Ty said over her shoulder as she left, “Purple’d be a cool color on you, Pammie, go for it.” She headed to Bick’s Bait and Rental on South Pier, wondering if Pammie read horror novels in bed at night. Talk about gruesome nightmares.
It was eight thirty in the morning, the sun was bright, and the temperature would hit the high eighties today. Lots of business for Bick and his rental rowboats, but not for a couple of hours, until he opened at nine thirty. His store always smelled like Lysol, to kill the fishy odors, Harlette had told her, but fish and Lysol weren’t a happy combination, not that Bick seemed to care. He bought the Lysol wholesale by the case. Bick was an energetic seventy-five, with tufts of white hair sticking out of his ears, nose, and eyebrows and a love of Jim Beam. He was standing behind his counter, eating a corn dog loaded with mustard and coated with sweet relish, a Diet Coke at his elbow, his daily breakfast, since his seriously vegan wife didn’t work in the shop in the mornings and so wasn’t around to throw the hot dog to the walleye in the lake. “Hey, Chief, what’s up?”
Ty told him what had happened, described the rowboat she’d seen.
“What? You actually think it was one of my boats?” He sounded outraged, like she’d accused one of his children of dealing meth to the local teenagers.
“Can’t be one hundred percent sure, Bick, since the fog was so thick, but I think the rowboat was acid green like the paint you use. Did anyone turn in a boat in the past couple of hours?”
“Don’t know, but I tell everyone where the boats go and they can bring ’em back at three a.m. for all I care.”
“Let’s check names against boats,” Ty said.
It didn’t take long. Rental boat number six, the Green Gaiter, scheduled to be returned at 6 a.m. this morning, wasn’t parked in its slot beside rowboat number five, the Green Lantern.
The name of the renter of the Green Gaiter was Sala Porto of Washington, D.C.
“Yeah, I remember him,” Bick said. He ate the last bite of his corn dog after dipping it into the small bowl of mustard Ty knew he would wash and put away before Mrs. Looney came in. “He rented the Gaiter for a week, fishing, lolling around with his girlfriend, drinking beer and swimming, that sort of thing, not here for the book festival. He said he had to be back in Washington today, so he’d return the Green Gaiter no later than six o’clock this morning.
“I told him his name was real interesting, I mean, how often do you hear the name Sala Porto? He smiled, said he heard that a lot, but he wasn’t a gangsta, didn’t hail from Sicily. He was an FBI agent, and the name was good because the bad guys thought he might be Mafia and that scared them lots more than a federal cop with a vanilla name and all those rules and regulations to worry about. You think he might be the guy you saw get hit over the head and thrown into the lake?”
“I don’t know, Bick. He actually told you he was an FBI agent?”
“Yep, he showed me his ID. ‘Creds,’ he called it.”
“Was anyone with him? This girlfriend?”
“I never saw the girlfriend, only this FBI agent, Sala Porto.” Bick showed her his signature.
“Credit card?”
“Yep, let me find it for you.” Bick scrounged in a small steel box, flipped through piles off credit card receipts, and pulled one up, waved it at her.
Ty studied the receipt. American Express for $240. His signature was bold—that was the first word that popped into her mind. More than bold, dominant.
“He used his own pen,” Bick said.
Black ink, of course, to go with that strong signature. Ty left Bick cleaning up a spill of mustard and walked to her white Silverado in the pier parking lot, shining bright under the morning sun. She leaned against her truck door, pulled her hat down to cut the glare, and pulled out her cell. She didn’t have any contacts at the Hoover Building, so she called the main number and asked for Special Agent Sala Porto. After being passed around for ten minutes, Ty ended up with a summer intern named Mindy who said she’d heard Agent Porto was with his girlfriend, Octavia—didn’t know her last name—on vacation, and who wanted to know? Ty put on her best cop voice, low and hard, and finally ended up transferred to the Criminal Division, where Agent Porto was assigned, according to Mindy. Agent Sala Porto’s unit chief was on vacation, and no one else wanted to talk to her. She was eventually passed to Executive Assistant Director James Maitland’s office. She grinned into the phone at that coup. She’d managed to get to a top dog. Ty used her most intimidating voice when she identified herself and asked to speak to Executive Assistant Director Maitland, stating it was a matter of great urgency. The woman said without pause, “All I’ve got to say, Chief Christie, is that this had better be good or I might be visiting you in your own jail cell.”
A man’s deep, impatient voice came on the line. “Maitland here. Goldy said this was urgent. Who are you, and what do you want?”
Maitland sounded like her kind of cop: no nonsense, straightforward, hard as nails. Ty identified herself as the police chief of Willicott, Maryland, then described what she’d seen three hours before and what she was doing about it. “The murdered man could be an FBI agent, Sala Porto. Or Porto could be the murderer. Or neither. I need your help.”
Maitland snapped out questions until she was wrung dry. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d wanted to know about her birthmark (a lovely strawberry on her left hip), her marital status (still thankfully single after two broken engagements), and if he did ask her age, she’d have no problem telling this man she was turning twenty-nine on the fourth of November.
Jimmy Maitland was silent a moment. “All right, Chief Christie, here’s what we’re going to do.”
3
* * *
WILLICOTT BOOK FESTIVAL
WILLICOTT, MARYLAND
SATURDAY, LATE MORNING
It was warm and sunny, an altogether perfect day for a book festival. Savich gave the smiling, fresh-faced parking attendant Jimbo a ten-dollar bill and parked Sherlock’s Volvo in Lot B beside an SUV filled with a half dozen enthusiastic young women, all talking, laughing, and gathering book bags, purses, water bottles.
Nearly-five-year-old Sean and his longtime girlfriend, Marty Perry, who was still on schedule to be one of his future wives, were so wired they bulleted out of the car, their goal to hunt down their favorite author, Remus McGurk, the creator of Captain Carr Corbin, intergalactic space marauder, and his sidekick, Orkett, a terrier with sharp teeth who filched chocolate bars.
Sherlock met Dillon’s eyes over the roof of the car. She knew he was as worried as she was. It had been only three days since the man had broken into their house and threatened Sean. The FBI lab hadn’t found fingerprints on the Ka-Bar, not that they expected to, and had determined the knife could have been purchased from dozens of stores in the D.C. area. Every agent in the CAU was working in his spare time on trying to identify the intruder. Most of Dillon’s agents believed it was either a pedophile who’d seen Sean, or a kidnapping for ransom, knowing Savich could sell one of his grandmother’s paintings. Or, he thought now, an old enemy here for payback. Oddly, that felt like it could be right. Detective Ben Raven of Metro was working different sources, and as of today, still nothing had popped. Even though Savich had moved the security system box to behind one of his grandmother’s paintings in the dining room and put a dead bolt on the front door, it didn’t alleviate the nerve-racking low-level fear. Savich had hoped the kidnapper or pedophile, or whatever he was, might be moved to make contact, but as of this morning, there’d been no communication of any kind and no further attempts on Sean.