The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer

by Rick Boyer

  Walking into the house, I wanted more than anything to believe him.

  And then we were standing around under the lamp inside. I looked at Mary, staring down at her letter, crying, not believing that good and bad news could come so close together.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MARY, Joe, AND I sat opposite Ronnie Henshaw. We had drawn up folding chairs, and were sitting under the stark glare of the fluorescent lamp that overhung the kid's desk. He studied my face, then spoke.

  "I remember you from somewhere," he said. "Aud your wife, too."

  "It was at Andy Cunningham's funeral," said Mary. "I remember seeing you there. So you knew Andy."

  "Sure, I knew him. I knew Andy well, in fact. He used to come and study here. Said it was nice and quiet, and there was nobody else around to distract him."

  He was right about that; the USGS warehouse was a regular tomb. Sitting there in that single-story building on the Quissett Campus, we could have been inside the Great Pyramid.

  "When did you guys meet each other?" I asked. "One of the beach parties, maybe?"

  Ronnie scratched his dirty brown hair and squinted in concentration behind his thick lenses. "No. I don't go to the parties. Nobody invites me. I never hear about them until the next day."

  This didn't surprise me. Ronnie was wearing scuffed old wingtip shoes over orange and black argyle socks. Baggy corduroy pants—in July mind you—that he wore so high they were practically tucked up under his armpits. A baggy, short-sleeved seersucker white shirt with a plastic pouch in the breast pocket crammed with writing instruments. A gangly, nerdy kid, he didn't look like the kind of guy Andy Cunningham would associate with, and he sure didn't look like anybody Jack had ever brought over to the house.

  "So how did you two meet, then?" Mary asked.

  "He kind of showed up here one afternoon and asked to take a look around. It's not open to the public. In fact, unauthorized personnel aren't allowed beyond that door there—"

  He pointed to a black steel door with a small glass window in the center. The glass inside was wire-impregnated. Same kind of stuff Joe wanted me to get for the Breakers's back windows.

  "'He said he just wanted a quiet place to study. He was sick of all the noise in town, and asked if he could set up a small desk here in this office, or even just a chair where he could read. I said it was against the rules, but then I found out he was a student at MBL, and a premed and everything. So I let him sit at my desk when I went out for breaks. With him here, sitting in for me, I could take longer breaks, too. We got to talking sometimes, you know, and pretty soon we were friends."

  "What's behind here?" asked Joe, rapping on the metal door with his knuckles. He rapped backhanded, facing the kid.

  "Well, a lot of valuable equipment, mostly. And our core samples. Those are pieces of rock. And then we've got our SRPs there in the back, in fireproof file cases."

  "What are those?"

  "Seismic reflection profiles. They're kinda like graphs. In fact, they are graphs. They're—hey!—that's one in your hands! Where did you get it?"

  "I found it," I said, handing Ronnie Henshaw one of the folded pieces of huge paper we'd found wrapped around the rock and stuffed into the bedpost of the day before. "That's why we're here."

  "You're not supposed to have this," he said after unfolding it all the way and reading the data under the wavy lines. "This is property of the U.S. Geological Survey. It's not in public domain yet. In fact it's—"

  "We kinda figured that," said Joe, holding up his palm to shut the kid up. He flashed his badge and cocked a thumb in my direction. "We're police. We're assisting in the investigation of Andy Cunningham's death, and we're pretty sure he was in possession of this profile thing just before he died. We just wanted you to identify it. And what we'd like you to do now, Ronnie, is go back behind this off-limits door, walk around the warehouse there or whatever it is .. . ," he paused, resting his hands on the desk and leaning over it until his face was only a foot from the kid's, ". . . and tell us if anything's missing."

  Ronnie said he needed to call his superior first. We said fine. Thirty minutes later a bald, graying man of fifty-five or so came in and introduced himself as Calvin Beard. We told him our story, and he opened the black steel door and led us into the big room, which had three long aisles lined with wooden bins. Our little procession snaked up and down the rows of bins, with Beard darting his eyes right and left as we walked the aisles. He stopped halfway down the second row and rapped the edge of the bin with his fingers.

  "Here," he said. "Core samples from the Nantucket hole are missing."

  "What's the Nantucket hole?" I asked.

  "In eighty-one we drilled a hole on Nantucket Island for a ground water study. You said you live here on the Cape?"

  "Part of the year," I answered.

  "Well then you know firsthand that we've got an increasing water shortage here, and on the islands, too. I mean, the population's increased tenfold here in the past thirty years. The demand for fresh water has increased maybe twenty times. And geologically speaking, places surrounded by sea water suffer from saline intrusion when their water tables are depleted."

  "That's nice," said Joe. "What the hell's it mean?"

  "What I'm saying is that when you pump a lot of water out of the ground in a place that's surrounded by sea water, pretty soon the sea water starts creeping into your aquifer and your water tastes salty. It can get so bad the water's undrinkable. So what we did in Nantucket was, we drilled a deep hole in the center of the island to determine the status of the water table, and to see if we couldn't dig new water wells there in the future."

  "That's it?"

  "Yep," replied Beard, peering into the recesses of the bin. "And I sure wish to hell I knew where those cores went to."

  We said we thought we could help out on that score, and took him and the kid out to the car where we'd stowed them and the rest of the big graphs, or seismic reflection profiles. We carried the stuff back inside, where Beard set them on the big table in the back room, confirming that these indeed were the missing pieces.

  "But why would Andy, or anybody else, want these?" asked Mary, leaning over the table and staring at the rocks and the large graphs.

  "I have absolutely no idea," said Calvin Beard.

  I tried another tack, filling Beard in on Andy's murder, and asking him if he could think of any economic value the things on the table before us could have.

  "'Well," he said, almost absent-mindedly, "both the cores and the profiles reveal the presence of rift basins. These are known to have hydrocarbon potential."

  "Hydrocarbon potential. Then you mean—"

  "Oil, Dr. Adams. High-grade crude petroleum."

  "I've heard that before, it seems to me," said Mary.

  "Uh-huh," said Beard. "We've known about the oil for over twenty years. In the mid-seventies, if you'll recall, there was big debate about whether or not to exploit the rift basins under Georges Bank. There was a lot of concern that such development would endanger the fisheries. In the end, the environmentalists and fishermen won, and the Bank was declared off limits."

  "So what's the big deal with this?" asked Joe, nodding his head down at the rocks and graphs.

  "I don't know, except that it's not Georges Bank; it's Nantucket Island."

  "Tell me what you see here," I said, sweeping my hand over the table.

  "Okay, first of all, these core samples . . . This is how they'd stack up, roughly," explained Beard, as he quickly arranged the cores one above the other, "which reveals a limestone cap on top. Underneath it is a series of conglomerate sandstone formations—which are these cores, here—each with high hydrocarbon yield and good permeability. Permeability in the rock is essential for the petroleum to seep through it. Otherwise, oil wells wouldn't work. So in a nutshell, what we have here is a classic example of a site that could be very feasibly exploited. If it weren't for the fact that the environmental impact studies ruled it out."

  "Who kn
ows about these samples, and the test well?"

  "Just us. The USGS. And the people at the Oceanographic Institute. We work together on these profiles."

  "Who did the drilling?" I asked. "You, or WHOI?"

  "Actually, neither. We contracted the drilling out to a private company."

  "Whose name is?"

  "A firm called OEI. It's out of New Bedford."

  "Oceanic Enterprises, Incorporated," I said.

  "How'd you know?"

  "Calvin, can we use your phone a second?"

  * * *

  "But you still don't have a direct tie-in, I don't think," said Paul Keegan over the phone. "I mean, sure, the cores and charts show that Nantucket's sitting on a pool of oil. So what? They're telling you that no development can take place there."

  "No legal development. Obviously, OEI wants to sink an oil well sub rosa. That would explain everything, Andy's murder, the break-ins, the New Bedford connection with the hocked radio, everything."

  "I'll be up around three, Doc. Hold tight till then. Where's Joe?"

  "Up in Boston meeting with people at the D.A.'s office. He gave me your number just before he left. Listen Paul, we really appreciate all you've tried to do for Jack. But now that the indictment's handed down, we really need you more than ever—"

  "I hear you, and I agree that this latest development is important. It could even be what clears Jack. But let me tie up a few loose ends down here first. Joe and I have indirectly succeeded where the state guys from Rhode Island failed: we've got Eddie Falcone sitting in the hot seat, finally."

  "Did that guy, the Drugstore, take the stand?"

  "Oh yeah. And Slinky's squirming. He motioned me aside privately and hinted that he's willing to plea-bargain. That's no surprise, since he's facing a federal rap from the DEA on this one. What we're talking here, we're talking five to ten in a federal pen, like Atlanta. The Atlanta pen. It's the modern day version of Andersonville. If you were facing five to ten in that hellhole, wouldn't you want to plea-bargain?"

  "Sure would."

  "Well, that's what we got here. Now, being out of state, Joe and I are about through down here in Providence. But the federal thing, the drugs, that we can serve up on a platter to the federal prosecutors in Boston."

  "I'll meet you up here around three."

  "Fine. By the way, Doc, has the senior Cunningham been calling you?"

  "Boyd Cunningham? Andy's dad? Once."

  "Uh-huh. Well, he keeps calling us. Wants to know if we've got the people who killed his son."

  "That's what he was asking me. And he keeps calling Jack, too. I kept quiet. What are you telling him?"

  "That we're following some promising leads, and that we'll have the killer, we hope, before too long. He keeps asking about old man Hartzell—keeps asking where he can find him. He sounds dangerous, like he's got blood in his eye."

  "Well, it might be wise to explain to him, next time he calls, that it seems less and less likely that Hartzell had anything to do with Andy's murder."

  "Right. Now, sit tight. I don't want you and Joe poking around up there and blowing the whistle before the time is ripe. We'll plan a strategy. Maybe pick up some of the people from OEI for questioning separately—see how their stories jibe. But what we don't want at this time, we don't want them to get the slightest hint we're onto them."

  I told him not to worry, just to meet us at the cottage at three so we could plan it all out.

  * * *

  Calvin Beard accepted the chilled glass of white and brushed the crumbs of fresh baguette off his sweater. He was sitting on our deck, bathed in the red-gold light of the dying sun. Sitting next to him was the trim, athletic Paul Keegan, replete with crew cut and square jaw. He was probably thinking to himself, "We're looking for a few good men . .

  Joe was talking with Mary next to the porch door. I was cutting cheese, pate, and bread and pouring wine. After the appetizers, while waiting for Mary's onion soup, we convened in the porch where Calvin Beard spread out a seismic reflection profile on the table and weighted it down with beach rocks so it wouldn't blow.

  "Now these reflection profiles are graphs of echo soundings through rock," he said, tracing his hand along the wavy lines. "The sonar pulser works like a sonar depth finder, or a fish finder. The echoes that are reflected are put on this paper. Different types of rock and mud have different echoes, and these appear on the graph paper as different types of wavy lines. To the trained eye, they reveal the type of rock and the thickness of the layer. This baseline here is the ocean floor. Okay, and here, you can all see the differing densities and layers of rock underneath it. The location is Nantucket Shoals. The other profiles you found in the bedposts are of the same general area."

  "And these are worth a lot of money," said Joe, learning over the table, "they're worth killing for?"

  "I would hope not, Lieutenant. The value of the reflection profile is that it lets us get a peek at the ocean floor without drilling for core samples. As I told Dr. and Mrs. Adams earlier, it's incredibly expensive to drill from a ship. The cost seems to expand geometrically with the depth of the water. And, if you add shifting currents and strong winds and tides, the cost is soon prohibitive."

  "So what these do, they tell you where to drill and where to forget it."

  "Pretty much."

  "So let's put the package together, then. Core samples from Nantucket hole, dug in eighty-one. These reflection profiles from Nantucket Shoals and surrounding ocean areas, which show—what? Promising sites for oil drilling?"

  "Precisely. A virtual guarantee of connecting with high-grade crude."

  "But it's illegal," said Joe. "And, even if legal, incredibly expensive to undertake. Which is why our friend Doc here has thought out a neat little scenario to explain it all. Haven't you, Doc?"

  All eyes stared at me.

  "It's just a theory. But here goes. Back in the mid-seventies Henderson and Whitesides—and this professor Chisholm, or whoever the third partner is—start up Oceanic Enterprises with the full expectation of reaping the rewards of undersea exploration. But the enterprise gets bogged down by the ruling against oil exploitation of the fishing grounds. The company does odd drilling jobs, but makes no big scores. Recently, things get so bad that they look around for other avenues. Maybe Chisholm, since he's the full-timer at OEI and presumably the undersea expert, remembers the core samples they took from the Nantucket hole and gave to the USGS. These apparently all but prove rich oil deposits. Also, the partners at OEI are aware that the USGS has other data—namely these seismic reflection profiles—that show rich fields underlying the ocean throughout the area. If they can get their hands on these proofs, they could attract full-scale development of a small well or two in the area."

  Beard shook his head.

  "I don't see how that would be possible, Dr. Adams. Any exploitation of the shelf couldn't go unnoticed. And what company, legitimate or otherwise, would undertake such a costly venture when they'd be certain to be intercepted?"

  "You're right. No company would even think of undertaking it. But what if the venture were land based? And what if it were legal?"

  Beard twisted up his face as though he'd just swallowed a lemon. He cleared his throat.

  "Wait a second. The key to any mineral exploration is the Minerals Management Service, a federal agency that is in charge of offering drilling leases for sale at auction. The continental shelf is part of the exclusive economic zone set up by the president in eighty-three. It's the same zone, incidentally, that extends U.S. fishing rights offshore for two hundred miles. The government has regulatory power over it. Follow me?"

  "You're saying that the feds regulate the whole shmear," said Joe, "and people can't sneak around drilling for oil on the shelf without getting caught."

  Beard spoke up. "That's exactly what I'm—did you say land based?"

  "Land based, on privately held land on Tuckernuck Island."

  Beard stroked his chin and looked up, staring off ov
er the ocean.

  "I still don't think they'd allow it. The state, I mean. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or any other state, has the power of injunction against anything that threatens a fragile environment. Now, I know that mineral rights in this state are reserved for landowners. So I don't see how it would be illegal initially. But I'm sure that eventually they'd go to court and close down the well."

  "I'm sure they would, too. Don't you see?"

  He thought a second before replying.

  "You mean that's why they're being so secretive?"

  "Sure. That's why they hired Andrew Cunningham to befriend that—what's his name?"

  "Ronnie Henshaw?"

  "Yeah, make friends with Henshaw, be his best buddy, so that he'd have access to the core samples and profiles, and could sneak them out of the USGS lab so that the strapped partners in OEI could get the backing to start drilling. Tell me something, Calvin. On a land-based operation like this, over the kind of field we know exists down there in these rift basins, what would the cost be?"

  "Minimal. And also, you'd have minimal risk of a dry hole. Maybe no risk at all. All you'd need is a forty-foot dcrrick and some pipe. When the well came in, you could take down the derrick and install a small-bore boom to the beach to load shoal-draft barges with the crude. I can't say how long you could operate before you were found out. Tuckernuck's not that widely visited. I know the commuter planes fly over it daily, but then again, part of it is wooded. If the ships were loaded at night, it might be a long while before anybody even caught on. But assuming only a few months, you'd still make a lot of money."

  "And how long before any legal action would be effective?" asked Mary.

  Calvin Beard shrugged. "Maybe just a few months. Maybe a year or more. Hell, maybe they could fight the injunction in court and keep the well going indefinitely. But I doubt it. I think secrecy at the outset would be vital. And the people they'd contact to come in on the venture would be wildcatters, not major oil companies."

  We all looked out over the water, not saying anything.

  "It's a good thing Jack's not here to hear what could happen to his whales," Mary said.