His right hand gripped the handle, trying to pull it downward. Nothing happened. He fought with the door latch. Ninety years of rust had welded it shut and no amount of pulling on Tom’s part could possibly encourage it to turn.
A new wave of fear churned in his stomach. Had his map of the ship, carefully reconstructed in his mind, been wrong? Had he made a major mistake in his assumptions. Could he have headed South when he was supposed to head North? Worse yet, what if he was exactly where he was meant to be? What if his attacker had locked the hatchway shut, permanently entombing him 205 feet below the surface of Lake Superior?
The thought chilled him.
How long would Sam Reilly wait for him to resurface? Even if he did come after him, there was no certainty that he’d be able to open the door. The latch, after all, was rusted shut.
That thought made Tom stop.
Then, beneath his facemask, he smiled — because if he couldn’t open the latch, his attacker couldn’t close it.
Tom shook his head, and pressed on the door.
It swung open.
Chapter Eleven
Sam listened to Tom as he recalled the events down below.
They waited at the site for another good two hours — much longer than any diver could possibly have stayed down below without being overcome by hypothermia. The dive boat never returned. According to the Annabelle May’s sweeping radar, there were no other boats anywhere within five miles of the dive site.
After an hour of silence, Sam said, “There’s a chance the other diver surfaced somewhere already and is now surface swimming toward Isle Royale.”
Tom crossed his arms beneath a thick woolen jacket. “Unlikely. I reached the surface a long time before him and my core body temperature was already low enough that I struggled to concentrate and my fine motor-skills were shot to pieces. I couldn’t even hold a compass, let alone have the attention span to maintain a heading for three miles to Isle Royale.”
“So he’s dead, then?”
“Drowned or froze. Either way, his friends left him to die.”
Sam sighed. “And now we’re still no closer to finding out what’s so important about the wreck of the J.F. Johnson that makes her so important.”
“What do you want to do?” Tom asked.
“Let’s find somewhere nice to anchor for the night, then we’ll go visit our friend Mark at the dive shop again.”
“Really?” A wry smile formed on Tom’s gregarious face. “You want to kick over that hornet nest again?”
“Sure. Why not? It’s the only lead we have.”
“For starters. It might just get us killed and we still don’t know who we’re trying to help here. There’s no doubt in my mind the good Senator was involved in something he shouldn’t have been or at least he knew about something and kept his mouth shut. Heck, if I had to guess, I’d say he was on the take for looking the other way. Either way, I don’t see a lot of innocent parties here.”
Sam said, “Except the son.”
“Yeah. Except the son.” Tom shook his head. “All right. Let’s go find a calm bay to anchor in and tomorrow we’ll go upset some nice folks down at the dive shop.”
Sam waited for Tom to start the twin diesel engines. A moment later, he stepped outside the upper deckhouse and told him to drop the mooring lines. Sam slipped the rope out of the cleat on the bow and dropped the lines overboard.
“She’s free,” he shouted.
“Good-oh,” Tom replied, as he stepped back into the wheelhouse.
Sam followed him and the Annabelle May quickly picked up speed, cruising toward the more protected side of Isle Royale.
Ten minutes into the trip, Sam’s satellite phone — sitting in the charging cradle next to the navigation table — started to ring.
He stepped over, picked it up and answered the call. “Hello.”
Elise spoke without preamble. “found something from the statement you discovered written in red inside the wheelhouse of the J.F. Johnson wreckage.”
“You found what happened to the Meskwaki Gold Spring?”
“No. As far as I can tell, it’s nothing more than a legend used to drive hoards of gold prospectors into the region during the late nineteenth century. But I know who Stanford was.”
“Really?” Sam felt a surge of hope. “Who?”
“His full name was Stanford Perry.”
“Go on!”
“In the 1920s he was a laborer on a number of local barges and paddle-steamers. There’s no record of where he was born or when he came to Minnesota. You want to know what ship he was working aboard in 1931?”
“He was on board the J.F. Johnson?”
“That’s right. It gets better.”
“Go on.”
“After the events of the J.F. Johnson’s sinking, Stanford’s life appeared to make a dramatic turn for the better. Some say that he might have used the loss of the vessel to seize control of a local organized crime syndicate he was working for at the time. Maybe the previous boss died in the accident, I don’t know. But what I do know, is two years later, he was an important man about town in Duluth.”
Sam said, “Tell me you know who his descendants are!”
“His grandson was none other than Arthur Perry.”
“Senator Arthur Perry’s family made its fortune in the bootlegging industry of the 1920s!”
Elise said, “Exactly.”
Sam ended the satellite phone call and hung it back on its charging cradle.
He looked at Tom. “Change of plans. I’m going to Duluth to catch a flight.”
“At this time of night?” Tom asked. “Where?”
“New York. The Senator lied to us and I want to know why.”
Chapter Twelve
Virginia Beaumont glanced at the dead body on the pavement.
The decision of whether to resuscitate someone or not never bothered her. Some paramedics saw it akin to playing God. But she didn’t see it that way. If there was ever any chance that her attempt might save a person’s life, she would try. If a person was dead, no amount of advanced life-saving medical intervention could change that.
Her practiced blue eyes rolled across the body, searching for any sign of life worth chasing. Any agonal breaths or color left in the skin. There weren’t any. Her entire experience as a paramedic told her this one was hopeless. It was only as a human courtesy that she reached down for the central pulse on the neck of the bloated body, sprawled spread-eagled on the greasy pavement. There wasn’t any.
The man was dead.
The body lay on a cement plinth under the awning of a Chinese restaurant, next to a pile of oozing black trash bags. The dulled eyes of the man were open, having taken on the same featureless gray as the sky they stared at. Cold, soft stillness greeted Virginia’s blue nitrile gloved fingertips, as she knew it would. The morning air was just crisp enough to confine the stench emanating from the bags threatening to split and ooze onto the Baxter Street sidewalk, and from her position at a high kneeling crouch it occurred to Virginia that the air was mercifully bearable. It was definitely crisp enough to chill the dead and dying with a savage quickness, so time of death was anyone’s guess.
Without removing his hands from his pockets, Virginia’s partner, Anton Mercia motioned with his elbow toward the cardiac monitor on the sidewalk adjacent to their kits. “You want me to take a rhythm strip, Ginny? “