Dak looked at Hal. “Look, I think we need a lawyer. We’ve said too much already.”
“What if this is connected to Jenny’s murder?” pointed out Devine.
“It’s not.”
“She was a fed. She came up here for some reason. She was murdered. Are there bad people involved in this eel business? Is it enough money to kill over?”
Dak looked once more at Hal and closed his eyes for a moment before saying, “The price for elvers really sank during COVID, but now it’s back up to around $2,300 a pound. What you see in all those tubs are worth about $250,000.”
Devine stared in disbelief at the tubs. “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. And you can make a lot more money off elvers than you ever can off lobster. And you don’t need a boat and all that other equipment. If you have a license you set big fyke or dip nets in a stream and you wake up in the middle of the night and go down there with five-gallon buckets and load up your catch, and then go buy a house or a fishing boat. It’s like Maine’s version of the California Gold Rush.”
“Okay. Who buys them from you?” asked Devine.
“Guys who come into town on a regular basis.”
“What kind of guys?” asked Devine.
“Mostly Asian,” said Hal. “Well, they’re all Asian, really.”
“How do they pay?”
“Cash. Bank wires and checks don’t really work in our business.”
“A quarter million in cash? What, do they bring it in suitcases?”
“Yeah, they actually do,” admitted Hal. “And they put the elvers in other suitcases. They typically put a legal export fish in refrigerated bags over them, like mussels. So long as they have an oxygen supply elvers are fine. They breathe through their skin.”
Devine walked over and looked in one of the tubs. He recoiled at the sight of what looked like hundreds of strands of bright white and yellow spaghetti — albeit with pairs of inky black eyes — flitting spasmodically through the water in massive hordes.
“So it is illegal the way you’re doing it?”
“Well, it’s not exactly legal, no,” said Dak.
“Why not just set up a licensed eel fishery? Or get a fishing license?”
“The fishing licenses are given out in a lottery and capped at around four hundred or so. Believe me, there are a lot more folks than that who want to do this.”
“And it ain’t fair,” interjected Hal. “They say it’s a lottery, but I say with that much money at stake some palms are getting greased, for damn sure.”
Dak said, “And as an elver farmer, it takes years to make your money back. And you have to have the capital to build a facility and buy the equipment and then you need to hire a bunch of people. And there’s a limit on how many pounds you can legally process each year. We can make far more money faster this way.”
“So this is how you get your capital to invest,” Devine said to Dak. “Not partners in Boston.”
“Yeah,” conceded Dak. “But I’m using that money to invest in local businesses that employ lots of people, and are bringing some pride and dignity back to Putnam,” he added in a defiant tone.
“Don’t go all altruistic on me. You’re doing it to get rich.”
“Well, that too,” admitted Dak.
“You got Coop Phillips and two other knuckleheads to come after me the night we first met in the bar, didn’t you?”
“I—”
“You believed I was really up here investigating you, right?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” replied Dak.
“So this elver stuff is a big business?”
“Globally, it’s billions of dollars a year,” said Hal in a reverential tone. “And I’ve been to China and Japan. Once the elvers get there, man, they are dumped into this supply chain that is full of corrupt assholes, smugglers, killers. Chinese mafia has their fingers all over unagi.”
“And maybe some of them came over here because your sister was getting ready to expose them, and so they killed her?” said Devine.
Dak shook his head. “No way. I can’t believe that’s what happened.”
“Did she ever say anything that made you suspect she knew you were involved in this?”
“Never, not once. I swear.”
“Okay, so you get your supply from Canada? Why not here?”
Hal replied, “We also deal with people here, but Maine has gotten pretty good about ferreting out folks like us. And Nova Scotia is right across the Gulf and New Brunswick is just a little bit north.”
“Lock this place up,” ordered Devine.
Dak said, “Please, Devine, do not shut us down. I’ve got big plans for Putnam.”
“I could give a shit about that. And you said you were going to make millions off selling this property.”
“Hopefully, yeah, but that could take a year or two to complete.”
“Again, I don’t care. Now lock it up.”
Dak was about to respond, but he didn’t. Or rather couldn’t.
The bullet zoomed through the open doorway and hit Dak in the arm. He slumped to the floor bleeding, and screaming in pain.
Devine already had his Glock out and fired multiple rounds in the direction of where the shot had come before taking cover behind the wall.
Then, silence. Until he heard a vehicle start up. Devine was about to run to his truck and take up pursuit when Dak screamed, “Hal!”
Devine looked over to see Hal on the floor, blood pouring from his chest. He knelt beside the stricken man.
Only one shot had been fired, so it must have ricocheted off Dak and hit Hal, concluded Devine. He didn’t have time to even locate the wound before Hal gave a long rattling breath that Devine had heard before on fields of combat.
“Is Hal... is he going to be okay?” said a sobbing Dak, holding his bloodied arm, and crawling over to them. “Is he breathing?”
“No, he’s not,” said Devine curtly. “He’s dead.”
Chapter 67
“It’s been raining so much any trace from the vehicle is gone,” said Sergeant Fuss. She and Devine were standing in front of the outbuilding where Hal had been killed and Dak wounded. Dak had been taken to a trauma hospital in Bangor. Hal’s body had been transported to Augusta via helicopter for a high-priority postmortem. Guillaume had accompanied the flight.
Dawn was breaking, and Devine was so tired he felt he was back in Ranger School.
“Did you find a casing?” asked Devine.
“Yep.”
“NATO or polymer?”
“The latter. Looks to be the same shooter as with Jenny.”
“But NATO was the one that almost killed me,” said Devine, really to himself.
Fuss eyed the outbuilding. “So, elvers, huh?”
“Apparently so.”
“Always wondered where he got his money.”
“To his mind he’s reinvesting it in the town, and I guess he is.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Devine said, “Nothing. It’s not my jurisdiction. So what are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll have to confer with the chief.”
“I expect you would.”
“But if we do nothing...?”
“No skin off my teeth. Unless what Dak was doing is connected to his sister’s murder.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know one way or another. I certainly have no proof.”
“Okay, we’ll let you know what we find.”
“I’m heading over to Jocelyn Point to make sure Alex is okay. I already filled her in on what happened, but I wanted to give her an update.”
“Right.”
Alex answered at his first knock. She must have been watching from the front window.
“Thank God,” she whispered, weeping quietly into his shoulder after he gave her a positive update on her brother. “I... I can’t lose Dak, too.”