Lemon Reef (33 page)

He emptied the toilet
, went through my mind again and again. It was a maddening thought that looped like a tuck stitch around and back again, knitting the pieces and parts of Del's life into a macabre tale before my eyes. The final proof for me that Del was murdered came not from what was in that tank, but from what was not in it. Had the police not noticed a clean head on a boat that had been occupied overnight? It struck me as a blatant confirmation of Talon's guilt and revealed his apparently correct reliance on the police to do a cursory investigation and then close the case.

“It's empty, wiped clean,” I told Nicole. “He beat us to it.”

“Yeah, well,” she was still working the edges of the carpet, her face close to the floor, as if she were using her nose to guide her. “No one knows hell like the devil.” She glanced up at me. “Maybe what we have is enough, Jenna.”

“It's going to have to be. We're out of time.”

I went to the cabin door, lifted my head into the night, checked Gail and Katie for lights; there were none. The waves drummed softly on the side of the boat, and from where I was standing I could see the bay was choppier than it had been just minutes before, and I could feel the breeze ever-so-slightly quickening.

“Bingo!”

I turned back and directed my flashlight at the ground near Nicole's hands. Under where the vacuum had been sitting, Nicole had lifted the rug to reveal a square hatch in the floor, approximately three feet by three feet. The compartment was locked, and the hinges were sunken into the floor, so my trick with the pins wouldn't work here. Nicole took out her tools and once again went to work.

I stood and watched her, remembering how, when we were kids, she repeatedly broke into Del's room using a paper clip. Del finally got tired of it and broke off a piece of wood inside the hole in the doorknob.

Nicole approached the lock from upside down, sliding the slim silver device with the pin-thin head into the keyhole. “I know this type of lock,” she said. She was talking to herself, saying things like, “Three pins, find the right torque. Shit.” There was a click or two. “Almost,” she said. “It's three pins.”

I nodded as if that mattered to me, when in fact I had no idea what she was talking about and little faith this would work. The boat rocked more emphatically and my heart started to race. I listened for sounds then went to the cabin door and put my head out to check the signals: darkness. Still, I glanced around the vacant docks before going back inside.

Nicole had started over yet again, gently inserting the silver wire into the hole of the lock, which was followed by more fumbling and cursing. Her hair fell forward; she repeatedly used her free hand to push it from her face. There was a crackling sound and then nothing. “Fucking bitch,” Nicole said and then dove back in.

“We're pressing our luck,” I said. “We should go.” Nicole ignored me and kept at the lock. I wandered with my light, allowing the beam to fall in corners and at angles. I studied the blue any-weather carpet, the walnut paneling, the compact, self-sufficient details. The salon had a couch and a television. The galley had a small sink built-in to a wood countertop, and a tiny stove. More clicks and curses. I was starting to feel nervous. We'd stayed too long. “Nicole.”

Nicole answered, “One, two”—
click—
“got it!” With what looked to me like a quick twitch of her hand, the keyhole rotated. Nicole turned the knob, the hatch in the floor sprang, and my hope we'd retrieve the tapes sprang with it.

The space, a three-by-three-foot square, was I guess about two feet deep. It, too, was empty. I let my flashlight linger on the empty space for a moment trying to regroup from what was now my second major disappointment.

Nicole stared into the compartment. “You know,” she said, “it's really small for cargo.” Her forehead lifted. “It's a decoy.” She reached into the compartment and began running her hands along the sides, feeling the edges and the corners. It seemed desperate to me, but I got down beside her and began to do the same on the other side. I ran my hand along the walls made of pine, my fingertips tracing the seams in the corners, then along the floor. I stopped when I felt an irregularity in the wood on the side closest to me—a little ridge.

“Shine your light here.”

The wood looked uniform to the eye but felt slightly raised. With the light directly on it, I could see beneath my finger a round hole about two inches in diameter that looked as if it had been plugged with matching wood. I picked at the plug with my fingernail and it popped out. Inside the hole was a metal latch. I lifted; there was a loud clicking sound; and the floor of the box, which I could now see was on tracks, slid away, revealing a deeper, larger compartment below.

Nicole grinned hugely. “Now that's what you call a cargo compartment.” She stuck her head down and in and swung her flashlight around. “There's a duffel bag.” She lowered herself in and then moments later reappeared, tossing the duffel bag out ahead of her.

I unzipped the bag. “VHS tapes!” For a moment I felt almost giddy.

Nicole closed the hatch and put the carpet back in place.

I started out of the cabin with the duffel bag, leaving Nicole to put the vacuum cleaner where she had found it.

“Careless,” she said to me.

Almost to the cabin door, I turned to see she was referring to the plastic bag I had been carrying, which I'd left on the floor when I had gotten involved in helping her with the compartment.

“I'll do better next ti—”

Thump!
Over us? Behind us? No way to know from which direction it had come or in which direction it was heading. The boat pulled and rocked, feet pounded so loud I thought the ceiling would give way. It was like being trapped inside a shaking can. My only thought was to get out of the cabin. I didn't want to get caught below, where there was less chance of other people hearing or seeing a confrontation. I ran for the exit. As I reached it, a figure leaped at me from the dark. Clutching the bag, I breathed in a cry. Fright took hold like a seizure: heart pounding, throat closing, legs giving. I fell backward into Nicole. She caught me and then pushed me aside, ready to fight. There was a silver light reflecting from her hand. In my panic I wondered,
Why is she carrying a mirror?
Then I realized it was a blade.

“He's coming.”

Scrambling to recover, it took me a moment to hear the voice and recognize the face as Gail's. She was fully dressed down to her sneakers, soaking wet, breathless, and she had muck in her hair and hanging from her nose.

“I knew you wouldn't see the damn signal, I knew it. He's coming. Talon's coming!”

My hand went to Nicole's arm, to the hand holding the blade. “Put that away.”

Nicole passed me and went to the fuse box. I began reconnecting the cabin door. I was still shaking, my knees still wobbly, as I used the flashlight to find the pins I had placed on the deck nearby.

“Forget it,” Gail said. “We've got to go. We've
got to go
.”

We were huddled in the cockpit as voices carried from some yards away. Nicole whispered that one of the voices was Talon's, and then I noticed the blade again. I could feel the front of the boat shift from his weight. They were stepping from the dock onto the bow.

“Put that away,” I again whispered to Nicole. I began pulling on her to leave.

Then a woman's voice carried. “Excuse me.” The boat stilled momentarily. “Do you guys have a light?”

There was more shifting of weight, the boat tilted and then equalized, a man's voice sounding farther away, said, “Sure.”

“How you doin'?” the woman said, her tone suggestive.

“Fine,” the man answered. It was Talon. “How
you
doin', sweetheart?”

Gail looked at me, her hand planted firmly on her head, where it had been for a good minute now. She whispered, “That's
Katie
.”

Nicole quickly, calmly moved toward the fuse box, as I slipped the first pin into the hinge, then the second. I couldn't find the third pin. The boat was shifting, another man's voice said, “Tal, let's go.”

“I'm fine,” Katie said, projecting her voice, it seemed, in order to let us know she was there.

“Do you know where lot twenty-nine is? I'm meeting up with some friends there.” Again, the boat stilled.

“Oh, are you new around here?”

“Just visiting with my friend. He owns that boat over there. I'm staying with him.”

I swept my flashlight across the nearby space until I spotted the third pin, and while reaching for it, my flashlight caught the reflection of a glass object tucked in a lifejacket underneath a built-in bench—an ashtray. I flashed on Pascale two mornings before; the first thing she'd done when she'd woken up was reach for her cigarettes. I knew then how Talon had killed Del. It was the one thing he could count on. First thing she'd do when she got up: smoke a cigarette. She might not eat, she might not drink, but she would definitely smoke. Maybe Talon had overlooked the ashtray in his clean sweep. Maybe it still contained cigarette butts, and they would be the proof I needed.

“If you head that way, you'll get there,” Talon said. “I've got to go, but if you give me your number, I'll call you.”

I slipped the last pin in as Nicole reconnected the alarm.

“Her
real
phone number.” Gail grabbed a fistful of her own hair and whispered, “The idiot just gave that psychopath her real phone number.”

“I guess some things never change,” I said, pushing a still-in-shock Gail toward the back of the boat. Following her, I looked into the ashtray hoping to find a cigarette butt. The ashtray was empty, eat-off-of clean.
No one knows hell like the devil.

The boat was shifting. Talon and his friend were taking the steps that went from the bow to the bridge over the cockpit to get to the rear deck. They reached the molded stairs leading from the bridge to the rear deck just as we scooted out of the port entry and onto the swimming platform. There was no time to think about what to do with the tapes. For now, I left them on the platform off the hull of the boat.

*

As I lowered myself into the water, I caught a glimpse of Talon. He looked momentarily and waywardly in our direction, as if he could smell us. I heard him say, “Hurry,” to the man he was with. We waited, silently treading water at the back of the boat, Nicole with her pouch in her mouth, me bobbing up and down, trying to watch them, to figure out what they were there for.

After a few moments, we heard something like a growl and then the sound of feet running toward the back of the boat. If this had gone differently, if Talon had not appeared that night, I would have carried the tapes back to the car, found the one that exonerated Sid, and destroyed the rest. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. And now Talon was running to the back of the boat, the duffel bag was on the swimming platform in plain view, and I had to decide between him retrieving the tapes and me sinking them.

It wasn't really a choice at all. I wasn't going to let the tapes of Del fall back into Talon's hands, and as for the videotape of Thomas's murder, if Talon retrieved it, it would be gone, and we couldn't use it for evidence anyway. So I pulled the duffel bag into the water and joined Nicole and Gail on the shadowy side of the boat, out of view. The bag became saturated and grew heavy until it was completely submerged. I let it go, pictured it and its contents sinking to the bottom of the bay.

Talon said, “Motherfucker. When? Who? Where could they be?” The boat shifted as he frantically went to one side then the other or walked in a circle, I couldn't tell.

The other voice said, “Well, who else knew about them?”

“Everyone who was fucking in them knew about them. But the only one who knew they were on the boat was Kramer.”

The other voice, “Man, it has to be him. He has the key to the locker.”

“Fucking Kramer,” Talon said. “I'm gonna kill him. I'm outta here Saturday right after the funeral. I gotta find those tapes,
pronto
.”

I felt the weight of the boat shifting again as Talon and the person he was with disappeared into the cabin. A few moments later, they left, Talon still cursing and saying something about Kramer being a pervert. We pushed off and swam back to shore.

Back in the car, we heard that lights had gone on, cold water and thick muck had been braved, and ten-foot fences had been scaled. I asked Katie, “How did you get over the razor wire at the top of the fence?”

Brows furrowed, she said, “What razor wire?”

I left it at that.

Friday

It was eight a.m. when Dirk Beasley pulled into the parking lot. I was waiting to have what I knew would be a disappointing conversation with her. I had the box Del had left; I had Jake Mansfield's findings; I could try to explain what Doug had said about cyanide. But I knew all of it together wasn't enough for Beasley to determine that Del had been murdered. The best I could hope for at this point was getting Beasley to agree to run more tests to see whether Del did have cyanide in her system.

“I have something for you.” I was holding the box.

“Come inside,” Beasley said. We walked down the corridor to her office without talking. Once inside, she asked, “Who are you?” The question surprised me. I hesitated, uncertain as to how to respond. “I received a report yesterday from a Jake Mansfield from NAVO. Do you know him?”

“I do. He's a friend and a colleague. I worked with him on a case last year.”

“You're an attorney?”

“I'm a newly appointed commissioner in California, but I was an attorney when I worked with Jake.”

“I've been interested in his research for a while now,” Beasley said. She held out her hand, directing me to have a seat across from her at her desk, and offered me coffee, which I gladly accepted. We sat among framed certificates not yet hung, books in piles, and documents with diagrams of bodies on them. Her salt-and-pepper hair framed her face, giving her a soft, boyish look. She had a pair of horn-rimmed glasses hanging around her neck, which she took off and put on as needed.