“That was my intent. Instead, I found these.” Mrs. Jay took two color photocopies from a manila file and held them against her chest. “These are prints I made from the boat show’s newsletters from 2010 and 2012. Remember what I said about wooden boats being high-maintenance? There are numerous ads placed by repair and restoration companies. And they like to print brag pictures of their work.” She then placed both ads faceup on her desk for them to examine. “Mr. Speyer, could either one of these be the boat you saw the other night?”
Heat would have been amused by how much the form of the librarian’s question was identical to that of a detective showing a mug shot array to a victim, if she weren’t so focused on the pair of advertisements. One was for a wooden-boat restorer in Glen Cove on Long Island, whose display showed a Brady Bunch–style grid featuring grainy shots of a 1962 Penn Yan, an Electri-craft inboard, and a light-blue eighteen-foot skiff rigged for an outboard. The other craftsman was located near Paterson, New Jersey, and his ad featured only one boat, in a hero shot of an immaculately restored sixteen-footer, also in light blue, also with an outboard-motor mount.
Alvin Speyer leaned over the pages and said, “Hmm.”
While he picked up each page for a closer examination, the research librarian said to Heat, “Of course, I could have phoned these places myself, but given what’s at stake here, I didn’t want to take the risk. I’m no detective.”
“Could have fooled me,” said Nikki.
Carolyn Jay blushed. “Well. More of a Miss Marple than a Nikki Heat.”
“This one,” said Speyer. He held out one of the ads.
“Are you sure?” Heat asked. “You do know that it could also be neither one?”
“No, definitely this one. It’s got the same white center console for the chrome steering wheel. And see the flared lines of the inset for the motor mount on the stern? Never seen that before on a boat. Made me want it when I saw it.” He tapped the page with his forefinger. “This. I’m telling you.”
With a grateful nod to the librarian, Heat took out her cell phone and dialed the number in the ad.
The owner of Natural Neil’s Marine Restorations in Glen Cove, New York, didn’t need to look up the sky-blue skiff in his records because, as with all the boats there, he had worked on it personally. The eighteen-footer had come in along with a number of small vessels damaged when Hurricane Irene blew through in 2011, and he liked the result of his labor so much, he posted a picture of it in his ads a year later. Once Natural Neil felt sure that Heat was who she said she was, he did go to his records to look up the address of the skiff’s owner. Before they hung up, he said, “By the way? It’s not really sky blue. In the trade, it’s known as celeste pallido.”
A half hour later, Detective Feller, in a floppy fisherman’s hat with a rod and tackle to complete his cover, steered his borrowed undercover Whaler from the Red Hook channel into Brooklyn’s Erie Basin. He chugged the man-made cove lazily, pretending to be as much interested in the gulls and puffy clouds as he was in his true focus, which was the wharf line. The barge company that had made the repair payment for the skiff had an address that placed it on a rectangular inlet off Beard Street, just west of the new Ikea. He avoided the narrow channel so he wouldn’t arouse any suspicion, killed his engine, and floated along in the basin, casting his lure and letting his gaze follow the splash, which was always in the direction of the barge dock. After a few casts, he leaned his fishing pole on the gunwale, reached down for his tackle box, and took out a sandwich. On his second bite he put the sandwich down and casually picked up his phone. Heat answered on the first ring. The detective said, “Got your sky blue skiff.”