The First Victim

CHAPTER 73

Rodriguez waited on the wharf while Stevie watched through the camcorder’s telephoto lens as two men hurried along the improvised path of ladders and wooden ramps connecting the various boats. Finally reaching the barge, these two secured a gangway for Rodriguez to use, and the three of them then hurried toward the trawler, their urgency and tension evident from the shouting. They were too far away and it was too dark for her to record their faces or anything they said, but she recorded them anyway.

Their route was unexpectedly long and involved, the path between the ships anything but a straight line. One finger on the camera’s trigger, another pressed tightly to block the red light that showed while recording, she followed the three to the trawler where they disappeared around its far side.

She zipped the camera away in its case and worked herself down an accommodation ladder that led off the tanker’s starboard side to the heavily listing ferry below. Reaching the deck, she faced a gap of six to eight feet to the next boat. With the stern submerged, she saw no other way off.

This next boat carried one of the planks, a stepping-stone in the improvised path forged between the shore and the trawler. That next deck would put her on the route to the sweatshop. She saw no choice but to jump.

A few feet into flight, a fraction of a second into the air, she knew she wasn’t going to make it. She slammed into the adjacent hull, reached out and grabbed hold of a stanchion. Her face took the brunt of the miss, her left eye banged up and swelling. The black water below invited her to fall. She managed to pull her other arm up, swung herself like a pendulum, and hooked her heel on the edge of the deck. She pulled herself aboard, the camera following. Splayed out on the deck, struggling to find her breath, she took a moment to recover, testing the tender flesh around her eye.

She hurried to the stern and onto the man-made path. Three vessels later she descended a ladder to an old rusted cabin cruiser. She stopped. She wasn’t alone.

She smelled the cigarette smoke too late, realizing all of a sudden that this funky old cabin cruiser was being used as a gatehouse along the route.

‘‘Yo!’’ a man’s voice called out.

She had literally rocked the boat when stepping down onto it, and the sentry called out accordingly. In a catlike motion, she leapt from the deck up over the wheelhouse as the sentry made a lazy effort to identify his visitor. She backed up, facing the stern but completely exposed, as first the sentry’s head and then his incredibly wide shoulders appeared in the cabin hatch not five feet away from her. To move-even to breathe-would give her away. She stood absolutely still, her lungs filled to capacity, her breath held and burning in her chest. The black-haired head pivoted left to right and left again. Another inch or two and he’d pick her up in his peripheral vision.

‘‘Yo?’’ he called out a second time, though more softly. ‘‘Kai? Timmy?’’ No answer.

She prepared to kick him in the face if he glanced back, cocking her right leg back in preparation. He’d never know what hit him.

Again, he looked to his left. Then he climbed back down the steep stairs and into the cabin.

She listened intently, not daring to move. A minute passed. Two. She felt the boat move and feared his coming topside again. But instead she heard him urinating. She crept slowly and quietly to the steep ladder leading off the boat’s far side and climbed, her skin prickling. She moved much more slowly, boat to boat, carefully assessing her situation. Planks and gangways, ladders and crudely fashioned steps. The shore grew increasingly distant. She encountered a set of six garden hoses taped together, water gurgling inside. That mechanical hum grew ever louder. A snoring beast. She marveled at Melissa’s resourcefulness. The woman had the footage to prove she had made it inside. No small feat.

The scavenged trawler loomed in front of her now, huge by comparison with the other boats around it, rising up out of the wreckage of ship decks, cabins and stacks-a rusting mass of iron and steel out of proportion with its neighbors, its joints frozen with rust and corrosion, consumed by decades of salt and storm, sun and wind. A skeleton of its former self. Huge sections missing, scavenged for resale or sold off as scrap, its profile a twisted torment of bent metal and ragged cuts.

She crossed the decks of the remaining two ships, staying low and in shadow, her full attention on that towering trawler. The hum developed different tones, no longer so indistinguishable, but split into a high whine, a tremendous metallic clatter and a low guttural growl. She thought her heart might explode in her chest.

Melissa had been caught. This fact remained foremost in her mind. The big man’s arrival spoke volumes to Stevie. With all that had happened, would they move to close down shop? She resolved to get some footage, drive to Public Safety and make her case, providing Boldt the necessary probable cause to involve the FBI. Behind her, on shore, an eighteen-wheel truck arrived. A figure climbed out. She crouched and ran toward the trawler. She would have to hurry. The driver had left the truck running.