“Agent Gabriel Dean,” said Gabriel, shaking the man’s hand. Trying, as best he could, to play it official. But he could feel Thomas Moore’s puzzled gaze. Moore could see that something was not right here.
“Yeah, I was just telling these detectives how we found her. Quite a shock, lemme tell you, seeing a body in the water.” He paused. “Say, you want a drink, Agent Dean? It’s on the club.”
“No, thank you.”
“Oh, right. On duty, huh?” Skip gave a sympathetic laugh. “You guys really play it by the book, don’t you? No one’ll take a drink. Well, hell, I will.” He slipped behind the bar and dropped ice cubes in a glass. Splashed vodka on top. Gabriel heard ice clinking in other glasses, and he gazed around the room at the dozen club members sitting in the lounge, almost all of them men. Did any of them actually sail boats? Gabriel wondered. Or did they just come here to drink?
Skip slipped out from behind the counter, his vodka in hand. “It’s not the kind of thing that happens every day,” he said. “I’m still kind of rattled about it.”
“You were telling us how you spotted the body,” said Moore.
“Oh. Yeah. About eight A.M. I came in early to change out my spinnaker. We have a regatta coming up in two weeks, and I’m gonna fly a new one. Got a logo on it. A green dragon, really striking. So anyway, I’m walking out to the dock, carrying my new spinnaker, and I see what looks like a mannequin floating out in the water, kinda snagged up on one of the rocks. I get in my rowboat to take a closer look and hell, if it ain’t a woman. Damn nice-looking one, too. So I yelled for some of the other guys, and three of us pulled her out. Then we called nine one one.” He took a gulp of his vodka and drew a breath. “Never occurred to us she was still alive. I mean, hell. That gal sure looked dead to us.”
“Must have looked dead to Fire and Rescue, too,” said Crowe.
Skip laughed. “And they’re supposed to be the professionals. If they can’t tell, who can?”
“Show us,” said Gabriel. “Where you found her.”
They all walked out the lounge door, onto the pier. The water magnified the sun’s glare, and Gabriel had to squint against the brilliant reflection to see the rocks that Skip now pointed out.
“See that shoal over there? We have it marked off with buoys, ’cause it’s a navigation hazard. At high tide, it’s only a few inches deep there, so you don’t even see it. Real easy to run aground.”
“What time was high tide yesterday?” asked Gabriel.
“I don’t know. Ten A.M., I think.”
“Was that shoal exposed?”
“Yeah. If I hadn’t spotted her then, a few hours later, she might have drifted out to sea.”
The men stood in silence for a moment, squinting off over Hingham Bay. A motor cruiser rumbled by, churning up a wake that made the boats rock on their moorings and set halyards clanging on masts.
“Had you ever seen the woman before?” Moore asked.
“Nope.”
“You’re sure?”
“A gal who looks like that? I’d sure as hell remember.”
“And no one in the club recognized her?”
Skip laughed. “No one who’ll admit to it.”
Gabriel looked at him. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“Well, you know.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“These guys in the club…” Skip gave a nervous laugh. “I mean, you see all these boats moored out here? Who do you think sails them? It’s not the wives. It’s the men who lust after boats, not the women. And it’s the men who hang around here. A boat’s your home away from home.” Skip paused. “In every respect.”
“You think she was someone’s girlfriend?” said Crowe.
“Hell, I don’t know. It’s just that the possibility occurred to me. You know, bring a chickie here late at night. Fool around on your boat, get a little drunk, a little high. It’s easy to fall overboard.”
“Or get pushed.”
“Now wait a minute.” Skip looked alarmed. “Don’t you go jumping to that conclusion. These are good guys in the club. Good guys.”
Who might be banging chickies on their boats, thought Gabriel.
“I’m sorry I even mentioned the possibility,” said Skip. “It’s not like people don’t get drunk and fall off boats all the time. Could’ve been any boat, not just one of ours.” He pointed out to Hingham Bay, where a cabin cruiser was gliding across the blindingly bright water. “See all the traffic out there? She could’ve tripped off some motorboat that night. Drifted in on the tide.”
“Nevertheless,” said Moore, “We’ll need a list of all your members.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“Yes, Mr. Boynton,” said Moore with quiet but unmistakable authority. “It is.”
Skip gulped down the rest of his vodka. The heat had flushed his scalp bright red, and he swiped away sweat. “This is going to go over real well with the members. Here we do our civic duty and pull a woman out of the water. Now we’re all suspects?”
Gabriel turned his gaze up the shoreline to the boat ramp, where a truck was now backing up to launch a motorboat into the water. Three other vehicles towing boats were lined up in the parking area, waiting their turns. “What’s your nighttime security like, Mr. Boynton?” he asked.
“Security?” Skip shrugged. “We lock the club doors at midnight.”
“And the pier? The boats? There’s no security guard?”
“We haven’t had any break-ins. The boats are all locked. Plus, it’s quiet out here. If you get any closer to the city, you’ll find people hanging around the waterfront all night. This is a special little club. A place to get away from it all.”
A place where you could drive down to the boat ramp at night, thought Gabriel. You could back right down to the water, and no one would see you open your trunk. No one would see you pull out a body and toss it into Hingham Bay. If the tide was right, that body would drift out past the islands just offshore, straight into Massachusetts Bay.
But not if the tide was coming in.
His cell phone rang. He moved away from the others and walked down the pier a few paces before he answered the call.
It was Maura. “I think you might want to get back here,” she said. “We’re about to do the autopsy.”
“Which autopsy?”
“On the hospital security guard.”
“The cause of death is clear, isn’t it?”
“Another question has come up.”
“What?”
“We don’t know who this man is.”
“Can’t someone at the hospital ID him? He was their employee.”
“That’s the problem,” said Maura. “He wasn’t.”
They had not yet undressed the corpse.
Gabriel was no stranger to the horrors of the autopsy room, and the sight of this victim, in the scope of his experience, was not particularly shocking. He saw only a single entry wound that tunneled into the left cheek; otherwise the features were intact. The man was in his thirties, with neatly clipped dark hair and a muscular jaw. His brown eyes, exposed to air by partially open lids, were already clouded. A name tag with PERRIN was clipped to the breast pocket of the uniform. Staring at the table, what disturbed Gabriel most was not the gore or the sightless eyes; it was the knowledge that the same weapon that had ended this man’s life was now threatening Jane’s.
“We waited for you,” said Dr. Abe Bristol. “Maura thought you’d want to watch this from the beginning.”
Gabriel looked at Maura, who was gowned and masked, but standing at the foot of the table, and not at her usual place at the corpse’s right side. Every other time he’d entered this lab, she had been the one in command, the one holding the knife. He was not accustomed to seeing her cede control in the room where she usually reigned. “You’re not doing this postmortem?” he asked.
“I can’t. I’m a witness to this man’s death,” said Maura. “Abe has to do this one.”
“And you still have no idea who he is?”
She shook her head. “There’s no hospital employee with the name Perrin. And the chief of security came to view the body. He didn’t recognize this man.”