“When was this photo taken?” I said. “Do you know?”
“I remember it very well,” she said. “It was a Saturday in September. Robert had just started high school, and it was Jimmy’s first year in college. Robert was thrilled that they were getting together for a day of fishing. He sort of figured that when Jimmy went off to college they wouldn’t see much of each other. He got up around four that morning, and Jimmy and his father came and picked him up.”
“Jimmy and Mike Warner?”
She nodded. “They were going out on Mike’s boat. Up around Gloucester, I think. They had a wonderful day of fishing, even though it was quite stormy.”
“Mike has a boat?” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. Robert went out with him and Jimmy several times.” She hesitated. “Not since Jimmy disappeared, though.”
I touched the two photos. “Do you mind if I borrow these?” She shrugged. “I don’t care. Robert will want them back.” I stood up. “I’ll return them, I promise. I’ve got to get going.” She walked me to the front door and gave me a hug. “Thank you,” she said.
“I haven’t done anything,” I said. “Keep in touch, okay?”
“I promise,” I said.
As I drove back to Boston, three thoughts kept colliding with each other in my brain:
The kidnappers’ CD was filmed on a boat.
The bag of ransom money had been picked up in a boat.
Mike Warner owned a boat.
Twenty-four
I GOT BACK HOME A little after two in the afternoon, driving in a misty spring rain that had started sometime while I was at Teresa Samborski’s house in Acton. Henry was pretty happy to see me. I scootched down so he could lap my face for a while, then let him out back.
I checked my phone for messages. None. My thoughts flipped to Evie. It was not yet noontime in California. I assumed she’d call me when she knew something.
Henry yipped from the back porch. He didn’t enjoy the rain.
I let him in, gave him a Milk-Bone, then went into my den. I put the two photos I’d taken from Robert’s room on my desk and found a magnifying glass in my desk drawer.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I hoped I’d recognize it if I saw it.
I detected nothing that struck me as significant on the photo of Robert and Jimmy holding up their big striped bass, although when I magnified the fly that was hooked in the corner of Robert’s fish’s mouth, I could see that it was a chartreuse Lefty’s Deceiver. He’d caught it on a fly rod. Good for him.
I turned my attention to the photo of the four adults at the outdoor table. I did it systematically, moving from the bottom, left to right, then back across right to left so that I wouldn’t fail to examine every square centimeter of the photo.
I was trying to figure out where this outdoor bar or restaurant was, and I saw what I’d been looking for in the upper-left corner, in the background. It was a banner flying under the American flag from a flagpole on the wharf that angled across the top corner of the photo. In the breeze, the banner was almost completely unfurled and I could read the fuzzy letters on it: CAY.
There was another letter at the end, but the way the tip of the banner was flapping in the wind, all I could detect was the beginning of the curve of that last letter. The left edge of an O, maybe. CAYO.
Or a G or a Q or a C.
I wrote down each possible combination. CAYO. CAYG. CAYQ. CAYC. I stared at the combinations of letters.
Meaningless.
I blinked. Looked away. Looked again.
Then I saw it. YC.
A harbor in the background. Captain’s caps on the men, bikini tops on the women. Seagulls. Dozens of moored boats. They were drinking at an outdoor table on a veranda or an open-air porch or a patio.
YC. Yacht Club.
If Dalt and Jessica Lancaster and Mike and Kimmie Warner were having drinks at a yacht club, and if Mike owned a boat, chances were this CAYC was the yacht club where he kept it moored.
I Googled CAYC on my computer, then scrolled down through Mr. Google’s seemingly endless list of hits.
The Canadian Association for Young Children.
The County Antrim Yacht Club. I clicked on that one.
County Antrim was in Ireland. Maybe the two couples had this picture taken when they were vacationing in Ireland together.
If so, it didn’t help me.
I kept going.
The Corning Area Youth Center.
The Community Alliance for Young Children.
The Cambridgeshire Association of Youth Clubs.
Then… aha. The Cape Ann Yacht Club.
Cape Ann was a bump of land detached from the mainland by the Annisquam River, a peninsula on the northern tip of the curve of Massachusetts Bay. The artsy seaport village of Rockport and the famous old fishing community of Gloucester were on Cape Ann. So was the town of Essex, home of the best clam shacks in New England, on the north side, and Manchester-by-the-Sea, a pretty seaside village on the southeastern side of the cape.
Cape Ann was less than an hour’s drive from Boston, a likely place for somebody living in one of the suburbs to keep a boat moored.
I clicked on this CAYC link. The Cape Ann Yacht Club was located in Essex, about twenty-five or thirty miles south of where the Merrimack River emptied into the sea at Plum Island. In other words, about an hour’s boat ride along the coast of the North Shore and up the Merrimack River to where I threw a quarter of a million dollars off the iron bridge.
The CAYC Web site gave its address and the phone numbers for the business office, the marina, and the restaurant.
The question I needed to answer was: Did Mike Warner keep his boat moored there?
I knew what Gordie Cahill would do. He called it “social engineering.” A delicious euphemism. “Soshing,” in the shorthand of PIs, was the art of manipulating people so that they’d divulge information they weren’t supposed to divulge. Soshing required lying, or at least exaggerating and fudging and distorting the truth. As long as it wasn’t specifically illegal, Gordie said, you did it. You had to do it because everybody else did it. If you didn’t, somebody less scrupulous than yourself would, and pretty soon you’d be out of business.
Effective soshing usually involved what they called “pretexting,” creating a false pretext to explain who you were and why you needed the information you wanted. You wouldn’t impersonate a police officer. That was specifically illegal, and therefore dangerous and stupid pretexting. But there was no law against impersonating a bank officer, or a customer-service representative of the telephone company, or an underwriter from a life insurance company. That was clever and effective pretexting.
Pretexting, like soshing, required lying, or at least serious deception, which PIs like Gordie rationalized the way deceit has been rationalized since long before Machiavelli institutionalized it in The Prince: The ends justify the means.
My end was to figure out if Mike Warner’s boat had been the setting for the ransom video starring a duct-taped boy named Robert Lancaster, or if Mike’s was the boat that had picked up the trash bag containing a quarter of a million dollars from the Merrimack River. Or, most likely, both.
Because I didn’t know whom I could trust, I had to accept the likelihood that the means to my end would require some soshing and pretexting and other difficult and uncomfortable deceptions.
I could justify it.
I was a lawyer. We lawyers, of course, were sworn to uphold the law. But lawyers social-engineered and pretexted all the time, especially with each other. We never called it lying. We called it Doing What It Takes to Win.
Laypeople think we lawyers are sleazy and conniving and bloodthirsty. We are the butt of some truly mean-spirited jokes. We tell some pretty nasty lawyer jokes ourselves. We think they’re funny, although when nonlawyers tell them they’re just mean-spirited.
But we don’t believe them. We lawyers have gotten a bad rap. We’re misunderstood. We’re at least as honorab
le and lovable as the next guy. Whatever we do, it’s because we’re committed to our clients. Our work is adversarial. That’s how the law in America works. There’s a winner and a loser. Our clients want to win. So do we. Winning is our job.
So we do what it takes, within the bounds of the law. Rarely do our clients think we’re sleazy or bloodthirsty. When we don’t win, in fact, our clients blame us for not being as sleazy and bloodthirsty as we should have been. For lawyers, the clients are the ones whose opinions count.
I sat there at my desk and thought about it for several minutes. Then I took a deep breath, picked up my cell phone, and dialed the number for the marina at the Cape Ann Yacht Club.
A raspy-voiced man answered. “Cape Ann Yacht Club. This is Dave.”
“Hey, Dave,” I said. “It’s Phil calling from Marine Engines over in Beverly? I’m looking at a recall notice here on some engine parts for—hang on—okay, the name is Warner. Michael Warner? My records are showing he’s got his boat docked there?”
“Warner?” said Dave. “Sorry. It’s not ringing a bell. You want to spell it for me?”
I spelled Warner for him.
“I’m looking on my computer,” he mumbled. “Hm, Walter, um, Wexler. Nope. We got no Warner. You don’t mean Walter, do you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s Warner. Well, damn. So now what’m I s’pose to do? I gotta get this recall notice to him, you know? There’s this whole liability thing.”
“You don’t have a home or business number for him?”
“Yeah. He’s not answering. It says Cape Ann Yacht Club on these papers, man.”
“Sorry I can’t help you,” he said.
“I am screwed,” I said. “How could this be wrong? It says right here in black and white. Cape Ann Yacht Club.”
Dave was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Hang on a minute there, Phil. Lemme try something for you.”
I hung on for close to five minutes.
“Hey, Phil?” he said when he came back on the line. “You still there?”
“Still here,” I said.
“Okay,” said Dave, “good luck. I just talked to Peggy, who’s our assistant manager? She’s been here like forever. She remembers Michael Warner. He kept his boat moored here up until a couple years ago. A Bertram, right?”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s right. A Bertram.”
“Okay. Peggy says Mr. Warner moved his boat over to the Kettle Cove Marina in Gloucester. That was two years ago last September, before I started working here. What happened was, they did a lot of renovations here? Built all new wharfs, expanded the restaurant, updated the security. Cameras and keypad locks and motion-activated floodlights, hired a night watchman. Fees nearly tripled, and a lot of folks, I guess, went looking for something, um, less upscale. Give Kettle Cove a try. Here, I got their number. You got a pencil?”
“I owe you, man,” I said. “Okay, I got a pencil. Shoot.”
Dave read a phone number to me. “You’ll probably talk to Sandy. She’s a good kid. You can tell her it was me who gave you her number.”
“Next time I’m up your way,” I said, “I’m gonna buy you a beer. You have saved my scrawny butt today.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. Glad to help.”
After I disconnected from Dave, I let out a deep breath. This pretexting and social engineering was nerve-racking.
But I’d done it. I’d gotten away with it. Me, Phil, from Marine Engines in Beverly with a recall notice for engine parts.
I was glad Dave hadn’t asked me which engine parts, or who manufactured them, or what was wrong with them. I wasn’t sure I could name any part of a marine engine, never mind one that was a likely candidate for recall.
I leaned back in my chair for a couple of minutes. I decided not to be Phil anymore. I wasn’t sure I wanted Dave and Sandy comparing notes on some guy named Phil.
I pecked out the number for the Kettle Cove Marina on my cellphone.
A woman answered. “Kettle Cove. This is Sandy. How can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “how you doin’, Sandy. This is Frank, here at Danvers Marine, and I’m about to head over your way to take a look at Mike Warner’s Bertram, but I seem to’ve lost the number for his slip. He says she’s been running rough and he’s in a big hurry to get it fixed. Help me out, willya?”
“Frank, is it?”
“You got it.”
“That’s funny,” she said. “I saw Mr. Warner just a couple days ago, and he never mentioned anything about his boat running rough. It’s a pretty old boat, but he takes good care of it.”
“Well,” I said, “he’s trying to take good care of it now. I got the work order right here in my hand, which means I got a job to do. I just need his slip number so I can take a look at her, you know?”
“Hang on there a minute, Frank,” Sandy said. “Let’s see what I can do for you.”
I waited with my fingers crossed.
She came back on the line a minute later. “Frank? You there?”
“Yep. I’m waiting.”
“Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “My loss.”
“Where you from? Danvers Marine, you said?”
“That’s it,” I said. I held my breath.
“Hm,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve ever done any business with you.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s about time we did, hey?”
“Sure,” she said. “I guess so. Thing is, I’m not supposed to give out information about our clients. You know what I’m saying?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I said. “I understand. I could be anybody. It’s just, I been trying to call Mr. Warner, and all I get is his voice mail, and I’m really backed up over here. I don’t wanna get you in trouble. All I need is the damn slip number.”
Sandy paused. I was afraid I’d blown it. Then she said, “Well, okay, Frank. What the hell. I don’t see any harm. You wanna write it down?”
“Yep,” I said. “I’m ready. Fire away”
“Mr. Warner’s Bertram is in slip G-9. You’ve been here before, right?”
“Not lately. You know how many marinas there are on the North Shore, Sandy? I been to all of ’em one time or another. After a while one starts to look like all the others, you know what I’m saying? You better remind me how to find G-9.”
“Sure,” she said, “okay. Slip G-9 is on wharf G, which is the last one out off the main dock. Even-numbered slips on the left, odd numbers on the right. So G-9 is the next-to-last slip on the outside on the right. Make sense?”
“Got it,” I said.
“You know Mr. Warner’s boat?”
“One of the other guys used to work on it,” I said, making it up as I went along. “He quit, so now it’s me. A Bertram, is all I got written down here.”
“A Bertram, right,” Sandy said. “She’s a thirty-eight-footer. Dot Com is her name. White with blue trim. Nice old boat. Sleeps four. Mr. Warner and his wife have been going out quite a bit lately. They do a lot of fishing. Funny that he never said anything about her not running right. I mean, folks usually mention it to me if somebody’s coming over to look at their boat.”
Dot Com, I thought. A cute name for a boat. So the dot-com boom was how—and when—Mike Warner made his money. I wondered if he was one of those people who hit it big, didn’t get out soon enough, and was now finding himself squeezed.
According to Dalt, Mike had exhausted his resources trying to track down his missing son. A boat could be a giant money pit.
“Well,” I said to Sandy, “all I know is, he’s in a big hurry. I got a rush on this. The fishing must be pretty good these days.”
“Very good, what I’m hearing.”
“Okay, well, thanks a million, there, Sandy. I’ll be over sometime this afternoon, take a look at Mr. Warner’s boat.”
“You’ve got to sign in at the office,” she said, “get the security code. When you do, be sure to say hello.”
“
You bet,” I said.
I hung up the phone and blew out a long breath. That had been way easier than I’d expected. Gordie always said you couldn’t overestimate the gullibility of the American public, and the billion-dollar annual sales from telephone and e-mail soliciting and television infomercials bore him out. He said, tell somebody you’re a reporter or, even better, a novelist, and they’ll just spill out their life story to you. Mostly, Gordie said, people like the idea of being helpful, and they’re flattered when somebody asks them for help.
Dave and Sandy were both nice, friendly, helpful people. Why should they mistrust Phil with the recall notice or Frank the marine-engine mechanic? They were just good old boys trying to do their jobs.
I printed out Mapquest directions to the Kettle Cove Marina in Gloucester, then went out to the kitchen. Henry, who’d been snoozing on the daybed in my den, scrambled after me. I found some sliced ham and made myself two ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I ate over the sink. Henry sat on the floor beside me. He looked up at me. Patience and loyalty and love glowed in his liquid brown eyes.
I gave him half a sandwich. He swallowed it in one gulp, then resumed gazing hungrily at me.
“That’s all you get,” I said. “The rest is mine.”
He lay down, dropped his chin onto his paws, and refused to make eye contact.
“It’s all about food with you, isn’t it?” I said to him.
He rolled his eyes up, looked at me for a minute, then sighed and closed them.
“Listen,” I said to. him, “I’m going to be gone for a while this afternoon, and you can’t come with me. Sorry.”
His ears flattened against his head. Henry was a master at reading intonation and body language. The only word I’d just spoken that he understood was “sorry.” He’d learned to equate “sorry” with disappointment and abandonment. Flattened ears meant he was worried and depressed.
I reached down and scratched the sweet spot on his forehead. “I’ll be back before you know it,” I told him. “You guard the house, okay? Don’t hesitate to bark at strange noises.”
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