It was only then that McCaleb finally realized he was naked.
Nothing was missing, nothing was disturbed. At least as far as McCaleb could tell. Nothing appeared out of order. The contents of his leather bag, which he had left on the galley table, seemed to be as he remembered them. He found the thick sheaf of documents he had shoved into the galley cabinet earlier in the day to be where he had left it. McCaleb inspected the sliding door and found scratches from a screwdriver. He knew how easy it was to pop a sliding door with a screwdriver. He also knew that the pop was always louder outside the structure than inside. He had been lucky. Somehow the pop or something else had woken him.
With the security guard, Shel Newbie, watching, McCaleb finished checking every drawer and cabinet in the salon and found nothing amiss.
“What about below?” Newbie asked.
“Not enough time,” McCaleb said. “I heard him as soon as he opened the door. I guess I scared him off before he did whatever he was coming to do.”
McCaleb was silent as he thought about the possibility that the intruder had not come to steal anything. He thought about Bolotov again but quickly dismissed it. The figure he had seen move sideways through the sliding door was too small to have been the Russian.
“Can I come up? I could make some coffee.”
McCaleb turned to the stairs. Graciela was there. When he had returned to the stateroom to get dressed, he had told her it would be better if she stayed below. But here she was, wearing her pink nightshirt over a pair of baggy gray sweatpants she had taken from his closet. Her hair was a bit disheveled and she couldn’t have looked sexier. He stared at her silently for a moment before finally answering.
“Well, we’re about to wrap it up, I think.”
“Should I call Pacific Division?” Newbie asked.
McCaleb shook his head.
“It was probably just some dock punk looking to rip off my Loran or the compass,” he said, though he didn’t believe it. “I don’t want to drag the police in. We’ll be up all night.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Thanks for helping, Shel. I appreciate it.”
“Glad to. I guess I’ll go back out then. I’m going to have to write up an incident report. In the morning they might want to make an LAPD report anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just don’t feel like waiting up for them to get over here. That run took it out of me. Tomorrow will be fine.”
“Okay, then.”
Newbie saluted and left. McCaleb waited a few moments and then looked at Graciela, who was still in the stairwell.
“You okay?”
“Yes. Scared is all.”
“Why don’t you go back down. I’ll be right down.”
She went back to the stateroom. McCaleb closed the slider and worked the lock to see if it was still operable. It was. He reached up to the overhead rod racks and took down the wooden gaff handle. He placed it in the door’s track and used it as a wedge to hold the door closed. It would do for the night. But he knew he would have to rethink the boat’s security.
When he was finished with the door and reasonably assured of security, McCaleb looked down at his bare feet on the salon’s Berber carpet. For the first time he realized that the rug was wet. He then remembered how the marina lights had shone off the body of the intruder as he had stood near the door.
ON THE DRIVE up to the Times plant in the Valley, McCaleb sat in the passenger seat of Graciela’s Volkswagen and was mostly silent. His mind moved over the activities of the night like an anchor dragging across a sandy bottom, seeking but finding no purchase, nothing to grip.
After he had noticed the wet spot on the carpet, he had retraced the chase to the parking lot and found the dock also was wet. It was a cool, crisp night and too early for the morning moisture to have formed. The intruder had clearly been wet when he had broken into the boat. The shine of light on his body indicated he had probably been wearing a wetsuit. The question McCaleb could not answer now was why?
Before they had left, McCaleb had gone over to Buddy Lockridge’s boat to see if his neighbor was there. He found Buddy, looking disheveled as usual, sitting in the cockpit reading a book called Hocus. McCaleb asked him if he had spent the night on the boat and he said he had. When asked why he hadn’t answered the phone, Buddy insisted that it was because it hadn’t rung. McCaleb let it go, thinking either Lockridge had simply been passed out and hadn’t heard his call or McCaleb had pushed the wrong speed-dial button.
He told Lockridge that he didn’t need him as a driver for the day, but that he wanted to hire him as a diver.
“You want me to scrape your hull?”
“No. I want you to search the hull. And the bottom. And all the piers around the boat.”
“Search? Search for what?”
“I don’t know. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Whatever you say. But I ripped my wetsuit again doing that Bertram. As soon as I sew it up, I’ll go over and check it out.”
“Thanks. Put it on my tab.”
“You got it. Hey, is your lady friend going to be driving you now?”
He was looking past McCaleb at Graciela standing in the stern of The Following Sea. McCaleb looked at her and then back at Lockridge.
“No, Buddy. Just today. She’s got to introduce me to some people. That okay?”
“Sure. It’s okay.”
In the car McCaleb sipped from the mug of coffee he had brought with him and looked out the window, still bothered by Lockridge not having answered his call for help. They were in the Sepulveda pass, going over the Santa Monica Mountains. Most of the traffic on the 405 was going the other way.
“What are you thinking about?” Graciela asked.
“Last night, I guess,” he said. “Trying to figure it out. Buddy is going to take a dive under the boat today, maybe find out what the guy was doing.”
“Well, are you sure you want to see this Times guy now? We could reschedule it.”
“No, we’re already on our way. It can’t hurt to talk to as many people as we can. We still don’t know what any of this stuff from yesterday means. Until we do, we should keep plugging away.”
“Sounds good. He said we could talk to some of her friends who worked there, too.”
McCaleb nodded and reached down to the leather bag on the floor. It had grown fat with all the documents and tapes he had accumulated. He had decided to leave nothing from the case behind on the boat, in case of another break-in. And adding to the bag’s weight was his gun, a Sig-Sauer P-228. Other than at his interview with Bolotov, he hadn’t carried the weapon since he had retired from the bureau. But when Graciela went into the shower, he had removed it from its drawer again and slid the clip into it. He did not chamber a round-following the same safety precaution he had always practiced while with the bureau. He then made room for the pistol in his bag by jettisoning his medical kit. His plan was to be back at the boat before it was time for him to take more pills.
He dug through the stacks of paperwork in the bag until he found his legal pad and he opened it to the timeline he had constructed from the reports in the LAPD murder book. He read the top and found what he wanted.
“Annette Stapleton,” he said.
“What about her?”
“You know her? I want to talk to her.”
“She was Glory’s friend. She came over once to meet Raymond. And then she was at the funeral. How do you know about her?”
“Her name is in the LAPD stuff. She and your sister talked in the parking lot that night. I want to talk to her about other nights. You know, see if your sister was worried about anything. The LAPD never spent much time with Stapleton. Remember, they were running the random-holdup angle from the start.”