by Rene Fomby
“Okay, Trevor, before we get started, one thing has me a bit puzzled. The name of your boat, the Sea Trial. What’s the story behind all that?”
Trevor seemed to visibly relax and looked briefly around the pontoon and up toward the salon. “That was Katy’s idea. A sea trial is the first time a boat is taken out into the water, its first real test for seaworthiness. Since neither of us had ever sailed out in the open water like this, it only seemed appropriate.”
Espinosa nodded, noting the answer in his little book. “Makes sense. Let’s move on, then. Can you please give us your full name, like it’s laid out on your passport?”
Trevor seemed to think about the question a little longer than necessary before he answered, but Espinosa just marked that up to nerves, given the situation.
“Trevor Lane Johnson. The Lane part is my mother’s maiden name.”
“Got it.” Espinosa jotted that down in his notebook as well. “And what do you do for a living, Trevor?”
“I’m a stockbroker. I help people with their investment portfolios.”
“How long have you been doing that?”
“Ever since I got out of college. About five or six years.”
“Any good at it?”
Trevor waved his hand around flamboyantly. “You tell me. They don’t just give away boats like this for free, you know.”
“Good point,” Espinosa said, catching Gavin’s eye surreptitiously behind Trevor’s back. “So the brokerage business has been good to you. Are you involved in anything else?”
“Sure, I’ve got some side gigs, mostly commercial properties. I don’t plan to slave away at stock brokering forever, you know, I need to stash some money away for the future, so I can retire while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. Live off my mailbox money.”
“Good plan. I wish I made enough money to put something away like that, too. But, government job, right?”
“I hear you,” Trevor answered with a smile. “But hey, if you do ever get a few extra dollars—or I guess pesos, in your case—you get some money you want to invest, you give old Trevor a call. I’ll set you up with a can’t lose opportunity. And give you the friends and family discount rate for my services in the process.” He looked back over his shoulder. “And that goes for you, too, Agent Larson.”
“Just plain Gavin will be fine,” Gavin told him. “And—thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Trevor turned back to face Espinosa. “So what’s the deal? You found Katy’s body. Don’t I need to go somewhere to identify it or something?”
Espinosa shook his head. “No, that won’t be necessary. We have no doubt it’s her, so we’ll save you having to deal with all that unpleasantness for now. But we do need to ask you a few more questions, if you don’t mind. Just to wrap up all the loose ends in this case.”
“No, I understand completely. Fire away.”
“Okay, to start with, how did you first meet Katy Mulcahey?”
Trevor’s face crinkled a little and his eyes were focused on the floor as he worked through how to answer that question. “I assume you already know about Brett’s injury, and how I came to take over as starting quarterback at Southlake?” He looked up, and Espinosa nodded. “Okay, well, Katy and Brett had been dating for a month or so before the injury. Nothing all that serious, just a high school fling, but then, when he started going through rehab on the shoulder, they kind of drifted apart. I don’t know any of the details, Katy never talked about it and I damned sure wasn’t going to ask Brett, right? But as time went on she seemed to take a shine to me, instead, and we started talking, and pretty soon we were going out together on a regular basis. Then my senior year ended and I headed up to Oklahoma, where I had a scholarship to play QB. They were just coming off a natty—a national championship, that is—and their starting quarterback was entering his final year with the team. I figured I could put in a redshirt year, learn the play book and bulk up a little, then take over the next year.”
“Is that what happened?” Espinosa asked, already knowing the answer.
“No, to tell the truth, things looked really good for me up in Norman, but being away from Katy so much, I guess I just woke up one morning and realized I had my priorities in life all screwed up. I needed to focus on my future, not on football, and that future included having Katy in my life. By far the best decision I ever made.”
“So you quit the team and moved back to Texas.” Espinosa said that as a statement, not a question.
“Right. She was enrolled at Texas Christian in Fort Worth. I tried to swing a transfer to TCU to be with her, but Oklahoma was making that difficult for me, especially since TCU was also in the Big 12, so I wound up at North Texas instead. Took some business classes, learned the ropes of investing, and when I graduated Katy’s dad helped me set up shop as a stockbroker. And as they say, the rest is history.”
The second file Harry Crawford had sent to Gavin’s satellite phone included transcripts from Trevor’s time at Oklahoma and North Texas, and nowhere was there any mention of any business-related classes, just a hodgepodge assortment of courses designed to get him a diploma as quickly and as painlessly as possible. And even then Trevor’s grades had been less than stellar. Mostly C’s and D’s, with an occasional B thrown in for good measure. But now wasn’t the time to bring that up. Best to let Trevor continue to think he had the wool pulled down firmly over their eyes and ears. Espinosa gave Gavin a look he interpreted as an invitation to take over the questioning, so he coughed lightly to get Trevor’s attention and leaned in. He kept his voice soft, his tone reassuring, and made sure to mix in a little drawl. Just another good ol’ boy from back home in Texas, shooting the breeze a little. Nothing all that serious.
“Tell us a little about that history, Trevor. What was your relationship with Katy like recently? You two getting along okay?”
Trevor broke into a wide smile. “Oh, hell yes. Couldn’t be better. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of her. Katy wasn’t just pretty, she was the kind of woman who could walk into a room and instantly every girl in there would hate her, and every guy would be wishing he was me. And the rest of the package was every bit as fine as the outside. Smart, funny, a great mom to Paxton. Yeah, if she ever learned to cook worth a hoot I’d say she was perfect in every way.” He stopped and retreated inward for a second. “I guess that came out wrong, that comment about her cooking. You know, you shouldn’t speak ill about the dead, and all that.”
“No, that’s perfectly fine, Trevor,” Gavin assured him. “So you’re saying you two were madly in love, even after six or seven years of marriage, and even after the baby was born. You know, a lot of women tend to pull back a little when they have their babies, focus more on the mom job and a whole lot less on being a girlfriend and a lover to their man.”
Trevor was smiling again. “Hey, maybe some girls, but not Katy, no way. I mean, not going into any details and all, but she was still bringing it almost every night, right up to—” His face went dark again as he remembered. Gavin gave him a moment to recover, then continued, even softer this time.
“Other than taking care of Paxton, did Katy have a career of any kind? Did she bring in any money to help pay the bills?”
Trevor shook his head. “No, not that she couldn’t have, if she wanted, but I made more than enough money for the both of us, and I was just happy to let her focus on being a mom, and on all the other little things that make life worth living. You know, sprucing up the house, planning vacations, that sort of thing.”
“You mentioned money. I know her dad passed away a couple of years ago. Did he leave her any money in his estate?”
“I honestly have no idea about any of that. Not my business, you know? All I know is, anytime Katy needed something, all she had to do was ask and I’d write out a check for her. She kept her own separate bank account because early on she kept bouncing checks on our joint account. I guess she just assumed the flow of money was endle
ss, you know? And when Daddy was paying all the bills I suppose it was. So she would just write checks and never bother to keep track of what she was spending. And, you know, back when I first got started in the brokerage business, money wasn’t exactly pouring into my checking account from a fire hose like it is now.”
Gavin nodded his head, giving Trevor every sure fire indication that he believed every single word that the young man was saying. And he might have, if it weren’t for the reports Harry had sent him the night before.
“Let’s move on, Trevor. Now I know this might be a little difficult for you, but I need to ask you some questions about what was happening the night Katy disappeared. You up for that, or should we take a short break?”
“No, no, I’m fine. I just want to get this whole nasty business over and done with, you know? Get back home and give Katy the send-off she deserves, then focus in on taking care of my little baby boy. He’s all I really got, now.”
Trevor looked like he was about to tear up again and stopped to stare down at his bare feet, so Gavin gave him a moment to regain control. When Trevor looked up again and nodded, Gavin continued.
“Okay, let’s focus on the night before last. The night dive. Who all went on that dive with you?” Gavin was leading off with the easy questions, the ones that carried very little in the way of emotional baggage.
Trevor looked down again. “Let’s see. Besides me and Katy, there was Billie and Casey, and Brett and his wife Tara. And that was in fact how we were teamed up for the dive, husbands and wives together, then Billie and Casey.”
“And Jillian and Sally stayed behind on the boat?”
“Right. I think the idea of diving at night kind of scared them both. Plus Sally had already had way too much to drink, so no way any of us were going to let her come along.”
“Gotcha.” Gavin made the motions of writing all that down, but of course he already had several notations of who was with whom that night laid out elsewhere on his legal pad. But the delay also helped to reduce the tension in the room, a big positive given where this line of questioning was now headed. “So you were with Katy, Brett was diving with his wife, and Billie and Casey made up the third set of buddies. At any point during the dive did you notice any of them separating away from their partners for any length of time?”
“Not really, although I wasn’t really paying all that much attention to them. My focus was on Katy pretty much the entire time.”
“Why was that?”
Trevor raised his eyes to stare up at the ceiling. “Katy had this annoying habit of never wanting to stay up with me on a dive. She was always drifting back a ways, forcing me to have to slow down to stay with her. I think I spent half my time on that last dive turning around to try and find her. And in the end, that was probably how I wound up getting separated from the group in the first place. How I wound up on a different boat.”
“What do you mean?” Gavin asked, happy to finally be getting to the meat of this interview, and grateful that Trevor seemed to be handling it so well.
Trevor’s eyes went down to his hands, clutched together in his lap. “I remember looking back for Katy, and it took me a long time to find her in the dark, but then I saw what I thought were her yellow fins way off in the distance, behind me and somewhat off to the side. I was really pissed that she had drifted off so far, and I turned around and kicked hard to get to her, but the closer I got the more I realized it wasn’t her after all. Just some other person wearing yellow fins. A dude, in fact. So I turned back again and tried to find my group, but I couldn’t sort them out from all the rest of the divers down there. Brett and Tara were wearing all black, so they looked just like everybody else, and Billie and Casey had this thing going on where they would drift off way ahead of everyone else, so that wasn’t any help. And other than the person I had mistaken for Katy, there were no yellow flippers anywhere in sight. I had only lost sight of the group for a few seconds, but that was more than enough, given the murky conditions down there. Finally, realizing I was lost down there with no buddy to rely on, I did what I was trained to do. I returned to the surface to look for our boat. It didn’t help that I was getting really low on air after all that chasing around trying to keep track of Katy.”
“So you went back up to the surface. What happened next?”
“I had to hold up at around twenty feet for a decompression stop, and the current up close to the surface was really moving fast, without the drag of the coral heads down on the seabed to slow it down. As I was hanging there, I could see the lights from the divers down below fading away from me pretty fast, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I couldn’t rush the deco stop, and at any rate I figured our boat would be tracking our bubbles and would have moved into place to pick me up when I surfaced.”
“But you wound up on the wrong boat instead.”
“Right. Our boat was hanging back where the main group was located, but I got lucky and hooked up with a smaller boat that had been chartered by a British couple. The driver radioed back to our boat captain that he had me on board safe and sound, and after dropping off the Brits he gave me a ride back here, to the catamaran.”
“And that’s when you first realized that Katy was missing,” Gavin suggested.
“Exactly. I think it was Brett who helped me onto the swim platform, and pretty much the first thing out of his mouth was, where the heck is Katy?”
“As I understand it, they had all returned to the boat thinking she was with you.”
“That’s what they told me, yeah.”
“Okay, Trevor, think back. You say you got lost when you went chasing after someone you thought was Katy. Do you recall when that was, exactly?”
Trevor shook his head. “I didn’t really check my dive computer until I stopped for the safety stop, and even then I wasn’t paying much attention to the time, mostly just watching the seconds tick away until I got to resurface. But based upon how much air I had left at the end, I’d say it was around thirty minutes after we started the dive. Maybe five or ten minutes longer, but no more than that.”
Gavin noted that Trevor’s time estimate correlated with what everybody else had already told him.
“Alright, so you lost track of your wife and went on a wild goose chase looking for her. Before that, though, when was the last time you can remember seeing her? And where exactly was she at the time?”
“I can’t be all that sure… I do recall looking back maybe five minutes earlier, or possibly only four or so. She was hanging over a coral head, examining something up close. I ducked behind another coral to wait for her to catch up, using the coral head to block the current. I kept watching for her to swim past, but she never did. That’s when I popped up and saw the yellow fins off in the distance, and thought it was her.”
“Okay, so you waited a few minutes, and when she didn’t show, you went looking for her again. And that’s when you got separated from the group.”
“We were already pretty far behind them, because Katy kept lagging behind, but yeah.”
“And when you looked around to try and locate someone else wearing yellow flippers, you didn’t see anyone other than the diver you had mistaken for Katy.”
“That’s right. He was the only person I could see anywhere near me with yellow fins on.”
Gavin glanced over at Espinosa and locked eyes. After a moment, Espinosa nodded.
“Okay, I think that’s enough for now,” Espinosa said, setting his notebook down on the table beside him. “Let’s all take a short break, shall we? Do you mind if Gavin and I use your cabin for a few minutes to talk privately? We can’t exactly walk around outside in this weather.”
Trevor shared a tight smile and stood up. “No, that’s fine. I think I need to go grab a beer or something from the galley, anyway. Talking about all this, about Katy—”
He looked away sharply and strode briskly toward the stairs leading up to the salon. Gavin and Espinosa watched hi
m go without a word, then Espinosa snatched his notebook up off the side table and placed a hand lightly on Gavin’s shoulder.
“Ninety-nine percent,” he muttered happily as he turned toward the owner’s cabin.
23
Owner’s Cabin
Gavin’s eyes scanned the cabin, treating it as a crime scene the moment they walked through the door, making note of exactly what was visible and how everything was positioned in the spacious bedroom. The bed was a mess, the covers pulled every which way, but one side of the bed looked more slept-in than the other, and the nightstand on that side still held a mostly empty bottle of whiskey. As Espinosa closed the door behind them, Gavin walked over to the other side and opened the nightstand drawer. Inside he found some earplugs, a paperback novel with a bare-chested man on the cover, and an iPhone. He retrieved some tissues from the head and wrapped them around the phone before placing it in his coat pocket.
Espinosa looked at him with questioning eyes. “You think you can crack that? In my experience the security on those things is pretty tight. Maybe you can send it to the coroner and see if they can unlock it using her fingerprints? Or possibly her face?”
Gavin shook his head. “I don’t know. Not even sure it’s set up for fingerprints, and as far as the face goes, after all the damage from the fishes I don’t think there’s any chance of that ever working. But evidence is evidence, and you never know…”
“Better to be safe than sorry, and wish you’d grabbed it when you had the chance. I’m with you on that.” Espinosa had moved over to that side of the bed, as well, and used the eraser end of his pencil to pull back the sheets a little. But there was nothing unusual there to take note of, so he let the sheets drop back down. “Okay, so what’s our plan? I waited until morning, like you asked, but it’s all pretty clear to me that I have my man. Time to make the call to the island for a boat to come pick him up. If we’re quick about it we might even be able to catch the next ferry to the mainland, and then a flight back to Mexico City. I don’t have to tell you it sure would feel nice to get a long ways away from this storm. While we still can.”