The detective didn’t appear to be impatient. He was leaning against one of the dock’s support pilings as if he had all the time in the world.
There was crime scene tape circling the Sea Maiden. She was sixty feet long, three-masted, beautiful even at rest. She wasn’t the largest boat in the fleet, but Zach knew that she was the one Eddie—and everyone else—loved the most. She was so sleek and maneuverable that, despite her size, one man could sail her. One of the prime attractions of an O’Riley’s tour, though, was the chance for passengers to help sail the boat, and Eddie had loved to work with people, young and old, teaching them how to read the wind and set the sails.
“You can go on aboard,” Morrissey told him. “The crime scene unit has finished up,”
Zach stepped on deck. Her sails were furled, and everything he’d heard seemed to be correct. There was absolutely no sign of a disturbance of any kind. He paced from bow to stern, studied the sails and the helm, and then went into the cabin. There were no suspicious notes lying on the desk, the radar seemed to be working just fine, and there was nothing wrong with the radio. Charts of Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island Sound were pinned to the wall.
Zach went through the galley, the main cabin, the heads and the two sleeping compartments. Everything was just as it should be.
As he passed the head on his way back to the ladder topside, he noted something that he had missed the first time. He hunkered down on the balls of his feet to study it.
Morrissey had followed him down, but had kept his distance, silent as he watched Zach conduct his examination of the vessel.
“Talc,” he said now.
“You had it checked out?” Zach asked.
“Hey, we’re not the big city, but we do have a decent crime lab,” Morrissey told him. “Yes, we checked it out. It’s talc.”
“Thanks.”
“Any idea what it could be doing there?” Morrissey asked. “I mean, who the hell needs talc for a pleasant sail out into the sound?”
“No one—that I know of,” Zach told him, straightening. “I can’t imagine anyone needing talc for anything other than a wet suit.”
Morrissey stared at him, frowning. The man was apparently not a diver, Zach thought.
“Wet suits are tight fitting—they have to be. Talc helps a diver get one on.”
“You think Eddie was going diving?” Morrissey asked.
“No. Eddie would never have gone diving in winter.”
Strange, he thought. The company hired an outside cleaning company to make sure their boats were always spotless, so the odds of the talc being left over from a previous trip were slim to none.
But it might make sense, even if the sense it made was disheartening. If someone had come aboard with the intention of killing Eddie and getting away with it scot-free, what better way to simply disappear after the murder than to dive overboard and swim to safety, wearing a wet suit for insulation against the cold water? There would be no need for a second conspirator to motor up and pick up the killer, meaning there would be no one to squeal, no one to tell the truth out of guilt or under pressure, no one to break.
“You think someone came aboard, killed Eddie, jumped off the boat and swam away?” Morrissey asked.
“I think it’s possible.”
“Do you know how cold that water is this time of year?” the detective asked.
Zach nodded.
“If you’re right, someone really wanted him dead,” Morrissey said. “I’ll start checking around the dive shops, see if they noticed anyone suspicious. I don’t suppose they offer dives off this boat in winter, do they?”
“No, just cruises,” Zach said.
Morrissey shook his head. “Bizarre. How would the killer have gotten an air tank on board without Eddie noticing?”
“I don’t know. And, hey, the talc isn’t a guarantee. But you didn’t find anything else, right?”
“Nothing. She was clean. The guys that found her out there, a couple of Coast Guard officers, said she was like a ghost ship. Nothing disturbed, nothing at all. They hadn’t opened a can of Coke or so much as put on a pot of coffee.”
“And the weather?”
“Smooth seas and a beautiful day, crisp and cool, but that was it. Light winds, no storms, nothing,” Morrissey said.
Zach hesitated. “And no bodies washed up on shore?”
“No. No unidentified patients in the hospital, nothing. I’ll start on the dive shops, though, see what I can find out about equipment rental,” Morrissey said.
“Our killer—if we’re even on the right track with this—probably has his own equipment.”
“What about air for his tank?” Morrissey asked.
“True enough. And I’m all for checking the dive shops. Any port in a storm, as they say.”
“We’ll keep looking for some kind of a lead,” Morrissey said. “Or…”
His voice trailed off.
Zach finished his sentence for him. “Or a body.”