been in a tennis match. Serve—volley—volley—slam! Talking with David was an aerobic activity. She focused on her food. The flounder was tender and sweet, the crab perfectly cooked, and both of them ate in silence for a few minutes. Kit stole a look at him. She liked the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed, and she liked his bone structure. He had a strong jaw and a wide, open face. His neck was thick and his forearms were ropey with muscle. Their short conversation proved he was smart and aggressive, not bad qualities, normally, but she felt like she had to be on her game with him. She barely knew him. No way was she was ready to share the details of her life with him.
“This is really good,” he said, lifting a forkful of flounder.
“So what were you going to tell me?” she asked.
David cocked his head.
“You lured me here saying you had information about my case.”
“Did I?” He laughed. “All right then.” He took a bite of salad, glanced out of the window, nodded and said, “Giant white bird, right?”
Kit turned her head to look at the creature outside. “Great egret. The only three-foot-tall, long-legged white bird on the East Coast.”
He grinned. “I was close, very close.” Then he told her about his conversation with Maria.
“You speak Spanish?” Kit asked him. She had learned a little in college, more when she and Eric were talking about adopting a child from Latin America, but she wasn’t fluent.
David nodded. “She didn’t open up. Maybe somebody’s running drugs, maybe illegals, maybe it’s something else. But here’s the other piece of the puzzle. I talked to an old guy down at Smitty’s. You know where that is?”
Kit nodded. Smitty ran a rundown bait shop down toward Cap’n Bob’s, near the southern end of the island.
“I wanted to see about doing some fishing. This old guy was out on the ocean two weeks ago, around 11:00 p.m. He saw a boat loaded with people running up the coastline with its lights off. He said people were just hanging off the gunnels.”
“The what?”
“The sides of the boat,” David explained.
“What was he doing out on the ocean?”
“Jimmy? He said he was fishing.”
“You think he saw a boatload of illegals?”
“Maybe.” David gestured. “All I know is, you don’t run up the coast in a boat loaded with people at night with your lights off unless you’re doing something wrong. He saw the same thing last week, same place, same time. Then I remembered reading in the paper that there’s been a drug interdiction operation on Rt. 13 lately. I’m wondering, is somebody trying to avoid that by going out on the ocean? So I’m going out there to see what I can see.”
“What?” Kit said. “When?”
“Tonight. Jimmy rented me his boat and I’m going out.”
“By yourself? That’s crazy.”
“The weather’s good. We’ve got a three-quarter moon, which is enough to see by. And I do a lot of things by myself.”
Kit’s heart pounded. “I’m going with you.”
“There might not be anything out there.”
“I don’t care. I want to go. Can you find a latitude and longitude if I give it to you?”
They agreed to meet at David’s at 10:00 p.m. Kit went to her cottage and changed into work clothes, khaki cargo pants, and a dark-colored golf shirt, but she substituted boat shoes without socks for the boots she usually wore. She grabbed a light jacket, strapped on her gun, and tied her hair back in a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Then she drove to South Main Street, and pulled into the driveway of David’s rental, her grandmother’s old house.
The channel seemed quiet as they steered away from town in the twenty-two-foot Grady-White David had rented. It was a good boat, sturdy enough for the ocean, and Kit could tell by the way he handled getting out of the slip that he knew boats.
“Four years in the Navy,” he told her when she said something about it. He also insisted she put on a life jacket. “I always wear one, especially at night,” he said. “It’s only smart.”
Stars lay scattered across the clear night sky in a thousand points of light. The Grady-White easily handled the chop on the channel, and its engine sounded strong as they cut through the waves. Kit realized she was shivering with excitement. “You can’t go straight down here,” she said. “There are shoals. You have to follow the channel markers.”
“Can you navigate?” David handed her the chart and a small flashlight.
“I’ve only been through here once.” When she clicked it on, the light was red. That was better for night vision—if you used a white light, it would take you 15 minutes to readjust so you could see in the dark. Kit knew that, and the fact that he apparently did, too, added to her confidence.
Using the chart, Kit guided him through the channel markers through the shoal-laced water on the south side of Assateague. As David cleared the confused seas at the confluence of Chincoteague Channel and the ocean, he swung the boat left. Kit sat next to him, bracing herself with one hand on the frame of the boat.
“Did they do the autopsy?” David asked, once their course was steady. “I didn’t want to ask you in the restaurant.”
“Yes,” she said, shouting against the wind and the roar of the motor.
“What did they find?”
“Ligature strangling, like you said.”
“How long before we found him?”
We? “He died within twenty hours.” Off to her left a quarter of a mile or so, Kit could see the white sand of Assateague, and the white line of the breakers just offshore. Miles off to the right, she could see a brightly lighted ship. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it.
“Cruise ship.” He glanced at her. “It’s for people who actually know how to take a vacation,” he shouted, grinning.
She smiled, and the wind felt cold against her teeth. The blackness of the ocean spread out before her like ink spilled across a page. Only the strip of white sand of Assateague oriented her. The three-quarters moon shed just a little light, and she felt hidden and exposed all at the same time. She looked up at the stars, wondered what it would have been like for the old sailors, steering only by the heavens, drawn into the unknown by the wind and the sea currents.
David cut the engine back. He pointed toward Assateague. “We’re about even with where the body washed up.”
“How do you know?”
“I carry a GPS with me when I’m surfing. I marked it as a waypoint.”
“So we’re opposite that spot now?”
David swung the boat to starboard, and pushed the throttle forward. “Yes. Give me your lat and lon.”
She yelled out the numbers of the spot the Coast Guard Search and Rescue had estimated as the approximate location that the boy’s body entered the water. As Assateague fell further behind them, Kit glanced over her shoulder, as if keeping the barrier island in view would somehow make her less vulnerable. Ahead, she saw nothing but the vast sea and a star-studded sky, and she couldn’t help but think of God, how big he was, and how small she felt.
After a while, David cut the engine back, left the helm, and picked up a fishing pole he had lying in the back. “We’re here. Want to fish?” he asked her.
Kit hesitated. “Why are we doing this?”
David grinned. “Killing time, so we can see what we can see.” He grabbed a minnow from the bucket he’d brought, impaled it on the hook, and dropped the line overboard. Then he handed the rod to Kit. “Hang on. If you feel a tug, jerk it hard to set the
hook, then reel it in.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’ve done this before. What are we fishing for?”
“Whales.” David laughed. He grabbed a pole for himself, repeated the process, and stood balancing in the boat, moving his rod, winding in line, and waiting. The vast darkness invited conversation. Soon they were trading law enforcement stories. Then he explained about the fish teeming below them in the deep ocean, and she pointed out constellations and star clusters.
They idled for a half an hour, fishing and talking and not catching anything, and as midnight rolled around she began to wonder if they should give it up. Then she saw David look once, then a second time, to his right. His expression changed, and he began winding in his line. “What’s up?” she asked him as he laid his rod down in the boat.
“I thought I saw something.”
Kit brought in her line and secured her rod. David turned the boat so they were headed straight into the waves. Some broke over the bow, sending spray back toward the helm. Kit shivered at the shock of the cold water.
“Yes, there,” David said suddenly, pointing.
Kit could see it now, outlined against the horizon, a dark, fast-moving boat, running without lights. Their paths would cross if they both stayed their courses. David dropped the throttle back so they were barely making headway. “What can you see?” she asked.
The boat screamed northward, maybe one hundred yards away from them. David and Kit heard voices carried on the wind. Shouting. “What’d they say?” she asked.
“I can’t make it out.”
Suddenly, the boat’s motor changed pitch, and the bow turned in their direction. David uttered a sharp expletive. “Get down, get down!” he said. He grabbed Kit and pushed her low in the boat and swung the vessel around. He jammed the throttle full forward and Kit lost her balance. She peered over the transom, saw muzzle flash and then heard the shot. “Stay down!” David commanded, as another shot sounded.
Kit’s heart hammered in her chest. She unzipped her fanny pack and drew out her Glock. The engine of the Grady-White roared in her ears. She could see David crouching as low as he could get over the wheel. She peeked over the stern again and saw the boat pursuing them, then more muzzle flashes.
Seeds of Evidence (9781426770838) Page 4
