“In there.” Tolliver indicated the thick tangle of reddish roots at the base of the stalk. “That's the holdfast — a chunk of it, anyway. It anchors the kelp on rocky surfaces. All kinds of critters live in holdfasts — anemones, sponges, crabs, what have you — but you'll be interested in the pebble caught inside. The holdfast has been to the lab and the techs got what they wanted. Thought you’d want to extract the pebble yourselves.”
We both nodded. Grateful for a cop who recognized rocks as evidence, who treated them with the same respect given to fingerprints or cigarette butts or bloodstains or what have you.
“I'll have you sign off on the chain of evidence and you can take this stuff with you. Oh, and, we'll be moving the Outcast to our storage dock so if you need another look, let me know.” Tolliver ran a hand through his hair, spiking it even more. “I'm real eager to know what happened to her out there.”
I peered through the fog, which had thinned enough to reveal the general lay of the land. Of the water. Tolliver's pier stuck out into a narrow channel, which extended southward into the mist. The pier was at the northern end of the channel, which bent westward and opened up into a harbor. At the harbor’s mouth was a mammoth rock, a fog-hung ghost whose shape and height I could not clearly discern. Big. I looked past the ghost rock, out to open sea, just visible now as a gray rolling field beyond the mouth of the harbor. The sea was an inhospitable-looking place. Had been inhospitable, certainly, to the Outcast.
I turned back to Tolliver. “Are you sure Donie was aboard? Could the tie line have come undone and the boat went adrift? Or someone cut the line?”
“Let me show you something that says the Outcast didn’t just goddamn wander off.”
He moved to the ladder that was braced on the pier, rising to the railing at the stern. He looked back at us. “Come on, it's aboard.”
We joined him.
He started up the ladder. “Here's where it gets even stranger.”
At first, as I stepped over the railing, I thought blood has been spilled. And then I saw I was wrong. There were stains sprayed across the deck in thick teardrops like projectile blood spatters. But blood dries brown. These stains were blue-black.
“Feel free,” Tolliver said. “My techs have already sampled.”
Walter approached the nearest stain. Squatted. Took out his hand lens.
Tolliver said, “You need a magnifying glass to tell you that’s ink?”
Walter stood. “I’m not a mariner — much as I might have wished it. I see black viscous stains on a boat and the first thing I think is engine oil.”
“Ink from what?” I asked. “Octopus? All this?”
“Squid,” Tolliver said.
“You said Donie fished for anchovies.”
“That’s right. But he was also doing a little moonlighting, taking sport fishers out. My town’s got two businesses — a working fishing port, and tourists. We get a lot of sport fishers, real hotshots. About a month ago, we got an invasion of squid.”
“Invasion?”
“I’m not talking market squid, the kind on your plate. I’m talking jumbo.” Tolliver lifted his arm above his head, as if holding up a trophy catch. “Man-size.”
I thought, holy shit.
“Invasion from where?” Walter asked.
“From southern waters, coming up from the Humboldt Current. They’re called Humboldt squid.”
“Why are they coming?”
“Hunting — the fish they eat are moving north, something to do with warmer waters moving north.” Tolliver shrugged. “Supposedly.”
I looked again at the deck, at the length and breadth of the spray, the sheer quantity of black teardrops. “You think…”
“I think hunting Humboldts is a whole new ballgame.” Tolliver pointed out a big smear of ink near the stern rail. There was a heel print in the ink. “Rubber boot. Slippery deck.”
“I see why you think he went overboard.”
“It happens.”
“And the sport fisher?”
“We're checking missing persons reports. Still, if Donie was out squid jigging by himself… Risky business.”
Walter cast a glance at the thick net wrapped around the drum roller.
“That’s how you take anchovies,” Tolliver said. “Here’s how you take Humboldts.”
Tolliver led us to an open fiberglass gear locker. We looked inside. Reels of heavy-duty fishing line. Foot-long tubes that looked like glowsticks, ringed by multi-spiked hooks.
“Humboldts hunt in packs, like a damn gang. They often come up at night — and light attracts them. Attach that jig to your line, bait the hooks, put the jig in the water. If they're around, they hit it.”
Walter gestured to the ink. “And get caught.”
“There were no squid in the hold,” Tolliver said. “So I assume the one that got caught was used as chum. Humboldts are cannibalistic.”
I said, “It sounds a little dangerous.”
“Like starting a bar-room brawl.”
CHAPTER 2
“Detective Tolliver was right,” I said. “It is strange.”
Walter looked up from his scope. “Tell me.”
He'd been examining the pebble from the kelp holdfast. I'd been examining the iron oxide scraping from the Outcast rub rail.
I said, “I've got hematite. Just hematite.”
He considered that a moment. “Puzzling, certainly.”
I gazed out the sliding-glass door at the sea. Strange, puzzling, certainly a mystery right now. Something out there had left its hematite mark on the rail — but hematite all on its lonesome was not what I'd expected.
“Perhaps another look?” Walter said.
I shot him a look. Very tactful. He meant, perhaps I'd missed something.
Perhaps I had.
We'd just gotten started.
We'd only just returned from the cafe across the street, our bellies full on Mexican omelets.
Last night — Monday evening, after finishing our evidence collection — we’d set up base at a motel just outside town that Tolliver had arranged. The Shoreline was a sturdy block of beachfront rooms, no frills but well-kept, white paint and blue trim. A nod to the nautical but no plastic seagulls, no kitsch. Practical and no-nonsense. Like Tolliver. There was that handy cafe across the street and, even better, sand and ocean right outside the sliding-glass door. We would not normally have chosen a beachfront place because Walter always kept an accountant’s eye on our travel budget but Tolliver’s cousin owned the motel and cut us a deal.
We had a suite at the end of the block, two rooms with a kitchenette common room in between. We stocked the tiny kitchen with coffee and the bag of leftover donuts and made the common room our lab.
Our portable lab had taken up the cargo section of Walter’s Explorer, and it now filled this room to the walls. White walls, no dings, one large seascape of boats in the sunset. Ikea knock-off dinette set, which served as our workbench.
On my half of the dinette workbench sat a specimen dish of reddish grains and the X-ray diffractometer — a nifty piece of equipment that shows the pattern of atoms and tells you what you have.
I had hematite, no doubt.
But there should be something further.
I put another few grains through the XRD and got the same result.
“Okay,” I said, “Straight hematite. I'm officially calling it strange.”
“Are you officially abandoning the rusty buoy hypothesis?”
“I'm sure not in love with it.” Rust, in a seawater environment, normally consisted of several products — hematite, yes, but also other iron oxides along with trace amounts of metals from the buoy. “Still, given that the transfer occurred up high, on that rub rail, a rusty buoy would be nice.”