‘‘Oil?’’ LaMoia asked.
‘‘It has the viscosity of old oil, to be sure. Nothing automotive. The graph was a mess of chemicals. Couldn’t get a clean enough sample for a good read. Because of its age maybe. We must have tried a dozen times or more, which accounted for the extra man-hours.’’ He leaned his head into the microscope and made adjustments on the focus. ‘‘Bingo!’’ he said, stepping aside. ‘‘Have a look.’’
LaMoia moved to the microscope. He worked the focus. Nobody’s eyes focused the same as Lofgrin’s. ‘‘That’s a match!’’ he said excitedly. The fish scales tied their suspect to the Hilltop homicides.
‘‘I concur,’’ Lofgrin said.
‘‘The oil,’’ Boldt encouraged. He knew the man well enough to know the importance of this evidence—Bernie Lofgrin always dragged out the really good stuff.
Lofgrin smiled at his old friend, letting Boldt know he was on the right track. ‘‘Grease, actually. Extremely heavy grease, used in winches, lifts. The substance that threw us off was nothing more than sea salt. Contaminated the hell out of our graphs.’’
‘‘Sea salt,’’ Boldt repeated. ‘‘Grease . . .’’ he mumbled. ‘‘And the only place we can confirm the use of those chains was in the sweatshop.’’
‘‘Ergo,’’ Lofgrin said in his usual contemptuous tone, ‘‘that sweatshop isn’t in any cannery. It’s on some ship.’’
‘‘A trawler!’’ Boldt exclaimed.
‘‘An old trawler,’’ Lofgrin added. ‘‘If we’re going to explain these fish scales, it had to be in operation over twenty-five years ago.’’
Boldt turned quickly on his heels and faced LaMoia. ‘‘Call in for backup. Two cars. Four uniforms. Have ’em waiting for us in the garage.’’
‘‘Where we going?’’ LaMoia asked, the two men already on their way out of the lab.
‘‘You’re welcome!’’ shouted an annoyed Lofgrin. He lived for compliments.
Out in the hallway, at a full run, Boldt informed his sergeant, ‘‘We’re going to do the one thing we should have done a long time ago: We’re going to bluff.’’
CHAPTER 71
s Stevie agonized in bumper-to-bumper traffic caused by a series of weather-related accidents she left a long voice mail for Boldt, having no idea if he would ever get it. ‘‘I think I’ve found the ‘graveyard’ Melissa mentioned on the videos. It’s complicated. We need to talk. Leave a way on my voice mail for me to reach you. If I don’t hear from you, you’ll hear from me. I’m going to get you the evidence you need.’’ She hung up.
Back at the KSTV studios, she collected a camcorder— lightweight and easy to use. She was on her way back down the hall when the night watchman caught her with a shout.
‘‘Ms. McNeal!’’
She stopped and turned, impatient to her core.
‘‘Damn glad to see you! Security people be looking everywhere for you! Police and feds been calling every fifteen minutes! They lost track of you. You had better stay put ’til I can hook you up with them again. They’re all pissed off.’’
‘‘Sure thing,’’ Stevie said. ‘‘You make the call.’’
The man waved and turned into an office.
Stevie took off at a run.
With absolute certainty that she had found the sweatshop, it all began to add up for her: the darkness of Melissa’s video, that echoing, reverberating sound. A ship!
The drive to Salmon Bay took less than ten minutes but occupied a lifetime. She accepted the danger she knew she faced as penance for involving Melissa in the first place. It seemed only right that she should have to relive Melissa’s hell in order to get Boldt the evidence he needed. No flashes of her life passing by, no nostalgia. She had a job to do. She was in her element.
She parked in the back lot of a marine supply store a hundred yards east of the impound area and went off on foot, staying away from the water’s edge and electing to thread her way through two rows of boat storage that housed skiffs and rowboats and sailboats stacked five high on steel shelving and covered by a tin roof. The property included two warehouses—one for dry storage, the other a repair workshop, its northern boundary fenced off from the government impound by a rusted ten-foot chain-link fence that bore ancient NO TRESPASSING signs. Stevie moved carefully, shadow to shadow, alert for night watchmen or sentries, alert for any sign of activity that might confirm the existence of the sweatshop. At last she came to the end of the storage and tucked herself beneath the hull of a ski boat from where she had a view of the impound facility: dozens of rusting boats and ships, all tied one to the other in an unplanned confusion. Algae-green lines drooped and sagged toward the water like awkward smiles. A graveyard indeed. The ships were old ruins of rust and corrosion—fishing trawlers, small freighters, power cruisers, sailboats, tugs—all put into illegal service at some point: drug running, guns, human beings—a harsh and mechanical landscape overcome by decay and neglect.
She saw no hint of life, no evidence of the sweatshop to film. A wooden gangway lay on the asphalt next to a barge, the only indication of a way up to the flotilla, but it would require at least a couple men to move it into place. The assortment of boats and ships was secured to pylons where seagulls slept with their heads tucked into their wings. See no evil . . . she thought. Past these, any semblance of order was lost, the boats tied together at random one to the other in a patchwork of fiberglass and metal and inflatable bumpers, most crippled and listing.
However improbable, however unlikely, there was a sweatshop hiding among the carnage. Brian Coughlie had chosen well—the last place on earth one would expect the sweatshop, and a place under his professional control. The sweatshop. Melissa!
Reenvisioning what she had seen from the helicopter, she tried to locate the vessel rimmed in the electronic lime green of the binoculars. Somewhere in the middle of the pack she decided, resigned to getting out there. But in fact the aerial view did not translate well to a five-foot-seven-inch woman standing thirty yards away from the flotilla’s perimeter, the first obstacle to which was a chain-link fence. In junior high maybe, when gymnastics had been a regular part of each afternoon, but suddenly the ten-foot-high rusted wire fence looked insurmountable.
Crouched beneath that ski boat, she heard a steady electrical hum. This hum meant electricity—electricity, power lines. The story slowly pieced together, her eyes found and followed a thick black cable that ran down a power pole at the farthest corner of the compound. The cable had been stuffed into the overgrowth to hide it, but it finally broke out of the bushes where it was tied to one of the massive rope lines that held the ships to the pilings, wrapped around the line like a fat snake. Stevie was no stranger to power cables, but as thick as her wrist, this one was clearly no simple ship-to-shore extension cord. This was some kind of major power supply—thousands of volts, like the one that fed KSTV’s control room.
Big enough for a sweatshop, she thought. Big enough to follow.
The camcorder strapped to her, she considered her choices: The barge was the lowest of all the waterfront boats, clearly the more easily scaled, but it also offered the most exposure. The tanker to the left, on the other hand, although harder to scale, offered good cover, and the loading net that hung from its side appeared scalable, if not precarious.