Devil's Harbor (14 page)

Mona wrote “Pacific Belle” on the board, drew a line linking it to Espendoza and another to Diego. She wrote “San Pedro” under Diego's name. She stepped back and looked at her work for a moment.

Then she said, “All three of them were at one time or another in that same patch of sea where you found Espendoza: Diego on patrol, Perez on
La Catrina
.”

She drew more lines linking the three men, forming a triangle on the whiteboard. In the middle of it, she wrote “Two Harbors” with a red marker.

“Looks like the Devil's Triangle,” she murmured.

Finn thought of all the shark sightings that had been reported in that area. “Here's another possible link,” he said. “The port authority told Diego that the
Pacific Belle
returned to port the same morning we found Espendoza's body. So it's possible, in theory at least, that she was out there in the channel, in the Devil's Triangle, that morning.”

Mona drew a line linking the
Belle
to Two Harbors and put a question mark next to it. “So you think Espendoza might've come off the
Pacific Belle
?” she said.

Finn shook his head. “Espendoza was floating; bodies sink and don't surface until they gas up, which can take days. If he'd come off the boat that morning, he would've sunk first. He'd been in the water awhile.”

Just then his phone rang. The screen showed a Mexico City area code. Finn answered. It was Vega, his contact at the Mexican Federal Police, whom he'd asked to run a check on Perez before Diego's murder. Finn had forgotten all about it.

“You sitting down?” said Vega.

Finn said he was.

“Perez was a cop.”

“What?”

“He was with the Policía Municipal Preventiva up in Rosario, in Sinaloa.”

Finn was glad he was sitting down. He said, “I thought he was—”

“A gangster, yeah, I know. But listen, he was a
local
cop in Rosario, and the Caballeros own Rosario. That means they own the judges, the mayor, and the cops, too.”

“So you're saying Perez was dirty?”

“He was alive, wasn't he? I mean, before you shot him? If you're a cop in Caballeros territory and you're not dead, that means only one thing: you're working for them.”

“Sinaloa. That's miles from Tijuana.”

“At least a thousand.”

“What was he doing off Catalina? Why does he own gas stations in Tijuana?”

“I can't answer that. All I can tell you is, you shot a dirty cop from Rosario.”

“I need proof Perez was dirty.”

Vega laughed. “You're joking, right?”

Finn thanked him, hung up. On the whiteboard, Mona wrote “Caballero” under Perez's name.

Finn thought,
What if the Caballeros killed Diego in retaliation for Perez? What if they killed the wrong
migra
agent?

From the black look she was giving him, he guessed Mona was thinking the same thing. He felt a hollowness in his gut. He regretted holding back from taking a drink that morning. He thought about the bottle of Jim Beam waiting for him in his truck, the seal unbroken. He breathed hard through his nose, tried to set his thinking straight, focus on the task at hand. He looked at the board, at all the lines and arrows connecting each name to the others. A crooked cop from a small town in Sinaloa; a teenager from East L.A.; a marine interdiction agent.

Mona had referred to the patch of sea outside Two Harbors as the “Devil's Triangle.” It seemed appropriate. He remembered pulling Espendoza's body from the water, the bloodied stumps in place of legs, the great dark shape gliding beneath him. He got up and took a pen from Mona and circled the “Pacific Belle
”
on the board.

“It keeps coming back to the boat, doesn't it,” he said.

Mona nodded. “You met the skipper. You trust her?” she said.

“She seemed cagey,” he said. “Like she was scared of something and didn't want me to know it.”

“Maybe she's doing something she's not supposed to be doing.”

“She's supposed to be fishing, so that's easy enough to find out,” said Finn. He still had his phone in his hand. He dialed a contact at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“Can you e-mail me the most recent catch log for a seiner out of San Pedro, the
Pacific Belle
?” he said. He also asked for a copy of her commercial fishing license. He gave his personal e-mail address and hung up. Mona was back in her seat.

“I'll contact the DMV and chase down the
Pacific Belle
's registration,” she said. “See where that leads.”

Finn told Mona he was going to take another look at
La Catrina
. Perez had been ready to kill federal agents to protect her, he said. He was convinced the answer was still hidden aboard her somewhere. They arranged to phone each other at the end of the day, or as soon as either one discovered important information.

When he left, they parted with the same stiff manner with which they'd met. A stranger watching would've been surprised to learn that they were married.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Finn drove to the CBP station. Along the way, he picked up a pint of Jim Beam and a large bottle of Coke. He poured out half the soda on the road and replaced it with bourbon. By the time he got to the boat he had a nice buzz going.

La Catrina
was still cradled in the hoist parked at the top of the boat ramp. It was Sunday and there were no forensics guys around. Finn had her to himself.

He started on the outside. He walked slowly around the entire hull, tapping it every few inches, listening for hollows that shouldn't have been there. He scrutinized the fiberglass, running his fingers over it, looking for sections that might've been cut, then patched over and resprayed. When he got to the stern, he saw that the line with which he'd stopped her was still tightly wound around her propeller shaft. He tapped the rope with his knuckle—it was synthetic rope, which was why it had melted and then fused around the shaft. He couldn't help smiling at his own handiwork: the rope felt as hard as concrete.

After tapping his way around the entire hull, Finn stepped back to get a broader perspective of it. But looking at the boat close-up or farther back, he couldn't see any signs of tampering.

He climbed up the rolling ladder, stepped onto her deck, and began searching. He started in her engine bay, which was hardly bigger than a crawlspace and still smelled of burning plastic and oil. The fire extinguisher with which he'd tried to put out the fire was still there, leaning uselessly in a corner. He checked every nook and cranny.

He climbed back out of the engine bay and methodically went over
La Catrina
's stern deck, making sure to feel along the lining of all her storage compartments for false bottoms. He checked the refrigerator, the bait box, the drinks holders, the rod holders, and the storage compartment under the bench seat.

He went through the tinted-glass door into the cabin. Inside, he was pleased to see how thorough the forensics guys had been before they'd been pulled off the job. They'd dismantled pretty much everything that could be dismantled. They'd pulled the flat-screen TV out of the wall to check the cavity behind it. They'd knifed through the throw cushions and the tan leather banquettes to check for contraband hidden within. They'd unscrewed the air-conditioning vents. They'd even pulled out the recessed light fixtures in the ceiling and left them dangling on their wires. They'd taken everything out of every drawer and cupboard in the galley, then taken the drawers off their rails and dumped it all into one corner. They'd opened all the canned food and all the food cartons, searched through their contents, and then thrown it all into a lidded plastic bin. Finn was hit by the smell when he lifted the lid, all the food beginning to go bad. Still, he poked through it all.

He went through all the charts and pilot books and paperwork in the drawers of the chart table next to the control console. He went into the bedroom and the bathroom and found the mattress slashed and the vanity unit dismantled. He found a flashlight, located the bilge hatch, then lay down on the floor, lowered his head through the hatch, and shone the flashlight around the bilge.

He went back out to the stern deck and climbed the external ladder to the flybridge. There was a second console up there, so the boat could be driven from up high as well as from the cabin. There was also a second icebox, in which, Finn assumed, Perez had kept his weapon. If he was going to find traces of gunshot residue anywhere, it would be up here. Yet when the forensics team had run all their fancy tests, they'd come up negative.

Of course, it didn't take a genius to see why, thought Finn. The flybridge was completely exposed to the elements on all sides. Because of his trick with the rope,
La Catrina
had been unable to travel under her own steam, and in the six hours it had taken to arrange for a boat to come out and tow her back to Long Beach, a Santa Ana had blown down off the mountains, and
La Catrina
had been towed straight into the eye of a wind gusting upward of forty miles per hour. It would've blasted away whatever residue there might have been on the exposed surfaces of the flybridge.

Finn thought about all this, and then thought how flimsy that would sound in court.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I assure you, the wind blew away the evidence …

He climbed off the boat empty-handed, walked back to his truck, and grabbed the bourbon-laced Coke from the storage compartment in the door.

When the liquor's glow had blunted the edges of his anger, he drove home.

*   *   *

He spoke with Mona on the phone that night. He was sitting at the kitchen table in their Redondo home with his laptop open in front of him, a drink with ice cubes in it next to that. He was bare-chested. She asked him whether he'd found anything on La Catrine and he said no, but he wasn't done looking.

She told him that she'd gotten the
Pacific Belle'
s registration details from the DMV, and he was impressed by her powers of persuasion. He'd never gotten any document that quickly from the DMV.

“Linda Blake owns forty-nine percent,” said Mona over the phone. “The rest is owned by a corporation called Muir Holdings. I did a company search to try to find out who that is, but whoever's behind Muir Holdings doesn't want to be identified. The company's held by a trust, and there's no way of finding out who the beneficiaries are. It means ‘sea,' by the way.”

“What does?”

“‘Muir.' It's the Irish word for ‘sea.' I googled it.”

Finn never did have a head for languages.

“Did you speak to La Abuelita?” he said.

“She's never heard of the
Pacific Belle
.”

When they'd said everything they had to say about the case, the conversation ran out of fuel and sputtered to a halt. Finn wanted to keep Mona on the line. He said he hoped she was planning on taking time off work. She was, she said. He asked how her parents were doing. He closed his eyes while she told him. Then he asked about the dogs.

“They lie on the floor whimpering, staring at the front door,” she said.

Finn couldn't count the number of times Diego had told him that Rhodesian ridgebacks had been bred to hunt lions. “Strongest breed in the world, kick any dog's ass, including pit bulls,” he used to say, prompting Finn to nod politely and try to keep a straight face. He'd known Ronald and Nancy since they were puppies, and he'd never met a softer, more spoiled pair of canines. They might've looked tough, but Finn pictured them bolting behind their favorite couch the moment a lion so much as glanced in their direction. For Diego, they'd been family.

“What are you doing, Nick?” said Mona.

“I just want to talk, Mona. That's all.”

“Are you drinking right now?”

He picked up his glass. The ice cubes in it clinked. “Yes,” he said.

The line clicked off.

He put down the phone. It was very, very quiet in the room. One of these days, he thought, he would have to do something about his drinking.

One of these days.

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Finn spent the rest of night lying on the couch, the TV flickering in the background with the sound down low, the bottle of bourbon he was working his way through his only defense against the black dreams. He slept in fits and starts only, afraid to sleep too deeply or too long lest the dreams return.

He got to the dock at first light, the sky streaked with gold and purple. Linda Blake was standing on the quay by her boat, talking to a refrigerator-size man wearing a grizzly beard, yellow bibs, and Xtratuf knee boots. Finn saw her see him and say something to the man, who turned and ambled past Finn, eyeballing him.

Linda was wearing the same sneakers and jeans as yesterday, plus a green fleece. An elastic band held her hair away from her face, and he caught the green-and-gold shimmer in her eyes. She didn't look pleased to see him.

“I'm busy,” she said.

“This won't take a minute.”

“Like I said, I'm busy.”

“You said yesterday that you'd been out on a weeklong trip.”

She stuffed her hands into her pockets. “That's right.”

“How many crew?”

“However many I can afford. Two, this time.”

“Same crew, usually?”

“Whoever I can get.”

“You gonna tell me their names?”

“You gonna get a warrant?”

Finn tried a different tack: “Where'd you go?”

“Out past the banks.”

Finn nodded. “You were fishing mackerel, huh?”

“Mostly.”

Finn ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth. “Yesterday when I asked you how it went, you said the fish are all gone. But you must've caught something, right? A week at sea, you have to come back with something?”