Fallen Hero: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 10)

by Wayne Stinnett

  “My new mobile comm center,” Chyrel said, following behind Tony. She had her usual oversized computer bag on her shoulder and was carrying a basket, which was full of several kinds of cables and a bunch of electronic gizmos. I try to stay out of the comm shack.

  “Hey, Chyrel,” Carl said, taking the basket from her and giving her a hug. “Glad to have you back. Charlie misses you when you’re gone.”

  “Aw, well I miss y’all, too.”

  “Tony,” I shouted, as he was going down the steps. “Change of plans. Go ahead and help Chyrel set up. We’re gonna be on the east side, helping clean up for a while until the seas subside a little more.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Devon said as we walked down the back steps. “What’s that?”

  “That’s our aquaponics system,” Carl replied. “We grow vegetables in one tank, the one with all the empty cages, and we raise crawfish and tilapia in the other.”

  “You took everything in for the storm?” I asked.

  “It did get a little breezy up here,” Carl replied, as Chyrel took the basket and followed Tony. “Everything’s in the eastern bunkhouse.”

  “We’re going to do some looking around up above Snipe Key,” I said. “But we have some time to pitch in, before we have to leave.”

  For the next two hours, Devon got a working tour of my island. I introduced her to Charlie and the kids, then we all went about cleaning up the shoreline. We dragged small branches to the fire pit, leaving the bigger stuff in the water to cut up later. Carl Junior and Patty were out of school due to the storm. They seemed to be making a game of dragging sticks with Finn’s help.

  Mostly, we picked up trash. Wind and waves from even a small storm will shake all kinds of trash loose. Then it floats out into the Gulf and the tide carries some of it into Harbor Channel, where it usually washes onto my shore at the bend in the channel. Plastic bags, bottles, trap floats, gas and oil jugs, along with all kinds of other detritus from the civilized world, finds its way here. We’ve even had boats float up on the eastern shore after storms. Some stuff we find, we can’t even figure out what it is. Other stuff, we have to make up what it is in front of the kids, like when we’d found one of those blow-up dolls after a storm the year before.

  We kept any usable lumber we found. Driftwood in the form of tree branches soaks up salt and minerals in the water and makes for an entertaining bonfire. Bamboo is best, as it absorbs more. Carl leans cut bamboo against a log and fills the ends with seawater. When the water evaporates and the bamboo dries, it creates an eerie green flame. Charlie has decorated the area around the bunkhouses, stone fireplace, and tables with different colored trap floats.

  I showed Devon the north pier, where I sometimes keep Island Hopper tied up, then we helped move the plants from the bunkhouse to the garden. One by one, we each stepped up into the huge, shallow-water trough, returning the plants to their individual support stands.

  “They’ve only been out of water since yesterday evening,” Charlie said. “They should all be fine.”

  The plants ranged from three-foot-tall tomato plants in cages to broad squash plants, cucumber, peppers, and other vegetables, each with its roots tangled through, and hanging below, the crushed coral in the baskets. Carl had laid a number of four-by-four posts on the deck in the bunkhouse for the baskets to sit on without damaging the roots.

  Tony came out and helped with the last of the plants. “Chyrel’s just about set up,” he said. “Told me to get outta her way.”

  Once we were finished, Devon asked, “How many people can you feed here?”

  “Barely ourselves, with the fruit and vegetables,” Charlie said. “If you don’t mind seafood and help catch it, we’re pretty much unlimited there.”

  “The vegetable plants are more to filter the water than anything,” Carl added. “They flourish on the nitrogen waste from the crawfish and tilapia and provide oxygen for them in return.”

  “Is that a mango tree?” Devon asked, pointing to one of the fruit trees on the clearing’s perimeter.

  “Yeah, pick a couple to bring with us, if you like.” I glanced up at the sun, still the only object in the pale blue sky. “We better get out there,” I said. “There’s maybe eight hours of daylight left.”

  Devon shook hands with the Trents and we started up the back steps together. “The techs still haven’t come up with where the boat might have drifted from,” she said.

  “Eggheads try too hard to be precise with stuff,” I said. “All we need is a vague location to start looking. And Rusty gave me that.” I stopped at the door to my house. “Tony, go ahead and start up the engines. I want to show Devon something.”

  I turned the knob and walked inside. In the corner, I pulled a few charts out of a slotted cabinet until I found the right one. Rolling it out on the dining table, I put salt and pepper shakers on opposite corners to keep it from rolling back up.

  “Take a look.” I pointed to a spot on the chart as Devon approached the table. “This is where the boat was found.” I traced my finger up the chart, following deep water. “A boat drifting on a falling tide would come down these natural channels, maybe bouncing off the shallows and being spun back into the deeper current. The numbers show water depth.”

  I poked my finger at Cudjoe Channel, near Sawyer Key. “This is where the boat most likely drifted into the back country. About five miles west of here. Beyond this, currents don’t matter much. On a falling tide, it’s only moving about two miles per hour in the open Gulf. The prevailing northeast wind and the current pushed the boat to where it drifted into Cudjoe Channel. Rusty says the current and wind working at angles to each other would probably push the boat due south.”

  I went over to my fly-tying table and grabbed a pencil. Drawing a line from the top of the page, due south to Sawyer Key, I said, “Most likely, it drifted this way.”

  “How can you tell how far it drifted along that line?”

  “Good question,” I replied. “It ran aground and was stuck at low tide. So, odds are it went adrift sometime after the previous high tide, which was just about the time Doc Fredric says they were killed, and when I heard the gunshot.”

  “I remember you said distance was hard to figure, but not direction. Where were you, when you heard it?” she asked, apparently grasping my trigonometry.

  “Right here,” I said, pointing to another spot. “We were on the flats just north of Crane Key and the direction we heard the shot come from was a few degrees north of northwest.”

  I drew another line, at a three-hundred-twenty-degree angle from Crane Key, until it intersected the first line. The spot where the lines met was just beyond the three-mile-limit line in thirty feet of water.

  “It’s not rocket science,” I said, tossing the pencil on the chart. “But engineers will try to pinpoint it to within ten feet and take days to do it. All we have to do is go to that spot and start making ever widening circles until we see something.”

  “What do you expect to see?”

  “Isaksson’s anchor, for one thing. If you know you’ll be anchoring up in the same place over and over, most people will use a heavy anchor with a mooring ball attached and floating above it, so they can always come back to the exact same spot. Morgan said the anchor line was cut, but maybe the anchor line was tied to a mooring ball, which could still be there. Failing that, Isaksson only had a survey permit, so there might be survey grids on the bottom. Harder to find, but they should still be there.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” Devon said, looking around my living room.

  I lived alone and had simple needs, so my living room wasn’t much to look at: a recliner and reading lamp, the dining table the chart was on, a small couch, my fly-tying bench, and a small bookcase filled mostly with assorted manuals and a few novels. Here and there were parts from outboard engines, dive equipment, and odds and ends.

  “Obviously,” I said, noting her gaze, “simple works for me.”

  “Yes, I see that.” Devon
said, then turned around quickly. “Oh, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I actually like it. Simple, manly, and functional.”

  I heard the engines on the Revenge start and took a sheet of paper from a drawer in the chart cabinet. I wrote down the latitude and longitude of the spot on the chart and folded the paper into my pocket.

  Once outside on the deck, Devon looked once more out over my island. “You know what you have here?”

  “What’s that?”

  “She said I was running a hippie commune,” I told Tony, as I idled the Revenge into Harbor Channel and turned northeast.

  “Obviously, the lady doesn’t know you very well, Skipper,” he replied with a grin, sitting next to me at the helm. He shook his head, looking at Devon on the port bench.

  “Straight out of San Fran,” Devon added. “Maybe without the weed. But I stand by that comment.”

  Leaving the relatively sheltered water of Harbor Channel, with the sun straight above us, we encountered the first big waves in the Gulf. I turned the Revenge west around Harbor Key Light. While the wind was a lot lighter and out of the southeast, as Hurricane Ike made its way into the central Gulf, the predominant direction of the bigger waves was out of the northwest. The light, steady breeze sheered the tops off the larger whitecaps. Waves slapped the wide Carolina bow flare, launching salt spray high into the air. The spray was picked up on the wind blowing across the foredeck and pushed away from the boat.

  Devon looked better than she had when we first entered Harbor Channel just a few hours ago. I’d made her take another Dramamine before leaving the island and planned to remind her take one every few hours, just to be sure. Nothing ruins a boat trip faster than girl-vomit.

  Tony leaned in toward the dash, watching the screen of the chart plotter. “Eighty-one-degrees, thirty-three-minutes longitude.”

  I turned the wheel to starboard and brought the throttles up just a bit to thirty knots, to make the math easier. I straightened the Revenge on a due north course. “Keep a sharp eye out, Devon,” I said. “I’m sure the dive site is still a few miles, but something else might be in the water.”

  The lady detective turned sideways on the bench and leaned an arm on the forward dash to look ahead, which also afforded me a nice unobstructed view of a shapely thigh. She wasn’t going to see anything, but I knew that staring intently at the horizon while the boat is rocking is the best way to teach the inner ear that you’re moving side to side and it’s normal. Fluid in the inner ear works like a carpenter’s bubble level to give us balance. As the boat rocks, the inner ear picks up on the motion and sends signals to the brain. The eyes, seeing the horizon tilt back and forth, tell the ears to shut the hell up. If you’re inside the cabin, or on deck and looking at a fixed object on the boat, it sends mixed signals to the brain and you get to taste breakfast again.

  I held the Revenge on a due north heading, checking the speed. At thirty knots, we’d reach the three-mile limit in about six minutes. The target spot was only a mile beyond that and was programmed into the GPS chart-plotter.

  When the GPS indicated that we were five hundred feet from the spot I’d programmed as a waypoint, I pulled back on the throttles, bringing the heavy boat down to settle into the water at ten knots. I cleared the chart-plotter, dropped a pin at the start point, and turned the wheel to starboard just as we crossed near the target.

  With no visual reference, that pin on the chart-plotter would become the center of an ever-widening circle, and I’d be able to use the plotter’s track function to keep each ring of the circle about sixty to eighty feet apart.

  “Look sharp outboard of my turns,” I said. “The first couple of circles will be tight.”

  After a couple of hours, the circles became wider, reaching a half mile in diameter. I was about to give up and move north. The seas had calmed slightly, but it was still sloppy. Wave heights were now less than three feet.

  “There!” Devon shouted as we neared the original longitude line. “I saw something white on the water.”

  I looked in the direction she was pointing and slowly turned the wheel that way. At first, I didn’t see it.

  “I see it,” Tony said. “About a hundred yards, dead ahead.”

  I saw something pop over a wave momentarily, and turned the wheel toward it.

  “Go down and get ready to snag it,” I told Tony and he was down the ladder in a flash.

  “Do you think that’s from Isaksson’s boat?” Devon asked, as she stood and went to the forward rail of the fly bridge in front of the forward bench.

  She braced herself on the rail, leaning slightly, as she watched Tony making his way up to the bow with a boat hook. I couldn’t help but admire her form in those cut-offs. Definitely not your typical cop.

  “Might be,” I replied, slowing to idle speed as we neared what I now recognized as a mooring ball. “Or someone’s lobster honey hole.”

  When Tony lunged with the boat hook, I slipped both transmissions into neutral. He quickly hauled up the heavy anchor rode that the ball was attached to, used one of my dock lines to loop a bowline knot around it, then dropped them both over the side. The Revenge drifted back in the current, and I could tell by the sudden stop that the anchor to which the float was attached was either very heavy or set deep on the bottom.

  “Come back here a minute,” I said to Devon. While Tony began to get our dive gear ready, I went over the basics of how to operate the Revenge, in case there was an emergency and we needed to be picked up.

  “I can’t drive this thing,” she said.

  “Sure you can,” I encouraged her. “Just like driving a car, and you won’t have to move it at anything more than an idle.”

  “What if I hit something?”

  “Look around,” I said. “There isn’t anything for miles to hit. Well, except me and Tony.” I grinned and gave her a wink. “Please don’t run me and Tony over.”

  I pointed out the ignition keys, told her how start the engines, shift the transmissions, and turn the boat. “If there’s any trouble, just start the engines, go forward and toss the line, then idle the boat close to us. The odds of you needing to do this are almost zero, but you should know how.”

  “How will I know if you need help?”

  “We’ll surface and blow a whistle,” I said. “Otherwise, just enjoy the sunshine, and work on your tan.”

  Her face colored slightly, but she recovered quickly. “My tan’s the same all over. Is this a clothing-optional cruise?”

  My eyes went wide and I stuttered a bit. “Well, um, not right now.”

  Yeah, that was smooth, McDermitt.

  “All set,” Tony shouted from the cockpit.

  I climbed down to join him, wondering if there was any seriousness in what she’d said, or if she was just trying to get a rise out of me.

  “Grid search?” Tony asked, slipping his fins on.

  “No,” I replied. “We don’t have a lot of daylight. Vis is surprisingly good. Anything we’re likely to find, I’m thinking is gonna be close and obvious. We’ll go to the anchor and then split off fifty feet to the east and west. We’ll do a half circle counter-clockwise to the other’s start point, staying up ten feet off the bottom. We should be able to see each other easy enough. If there’s anything to be found, it’ll probably be within the three-hundred-foot circle we’ll be able to put eyes on.”

  Tony nodded and we checked each other’s gear while Finn looked at us curiously. He knew what we were about to do, and he’d surprised me a few times by showing up right beside me on shallow dives. He liked to dive the shallows for clams. I told him to stay on the boat with Devon, and he looked up at her on the bridge and barked.

  Tony stepped through the transom door and did a giant stride entry, with me right behind him. We gave each other the okay sign, neutralized our buoyancy compensators, and started finning against the slow current. Reaching the anchor line, we followed it to the bottom. What Isaksson had used to anchor the mooring ball was the rusted block
of a big marine diesel engine. We hovered a few feet above the engine block for a moment, checking our compasses. I attached a strobe to the block and switched it on. We both signaled okay, turned away from each other, and began kicking.

  Searching underwater isn’t difficult if you know how. But there aren’t any roads, nor any visual clues as to where you are, where you’re going, or how far. I extended my compass and swam due west, counting my fin strokes. I knew it took three kicks to cover ten feet at a relaxed speed, so when I counted fifteen kicks, I turned due south and started my end of the circle, using the strobe on the engine block as a visual clue for distance.

  When I looked to my left, I couldn’t quite see Tony, a hundred feet away. But I could see his bubbles flashing silver in the distance and knew he’d be doing exactly the same thing I was.

  I slowly continued finning in a wide circle to the south and then east, looking left and right for anything that wasn’t supposed to be there. I was just astern the Revenge when I heard the clanking sound of steel on an aluminum tank. I turned due north and kicked hard, swimming past the Revenge. When I neared the engine block, Tony came into view, kicking slowly into the slight northwest current, a few feet off the bottom.

  As I got closer, I saw what he’d signaled me about. On the bottom, about ninety feet from the engine block and directly in front of him, was a survey grid made of red-and-white snap-lock pipes. Isaksson’s dive site.

  I joined Tony and looked down at what might be the spot where Jennifer Marshall had been murdered.

  I noted the direction of the current over the dive spot and signaled Tony to return to the boat. I wanted to move the Revenge up current enough to put her directly over the dive spot.

  Harley heard the bell ring. “Damned phone,” he muttered, answering it again. Again, there was only a dial tone. He put it back and bent to his task once more, slurping tequila from Jasmine’s belly button. Just as he bent his lips close to her skin, the phone rang yet again.