Tolliver turned to Walter and me. “Do you have any more questions for Fred?”
“Not unless he can explain devil moons,” I said.
Stavis chose to laugh, again.
We were starting to move toward the Breaker when Tolliver suddenly shouted, “Lanny!”
We looked where Tolliver was looking, at the Outcast.
Lanny Keasling stood at the bow of Robbie Donie's fishing boat, back against the railing, facing the wheelhouse, looking like a captain assessing the state of his ship. An interrupted captain. He was frozen, head swiveled to face us.
“Lanny.” Tolliver started toward Jorge's dock. “What are you doing?”
Lanny dashed past the wheelhouse to the stern of the boat and pointed to the drum roller upon which the net was wound. “It's tangled,” he said, “I'm going to fix it.”
“You can't fix it, the boat doesn't belong to you.”
“I'm going to buy it.”
“That very well may be, and I'll be the first to congratulate you.” Tolliver's tone was calm, without a hint of condescension. “But currently the boat is in police custody. You shouldn't be aboard.”
Lanny stared at Tolliver. His face was pale.
Pale as a moon jelly, I thought.
“Why don't you climb off and come over here,” Tolliver said. “Let's have a chit-chat.”
“I can't, I have to go, I can't have a chit-chat with you and I'm not supposed to talk to Cassie any more and I have to go.”
Lanny nimbly leapt off the boat onto Jorge's dock and dashed up the boatyard and disappeared around the cinder-block building.
CHAPTER 33
I said, “Bless Doug Tolliver and his azaleas.”
Walter went to find his cell phone.
I gazed out the Shoreline Motel's sliding glass door at the golden afternoon. Sunlight angled in and made me squint. Still a gorgeous day.
A long day.
A day of tragedy and a vision of swimmers that I feared was going to revisit me in my dreams.
A day of puzzles.
A day of accomplishment, too, balancing the ledger. It had begun with the discovery out at the dunes and, just now, it became a day of revelation.
“Bless Google search,” Walter said, opening his phone.
Yes, give credit where credit is due.
Still, it was Tolliver's azaleas that had set us on the search path.
I regarded the shining blue sea, flat and calm and vast. Looking utterly untouchable. I squinted, blurring the scene, picturing what lay out there, somewhere between the beach and the horizon.
I supposed one could say that the marine equivalent of Tolliver's azaleas was phytoplankton — if one were to take metaphoric license. I took it.
“Doug!” Walter said, his voice honeyed. “The red float — we've had a breakthrough.”
The azalea breakthrough.
No need to contact Walter's forensic paint analyst.
“What breakthrough?” Tolliver's voice, tinny through the speakerphone, sounded drained as I felt.
Walter's own voice turned brisk. “I believe you'll want to bring Oscar Flynn in for questioning.”
I listened as Walter explained to Tolliver what we had discovered, and I nodded when Tolliver emitted a long low whistle.
“I'll want you here,” Tolliver said. “You need to do the techy talk with him. I'll give you a call when I get hold of him — let you know when to come in.”
It was almost an hour before Tolliver called back.
Walter put him on speaker again.
“Never mind coming in here, I've located Flynn and we're going to go talk to him where he is now. You won't goddamn believe this.”
“What?” Walter asked. “Where?”
“The aquarium.”
CHAPTER 34
The tank was circular, a good ten feet in diameter. It gave the impression of a huge blue eye, awash in tears.
Tolliver stood with his back to the tank, facing us. “Here's what we know. This is as-of when I got the call, before I called you. Keep in mind, the natural history center is undergoing upgrades, new exhibits. They're not open to the public yet so nobody was in here until a couple hours ago when a worker passed through and saw… Well, you see.”
Yes. The empty tank.
I saw but I could not yet bring myself to believe.
The identifying plaque was already in place: Aurelia aurita.
The room itself had a nearly-finished look. A wall of photographs showed local marine life — crabs, fishes, anemones, kelp. A touch pool sat in the center of the room, already populated with starfish and sea urchins and hermit crabs. The room's bamboo floor was polished, unscuffed. The walls were painted an eggshell white. A painter's tarp was bunched in one corner and open cardboard boxes were shoved in another.
Staff were coming and going, passing through the aquarium room, to and from other rooms. Most wore casual you-caught-me-off-duty clothes, shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops. Most looked blown-away.
“Way I understand it,” Tolliver continued, “the aquarium has what's called an open system. Basically, water gets pumped out of the bay and into the exhibit to bring in, you know, the nutrients, and then it exits back into the bay. You get this gentle flow through the jelly tank, keep the buggers suspended, and then the screen over the outflow keeps them from getting funneled into the pipe. And then there's filters and that kind of thing but I didn't get into that, I only got the dummy version. Anyway, you can see that the screen became unattached, as I was told.”
Hanging by a screw was more like it. Stuck to the dangling screen was a gelatinous blob. Collateral damage. Not all the jellies made it out alive.
“And also, the screen on the pipe that goes into the bay became unattached. So I was told.”
“Sabotage?” Walter asked.
I looked around the room for Oscar Flynn but did not see him.
Tolliver said, “Sabotage would be my first call. But, I'm told, it could be just mishaps, the kind of thing that happens in the final stages of a project. Last minute changes, equipment problems, rush rush rush. I asked for a report. Should get something that makes some sense of it all real soon.”
I said, “So the moons we saw today…this is where they came from?”
“Seems so.”
“An aquarium. The kind of place you visit on vacation.”
“They'll need to do their tests but it looks like this is the source. It does explain the timing of what we saw today. Ebb tide last night around midnight starts taking the escaping jellies out the channel and then they ride the prevailing currents southward. By the time that bunch is arriving at Diablo Canyon, the next ebb tide, around noon, is sweeping the remaining jellies out through the channel. Past the beach. What we saw.” His lean features were drawn even leaner, grim.
“Then Dr. Russell was incorrect?” Walter asked. “Regarding the source?”
“Not necessarily. I'm told the aquarium collected its, uh, starter batch of jellies just offshore, with some kind cup-on-a-stick gadget. From those, they've been culturing new batches.”
“All of them cultured from a new strain of Aurelia? Meaning the aquarium has been growing toxic moons from the get-go?”
“So it would seem.”
“My God,” Walter said.
Tolliver nodded. “I didn't even think of this place as the source, earlier out at Diablo. Out at the beach. I knew they were adding an aquarium to the facility. But I didn't even think…”
“Who would?” I said.