Swimming With the Dead (22 page)

“Rose!  Show her the pictures of the picnic for the dockhands that Michael was so interested in.  She don’t want to see our life history,” Bert said.

Rose flipped through the book to shots of people sitting at picnic tables and running three-legged races.  “This here is all the guys that worked on the docks back then.  There’s Bert; that there is Demitri on the end.”

He was a burly guy, short and stocky, dark hair, dark-skinned.  Something about him was vaguely familiar.  Around his neck he wore a chain with a religious medal on it.  It looked like one of those Saint Christopher medals.  I was sure I had seen it before.  There was an empty place on the page where another photo had been.

“Michael asked to take it,” Rose explained.  “It was a picture of Demitri with Bert and another dockhand.  He promised he’d send it back but never did.  Guess I know why now.  It’s a cryin’ shame.  That was a good boy.  Too much life ahead of him.  Would of been a fine husband and father.  Makes me just sick to know he’s gone.”

“Did he say why he wanted the photo?” I asked.

“No, but I think he could have recognized Demitri,” Bert said.  “How would he know him though?”

I was asking myself the same question.  I remembered the photo stuck in one of Michael’s books.  I’d looked at it briefly, wondered about it.  It had seemed odd for him to have it, an old picture of three guys.  I’d placed it back between the pages and forgotten it till now.

“Kinda makes you wonder, don’t it?” Bert said, walking me to the door.  “That robbery, the
Chikuzen
hauled out to sea about the same time, Michael comin’ around askin’ questions about the ship, takin’ that photo, endin’ up dead.”

“Yeah, makes you wonder,” I said.

With an hour to kill before meeting Peter and Louis, I decided to take a walk around town and work off the five thousand calories I had just consumed at the Wilsons’.  Saint Martin was cosmopolitan and filled with tourists, a world apart from the islands of the BVI.  There were casinos, condominiums, scores of hotels, and hundreds of duty-free shops, basically just one big shopping mall.  I passed stores filled with exclusive watches, handcrafted eighteen-carat gold jewelry, silver, crystal, emeralds, diamonds.  No wonder Demitri Stepanopolis had been lured by the riches on these streets.

Chapter 21

I found the photo where I had left it, stuck in the back of the diving guide.  The three men stood, shirtless and smiling, beers in hand.  Bert Wilson, another man, bald with a beer belly hanging over his pants, and Demitri Stepanopolis.  I could clearly see the religious medal, a cross with intricate engraving on it, hanging from a long chain around his neck.

I was sitting out on the balcony off my hotel room, still wrapped in a bedsheet, feeling satiated and smug.  O’Brien had just left.  He’d ordered breakfast—eggs Benedict and fresh fruit.  We’d lingered over coffee, watching wisps of clouds drift in the deep blue sky.  Sailboats were heading out of the marina, sails lifting and flapping in the breeze.  The wind was blowing gently, about fifteen knots, O’Brien had informed me.

I was learning about O’Brien.  His psyche was oriented to the sea.  He paid attention to weather—temperature, wind speed and direction, clouds and rain—and he analyzed it in terms of its effect on the water.  I couldn’t imagine him being happy living more than a heartbeat from the water’s edge. 

After O’Brien had gone, I’d spread Michael’s research notes, books, the photo, and my notes out on the patio table.  Missing was that damned diagram.

Times like this always reminded me of when I was a kid.  A rainy Saturday, cartoons over, my sister and I bored, we’d dump a thousand-piece puzzle on the kitchen table and begin.  It was all a confusion of shapes and colors.  She would start with random pieces, trying to fit them together, while I would start analyzing, putting colors together, all the pieces that looked like trees in one corner, red barns in another. 

That’s what I was trying to do now.  I had a bunch of random shapes and colors spread out all over the table.  Somehow I knew they were all connected.  I found myself resorting to my sister’s technique—aimlessly moving pieces around.  Stepanopolis, foreman of the
Chikuzen
, the robbery in Saint Martin, the photo of the three men, Michael’s death at the
Chikuzen
, his research. 

The fact that Michael had borrowed the photo was too much of a coincidence.  There had to be a connection to Stepanopolis.  How could Michael have known him?  He would have been in graduate school in the States when Stepanopolis was killed.  Yet Bert Wilson was sure Michael had recognized Stepanopolis.  Did that mean that Michael’s death was connected to the robbery?  Maybe, maybe not. 

Maybe the Stepanopolis connection tied to the research.  Had Michael found pollutants at the wreck site?  Were toxins being stored on that ship?  And the wife?  Where had she disappeared to?  What had happened to the jewels?  Washed out to sea?  Or hidden somewhere in the maze of a ship for which only Stepanopolis knew the layout, a ship with an unscheduled date with the deep blue?  It all seemed a bit fantastic.

What about Arthur Stewart?  Harry Acuff?  Billy Reardon?  Were they stray pieces of another puzzle?  Was Acuff a local no-account, just as he appeared, Reardon an opportunist preying on tourists, Stewart a caring father incapable of murder?  What about Michael’s call to Dunn’s office?  Why hadn’t he left a message?  There were too many pieces still missing.

I thumbed through the photos I’d taken during my dive at the
Chikuzen
, studying them for at least the fourth time.  There was something about the marks on the compressor that didn’t fit.  On one side, it looked more like scrapes than like a bar had been wedged underneath it.  Almost like it had been pushed off the ledge rather than pried loose.  Would Michael deliberately have pushed the compressor down to get a look at what was behind it?  If he had, it would have been pretty difficult for him to end up underneath it.  Had someone pushed it onto him?  It was possible that the marks had occurred when they’d recovered the body, but I didn’t think so.  Carr had said they had tumbled the compressor off the body with a crowbar, which made sense.

I opened the notebook that I’d found on the
Lucky Lady
.  I’d picked it up from the evidence room after Dunn had had the boat and its content dusted for prints.

Michael had made hundreds of entries in the notebook at sites all over the BVI.  It looked like he would survey an area and move on to the next until the entire region was tested.  Then he went back to retest, noting carefully the weather conditions, air temperature, wind direction and speed, water temperature, water visibility, currents.  He also included information on the number of sailboats, dive boats, and motor boats.

I guessed that he was looking at any short-term changes that might have correlated with the change in activities as well as gathering data for the long view, correlating how water quality looked now as compared to last year and making predictions about the years to come.

Michael had done the same testing at the
Chikuzen
.  None of the data meant anything to me.  Next to the most recent entries at the
Chikuzen
were notes about the dead fish, mostly parrot fish, some squirrel fish, sergeant majors.

“Nothing unusual in water samples.  Try testing for other substances.  Talk to Maynard,”
it read.

I’d pay another visit to Maynard.  He’d never mentioned any discussion with Michael about his
Chikuzen
data.  Maybe it had not been significant.  Maybe Michael had never had the chance to talk with him.  But then, maybe Maynard had something to hide.

I was on my way out the door when Dunn called.  A body had been found out at Steele Point.  From the description, Dunn said it sounded like Billy Reardon.  He was on his way out there and figured I’d want to come along.

Ten minutes later, he pulled up at the hotel.  He filled me in on the way out to the site.  The body lay at the bottom of a steep, jagged rock formation that dropped straight into the ocean in places.  Evidently some tourists in a motor boat, trying to get a closer view of an exotic-looking house that nestled in the rocks out at the point, had ignored the no-trespassing signs on the pier and stumbled onto the body.  They’d thought it was a pile of clothing in the rocks until they had gotten close enough to see the blood.

Steele Point was at the western tip of Tortola not far from Soper’s Hole.  The house was perched on the tip of the point, with spectacular views from several strategically placed verandas.  Wooden steps connected each of the levels of the house and ran to a swimming pool up above.

“Christ, this place must be worth millions,” I said.

“Yeah, owned by some famous sculptor.”  Dunn pointed to where the steps led up the hill. “Up there is his workshop.”

Some workshop.  It was balanced out over the hill, its windows and verandas providing more expansive ocean views.  Surrounding gardens and terraces were filled with frangipani, oleander, hibiscus, and stone sculptures.

“I could handle living here for a while,” I said.

“It’s sometimes available for rent.  For about nine or ten thousand dollars you could probably stay for a week.”

“Right.  And maybe I’ll win the lottery.”

We made our way down the long winding steps that led to a private jetty and swimming deck.  The tourists were down the beach, complaining about the fact that they were being detained.

“You Dunn?” one of them asked, cocky and belligerent.

“Yes, I am Chief Dunn.”

“Well, Chief,” he said sarcastically, “we’ve been here for two hours waiting for you.”

“And you are, sir?”  Dunn was really keeping his cool with this asshole.  I had to admire his restraint.  I would have been threatening arrest by now.

“Gordon, Gordon Green,” the guy said.  “Why the hell are we being detained?”

“It’s routine, Mr. Green.  You did find a body.  Don’t you think that warrants a bit of your time?”

“Hey, we didn’t see anything,” Green said.  “We were just minding our own business.”

“You were trespassing, Mr. Green.  If you hadn’t gone where you shouldn’t have, you wouldn’t be standing here now.  Just a few questions and you can be on your way.”

Green and his cohorts couldn’t provide much.  They had been fascinated by the house, decided to take a closer look, tied up to the pier, found the body, called the police.         

Before letting them go, Dunn gave them a good lecture about privacy and respecting the folks who live in the islands.  By the time Green and his friends left, they were duly contrite.

The body was wedged in the rocks, twisted and broken.  One leg was bent backward at the hip and folded under the torso.  The head was battered, face bloody, neck clearly broken.  It was Reardon. 

Next to him, lying in the sand, was my backpack.  Dunn picked it up by the strap.  It was empty.  Scattered nearby were my passport, airline tickets, and empty wallet.  We searched the area.  The diagram of the
Chikuzen
was simply not there.

“S’pose he could have been drunk, stumbled over the edge,” Dunn speculated.  “Take someone with some muscle to force a man this size off that cliff.”

“Yeah, or he was dead when he went over and dumped here,” I said. 

Reardon would have been expendable, a local drunk hired to do a job.  Maybe they’d argued about his failure to complete his end.  Maybe he’d demanded more money.

“Whoever was at the bottom of this would have known that Reardon would be a threat, cause trouble sooner or later,” I said.  “One good drunk and he’d be bragging about his deed or he’d come back for more money, threaten exposure.  If those tourists hadn’t been trespassing on the beach, it might have been months before he was found.”

We headed back up to the house.  It was empty.  According to the groundskeeper, who had just arrived from Soper’s Hole, no one else had been there for several months.

“Place was pretty well locked up when I left.  That front gate was padlocked.  It’s been forced open,” he said.  We’d seen the broken lock when we’d driven in.  The driveway was about four hundred feet, gravel, and now covered with fresh tire tracks from police vehicles.

“I was up here last week to check on things,” he said.  “Everything was fine.  Haven’t been up since.  No one using it till next month.”

We walked along the edge of the cliff.  The terrain was rocky but still managed to be thick with vegetation and trees.  It offered plenty of cover yet was too rocky to provide much in the way of footprints.  There were some scuff marks in the rock where Reardon must have gone over.  Some of the rocks had been dislodged.  It looked like there had been a struggle or that Reardon had been dragged to the edge and pushed over.

“My men will be looking for anyone who might have seen something, but this is a pretty isolated place,” Dunn said.  “I’ll have the medical examiner do the autopsy this afternoon.  Should have something by tomorrow.”

Before I left, I filled Dunn in on my visit to Saint Martin, my talk with the Wilsons, the jewel heist.

“Jewels?” he asked, incredulous.

Dunn was still processing the information when I left.  I caught a ride back into Tortola with one of the deputies as they were hauling Reardon’s body up the side of the cliff.  He dropped me off at the Environment and Fisheries office.  Based on my reception the last time I saw him, I figured Maynard would be pissed when I walked through his door.  I wasn’t disappointed.

He was on the phone. “Ms. Sampson,” he said, covering the receiver.  “What brings you here?”  I could hear the animosity seething beneath the surface.

“Hoped you could shed some light on some of Michael’s data,” I said, pulling the notebook out.

“I’ll call you later,” he said into the phone, “just get it fixed.”

He placed the phone back in its cradle.  “These part-timers,” he said.  “Don’t want to expend any effort.  Damn boat’s been out of commission for days.”  I wondered why he was explaining all this to me.