The Scuba Club

by Rene Fomby

  “But I didn’t hire the dive master,” Tara complained. “Like I said before, it was Trevor who did it. Trevor hired him to take us on the night dive!”

  Trevor looked ready to jump down her throat again, but once more Gavin waved him back. “We’ll get to that in a minute, Mrs. Cutler, but first let’s talk about that dive knife you mentioned a little while earlier. The one you said proves Trevor did it.”

  “Right! Because his was the only knife that was missing.”

  “You are correct about that. A very astute observation, indeed. But here’s the problem. When I checked the two knives that were not missing, something curious popped out at me almost immediately. You see, it appears that Casey and Brett were both wearing buoyancy compensators—I think they called them wings—that were several years old and had already seen quite a bit of wear and tear. But Trevor, he had a wing that was pretty much brand spanking new. So imagine my surprise when I pulled the two little knives out of Casey’s and Brett’s vests and saw that Brett’s knife was corroded and worn like the one I found underwater, but Casey’s knife, well it looked brand spanking new, as well. Just like Trevor’s vest.”

  The room had gone eerily quiet, and everyone’s eyes were now focused squarely on Tara Cutler. Gavin looked over at Espinosa, then back at Tara, his eyes now digging into hers, fixing her in place like a pithed frog. “I think the reason for that is pretty obvious, wouldn’t you agree? The knife I found in Casey’s wing was actually Trevor’s. Someone had pulled it out of Trevor’s vest after the dive to cover up the fact that one of the knives was now missing.”

  “So now you’re saying Casey did it?” Tara asked. “Casey switched the knives? So what does that have to do with me?”

  “Actually, I think our little criminal mastermind in this caper was a wee bit smarter than that, what with being a mastermind and all that. No, I think the person who switched out the knives did a little double switcheroo, probably when it became apparent just how shiny and new Trevor’s blade was compared to the other.”

  “So now you’re saying Brett killed her?” Tara asked, turning slightly to face her husband accusatorily.

  Gavin shook his head. It was time for the penultimate reveal in this case. “No, it wasn’t your husband, Mrs. Cutler. I think it should be obvious by now that Brett was the last person who would have wanted Katy dead. Particularly since the DNA swabs I took prove that he was also the father of Katy’s now dead unborn daughter. In the end, that was the real reason they decided to dump you and Trevor and run off together. Brett Cutler was the father of both of Katy’s children. It seems Katy’s little high school flame had flared up again recently. And that old flame was now burning hot and bright, indeed. Hot enough to plant two babies in her, at least.”

  Brett had his head buried in his hands, slumped over in defeat, avoiding the eyes that were all staring directly at him. Espinosa had the best angle on Tara Cutler’s face when Gavin announced the results of the paternity test on the unborn child, and silently mouthed the words “no surprise” when Gavin glanced his way. Gavin nodded back.

  But Tara wasn’t quite finished fighting, even though every brilliant scheme and artifice she had spent months if not years concocting now lay bare and broken at her feet. She still had one last punch left in her. “Okay, so my cheating husband was going to dump me for that whore, Katy, and if what you said is true, they were going to try and buy my silence in the whole matter by paying me a few miserable million dollars. Why they thought that was important, I can’t imagine. Maybe Brett was finally showing some backbone and felt sorry for what he did, or it’s possible they thought Trevor might somehow be able to leverage the whole cuckolding thing into a big payoff for himself unless they bought me off. I don’t know, but I had nothing to do with any of that, now did I? And yeah, maybe I did research some possible dive operators for our trip, so what? Is it a crime to try to come up with some ideas on how to have a good time on the trip? Or even get mad enough at my dear husband at some point to fantasize about ways to kill him? What wife can say she’s never had that particular thought race through her head every now and then? So okay, if that’s all you’ve got then, just a confused pile of unfounded allegations, and not a single shred of evidence pinning me to any of it that will stand up in court, well, then, good luck with that.”

  Gavin sighed, a long, low moaning sound that echoed off the walls of the small hotel bar. “You’re right, Mrs. Cutler. I can’t rightly accuse you of murder if I can’t somehow pin the murder weapon itself on you and you alone. Or at least, a reasonable stand-in for the murder weapon.” He nodded one last time toward Espinosa, who pulled out a set of shiny steel handcuffs and started walking her way.

  Gavin returned his gaze to Tara, and the other six remaining members of the sad little Cozumel scuba club divided their attention between him and her, as well. He smiled, a tight, forced smile, while he blithely hammered home the final nail in her coffin. “You know, everyone in my line of work these days keeps saying that DNA evidence is the new gold standard in law enforcement. And as a matter of fact, we did have us some DNA evidence in this case, and while it turned out to be pretty durned useful in the end, it still didn’t point us to the murderer, at least not directly. No, as it turned out, the gold standard in this case wound up being something fairly old school, in fact. A single fingerprint, believe it or not. And, more specifically, a fingerprint I found on the knife I pulled from Casey’s vest. Somewhat smudged, not exactly a perfect print by any means, but after dusting the various glasses of orange juice and such you guys drained over breakfast this morning, only one person was even close to a match for that print. And that would be you, Tara Cutler. You were the person who murdered Katy Mulcahey. You were the person who murdered Katy and her unborn daughter.”

  56

  Hotel Bar

  Tara came out of her chair like a bullet, and her claws were in Gavin’s face almost before he could react. He threw up both arms to ward her off, but that left him no defense for her real intention, her real target, which he realized too late as her hands flicked down and grabbed the pistol out of the holster lying against his left breast.

  “Back away!” she shouted, waving the gun around, wildly it seemed at first. But Gavin couldn’t help but notice the easy way she flicked off the safety with her right thumb.

  He watched her with a strangely curious expression as she slowly backed herself away from the petrified group, apparently aiming for the entrance to the bar and a quick exit out through the empty hotel lobby.

  “Now, Tara, let’s think this one through a bit, shall we?” he said quietly, taking a small but steady step in her direction.

  “Don’t move!” she yelled, turning to point the gun directly at Gavin’s chest. He didn’t flinch, but instead continued to close the distance between the two of them even as everyone else in the room stayed frozen in their tracks, afraid to draw her attention their way.

  “And what exactly is your plan here, Tara?” Gavin asked, stretching his right hand out toward the gun, seemingly oblivious to the danger.

  “I said don’t move!” she screamed again, cocking the hammer back and squinting down the barrel at Gavin with wild eyes.

  “Surely you don’t actually think you can escape this island?” Gavin purred, taking another small step forward. “I mean, there’s a hurricane out there tearing the place apart piece by piece, and no plane or boat is ever going to give passage to the mainland for an escaped murderer. Particularly one who’s just shot a federal agent. So why don’t you just hand over that itty bitty little gun and let’s talk this whole thing out.”

  “I’m warning you, I’ll shoot!”

  “No you won’t,” Gavin told her, tossing her a soft, disarming smile. He stepped forward again, now only about two feet away from the gun, and his hand stretched out even further, reaching for it.

  “I said STOP!” she screamed, curling her finger around the trigger.

  “Don’t be silly, Tara.
You won’t shoot me. You can’t shoot me.”

  And he made one last step toward her just as she pulled the trigger.

  57

  Hotel Bar

  CLICK.

  The unexpectedly sharp sound of metal striking metal was somehow even more startling to the nine people sitting and standing in the small hotel bar than the expected but strangely absent blast of a gunshot. She pulled the trigger again, and then once again, one final time, before Gavin’s own fingers settled on the barrel of the gun and pulled it firmly but gently from Tara’s grasp.

  “Why? How?” was all she could gasp out before dropping into a defeated heap on the cold tile floor, sobbing uncontrollably as Gavin looked down on her from above, slowly shaking his head even as he returned the gun to its holster.

  The rest of the room stared at Gavin, wanting answers as well.

  He smiled, coldly. “Well, darlin’, you forgot the part about dumping me into the ocean with all my clothes on, trying to send me to the bottom of the sea. A bad move on your part, seeing as how that got pretty near everything I had on me soaking wet. Including my gun, which I had to disassemble and dry off with a kitchen towel before coating it liberally with cooking oil and putting it back in its holster for safe keeping. But as much as I trust Canola oil for cleaning guns, I didn’t quite trust the fact that I didn’t have any of those tiny little brushes with me from a legitimate cleaning kit to dig around inside all the hidden little crevices of the gun, so I thought it wiser to just keep these little babies in my pocket.”

  He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a clear baggie filled with bullets.

  “Like I said, there was no way you were ever going to shoot me with that gun. You’d have been better off just flinging it at me. At least that way I’d have had to duck.”

  Espinosa had finally pulled himself out of his momentary daze and shuffled quickly across the room to snap his handcuffs on Tara, the same handcuffs he had used just the night before on Trevor Johnson, who was still seated in the middle of the small group of friends, a look of utter shock plastered across his face. Brett had jumped up, looking every bit like he was planning on racing to his wife’s defense, then thought better of it and sat back down. The other four members of the now-defunct scuba club just stared back and forth at each other in rapt disbelief.

  58

  Hotel Bar

  Finally, Trevor came out of his daze and spoke up, a small quiver sounding in his voice. “I—I guess this means you two now know I’m completely innocent in all of this. So can we go now? I for one would like to find a soft bed somewhere, if that’s possible. I didn’t get much sleep last night, sitting in that tiny jail cell worrying my brains out, arrested for something I didn’t do.”

  Gavin turned around from watching the Mexican police take Tara Cutler off to jail and slowly shook his head. “Oh, I wish we could, Mr. Johnson, I wish we could, but I’m afraid we still have a few last little loose ends left to tidy up.” This next part was a detail he hadn’t yet had an opportunity to share with Detective Espinosa, and he saw his colleague even now eyeing him with a suspicious glare. “You see, it appears from the evidence that Tara Cutler wasn’t working alone in all of this. It appears she may have had an accomplice.”

  Everyone’s eyes bounced from Trevor Johnson to Brett Cutler and back, and Gavin watched their reactions to this new revelation like a hawk watching a field full of plump mice. Finally, he grabbed a chair and sat down, noting briefly the unfriendly look on Espinosa’s face for being cut out of this final aspect of the case. “You see, there was something that kept bothering me about all this, almost from the get-go. It’s all really just a matter of risk versus reward, you see, how to maximize the likelihood of success while simultaneously minimizing the risk of getting caught red handed. Well, there wasn’t actually any blood involved here, so no real red hand, but you get my drift. Anyways, the thing that struck me right away was the need for isolation, the killer’s need to make sure that she and Katy Mulcahey were at the very back end of the group of divers, that nobody else was hanging back in any way that might disrupt her master plan, that might somehow foil her attack. And that attack, it wasn’t quick and simple, I’m here to tell you. No siree, that attack, it required pinpoint timing, because even after Katy Mulcahey’s air was turned off and her inflator hose was severed, Tara Cutler had to hold her in place long enough for Katy to pass out. Had to hold her in place while she kicked and punched and squirmed and did everything in her power to get free. And Tara had to do something about Katy’s dive light, which was swinging around wildly, just begging to catch someone’s attention. So you can see where it might be highly inconvenient if someone happened to somehow mosey along right into the middle of things and interfere with the whole shooting match at that oh so critical moment.”

  “But we’ve already covered all that,” Brett Cutler explained. “Billie was moving along extremely fast in the current for some unknown reason and Casey had to swim hard to keep up with him, so that wound up putting them way out in front of the group. And as for Trevor, Katy had a long history of always hanging back, never staying up with the rest of the group, so that part wasn’t a surprise at all.”

  “Yes, Mr. Cutler, that much is true. A long history that your wife was well aware of, by the way, and clearly took into account when she drew up her little plan. But still, if you’d been paying attention to things just a little bit better, you’d have noticed your wife turning off her own dive light and swimming back to attack Katy.”

  “But—but—” Brett Cutler appeared at a loss for words, and it took him several seconds to finally stammer out a defense. “No, I agree, I wasn’t paying close enough attention to her. But that doesn’t make me a killer!”

  “No it doesn’t. And like I said earlier, you would have been the last person on earth who would have wanted Katy dead. Who would want to murder the mother of his own two children, after all? Not to mention a woman who was every bit as rich as she was good looking. That part never hurts, believe you me. But still, it raises a good point. In order to pull all this off, your wife needed to duck away from you completely unnoticed for at least several minutes, and she also had to make sure nobody else was watching her at the time. And that had me somewhat perplexed. How would someone as smart as Tara Cutler figure out a way to keep herself from getting caught in the act? How could she be rock-solid certain that none of the other members of your little scuba club would glance back at some point and catch her in the act? Catch her in flagrante delicto?”

  Gavin rubbed the back of his neck and stared up at the ceiling. “Which brings up something I’d forgotten until just this very morning, a small snippet of conversation that occurred almost the very same moment we stepped on board that boat. Something about Billie, how he was always the group’s fixit man. And not just when it came to engines and pumps. No, I believe it was Trevor himself who told me that Billie was the go-to guy underwater, as well. Trevor said he always seemed to be Johnny-on-the-spot anytime something went wrong on a dive. And once I remembered that little conversation, it struck me—how on earth could Billie help anyone out if he was always catching the current and flying off, way ahead of everybody else? Right? Well, the fact is, he couldn’t. And so I went back to my notes to see whether he’d gotten any new equipment that might have changed things around for him, but no, he was still wearing the same old hand-me-down vest from eBay he’d been wearing for years. And always on a dive down here in Cozumel, where strong currents are an everyday fact of life. So, with that in mind, why was it he was suddenly some kind of underwater Superman, flying off at the speed of sound, leaving all his little wards behind in his wake?”

  He stopped and fixed his gaze on Casey. “Well, the thing is, I just couldn’t come up with a single thing that could explain it, not one danged thing. And you know, we in the police business have a simple little rule of thumb for situations like this—if you can’t explain it, it just didn’t happen, plain as that. Billie
hadn’t somehow morphed into a flying nun overnight. He was just floating along at his regular pace, same as always. Isn’t that right, Mr. Thompson?”

  Casey threw up his hands in protest. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, man! Everyone saw it, all of us, Billie racing way ahead while I did everything in my power to slow him down!”

  “Is that really what happened, Casey?” Gavin asked, his face twisted in a skeptical look. “Or was something else going on, instead? Maybe you had your own little role in this whole operation, your own little part to play in this little underwater Shakespearean drama of ours? And before you answer, remember what I said about our having access to all of Tara Cutler’s emails.”

  Casey’s eyes widened like saucers as his mind raced to remember what evidence he may have accidentally left behind, despite all of his efforts to be discreet about leaving anything even remotely incriminating where it could someday be found. “I—I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do, Antoine. As a matter of fact, I know you do. You see, in order for Tara’s brilliant little scheme to work, Billie had to be kept out of the picture somehow. And the only way to do that was to have him shadowed the whole time by someone who could be counted on to pull him down behind a coral head every now and then, out of sight of everything that was happening behind him. And that also meant he needed to be kept at the front of the group, instead of hanging around near the back in case someone had a minor emergency, like he had done on all the other dive trips. So with a dive master who was busy doing just about anything other than mastering the dive, and with Tara making sure she and her husband were staying well behind the two of you, and with Katy doing her usual thing and bringing up the rear, the layout was perfect, wasn’t it? You had Billie convinced he was a rocket man for some reason, some reason he couldn’t possibly explain, but in fact you had him corralled the whole time like a lost heifer. Leaving Tara Cutler free to circle back and eliminate her rival for Brett Cutler’s affections.”