by Dan Ames
Pauling continued to read the background Blake had supplied. She set aside the scandalous stuff and went to a biography from one of Dr. Sirrine’s earlier employers.
It told her that Abner had graduated from a prestigious private school on the East Coast and then went to Dartmouth where he graduated magna cum laude. He immediately began writing papers and gaining recognition for his insights into bird migrations, in particular the birds of southern California. These papers had ultimately led to his being offered the position at California State College, where he’d been an instructor for decades.
Pauling learned that after his resignation, Dr. Sirrine went off the grid before he reappeared for the Bird Conservatory. Pauling wondered if the reason he was accepted for the job was that he wouldn’t have any underage females working for him.
That made sense to Pauling. She continued to read the material from Blake on Dr. Sirrine until she had completed nearly everything.
Before she dug into information on the others she thought about what she'd read.
Could it be that Dr. Sirrine had anything to do with Paige’s death?
On the surface, it seemed absurd.
Dr. Sirrine was like a goofy old uncle. Additionally, his physicality was less than impressive. He didn’t look fragile necessarily, but he certainly wasn’t much of a physical specimen.
Pauling saw no way in which Dr. Sirrine could overpower Paige.
Unless of course Paige had been under the influence of something, knowingly or unknowingly. Pauling thought of her escapades the night before. But nothing she had seen in Dr. Abner Sirrine suggested he would've killed Paige.
But if there was one thing she had learned at the FBI, it was to never underestimate the potential for evil in the human heart.
Chapter Thirty-Three
After Pauling ate breakfast and had a couple more cups of coffee, she decided to skip the field trip Dr. Sirrine had planned for her and instead commandeered the jeep and drove it directly to the commander’s office.
She parked in the little gravel parking lot outside a civilian-looking building that looked more a real estate agent’s office than military headquarters.
Pauling walked inside and saw two offices. One was empty and the other was occupied by Commander Bill Wilkins and seated in a chair across from him, Michael Tallon.
Pauling decided to be bold and ignore protocol so she walked right up to the office and stood outside the doorway.
Wilkins looked at her and his expression made Michael Tallon turn and look over his shoulder. When he saw Pauling, he smiled.
"Hey! Pauling, how are you doing?"
"I'm doing fine. How are you? Hello, Bill."
“Pauling,” Wilkins replied.
"Couldn't be better,” Tallon answered. “Are you here to see me or this old salt?"
"The old salt," she said.
“No problem, we were just finishing up,” Tallon said. “I’ll talk to you later, Bill.” Tallon got to his feet, nodded at her as he walked past and then stopped.
"Hey, have you ever gone diving for lobsters before?"
"No, can't say that I have," Pauling answered.
"Great. Let's do it. You can’t come out to San Clemente and never go lobster diving. It’s a rite of passage."
“Sounds interesting,” Pauling said.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.”
He walked on and Pauling turned to Commander Wilkins.
"Is he serious?" she asked.
Wilkins nodded. “Yeah, I'm afraid so. I try not to eat too much lobster, as good as they are. High in cholesterol.”
Pauling took the chair in which Tallon had been sitting.
"So what can I do for you?" Wilkins said.
"Well, you offered to give me a tour of your part of the island so I thought I would finally take you up on that,” she said. “Or is now a bad time? Is this the kind of thing you schedule?"
"I did, in fact, have a couple things on today’s calendar but when a beautiful woman like yourself offers to spend some time with me, I'm not gonna turn her down,” Wilkins replied. “I may be old but I haven't lost my faculties."
He snatched up a set of keys and gestured for Pauling to follow him.
"So who actually provides law enforcement for the island?” she asked, knowing the answer but wanting to see what he would say. “Is it the military police or your own guys? Or is there an outside police force whose jurisdiction the island falls under?"
"You get right to the point, don't you?" he said, glancing at Pauling. “Technically, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department whose nearest precinct is actually on Catalina Island. Have you ever been to Catalina Island?"
Pauling thought about it. "Yes, I have been on Catalina but it was a long time ago when I was a little girl."
Wilkins led her outside to a small blue pickup truck and he took the wheel. She slid into the passenger seat. The truck smelled like coffee and cigarettes.
"We're not a very big operation,” he said. “We only have a couple hundred people here usually. Mostly guys rotating in for training and rotating out. The people who are here on a full-time basis tend to be the Seabees who are the construction people from the Navy. Of course the kitchen staff are year-round. The maintenance people are year-round, too.”
Wilkins drove her from one end of the island to the other, pointing out the various locations of training sites. Most of them were not much to look at.
As they drove, she occasionally spotted groups of men jogging.
The tour took less than an hour and Pauling didn’t see anything that surprised her, or that she hadn’t seen before.
The most interesting thing to note was what Wilkins hadn’t shown her.
Rag City.
Eventually, they wound up back at Wilkins’ office.
“So were you shocked when the body of Paige Jones showed up?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” he said casually, as if she’d asked him about the weather report. “We see training accidents all the time. Some of them are fatal. But the birdies? Nothing ever happens to them. It was a shame. I’d met her, saw her occasionally at the Crab. A beautiful girl.”
Pauling nodded.
The phone on the desk rang. Pauling almost chuckled. Who had landlines anymore?
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said.
“Thank you for the tour.”
He nodded to her as he picked up the phone.
Chapter Thirty-Four
She found Dr. Sirrine standing outside the herbarium. He was examining a new batch of seeds that had been collected that morning.
Pauling took in his appearance, which was the same as always. Khakis, a barn jacket, worn leather boat shoes and a field hat.
“Any exciting discoveries?” Pauling asked.
Dr. Sirrine shook his head.
“No, but it’s been a dry season and the ground cover isn’t doing as well as we’d hoped,” he said. “But it’s not horrible. Plenty of camouflage for our favorite birds’ food.”
“That’s good,” Pauling said. “Hey, do you have a minute? I’d like to talk to you about something.”
Dr. Sirrine put down the seeds he’d been studying and glanced at her.
“This sounds serious.”
Pauling didn’t respond.
He pointed to a bench near the back of the building. They walked to it together and sat down.
“What did you want to discuss?” he asked.
“I’ve read the newspaper articles about your departure from California State College,” Pauling began. “I guess I wanted to hear your side of the story.”
Dr. Sirrine sighed and rubbed his hands on his thighs, brushing off some dirt and loose grass he’d collected during his research.
“What makes you possibly think I would want to talk about that?” he snapped. “It’s ancient history.”
“So do the newspaper stories tell the whole truth? Or is there more to the story?”
“Truth and reality are two different things,” he explained, a tone of condescension in his voice. “They told their truth, and I have mine. The reality depends on which lens you’re standing behind.”
“Spoken like a true professor,” Pauling said. She paused, and was amazed at how right at home she felt. She’d interrogated some bad people in her life. The naturalist sitting next to her was severely undermatched.
“How much does the Bird Conservatory know?” Pauling asked.
Pauling sensed Dr. Sirrine’s back stiffen at the mention of it.
“Is that a threat?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Do you feel threatened by the idea of me talking to them? Or do they already know your full history?”
In other words, Pauling thought, yes, it’s a threat all right.
Body language oftentimes speaks several volumes louder than verbal speech. When Dr. Sirrine’s body seemed to fold in on itself, Pauling knew she had cracked him.
“There was nothing, absolutely nothing, untoward,” he finally said. “The fact was, she had been my student, but wasn’t under my tutelage when we began seeing one another. She was eighteen. I was thirty-eight.”
A truck drove by on Perimeter Road and Dr. Sirrine waited for its sound to fade.
“I was lonely, she was in need of adventure. For a brief time, we found solace with each other.”
His voice had warmed, and Pauling instinctively knew Dr. Sirrine still had feelings for the woman.
“But as is so often the case with these things, it ended badly,” he explained. “For someone my age, I knew these things happened. She was young, and didn’t know how to handle it, so she lied and said the relationship had begun six months before it actually did. When she was seventeen. She knew what would happen to me. And it did.”
“Did she ever recant her story?” Pauling asked.
Dr. Sirrine shook his head. “No, she changed her story, repeatedly. But she never recanted the fictional start date. However, each time she told the story she added in new details, mostly regarding my depravity. It was almost like she felt she couldn’t tell the same story over and over. She needed to spice it up each time. Needless to say, the damage to my teaching career was irrevocable.”
Pauling leaned back against the bench. She folded her arms across her chest.
“What did you think when they found Paige’s body?”
His laugh was full of cynicism. “I naturally thought of myself. I figured someone would eventually come calling, questioning me regarding my whereabouts, that kind of thing. I figured it would be the police.”
“And did they?”
“They talked to me about her, but I had nothing to tell them. And they only asked about her in the context of a drowning. They clearly felt foul play wasn’t involved, and frankly, I felt the same way. That is, until you arrived. And then I began to wonder who had hired an investigator, and why.”
Pauling ignored the bait.
“Did they ask about your past?” she asked.
“No.”
He looked directly at her.
“You’re the first.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
When Pauling was finished talking with Dr. Sirrine and he had gone back to the Nest, she heard movement behind her and a door banged shut. She got up from the bench and walked around to where she heard the sound. There was a door that must have been a side entrance to the herbarium.
Pauling went inside and Janey was standing at a rolling table, working with some soil samples.
Pauling wondered if Janey had been trying to listen in on her conversation with Dr. Sirrine.
And if so, why?
"Do you enjoy your work here?" Pauling asked, as she walked up to watch Janey.
Janey spoke quickly, almost nervously. "I enjoy what I do, but not much else. You know, when I came here a lot of people at the Bird Conservatory said the work was rewarding but you'll live in isolation. There's nothing to do there, they said. You'll lose contact with friends and family and being able to do social things. And I found out they were right."
It had all come out in a gushing torrent and Pauling suspected Janey had been listening to her conversation with Dr. Sirrine. She’d been a little too eager to fill the void.
"But you do enjoy the work?” Pauling asked. “Are you achieving things professionally?"
Janey stopped what she was doing and turned to Pauling, almost as if she hadn’t fully realized she was there until that moment.
“Do you enjoy what you’re doing?” Janey asked. Her tone was verging on anger. Pauling was surprised. What had she done to piss off this woman?
“Are you achieving things that you want to achieve in a professional sense?" Janey persisted. Some of the snark had gone out of her tone, but Pauling sensed there was a lot of emotion behind the question.
Pauling knew what Janey was getting at. She was obviously thinking that Pauling was snooping around about Paige’s death. But why would that upset her?
"I find my work challenging," Pauling said. “But I feel that what I do is very important.”
Pauling followed Janey as she carried a tray of seedlings and put it under a grow light.
“I wanted to thank you for telling me about Paige and some of her habits,” Pauling tried, softening her tone as much as possible. “I was wondering, was there anything else you can think of? Anything else that happened to Paige while she was out here? Anyone who might've wanted to hurt her?"
Janey frowned. "No. I did remember one thing though, and I meant to tell you. One morning I saw Paige at breakfast and her face was puffy and red and there were marks on her throat. It was hard to tell what they were though. There are a lot of strange pollens out here and sometimes we have allergic reactions. Not to mention all kinds of spiders and flies and mosquitoes. We’re constantly getting bitten,” Janey said. “But there was a part of me that wondered if someone had slapped her around a little bit. Maybe even put their hands around her throat. Then again, I figured I might have been paranoid or something. And it wasn’t my place to ask.”
"So you didn’t ask her about the marks?" Pauling asked.
"Not right away, but eventually I sort of did. A couple of times. But she never wanted to talk about them, and she never told me what happened. As far as I know she never told anyone.”
Janey set down the tray of soil as if it was a punctuation mark on what she said. And then she walked away.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Pauling spent a fitful evening going over the material Blake had sent her, updating her dossiers on everyone involved and then eventually falling asleep.
She had a bad night’s sleep punctuated by a nightmare in which she was stranded in the desert facing a pickup truck with a huge machine gun installed in the truck bed, manned by a terrorist.
When she awoke, she got her coffee and found Michael Tallon waiting for her.
She’d forgotten about his offer to take her diving for lobster.
"Ever had lobster for breakfast?" he asked. His blue eyes shone like beacons and Pauling realized once again how incredibly good-looking he was. And then she caught herself. She was here to investigate Paige's death. Not to meet a handsome military guy.
She wasn't sure why she had accepted the offer in the first place. But it occurred to her that Paige’s journal had referenced a man with blue eyes. And Paige had washed up on the shore as if she'd been out swimming.
So when a man with blue eyes invited her out for a diving expedition she felt, as an investigator, she had to say yes.
Because in the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but wonder if this was exactly how Paige had met her unfortunate demise.
An innocent offer from Michael Tallon.
Pauling didn’t think it would be the case, but she also felt like she needed some insurance.
Besides, she still had no idea if Paige’s poem was even about Michael Tallon, or if it was about a man at all. It all depended upon the interpretation.
Before she left, Pauling sent an email to Blake, letting him know that she was going out on a dive boat with a Michael Tallon. She made it sound like a casual mention in a frivolous email and refrained from specifically asking Blake to do anything.
Pauling also made a concerted effort not to mention how angry she felt that Jack Reacher was nowhere to be found. Nathan Jones would have to give her a proper explanation when she got back.
They took Perimeter Road down to the military's shipyard. There were some boats with machine guns on them and Pauling was again reminded of her dream.
"Those are called RHIBS,” Tallon explained. “Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats.”
He pointed over toward another set of two boats that were bigger and held more machine guns. "Those are called Mark Vs.”
Tallon parked the vehicle and they made their way down to the pier where Tallon led her to a boat that looked like a glorified barge.
"Yeah, this isn't as sexy as those other boats but it'll get the job done,” he said. “This is our backup boat for dive training. Right now there's hardly anything on it which makes it perfect for us to go look for some lobster."
It was a small vessel maybe 25 feet in length but at least 15 feet wide. There was a little pilothouse and then there were rows of oxygen tanks on the side along with dive gear.
“Why don't you untie us while I fire up the engines?" he said.
“Aye aye, captain,” she said.
Pauling went to the bow and stern of the boat and undid the thick ropes holding the barge in place as she heard the rumble of what she assumed to be a big diesel engine get going.
They slowly pulled out of the harbor and into an immediate chop. The barge didn’t exactly rise and fall with the waves as much as plow through them, occasionally bumping and going sideways.
