After a long moment I said, “Sometimes the job cuts close to the bone.”
Walter, in the back seat, was silent.
We’d each lost loved ones six months ago. We’d each trusted in the humanity of someone who had none.
We all fell silent.
I understood Tolliver’s rant, in spades. I’d grown up in a small town, too. I’d joined Walter in the forensic geology lab but we were based in an idyllic ski town without much serious crime. I'd worn rose-colored glasses about my hometown, just like Doug Tolliver. For the most part, the serious crime that required forensic geologist expertise took place elsewhere. Walter and I would leave the nest to do our job. And then one day everything went bad at home. We lived on a volcano that blew the town to hell, and murder went along with the hellishness. Yeah, I knew the shock of losing faith.
I yanked my thoughts from the small town of Mammoth Lakes back to the small town of Morro Bay.
Back to the town at hand.
Not having grown up in Morro Bay, not having watched these little kids grow up into their destinies, I had no trouble suspecting the Keaslings of foul play or at the least subterfuge. Even Lanny, I was distressed to admit. And Fred Stavis? Oscar Flynn? Wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.
But mistrust and suspicion were, at best, like cat whiskers. Sensors of something on the wind. Finding and proving that something required another animal. A dog on the hunt.
It was hard evidence that would tell the story.
I turned to Tolliver. “Doug, anything new on the diver's boat?”
“Nothing.” He sighed. “Nobody's reported a boat missing. And no more boats found adrift.”
“What about prints on his dive tank?”
“Nothing. My techs are rushing this case but what we've got is a big fat zero on the entire fingerprint front. No prints on your yellow float — be standard for somebody handling marine gear to wear gloves. No unidentified prints on Robbie Donie's duffel bag. Far as the Outcast prints go, unless we find some record of Robbie's charters we've got no way to find out who might have been on board with him the night he disappeared.” Tolliver drummed the wheel. “And the latest in the department of nothing, we've got zip on the container of anchovies that poisoned Joao Silva. Smart perp. No prints.”
I said, “You've got the anchovies. That's a something.”
Tolliver gave a short laugh. “That it is. The lab's on it.”
Walter said, “Has it been determined that it was domoic acid that poisoned Silva?”
“Looks like it. He's still unconscious but the docs diagnosed him by the symptoms, and the symptoms fit with domoic poisoning.” Tolliver glanced at Walter in the rear view. “I know, small world, what with that sea lion thing you two just saw.”
“Any chance there are toxin-bearing anchovies being caught and distributed?”
“Already on it,” Tolliver said. “I sent my people out to the docks and the bait shops. They didn’t turn up any bad chovies. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there — everybody's on alert.”
I asked, “What about the container, itself? Anything more on that?”
“Department of nothing,” Tolliver said. “This particular style is standard. Like Sandy said, used all over town.”
“Sandy seems the CYA-type.” I added, “Cover your ass.”
Tolliver snorted. “I’ve run across plenty of CYA. As for Sandy, she can be a bitch on wheels but she tells it like it is.” Tolliver's hands tightened on the wheel. “At least that's what I always thought.”
I asked, “You mentioned that she lost her tugboat license. How?”
“Accident of some kind. There was a question of negligence. I don’t have the details.”
“But she’s licensed to captain a whale-watching boat?”
“Different license. Her tug master’s license was suspended for eight months. The tug owner wouldn’t rehire her once she was off probation. Word is, he blacklisted her. So she ended up buying the Sea Spray and getting an inspected-vessel license to drive it. Like I said, different license, different gig.”
I recalled Sandy’s bitter silence when Walter asked about the tugboat photo on her office wall. I recalled her obvious disdain at captaining a whale-watching boat. So Sandy Keasling ends up nursing her grievance in her hacienda on the bluff. Still, as best I could see, the loss of her tugboat license had nothing to do with Robbie Donie or John Silva. There was no logical connection.
“Welcome to San Luis Obispo,” Tolliver said, lifting a finger from the wheel to point ahead.
The highway now entered a good-sized town sprawled beneath another towering volcanic plug.
“Up ahead, to the left,” Tolliver said. “There’s the Cal Poly campus. Let’s leave human ugliness aside and go find out what’s happening in my ocean.”
“And get an ID of my coral,” Walter said.
CHAPTER 22
“Think of it as the sucky zone,” Dr. Russell said, gesturing at the undulating red blob on the giant auditorium screen.
She flashed us a movie-star smile.
Violet Russell, Professor of Marine Ecology at Cal Poly State University, had just finished conducting a class and remained on stage for our instruction. She'd promised to get to Walter's coral, once she explained what was going on in Tolliver's patch of ocean.
“Right now we're gasping for breath,” she said. “We're oxygen-starved.”
I bet her delivery went over well with her students. Sure had our attention. The woman could command a room. Professional in her white linen pants and red linen blazer and beige silk tee. Witty in the silver starfish clipped to the silver streak in her Afro. Practical in her leather sneakers, smoothly striding across the stage to the podium.
She tapped a computer keyboard and our blob was now superimposed on a profile of the continental shelf.
We hovered just off the shelf.
“Any idea what causes it?” she asked.
Nobody volunteered.
“I’ll give you a hint. It’s not caused by the zombie apocalypse.”
We dutifully laughed.
“Oookay, bear with me, I’m used to competing with Facebook, or whatever the site-du-jour is with my students. Let me adjust. I’ve got two scientists and a police detective.”