The ferry ride across Elliott Bay rivaled a roller coaster at an amusement park. With the wind increasing in intensity, the waves also grew, making the ferry pitch and roll. Occasionally the whitecaps would crash over the bow with enough force to trigger car alarms. Tracy wasn’t in the car hold; the ferry had been full, as John Owens had predicted. She’d walked on, but now wondered if that had been such a good idea. If the storm got worse, and maybe even if it didn’t, the Department of Transportation could shut down the ferry system, and she’d be stuck in Bremerton for the night without a car.
She sat in one of the booths, watching the whitecaps out the window. Unfortunately, the bad weather didn’t stop the tourists from being tourists. Some stood on the deck, dressed in raincoats, seeing how far they could lean into the wind, as if walking up a hill.
When the ferry docked in Bremerton, Tracy departed on unsteady legs and with a queasy stomach. She raised a hand against the wind and rain to search the parking lot for John Owens. A car flashed its headlights twice and she moved toward it, seeing Owens in the shadows between swipes of the car’s windshield wipers. She pulled open the passenger’s-side door and quickly slid into the seat.
“I’ll bet that was an E ticket ride,” Owens said, dating himself; E tickets had not been in use at Disneyland for several decades.
The inside of the car felt like walking into a sauna, fully dressed. Owens had the defroster blasting air at the front windshield, and Tracy could see where he’d wiped uneven streaks on the inside of the glass in an attempt to clear it. He reached out again with the sleeve of his jacket and swiped several more streaks. “The defroster is the shits in this car,” he said.
Tracy removed her raincoat, deposited it on the floorboard in the backseat, and helped him wipe the windshield. “You have any luck locating the janitor?”
“Yeah, I got an address.” Owens pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to consider his watch. “Not sure if he’s home, but he’s close enough to the base that we can drive over and knock on his door before we go meet my friend.”
Owens had arranged to get on base with a captain he knew well. He said the captain would get them through the Charleston Gate and escort them to wherever they needed to go. Frustrated at his inability to clear the windshield, Owens cracked his driver’s-side window, which allowed in spittles of rain, and pulled from his parking spot.
Tracy’s cell rang. She recognized the number on her screen and quickly answered. “Mike?”
“Nice weather, huh? I hope you’re not out in this.”
“Unfortunately I just took the ferry to Bremerton.”
“Bet that was fun.”
“I won’t be eating anytime soon. You got something on the security tape?”
She noticed Owens glance over at her.
“Watermark is broken,” he said. “Several times. Someone definitely edited it in the places you found.”
That raised another series of questions, but they weren’t questions Mike Melton could answer in a lab. “Okay,” she said. “Good to know, Mike. I’m hoping to get a copy of the original while I’m over here. If I do, I’ll send it over to you.”
“Stay dry,” Melton said, and disconnected.
“What about the security tape?” Owens asked.
“I had the crime lab analyze the tape given to the OIC, Rebecca Stanley. They say it was edited,” she said. “The watermark is broken.”
Owens squinted as if having trouble seeing. With the window cracked and the defroster on high, he’d opened a half-moon-shaped gap in the condensation. “How can somebody edit the tape? Doesn’t it have a date and time stamp on it?”
“Apparently you can edit a copy. There’s software available.”
Owens shook his head. “I guess there would be, wouldn’t there? Can he tell where it was edited?”
“It was edited after Tulowitsky left the building and then again when he returned.”
“To hide someone’s presence inside?”
“That would be the most logical reason for someone to do it.”
“Battles?”
“We won’t know for certain until we get the original, if it still exists.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?”
“My understanding is the security office keeps the tapes for a designated period of time. Then they roll over the contents.”
“How long before the rollover?”
“Stanley didn’t know.”
“You want me to make a call?”
“I’m worried that could sound alarms. I’d rather go in person, serve the warrant, and get the tape without giving anyone a reason to destroy it. Otherwise, this could all be a wild-goose chase.”
“We got the weather for it,” Owens said. “You want to go to the base first?”
Tracy checked her watch. Tulowitsky would be leaving for work soon. “No. Let’s talk to Tulowitsky first. If my theory is wrong, the tape might not matter.”
Al Tulowitsky lived in a modest, one-story home not far from the naval base and his employer, IJS. The front of the house did not face the street. Rather, the home was situated perpendicular to the road. A dirt-and-gravel easement extended for perhaps a hundred yards and served as the driveway for three homes. Owens pulled down the easement and parked beneath the limbs of a gnarled pine. Forsaking her raincoat, Tracy followed an uneven stone walkway strewn with spent pine needles to a front door protected by a tiny overhang that offered little relief from the wind and rain. A gutter to the right of the door overflowed, the water splattering the ground and kicking back up at Tracy’s shoes and ankles.
Owens, who wore slacks and black dress shoes, stepped lightly around the puddles and joined Tracy at the door. Water dripped from the overhang onto his Gore-Tex jacket. Tracy used a door knocker to rap three solid beats. The door pulled open as if Al Tulowitsky had been standing on the other side, expecting them. The surprised expression on his face refuted that assessment.
“Mr. Tulowitsky,” Tracy said. “We met the other day at IJS’s office.”
“I remember,” Tulowitsky said, clearly confused by her presence. He glanced at Owens. Tracy introduced him.
“I have a few more questions I’m hoping you can answer for me.”
“What kind of questions?” Tulowitsky wore his work uniform—blue pants and a white short-sleeve button-down with the company logo of the energetic man on the breast pocket.
“I just need to nail down a few things for a timeline.” Water continued to drip from the small overhang, and the pine tree shed water like a shower burst with each gust of wind. “We won’t take up much of your time,” she said.
“I have to get to work pretty soon.”