“Are you being told?”
“Actually, no, not officially. But you know how locals are, Lieutenant. People do like to gossip.”
The EMS guys, for instance, I thought. I told him what had happened at the moonpool, and that the current thinking was that it might be Carl Trask who had drowned in the moonpool. Surprisingly, that produced another skeptical look.
I told him the Bureau special agent in charge was named Caswell, and then asked McMichaels if he knew Colonel Trask personally. He did. The colonel had made his manners some time ago when he took the physical security job at Helios. He’d called on all the local police departments and sheriff’s offices within twenty miles of Helios, and he was a prominent member of the multi-county nuclear accident response organization, as was Dr. Quartermain. Then the sergeant asked why we thought the body in the moonpool might be the good colonel. I told him, explaining the problem of making the physical identification. He grimaced, thought about that for a moment, and then asked when, exactly, all this had happened. I told him.
“That’s very odd, then,” he said. “Because I think you may be mistaken. In fact, I’m sure you’re mistaken. I saw Colonel Trask down at the Southport marina earlier this evening-he was refueling a rather large cabin cruiser, on which I believe he lives. Named the Keeper, is it?”
He was smiling now at my obvious surprise, and then he reached into his trousers pocket and produced a small envelope. “He even asked me to deliver this little love note to you; that’s how very sure I am that the good colonel is alive and well. Drop by the House sometime; we always have a pot of coffee going.”
He heaved himself out of the rocker and then paused at the top of the steps. “Dr. Quartermain,” he said. “An odd choice for the job he holds over there.”
“Because… what?” I was hoping McMichaels wasn’t some kind of closet racist.
“The word around town is that the good doctor has a bit of a gambling problem,” he said. “Of the compulsive persuasion, or so I’m told.”
“This something you know?”
“Indeed not. Just what I’ve been told by people who fancy the occasional game of cards.”
“Does the company know?”
He eyed me over those antique-looking spectacles. “Probably not,” he said. “Good night to you, sir.”
I opened the envelope after he left. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a series of numbers handwritten across the top. If Trask was trying for a secret code, he’d succeeded-I couldn’t make any sense of the numbers. The bigger news, of course, was that Trask was not the corpus delicti in dry layup at the plant. I looked at my watch-almost one o’clock. I decided to let my news wait until morning. There was no grieving widow, and, as best I knew, no clear and present danger to the plant.
The gossip about Ari Quartermain was interesting, if true, but I couldn’t see any connection between that and Allie Gardner. My brain swirled with all sorts of possibilities and mysteries, but I elected to shut down and get some much-needed sleep.
In the morning I briefed Pardee and Tony on our late-night visitor. Tony examined the note, then passed it to Pardee.
“Why would he send you a note?” Pardee asked.
“I don’t know-to let me know he’s alive? Maybe he’s heard all the rumors.”
“Or to set up a meet?” Pardee said. Tony asked for the note back and took a pencil to the numbers.
“Right,” he said. “The first set of numbers is very likely a latitude and longitude position; the second one is a date-time group, probably in Greenwich time-there’s a Z at the end of it. So: place and time.” He looked at his watch, which was festooned with time-zone dials. “Tonight, in fact, at 11:00 P.M. ”
“Good headwork,” I said. “Can you tell where?”
“I’ll need the GPS set on the boat, or at least a chart of the area. But these numbers look local-maybe in the Cape Fear estuary, or just off Carolina Beach, in the Atlantic. Did you tell him we have a boat?”
“He knows, and this makes sense, of sorts-a rendezvous at sea ought to be fairly private.”
“Unless one of the alphabets planted some devices,” Pardee said.
“Would they work out at sea?”
“They could record, but probably not transmit. But they could have placed a satellite tag, and if they did, they’ll know someone’s moving that boat around.”
“Shouldn’t we tell Dr. Quartermain?” Tony asked.
I hesitated. I felt ninety-percent sure that Ari Quartermain was not a bad guy, but the local police sergeant had sowed a seed or two of doubt. “Let’s lay eyes on Trask; that way our information will be firsthand,” I said. “Then we can tell Ari. In the meantime, let’s confirm the rendezvous point, and then we’ll start working backwards on Allie’s timeline.”
Tony went down to the marina to pull a chart so he could verify that the numbers did translate into a rendezvous position. Pardee and I called Ari’s office and asked his new secretary to see if those visitor log copies were available for us to pick up. My plan was to get those and then go into Wilmington and talk to Bernie about getting a look at her vehicle, or the report of their search, assuming they’d done one. I called our H amp;S offices back in Triboro to get the videotape Allie had taken of the legal lovebirds.
“What videotape?” Horace asked. “She never returned, remember?”
I knew that, I thought. Back to Bernie Price. I was more tired than I realized.
As it turned out, Bernie couldn’t help us, either. The feds had taken everything-the car, the contents, Allie’s backpack and briefcase, everything-and since the front seat of her car had registered on a Geiger counter, the Wilmington police impound was just as happy to see Allie’s radioactive ride go away.
Reluctantly, I called Creeps and explained what I needed. I harped on the fact that we were honoring our agreement: This was about Allie Gardner and not events at Helios. He told me he’d see what our Bureau could do.
For the moment, we were stymied. I called the marina over in Carolina Beach to see if the Keeper was present for duty. It was not, and Cap’n Pete had no information as to where the colonel had gone off to this time, as usual. He wouldn’t have told me if he knew, I suspected.
Another blank wall. We were batting a thousand this morning.
I decided to go for a run. When I got back, Pardee had news. Creeps had arranged access to Allie’s car, which was being held at the Customs and Border Protection office in Wilmington. They had, surprisingly, not yet put a forensics team on the car, so if we wanted to do so, the Wilmington resident agent would send an agent to be present. Any physical evidence would, of course, have to remain in federal control.
We stopped by the Helios admin center to pick up the visitor log copies and then went on to Wilmington. The Customs and Border Protection office was located on Medical Center Drive in a low, brick building that looked a lot like the local FBI resident agent’s office. There was a fenced parking compound behind the building containing some boats and various vehicles with the CBP logo on the doors. We went up to the front doors and confronted a video camera. There were no actual signs on the building indicating it was a government building, but the roof was littered with radio antennas, and the flags of both the United States and the Coast Guard fluttered out front. The doors clicked, and we began processing through security.
The agent sent over to assist us in our enquiries was none other than the lovely Samantha Young, ex-administrative-assistant at Quartermain’s office. She was dressed in a neatly tailored pantsuit, which did nothing to disguise her splendid physical assets. Even the CBP guys were impressed, which probably explained why we had four male agents helping us sign in.
“Hi, there, Ms. Judas,” I said.
“Ouch,” she said with a smile. “Nothing personal, you understand.”
“Just business, I know,” I said. “But it got personal once I went inside that Marine Corps rest home.”
“Whatever that is,” she said with a face chock-full of feigned innocence.