Precious Cargo

by Clyde W. Ford

  “Thank you,” Angela said. She sighed. “I may never be able to erase from my mind the frightful image of that young woman at the end of our anchor, but knowing that you’ll find out who she was helps.”

  “You’ve lifted a burden from our hearts,” Marvin said. “This may be the last year we cruise the Inside Passage. I wouldn’t want forty years of fond memories to end on such a dismal note.”

  “Dear, people must tire of hearing us say that every summer’s cruise might be our last,” Angela said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Marvin said. “At our age, each day’s a gift. The present is the present.”

  It sounded like something Señor Oller might say.

  Marvin patted Angela on the knee. The two exchanged a soft, sweet glance. Then Marvin placed his hat back on his head and tapped it down. He stood. “Come, dear, let’s leave Charlie to his Sunday.” He reached for my hand. “Thank you, again,” he said. Then he reached out for Angela and pulled her up from her seat. They slipped through the plastic enclosure and strolled, arm-in-arm, back down the dock toward their boat.

  When Señor Oller said, “Perfection isn’t the goal. Love is,” he could easily have been speaking about a couple like Marvin and Angela.

  I reopened the English Suite and picked up my guitar. But the plain white card at the bottom of the case called out to me. I reopened it, too, and placed it on the stand in front of the music.

  I’d thought about calling Kate the night she left the wine and the card, but I called my friend Loi Ng instead. I thanked him for his help in solving my first case and I told him we should celebrate together. Then I told him the truth. I hadn’t been with a woman in the years since Sharon’s death. And the thought of starting over, being with someone else, both excited and scared me.

  Loi spoke in rapid-fire Vietnamese to his wife, Minh Thi. Then he put her on the line. Both of them had known Sharon.

  “Mr. Charlie,” Minh Thi said in her soft, mellifluous voice. I remember laughing to myself, realizing that she hadn’t a clue what “Mr. Charlie” would signify to an African American. “No harm try for love. Only harm do nothing, then feel sorry for self. Sharon very nice woman. Very loving. Would want you find love.”

  Somehow Minh Thi knew.

  Before her death, Sharon made me promise that in time I’d find a loving woman. But Sharon insisted that this woman also should love boats as much as she did. Kate Sullivan did love boats as much as Sharon, and Minh Thi would hear nothing of our difference in age.

  “Twelve year? Nothing,” Minh Thi said. “Muscle of younger person stronger than muscle of older person. But love of older person maybe stronger than love of younger person. Older person has seen more life. Knows more value of love. Mr. Charlie, you call ‘wine woman.’”

  And I did.

  SO FOR THE LAST NINE MONTHS I’d been practicing another new piece in my life: being in a relationship with Kate Sullivan and watching that relationship grow. I’d break the news to her about the change in our cruising plans later. Right now, I wanted to begin the English Suite. And after that, even though it was Sunday, I wanted to start asking questions about the young woman that Marvin and Angela Baynes had pulled up from the bottom of Eagle Harbor.

  two

  After a frustrating half hour of trying to play the English Suite from memory, and berating myself because I couldn’t, I put my guitar away and stepped off the Noble Lady. A tremulous, nasal rendition of “Amazing Grace” filtered through the rising, early afternoon heat. Ahead of me, Leonard Whitehall paraded back and forth between slips, red-faced, a bagpipe squeezed under his arm, his fingers working the tune. Off to one side, sitting on the bow of Pied Piper, his wife, Leslie, stroked their two Scotties, one black and the other white.

  Leslie smiled as I passed by. “It’s an annual ritual,” she said. She motioned toward her husband with her head. “Each year, Len welcomes summer and the beginning of our cruising season by playing the pipes.”

  I stopped to listen, remembering that it was a remorseful, shipwrecked captain of a slave ship who wrote “Amazing Grace” to atone for the sins of his wretched business. I reached aboard Pied Piper to stroke the white Scottie, but it narrowed its eyes at me, growled low, tossed its head to one side, and trotted away down the side deck. I pointed to Len.

  “He needs a kilt,” I said.

  “He’s got a closet full,” Leslie said. “Thank god, he’s not wearing one today.” She laughed, and then whispered, “His legs looked better thirty years ago.”

  When I reached Len, he marked time in place, eyes straight ahead, continuing to play while allowing me to pass. In the background, a chorus of sounds accompanied his bagpipe: the drumbeat of hammers, the drone of power tools, and the hiss of pressure washers. Boaters scurried to ready their vessels for cruising.

  I took the asphalt walkway around the marina, toward Gate Six. Halfway there, I paused for the view. The snowy white cap of Mount Baker poked above the hills behind the city, jutting into a deep blue, cloudless sky. Off in the distance, beyond Bellingham Bay, the craggy peaks of the Olympic Mountains held a line of clouds at bay. Windsocks and flags fluttered from the riggings of sailboats, rumoring of light winds. All signs pointed to a Pacific high-pressure front trying to build.

  A line of blue dock carts filled with groceries awaited me at the top of the Gate Six ramp. With a low tide, the ramp angled down precipitously. Boaters grabbed a handrail with one hand, their cart with the other, leaning backward against the pull of gravity, while slowly working their way down. A young girl in a bathing suit and flip-flops struggled with her cart. I could see the cart about to get away from her. I raced to the head of the line and lunged for the cart handle just as it slipped from her grasp. She ran to the bottom of the ramp. When I got down to her with the cart, she slowly worked her gaze up the length of my body.

  I handed the cart to her. “Can you make it from here?” I asked.

  She said nothing. She just stared at me and slowly nodded. She seemed amazed at the tall black man who’d appeared out of nowhere to her rescue.

  Three rows over from the main ramp, Big Ben sat in a slip with her cabin door open. The wooden, thirty-six-foot Grand Banks belonged to Bellingham police detective Ben Conrad. The sound of metal clinking on metal arose from inside the boat. Then silence. Then, “Shit!”

  Apparently, I’d caught Ben aboard.

  “Ben,” I called out.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Charlie.”

  “Noble, that you?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Good. Just in time to go fishing.”

  I called back. “Lose a wrench in the bilge?”

  A pair of oil-stained hands emerged from the cabin door, followed by Ben’s face with a streak of oil across the cheek. “Fucking right. How’d you know?”

  “Ahh. The telltale sounds of metal bouncing off metal, then silence followed by loud profanity.”

  Ben wiped his hands off with a rag then stepped onto the deck. “Lost a half-inch socket along with the wrench. Hell, half the bolts on the damn boat are half-inch. Come on aboard.”

  Ben waved me on. I swung up onto the rear deck.

  “Stainless steel wrench and socket?”

  “Uh huh. Expensive suckers.”

  “Too bad, a magnet won’t work.”

  “What do you use?”

  “Never lost anything in the bilge,” I said.

  Ben looked me straight in the eye. “Bull. If you own a boat, you’ve lost tools in the bilge.”

  I laughed. “Duct tape.”

  “Duct tape?”

  “Uh huh. Wad it up, sticky side out. Put it on the end of a pole or piece of stiff hose. Drop the pole into the bilge and fish around until something bites.”

  Ben pointed at me and winked. “Good idea, Noble. Step in and have a seat. I’ll be right up.”

  I slipped inside and grabbed the helm seat. My legs dangled above huge open pits, where Ben had ripped up the cabin sole, pulling out large parque
ted squares to expose the engine, the shaft, and the boat’s mechanical guts. He tore duct tape from a roll and mashed it between his two beefy palms. Then he pressed it onto the end of a length of fuel hose. Ben stepped down into the engine well. He bent his knees and started to descend deeper into the bowels of his boat, but he bounced up.

  “It’s one thing I hate about working on boats,” he said.

  “Not enough space.”

  “Especially for tall guys like us.”

  He dipped down again, burying his head so deep into the bilge that only his wriggling backside showed. I waited and listened to him grunt.

  “Biting yet?”

  “Hell, no,” Ben mumbled. Then, “Come here you little sucker. . . . Damn. . . . Damn.”

  “Big one get away?”

  “Go to hell, Noble.”

  “Been to bilge hell many times before, and used duct tape to get out.”

  “Come to Daddy. . . . Come to Daddy. . . . That’s right,” Ben said.

  Then he became silent, though his backside squirmed as if he wanted to squeeze all of his large body into the bilge. Suddenly, he popped up from the engine. His face looked like he’d emerged from a day’s hard work in a coal mine. But he held the stem of an oil-soaked socket wrench high in the air like a prized salmon he’d just landed. A smile and a line of white teeth broke through the grime on his face.

  “I owe you one,” Ben said. “Beer’s in the fridge. Grab two. It’s time for a break.”

  I stepped around the gaping openings in the cabin sole and made my way to the galley while Ben washed up in the head. He lowered the parquet squares back in place. I handed him a bottle and we walked outside. Ben unfolded two plastic chairs. We sat on the rear deck, holding our beers.

  A twenty-seven-foot coast guard patrol boat zoomed into the harbor, slowing down as it neared us, but still sending a train of waves our way. We bobbed in its wake. Sunlight glared off the patrol boat’s shiny aluminum pilothouse, which sat atop its black, inflatable bottom. Two men in dark blue uniforms and bright orange life vests stood on the rear deck of the patrol boat tying off fenders, which trailed in the water. Ben hoisted his beer bottle toward the coast guard boat.

  “You miss that?” he asked.

  “I worked in intelligence. It’s been a long time since I went on patrol.”

  “Yeah, but do you miss being in the Guard?”

  “Sometimes. I miss the travel, and the people I worked with.”

  Ben took a swig of beer. “Don’t know if I coulda done what you did. Refusing an order to doctor an intelligence report. I’ve thought about it. Janet and I even talked about it. You know, if the chief said I needed to alter a report would I do it?” He took another swallow of beer. “If it meant losing my job . . . I just don’t know.”

  “And if it meant losing your soul?”

  “You felt that strong about it, didn’t you?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Maybe you were a better man than I’d have been in the same situation. . . . I just don’t know.”

  I raised my beer bottle to my lips and took a sip. “I hope you’re never put in a situation where you have to find out.”

  “Ain’t that the damn truth.”

  I drank some more beer, then pulled the bottle away from my lips and studied the label.

  “Since when are you into Northwest microbrews?” I asked.

  “I seem like a Bud guy, don’t I?”

  “Uh huh.”

  He grimaced. “Since Janet.”

  “I see. Added a little class to your life, huh?”

  Ben smiled. “You come over to talk about the gals?”

  “Not really, but we can. I came over to talk about the young woman raised from the bottom of Eagle Harbor.”

  Ben took a healthy swig. “Oh, that. Figured you might be looking into it.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. I spoke with the folks that found her. They make a cute couple don’t they?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Anyway, they wanted us to find out all we could about the woman. Hell, I told ’em we didn’t have the manpower or the money. Told ’em to hire an investigator. They said they knew just the person. I figured it was you, since their boat’s also moored at Gate Nine.”

  “But isn’t investigating this woman’s death your job?”

  “Ten, fifteen years ago, the police department woulda been all over this. We did the usual. Medical examiner performed an autopsy. Took a DNA sample. We sent prints and a photo to the national missing persons database. Reported the incident to state and federal authorities. If relatives turn up, or her prints or photo get a hit from another jurisdiction, then maybe we’ll give it more juice. Right now, she’s on ice at the morgue. The case’ll get put at the bottom of our ‘to-do list.’ We’re overworked and understaffed. You know the drill. Truth is, and frankly I hate to say this, this gal’s death isn’t a high enough priority. Hell, it didn’t even happen in our jurisdiction.”

  “What do you mean not in your jurisdiction?”

  “That couple snagged her body in Eagle Harbor. Eagle Harbor’s on Cypress Island. Cypress Island’s in Skagit County, not Whatcom County, where we are.” Ben pulled the bottle away from his lips and laughed. “Hell, the Skagit County Sheriff’s Department is overworked too. They were more than happy to hand over the case to us. Since the couple that found her live aboard in Bellingham, it kinda made sense. The chief owed the Skagit sheriff a favor, so we took the lead on the case.”

  “On paper only.” I took a swallow of the microbrew. It had a sweet, chocolate flavor.

  “Look, around here we’ve got more meth labs than pharmacies, drug runners tunneling underneath the border from Canada, and motorcycle gangs ruling like warlords. Add to that a shitload of regulations that Homeland Security wants us to follow—all unfunded, mind you—and we don’t have a lot of time for your routine investigation of a dead body.” Ben lowered his head and shook it. “It’s a damn shame. We’re no longer on patrol at the airport. So the airport has had to outsource security to a private firm. And we’re damn near outsourcing daily police work to guys like you. . . . It’s not why I became a cop.”

  “Can you tell me anything more about this young woman?”

  “I don’t know much. Based on the crab feeding, the medical examiner thinks she was in the water for a week or more. Gruesome stuff, ain’t it?”

  “Did she drown?”

  “The ME says no, because there was very little water in her lungs.”

  “Bruising?”

  “On her ankles, wrists, and neck. Maybe vaginally but there was too much decomposition and crab feeding to be certain.”

  I closed my eyes and let a stream of beer slide down my throat. “Rape? Bondage sex? It gets out of hand, and the guy throws her overboard.”

  “Could be one of those big-ass party boats, like that one, out for a good time.” Ben pointed with his beer bottle across the marina to the eighty-foot yacht, Longhorn, sitting at the visitors’ dock.

  “Or a killer who lures prostitutes onto his boat, has sex, then kills them.”

  “Great, Noble, the San Juan Islands Killer. Just what we need. Look, I’m thinking she wasn’t local. If she was, family or friends would have noticed her missing and filed a report.”

  “Unless she was a runaway.”

  “We ran a computer-reconstructed photo of her face against the missing persons database. Fingerprints too. Nothing.”

  “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t a missing person.”

  “I know that. But it doesn’t mean she was, either.”

  “Did you comb the beach?”

  “Yep. And we got zip.”

  “How about dragging Eagle Harbor? Sending down divers?”

  Ben nearly spit up a mouthful of beer. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Evidence.”

  “Chief would shit his pants if I asked for divers and a drag team. Now
tell me she had drugs on her, or a bomb, and the FBI, ATF, DHS, Coast Guard, and a hundred other friggin’ agencies would be all over Eagle Harbor. Hell, they’d probably try to drain Puget Sound. If a local investigation doesn’t smell of terrorism or drugs no one’s going to throw big money at it.”

  “What’s this woman look like?”

  “Pretty gal. Young. Dark-skinned. Native. Hispanic. Oriental. Maybe Mediterranean. Hell, you should pay her a visit and see for yourself.”

  “I’ll settle for a copy of her photograph.”

  Ben sighed. “Turns my stomach too. You’d think after all these years I’d be used to staring death in the face.” Ben hit the arm of his chair with his bottle. “You want another?”

  “Sounds good.” I turned up my bottle and finished the last of my beer.

  Ben stood up and disappeared inside the boat, emerging moments later with two sweating bottles. He twisted off a cap and handed one to me. “Can we change the subject?” he asked.

  “Anything more I should know?” I asked.

  “Nothing I can think of, but if I do I’ll give you a holler. You’ll keep me in the loop?”

  “I will. You wanna talk about the women?”

  “You read my mind.”

  “How’s Janet?” I asked.

  “Wild. Crazy.” He hoisted his beer. “Maybe too much for a Bud guy like me to handle.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “You ever see her at the helm of a boat?” Ben smiled. “Yeah, I guess you have, haven’t you?”

  “That’s why I thought you two would hit it off,” I said.

  “Well, you figured right. Janet’s as crazy about boats as I am. Barbara hated boats.”

  “That’d be tough.”

  Ben laughed. “That’s why she got the house and I got the boat in the divorce. Janet, on the other hand, can handle this boat better than me. Truth is, she’s one hell of a nice gal. She’s divorced. I’m divorced. We’re taking things at a real low rpm. Biggest problem for me is that she’s got this wild side. You know, peace, environment, poverty, abortion. She gets all worked up, then goes off to join a group protest. Every Friday she’s out in front of the Federal Building, holding up a sign for us to get out of Iraq. Hell, I’m with the guys on the other side of the protest line.”