by William Cook
“You think somebody...murdered them? Oh, God! Oh, God!”
Charley wrapped his arm around her and drew her close. “I'm sorry, honey, but you can see why we can't let Holly and Heidi hear about this until we have more evidence. An actual case. Right now, we only have my suspicions, backed up by Chris's opinions, about why the fuel tanks on the Johnny B. Goode were empty—something Henry, the guy from the salvage company, discovered. Chris is certain Carl would have never let his boat run out of fuel.”
He wiped away her tears with his thumb and kissed her cheek. The room was quiet but for the rain beating on the skylight overhead like brushes on a snare drum. Her chest heaved.
“This town loved those men. I don't think they had a single enemy.” Her breath came in short, irregular gasps, as though she were trying to prevent herself from sobbing.
“That may be, but it looks like somebody wanted them dead.” He lay back down beside her. “I asked Chris the best way to sabotage a diesel engine on a boat, so it would run for part of the day, then quit and not start again. He didn't bat an eye. 'Make it run out of fuel,' he said. It's really tough to get those things restarted when you do that.”
“Your point being?”
“Somebody knew what they were doing. Fixed the gauge so it wouldn't register. Set it all up.”
“A mechanic?”
“Or another guy who knows his way around boats.”
Chloe pursed her lips. “I've been told the crabbing business here isn't really competitive. The boats are always helping each other out. Somebody's in a jam, another boat comes to the rescue.”
Charley was nodding. “I've heard the same thing. I'm guessing that killing those guys was about something else altogether. Like you say, the crabbers here have a kind of brotherhood of the sea. Their only enemy is the ocean.”
“The ocean.” She frowned, remembering once again the service they had attended the day before. “Decker Grange—the guy Hamilton Funeral Home uses for all its gravestone work—he'll be carving their names on the memorial stone in the harbor next week. Brings the total up to 89 lost at sea since the town started keeping records.”
“Damn! Not exactly a record to be proud of.” As he lay there, he shook his head back and forth. “Ever since that sneaker wave took Marisa Kennedy last winter, I've been looking at the ocean different. Like it's a wild animal or something.”
“Me, too. You can't trust it. Can't turn your back on it.” She turned to him and rested her head on his chest. “I won't swim in it. I'll use the pool at the community center before I stick my toe in the ocean.” She ran her fingers over his chest and down his right thigh. “Big confession—I even walk the beach less than I used to ever since Peter Bristol found that arm down there.”
Charley laughed. “You and me both. Of course, the good news is that when Kaitlynn is ready to matriculate to Pacific Crest University, she won't have to contend with Sterling Friese.”
“Amen. I sure hope they lock him up and throw away the key.”
They lay for several minutes without talking, listening to the rain. Then Chloe raised her head and kissed him. “Can I interest you in a little love before we fall asleep?”
“You certainly can,” he said with a grin.
6. Charley's Vibe
Whitehorse had been chewing on his conversation with Chris Harper all weekend. He decided to present his thoughts to his partner this morning and officially open a “case.” Chiara was fixed on her computer screen when he arrived and barely acknowledged his greeting.
“I'll be right with you, Charley. Just have to check a few more details.”
“Hi, everybody,” called Esperanza as he entered. The big man shook the rain off his coat and hung it on the rack. “Don't let me interrupt,” he said, when no one responded.
“Sorry, man. I guess we're both distracted. I've got some interesting news for you, and Chiara has been glued to her computer since I got here. Let's start with a cup of coffee.” When he saw the frown on his partner's face, he added, “It's safe. Chiara made it.”
Esperanza smiled and reached for a mug. “In that case...”
Chiara swiveled her chair around. “OK. I've got interesting news, too.”
“You mean other than its being a 'Blue Hair Day?'” said Esperanza as he stirred creamer into his coffee.
“You're lucky I'm so good-natured, mister!” Chiara smiled at him and added, “I am serious, by the way. Found something you both will want to take a look at.”
“OK,” said Whitehorse, “but let me go first, once I taste this.” He lifted the mug to his lips and then gave her the thumbs-up sign. “You make the best damn coffee. What's your secret?”
“Can't tell you. Otherwise, you might start to do it yourself, and I could be out of a job.”
“Not a snowball's chance in hell, girl. Rest assured, you're here for much more than coffee.” He sat on the edge of her desk. “Listen up, amigos. My latest...suspicions.”
“Here goes.” Esperanza turned to give his full attention. “I knew you'd picked up some kind of scent.” He raised his mug in salutation. “To the Tracker.”
Whitehorse snorted at him and began. “I believe the captain and crew of the Johnny B. were murdered.”
Esperanza spit a mouthful of coffee back into his cup. Chiara looked as though her boss had just slapped her in the face.
“Before you get all weirded out on me, let me explain.” Whitehorse shared his story. He talked about Carl Hamisu's prowess as a captain, about meeting with Harper on Saturday, about diesel engines and air-locks.
Esperanza grimaced. “I don't know, Charley. Seems kinda thin—a real stretch, if you ask me. How could our murderer know a storm would take the boat out?”
“He couldn't, of course. But let's say he's an opportunist. You remember the crab season was delayed a whole month. Boats are still playing catch-up, trying to recoup their losses, despite any weather problems. He knows Carl will be heading out to crab, storm or no storm. So, he grabs the opportunity and sabotages the Johnny B. He realizes that the boat may just run out of fuel and need to be towed back in, by another crabber or by the Coast Guard. All the would-be murderer would have done is made life a little harder for Carl. Harassed him. Maybe even scared him, wondering what might happen to him and his business next. But our murderer thinks, 'Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Just maybe I can hit the jackpot, and the storm will take the damn boat out.'”
Esperanza was shaking his head back and forth. “Whew! You sure are a teller of tales, Charley. I'm still not convinced. We got no motive. And there have to be a hundred easier ways to kill three guys.”
“Sure. But our killer doesn't want to draw any attention to himself and whatever he's doing. The deaths have to look like a random act of God. Like I said, he's an opportunist. If this didn't work, I'm sure he already had a Plan B in mind. What do you think, Chiara?”
She winced. “I'm sorry, but I kind of agree with Tony. You don't have much to go on, other than your gut instinct. We know you have a good gut, but we're gonna need way more evidence to make a real case out of this.”
“OK. I hear you. Anyway, that's how I spent my weekend.” He took another sip from his mug. “What about you, Chiara? You said you had something for us?”
“I did what Tony asked—looked to see if there were any other unsolved missing person cases along the coast. Well, it turns out there's a bunch.” She looked at her computer monitor. “Marie Lovejoy, 23, disappeared from the Sea Lion Motor Court in Astoria, Christmas before last. Ellie Sarnhoff, 15, never came back from a walk on the beach in Seaside last spring.” She looked at the policemen. “I got more. Jimmy Lavender, 12, was out riding his bike in Waldport last summer. Didn't make it home. Most recently, Deirdre Chinakost, 25, went missing last September in Florence.”
“I didn't realize there were so many.” Esperanza frowned and stroked his chin.
“Well, they're real spread out up and down the coast. Easy to miss.”
“Any con
nections between them? Any patterns?” Whitehorse wondered aloud.
“Just little odd ones. I swear, Charley, you must be contagious. The longer I work with you, the more your vibe wears off on me. Anyway, all of them disappeared exactly three months apart. And Patricia Carmody is three months away from Deirdre Chinakost.”
“Jesus!” Esperanza sputtered. “Are we looking at the same perp? Following some crazy kind of schedule?”
Chiara shrugged her shoulders. “You tell me. There's one other thing.” She turned her screen so the policemen could see it. “I pulled up their pictures. Maybe they've been photoshopped and maybe not, but they're all blonde and beautiful. I mean fashion-model gorgeous, even the boy. One of them, Chinakost, even did a stint for an agency in San Francisco a few years ago. Did some work for lingerie catalogues.”
“Impressive, Ms. Sherlock. Got any other ideas? And thanks, by the way, for confirming yet again that the best decision we ever made was getting you hired.” Whitehorse raised his cup to her.
Chiara stood and took a bow, all the while smiling like a Cheshire cat. Then she sat down and slid a textbook out from under her desk. “You guys know I'm taking a couple courses at McCall down in Newport? Anyway, we've been studying human trafficking in my Sociology class. I had to do a paper on it.” She opened her book and withdrew several typed pages.
“Wait a minute. I want to hear Human Trafficking 101. Just let me refill my cup first. Tony, can I get you some more?”
“Sure.”
When they had settled back down, Chiara addressed them like students at school. “OK. So, our professor, Dr. Stefanik, told us it's a $150 billion industry worldwide, with about 40 million victims globally. That's sex trafficking and labor trafficking. It's modern slavery.”
“Christ!” Esperanza said.
“Well, I'm sure he's got nothing to do with it. One of the biggest risk factors for victims is recent migration or relocation. People can't speak the language. Get lied to. They get threatened with deportation. They're kept isolated and are physically and emotionally abused.”
“Other risk factors?” Esperanza seemed to be wrestling with the enormity of the problem.
“Being a runaway, substance use, mental health issues.”
“Do our missing persons share any of those risk factors?” Whitehorse asked the money question.
“Not as far as I can tell. No calls were ever made to the National Human Trafficking Hotline or to the FBI's Child Exploitation Task Force out of Portland.”
“Sheesh! Sounds like you've been doing your homework. So why do you think that's what we're dealing with?”
Chiara smiled. “I call it Charley's Vibe.”
Esperanza guffawed. “Now I've got two Trackers to deal with!” He put his mug down on the desk. “But seriously, you've got me interested. Give me some more stats.”
Chiara looked at her paper. “OK. There were more than ten thousand individual victims in the U.S. in 2017, and almost nine thousand trafficking cases. Of course, those are just the ones we know about.”
“Where are you getting those numbers?” Whitehorse asked.
“A nonprofit group called the Polaris Project. They're the ones that operate the Hotline I mentioned, and they keep all the statistics. There were just under 27,000 calls to the hotline in 2017.” She ran her finger down the page. “In Oregon, there were 103 victims identified and 300 calls in that same year. From the map, it looks like most of the calls came from along the I-5 corridor, but I see one marker at the coast.”
Whitehorse stood and broke the spell. “Wow. Helluva job, Chiara. Thanks.” He took a deep breath and looked at his partner. “You thinking what I'm thinking?”
“No, you crazy sonofabitch. And you shouldn't be thinking it either.” Esperanza shook his head back and forth and muttered some expletives under his breath. “If you don't quit it, you're gonna be writing novels instead of police reports.”
“Ouch! I have been reprimanded. Duly noted. I shall go to my desk, open my computer, and start doing some real police work.”
7. Rumpelstiltskin From the Fifth Dimension
The last two days had been a blur of activity. Responding to a lethal traffic accident, answering a drunk and disorderly complaint, accompanying a funeral procession to the cemetery, arresting a shoplifter at the mall, beginning the initial investigation of a meth house, and trying to calm an alleged racial incident at the local high school left both policemen exhausted. Esperanza was back out at the school, still smoothing ruffled feathers. It wasn't until an hour before his shift was to end that Whitehorse had an opportunity to pull a file from the cabinet.
“Subpoenas came through. I printed some stuff out after going blind staring at my monitor.”
Chiara was craning her neck. “Can I see?”
“Sure. Come and take a look.” He slid the pages to her. “The top part is Patricia's cell phone records for the last six months. I’ve got some Facebook under that.”
“Geez, Charley, you killed a lot of trees for all this paper. Can’t we do it all online?”
“What can I tell you? I’m a dinosaur. After a while looking at a computer screen drives me crazy.”
“Well, call me next time. I’m used to it.”
“Will do. There’s plenty more we’ll have to look through, so I’ll keep you in the loop.”
“OK. Anyway, you mentioned cell phone records?”
“Well, not the content of the conversations. Can't get that. Just who she called and who called her. Last time I looked, I focused on the month of December, but we should go back further. We have access to her email accounts, too.”
“What have you found so far?”
“Just confirmation of her mother's story. See the Facebook message from December twenty-seventh?”
Chiara leaned over Whitehorse's desk. Her green hair fell from her shoulders and brushed the page. She read aloud. “What does it take to get you to answer your phone? An Act of Congress? Don't you go to that audition. No way is Spielberg and Streep in a warehouse in Depot Bay. Or did you say Home Depot and I got it mixed up? Call me goddamn it!”
“She misspelled Depoe Bay.” Chiara smiled and looked at her boss.
“Most people outside of Oregon do. But how did Patricia find out about auditions supposedly being held here on the coast by somebody as famous as Spielberg without the whole world knowing about it? And Meryl Streep? Gimme a break.”
She thought for a moment. “Hmmm. Maybe targeted Facebook ads?”
“What?” He shook his head. “I've never advertised on Facebook. What do you mean?”
“Well, suppose you're trying to sell a new medicine to slow the progress of Old Timer's.”
“Alzheimer's?”
“Yeah. Alzheimer's. You wouldn't want to waste your advertising budget on somebody my age. You'd probably want to aim it at people over 60 or 70.”
“So, supposing Patricia was abducted and didn't drive herself off a cliff into the ocean, our perp would have designed a group for his phony movie pitch, one that our girl would fit right into?”
“Right. Probably had to do with her sex and her age and her interests. Who knows? You can get pretty specific about your audience.”
Whitehorse handed her half the stack of Facebook copy. “Let's find the ad.” With a new-found hope, he began scanning the records, running his finger down the page to help in his search and to keep him at maximum speed. Fifteen minutes later, as he turned the last page, he sighed. “Well, it was a good idea while it lasted. For a while, I thought we might be onto something, but I guess that would have been too easy.”
“Don't look so disappointed, Charley. Our 'perp'—that's a fun word—our perp probably deleted his ad. If he really wanted to cover his tracks, he would have closed his Facebook account, too.”
“So why are you smiling?”
“You know 'deleted' doesn't necessarily mean 'gone forever' on Facebook, don't you?”
“I should know that.” He smacked the side of his
head with his left palm. “I've subpoenaed them enough times to get evidence. They can hold deleted data up to three months before it permanently goes away.” He felt a spark of vitality lighten his mood again. “There's still time, but we've got to find the name of the owner of that account if we're gonna go after Facebook for it. You take half and I'll take half.”
“And what am I looking for?”
“A name. Not one of her usual friends’ names. Maybe Patricia referencing an ad agency or a movie company. Something out of the ordinary.”
This investigation required a closer scrutiny of the pages. Each wrote a list of the names they found in the phone calls, as well as in Facebook posts and messages. The office grew so quiet, the only sounds they heard were the ticking of the clock on the wall and the rustle of pages being turned.
Whitehorse jerked his head up when Esperanza burst in.
“What's up, guys? It's as quiet as a tomb in here. And it's almost quitting time.”
“Doing real police work instead of writing novels,” quipped Whitehorse, as he returned his gaze to the papers on his desk.
“Aw, snap! Got me, partner. Seriously, whatcha doin'?”
Chiara raised her head. “Looking for a name we can pin on a Facebook account that we think got closed. Maybe another clue to Patricia Carmody's disappearance. Wanna help?”
“Sure. Hand me some of that stuff. Later I'll tell you what happened at the high school. You’re gonna wanna hear all about it.”
Whitehorse handed him a stack of telephone pages. “Why don't you concentrate on December? Write down a list of all the names you find. I'll take it back another month or two.”
“What's this BeMoreBeautifulToday thing? Each time it comes up with a different phone number.”
“Robo calls, Tony.” Chiara prided herself in being patient with her bosses, for whom smart phones and computers were not as second nature as they were to her. “You've gotten them, but maybe for hearing aids or pain relief. When you block the number, they generate a new one. They're persistent buggers. Drives my fiancé crazy.”