"Yeah, but he's a bullshit artist, and he's got things to hide. I've got a glass in my glove compartment with his prints on it, and I'm going to get out the old fingerprint kit as soon as I get off the line. He's close by you, maybe somewhere right in Cairn. This little prank took some careful timing to make it work. He not only knew when I left, and how long it would take me to get to New York, but also when you left the house. That was his window of opportunity, when he called Mary and Francisco to leave his message. He's watching your house-or was. The fact that he didn't just shoot us tells us something about him: he's an overgrown juvenile delinquent, probably fairly bright, who tries to get his way through bluff, intimidation, and manipulation. But he apparently doesn't have the guts to kill, not even from ambush."
"Maybe he's waiting for a better opportunity."
"I don't think so. It turns out our friend is a fucking practical jokester."
"I'll show him a practical joke."
"No, I'll show him a practical joke. You just keep your eyes open up there. And don't discuss any of this with Mary."
"Agreed. But what if he doesn't. . uh, show up anywhere?"
"What if he doesn't have a record?"
"Yeah."
"A dipshit like this has to have a record with somebody, somewhere, even if it's only for an arrest. If I can find out who he really is, then I'll be in a better position to take a run at him. Most of these people who are into the occult begin to believe their own bullshit, and that's a weakness. I'm going to show him a little sorcery. But you let me handle it. All right? Mary will get all wound up if she gets wind of this."
"I hear you."
"I'll be in touch. You keep your head low."
"Yeah. And before you tell me how low your head already is, let me tell you to keep it even lower."
"I'll talk to you, brother," I said, and hung up.
I went downstairs to the garage, took the plastic-wrapped tumbler out of the glove compartment of the Volkswagen Rabbit, brought it back up to my office. I retrieved an old fingerprint kit from the bottom of a filing cabinet and went to work dusting the glass, working carefully around the curved surface. There was, of course, no guarantee that the prints were going to be of any use at all, but, as I had told Garth, I had a strong feeling that Mr. Sacra Silver had been a bit too clever by half at least once in his life, had run afoul of the law, and that his prints would be on file somewhere.
I ended up with good prints of every finger on his right hand, including the thumb. I transferred the prints on the tumbler to plastic film, took the film to our photo lab in a back room.
There I set up our high-resolution Polaroid camera and shot the fingerprints with high-speed film against a soft gray background. When I had finished, I picked up the telephone and called a friend, a captain in the NYPD, who owed me a couple of favors.
"I don't know where you got this water, Mongo, but I don't see how it could have come out of the Hudson River."
I studied Frank Lemengello, the husky, bushy-haired chief chemist at the lab where I had brought the samples I had taken from Tom Blaine's basement. He was sitting on his desk, with the three green plastic jugs to his right. Beneath each jug was a computer printout of the chemical makeup of each sample.
"Actually, I didn't take the samples. They were collected by a man who's dead now, but he almost certainly did take them out of the Hudson. What's the problem with that?"
"The stuff in all three of these jugs is seawater."
"Seawater?"
"Yeah. You know, like from the ocean."
"The Hudson is an estuary, lower than sea level, all the way to Albany. It has tides, and the water in that part is saline."
"It may be saline, but it's not seawater." Frank paused, patted the jug closest to him. "This is seawater. Even at the mouth of New York Harbor you get a lot of mix with fresh water; you wouldn't have this concentration. But there's other stuff in there too."
"Like what?"
"Some heavy metals, and petrochemicals like ethyl benzene and toluene. It's all on the printout. Nasty stuff, by the way."
I thought about it, trying to figure out how a concentration of undiluted seawater laced with heavy metals and petrochemicals had found its way twenty-five miles up the Hudson River, and finally thought I had an answer. "A tanker," I said.
"Come again?"
"An oceangoing oil tanker flushing out its bilge, ballast, and holding tanks after making a delivery. That's how that stuff got in the river."
He gave me a nod, but it was tentative. "That could be the answer, I suppose; but to get these concentrations, you'd have to collect your samples right at the port virtually as a tank was being flushed, or you'd get more dilution with river water."
Which would explain why Tom Blaine had been diving at night, in the deep channel, beneath a tanker.
It didn't explain why Tom had died, but it hinted strongly at a grisly conclusion. If a tanker was in the process of flushing its tanks, it wasn't going anywhere at the moment. But in this case the main turbines had been turned on. It seemed inconceivable to me that a captain would choose to murder a man over some bilge water, but it was beginning to look as though that was exactly what had happened.
"Frank, you don't know anything about pollution laws, fines for dumping, that sort of thing, do you?"
The chemist shook his head. "Can't say that I do, Mongo."
"Well, then," I said, gathering up the jugs and printout sheets, "I guess I'll just have to go find somebody who does."
Chapter Seven
The nearest Coast Guard Command station was located in the New York Harbor, on Governors Island. It was a short subway ride for me, but a trip into the city for Garth. Nevertheless, when I called to tell him about the lab report on the samples, and what I intended to do next, he insisted that he wanted to go with me. I hung around the office catching up on paperwork until he arrived, and then we headed for the subway.
We actually got in to see the top man himself, one Captain Richard Marley. Marley was a beefy man with a pleasant manner, curly brown hair, and light brown eyes that, to my consternation, seemed to glaze over when I explained why we had come, and started to hand him the computer printouts.
"Excuse me," he said, taking the papers from my hand, then setting them off to one side of his desk before sinking back into his leather swivel chair. "This wouldn't have any connection with that riverkeeper up in Cairn, would it?"
Garth and I looked at each other, then back at the Captain of the Port of New York. Garth said, "As a matter of fact, it would. Those are laboratory analyses of water Tom Blaine took out of the Hudson north of here. He died getting those samples."
Marley blinked, sat up straight. "Died?"
"He got chewed up by the propeller blades of some tug or tanker."
Marley winced, half turned away. "Jesus. You're sure it was a tug or tanker?"
"It's what the coroner said. A normal powerboat, even a cigarette boat, would have sliced him up, but not into the sushi he ended up as."
"He could only have been run over by a big boat if he was in the deep channel. What the hell was he doing diving in the deep channel?"
"Getting those samples," I said with some impatience, pointing at the sheets of paper on the corner of his desk. "Or samples just like those. There's more than one ship involved. The samples I had analyzed came from two different ships, almost certainly tankers, and he was probably killed by a third."
"And you two have been hired to look into the death?" Marley asked in an even tone. "Or are you working on a pollution case?"
"We haven't been hired by anybody to do anything. You might call what we're doing a labor of love."
"I'm sorry to hear about Tom Blaine's death, Frederickson," the burly man said, once again leaning back in his chair. "I'll admit I considered him a pest, but he always thought he was doing the right thing, and he worked damn hard at his job. Just what is it you want from me?"