The Argos came into the marina with its sails furled, moving smoothly under the power of its engine. Cork knew little about sailboats. This one looked to be about forty feet long, with a single mast and two sails. The hull was sleek white, and he suspected it was constructed of fiberglass but couldn’t say for sure. What he could say without doubt was that it cost a hell of a lot more than he would ever dream of paying for a boat. It eased into its slip. A young woman jumped lithely to the dock with rope in hand and tied off the bow to a cleat, then moved to the stern, where she was tossed a rope and did the same there. The engine died. A minute later, a compact, tanned man wearing a white ball cap and white shorts, a dark blue Polo shirt, blue boat shoes, and black Ray-Bans joined the young woman on the dock. Young woman? That was stretching it. Cork judged her to have been just out of high school, if that. She had long blond hair and wore dungarees and a beige linen shirt, unbuttoned, over a yellow bikini top. They kissed, and the man patted her behind and said something. She laughed and went back aboard the sailboat. The man walked the dock toward Cork.
“O’Connor?” he asked, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses.
“Mr. Verga?”
“Call me Demetri.” They shook hands. “Why don’t we go into the bar? I could use something cold.”
Inside, Verga took a table next to a window that overlooked the marina, where the masts of the sailboats stood white as bare aspen trunks against the silvery blue of Chequamegon Bay. He finally removed his sunglasses, and Cork saw that his eyes were algae green. His face was broad and weathered, and the dark stubble of his cheeks made his skin there look charred. Cork put him at maybe fifty.
A waitress came immediately.
Verga said to Cork, “You want something?” As it had on the phone earlier, the man’s voice carried the hint of a Mediterranean accent.
“You have Leinenkugel’s?”
“We do,” the waitress said.
“I’ll take a Leinie’s.”
“Two, Mitzi,” Verga said, and the waitress vanished.
“Thank you for agreeing to talk to me, Demetri.”
Verga waved it away. “No big deal.”
“I hope I didn’t take you off the lake.”
“I’ll go back out later.”
“You seem to spend a good deal of time on that sailboat of yours.”
Verga held up his hands. The palms carried long scars that looked as if they may have been from rope burns. “I’m Greek. Sailing’s in my blood.” He leaned his forearms, muscled and knotted with veins, on the table. “So you’re trying to find Mariah Arceneaux. Good luck.”
“I’m sorry about Carrie.”
“Thanks. Except I kind of figured something terrible had happened, so I had time to prepare myself.”
“Why so sure something terrible?”
“Everybody I talked to when Carrie ran away told me kids come back. She never did.”
The beers were delivered, bottled and cold and dripping with condensation. Verga took a long draw, and when he’d swallowed, Cork asked him, “Did you have any sense at all where Carrie might have gone?”
Verga wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “None. Clueless. I kept thinking I’d get a call from her when she ran out of money. She never called. Like she dropped off the face of the earth.”
Cork drank from his own bottle. The beer went down with a satisfying chill. “What did you think when Carrie’s body washed ashore?” he asked.
“I still don’t know what to think. I ask myself, Where the hell has she been all this time? Up here somewhere? Where would she hide, and why?”
“What was she like?”
“A terrific kid.” Verga took another long draw, belched, and didn’t bother to apologize. “Her mom used to waitress here. Lot of times while she was working, she didn’t have anybody to watch Carrie, so she brought her to the marina. Carrie was real good, real helpful. Used to hang out on the docks, always asking about sailing. So I started taking her and her mom out on the water occasionally. Carrie was a natural. A born sailor. Her mom, not so much. Prone to seasickness, real nervous about falling in. One thing led to another, and Christine and me got married. I adopted Carrie. We became a family.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Three years.”
“I understand your wife drowned in the lake.”
“Yeah. Terrible, terrible thing. We’d sailed out to Cat Island, all of us. Anchored there for the night. Christine never drank while we were sailing, but once I lowered the canvas, she usually made up for lost time. That night, she really put it away. We went to bed, woke up in the morning, and she was gone. Just gone. Me and Carrie looked all over for her. Finally radioed the Coast Guard. They found her on the bottom of the lake not far from the boat, wearing what she was wearing when we went to bed. As near as I can figure, she got up in the night, went up on deck, God knows why, and stumbled overboard. She wasn’t much of a swimmer. And with all that alcohol in her . . .” He finished with a fatalistic shrug and another draw from his beer.
“You never heard her call out?” Cork asked.
“Never heard a thing. Neither did Carrie.”
“That must’ve been quite a blow.”
“It was tough on both of us.”
“You’re still sailing, I see. What about Carrie? I mean before she ran away.”
“Didn’t keep her off the lake at all. Affected her in other ways, though. She got real quiet.”
Cork sipped his Leinie’s. Verga’s eyes had shifted away from the table, and Cork saw that he was watching the waitress, Mitzi, who was a redhead, tattooed and big-breasted and no more than twenty-one.
“Were you surprised when she ran away?”
Verga brought his attention back to the table. “Yeah, it hit me hard.”
“Any idea why she ran?”
“Anyone who says they understand teenagers, Mr. O’Connor, is a damn liar.”
“Did you try to find her?”
“Of course I did. I pushed the sheriff’s people down in Washburn to look into it. I talked to everybody I could think of who knew her. Went over to the reservation and asked around. That’s when I learned that Mariah was gone, too. That’s all I learned. Those people wouldn’t say shit to me.”
“How did you know she ran away? Couldn’t she have been abducted?”
“She packed up. Took everything with her that meant anything. My housekeeper, Bibi, told me another girl picked her up in a car.”
“What girl?”
“Bibi couldn’t say. Never saw her before.”
“Mariah Arceneaux?”
“Not her. Bibi knew Mariah. She’d been to my house before and had gone sailing with Carrie and me. This was someone else.”
“What did she look like? Did your housekeeper give any description?”
“Indian. That’s about it.”
“Young? Old?”
“A kid, like Carrie. But Bibi did say she was driving a nice set of wheels. Kind of unusual for a kid from Bad Bluff. I told all this to Joe Hammer, the investigator from the sheriff’s office. He didn’t get anywhere with it.”
Cork’s statement was a tough one, and he was quiet while he considered how to couch it.
“I talked to Hammer, too. Considering the state in which Carrie was found, one of his speculations is that she might have been involved in sex traffic.”
“You mean like a prostitute? Carrie?” Verga’s eyebrows came together, storm clouds colliding. Anger stirred in the algae-green eyes beneath. “He never said that to me.”
“You think he’s wrong,” Cork said, stating it as fact.
“I think when I see him next, I may have to put my fist down his throat. Spreading garbage like that about Carrie. Who the hell does he think he is?”
“Does the name Raven Duvall mean anything to you?”
“Nothing. Why? Should it?”
“It’s possible that’s the name of the girl who drove off with Carrie.”
“And you know this how?”
“It’s the kind of thing I get paid to find out.”
“You said you’re working for Mariah’s family, yes?”
“I said I was investigating on their behalf.”
Verga eyed him a long time and with suspicion. “Someone else footing the bill?”
“Client confidentiality,” Cork replied.
“What does it cost to hire you?”
Cork told him.
Verga said, “I hire you, you’ll share anything you find out with me?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. The Arceneaux family. For them, you’re finding Mariah. But for me, you’ll be looking for someone else.”
“Who?”
“The son of a bitch who killed Carrie.”
“Officially, her death was an accident.”
“You believe that?”
“At this point, I don’t really know what to believe.”
“So what about it? You’ll work for me?”
“Let me think on it, okay? The ethics might be tricky.”
“Ethics.” Verga finished his beer, set it hard on the tabletop with a crack of glass against wood, and said, “Fuck ethics.”