Then again, grief distorted reality.
“I can see that look on your face,” Collat said to me. “You think I’m not looking at this clearly.”
“No,” I lied. “No, it’s just that this isn’t the kind of thing Armstrong normally deals in.”
“Then you won’t help me.”
“I didn’t say that.” My eyes shifted to DJ. “We already promised we’d help.”
“Good. I’d hate to see Mr. Armstrong’s record get tarnished.”
Collat rose off the couch, brushed himself off, then turned around and collected his badge and his gun. He clipped them on his waistband.
“I think you should check Luc’s boat first.” Collat reached in his pocket. He produced a small key and held it out. I reached my hand out, accepting it. “He’s got a slip at Krum Bay Marina on St. Thomas. You’ll find his boat there—an American Tug 365 with a forest green hull. Name’s St. Thomas Gazette.”
Once again, Reel Fun carried DJ and me across the ocean, this time from San Juan, around Culebra, to the lee side of St. Thomas, and into Long Bay. The return trip took the same three hours.
DJ guided the boat to the mouth of West Gregerie Channel—between St. Thomas and Water Island, west of Charlotte Amalie. Then he swung northward, taking us into Krum Bay—a place I’d never heard of.
Alicia and I had moved to St. Thomas a few months ago. I didn’t have the lay of the island memorized yet, but I knew most of the important landmarks. Places like Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the USVI, where all the big cruise ships docked for multi-day excursions into Blackbeard’s Castle and Fort Christian. I’d been to Magen’s Bay Park, facing the Atlantic side of the island, and Cas Cay, on the windward side, where I taught Alicia some of the basics of snorkeling and free diving.
Learning what leeward and windward meant was easy. The wind always blows from the east—windward. Sometimes the northeast or southeast, but always out of the eastern quadrant. The east side of these islands was rugged, with rocky coasts and cliffs. The leeward sides never saw much wave activity and that was where you found the best beaches and anchorages.
I’d learned the places where locals ate and shopped and unwound, away from pesky tourists asking for the best places to get a burger, touch sea turtles, or score some weed.
As far as I could remember, nobody ever said to stop by Krum Bay.
As we motored further into the bay, I figured out why. From my spot on the settee on the flybridge, I looked toward the western shoreline and saw the island’s desalination plant. Near a few rectangular steel buildings, dozens of long, white and royal blue pipes ran parallel with a concrete patch covering the ground.
No one wanted to see industry sucking up the turquoise Caribbean waters, extruding them through filter after filter, until they were scrubbed into sterility.
On the opposite shore—beyond DJ’s goatee flapping in the wind, sat thick walls of deep-green trees. On the western edge of a dirt clearing was a boat ramp. There were holding tanks of some kind there, the big ten-thousand-gallon suckers. I guessed they either held water or fuel for the plant, for when the power inevitably cut off—which it often did on St. Thomas.
After passing around a sunken barge, DJ held Reel Fun steady. Within a few minutes, we came upon a small marina. At first glance, I guessed there were no more than two dozen vessels docked there or moored nearby.
Halfway up the nearest dock we saw Luc’s boat, just where Detective Collat had said. The St. Thomas Gazette was a thirty-six-footer with a deep green hull. It looked like a miniature tugboat with a commercial-style bridge, but the deck was tiny—barely enough to walk around.
I tapped DJ’s shoulder and pointed at the boat. He acknowledged me with a mutter lost in the light breeze, then spun the wheel in the direction of the Gazette.
While he maneuvered closer to an empty spot at the end of the dock, I went down the ladder to the cockpit, and got the lines and fenders out, tying the lines to the boat’s cleats to be ready to tie us off.
We idled forward, the dock coming up on our starboard side. I dropped the fenders over, and then, as soon as I’d gotten a loop around a cleat, DJ cut the engines.
I hopped off Reel Fun and cleated the line, then went forward and grabbed the bow line before DJ could get down from the flybridge.
Confident that I’d done it right, I stepped back as DJ came slowly down the ladder. He shut the aft storage door in a way that made it clear he wasn’t happy about me leaving it open. Then, he peered down at the dock lines…and grimaced.
“Sloppy work, Dep. That cleat hitch is wrong,” he said with a big grin. “Tie it again.”
I thought I’d done a solid job. Maybe the first time I’d been confident about my knots. But when I looked at it again, he was right. The knot wouldn’t hold unless I tucked that last section of line beneath itself and cinched it down tight.
I jumped onto the boat’s aft deck.
“Ain’t you from a beach town, Dep?” DJ asked as I went past.
I hoisted myself onto the thin stretch of starboard deck. “I am,” I said. But when I was a kid—before joining the Air Force—I didn’t tie up boats. I didn’t fill holds. I didn’t scrub hulls or chart courses. Dad hired people to do that for us.
“Nobody’s coming through here,” I said as I retied the line. “The water’s calm—nothing is going to shake that knot loose.”
“Once we get some salt on that pretty little boat you got docked around the way, you can tie the knots as loose as you care to. I’m captain on my boat. And Captain Martin says re-tie your line, sailor.”
“Aye, sir.” I leaned back on my haunches, holding my hands toward the knot for DJ’s inspection.
“That’s ship-shape, Deputy Snyder,” he said with a nod.
“Good. Now that you’re satisfied, Captain, maybe we can go do the job we came here to do.” I vaulted the rail amidships and dropped five feet to the dock. DJ sat on the edge of the starboard railing, swung his legs over, then used the toes of his good leg to pull the boat as close to the dock as it could get. Then, he pushed off, sliding onto his feet, standing straight on the dock. It was a pretty tricky maneuver for a guy with one leg. I wondered how many times he’d screwed it up and fallen in.
“That sounds like a fine idea,” DJ said. “You might rethink jumping down like that. One rotten board and you’re going into the drink.”
Whatever.
I led the way down the dock. We walked past three slips—two empty, one holding a fishing trawler. The boat rocked slightly on the calm water in the bay. I assumed that meant someone was moving around inside, but I didn’t want to talk to any of Luc Baptiste’s neighbors yet. Not until I got a look at his boat.
The St. Thomas Gazette looked well-maintained on the outside. The hull was free of any hangers-on that I could see. The paint job hadn’t faded in the sun, or chipped from harsh weather, which meant Luc had probably had it painted recently.
Odd thing to do for a man considering suicide.
DJ stepped onto the swim platform. “You got that key Collat gave you?”
“One second,” I said. “I want to get a good look at the outside before we go in.”
Could be nothing helpful on the outside, but every investigation required a methodical approach, so I walked the dock around the outside of the boat. Overlooking some small detail, due to being rushed, could be the difference between confirming the coroner’s report about Luc Baptiste or finding something else. To a coroner, there were only five manners of death: homicide, suicide, accidental, natural, and unknown. The question still nagged at me. Even if there was no evidence to support homicide, why had the coroner chosen suicide over unknown?
As it turned out, the boat looked exactly as I’d expected. Everything clean. No rust stains caused by water dripping from toe rails. No cracks in the glass around the bridge. Nothing out of place.
When I came back around to the stern, DJ had let himself aboard from the swim platform.
“What�
�s the theory? Navy SEALs climb up the side of the boat and drag Baptiste into the water?”
I dug into my pocket and pulled out the key. “Not this time.”
I tossed the key to DJ and he snatched it out of the air.
“Hell, the poor son of a bitch probably did drown himself,” DJ said, as he walked to the salon door. “I mean, look at this place. Ain’t exactly the most picturesque spot in the whole Virgin Islands. I’d tie stones to my ankles and jump into the water too.”
“Maybe you would,” I said, as I climbed aboard. “But if you were going to do it, you’d probably do it right here where your boat is. And your body probably wouldn’t have washed all the way out to the north end of the island. You’d be lucky if you ever made it out of Krum Bay.”
DJ lifted an eyebrow at me. He looked impressed.
“If I want to dump a body, guess I know who I should be consulting.” he said with a grin.
I shook my head at him. “Open the door, DJ.”
“Hatch,” he said, correcting me. “A door on a boat is called a hatch. Windows are portholes and the living room is the salon.”
“Last I knew, a boat doesn’t sink if you call the bathroom a bathroom,” I said.
His smile broadened as he shook his head, turned the key in the lock, and pushed the door open.
Inside, the living room was trashed.
Everywhere lay everything; food, dishes, cleaning supplies, clothes, books; even the TV had been ripped off the wall to our left. Immediately on our right, the fridge hung open, and the microwave had been torn clean out of its cubby above the fridge. All the cabinet doors were ajar, one of them literally hanging by a single hinge. I tasted the stench of rotting melon in the back of my throat.
“Ain’t this something curious?” DJ said, stepping through the door, and kicking a cabinet shut under the sink at the same time.
I came in behind him. The settee cushions lay in an uneven mess on top of the frame, like trees after a hurricane. They’d all been sliced open, their stuffing hanging out.
“Very curious,” I said. “Safe to say somebody was looking for something.”
“You ain’t kidding about that.” DJ was already up the trio of steps in the forward part of the living room—the salon—leading into the pilothouse. “Wonder if they found it?”
“Soon as we nab whoever killed Luc, we’ll ask.”
There was no longer any doubt in my mind that Luc’s death wasn’t a suicide. I allowed the possibility on our ride over from San Juan, or even the off chance that he’d been in an unfortunate accident. But now that I saw Luc’s place, I was certain he’d been murdered.
“What do we do now?” DJ asked.
“Check around the boat. See if we notice anything out of place—anything that might give us a hint about where to go next. You start up there, I’ll start down here.”
“Seems to me like everything’s out of place,” DJ said.
“Then look for something that’s where it’s supposed to be. Maybe if we can find where they stopped looking, it’ll tell us what they were looking for.”
Over at the settee, I looked down into the storage compartments which would’ve normally been hidden by the cushions. I saw towels scattered, a tackle box upended, hooks, lines, and sinkers glittering up at me. In the compartment on my right, a DVD collection had been meticulously riffled through—each case opened.
There was my first hint: whatever they were after must’ve been small enough to fit in a DVD case.
“Keep an eye out for something compact, DJ. CD-ROMs, DVDs, thumb drives, pocket notebooks—anything that could hold Luc’s notes.”
“I’m on that, Dep,” DJ called from the pilothouse.
“And stop calling me that. I was never a deputy.”
I took the stairs up to the pilothouse. I saw DJ going through the storage bays under the seats. In front of me, against the portside wall, a second set of stairs led downward and toward the Gazette’s bow.
“I’m going to check down there,” I said, pointing in that direction.
After I took the stairs down, I found myself in the main stateroom. Straight ahead of me, the bed had been tossed and stripped of its sheets. The bare mattress leaned against the wall, a large tear nearly bisecting it, and the storage beneath looked much like the settee storage in the salon—everything pushed around and disorganized. Anything that could be dumped—like suitcases, a backpack, and a toiletry bag, was spilled out all over the floor.
Behind me, the bathroom looked like the rest of the boat. The medicine cabinet yawned open, empty pill bottles had been uncapped and dumped into the sink or the commode.
We spent the next couple of hours picking through the boat. The most prominent through-line to the ransacking seemed that the perps were after something small. Whether it was the size of a credit card, or a postage stamp, I couldn’t say.
I had been searching the bedroom for at least an hour when, on my hands and knees, I noticed a small panel to the left of Luc’s bed. If I didn’t have my nose to it, I would’ve easily missed it, but this close, I saw the faux wood-grain pattern on the false panel didn’t match up to the grain around it.
The panel had a little give to it, like a cabinet door held with a magnetic latch. Now opened, I found a waterproof container inside the compartment about the size of two shoeboxes pushed together. I pulled it out, sat it on the bed, and opened the latch.
Inside, next to a small, black, zip-up case, I found a bundle of documents tied together with twine. I took it out, slid them out of the twine and thumbed through one after another.
The bundle was a hodgepodge of different things like legal documents, handwritten letters, photographs, bank records, bills addressed to people other than Luc Baptiste—all of it appeared deeply personal. The kind of stuff no one wanted another soul to see.
Luc had built up a nice trove of dirt on a lot of people. Some would see it as gathering information, but it looked a lot like fodder for blackmail to me.
I pulled out one letter written in neat cursive. The letterhead came from the office of Rachel Little, Chief Executive Officer of Hildon Pharmaceuticals. It appeared to be a divorce settlement between Ms. Little and an ex-husband, citing her own infidelity, and dated over three years ago. A lot of assets seemed to change hands.
“DJ,” I called out.
His hair flung down from the door to the stateroom. Took my eyes a second to find his.
“Luc Baptiste kept a whole stash of private information on people.” I set the letter aside and picked up the next thing that caught my eye: a photograph of a gray-haired man with his lips locked on a much younger woman. I recognized his designer suit. Must’ve seen it a dozen times on a dozen different businessmen. “Blackmail.”
The boat shook when DJ landed at the base of the steps. He walked over to me.
“Lotta folks knew who Luc Baptiste was,” DJ said, as he took the bundle and riffled through it. “If you had money and something to lose, you didn’t want him knocking on your car window and shoving a voice recorder in your face. You think this was work or pleasure?”
“Could’ve been both.” I examined the photograph more closely.
“Oh, man,” DJ said.
When I looked over, I thought I saw him hide a grin.
“You ever heard of a guy named Nick Garner?” He slipped a piece of paper from the bundle and handed it over to me.
“Should I?”
“A lot of the locals on St. Thomas do. Including Luc Baptiste. He runs that Wild Life resort.”
I glanced down at the paper to see a black and white copy of the USVI seal. This was some kind of official document.
“It’s a restraining order,” I said. “Luc had a restraining order against this Nick Garner guy?”
“Check the date, Dep.”
Last week. I looked from the paper to DJ.
“You’re gonna hate this dude’s guts,” he said with a grin. “Wanna take a quick ride up north?”
Traveling
west from Krum Bay, DJ and I took Reel Fun through the heavier boat traffic of Long Bay, then turned westward, toward Culebra. We passed Savannah Island, then covered ten miles of open water before we slipped through the channel between Culebrita and Cayo Norte.
As we came through, I noticed a dock on the eastern shore of Culebra. At this distance, I couldn’t see much, except that there were more than a dozen boats tied to it.
Further to my right, a buoy with a white sign swayed on the waves, about halfway between Reel Fun and the dock. Writing was scrawled across it in red. I took a pair of binos from a compartment near DJ’s knees.
The sign read: Welcome to Wild Life at Zoni Beach! in big, friendly letters, flanked by an elephant and a tiger’s face with flashing eyes.
“Does Nick Garner run a wildlife preserve?” I asked DJ, as I lowered the binos. “I thought you said this place was his resort.”
“This place is whatever it has to be. Whatever gets him the biggest tax break. Last I knew, he was reorganizing to make it a church.” DJ had the VHF mic in his hand. He clicked the button down, identified his vessel and asked for a day slip.
I turned the binoculars toward the dock and watched people file onto a party barge. The wind shifted, and I heard music thumping from that direction. To the north of the pier, the crowd on the beach looked older than what was typical. I put the pieces together in my head.
Then I spotted an African elephant wading near the shore, spraying water from its trunk.
“He’s got an elephant.”
DJ snorted and shook his head. “If he’s got one, he’s got a half dozen. When Garner kicks off, there’ll be a herd of them eating the daisies in your front yard.”
“I’ll invest in a good pooper scooper.”
“It’s not a joke,” DJ said. “No wild animal should be forced to depend on a guy like Nick Garner. He’d let the tourists take a bite of one if he thought the money was better.”
“So, he’s a real captain of industry.”
“He should be shot.” DJ eased back Reel Fun’s throttle, slowing her down as we neared the dock.
Wayward Sons Page 6