“The guy’s caught more herring over the years than all these young guys put together,” George added. “The only reason he’s still fishing is because he’s genetically programmed to do it. That and the fact that he needs something to moan about.”
“My, aren’t we unsympathetic today,” I said. “I happen to know that if it wasn’t for his old-age pension, he’d have to rely totally on his investments. But let’s get serious. We have a fishery to plan. We’ll wait until this evening, but I’m thinking we should announce that we anticipate a fishery tomorrow. We’ll ask the fleet to hold at anchor so they don’t go roaring around and scatter the fish. We’ll release them tomorrow morning and open the fishery at say, two in the afternoon. What do you think?”
Pete nodded. “By God, a fishing plan. Did you think of that all by yourself?”
“No, I read your notes.”
“I thought it sounded familiar. In that case, I agree.”
I looked at George and he nodded with absolutely no hint of a lack of enthusiasm. So it was unanimous. Just as I was thinking about how easy fisheries management was, Alex yelled up from the galley. “Danny, there’s someone here to see you.”
When I poked my head into the galley, it took a bit of effort to recognize the clean-cut, dignified-looking gentleman helping himself to coffee from the pot on the stove. “Fergie, for Christ’s sake. When did you get here? When did you get so respectable?”
Gone was the long hair and the Fu Manchu and the ripped jeans. But the grin was the same and so was the booming “hey, you” as he grabbed me and pounded my back into submission. “Goddammit, Danny. You don’t look like a bureaucrat.”
“Well, you don’t look like a responsible adult. Actually, you do. Hey! It’s great to see you. Sit down. If a strange guy offers you food, eat it. It’s good.”
“He already did. I don’t really care for wild blackberries in a chocolate sauce spread over potato pancakes, but the genuine maple syrup topping kind of won me over.”
“Yeah, you’re easy as ever. Have you seen Mark and Christine yet?”
“We anchored right beside Mark, and he yelled that you were here. I haven’t seen Christine yet, but I need to talk to her about the Les Jameson thing.”
Several of my synapses flared inquiringly at that, but I decided to leave it until later. “Hey, Fergie, we need to talk to you about a bunch of stuff. Let’s get together for lunch at the hotel. One o’clock?”
“Right on. I’ve been looking forward to this. It was a good crew, Danny. We were a really good crew. The truth is, I jumped on a boat to come up here just because I hoped we’d all get together again.” He stood up from the table, grasped my hand with one of his paws, and pulled me in so he could pound me again with his free hand. He gave me a thumbs-up as he stepped over the transom to the back deck. I leaned out the galley door and watched him jump into a standard piece of fishing aluminum and surf off in a non-shoreward direction.
I had things to do. There were the reports to fill out. I approached this with all the verve and panache of the Leafs defending a three-goal deficit. I was looking at several standard forms that were supposed to encapsulate the fisheries management situation for roe herring in Area Seven. But I couldn’t fill in the blanks, not on this form nor any other, in such a way as to describe what was actually happening with real fish and real humans in this blessedly real area of the world. But paper was winning, over rock, scissors, and the conduct of life in general.
The imposition of the paper world onto the real world had always struck me as the first tragedy of bureaucracy. This was the third entry on my list of “Reasons Our Bureaucracy Keeps Screwing Things Up.” We’d forgotten. Paper could be shredded but reality could shred us.
I struggled with it for far too long. Finally Form 42P1A2 got the best of me. There comes a point where “none of the above” doesn’t seem quite pertinent enough. Impertinence won out. In answer to line 27, reasons for variance from projection, I scribbled “reality rules” and went for lunch.
I was the last one there and the gang had obviously enjoyed a few barley-based appetizers. As I approached the table, Fergie finished a story with a rude hand gesture and they all roared with laughter. I sat down to shouts of, “Danny Boy, your round, pal.”
We BS-ed for awhile, studied the menus, and got the ordering out of the way. As the waitress left, Fergie remembered what he wanted to ask Christine. “You guys found Les Jameson’s boat but no sign of him, right?” Christine nodded. “Was there any sign that there was another person on the boat?”
“We didn’t have any reason to think so,” Christine sat up a little straighter. “What makes you ask?”
“We were at the fuel dock in Port Hardy the afternoon that Les pulled out. He was there fueling up and I just had the impression that there was another person on his boat. He was standing on the back deck and it sorta looked like he was talking to someone in the cabin. But I couldn’t be sure. And if no one else is reported missing, I guess I was imagining things.”
We all mulled that over for awhile. “I guess what we could do is go back and look at the boat for a sign that there was a second person on it,” Christine said finally. “We never really considered that before. I’ll do that this afternoon. And now, Fergie, Danny’s got a story to tell you.”
By the time I finished, our food had arrived and been unconsciously inhaled. There was silence for quite some time before Fergie swore viciously. “Those cocksuckers! Those pencil-necked, scum-sucking shitbags! I don’t care who they are, we’re going to find them and make them suffer. Billy was too good a guy to have his life taken away by some dipshit fucking with fish.”
“We’re not sure of anything yet,” I said, trying to calm him down. “We don’t know what any of the connections are, but we’ve got things we can follow up on, and we can all make damn sure that we won’t let it go until we know what the hell happened. Mark, we’re going to fish tomorrow, and then you and I will be heading for Vancouver. Fergie will still be here waiting for the gillnet opening. Christine, do you know what the Racer will be doing?”
“We’ll stay until the gill nets are finished. Fergie and I will have a few days to poke around here. You and your RCMP friends can follow things up in Vancouver.”
Mark was fidgeting impatiently. “I need half an hour on that crew boat. If there’s any info on the plotter, I can get it.”
“Are you certified?”
“At what?”
“Anything.”
“Fuckin’ right.”
“Okay, I’ll call Louise and tell her you’re certified and she’ll let you look at the plotter. At the same time we can check in with Cecil and see if he’s found out anything about who was using the Kelp.”
As we queued at the cash register, I noted that Fergie was so shocked by what he’d heard that he was paying for his share of the lunch. I stopped in the lounge to phone Louise, and, thankful that I wasn’t lying to her face to face, told her that Mark was certified to play around with the Didsat Model MFD6 plotter, and suggested she meet us with the keys to the boat.
“That’s great, Danny. I couldn’t find any of our guys who knew anything about them. See you in half an hour.”
Fergie was driving a thirty-foot herring punt. Mark went with him, Christine came with me and we roared back to the Jimmy Sinc to pick up Crowley’s computer, and then around the corner to Bella Bella.
We found Cecil on the Waterfowl and invited ourselves in for coffee. Cecil and Fergie shook hands and grinned at each other.
“Jeez, we’ve gone from the Dynamic Duo to the Three Musketeers to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Cecil observed wryly. “Any bad guys better look out.”
“Speaking of which, has anyone been seen hanging around the Kelp, that aluminum crew boat we were asking about?”
“No. Nobody’s seen anyone, heard anything, smelled anything, or seen, heard, or smelled anyone who has seen, heard, or smelled anything. Which tells me one thing for sure: if anybody’
s been using it, they aren’t local. Now, there’s two ways into this charming little hideaway: boat or plane. Nobody would come by boat to pick up a boat that was stashed here. Which means they flew in. But nobody saw anything during daylight hours. Plane gets in at four in the afternoon. So if anybody flew in to use that boat, they would have had to hang around until after dark. Foreigners don’t blend in easily here. So, if you had an idea when the boat was used, you could ask around about strangers in town, as well as check the airline passenger lists.”
“I know one date it was used for sure, according to Alistair’s journal. April 11, that’s when he saw it. And probably April 13, the day he was shot. I’ll get Louise to check those dates.”
No sooner had I said her name, than I saw her walking down the dock. I gestured to the porthole. “Here comes Louise. Thanks for the help, Cecil.”
We climbed over the rail of the Waterfowl and stood on the dock as Louise approached. She looked at the computer tucked under my arm, smiled at me and my heart skipped in waltz time. “Which one of you people is the certified, Danny-approved, Didsat plotter technician?”
Mark stepped forward. “That’s me. Glad to help. If there’s any trip information on that plotter, I’ll get it for you.” He led the way down the float, stepped onto the Kelp, and waited as Louise opened the cabin door.
She raised a cautionary hand before letting Mark enter. “You’re dealing with evidence that may be involved with a murder case and you may be required to testify regarding anything you discover. In other words, we need to certify the chain of evidence. I need to document everything you do. So you need to tell me exactly what you do, keystroke by keystroke.”
Mark nodded. “I understand. It would be handy if you could tape this.”
“I can do that.” Louise laid a compact tape recorder on the cabin dashboard and pressed the record button. “April 19, 2004, Staff Sergeant Louise Karavchuck, Bella Bella government dock, extracting evidence from an electronic navigation device on the motor vessel Kelp. Please proceed, Mr . . . ?”
“Angastouri; Mark Angastouri.” He walked to the front of the wheelhouse, reached up to the plotter, and pressed the power button. “I pressed the on button and the plotter is now opening up the initial display. Press menu button and then ‘display waypoints.’”
The screen displayed a long list of geographical points referenced by their latitudes and longitudes, obviously going back to when the Kelp was owned by Mac McPherson. Mark scrolled down to the bottom of the list, selected the last fifty waypoints, went back to the menu and selected “trip plotter.” The screen morphed into a chart of the area, with squiggly lines all over it. These lines represented voyages that had been made by the Kelp. Many of the lines were almost identical, overlaying each other so that they formed a thicker track line running from the dock at Bella Bella to Yeo Cove with a stopover at Morehouse Bay in Return Passage. It was obvious that the Kelp had made many return trips to Crowley’s float house. Other tracks started at the dock, ran together for awhile, then fanned out to cover many small bays on the north and west coasts of Campbell Island. A half dozen or so tracks wormed down Lama Passage into Fisher Channel, entered Lagoon Bay, and came back.
Mark looked at the display and chewed his lip. “The trick now is to display these trips by date. The only thing I remember is that if I do it wrong, we’ll lose everything.” He looked at Louise who looked at me. I laughed and Louise visibly relaxed.
“Try April 11 and April 13.”
Mark punched a few buttons and the course the Kelp had followed on April 11 came up on the screen. It was strange in that it didn’t start at the dock, or at the end point of a previous trip, but in the middle of nowhere: the lower end of Fitz Hugh Sound. It traced a line through Lama Passage, past Bella Bella, and then the familiar track to Yeo Cove via Morehouse Bay and back to Morehouse Bay. The plotter showed nothing for April 12, but at 5:00 AM on April 13, the day of Crowley’s death, the Kelp had gone to Yeo Cove and then back to Bella Bella.
“Bingo!” Mark slammed his fist on the bulkhead. “I think Crowley’s murderer drove this boat and all we have to do is find out what happened to him when he got back to Bella Bella. He must have flown out.” He looked at Louise.
“Sorry to disappoint everybody. We already checked the passenger list for the thirteenth and there were no foreigners on it: just some fairly non-suspicious local types, mostly elders going out for medical stuff. Same the next day. And for three days previous to that, there was fog in Port Hardy so everything was grounded.”
“He’s still here,” I said. “And that means he’s probably a fisherman, or posing as one.” I looked at their faces as they thought it through. If the killer hadn’t left, he would stick out like a sore thumb, unless he had an excuse for being in the area. There wasn’t much to camouflage an outsider, no circuses in town, just the herring fishery.
Louise pulled out her notebook. “There’re sixteen rooms at the Shearwater Hotel and another eight at B&Bs in the village. They’re all full and I’ve got all the names. We’ll go over them later. Are you finished here, Mark?”
“One more thing. Okay if I start her up?” He turned the key and the engine roared into life. He pushed the shift lever into forward for just a second. The boat surged gently against the tie-up lines and then relaxed. Mark shut off the motor. “Don’t see any need for a towing bridle. Runs fine.”
“Can you disconnect the plotter so we can store it? It’s important evidence now,” Louise said.
Mark nodded and began the shutdown process.
I stepped off the boat onto the dock and handed Crowley’s computer to Louise. “I’ll see everyone later. Got a herring fishery to run.” But as I walked toward the Zodiac, I was thinking not of the opening tomorrow, but of what the hell the attraction was in Morehouse Bay. The Kelp had been there at least eight times in the last year.
Back on the Jimmy Sinc, I gobbled a bowl of Alex the cook’s clam chowder and went up to the bridge for the evening conference. The test boats started their reports. Things were pretty much the same, except that there were now more fish in the southern end of Spiller Channel. Everyone assumed new fish were moving into the area. I looked at George and Pete. They achieved consensus that we should stick with Plan A.
I keyed the mike. “Attention, the roe herring fleet in Area Seven. This is the James Sinclair. Stand by for an announcement.” I waited ten seconds to give everybody a chance to move from their respective galleys to their respective wheelhouses. I gave an update on the test results and sounding information, then got to what everyone was waiting for. “We anticipate a fishery at 1400 hours tomorrow afternoon in Spiller Channel. We ask the fleet to remain at anchor tonight. We will convene an advisors’ meeting on the James Sinclair at 0800 hours tomorrow. If the advisors agree, we will release the fleet and commence the fishery at approximately 1400 hours. Come back to the James Sinclair with any questions or comments.”
“James Sinclair, Point Kelsey.”
“Point Kelsey, James Sinclair. Go ahead, skipper.”
“Yeah, James Sinclair, just wondering here, why can’t we head up there now and do a little scouting?”
“Point Kelsey, James Sinclair. At last year’s post-season review, it was agreed that too many boats running around scatters the fish. So this year, we’ll keep it to a minimum. Everyone should have two or three hours prior to the fishery so it’s a level playing field.”
We went back and forth for awhile. No one was too exercised about anything. The complaints committee had evidently taken the night off, and I eventually crept into my bunk with a pleasantly goose-bumpy feeling of anticipation.
Eleven
When I woke and put on a clean pair of socks the next day, I had no way of knowing that that would be the high point of my morning. Coffee in hand, I sidled into the wheelhouse and nodded at George. Pete joined us almost immediately and we slurped contentedly while waiting for the test boat reports.
At 0630, the Western Marauder came o
n the air. They were at the north end of Spiller Channel and they couldn’t see any fish. The Northern Queen, at the south end of the channel, reported some scattered schools but no more than one hundred tons total.
Oh shit. It was a fishery manager’s worst nightmare: a fleet vibrating with the anticipation of a fishery and the goddamn fish had disappeared. Worse, I was the messenger. I’d be lucky if they only shot me.
I tried to sound, if not unconcerned, at least not on the verge of panic. “We’ll wait until 0730. If the guys haven’t located anything by then, we’ll cancel the advisors’ meeting and go looking.”
I wondered which herring had been the leader, the trendsetter. One of the millions had obviously become dissatisfied with the attractions of Spiller Channel and communicated that feeling to his immediate neighbors. “Hey guys, this place is, like, so yesterday. But I know this cool little ecosystem that hasn’t been discovered yet.” Before anyone realized what was happening there was a mass movement. Bloody fish were worse than humans.
At 0730, I went on the air, canceled the advisors’ meeting, and stood the fleet down. I heard myself using the words “non-critical decision sequence” and “temporary dispersion event.” I hadn’t spent all those years in Ottawa for nothing. The airwaves were immediately alive with electromagnetic indignation. I tried to listen to all five radios as they cataloged in detail my stupidity, inadequacy, moral degeneracy, my most astounding physical defects, and the lack of formal recognition of my parents’ relationship.
A half-hour later, the quality of the vituperation began to wane. There are only so many metaphors that can be constructed around a person’s resemblance to male or female genitalia. I told the fleet to stand by for the 8:00 PM update and nodded at George. The James Sinclair pulled anchor, and we slunk out of the harbor.
Pete was the first to speak. “That was a pretty good fleet rant, but not the best. I remember when Sam Mattingly had to close the Skeena sockeye fishery so the sporties could catch more steelhead. He couldn’t get a word in for at least three hours. Mind you, there were more boats there.”
The River Killers Page 11