Deek used the sad little soap to wash in the dribble that passed for a shower in his motel room. It was a mom-and-pop-type operation, that kind of place that looked like a Motel 6 but didn’t quite meet their quality standards. The bedspread had cigarette burns and the carpet held dark stains that made Deek think of serial killers.
He used a towel with the absorbency and weight of tissue paper to dry himself, then he pulled on some pants and sat on the bed and listened to the police scanner. A half-eaten sub sat beside the television, which showed a hundred channels of static.
The department budget extended to better hotels than this but he wanted to keep costs to a minimum in case he needed to fudge his expenses later. He had never chased down a terrorist plot before and he wasn’t sure what it might entail, but he knew as an economist that an empty bank account limited the options.
Deek was toweling his hair and wondering whether Sam and Dusty were going to help or send him packing back to DC, when he heard something on the scanner. The usual chatter was replaced by an emergency call to a fire on the water.
Deek focused on the call by staring at the scanner as if it had a screen. An explosion at a fishing pier. Something about it set Deek’s imagination running. He needed to see this for himself. But he couldn’t.
His rental car was at the resort where the boat show was to be held. He had hired a boat that was now tied up at the marina on Pine Island. Dusty had brought him back over to Pine Island after the party broke up at the strange pontoon boat that never moved, and then the detective had given Deek a ride back to his motel.
Deek checked the map on his phone. The pier with the explosion was several miles away and was going to require a taxi ride, and although he could expense the ride when he got back to DC, Deek wasn’t sure how much more his credit could take. The app said not much, but he hoped there was some kind of wiggle room in those numbers.
He listened to the chatter on the scanner as he hung his towel and put on a shirt, then he sat back on the bed. It took him a few minutes to realize that he was tapping his foot like he was in an electric chair. He had to know. Explosions didn’t happen on the water for no reason. Was it a test run for the terrorists?
Deek grabbed his wallet and was calling a taxi as he stepped out the door. Twenty-five minutes later he arrived at the marina. It looked like the fun was over. There were no lights, no sirens, no tactical teams in body armor. He walked over to a guy in shorts and a tank top who was watching a cop talking to a woman at the entrance to a long pier.
“What happened?” asked Deek.
“Some dude’s boat blew up.” The guy sniffed. “I left my damn rod on the pier. Cop won’t let us back on until he’s spoken to everyone. What’s there to say?”
“Anyone hurt?”
The guy shrugged. “Didn’t see them taking a body away, so…”
When the cop finished talking with the woman, the guy in the tank top approached him and Deek followed.
“Can I get my fishing rod now?”
The cop looked down the pier and then back. “Go on. But come straight back. Fishing’s done for tonight.”
The guy took off and the cop looked at Deek. “You see anything?” he asked.
“No, I just got here. I’m Morrison, Maritime Administration.” He tried to make it sound like he was FBI or something, but he wasn’t sure he nailed it.
“Maritime Administration? Never heard of it.”
“Accidents on the water are something we track. What happened here?”
“A leaky fuel line on an old boat. It blew up.”
“Casualties?”
“Nope.”
“Who owns the boat?”
“Dunno. It’s an old fiberglass thing, no registration decal, so no telling. I’m gonna wait here a while to see if the guy turns up, otherwise I guess he’ll come looking for us when he finds his boat gone.”
“What guy?”
“Whoever owns it.”
“You get any kind of description?”
“Old guy, with a beard. Maybe. Nobody actually saw him get out of the boat, and I don’t know how an old guy gets up onto this pier from a boat anyway. But that’s what the witnesses saw. An old guy walking off the pier shortly before the explosion. Crazy old loon probably didn’t maintain his tank. Was probably lucky he didn’t get blown up too.”
Deek thanked him and walked away. He’d wasted good money on a cab ride for nothing, and he couldn’t blow any more on another taxi. He would have to walk back to the motel. Or was his car closer?
Suddenly Deek felt the world spinning. Maybe he was chasing shadows like his boss said. Maybe he was seeing things that just weren’t there. He was risking his career—whatever that meant—on a flight of fancy. He felt the compulsion to throw up, so he ran toward a garbage can. For some reason that felt better than vomiting on the ground. He gripped the can and convulsed as he dry wretched. The taste of an hours old meatball sub burned his throat but nothing else came up.
He couldn’t even vomit right.
Deek wiped his face as he looked down into the dark trash can. He saw something furry and recoiled when he thought it might be a raccoon. After he had pulled his heart from his throat, he looked back into the can. It wasn’t a raccoon. He reached in and pulled out something dark and soft. It was like hair, but not real hair. He turned it around and straightened it out.
It was a long fake beard. The kind of thing a person might wear for Halloween if they were dressing up as a lumberjack. Only it wasn’t Halloween, not even close. Then he recalled what the cop had said. An old guy with a beard. Only now the beard was in Deek’s hand.
Deek strode away. He had something, he knew it. He wasn’t sure what, and he wasn’t sure how he would sell the idea of a fake beard meaning anything, but his gut was telling him it was something. He had to tell Sam. He had to tell Dusty.
He had to get back to his room. He checked his phone and found that his car was about the same distance away in the other direction. A two-hour walk around the maze of canals. But at least then he’d have his wheels.
As he walked, he processed what he knew and what he thought he knew and his confidence ebbed and flowed like a vicious tide. By the time he was halfway there he knew only two things for sure: he was going to devour what was left of a crusty old submarine sandwich and he was going to sleep like the dead.
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* * *
A few hours later, the morning spread bright and warm across the second-floor balcony of the safehouse, where Angler sat drinking coffee. His first safehouse had been arranged for him, and it was still available should he need it, but Angler preferred staying under everyone’s radar.
The house sat on stilts with a golf cart parked underneath, in a small subdivision of houses at the north end of the Baskin Island. He had tied up his rental boat at an empty pier on the back bay of the island and walked to the house along quiet, sandy tracks. The house was vacant—such was the benefit of home rental websites with calendars—so it was just a matter of walking the area until he found the place that matched the online photos.
The balcony was separated from the homes around it by a thick canopy of shade trees and cocoplum hedges. From his vantage point he overlooked a grass airstrip that cut roughly east-west through the trees like a scar. His attention was drawn to the sound of an engine starting up with too much choke, a spluttering that firmed into the solid throbbing of a small aircraft.
A couple minutes later a four-seater Cessna rolled out from beside another house and motored to the end of the runway. It sat for a moment—Angler assumed the pilot was doing his final checks. Although there was no tower, the pilot was probably getting clearance from the local commercial airport in Fort Myers.
Then the engine roared and the aircraft bounced along the strip and took off well before it got anywhere near the end. Angler watched it bank away to the north, then looked back to the airfield, where a man walked a French bulldog onto the strip and away toward the east of the island.
Angler sipped his coffee and thanked the homeowner for leaving the house well stocked. Plans were forming in his head. Ways in and ways out. Staging points and entry points. Threats from security and law enforcement. There were only a few more boxes to check, and Angler planned to check those after he had a second cup of caffeine.
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* * *
Sam took her boat over to Pineland. Hers was a part-time role with the sheriff’s office, so she had no rostered shift, but she towed Deek’s rental skiff back to Chris’s marina on her own time. She took a quick look at the scuba storage where someone had broken in and found Chris had repaired the cage with baling wire. Then she sipped a hot tea and used her cell phone to call Enoch’s office while she had reception.
Enoch Brookes was a wealthy investor who split his time between the hubbub of New York City and the quiet anonymity of Baskin Island. He had been friends with Sam’s uncle, Herm, for decades. Together Herm and Brookes had scuppered attempts by developers to overturn the nature conservancy on Baskin Island. To that end, Brookes had purchased the four homes that had been built at the south side of the island to prevent developers buying their way in. Brookes stayed in the southernmost house when he was on the island, and the others remained vacant, though maintained.
“Brookes Capital,” said the woman who answered the phone.
“Margaret, this is Sam Waters. I’m a friend of Enoch’s from Baskin Island.”
“Yes, Sam, of course. How are things in Florida?”
“Monotonously sunny.”
“Careful what you wish for, the other option might be a hurricane.”
“Oh, I don’t wish for anything else. But I wondered if Enoch was available?”
“I’m afraid not. Can I help?”
“Maybe. Does Enoch ever rent out his house on Baskin?”
“His private home? Never.”
“What about, how do I put this, his spare houses?”
“On Baskin? No, not as a rule.”
“It’s just that there seems to be someone docked at one of the homes, and I wanted to check before I barged in on someone to whom he gave permission.”
“Let me check with him. He’s in Asia right now so it might be a few hours.”
“No problem, thanks, Margaret.”
“Thank you, Sam. Enoch appreciates you all keeping your eye on things.”
“No problem. Bye.”
Sam ended the call as she saw Dusty motor over from the island into the commercial dock where he left his police-issue SUV overnight. She wandered over.
“I called Enoch,” said Sam. “He’s in Asia but his secretary said she’d get back to me.”
“I think Margaret’s a personal assistant, but okay.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Perception, I guess. I thought you’d be all over that.”
“If it’s the same job I don’t see how playing semantics helps.”
“If you say so, Sam.” Dusty tied up his skiff and walked toward his car. “I looked up the boat this morning. It’s registered to a holding company that is owned by Harold Hildebrand, so I guess the economist’s intel is good. On that at least.”
“What do you make of the rest of it?”
“It’s thin bordering on crazy. I put in a call to the FBI field office just to cover my bases.”
“Your bases? More like your ar—”
A horn blared from a small car tearing into the gravel lot. It skidded to a stop near Dusty and Sam, and Deek Morrison practically fell out of it.
“You’re both here. Cool. Did you hear about the explosion?”
Dusty and Sam traded a look. “Explosion?” they said in unison.
“Yeah, last night. You didn’t hear about it?”
“No,” said Sam. “Where?”
“The fishing pier up at the Cape Coral Yacht Club.”
“I know it. The pier blew up?”
“No. A boat did.”
“Someone blew up a boat?” asked Dusty. “How do you know this?”
“I was listening to the police scanner.”
“Really? You don’t have a TV?”
“I do, but it doesn’t work. But that’s not the point. I’m telling you there was an explosion.”
“Give me a minute,” said Dusty, walking away with his phone to his ear. For a moment Deek and Sam watched him having a conversation.
“This might not be related,” said Sam.
“It is. Listen, I went to—”
“What do you think this was?” asked Dusty, returning to them. “An old boat with a faulty tank blew up. Nothing suspicious.”
“Oh, it’s plenty suspicious,” said Deek. “If a boat blew up, where’s the owner?”
“Might have been stolen.”
“Then it’s suspicious.”
“But not terrorism.”
“I’m telling you, I went to the scene. The officer there told me witnesses reported an old, bearded man walking away from the boat shortly before the explosion.”
“So?”
“So, I found this.” Deek stepped back to his car and returned with a plastic freezer bag holding what looked like a dead squirrel.
“What is that?” asked Sam.
“A fake beard. I found it in a trash can near the dock.”
“You took evidence from a scene?” said Dusty.
“No. That’s my point, there was no scene. No one else was looking for anything. I found it and now I’m turning over to the police.” He handed it to Dusty.
“What do you want me to do with it? The chain of custody is a disaster. It could be yours.”
“It might not be evidence, but it might tell you something about the guy who was wearing it.”
Dusty glared at Sam as if it were her fault for bringing this lunatic into his life. “It was a decrepit, old boat, Deek. Not a super yacht.”
“Maybe it was a practice run.”
“Terrorists do their practice runs in Afghanistan or North Africa, not a couple miles from the target.”
“Unless they have a reason to practice nearby.”
Dusty shook his head. “All right, I’ll have it tested. But when it gives up nothing, I need you to crawl back into your cave and leave me to do real detective work.”
“Whatever,” said Deek. “I’m telling you, it fits.”
“You’re making the evidence fit the hypothesis. It’s a rookie mistake. Now, I’ve got to get to work.”
Dusty took the bag and drove away, leaving Sam and Deek looking at each other with nothing to say.
“What now?” asked Deek.
“I’ve got things to do.” Sam turned toward the dock. “Oh, and Deek. Don’t go doing anything stupid.”
“Did you check the boat?” He nudged his head toward Baskin Island.
“We did. It’s Hildebrand’s.”
“See?”
“He might have a legit reason to be there. Just let us check it out, Deek.”
She walked toward her boat and Deek kicked the gravel. Then he got back into his car and headed for the only place he could think to be.