The Keeper

by George C. Chesbro

  Jade quickly turned around and looked out over the water, which now shimmered like oil in the harsh glare of an additional half dozen powerful floodlights that had been hurriedly set up by the police and fire departments. There was no boat anywhere near the stretch of flotsam-strewn open water where the trawler had been tied up, and no undamaged boat within forty yards of the spot.

  She walked quickly back along the deck to where Jeffrey Bond, unshaven and his hair uncombed, was standing stiffly at the head of the raked gangplank leading down to the decimated central floating dock. His arms were crossed over his chest, and she could see the muscles in his jaw working. He continued to stare out over the water as Jade came up to him, and his deep voice reverberated with cold fury when he spoke.

  “The fucking Navy is going to have to answer for this. Jade. I don’t care what I have to do, but I’m going to see somebody’s lazy, stupid ass fry. If they’d even harbored a suspicion that we had a live bomb parked here and they let us stand around all day and all night with our thumbs up our-”

  “Jeff, the detective over there says there were people on board a white boat moored close to Jack’s trawler.”

  “What the-?!”

  The police chief wheeled around and grabbed the stanchion of a floodlight behind them at its base. He dragged the light to the railing, then redirected its beam so that it lit up the shoreline fifteen feet below them. Jade looked down over the railing and gasped in horror.

  The foaming surf washing up on the rock-strewn sand was tinged red, and bobbing in it were chunks of what could only be human flesh. Further down the shoreline, to their right, was a man’s forearm that had been torn off at the elbow, and clutched in that hand was a child’s hand. Jade moaned and turned away.

  “Fuck!” the police chief bellowed. “Fuck!”

  Jade turned to look at Bond, whose ebony flesh had turned ashen. Beyond him, further down the deck, the detective in the blue windbreaker, his soaked clothes still pasted to his body, had gotten to his feet and was leaning out over the railing, looking down. His face with its craggy features was a frozen mask of shock and anguish.

  “Jade,” Bond continued in a terse, clipped tone, “I’d like you to stick around. With your background and training, you may be able to help my men. I don’t really have any investigators trained to handle this kind of thing, except Roy over there, and he’s in no shape to look at anything. I want to pick up on everything we can before the county cops, state police, the fucking incompetent Coast Guard and Navy, the F.B.I., and whoever the fuck else show up and tries to push us out of the way. Somebody’s been playing fucking games with us, and I want to find out who’s going to share the blame. Will you give us a hand?”

  “Glad to, Chief,” Jade replied as she once more glanced down the deck to see that the injured detective had now turned his tormented, haunted gaze on her. Jade didn’t like the look on his face, and she stepped back into the shadows behind the floodlight.

  Chapter Three

  i

  Jade found no more than what she had expected to find, which was nothing except the obvious, massive physical evidence of the wreckage in the marina which indicated an explosion of considerable force. F.B.I. special agents and state police divers with metal detectors had found no trace of the steel box that had been strapped to the back of the carcass, not even a shard stuck in the jagged planks and pilings of what was left of the floating dock, nor in the deep muck beneath the spot where the trawler had been tied up, nor in the hulls of any of the boats that were still floating around the perimeter of the blast site. Jade was not surprised. She was certain that the boat had been deliberately destroyed, probably with a charge of C-5 plastique, to obliterate any trace of the rotting carcass, and the men who had blown up the boat had first removed the mine and then taken it with them.

  She could only wonder what the Coast Guard and Navy investigators, who kept off to themselves, were thinking, or what they suspected. She could say nothing.

  She worked through the night with Jeffrey Bond and two of his policemen as they helped the paramedics painstakingly collect the pieces of human flesh that had washed up on the shore. Then they searched through the wreckage around them, searching for some clue she knew they would not find.

  At dawn she had gone home to shower, change clothes and pick up her tool belt, and had then returned to the marina to inspect her own boat, a 27-foot sloop, and her patrol boat, a blue and white Boston Whaler with twin 225-horsepower engines that belonged to the association. She had been startled by the approach of a television reporter with a cameraman in tow. She had tried to turn away from the lens, because exposure on television was the last thing she wanted, but it had been too late. Then she had made the snap decision to give the interview the reporter was seeking, for her face had already been captured on tape and appearing to want to avoid being seen might be counterproductive, attracting even more attention and suspicion from the potentially hostile people who were almost certainly always monitoring her movements. She had answered the reporter’s questions forthrightly, looking straight into the camera, pointing out that she was only a riverkeeper and denying she had any role whatsoever in the investigation. She also refused to speculate on the cause of the explosion, deferring to the local, state and federal authorities on the scene.

  Her sloop, moored beyond one of the outer floating docks, was unscathed, but the Boston Whaler had sustained damage to the engine mount, gunwales, and starboard hull. She spent the rest of the day working to repair the damage, and it was late afternoon before she was finished. She unplugged the electric saw from the outlet above her head on the dock, then turned around in the boat when she heard footsteps approaching. The man she recognized as the Cairn detective who had been injured in the explosion, his head swathed in a bandage and walking with a slight limp, was coming toward her. He stopped when he reached the section of the dock where her boat was tied up, leaned on the railing and looked down at her, studying her with his gray eyes.

  “Hi,” he said after a few moments. “I’m Roy Mannes. I’m a Cairn detective. I know you’re the riverkeeper. I’ve heard about you, but I never got around to meeting you until last night. I’m afraid I wasn’t at my best.”

  Jade nodded and smiled. “I’m Jahli Aden. Most people call me Jade, and you’re welcome to if you’d like. How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve got a headache.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me. I heard the explosion knocked you right off the dinghy dock, and you hit your head on a piling. It’s amazing you’re up and walking around at all. You must have suffered a concussion.”

  “I’ve been hurt worse. You’re an Arab?”

  “Palestinian.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You’re an American?”

  The burly man frowned slightly. “Yeah?”

  “North or South American? Are you from the United States? Canada? Maybe you’re Mexican, or Chilean? Apache? Cherokee?”

  “Gotcha’.”

  “I’m also an American, Roy,” Jade said as she swung the electric saw up onto the deck at the detective’s feet. “Just like you.”

  “I’d like to ask you some questions, Jade. Mind if I climb down?”

  “I think it would be easier on your leg if I came up,” Jade said as she stepped off the boat onto the short ladder fastened to the dock and climbed up to where the detective stood. “What would you like to know?”

  “You want to go for a cup of coffee? A drink?”

  “No, thanks. I have to go home pretty soon to make dinner for my kids.”

  “I understand you were the first person Jack called to ask about that thing he netted, and you advised him to call the Coast Guard.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Why not the police?”

  “The police would have called the Coast Guard anyway. It was a maritime situation, and the Coast Guard has primary jurisdiction.”

  “You’re a Navy vet?”

  “That’s
also correct.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what did you do in the Navy?”

  Jade smiled thinly and shrugged. “Just Navy stuff.”

  “You don’t want to be any more specific?”

  “I was a captain; a bureaucrat. Mostly I shuffled papers and got coffee for the admiral who was my boss. Why are you so interested?”

  “You have any idea what kind of fish that was on Jack’s boat, or why anyone would strap a bomb to its back?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Roy Mannes’ eyes narrowed slightly, and shadows moved in their gray depths as he studied her. Finally he asked, “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. What are you getting at, Detective?”

  Now the detective took his gaze off her, shoved his hands in his pockets and looked out over the river. His mouth was set in a grim line. “The Cairn Yacht Club identified the owner of the mooring site where the white boat was destroyed. There was a family of four aboard—a husband and wife and their two children.”

  “I know,” Jade replied quietly. “Jeff came by earlier and told me.”

  “They’d gone out the day before for an overnighter. They must have slipped back into the marina after dark without anyone noticing. They ended up in pieces. If I’d done my job right, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Roy, nobody’s blaming you for what happened. There were big signs posted on the ends of all three floating docks announcing that entry into the marina was forbidden, and you didn’t even come on duty until ten. All of the boats were supposed to have already been checked out to make sure nobody was aboard.”

  Now Mannes looked back into Jade’s face, and his eyes glittered with pain and rage. “Procedure, Jade,” he said tightly. “I should have run my own check, hopped into a dinghy and checked out all the boats myself, as soon as I came on duty instead of just relying on somebody else’s word. I’m a cop, not a goddamn night watchman. If one of those people in the boat hadn’t turned on a light to go to the head or something, we wouldn’t even have been able to identify the bodies. I didn’t do my job properly, and now a mother and father and their two kids are dead. I damn well intend to find out who’s responsible.”

  “I’m sure the F.B.I. and the investigators from the Coast Guard and Navy are going to-”

  “Those people aren’t going to do shit,” the detective interrupted angrily. “They’re all going to be too busy covering their collective bureaucratic asses, or maybe blaming each other.”

  Jade frowned slightly. “Why do you say that? The Navy, at least, is going to have to move aggressively on this. It was the Navy that was notified by the Coast Guard, and it was the Navy that decided the matter could wait a day. How can they deny responsibility?”

  “Easy. For openers, they’re denying they ever called us to ask for a quarantine. They’re denying they ever spoke to the Cairn Police Department at all.”

  Jade slowly blinked as she stared at the man, and suddenly she felt a tightness in her stomach and chest. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “But you must have a tape of the call.”

  “Sure, we have a tape of the call,” Roy Mannes said tersely. “On it there’s the voice of a man identifying himself as Naval Commander Bresnell, and he’s asking us to quarantine the marina until they can send some investigators around the next morning to check things out. Now the Navy says they’ve never heard of any Commander Bresnell. They do admit getting a call from the Coast Guard, but they claim it wasn’t indicated to them that there was a clear and present danger. They claim they were considering the question of jurisdictional responsibility, and that they planned to get back to the Coast Guard the next day to tell them they should handle the problem since the trawler was in an inland waterway. Since that call was never made, the Coast Guard says it isn’t responsible. Both the Navy and Coast Guard say the explosion must be the work of some gang of terrorists, so the F.B.I. should handle the investigation. Does this sound to you like the beginning of a super-heated inquiry?”

  Jade slowly shook her head as her thoughts raced. After her own experiences in the Navy, she had thought the organization incapable of any bureaucratic obfuscation or mendacity that would surprise her, but they were proving her wrong. “Terrorists?” she said at last. “The Coast Guard and Navy think there’s a bunch of terrorists making fish bombs?!”

  “I’m just telling you what they said, lady. They don’t want to talk about that fish in Jack’s nets, and they don’t want to talk about the bomb strapped to its back. They don’t even want to concede that there was a carcass with something strapped to its back, because they never saw it. There’s no physical evidence, and nobody around here—including this knucklehead—had the presence of mind to take even one goddamn photograph.”

  The detective paused, breathed deeply, continued in a softer tone, “In a way I guess I don’t blame the Navy for not wanting to speculate on what caused the explosion. I did a hitch in Nam, and I spent some time on the bomb squad in the NYPD, so I know a little something about explosives. The box on the back of that thing was definitely a mine, but an explosion of that magnitude wasn’t caused by any mine of that size in the position it was, suspended in the air. A suspended mine might have torn up the trawler’s deck and done some serious damage to the white power boat, but it wouldn’t have totally destroyed either boat, and it wouldn’t have torn up twenty yards of dock. To do that kind of damage would have taken two, maybe three, extremely powerful separate charges, with one of them placed on the trawler’s hull below the water line. It was no single mine that killed those people, lady. Then there’s the question of why terrorists, who would presumably want to maximize the effect of their operations, would be interested in blowing up a fishing trawler and a third of a marina, which they had to assume would be deserted at night, just because somebody had netted this fish bomb thing. The whole thing stinks worse than that rotting carcass Jack brought in. Those sons-of-bitches from the F.B.I. and military who were monkeying around here know everything I just told you, but they never shared a word with Jeff. I think that our good friends from the F.B.I., Coast Guard and Navy know a few things they aren’t sharing with us local yokels. Do you get my drift?”

  Jade had noted the growing hostility and suspicion in the detective’s voice; she thought they might arise from anger and frustration, but she couldn’t be sure. What made things difficult for her was the fact that, as far as she was concerned, Roy Mannes was dead on target on all of his points. She couldn’t be certain about the F.B.I.’s or Coast Guard’s attitude toward the incident, but she was absolutely sure that the U.S. Navy was going to be highly displeased if a Cairn detective started airing his suspicions in public, or if he tried to follow up on those misgivings.

  Four innocent people, including two young children, had died as a result of somebody’s reckless scorn for the law and public safety. It could be very dangerous for Roy Mannes if he went off on his own to try to find out who was responsible, but she couldn’t even warn him.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” Jade said quietly.

  “I want to know what you were looking for last night, lady!” the detective snapped.

  Jade stiffened. “Excuse me?”

  “I was watching you when you came down to the dock. I saw you shielding your eyes and looking out across the river; you kept staring at the water even while you came over to see if you could help me. I want to know what the hell you thought you might see out there.”

  Jade shook her head. “I was looking at the wreckage in the marina, Roy. What could I be looking for out on the river? It was dark. Besides, how could you tell where I was looking? You’d been hurt, and you were only half conscious. You’re upset and you’re blaming yourself, but that’s no reason to-”

  “Don’t tell me what I saw, lady; you were scanning the river. Earlier, just before the explosion, I thought I saw something else. At the time I thought it was just a trick of the light and shadows, but now I know it
was a man on the trawler. Whoever was on that fishing boat didn’t walk out there on the dock, which means he came in on his own boat. I’m thinking maybe he set the charges that blew up the trawler and the family, and then maybe he took the mine with him. I’m also thinking that maybe you had the same sort of suspicions, and it was that second boat you were looking for signs of out on the river. Finally, I’m thinking that maybe you know a lot more about what happened than you’re letting on to anybody around here.”

  Jade returned the man’s hard stare, prolonging the silence as she concentrated on keeping her face impassive and her breathing regular. Finally she said softly, “And I’m thinking maybe I understand now why you were so curious about my nationality. Are you suggesting that maybe some of my Arab friends are responsible for what happened?”

  “I’m asking you to tell me what you were looking for out on the river.”

  “I don’t have time for this, Detective,” Jade said in the same soft, even tone. She adjusted her tool belt, picked up the power saw and stepped around the man. “I’m glad you’re okay, and I hope you have a nice evening.”

  “Just a minute, lady!”

  Jade stopped walking and tilted her head back slightly, but she did not turn around. “Make it very quick, mister.”

  “I’ve been a cop for a lot of years, lady, and I’m pretty good at telling when people are lying. You lie tough and cool, but you’re still lying. I don’t know why, but I sure as hell intend to find out. A family was blown to bits on my watch. I damn well intend to nail the bastards responsible, and I don’t care who I have to walk over to do it. Don’t you mess with me.”

  Jade walked away at a measured pace, but now she felt a shortness of breath and a tightening of the muscles across her back. When she got to her car she sat behind the wheel for a few moments, holding her hands in front of her to make sure they were steady. It was not confrontation with Roy Mannes that concerned her, but who else the detective might try to interrogate, and the consequences that could have for him as well as for her and her children.