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The fish farm was in full operation when Dan arrived. A self-propelled barge, perhaps the same one that Farnsworth had been on or at least one very similar, was unloading several large bales wrapped in white plastic. Dan figured those were the fish food totes he had heard so much about, and as he approached he could see two men were using a small crane to jockey one of them into position above a hopper.
As Dan brought the inflatable up to the float a heavyset man wearing an orange life jacket with ‘JOHNSON’ printed in black marker on the front strode over and waved him off.
Reg Johnson was the name of one of the men listed on the interview form and if this was the same man, he didn’t look happy to have company. Under the weathered skin there was a flush of anger.
“You can’t tie up there. This is private.”
Dan reached into his pocket and pulled out his credentials. “Police. I need to speak to whoever is in charge here.”
“Hell, we’ve already talked to you guys.” Johnson leaned forward and spat into the water. “I can’t tell you any more than I’ve already told them.”
Dan ignored the protest. “You were here when Colin Farnsworth fell off the barge?” he asked.
Johnson scowled and shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, if that was his name, but so what? I didn’t see it. I was over on the other side.” He inclined his head towards the far side of the float where two other men were working on a piece of equipment. His words were clipped, and his belligerent tone was emphasized by arms folded across his chest and an aggressive scowl.
“Did you hear anything?” Dan asked.
“Heard a couple of guys shouting, that’s all. It’s noisy around here when they’re unloading. You’ve got the crane working, and the guys are yelling instructions, and those barges have engines damn near as big as the tugs. They make a hell of a racket.”
“It doesn’t sound that noisy right now,” Dan said, turning to look at the barge.
“They’re almost done. They’re not using their crane and that’s a small barge anyway. We had the big one here the day of the accident. Come back when that’s in and you’ll see what I mean.” Johnson dismissed Dan’s comment with a wave of his hand.
“So nothing unusual?”
“Like what?”
“Like a gunshot.”
Dan watched Johnson’s reaction closely as he said the words. The man’s head jerked up and he stared back, his eyes wide and fixed intently on Dan’s face. If he was aware of what had happened, he was putting on a good show of being shocked.
“What the hell are you talking about? Why would I hear a gunshot?”
“We found Farnsworth’s body. He didn’t fall. He was shot.”
For a long moment Johnson was speechless. His eyes dropped and he turned his head to look down the float. Dan had the feeling the man was trying to relive the moment, picturing whatever it was he had seen that day, running it past this new piece of information to see if it made sense. When he turned back, the belligerence was gone and his eyes were focused in the middle distance, on something only he could see.
“Nah man, that’s crazy,” he said, shaking his head slowly in denial. “Why would anyone want to shoot him? All he did was load and unload. And no one here has a gun anyway. Why would they? That’s nuts.” He shook his head again, more rapidly this time, and his voice firmed up. “Nuts,” he repeated. “Couldn’t have happened.”
Dan watched the large man a little longer. He knew it wasn’t unusual for someone to dismiss something they couldn’t understand and it often meant they were telling the truth. It would take a little time to let reality sink in.
He turned to look at the other people working the farm. Two of the men he had noticed previously were now talking to a couple of divers who had obviously been down in the pens, and he could see two others out on the floats near the building.
“Any of those guys here when it happened?” Dan nodded towards the men.
Johnson pulled himself back to the present and followed his gaze. “I guess the divers were here, but the other guys are all new.”
“New?” Dan asked, his voice sharpening. “New as in a new shift or new as in new guys?”
“Both,” Johnson answered. “Two of them are new guys: one started yesterday and one’s just started his first shift today. The other two have been working here for a few months but they were off—just came back on yesterday.”
“That kind of turnover normal?”
“Sure.” Johnson shrugged. “At least it’s not unusual. Lot of guys figure this for easy work—all you got to do is show up and feed a few fish right? Doesn’t take ‘em too long to find out it ain’t what they figured.”
He gave a snort of derision and his voice took on a tone of resignation as he recited a litany of excuses.
“Some can’t take the long shifts—they sometimes have to work ten or twelve hours plus travel time, four days one week, three days the next through the summer. Some can’t take the rain. Some get seasick the first time they come out on the crew boat. Some can’t handle the smell. Whatever. Winter’s the worst, but in summer we get the bums looking for an easy buck and the city kids who want a big adventure.”
That was pretty much what the woman Dan had spoken to on the phone had said when he called the barge company, but it still didn’t seem right.
“Two out of four seems pretty high to me.”
It was more than high; it was suspicious, but Dan didn’t want to voice that thought. So far, he thought Reg Johnson was telling the truth and he wanted to keep him talking.
“Yeah, maybe. Guess it would be for most jobs, but it’s what happens out here. And we might not have anyone else quit for another few months. Kinda balances out.”
Dan nodded and glanced around the farm. Another man had come out of the building and was checking some kind of gauge fixed to a pipe running into the water.
“How many guys do you have here?” he asked as he watched the man return to the building.
“Depends. We usually have two or maybe three divers, plus four regular crew, plus the system operator and a supervisor. If we’re stocking the tanks or unloading, we’ll bring in more.”
“And you’re the supervisor?”
“Yeah, I’m one of them. Me and a couple of other guys. We switch off.”
“You stay here at night?”
“Hell, no. None of us do. We all go back to Hardy on the crew boat. The security guys stay here—two of them right now but we usually only have one.”
Dan looked at him. “Why two? Have you been having problems?”
Johnson shook his head. “Nothing real serious. Some of the locals don’t want us here and they’ve tried to come onboard and vandalize the place. Mostly crazy kids from the city wearing headbands and tie-dye shirts and shit. They come out here in the dinghy from Mom and Pop’s fancy boat and give us a hard time. Then there’s a few fish-huggers—environmentalists in kayaks, that sort of stuff. Some local Indian band people who figure we’re killing their wild salmon.” He spat into the water again.
Dan was going to ask if any of them had been there that day, but they were interrupted by a shout and the float lurched under their feet.
“Shit!” Johnson swung around to look at the barge then strode over towards it. The crew had let go the forward line and the bow had caught the current and swung out, forcing the stern in so that it slammed hard against the edge of the float.
Dan watched for a moment as Johnson and a crewman struggled to hold the heavy vessel off, and then let his eyes roam over the farm. Had he learned anything? Not really, and he doubted that talking to the divers was going to help, but he was certainly going to look into why so many people had quit their jobs, particularly those who were working the day Colin Farnsworth was shot.
A gust of wind blew into the cove from the south and he was suddenly engulfed in the reek of rotting fish. The smell was so strong he almost gagged, and he felt his eyes start to water. On the other side of the float the divers had returned to the water and were passing up nets full of dead fish to the men on the float who emptied them into waiting plastic containers.
Dan had worked his share of homicides and had attended more autopsies than he cared to remember. It had taken him a long time, but he had finally learned to handle some pretty overpowering odors. This was perhaps the worst he had ever known and he suddenly understood exactly what Johnson had been talking about when he said people quit because of the smell. It was so strong the air was thick with it, as if the odor itself had mass and density.
He turned back towards his inflatable and stepped over the tube into the well. The smell seemed a little less intense here, although that was probably just because the wind had lessened. Compressing his nostrils and narrowing his eyes, he reached for the key and turned the motor on. There was no way he could go and talk to the divers now even if he wanted to. They didn’t seem to be diving to any great depth, but they only came up to the surface long enough to pass up their nets and Dan did not want to think about how strong the smell would be near those open totes. The sooner he got away from here the better. He was reaching for the tie-up lines when Johnson returned.
“Pretty tough to take huh?” Johnson loosed the forward line from the bollard and held it as Dan released the stern.
Dan nodded. “Yes, it sure is. Is it always like this?”
“No.” Johnson shook his head. “When the fish get to this size there’s always more morts, but we just had a low oxygen event and that makes it worse.”
Dan stared at him. “A low oxygen event? What the hell is that?”
Johnson turned and gestured to the building. “We have pumps in there to pump oxygen into the water. These fish are almost ready to harvest so the pens are pretty crowded. Without extra oxygen they wouldn’t survive. There was a problem with one of the pumps last night. We’re not sure what caused it, but it took a while to get it back online. We lost a lot.”
“Do you know how many?” Dan asked. “It smells like thousands. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
“Few hundred for sure,” Johnson answered, shrugging his shoulders. “Could even be a few thousand although I hope not.”
Dan scanned the pens and tried to imagine what a few thousand salmon would look like, but failed. It was simply too large a number to grasp.
“How many fish do you have here? A few thousand seems like a lot to lose.”
“We start out with a million smolt—that’s the young ones the hatchery stocks us with. We’ve got twelve pens so about eighty thousand in each pen.”
A million fish. The number was almost beyond comprehension and Dan could only shake his head. A million fish multiplied by the thirty or so fish farms in just this one small area. Where were the hatcheries that supplied the smolts? How long did it take to raise them? What happened to the fish when they were harvested? Where did they dispose of the dead ones?
His mind swirled with seemingly endless questions, but another gust of wind from the south quickly brought him back to the present.
“Guess you must get used to it after a while,” he said as he turned his head and held his hand over his nose.
Johnson inclined his head. “Not really. More like you learn to accept it.” He paused and stared out over the water, the rope still taut in his hand, then turned his gaze back to Dan. “You serious when you said that guy on the barge was shot?”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “He was.”
“Shit. That’s . . . “ His voice tapered off.
“Yes, it is. And we’ve got two other men missing. Maybe you know them? We know they worked at a fish farm around here,” Dan watched Johnson closely to see how he would react to the names. “Harold Manuel and William Jules?”
Johnson only frowned and shook his head. “Manuel and Jules? Not anyone from here. They’re both Native, right?”
Dan nodded.
“Don’t have any Natives working here,” Johnson continued. “They don’t like us. Maybe on the farms up there north of Broughton. I think there’s a band up there supports the industry and they might have some of their people working.”
Dan nodded. He knew there was strong opposition to open-net acquaculture, but he hadn’t thought about whether or not that opposition would stretch to all fish farms or to all band members. If it did, it should make locating the farm Harold Manuel and William Jules had worked on an easier task.
“How about Jimmy Fulton? You ever hear of him?”
Once again Johnson shook his head. “Not a name I’ve ever heard of, but you could check with the office over in Hardy. He might work on one of our other farms.”
Dan thanked him, reached into his jacket, pulled out a card and handed it up. He wanted to get away before another gust of wind brought more of the smell. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”