I'd lucked out.
The red float was real.
Walter said, “Let's have a look.”
He carefully slid aside the edge of the plastic bag, laying the float bare in the bright light of day. It was molded plastic, about two feet long. Structurally, it was like its cousin the yellow float, a standard marine float, so common you could surely find its like on a standard working boat in the Morro Bay harbor.
But there were differences. First, most obvious, was that the red float did not have a nylon rope attached.
Second — a much larger difference — was the nature of the color.
I said, “This float’s been painted.”
“Indeed,” Walter said, “and a rather slapdash job of it.”
Indeed. Either the paint had been applied hastily, or the painter was unskilled. The red coating was streaked, splotchy. Darker here, lighter there. And in one spot, I saw, the painter had missed a spot entirely, a thin strip with no red coating at all. The strip was yellow.
Somebody had covered a yellow float with red paint.
I didn't get it. “It's a molded-plastic float with molded-in color. Why apply a different color coating — even sloppily?”
Walter got his hand lens and bent to study the paint under the twenty-power lens. And then he sat back and folded the lens. He gave me a twenty-power look, that face he wears when he's circling a hypothesis. “It’s a somewhat granulated paint.”
“I know zilch about paints. Granulated or not.”
“Consider the color.”
I looked at the float, red as that bat-shaped starfish in the tide pool outside our motel. That color had lived in my dreams. “Yeah?”
“I know enough about paints to say that the red iron oxide hematite is often used as a pigment in red paint.”
I hadn't known that. Now I did. How about that — hematite in the rub-off on the Outcast and the Sea Spray, and used as a pigment here. I wondered if this was going to qualify as an aha moment. Neither of us said the word. Best to get this sucker back to the lab and confirm.
I still wanted a look at the eyebolt end of this float. The yellow float had a rope attached and I wondered why this float did not. I took out my hand lens and made my own small discovery. There were a few scratches on the eyebolt end and I thought perhaps the float had caught on something scratchy and then been yanked free and the rope fastener had broken.
I showed Walter my discovery and presented my small hypothesis.
“Plausible.”
“Good. Because I have no freaking idea about your discovery — why this float's been painted.”
He said, “We'll find out.”
We returned to the lab high on discoveries and vexed by questions and put the X-ray diffractometer to work.
The first answer came easily and made a certain sense. The scratches on the base of the float contained residue of stainless steel, a composition that included nickel and chromium — marine grade.
It was not out of the question that this float had been attached to something like that instrument cage we had found on the reef. Something with a sharp edge or two.
We moved on to the red paint.
Walter took a scraping and put it through the XRD and confirmed the identification of the powdery granules as the iron oxide Fe203. Hematite. It was an aha moment until the XRD identified a second component in the paint, sodium polysilicate. Googling identified that as, among its other uses, an adhesive agent that was soluble with extended duration in water.
This float was getting odder and odder.
Why use a water-soluble binder in a marine paint?
Further Googling led us to a class of marine paints called anti-fouling. They used biocides that were slowly released to repel organisms that liked to attach to all sorts of substrates in and around the sea. Hence the need for a water-soluble adhesive.
Not only that, red iron oxide primer was used as an anti-corrosive coating before the anti-fouling paint was applied.
We could have made sense of our paint, but for one thing: we did not have a biocide.
What we had was a puzzle.
I gazed out the glass door at the blue sea, and then back to the red float on our worktable. “So what's the point of this paint, with a temporary adhesive? If not anti-fouling?”
“I'd like to put that question to a forensic paint specialist.” Walter picked up his cell phone.
“You have somebody on speed-dial?”
“I'm phoning Doug, first, to bring him up to speed.”
“Maybe he'll know about weird marine paints.”
“You put marine and Doug Tolliver in the same sentence and who knows what pops up.”
CHAPTER 30
A small crowd was coalescing on the waterfront.
We were up above — on the outdoor deck of Fresco, Tolliver's favorite cafe — and I could not get a full view of what the crowd down below was examining.
Something in the water.
I nearly rose from my chair to see but then Tolliver said, “Anybody want dessert?” and I returned my attention to the table.
After leaving the Shoreline half an hour ago Walter and I had met up with Tolliver at the cop house. We'd dropped off the black garbage bag, which Tolliver dispatched to the county lab for fingerprinting. He'd had no idea what to make of the paint; we'd said we were keeping the float until we could consult with a specialist. Then we'd headed to the waterfront for lunch and further updates. Tolliver's only news was that the divers he'd sent out to Cochrane Bank this morning had found no sign of Robbie Donie's body, either at Target Red or Target Blue, and that he'd not yet learned who installed the instrument array. And so we'd spent lunchtime discussing the puzzle of the red float with the strange paint job.
I heroically declined dessert and Walter sighed and followed suit and Tolliver said, “You sure? They make an olallieberry pie that'll knock your socks off.”
I was sure the pie was all that he promised. The main course of smoked fish tacos would have dislodged my socks, had I been wearing socks. My stomach full, luxuriating in the warmth of the sun on my shoulders, I could understand why Tolliver was fond of this cafe. I could understand why he was fond of the entire town, of the picturesque waterfront and the shining blue water and the muscular tower of rock guarding the harbor. I could see why he was fond of the sea beyond, of his patch of blue ocean. I could darn near picture myself living here in a shack by the sea, kayaking through the gentle waters of the channel.
“Look at ‘em all.”
The shout drifted up from the waterfront.
I could definitely picture myself having a look this time.
This time, all three of us rose and moved to the deck railing and gazed down at the channel.
The water was lumpy.
Walter left two twenties on the table and we hustled down the stairway to the waterfront.
There was no reason to be afraid.
There had been no reason to be afraid yesterday on the swim through the eddy to the tunnel, when we had been engulfed in a bloom of comb jellyfish.
Comb jellies didn’t sting.
I stared down into the water.
“Moons,” Tolliver said.
Four nights ago I'd kayaked through this channel, paddling through a garden of jellies that looked like saucer moons and fried eggs and blue flowers, but here and now there were only moons.
Thousands of them. Swarming the channel. The bloom stretched out — back the channel toward the bay, and up ahead toward the harbor — and right in front of us the jellies clumped into a nearly solid mass.