Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (12 page)

I kept at her until she ran dry. Got more of her life story than I wanted to hear, but that happens sometimes. Once you open the floodgates, the pond’s gonna drain. She’d come out to the West Coast from Poughkeepsie, New York, about twenty-five years ago. Had a full-ride basketball scholarship from Seattle Pacific U, but blew out her knee early in her sophomore year. School wasn’t really her thing anyway, so she dropped out and kicked around a bit. Did the Europe thing. Did the Mexico thing. Coupla bad marriages—at least they didn’t have any kids—string of dead-end jobs, yadda yadda, ain’t it funny how time slips away?

By the time she was finished, I felt pretty certain I’d gotten whatever there was to get. She didn’t have any more idea where Brett Ward could be found than I did, and I didn’t have so much as a suspicion.

I walked over to a desk. Six or eight framed photographs were arranged on the surface, mostly family stuff. Rosemary and what figured to be her mother and father sitting at a picnic table together. A younger woman who looked enough like Rosemary to be her sister and what I assume to be her three kids, all smiling like crazy into the camera. Picture of a sailboat on a lake. A black Lab drooling on a tennis ball. Standard family photo stuff. The kind of thing that passes for memories these days.

On the back left of the desk sat a gold-framed Brett Ward. Mr. Preppy in a red sweater vest over a crisp white pullover, braced behind the wheel of a sailboat, Space Needle looming over his left shoulder, hair blowing in the breeze, big, bright virile grin. All very
GQ
bright and shiny.

I picked it up and held it in my hands. “Can I have this?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Take it. I never see that face again it’ll be too soon.”

I dug out another old business card out of my wallet and handed it to her.

“If you think of anything else,” I said.

Despite Rosemary De Carlo’s vague recollections, I’d found the place with little trouble. Problem was that Shilshole Marine Yard was no longer in business. A quarter mile of temporary chain-link fence ringed the property from sidewalk to waterline. A red and white plastic sign wired to the front gate said to contact Northwest Maritime if you were interested in buying the property and to otherwise keep the hell out. Somebody had spray-painted a blue Latino gang sign over the phone number, making it impossible to read. Scattered around the property, vessels in varying stages of decomposition slouched on the blacktop like vagrants.

These days, mom-and-pop boatyards are every bit as much an endangered species as Midwestern family farms. Just keeping up with the escalating environmental requirements costs a fortune, and then, to add to the problem, as the potential value of the property increased, so did the size of the tax bite. Unless you happened to be the darling of
the deep pockets set, your two hundred feet of waterfront was worth more than the business was ever going to be, no matter how long your family had been there or how good a businessperson you were. All of which made it even more tempting to take the money and run.

And lord knew Seattle had no shortage of newly moneyed morons who’d pay whatever freight was necessary for a glimpse of something wet. Sound, lake, canal, river, bay, sump. It didn’t matter. All it had to be was wet. If it was wet, it was scenic, and if it was scenic, they’d build on it. Real estate ads contained phrases like “partial seasonal water view,” which meant that if you stood at the peak of the roof in the dead of winter and, at the time, were neither fogged in nor being blinded by sleet, you could just about make out this body of water in the distance.

It was the lure of the salt, I figured. Something in our shared embryonic past calling us back to the warm water of the womb. Didn’t matter whether it was distant or dangerous, if it was placid or polluted, the siren song of our collective consciousness kept calling us home to “waterfront property.”

In an attempt to stem the relentless tide of gentrification, King County had begun making it nearly impossible to move from a commercial to a residential property designation, which, as far as I could see, was the only reason why this particular piece of property hadn’t morphed into thirty or forty luxury condo units at a million-three a pop.

I parked my car in front of the Tides Tavern, crossed Shilshole Avenue, and walked east along the fence line with the sky the color of slate and the icy onshore flow from
Puget Sound jabbing at the back of my neck. I shuddered inside my coat and turned up the collar.

At the far end of the boatyard, almost in the neighbor’s parking lot, I found an overturned oil drum nestled among the weeds, rolled it from the bottom side up, climbed on, and boosted myself to the top bar of the fence.

Jumping from heights is one of those moments where you first notice you’re getting older, that the balance isn’t quite what it used to be, and the knees aren’t as nearly as accommodating about absorbing shocks as they once were.

My body acted as if I’d jumped off the Space Needle. I staggered forward on impact and nearly turned an ankle, stumbling spastically through knee-high brush and brambles until I was able to regain some semblance of balance and composure.

I took a minute to count body parts and make sure nobody had seen me staggering around like a drunk. My ear throbbed to the beat of my heart. The impact with the ground had aggravated my shoulder. I cradled myself until it calmed down. I was grateful for something else to think about when out in the street an eighteen-wheeler came growling by. Moving slowly up through the gears until it finally blended into the general hum of the city.

As I saw it, I didn’t have the luxury of being surreptitious. If somebody saw me, then they saw me. I’d burn that bridge when I came to it. Nobody had seen Rebecca in something like a week and, even presuming she was out there somewhere mucking around on her own, whatever she was doing, she was doing without her cell phone, driver’s license, and credit cards. My gut felt as if it was full of nails.

I cut left around the stern of an old wooden fishing vessel. The
Cheryl Anne
. Blue and white up top, black beneath the waterline. Didn’t take a marine engineer to see that the old girl wouldn’t be going anywhere. The entire transom had fallen off, exposing her nautical ass in a most unseemly manner.

The yard arrangement was classic. Little boat shed for little vessels with little money. Big boat shed for bigger vessels with serious folding cash. Everybody else was propped up on jack stands outside in the yard, “on the hard” as they liked to say.

Out in the ship canal, an enormous red and white Crowley tug was motoring its way out toward Puget Sound. I watched as whoever was at the helm of the
Response
raised his hand. I thought he was waving hello, as boaties are inclined to do, and was about give the obligatory return wave when the sudden blast of his air horn shook me to my core. I shuddered again and hunched my shoulders against the chill.

What looked to be an eighty-ton travel lift straddled the haulout slip like a giant blue mantis, its polyethylene lifting straps hanging lank above the inky water. If I recalled correctly, a lift that size was good for at least eighty-footers. Maybe as big as a hundred, depending on the make and model.

I followed the “office” arrows around the south side of the building. Twenty feet of old twelve-pane windows and a peeling green door looked out over the yard. The glass was filthy, inside and out, the glazier’s putty so dissolute it had fallen out in many places. A single arm of blackberry
vine, bristling with thorns and thick as my wrist, wandered unimpeded over the front wall.

I checked the area immediately around the door. No stickers or decals. Apparently, not Zagat rated. No “this business is protected by” such and such security company either. I checked the door and didn’t see any obvious alarm wiring, but then again, you’re not supposed to. No alarm bells under the eaves. Besides which, this didn’t look to me like the kind of property where anybody was going to be willing to foot a monthly security bill. Looked like the metal thieves had already lifted anything ferrous that could be toted off and sold. What was still lying around the yard was either too big to mess with or without value. Tentatively, I turned the knob. The door swung open.

The moment my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could tell I was too late. Somebody had gotten there before me. Everything that opened was open. A number of things that didn’t open had been smashed on the floor, as if destroyed in frustration rather than as part of the search. Whoever had preceded me apparently wasn’t having any more luck finding Brett Ward than I was, and was none too happy about it either.

I stepped inside, found a light switch to the right of the door, and flipped it on. Several banks of old-fashioned fluorescent lights began to hiss and blink.

The room was maybe ten by twenty. Fake wood paneling, circa 1950s rumpus room. Metal desk down at the end. Coupla cleavage calendars pinned to the wall behind the desk, three metal file cabinets to the right, and a couple of motel chairs for guests. Couple of other racks and tables scattered about the walls, one piled with paperwork,
another with paint cans, and yet another with all the carcinogenic condiments and plastic stirring implements necessary for making truly wretched coffee.

It was, however, the black metal door directly opposite where I stood that hijacked my attention, or rather the collection of waffle-soled boot prints scattered about the surface. Bunches of them, high and low, left, right, and middle. Several of them upside down, where he’d stood with his back to the door and tried to horse kick it in. No doubt about it, somebody had worked up a hell of a sweat trying to get through that door, all to no avail too, which probably explained all the unnecessary breakage.

Now, if you knew Brett Ward, you knew that he was a smooth kind of guy. Not the sort to be lugging around a big set of keys that made lumps in his pockets and screwed up his pleats. No, no. That wasn’t Brett at all. What knowing Brett Ward told me was that if Brett Ward had the key to that door, he wouldn’t be carrying it in his pockets. No sir. It would be right here someplace, where he could lay hands on it with a minimum of effort. I’d bet on it.

First, I had to lift the desk back onto its feet. That was the hard part. Absolutely amazing what those old metal desks weigh, especially if one of your arms isn’t working. On the other hand, the key was exactly where I’d imagined, front and center in the top drawer of the desk, so I guess the aggravation evened out.

I snapped the bolt back and pulled open the door. A narrow trapezoid of light raced across the floor. I felt around both sides of the door but couldn’t find a light switch of any kind, so I took a couple of tentative steps into the room and waited for my eyes to adjust. As my pupils expanded, I could
make out what looked like a hotel room or, more likely, the master stateroom from a salvaged yacht. Nicely appointed and anonymous. Little fridge. Couple of mirrors. Big platform bed, end tables, lamps, the whole ball of wax. The bed was even made. The pillows fluffed.

Maybe it was just me, but around the time the novelty wore off, the room started to look sad and a bit depressing. Like what was wrong with a grown man who went to this much trouble just to boff the company receptionist. It boggled the mind.

I edged toward the brass table lamps that flanked the bed. Tried one and then walked around and tried the other, neither of which worked, so I followed the wires up the right side of the bed and around the corner, where I found a pair of wall outlets and plugged in.

A warm glow enveloped the room. Maybe a little brighter than I would have chosen for a romantic interlude, but passable nonetheless. I guessed Brett liked to see who or what he was doing. Probably told her she was so beautiful he didn’t want to miss a thing. A couple of quick involuntary images of Brett Ward hunched up behind Rosemary De Carlo made my head swim. I hadn’t slept much lately and felt a bit woozy, so I leaned against the wall and took a minute to regroup.

I don’t know why it caught my eye, but it did. Over in the back corner of the room. A pair of nondescript blue wires jutted from under the carpet, made a quick right turn, and disappeared through the adjoining wall. For what? The room’s electricity was obviously on the same circuit as the lights. The digital clock had blinked midnight ever since I plugged in.

Then it came to me, like the proverbial bolt out of the blue. I chided myself for being stupid, blamed it on sleep deprivation, and walked over to the corner of the room. Took me under a minute to figure out. Once I pulled the dresser out from the wall, I found there was no damn wall, just a framed-out rectangle where, if I got down on my hands and knees, I could crawl back into some sort of hidden corridor.

I sighed. I wasn’t crazy about cramped spaces, and crawling back into Brett Ward’s private porno palace was going to put me a lot closer to him than I wanted to be. I’d have killed for a pair of coveralls and a surgical mask as I got down on one knee and wiggled my shoulders through the opening.

Turned out there was a little Flip HD movie camera secreted behind each of the mirrors. He had a plank set up to hold the Dell laptop that he used to burn his DVDs. I turned the PC on, opened the media player, hit Play, and there he was, Brett Ward, buck naked, with his mouth locked on the crotch of a fleshy brunette, whose impassioned urging seemed to spur him to ever greater ministrations. I had the odd thought that viewed dispassionately and from just the right height, human beings engaged in sex must be a rather confounding sight. I pictured antennae aliens looking down and wondering: “Just what the hell are they doing?”