Bunker 01 - Slipknot (27 page)

After four rings, a machine picked up. “You have reached the office of Ginny Turner at Turners’ Fish Plant. Please leave a brief message after the beep.” Ginny Turner! My instincts had told me that she was up to something. But what?

What had I missed? Alex wouldn’t have called Ginny. It must have been Lincoln. As much as I had wanted to deny Lincoln’s involvement in anything scandalous, there were just

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too many signs pointing in his direction. I was absolutely positive that Lincoln had planned and aborted the scuttling of
Sea Hunter
. Perhaps it had been planned prior to Dow’s murder, but because Alex had filled in on deck, Lincoln couldn’t go through with it. There was a good chance that he had indeed been driving the boat truck the night I was caught at Dow’s. Lincoln could be 34. That could have been his age when he placed his first bet. Although I would have liked to blame anyone else, the odds were that Lincoln had set me up to be killed under the pretense of a date. He’d probably even fired the shots himself. But how did Ginny Turner fit in?

Were the two of them joined in some conspiracy? Had one or both of them murdered Dow?

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for fifteen minutes alone in Ginny’s office. She was hiding something. I felt it in my gut.

She seemed like the type to be sloppy about deleting messages. If I could listen to her phone messages, perhaps I would learn something about her connection to Lincoln.

Well, I thought, she’s not in her office now. And I can pick a lock with the best of them.

16

sleep is overrated, I thought as I hurried into jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt. I have the rest of my life to sleep, I reasoned while double-knotting the laces of my tennis shoes.

My second wind was kicking in as I added a few items to my bag that might be useful in breaking or picking whatever locks I might encounter between my apartment and Ginny Turner’s inner sanctum. Henry’s rechargeable flashlight would come in handy, so I took that, too. I wasn’t even tired, I realized as I left on foot and jogged down the hill toward the fish plant.

The dogged persistence that had always been my strength had earned me the name of the Pit Bull among the detractors I had left behind in Florida’s crime-fighting community. I’m back, I thought as I passed through the gate and into the deserted parking area. What I lacked in physical strength and intellect, I gained in pure and simple stubbornness. I was never a contender in the hundred-yard dash; my strength was endurance. Supercondensed, I was the absolute epitome of

“chronic.” I also happened to be very good at bolstering my own confidence and courage.

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All that had been simmering in me since Nick Dow’s body washed ashore was now approaching a boil. Every bit of advice I had received from my mentor through the years had come down to some analogy with hard-boiled eggs. He would never advise to strike while the iron was hot; he would say it was time to put the eggs in the water. That time had come. I simply could not wait until tomorrow.

Circling the perimeter of the plant, remaining close to the building to minimize my exposure in the light from the moon, which was nearly full, I was disappointed to find that all entrances were locked from the outside. I could pick any of the inexpensive, generic locks using a bobby pin, but I’d hoped to find a way in that was less illegal. Trespassing was preferable to breaking and entering. The plant’s floor plan was fresh in my head from the survey I had done, so whatever entrance I used would lead to Ginny’s office, as there were no interior locks. Because the ground floor of the plant consisted of a processing area and refrigerated spaces, there was only one window—a little natural light and fresh air for workers on break—located high in the external wall of the lunchroom. It was open.

If it hadn’t been for my broken ribs and (I hated to admit) my age, I probably could have reached the lower sill and pulled myself up and through the window in a flash. But I had recently begun to realize that people really do get smarter with age—something of a necessity as other things ebbed.

Just around the corner of the building was a stockpile of empty wooden lobster crates. Pulling two crates from the pile and dragging them under the window, I stacked them and s l i p k n o t

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climbed on top, putting myself in a position to ease my rear end onto the ledge rather gracefully. A table conveniently located under the window allowed me to drop into the lunchroom without any show of athleticism. Vending machines hummed loudly, and I found the door by their multicolored lights.

Entering the fish processing area, I pulled the flashlight from my bag and wove my way around the sleeping stainless contraptions. With blades and belts at rest, the cold and ster-ile machinery reminded me of a scene from a horror movie.

An imagined snapshot of my body being filleted, skinned, and frozen urged me to hustle through the field of hulking steel. Parting heavy strips of plastic, I entered the salt storage area, where I slowed my pace through pallets of nonthreaten-ing seventy-pound bags until I reached the next plastic curtain, which led to a long corridor. I passed several rusty metal plates the size of barn doors—they sealed expansive refrigerated rooms and freezers—and finally reached the door that opened onto the stairwell to Ginny’s office.

At the bottom of the stairs was another door, this one exit-ing to the parking area and locked on the outside. Up the stairs I went and entered the small waiting area outside Ginny’s office. Remembering her office window, I turned off my flashlight before trying the doorknob. A bit of light from a streetlamp streamed into the otherwise black office. After drawing the blinds and pulling the cloth curtains together, making sure the edges met in the center of the window, I was satisfied that I could safely use the flashlight to prowl around.

As I’d suspected, Ginny had not cleaned up the messages

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on her telephone’s answering system. Illuminated red numbers indicated seventeen old messages. I hit the playback button and listened. The first recording was a short pause and a hang-up. That must have been me, I thought. A number of calls from delivery truck drivers sounded like routine check-ins before and after Ginny’s usual office hours. There were calls from fish buyers and sellers, all of which shared a common theme: Sellers complained of low prices, and buyers lamented what they considered too high. This is leading nowhere, I thought as I continued to listen to benign messages.

Finally, message fourteen was of interest. I replayed it several times, trying to decide whether it was Lincoln’s voice, but the connection and recording were not good enough for me to determine. “We’re headed offshore. I hope your price goes up by the time we get back in.” Strange, I thought, that a fisherman would assume Ginny would recognize his voice.

Stranger still was “
your
price,” as opposed to “
the
price,”

which had been used in every other message. It was a fairly poor recording, very static-filled, as from a cell phone. I listened again, this time focusing on the syntax. Yes, I was certain that he had said “your.”

So what? I thought. Had I come here for this? The message was strange, but strange was not nearly enough. Strange did not lead to conviction. Strange was nothing. Discouraged that I had wasted time and taken an unnecessary risk, I listened to the answering machine wind through the last three calls. And there it was, the final message, from a female: “Hi.

Where are you? Thirty-four has agreed but wants more s l i p k n o t

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money. Call me.” Most unfortunately, I had no way to determine the date or time of any of the messages. I was certain this last one had been left by Lucy Hamilton. So she knew the gambling code. She and Dow had been involved in something beyond the crabs. Ginny, too, was aware of the code Dow had used in his book. Although this was far from what I needed to ignite the lightbulb over my head, it was enough to form a possible scenario. I sat in Ginny’s chair and closed my eyes in concentration.

Of course, I thought, 34 had to be Lincoln. He was in deep debt to Dow and might have killed him to avoid paying up. The letter denying his son scholarship money might have driven Lincoln to consider scuttling the
Sea Hunter
. Before dumping Dow’s body overboard, Lincoln probably had removed the book of evidence from his back pocket and stashed it, along with the letter from BU. Or Dow had hidden the book himself, and Lincoln was still searching for it. As I was the only person in town poking around the circumstances leading to Dow’s death, I had become a target. Lincoln couldn’t kill me aboard the boat—two witnesses, one of whom was his beloved Alex. But what had he agreed to do for Ginny and/or Lucy that he needed more money to complete?

Maybe they had paid him to murder Dow? No, I was certain that the fourteenth message had been a call made from my cell phone, and that had been in my sole possession until well after the murder. That didn’t make much sense at this point.

Maybe I could find something helpful in Ginny’s books or her desk drawers, I thought. I was now so tired, I could barely

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hold my head up, but when would I get another opportunity to sneak a peek at Ginny’s business? Timing is everything—

the eggs again, thanks to my mentor. If I could find the company checkbook, maybe that would shed some light.

God, I needed sleep. Shuffling through the contents of desk drawers, I had difficulty focusing. The top page of a stack appeared to be a pending sales agreement between Ginny Turner and Blaine Hamilton. The document’s description of the property and location made it clear that it was the plant and surrounding area. Jesus, where does she keep the checkbook? I thought. My eyes were stinging. The beginnings of a headache were encroaching. A dry throat sent my thoughts to the Coke machine in the lunchroom. Keep searching, I urged myself, and I fought the nauseated feeling mounting in my gut.

The hint of an acrid odor caught my attention. Jesus!

Headache, fatigue, nausea, dry throat, and confusion: the classic symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. Something was horribly wrong. Dropping papers on the floor, I scrambled out of the office, through the waiting area, and down the stairs. I needed to reach the lunchroom window while I had my wits about me. At the stair door, my flashlight outlined a tunnel of thick smoke moving rapidly toward me. Crouching low, I was able to get beneath the billowing mass and breathe a bit easier as I duckwalked the length of the corridor. Even in my oxygen-deprived state, I was aware that the plant was on fire and that my only exit was the window. All exit doors were locked from the outside, right? I questioned whether I had checked every door before entering through the window.

s l i p k n o t

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But I knew there was no time to waste. I had to make it to the window.

As I hustled through the storage room, I wondered what happened to salt when it caught on fire. I wasn’t about to stick around to find out. Although the processing area was filling with smoke, the high ceilings allowed me to transit under the poisonous mass nearly upright. When I reached the lunchroom door, a loud roaring on the other side squelched my exit strategy. I placed the back of my hand against the steel door to confirm my living nightmare. Yanking it away before I burned myself, I knew the room on the other side must be fully ablaze. Now what? I wondered. I couldn’t possibly go back to the office and jump from the second-story window, as all of the smoke was going that way. I wouldn’t survive long enough to open the blinds. I couldn’t depend on being resaved by the Green Haven Cellar Savers. No one even knew I was in here. Or did they?

I had always refused to depend on luck for my own survival. If you rely on luck, it will eventually run out. Or, in my mentor’s terms, it’s time and temperature that ensure proper eggs—not a guessing game. But here I found myself facing sure death and deciding to scurry around the plant, hoping that I had missed an unlocked door. If I’m lucky, I thought, I’ll find an open exit. If I’m unlucky, I’ll die from smoke inhalation. Around and around I went, like a caged animal, frantically pushing on doors that refused to budge. On my second lap, I pounded on the doors and called for help. The smoke now hung lower from the ceiling, crowding me closer to the floor. The walls were getting hot, and puddles along

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the edges of the concrete floor sizzled. On my third lap, I banged my knee on a large PVC duct. The gurry chute!

The plant’s gurry chute, or sluiceway, for the waste products from every fish-processing machine, was my way out.

There was a large stainless steel bin, or hopper, into which ran plastic pipes that carried blood and guts, or gurry, from the automated stations as well as the troughs that lined the tables supporting manual cutters of fish. One end of the bin was fitted with the large PVC duct that I assumed ran in a downhill straight shot through the external wall and into the harbor.

Flames had found a path along the crease joining the wall and ceiling, casting an eerie orange glow through plumes of smoke. At this rate, it would not take long for the roof to collapse. I took a deep breath and climbed into the gurry hopper.

Feet first, I decided, and hoped the duct was of a large enough diameter to allow me passage. Having no other option, I slithered in. Like entrails, I slid quickly down the greasy pipe and splashed into the ocean. In no immediate danger, I treaded water and gulped in full lungs of fresh salt air. Clearing my smoky brain, I swam the short distance to the closest ladder. The tide was at just the right height for me to reach the bottom rung. As I pulled myself up, the pain in my ribs was a most welcome sensation. Oxygen, cold water, or both had revived me to the point where I believed I could evaluate my situation and make sound decisions. Feeling naked without the bag that almost never left my side, I realized that it and its contents were gone forever.