An Incident At Bloodtide

Chapter Seven

The nearest Coast Guard Command station was located in the New York Harbor, on Governors Island. It was a short subway ride for me, but a trip into the city for Garth. Nevertheless, when I called to tell him about the lab report on the samples, and what I intended to do next, he insisted that he wanted to go with me. I hung around the office catching up on paperwork until he arrived, and then we headed for the subway.

We actually got in to see the top man himself, one Captain Richard Marley. Marley was a beefy man with a pleasant manner, curly brown hair, and light brown eyes that, to my consternation, seemed to glaze over when I explained why we had come, and started to hand him the computer printouts.

"Excuse me," he said, taking the papers from my hand, then setting them off to one side of his desk before sinking back into his leather swivel chair. "This wouldn't have any connection with that riverkeeper up in Cairn, would it?"

Garth and I looked at each other, then back at the Captain of the Port of New York. Garth said, "As a matter of fact, it would. Those are laboratory analyses of water Tom Blaine took out of the Hudson north of here. He died getting those samples."

Marley blinked, sat up straight. "Died?"

"He got chewed up by the propeller blades of some tug or tanker."

Marley winced, half turned away. "Jesus. You're sure it was a tug or tanker?"

"It's what the coroner said. A normal powerboat, even a cigarette boat, would have sliced him up, but not into the sushi he ended up as."

"He could only have been run over by a big boat if he was in the deep channel. What the hell was he doing diving in the deep channel?"

"Getting those samples," I said with some impatience, pointing at the sheets of paper on the corner of his desk. "Or samples just like those. There's more than one ship involved. The samples I had analyzed came from two different ships, almost certainly tankers, and he was probably killed by a third."

"And you two have been hired to look into the death?" Marley asked in an even tone. "Or are you working on a pollution case?"

"We haven't been hired by anybody to do anything. You might call what we're doing a labor of love."

"I'm sorry to hear about Tom Blaine's death, Frederickson," the burly man said, once again leaning back in his chair. "I'll admit I considered him a pest, but he always thought he was doing the right thing, and he worked damn hard at his job. Just what is it you want from me?"

"For openers," I said tersely, "an investigation into the circumstances of his death-which I understand is your job."

He didn't like that, but at least it got his attention. His jaw muscles tightened, and his light brown eyes glinted. "Where did you get that idea?"

"From people who claim it isn't their job-local cops, and presumably the state police, since they never showed up. I haven't checked with the FBI, CIA, or United Nations, but I'm sure they'd tell me the same thing-that whatever happens on the Hudson is your jurisdiction."

"You want to know what my job is, Frederickson? I'll tell you. This is the largest operational command in the Coast Guard. Six thousand ships a year pass through this harbor. I'm responsible for monitoring oil spills, polluters-"

"Aha," Garth said with quiet intensity.

"And a few other little things. It's our responsibility to enforce the laws of marine navigation; we're responsible for averting terrorist threats. I command three hundred and forty men and women, and thirty-two ships on the Hudson River all the way from this port up to the Canadian border. Now, gentlemen, we love the environment, the seas and rivers, as much as the next person-probably more, or we wouldn't have chosen to serve in the Coast Guard. But we're not an arm of the Environmental Protection Agency; we're armed forces. We're not pollution detectives. We don't have the manpower. One of Tom Blaine's problems was that he thought we should be pollution detectives, and that we should spend all our time helping him clean up his relatively small bailiwick up there around Cairn. If you've got a major oil spill from a tanker, we'll be on the scene in minutes; but if I had to cooperate with every environmentalist, every individual who brought in a lab report about some bad water and asked us to do something about it, there wouldn't be enough hours in the day to do that work, much less carry out our mandated responsibilities. Blaine wouldn't accept that position, and I finally had to bar him from this facility and stop our people from taking his phone calls-not because I wanted to, but because I had to. The reason your local police don't want to handle it is because they have to answer to the local politicians, and the politicians don't want to rattle the cages of the local industries that pay a lot in school and property taxes. In short, if you want something done about a minor pollution problem upriver, you're going to have to rattle the politicians' cages, not mine. I'm not saying that whatever's on those sheets doesn't represent a real problem; you're just going to have to take it someplace other than the Coast Guard."

"This may be more than just a minor pollution problem, Captain," Garth said quietly. "Tom Blaine was killed collecting samples like those. Maybe he was murdered."

"Murdered?" Marley said it as if the word itself had a bad taste.

I stepped closer to the edge of the desk. "Yes, Captain. Tom wasn't stupid enough to dive under a moving ship. There would be no reason for an oil tanker captain to power up the props while he was at anchor and flushing out his tanks."

"Who says Blaine was killed by an oil tanker, and who says a captain was flushing out his tanks in the river?"

"It's the conclusion the chemical analyses on those printouts points to-if you'd care to look at them." I paused, waiting to see what the Coast Guard commander would do. He glanced at the sheets, then looked back at me. I continued, "Garth and I think there's a good possibility that a captain of an oil tanker turned on the engines of his ship, knowing Tom would be killed, to stop Tom from collecting samples of what that captain was dumping in the river. If you'll look at those printouts, you'll see there was all kinds of toxic crap in the samples. I take it flushing out tanks in an inland waterway is illegal, right?"

Captain Richard Marley ran a hand through his thick brown hair, which immediately sprang back into place. "I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong end, Frederickson, and it's leading you to make unwarranted conclusions. A certain amount of leakage from bilge and ballast tanks is unavoidable-even though Tom Blaine would certainly have argued otherwise. There would be absolutely no reason for a tanker captain to risk a fine by flushing out his tanks in the river, because he'd have nothing to gain; he has nothing to transport back to the refinery in those flushed tanks. He delivers oil, then goes back to his shipping point in the Middle East, or wherever, to pick up another load. He has an entire ocean voyage to wash out ail his tanks at his leisure."

Garth said, "Maybe he was taking a load of something out."

Marley extended his hands out over his desk, palms up. "What? The industries up the river are users of oil, not suppliers. You know how many millions of gallons those tankers can hold? They're not used for carrying seltzer. There aren't any chemical plants up there with either a capacity or product that requires tanker transport; barges, yes, but not tankers. That's what's wrong with your speculation. For the sake of argument, let's suppose a captain did flush his tanks in the river-maybe by accident, since I can't think of any reason for it. You think a captain is going to murder a man over what amounts to a relatively minor infraction? It would be like killing a traffic cop over a parking ticket. I find it highly unlikely."

"My brother and I would just like to make sure, Captain," Garth said in a flat tone.

"Look, I have no doubt that Tom Blaine was investigating something he considered important, and gathering evidence he hoped his employers could use in court. He was always investigating something; it was his job, and he loved it. But that doesn't mean there's a connection between what he was looking into and the fact that he was run over by a very big ship. You use the word 'murder,' but my guess is that the captain of whatever vessel killed him wasn't even aware of what had happened. He still isn't. And if he doesn't know what happened, then it's damned unlikely that you're ever going to be able to identify with any certainty the ship that was involved. That leaves you with whatever data you've got on these computer printouts you've brought me. I'm not unconcerned about whatever pollution violations may have occurred, gentlemen, but I can't set a precedent by doing for you what I wouldn't do for other people who came here with similar requests-as much as I personally might want to. I know who the two of you are, and your reputations truly precede you. It's why I agreed to meet with you personally. My recommendation is that you approach the appropriate New York State authorities with whatever you think the problem may be-pollution, or murder, or both."

So much for our visit to the Coast Guard. "Captain," I said, "I presume you keep a log of every commercial vessel that passes in and out of this harbor?"

He nodded curtly. "Each and every one."

I took a pad and pen out of my pocket, wrote down two weeks' worth of dates, put the paper down on the captain's desk, literally under his nose. "Sir, there's a time frame around the Tuesday night the medical examiner thinks Tom died. Would you be willing to give us the names and registration numbers of the oil tankers that were on the Hudson River on those dates?"

"No," he replied immediately, as he pushed the paper away from him.

"My brother and I are private investigators licensed by the state of New York, Captain. This is business, not a personal favor. Our licenses entitle us to certain privileges and courtesies from both state and federal agencies. You can check with any agency we've ever dealt with in the city, state, or federal government. You'll find that not everybody likes us, especially in this administration, but I think you'll also find that they all have respect for the way we deal with information, privileged or otherwise, that comes our way in the course of our business. We won't embarrass you."

"You mentioned privileges and courtesies, Frederickson, not rights. Again, if it were up to me personally, I'd just give you the information you want with my blessing. But I can't do that. It sets a precedent. If I hand Coast Guard data over to you, I'd have to honor the same request from every private investigator in the country, if it was made. It wouldn't be good policy."

"Nobody will know where we got the information."

"I'd know. Bring me a court order, and I'll give you the list-and buy you both a drink besides. But otherwise, no."

"You know we can't get a court order."

Marley looked uncomfortable. He averted his gaze, drummed his fingers on the desktop for a few moments, then looked at us out of the corner of his eye. "I really would like to help you gentlemen-maybe as a tip of my hat to Blaine, who pestered the hell out of me because he wanted a clean river. You want a list of oil tankers that were up the Hudson on certain dates, and I can't give it to you. There may be other organizations that compile such data. Have you considered other sources?"

Garth and I looked at each other. I didn't have the slightest idea what our coy Coast Guard captain was talking about, but Garth apparently did. "Thanks, Cap," he said, nodding to the man behind the desk. "Come on, Mongo. Let's go back to the brownstone and pick up a car."

I asked Garth, "You notice anything peculiar about these pictures?"

We were back at Jessica Blaine's home, in the basement. We had returned to ask the woman if we could borrow one of her husband's old ledgers, which we intended to show to a representative of the Cairn Fishermen's Association in the hope that he might be able to link the codes on the plastic jugs to past violators. Jessica Blaine had told us we could take whatever we wanted. I had forgotten about the photographs of tankers on the corkboard over Tom Blaine's battered desk, but now, as I stood staring at the display, I understood why the riverkeeper had taken them. They were evidence.

Garth looked up from the ledger he was studying, shrugged. "He liked to take pictures of tanker traffic going up and down the river. So what?"

"Up and down the river. That's the key. Look at the waterlines on those ships."

Garth stared at the photos for a few more moments, then clucked his tongue. "Aha. They're all just about the same."

"Thank you, Dr. Watson. You'd expect them to be riding low in the water going upriver, because they're carrying shipments of oil. They should be riding a lot higher going back downriver, but they're not-at least not as much as you'd expect. It means they damn well do fill up with something after they deliver their oil and flush out their tanks, and whatever they're carrying back displaces about the same amount of water as the oil."

Garth shook his head. "Marley told us there isn't even one industry upriver that ships out liquids in quantity, and yet here we have a dozen tankers, presumably coming from different locations, and all fully loaded as they head back downriver. The only cargo I can think of from around here that would fill that many tankers is. . water."

"Right. River water. It may not be exactly fresh, but it's not totally saline either. It would be a lot easier to purify than seawater, a real bonus if you depend on desalinization for fresh water, and most of the capacity of your desalinization plants was recently knocked out by an invading army. I'll bet they're taking the stuff to Kuwait, and maybe a few other Middle Eastern countries."

"A goddamn slick trick, stealing millions of gallons of river water, and right under everyone's nose," Garth said, starting to take down the photographs, slipping them into the back of the ledger he held. "So now let's see if you and I can't find out who's gone into the sideline of selling the Hudson."

The Cairn Fishermen's Association rented office space in the basement of an Episcopal church in the center of town. We walked there, found the volunteer on duty to be an attractive red-haired woman in her early thirties who told us her name was Lonnie Allen. She had green eyes that went nicely with her red hair, and the kind of deep, even tan that comes from spending a lot of time on the water. She was wearing sandals, stonewashed jeans, and a Clearwater T-shirt.

We told the woman why we were there, then handed over the plastic jugs, computer printouts, photographs, and ledger for her to examine.

"That's oil tanker discharge," she said after only a cursory glance at the printouts.

"Right," Garth said. "We were hoping you might be able to provide us with a list of the tankers that were in this area around the time that Tom Blaine was killed."

Lonnie Allen nodded curtly. "We keep records of shipping traffic, but I don't have to look on the list to tell you where the samples in those jugs came from. The 'C' on the labels stands for Carver-Carver Shipping. In fact, all of the tankers in those photographs belong to Carver; they have red and yellow stripes running the length of the ship just above the waterline, although they're often too faded to see. What you have on the labels after the 'C' is the registration number of the tanker the sample was taken from. You can't see them in the photos, but the registration numbers are usually stenciled on both the bow and stern; from across the river, you can usually make them out with a decent pair of binoculars."

"Carver as in Bennett Carver?" Garth asked.

The woman nodded. "Our local Bennett Carver, yes. Carver, by the way, is by far the largest shipping line on the river. Bennett Carver founded it, but he retired a couple of years ago after taking the company public and cashing in for a hundred million or so. We were sorry to see him retire, because he was always pretty cooperative while he ran the company. And responsible. I guess things have changed. The analysis of the samples in those jugs tells us they've been flushing their tanks in the river. That's illegal."

I asked, "Who runs the company now?"

She shrugged. "The usual faceless board of directors, under some CEO whose name I can't recall right now. When we find somebody to replace Tom, which won't be easy, we'll put him or her to work on this tank-flushing business."

"Garth and I think there may be more to it, Lonnie. If you look closely at those photographs, you'll see that the tankers are fully loaded going back downriver. We think they may be carrying river water back to the Middle East to sell."

She picked up one of the photographs to look at it more closely, raised her eyebrows slightly. "You're right," she said, a hint of annoyance in her voice. "If it's river water they're carrying, that would be illegal too. The law says that the waters of the rivers and lakes in this country belong to all the people. In effect, these tankers would be shipping stolen goods."

"What would be the penalty if they were convicted of that?"

She put the photograph down, shook her head. "It's hard to say-maybe a couple of hundred thousand, probably less. Not enough, and not as much as they'd probably spend in legal fees to fight conviction. If they knew we had hard evidence, they'd probably simply stop. It's not the fines they worry about, it's the bad publicity. The fines don't usually mean that much to a company as big as Carver Shipping."

Garth said, "You have the evidence here."

Lonnie Allen again shook her head, ran her fingers through her long red hair. "No. What you have here are three plastic jugs containing what is essentially seawater, and some scenic photographs. To take it to court, Tom would have to be alive to testify himself where the samples had come from and under what conditions. The same with the photographs, which the company might argue had been faked. And then you'd have to somehow prove that what was being done was company policy, and not just the unauthorized action of some captain; that would be their fallback position."

I pointed to the photos. "Those are all Carver tankers, and they're all different. It's not just one captain involved."

She nodded. "Yes. But again, you would need Tom to testify to the dates and times the photos were taken. Tom seems to have spent a lot of time carefully documenting the violations, because he didn't want the usual brush-off from the Coast Guard; it's very hard to get them to act on environmental matters, and you have to have an airtight case if you hope to win in court. A new riverkeeper will have to begin gathering fresh evidence."

"You might want to wait awhile before siccing anybody else on those people," Garth said quietly. "I'm sure what happened to Tom wasn't in his job description."

She frowned. "You think Tom was deliberately killed? Murdered?"

I said, "We think we'd like to talk to the captains of all the tankers who might have been in the area-running or at anchor-on the Tuesday evening when Tom was killed. His most recent log is missing, so we don't know what ship he was checking out. It wouldn't be the ones he labeled on those jugs, because he already had the goods on them. I found pieces of him here on Wednesday, across the river, so tide and current will have to be factored in when you're looking for the location of the tanker that might have killed him. I doubt if the company would be very cooperative, and even to ask them for information would tip our hand."

"I can give you the information you need," the woman said tersely as she rose, and walked to a filing cabinet set against the rear wall. She opened a drawer, took out a blue notebook, leafed through it until she found the page she wanted. She began to scan the page, then started slightly. "Oh, God," she said in a small voice.

"What is it, Lonnie?" Garth asked.

"I have the perfect candidate," she said, her tone now laced with disgust. "Except, according to our records, this ship was definitely at anchor. There would have been no-"

"Tell us about that ship, Lonnie."

The woman replaced the book in the file drawer where she had taken it from, then returned to her desk, slowly shaking her head. "Every three months we receive a listing of the command personnel assigned to tankers and barges; the companies themselves are usually pretty cooperative on this. On the night Tom was killed, there was an oil tanker at anchor almost directly across the river from here. High tide was around midnight, which means that if Tom was killed around that time, pieces of his body could have been carried upriver for a time, then caught in crosscurrents and swept over when the tide changed. There were five other big ships that came through that evening, but none of them fit as well into the framework of time, tide, and current you mentioned. It's an iffy proposition. Anyway, the registration number for that tanker is 82Q510. Its captain is a man by the name of Julian Jefferson. He's a drunk. Tankers he's captained have been involved in two oil spills and one running aground. We've been trying to get him off the river for years."

"Who does he work for?" Garth asked.

"Carver Shipping. But you have to understand that a ship at anchor would have no reason to start up its main engines."

Garth grunted as he wrote down the number in a notebook. "The company, state, and Coast Guard allow a drunk to pilot an oil tanker up and down the Hudson?"

She shrugged. "What can I tell you? His license has never been revoked. The rumors are that he has important family connections in the oil industry, and I guess that counts for a lot. According to the law, only foreign-registered vessels require a special pilot to take them up the Hudson; domestically registered ships can use just about anyone they want to. So Mr. Jefferson is still out there, another accident waiting to happen."

It looked like one had already happened, I thought as Lonnie Allen wrote down the registration numbers and owners of the other big ships that had been on the river that night, and handed me the paper. Except it might not have been an accident. I said, "Thanks for the information."

Garth asked, "When will you have a new riverkeeper?"

The woman with the red hair and green eyes sighed. "It's hard to say. The job doesn't pay much, after all, and you need a special kind of person to do it. A month, maybe more. Listen, may I ask just what it is you're trying to do?"

"Tom was a good friend of mine," Garth replied. "He was also a friend of the river I enjoy living on. From the way things look, he was working on an important case of pollution, and he felt he had to amass a mountain of evidence in order to get the authorities to pay attention. Now that he's dead, you say someone is going to have to start all over. Let's just say that Mongo and I are interested in keeping an eye on things until you can find somebody to take up where Tom left off."

Now the woman looked slightly embarrassed. "We can't afford to pay you."

I said, "This is on our own hook, Lonnie. We're doing it for our own reasons. But I'm sure Garth and I could develop a taste for shad, and I understand shad can be prepared in dozens of different ways."

Lonnie Allen's face brightened. "Well, shad is one thing our members have plenty of, at least when it's in season. If you'll agree to take deferred payment, I'll even throw in a batch of recipes for those dozens of dishes."

"Done," Garth said.

While it was true that Garth and I were interested in seeing that Tom Blaine's efforts to build a case against Carver Shipping not go to waste, we were even more interested in seeing that his death was properly investigated. That, it seemed, was not going to be so easy. The two matters were tied together. To get the state police or Coast Guard to investigate the circumstances of the man's death, it looked like we were going to have to prove that somebody had a motive for killing him, namely to prevent him from blowing the whistle on Carver Shipping for stealing Hudson River water, and in the process poisoning the well they were illegally stealing from. Proving the second part seemed a straightforward enough, if time-consuming, task, assuming Carver Shipping hadn't stopped their practice of flushing tanks and taking on river water after Tom's death. We were just going to have to do the Coast Guard's job until the Coast Guard realized there was a job to do.

We set up a Minolta 35mm camera with a zoom lens on a tripod in a sheltered area on Garth's deck, focusing on an area of the deep channel between us and a tool and die factory complex across the river-presumably the facility Julian Jefferson's tanker had been servicing at the time of Tom Blaine's death. The proper business of Frederickson and Frederickson, namely making some money, could not be postponed forever, which meant I was going to have to go back to the city. However, between Garth and Mary, and maybe one or two college students home for the summer and looking for easy work, we could make sure that somebody was always at the camera during daylight hours to take photographs of incoming and outgoing Carver tankers, and then note the date and time in a log. If Carver Shipping was still transporting water, we would have our own photographs and witnesses. It was a first step. If we could get proof of a company policy to flout the law, a conspiracy first uncovered by a man killed by a vessel that most likely belonged to that company, then we would see what we could make happen next. There were always the newspapers, and Garth and I had plenty of contacts in the media.

Mary's strained voice came from the beach below the deck. "Garth? Mongo? Are you up there?"

Garth and I looked at each other, and Garth called, "Yes. What is it?"

"I think you two should come down here right away. There's something you should see."

Alarmed by the tone of Mary's voice, we hurried out of the house and down the path leading to the beach. We came to an abrupt halt when we rounded a corner of the boathouse, startled by the sight in front of us.

It was low tide, which meant that fifteen to twenty yards of beach were exposed. Left in the sand by the receding waters were what looked to be hundreds of hypodermic syringes littering the beach like some kind of malevolent glass and blue plastic sea creatures that had come ashore to spawn terror at the least, and maybe slow, agonizing death. Strewn among the needles like strands of poisonous afterbirth were long strips of bloody bandages. Mary, ashen-faced and with her arms wrapped around her, stood at the far end of the field of needles and bandages, which seemed to be confined pretty much to the area of beach around the boathouse.

"Mary, you didn't touch any of that, did you?" Garth asked tersely.

Mary slowly, almost solemnly, shook her head, then started walking toward us, giving the field of syringes and blood-soaked cloth a wide berth.

"I'm going up to the house to call the health department and the neighbors," Garth continued, turning to start back up the path. "From the looks of things, most of that shit ended up on our property, but the other people around here should be warned."

Garth hurried up to the house, and I took Mary's hand as she came up to me.

"I didn't exactly tell Garth the truth," she whispered hoarsely.

"What are you talking about?"

In reply, she lifted her left foot to show me the sole. It was stained with blood. "I was just walking along, thinking about this new song I'm working on, not watching where I was going. I stepped on one of the needles that was sticking up out of the sand. I. . My first reaction was just not to frighten Garth." She paused, and the giggle that came out of her mouth was just a note or two short of hysteria. "Not telling him was certainly kind of silly, wasn't it? He's going to have to know sooner or later."

I ran up the beach and into the boathouse. With trembling hands I tore off a large strip from a roll of plastic sheeting we used to cover the catamaran in the winter. Then I hurried back out on the beach, carefully picked up three syringes and a strip of bloody bandage, rolled them up in the heavy plastic. "Come on, babe," I said, grabbing Mary's hand. "We're going to get Garth, and then we're taking you to the hospital."

She staggered after me up the path, looking back over her shoulder at the ugly array of needles and bandages. "It's starting, just like I said it would," she said in a hollow voice. "Bad things;

I told you Sacra makes bad things happen."

The nurse in the emergency room at Cairn Hospital wasn't much impressed by the small puncture wound in the sole of Mary's foot; he, and the doctors on duty, were, though, appropriately shaken by the bundle of syringes and stained bandage I had brought with me. Dr. Angelo Franconi, a friend of Garth's, immediately took the package, told us he would see what he could determine about the contents from examining the debris under a microscope. The nurse disinfected and bandaged the wound in Mary's foot, and he gave her a pair of paper slippers to wear. Then we went downstairs to the coffee shop in the basement and waited nervously.

Fifty-five minutes later Angelo Franconi, looking both relieved and puzzled, joined us. He pulled a chair up to our table, laid a hand gently on Mary's forearm, spoke to my brother. "We can't tell for certain that the needles are clean until we try to grow a culture, which I've already ordered done. But, from examining them under a microscope, I'd say the chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that the needles were never used; one of them was still in its original plastic package. Somebody with a boat must have lost a lot of syringes overboard, and the carton broke up in the water somewhere very close to you. Wind and tide were just right to wash most of the stuff up on your beach. It certainly is a freakish kind of accident, but I don't think you have much to worry about."

Garth asked, "What about the bloody bandages?"

The dark-skinned doctor ran a hand back through his close-cropped black hair, shook his head. "Now, there's a real mystery. I can tell you the blood isn't infected with any pathogens you can see under a microscope. It isn't even human; it's chicken blood. I can't imagine where surgical bandages covered with chicken blood would come from, and it really is curious how that combination of garbage washed up on your property."

I didn't think it was curious at all, and I didn't consider it much of a mystery. When I looked at Garth, I could see he felt the same way.

"You said you wanted me to leave him to you, and I'm doing that," Garth whispered to me as we walked out of the hospital. "But you'd better be quick about it, because if I stumble across him before you do, I promise you his corpse will be the next piece of garbage that washes up on somebody's beach."