Seeds of Evidence (9781426770838) (6 page)

She raised her chin. She couldn't meet his eyes. “It's been a long day.”

He glanced at his watch. “You want to go to dinner? I'm starving.”

“No, thanks.”

He shifted his jaw. “I'd like to talk to you . . . about your case.”

“I don't discuss investigations.”

“I've got some information I'd like to pass on to you.”

“You can tell me here.”

“I'd like to take you to dinner.”

“I can't let you do that.”

“You almost throw me to my death and now you won't eat with me?” His eyes were brown, and right now they were sparkling with humor. The declining sun played off the golden highlights in his hair and illuminated the light stubble of his beard. His mouth bowed upward in a slight smile.

Kit took a deep breath.

He took her hesitation as a cue. “How about Rita's in forty-five minutes?”

Rita's Restaurant on the east side of the island had one table overlooking the Assateague Channel left when they got there. “Lucky us,” Kit said, but David just smiled and the look in his eyes told her he'd called ahead. How annoying!

He also knew the waitress, and when Kit said she'd have the flounder stuffed with crab meat he ordered the same thing. “That's good,” he said. “I've had it before.”

A pool of reserve kept Kit quiet. How should she take this man? She found him attractive and off-putting at the same time. His confidence disarmed her, but she couldn't figure him out. She sensed an undercurrent about him that she couldn't quite identify. Her ability to read character was pretty good; but then, if he was a cop, his was as well. What was he thinking about her?

“OK, so you seem to know these birds around here. What's that?” he asked, nodding toward the bright white bird that had just landed nearby.

“Cattle egret,” she said.

“And those?” He pointed off to the right.

“Terns. And a fishing gull.”

“And those little guys?”

“Swallows. They're actually eating mosquitoes as they fly. So we like them.”

“How do you know all this?” he asked, smiling.

“I've been coming here a long time.”

“Couldn't have been that long. How old are you?”

“I'm thirty-two. But I've been coming here for twenty-five years.”

David whistled softly. “Twenty-five years is a pretty long time. I take back what I said.” He smiled softly. “So what's Kit short for?”

“Katherine. Katherine Anne.”

He nodded. “That's a good name.”

Kit toyed with her fork. Her father's pet name for her growing up was Kitty.

“How long were you married?”

Her eyes opened wide in surprise.

“You keep touching your ring finger,” David said, demonstrating. “I'm guessing your wedding band hasn't been gone for long.”

Kit felt the heat of embarrassment in her face. “What do you do for the Metropolitan Police?”

“I'm a detective,” he said.

“Homicide?”

He shifted his jaw. “Yes.”

“So you could tell the boy had been killed?”

“I saw the ligature marks on his neck.” He stretched back in his chair.

“How'd you know I'm in law enforcement?”

“How many women carry a gun bag on the beach?”

“It looks like a regular fanny pack!” she said defensively.

“Not if you know what a gun bag looks like.”

Kit toyed with her silverware and debated her next move. “So how is it you can take six months off?”

David smiled softly. “I wanted to quit. My boss wouldn't let me. He pretty much made me take a break instead.”

“Something happened?”

He shrugged. “You know how it goes.” He shifted in his chair. “How long have you been an agent?”

“Five years. So what happened? Shooting incident?”

He ignored her question. “You like it? Being an agent?”

“I have a passion for justice.”

“That's a good thing.”

“Sometimes it gets me in trouble.”

“I thought the FBI was all about justice. How could that get you in trouble?”

The lamp in the middle of the table flickered, forming shadows on the white tablecloth. “Politics,” she said. “I pursued a lead in a case that wasn't politically correct.”

The food came, interrupting their conversation and dissipating the tension. Kit felt like she'd just been in a tennis match. Serve—volley—volley—slam! Talking with David was an aerobic activity. She focused on her food. The flounder was tender and sweet, the crab perfectly cooked, and both of them ate in silence for a few minutes. Kit stole a look at him. She liked the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed, and she liked his bone structure. He had a strong jaw and a wide, open face. His neck was thick and his forearms were ropey with muscle. Their short conversation proved he was smart and aggressive, not bad qualities, normally, but she felt like she had to be on her game with him. She barely knew him. No way was she was ready to share the details of her life with him.

“This is really good,” he said, lifting a forkful of flounder.

“So what were you going to tell me?” she asked.

David cocked his head.

“You lured me here saying you had information about my case.”

“Did I?” He laughed. “All right then.” He took a bite of salad, glanced out of the window, nodded and said, “Giant white bird, right?”

Kit turned her head to look at the creature outside. “Great egret. The only three-foot-tall, long-legged white bird on the East Coast.”

He grinned. “I was close, very close.” Then he told her about his conversation with Maria.

“You speak Spanish?” Kit asked him. She had learned a little in college, more when she and Eric were talking about adopting a child from Latin America, but she wasn't fluent.

David nodded. “She didn't open up. Maybe somebody's running drugs, maybe illegals, maybe it's something else. But here's the other piece of the puzzle. I talked to an old guy down at Smitty's. You know where that is?”

Kit nodded. Smitty ran a rundown bait shop down toward Cap'n Bob's, near the southern end of the island.

“I wanted to see about doing some fishing. This old guy was out on the ocean two weeks ago, around 11:00 p.m. He saw a boat loaded with people running up the coastline with its lights off. He said people were just hanging off the gunnels.”

“The what?”

“The sides of the boat,” David explained.

“What was he doing out on the ocean?”

“Jimmy? He said he was fishing.”

“You think he saw a boatload of illegals?”

“Maybe.” David gestured. “All I know is, you don't run up the coast in a boat loaded with people at night with your lights off unless you're doing something wrong. He saw the same thing last week, same place, same time. Then I remembered reading in the paper that there's been a drug interdiction operation on Rt. 13 lately. I'm wondering, is somebody trying to avoid that by going out on the ocean? So I'm going out there to see what I can see.”

“What?” Kit said. “When?”

“Tonight. Jimmy rented me his boat and I'm going out.”

“By yourself? That's crazy.”

“The weather's good. We've got a three-quarter moon, which is enough to see by. And I do a lot of things by myself.”

Kit's heart pounded. “I'm going with you.”

“There might not be anything out there.”

“I don't care. I want to go. Can you find a latitude and longitude if I give it to you?”

They agreed to meet at David's at 10:00 p.m. Kit went to her cottage and changed into work clothes, khaki cargo pants, and a dark-colored golf shirt, but she substituted boat shoes without socks for the boots she usually wore. She grabbed a light jacket, strapped on her gun, and tied her hair back in a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Then she drove to South Main Street, and pulled into the driveway of David's rental, her grandmother's old house.

The channel seemed quiet as they steered away from town in the twenty-two-foot Grady-White David had rented. It was a good boat, sturdy enough for the ocean, and Kit could tell by the way he handled getting out of the slip that he knew boats.

“Four years in the Navy,” he told her when she said something about it. He also insisted she put on a life jacket. “I always wear one, especially at night,” he said. “It's only smart.”

Stars lay scattered across the clear night sky in a thousand points of light. The Grady-White easily handled the chop on the channel, and its engine sounded strong as they cut through the waves. Kit realized she was shivering with excitement. “You can't go straight down here,” she said. “There are shoals. You have to follow the channel markers.”

“Can you navigate?” David handed her the chart and a small flashlight.

“I've only been through here once.” When she clicked it on, the light was red. That was better for night vision—if you used a white light, it would take you 15 minutes to readjust so you could see in the dark. Kit knew that, and the fact that he apparently did, too, added to her confidence.

Using the chart, Kit guided him through the channel markers through the shoal-laced water on the south side of
Assateague. As David cleared the confused seas at the confluence of Chincoteague Channel and the ocean, he swung the boat left. Kit sat next to him, bracing herself with one hand on the frame of the boat.

“Did they do the autopsy?” David asked, once their course was steady. “I didn't want to ask you in the restaurant.”

“Yes,” she said, shouting against the wind and the roar of the motor.

“What did they find?”

“Ligature strangling, like you said.”

“How long before we found him?”

We? “He died within twenty hours.” Off to her left a quarter of a mile or so, Kit could see the white sand of Assateague, and the white line of the breakers just offshore. Miles off to the right, she could see a brightly lighted ship. “What's that?” she asked, pointing to it.

“Cruise ship.” He glanced at her. “It's for people who actually know how to take a vacation,” he shouted, grinning.

She smiled, and the wind felt cold against her teeth. The blackness of the ocean spread out before her like ink spilled across a page. Only the strip of white sand of Assateague oriented her. The three-quarters moon shed just a little light, and she felt hidden and exposed all at the same time. She looked up at the stars, wondered what it would have been like for the old sailors, steering only by the heavens, drawn into the unknown by the wind and the sea currents.

David cut the engine back. He pointed toward Assateague. “We're about even with where the body washed up.”

“How do you know?”

“I carry a GPS with me when I'm surfing. I marked it as a waypoint.”

“So we're opposite that spot now?”

David swung the boat to starboard, and pushed the throttle forward. “Yes. Give me your lat and lon.”

She yelled out the numbers of the spot the Coast Guard Search and Rescue had estimated as the approximate location that the boy's body entered the water. As Assateague fell further behind them, Kit glanced over her shoulder, as if keeping the barrier island in view would somehow make her less vulnerable. Ahead, she saw nothing but the vast sea and a star-studded sky, and she couldn't help but think of God, how big he was, and how small she felt.

After a while, David cut the engine back, left the helm, and picked up a fishing pole he had lying in the back. “We're here. Want to fish?” he asked her.

Kit hesitated. “Why are we doing this?”

David grinned. “Killing time, so we can see what we can see.” He grabbed a minnow from the bucket he'd brought, impaled it on the hook, and dropped the line overboard. Then he handed the rod to Kit. “Hang on. If you feel a tug, jerk it hard to set the hook, then reel it in.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I've done this before. What are we fishing for?”