Soundkeeper (17 page)

Hall had picked Gale up here when they went out together, and he wondered if she stayed here to be closer to Pinckney Island.

“Do you keep in touch with your buddies?” Hall asked, gesturing at the picture.

Silas looked up from the fish he was preparing.

“Some of them. Not those guys, though,” he said.

Silas dipped one of the filets in a bowl of buttermilk and dredged it through some corn meal.

“Our embassy got hit. Neither of them made it.”

Hall regretted his question and asked if there was anything he could do to help. Silas asked him to make a pitcher of lemonade, and Hall was grateful that it was instant. After five years of living on his own he was still lost in a kitchen. He would have starved in college if Domino’s ever closed.

“I found another fish kill today,” Hall said.

Silas looked up from the steaming cast iron skillet.

“It was near the one Gale discovered last week.”

“I remember her talking about it,” Silas said. He didn’t seem upset by the mention of her name.

“It was a fuel spill. The slick was still on the water when I got there. I saw an old barge nearby not long before I found the spill.”

Silas was putting some shrimp and the golden brown pieces of fish on a couple of paper plates.

“Do you think it was intentional?” he asked.

“I do. I think he was flushing out his fuel tanks,” Hall answered.

Silas wasn’t able to resist any longer and took a bite of fish before he replied.

“He could have been aground and dumped some fuel to float again,” Silas said.

Hall considered that possibility as he chewed a huge shrimp.

“This is the best shrimp I’ve ever had,” Hall said.

“I netted them in the channel that leads to your place on the island.”

After resolving to buy a cast net and taking a bite of spottail bass that was just as good as the shrimp, he considered what Silas said.

“I guess if he was aground and dumped some fuel to float, it’s not quite as bad as dumping it for no reason at all.”

“Still wrong, but not as sinister, I suppose,” Silas said.

The fish was gone too quickly, and Silas insisted Hall take some shrimp home. On the dock Silas asked him what the barge looked like.

“It was pretty far away, but it looked like the kind you would see working with a dredge. A small pilothouse at the stern, a lot of rust, maybe some blue paint.”

They exchanged phone numbers, and Silas promised to call him if he saw the boat.

“I’ll have my dad give the description to his crews,” Silas said. “If that boat is still around, it won’t take long to find it.”

Full of hope and good food, Hall walked down the dock toward his patrol boat. Gale’s skiff had been loaded on its trailer and was parked in the gravel lot next to her truck. Her boat was one of a kind, with Soundkeeper painted in bold black letters on both sides and green sea turtles, grey porpoises, and brown sea horses painted haphazardly on the bright yellow hull. The boat looked as happy and full of energy as Gale had been, and she frequently used it as a background when she was being interviewed by one of the local television stations.

Hall had never seen an outboard motor that ran on bio-diesel, but it didn’t surprise him that Gale had one on her boat. She was committed to her cause, which he realized was his cause as well. He climbed up into her boat and sat behind the wheel and wondered what had happened to her. Agency regulations required him to wear a Personal Flotation Device every time he was on the water, but he’d never seen Gale wear one. Hall’s PFD was small and stayed deflated until it came into contact with water which made it activate automatically. But it was still cumbersome and hot. He could not remember stopping a single boater since he’d been on the job who had been wearing a life jacket. He’d once heard that the majority of men who fell off boats and drowned did so when they were pissing off the side. It was easy for anyone to fall out of a moving boat and watch it motor away. A good swimmer could only tread water for a couple of hours.

He opened the compartment under the seat and found Gale’s video camera in a plastic bag along with her notebook. He flipped open the screen, pushed the rewind button for a few seconds, and then hit play. Gale was narrating, explaining that the scene she was filming was at the Live Oaks development and that the developer was in violation of state and federal clean water laws yet again. You could hear the frustration and passion in her voice, a passion he knew was missing in his life.

For just a moment, she held the camera at arm’s length and her face filled the screen while she spoke. She was a beautiful woman, and he was struck with a sense of personal loss for the first time. He wished that he’d had the opportunity to get to know her a lot better.

Her handwriting was neat and flowing in the journal, just like he knew it would be. The notes she took were precise and well written. He flipped through the pages and was surprised to see his name written in the margin of one of the pages, along with his phone number and a question mark. Maybe she didn’t know what to think about the new refuge officer. She wasn’t the only one.

He put the camera and journal into the plastic bag and left them in the boat. Then he went home, to Pinckney Island.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

So often it was the arrogance and ego of a criminal that got him caught. As the senior detective, Varnum was tasked with several ongoing cases on which he reported directly to the sheriff. One of those cases was to perform random financial reviews of certain county employees. Deputy Sheriffs, purchasing agents, tax assessors, and county inspectors were all required to sign paperwork authorizing their employer to review their financial status at any time for any reason. Varnum wished the authorization extended to elected officials as well but he realized that would make too much sense.

The records he was reviewing belonged to an inspector who worked for the Department of Environmental Health. Varnum knew he inspected wells and tested samples of groundwater for contamination but wasn’t sure what else the job entailed. An anonymous call had been received by the sheriff’s voice mail, and the caller had stated this inspector had been accepting payoffs for several years and had been hiding the money in his wife’s accounts in order to escape detection. Varnum guessed that the anonymous caller was either the person who was paying the bribe or someone who was jealous of the money. He’d learned through the years that greed and jealousy were much greater motivators than doing what was right for society. The court order Varnum took to the bank authorized him to review any accounts held by the inspector or accounts that he was named the beneficiary of.

Unless Harold Peterson had won the lottery or received an inheritance, something was not right. The house he lived in was modest and easily afforded by a civil servant, he drove a ten-year-old truck, but his wife had a new Prius. However, the boat payment that was automatically deducted from his wife’s checking account was twice as big as their mortgage payment. The boat was a forty-two foot Nordic Tug, a cruising boat designed to look like a tug boat. When he found a picture of the boat on the internet he felt a bit of jealousy. It was a beautiful boat with as many cabins as he had bedrooms in his house. The galley featured granite counter tops and a Force Ten stove that cost more than a semester of college for his daughter. A quick search revealed that last year’s model went for over half a million dollars and that didn’t include the monthly dockage fees at a new marina. The numbers didn’t add up.

With the help of a federal grant the county had computerized its records management two years ago. Varnum had the authority to log onto any system in the course of an official investigation and he entered the records management system of the Department of Environmental Health. Inspector Harold Peterson had one-hundred and eighty-three open permits, job sites where he was responsible for taking soil samples, submitting them to the state laboratory, and then granting the final building permit, which had to be issued before any construction started.

Varnum began to scroll through the permits in Peterson’s file on his computer and just when his eyes couldn’t take any more he saw a name that interested him: Mark Lancaster. Two months ago Peterson was assigned a case for a company called Palmetto Properties. Mark Lancaster was listed as principal developer and broker. Varnum recorded the address of the permit site in his notebook and printed several other pages before he logged off of the system and turned off his computer.

After that he went to the locker room where he changed out of his coat and tie and into a pair of khakis, worn docksiders and a faded polo shirt. He drove slowly past the marina twice before he parked far enough away from the dockmaster’s office so no one could see his unmarked police car.

The marina was full of all types of boats from simple fishing skiffs to live-aboard trawlers and sailboats. The tide was low, and the gangway that led to the floating docks was angled sharply downward. In front of a few of the boats were mailboxes and potted plants, and Varnum guessed the people who owned them lived there all of the time, just like a floating apartment. Varnum liked the fact that all of them had a waterfront view and no grass to mow.

He found the Peterson’s boat after strolling the docks for a while and wrote down the vessel registration number in his notebook. He was curious to see whose name it was in, because neither Peterson nor his wife had shown a boat registered to them when he checked their names in the database before he left his office. It looked brand new and just as expensive as he thought it would be. The brightwork was spotless, and all of the lines and canvas were new and unfaded. The large anchor that hung from the bowsprit looked like it had never been used. In the boat slip next to Peterson’s trawler was a small daysailer with a color scheme that matched that of the Peterson’s faux tug boat. Varnum wrote down that registration number as well.

After walking the docks for a while and trying to imagine what the people who owned these boats did for a living, he stopped by the office and chatted up the marina manager. He told her he had a forty-foot fishing boat he was going to bring up from Savannah and was looking for a marina in the area. She was attractive and her sales pitch was interesting and he learned that for just a bit less than his monthly house payment he could lease a boat slip. Included in the monthly dues were water and electricity, cable television, wi-fi internet service, and twenty-four hour access to the showers, restrooms, and laundromat that were located in the clubhouse. The marina sponsored parties on Labor Day, Independence Day, and Memorial Day. She told him she lived on a thirty-foot Hunter sailboat in the marina, and he noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

He took the packet of information from her, and she told him if he came by in his boat she would be happy to show him around the area on the water. He was about to ask her if he could reach her after business hours at the number listed on her business card when the telephone on her desk rang. By the time she was finished with her conversation he had lost his nerve and thanked her for her assistance before he left.

The cigarette tasted sour and was only halfway gone when he flicked the tobacco out of the paper and put the filter in his pants pocket. He looked at all of the boats in the marina and decided that he would be just as lonely in a million dollar yacht as he was in a thirty-year-old, three-bedroom, one and half bath tract home that needed paint and new carpet.

After stopping for a mega-sized cup of coffee, he found Mark Lancaster’s proposed development. When he drove by he saw an old front-end loader, a bulldozer and a rusted dump truck sitting behind a chain link fence. The gate was closed and padlocked, and it didn’t look like anyone was there. He parked one street over and walked behind the property. The fence enclosed the entire parcel, but it didn’t take him very long to find a spot where a fallen pine tree had pushed a section down enough so he could easily hop over it.

It looked like every construction site before the actual building started that he’d ever seen. At the back of the property, near the spot he entered, it looked like someone had been using the bulldozer to level the land by skimming off the top few feet of soil. There were wooden stakes with multi-colored ribbons hanging off of them and a temporary power supply next to a small construction trailer. The wind shifted and he smelled something that reminded him of hot tar. Then he heard the jingle of the chain on the gate. There wasn’t anything to hide behind, so he jumped behind a patch of weeds and proned out in the dust to keep from being seen.

From his hiding spot he saw a black Trans Am pull into the lot, and the driver got out with a passenger. Varnum was too far away to make a positive identification but he was pretty sure who the driver was. The two of them went into the construction trailer, one of whom he’d had breakfast with not long ago. Varnum wondered if she was trying to get her loan paid off ahead of time.

There weren’t any windows in the back of the trailer, so he stood up and walked back to the low spot in the fence and returned to his car. He moved it and parked so he could see the gate through his binoculars and began to wait. An hour later a taxi pulled into the lot and tooted its horn. With the binoculars he was able to confirm his earlier suspicions and watched his informant get into the cab and drive away. After she left, he saw the driver of the Trans Am climb onto the loader and begin to scrape up dirt and load it into the old dump truck. Varnum wanted to follow it when it left, so he turned on the radio and listened to a baseball game to pass the time while he waited.