Toni Dwiggins
Skeleton Sea
EPIGRAPH
“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”
“No water, no life. No blue, no green.”
CHAPTER 1
When the detective phoned to enlist our services he characterized the case as a mystery at sea.
Thirty-eight hours later we got our first look at the ghost boat.
It had been found adrift and deserted.
It looked ghostly enough right now, docked in the fog at the end of the pier.
Fog eclipsed the horizon. Best I could tell, the pier jutted into a channel near the mouth of a harbor. I strained to see farther but I could not find the ocean beyond. Best I could do was taste its salt and smell its kelp and hear its waves.
Walter and I stepped onto the ramp that led down to the pier where a man in a Morro Bay Police Department parka awaited us. He was tall and lean with graphite-gray hair worn in a spiky pompadour. He looked to be in his forties or fifties — younger than Walter's sixties-ish, as Walter liked to phrase it, older than my straight-up thirty — in any case, experienced.
The detective greeted us first. “I'm Doug Tolliver, and if I'm not mistaken you'll be Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws of Sierra Geoforensics.”
I smiled. “You're not mistaken.”
Walter said, “We're pleased to meet you.”
“I'm pleased you two agreed to come on such short notice.”
“You were in luck,” Walter said, “we'd just wrapped up a case.”
“Let's hope that luck holds.” Tolliver gave us a probing look. “Because this one's damn strange.”
Walter's eyebrows lifted and then he smiled, face seaming like a layered seabed.
I shivered.
Wished I'd worn a warm scarf.
Or perhaps it was a shiver of anticipation. I had to admit that the detective had hooked me, too. I felt curiosity kindling, the imperative to find out what happened to that boat, out there at sea.
Tolliver directed us down the pier. “Welcome to my patch of ocean.”
Early this morning we'd left our home base in the California mountain town of Bishop, embarking on the four-hundred-mile drive to the California central coast town of Morro Bay. Bananas and donuts and thermos of coffee on the road for breakfast, In-N-Out burgers for lunch, vowing to eat vegetarian for dinner. We took turns driving and reading aloud — Walter, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; me, Boats for Dummies. We arrived here at the edge of the sea in the early afternoon.
Tired, buzzed on caffeine, happy to stretch our legs, ready to collect the evidence.
As we moved down the pier the fog shifted and the boat gained definition. It was about twenty-five feet long, stacked with a wheelhouse and a mast and antennae and wires and lines that I hadn't yet learned about. The wheelhouse was at the front and on the open deck behind there was a big drum wrapped in netting.
The name painted on the white hull in red block letters was Outcast.
We halted beside the boat.
Tolliver asked, “You want the whole nine yards before we talk evidence?”
Walter nodded. “On the phone, you said the fisherman disappeared.”
“Uh-huh.” Tolliver folded his arms. “Here’s everything we know. It’s not a helluva lot. The Outcast turns up adrift, yesterday morning, not far outside the harbor. Nobody aboard. Had her running lights on, for night fishing. She belongs to an anchovy fisherman named Robbie Donie. No sign of Donie, or his body — the Coast Guard did a tide-currents-wind grid check. We assume he went out fishing the night before, Saturday — it's usually a nighttime job. Nobody saw him leave the harbor on that trip. Donie runs a small-scale operation. The fellow who crews for him is visiting family back in Pennsylvania, and he has an alibi. Nobody home at Donie’s place. He lives alone, divorced. There's an aunt in Bakersfield who never sees him and doesn’t much care. Not many friends. Nobody reported him missing. Hell, just see what he named his boat. Outcast.”
“Are you thinking homicide?” Walter asked.
“I’m looking into it — the logbook’s missing and the GPS is broken. That raises the question. But if we go the homicide route, we need a better motive than somebody thought Donie was disagreeable. I thought so myself.”
“Any prints?”
“Donie’s of course, and half a dozen unidentified sets. One set will be from Jim Horowitz, he’s the crew. We also collected hairs and fibers. Old stuff, new stuff, we’ll have to see.” Tolliver glanced toward the sea. “Other side of the coin is, could be an accident. Fishing is a damn dangerous operation. And if that’s what it was, that’s sorrowful enough, but it happens.”
“Cassie and I will shed some light.”
Tolliver slowly nodded.
I said, “Endeavor to.”
“Endeavor. Please. I've got three things I want you to shed light on. First is this damage on the stern rub rail.”
The boat was angled so that the Outcast's stern butted up to the pier. I'd read the relevant section in Boats for Dummies so I immediately ID'd the rub rail here: a vinyl strip protected the seam where the hull met the deck. There was room for only one of us so I took my hand lens from the field kit and moved in. A long scrape marred the rub rail and it was encrusted with tiny mineral grains. I put my lens to a large-ish grain. It came into twenty-power magnification. Size, somewhere around seventy microns. Shape, angular. Color, reddish. I used tweezers to pluck out the grain. Walter passed me a specimen dish.
Tolliver hovered. “What do you think?”
I said, “An oxide of iron.” I passed the dish to Walter and he grunted in agreement.
Tolliver said, “I thought maybe the boat collided with something, maybe a rusting buoy. Or it got scraped by some kind of debris, tossed up there by turbulence. But it sure doesn't look like an impact gouge.”
“Is the seafloor around here heavy in iron?”
“Despite claims to the contrary from boaters who’ve run aground, the seafloor doesn’t just jump up and hit a boat.”
I smiled. “I was thinking more along the lines of a…sand bar or something.”
Walter said, “You did mention sand evidence, Detective.”
“Make it Doug. Yeah, I did. There was sand in a duffel pack lying on the deck near the drum roller. The drawstring top was wide open. Looked like somebody ransacked the thing. Found what he was after, or it wasn't there to begin with. All we found was a bit of sand.” Tolliver took a zippered baggie from his pocket and held it up.
We peered. Not much sand in there. A pinch.
Enough.
I said, “And the third thing?”
“Over here.” Tolliver led us to a plastic bin, and opened it.
Smelled like brine. Smelled like the sea.
Inside was a rubbery stalk of brownish kelp with leafy fronds and fat bulbs, attached to a tangled root ball.
“We found that entangled in the anchor chain,” Tolliver said. “It's giant kelp, grows in coastal waters. I'm looking at the idea that Donie anchored in a kelp bed night before last. And then pulled up anchor. And then went overboard. And then the boat went adrift.”
Walter said, “Mightn’t he have caught that kelp on a previous trip?”
“Not likely. No experienced fisherman is gonna leave kelp tangled in his anchor chain.”
I said, “And our evidence?”