The Scuba Club

by Rene Fomby

  “Okay, so you said fifteen to twenty minutes before you came up. How long would that have been in relation to the time you all went in the water?”

  Billie thought about that, then checked his dive computer, still attached to his wrist. After poking a few buttons, he looked up “Uh, we went into the water at almost eight, straight up. My total dive was fifty-five minutes. So that would have made it around eight thirty-five, eight forty. Or thereabouts.”

  “Got it,” Gavin said, writing down the time. “Okay, I think this has been a good start for now, but we may have a few more questions for you later. Before we let you go, however, is there anything else you can remember about the dive that might shed a little more daylight into Katy’s disappearance?”

  “Um, not really. I mean, we all came up to the surface at pretty much the same time, just the four of us, plus the dive master. And, by the way, other than Casey and me, the dive master was in front of the group almost the entire time, pointing out things to look at with his dive light. When Casey and I grabbed him to let him know we were getting low on air, that’s when he looked around and noticed that Katy and Trevor were missing. I blame a lot of this on him, you know? Instead of focusing on doing a guided tour of the reef, he should have been focused instead on keeping us all safe. If he’d been paying more attention to our safety, maybe Katy would still be alive. If I were Trevor, I’d sue his sorry ass, for sure.”

  Gavin shook his head. “Unfortunately, as they say back home, you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip. These dive masters barely make enough money to keep their families in tortillas and beans. And I seriously doubt any of the independent operators down here have insurance. Or could afford it even if they wanted.”

  “You’re right about that,” Espinosa agreed. “Okay, Billie, you’re free to go. For now. When you get upstairs, send your girlfriend down, would you? And Billie—no talking to anyone about what was said down here, especially to Sally. Otherwise I will have to arrest you. For obstruction of justice.”

  “Got it, man,” Billie responded with a zipper motion across his mouth. “My lips are sealed.”

  After Billie disappeared up the stairway, Gavin spun his legal pad around for Espinosa to see. “I’m beginning to think Casey was right about all this. Since the two girlfriends were left behind on the boat, there’s no conceivable way either one of them could have been the killer. And as for Casey and Billie, their stories check out solid, so you can cross them off the list, as well. That leaves us, then, with only three possible suspects. Brett, his wife Tara, and, of course, Trevor.”

  “Unless they all had a part in it. We can’t totally discount that,” Espinosa said with a grimace. “But I’m still betting on the husband.”

  14

  Sally

  Gavin’s first take on Sally was that she seemed like the kind of girl who would break a rule just to say she’d done it. The kind of girl you might take out on a date once or twice, but definitely not the kind of girl you’d bring home to mama.

  And as he watched her stumble down the short flight of stairs, he was not disappointed. Judging by her glassed-over eyes and the stench of rum that filled up the room every time she opened her mouth, it was clear that in the short span of time Billie had been talking to them she had managed to polish off the rest of the Captain Morgan’s. And probably put a big dent in the rest of their rum supply, as well.

  There wasn’t much point in questioning Sally, other than to back up Billie’s story about the marijuana he had supposedly dumped over the side. So that was precisely where Espinosa intended to start his questioning.

  “For the record, Sally, can you give us your full name?”

  That seemed to throw her for a second, but she quickly recovered. “Sally Clarke. Sally Ann Clarke, to be sure. With an ‘e’ on the end of the Clarke and no ‘e’ on the Ann.” Her voice sounded raspy, like she’d spent the bulk of her life chain-smoking cigarettes. The kind without the filters.

  “Okay, Miss Clarke. I’m going to be blunt, here. Your boyfriend just confessed to dumping something off the back of the boat, which is a serious felony in a case like this. Can you tell us exactly what it was that he was so interested in hiding from us?”

  She looked confused, whether from the alcohol or from having to work through the risk/return calculation, it was hard to tell. The alcohol certainly didn’t help, Gavin thought. Finally she answered, staring at her blood-red fingernails the entire time.

  “Yeah, Billie and me, we brought some stuff with us to celebrate with. You know, we don’t get a whole lot of chances to go all fancy like this, and I thought it might be fun to get a little crazy for a change. You know, take the partying to the next level.”

  “And just how crazy are we talking?” Gavin asked.

  “Nothing much. A little weed, some blow. A couple of exotics, maybe. All of it quite harmless in the end, I will assure you. But then you coppers started coming around asking questions, and Billie got a little nervous. That’s why he decided to dump his entire stash in the ocean.”

  “His stash? The drugs were his?” Espinosa asked.

  “Yeah, of course they were his. Like I have any money to buy drugs, you know?”

  “Right. So did Katy or Trevor know anything about the drugs?”

  “Yeah, yeah, and they were real pissy about it, too. Like they had any right to be all high and mighty, the two of them. Especially Trevor. The cheatin’ bastard.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Gavin asked, trying to keep up with everything she was saying on his legal pad. This was actually starting to get interesting. Trevor was messing around on his wife? And he wasn’t bothering to keep that fun little fact to himself?

  Sally crossed and then recrossed her legs, a risky maneuver given the length of her skirt. “Oh, that one, he plays that whole game about being all proper and shit, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but in real life he’s a total loser. A—total—loser.”

  “How so?” Espinosa was getting intrigued, too, at this point.

  “Well, first of all, he pretty much screws anything and everything that moves, everyone knows that. Even put the moves on me, like I would ever have anything to do with the likes of him. Probably has AIDS for all I know. Would serve him right.”

  She stopped talking suddenly and gave Espinosa a long, appraising look, like she was sizing up a side of beef. Then crossed her legs again. More slowly this time.

  “Okay, let’s get back to Trevor,” Gavin said, trying to keep the questioning on track. “How did Katy feel about her husband’s infidelity? Did she ever say anything to you about it?”

  Reluctantly, Sally tore her gaze away from Espinosa. “Well, my understanding from Billie is that Katy was good with the arrangement. Trevor could screw anyone he wanted, just so long as he left her alone and paid all the bills. Especially the bills for that useless child of hers. What’s his name again? Patton or something? Anyway, Katy Mulcahey, that was one cold bitch, I’m here to tell ya. Wouldn’t even take Trevor’s last name. Not a lot of people are crying over that one, I can promise you.”

  Sally’s vehemence on the subject of Katy and Trevor had left Gavin feeling a bit blindsided. And had him wondering where exactly he himself might wind up on Sally’s enemies list at the end of all this. But, judging from the sleepy looks she was giving his Mexican partner under her electric blue eyelashes, it was pretty clear Espinosa was being penciled in on a different list entirely. He tapped his notepad with the side of his pen. “Okay, well, it sounds to me like whatever arrangement Katy had with her husband, that was just between the two of them. So why all the hostility?”

  “Oh, that wasn’t the half of it, not by a long shot. The two of them—they were all about the money. Especially Katy. She was the real power behind the throne, her and that rich daddy of hers. You think Trevor has the smarts to run a stock brokerage firm? Why, he barely has enough brains to know which shoe to put on what foot. Everyone knows her daddy was feeding
him all the inside info on which stocks to pick for his clients. That’s why everything started to go to hell in a handbasket the minute her daddy up and died.”

  That certainly piqued Espinosa’s interest. “Wait, what are you saying? Trevor was getting into some kind of financial trouble?”

  “Oh hell yeah! And that’s why he started screwing over Billie. And everyone else who worked for him, for that matter. Welched out on all the promises he’d made to them. Billie and me, we’d be married already if Trevor hadn’t canceled their handshake agreement on Billie’s cut of all the office leases.” She turned to stare directly at Gavin. “Look, copper, if you’re trying to pin down someone who might have a bone or two to pick with Trevor Johnson, well you better get yourself a bigger legal pad than the one you’re holding now, because that man has more enemies than Carter has little pills, is all I’m sayin’.”

  Gavin leaned back, and immediately he and Espinosa locked eyes. Maybe they had been way too quick in writing off Billie’s possible involvement in Katy’s death. The demon rum was already paying big dividends in this case. And if Trevor was in fact facing serious financial troubles, Katy’s death couldn’t have come at a more convenient time. He wouldn’t exactly be the first husband to take out an insurance policy on his wife. Plus, from the way Sally was telling it, Katy had kept up all her expensive habits from back when her rich daddy was still paying the bills. So rubbing her out could have worked out pretty well as a win-win solution for Trevor.

  “Do you have reason to suspect that Trevor might have been involved in his wife’s murder?” Gavin asked, drawing the words out slowly to make sure Sally understood the full implications of what he was asking.

  “Who else woulda done it? Handicap Brett, who couldn’t even wipe his own ass if his wife didn’t leave him instructions? Or Brett’s pansy-ass wife, who can’t even figure out how to get herself pregnant? No, it was Trevor, alright. If her daddy was still around, Trevor, he wouldn’t have had the balls to pull it off. But with Daddy gone, it’s clear to me that Trevor saw this as the perfect time to move on, cash in on the life insurance lottery and suddenly all his money issues are behind him. Trust me, you look into how much money he has to gain by her death, and you’ll find out that killing her was the smartest thing that man has ever done. This boat won’t even scratch the surface of what he has to gain from her death. Won’t even scratch the surface.”

  Gavin and Espinosa shared another behind the back look. An interview they had both written off as routine had suddenly opened up a whole new can of worms in the case. And husband Trevor was, as a matter of fact, one of the three remaining suspects. And quite possibly the very last and fattest worm left in that can.

  15

  Sea Trial

  Gavin checked his watch as Sally disappeared up the stairs to the main cabin. “Look, Espinosa, let’s take a short break. You hit the head if you need to, while I try to touch base with a lawyer buddy I know back in the states, a guy who might be able to help us dig up a little background dirt on these jokers. Meet back in ten?”

  “Sure. Although I might just grab a Coke instead. Or better yet, a Tipo Chico if they have one. You want something?”

  “No, I’m good. Just need to get the gears of justice working for us on this one. But do you mind if I borrow your phone again?”

  “Ten bucks a minute. And a five dollar service fee. Otherwise, it’s all yours.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gavin took advantage of the fact that all of the residents of the boat were up above in the salon and ducked into the owner’s cabin to make the call. It took six rings before his friend on the other end picked up.

  “Crawford here. How can I help you?”

  Harry Crawford was an old friend from the very start of the Tulley case, a lawyer he trusted like his own brother to handle things on the down low anytime discretion and competence were critical. They’d first met almost two years earlier when Gavin had been assigned protection duty for Harry’s employer, Samantha Tulley. Sam was an emerging force in the well-sheltered and doggedly corrupt criminal defense community of tiny Blair County, Texas, and had made more than her share of enemies among the judges and prosecutors there, enemies who were angry enough to make some fairly credible threats against her life. And then carry them out. FBI agent Gavin Larson had been assigned the case because of his earlier efforts to root out corruption in the county, and with this prior experience he took the threats quite seriously. Seriously enough to put a two person detail in place to watch her house 24-7, and another detail to shadow her as she went about her daily duties defending the poor and occasionally innocent at the county courthouse. Despite all of his careful planning, however, her three-story antebellum mansion in downtown Blairton was torched to the ground by professional arsonists in the wee hours of the morning as she slept, and Sam barely escaped with her life, now bearing painful memories of the fire and scars on her hands and feet that would stay with her for the rest of that life. The fire also claimed the small guest house Harry Crawford had been staying in, and he would have been burned alive, too, if not for the fact that he had spent the entire evening shutting down the local bar scene with several of his law school buddies.

  But the fire did claim two innocent lives that night, the two agents Gavin had assigned to the house, one of them shot in the head by a sniper and the other consumed in the blaze while trying to rescue Sam Tulley. Two agents Gavin had counted among his closest friends. Two agents who had left behind several small children, children far too young to even begin to understand their loss.

  And the truly inexcusable part of the whole debacle was that Gavin had his eye on the wrong people the entire time. While he poured all his resources into monitoring the Blair County legal establishment, even setting up phone taps on several judges and the District Attorney, the real villain turned out to be someone much, much closer to Samantha Tulley. It was her father-in-law, William Tulley. In hindsight, it was all so blindingly obvious. Gavin had been looking right when he should have been looking left, and as a result two close friends had paid the ultimate price. And William Tulley had come within a hair’s breadth of killing his daughter-in-law and gaining control of the small fortune his son had left behind for her when he died.

  The magnitude of Gavin’s mistakes had swept through the law enforcement community like a firestorm, and almost overnight the name Gavin Larson had become a running joke, a symbol of incompetence shared by lawmen and women across the country. The FBI could have fired him for what they considered an inexcusable blunder, but instead they banished him to the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, Morocco, assigned to babysit visiting dignitaries and run little errands for rich American tourists, hoping that he would eventually get the hint and hang up his badge. Which he almost did, until that fateful day when Lieutenant Commander Andrea Patterson suddenly stepped into his life at the airport in Rabat. As Gavin’s mother had often told him, when life hands you lemons, you better brew up a big ass pot of cold sweet tea to go with it. And Andy Patterson turned out to be a tall and refreshing glass of tea, indeed.

  Gavin sat back on the bed, hunched over the phone to mask his conversation from anyone who might be listening in from the outside. “Harry. This is Gavin Larson. Sorry about the cold call. I’m out on a boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and don’t have a signal. So I had to borrow a loaner phone from a Mexican detective I’m working with out here.”

  “Oh, okay, that explains the strange number. Almost didn’t pick up at first, was ready to let it go to voicemail. But hey, it’s great to hear your voice, Gav. What’s up with you? I take it this isn’t just you being bored again and wanting to catch up—”

  “No, bud, I wish it were, but like I said, I’m out here in Cozumel on a case. Girl got herself murdered, and Bob Sanders wants me to find out who did it. He was her godfather. You can fill in the rest.”

  “I’ll skip the Marlon Brando impersonation for now. I assume you need my help somehow? Does this have anythi
ng to do with the girl who disappeared during a dive? That story’s all over the news here in Houston. Daughter of a dead senator, apparently.”

  “Yeah, right as rain on both counts. Listen, I need you to do your special lawyer abracadabra and run a thorough background check on a handful of folks. I only know their names, and in some cases only first names, although with context. But it’s time critical—we have a storm bearing down on us out here, so we may have to bug out any day now.”

  “Right, I was just watching the weather report on television. That thing in the Caribbean has spun back up to full hurricane status, and the weatherfolks here in Houston are worried it might even head our way. One thing we don’t need right now is more rainfall.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m stuck out on the water down here on a tiny little boat, and at the moment I am literally sitting underneath the water line. So getting slammed head on with a full-bore hurricane is not sounding all that good to me right now, either.”

  Harry seemed to hesitate. “You sure that’s a good idea, Gav? You out on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean, given—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. And it really isn’t all that small, more like a floating four bedroom condo, so the water isn’t all that big an issue right now. But as you can imagine, I’m not exactly enjoying the whole boating experience, so the sooner I can wrap all this up out here, the easier I’m going to sleep at night.”

  “I hear you, Gav. Okay, Samantha is up in Fort Worth visiting her parents, so I can put my plans on hold for the evening and dive right in. But why can’t you run all this through the FBI? Surely they have much better tools to dig up dirt on folks than I do.”