Out of the Cold Dark Sea Read online

  “But you don’t know what it was?” When she didn’t answer, he asked, “Do you know what he was working on?”

  “Not really. We haven’t talked much lately. I’ve been busy at work, Hewitt’s been busy. He tends to disappear when he’s in the middle of a big project.”

  “And he didn’t give you any indication of what this project might be?”

  Martha gave him a weak smile and a shrug. “Lieutenant, asking the same question in different ways won’t change my answer. I still don’t know what he was doing.” She leaned forward. “If I did know, I’d tell you. This isn’t him! He didn’t go into that water willingly, I can assure you. Surely there must be more that you and the Seattle Police Department can do than just wait for a body to show up.”

  Fatigue lined the lieutenant’s face; his shoulders seemed to slump with unexpected weight. He clasped his hands across his thick middle. His voice remained calm, hinting at a deep well of patience. “You have every right to be concerned about your friend, Miss Whitaker. While I appreciate your conviction that he didn’t drive down that ramp himself, it is my professional responsibility to be open to all possibilities and skeptical about each. Until we learn more, we’ll be doing everything we can to determine what happened. But right now, I have no evidence a crime’s been committed, and I certainly have no evidence of foul play. My divers will continue to search the surrounding waters, but let me be frank: with the tide and currents and the cold water, it may be weeks or months before we find a body. An officer will be assigned the case. He’ll be contacting the hospitals, Mr. Wilcox’s family, his work colleagues to see if anyone might know of his whereabouts.”

  He rose with a grace that surprised her and handed her a card. “Please call me at any time if you remember something. And I’ll be sure to let you know if we find anything here.” He extended a hand. When she grasped it, he said, “Thank you, Miss Whitaker.”

  “What happens now?” Martha asked.

  “We keep looking,” Lolich replied. He glanced out the window. His voice became even more deliberate. “The tide was at full ebb between six and seven o’clock this morning. It would have created a two to two and a half knot current through here.”

  He didn’t say more. He didn’t need to. Deep and cold, the waters of Puget Sound could hide a body for a long time. How far would the tide carry a lifeless body? Martha wondered. Would the crabs pick it clean before it had a chance to surface? A pile of white bones on the murky bottom . . .

  TWO

  Mid-morning, the trip from the boat ramp to Lake Union proved easy. To the steady beat of the windshield wipers, Martha wove the Mini Cooper around the north end of the lake. At a red light, she closed her eyes. Rain beat on the hood. Blood pounded through her veins. A deep breath was followed by a second, a third. Her body began to respond to years of training, replacing fear with control.

  A horn shattered the moment of meditation. As she sped away, Martha tried to regain a sense of calm. She needed to think. Needed her thoughts clear. Needed to master her fear. Don’t deny it or ignore it; don’t let it paralyze you. Accept it and let it become a part of you. From a place of stillness, she could formulate a plan.

  People are taught to be afraid but seldom taught what to do about it. Hewitt had been afraid and had reached out to the one person he could trust. But afraid of what? Why call her and not the police? Had he disappeared or been kidnapped or had someone driven him into the water to let him drift off on the ebb tide? But who? Who would want him dead?

  Tucked back off a gravel side road, the modest headquarters of the Seattle Harbor Patrol appeared on her right. She flashed on the image of Lieutenant Lolich, his face steady and bland, like a bored uncle at a junior high commencement. She knew the police were only going to poke around the edges of Hewitt’s disappearance, waiting for some irrefutable piece of evidence that might suggest something more sinister had happened than a decrepit old man driving himself into the water and opening the door. A favorite cliché of her father’s came to her: “I ain’t got a dog in this fight.” It had always been his excuse for doing nothing. She suspected it now applied to Lolich.

  Gas Works Park, despite the abandoned, rusting towers that gave it its name, appeared like a sodden green sanctuary amid the industrial landscape. Across the street, condominiums built in the past ten years crept up the hillside like rabbit warrens.

  At the next light, she texted Crystal: “Cancel all appts today. Won’t be in.”

  A text came back immediately: “Wise? Gksu lunch. Mtthws at 6.”

  Martha knew her billable hours had slipped since she had agreed to work pro bono for Zahit Göksu, the poor Turkish immigrant, and his comatose son. No doubt Matthews had slipped her into his schedule for an end-of-day chat to remind her of that. But neither her boss nor any of her colleagues at Carey, Harwell and Niehaus had experienced the grief of seeing a loved one lying unmoving and unresponsive day after month after year. She could not deliver revenge, but she could seek justice to help Göksu manage what could be a lifetime of medical bills. Having no faith in miracles, she could only hope that the boy’s life would be mercifully short.

  Another horn got her moving again. Quickly, she thumbed her response, “Tell srry. Family emrgncy.”

  “Need plane ticket?” Crystal knew her family lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

  “No but thxs.”

  Martha tossed her phone onto the passenger seat and zipped through the last curves before the merge onto the University Bridge. Where she came to an abrupt halt. The bridge was going up, the bells clanging. On the far side, just visible over the bridge deck, was the top of a mast. It began to inch toward the bridge, making a slow transit from Lake Washington to Lake Union. Behind her, stopped cars formed a line snaking back toward the U District. A bedraggled bicyclist, head down against the rain, hung on to the deck railing, spinning the pedals backwards to stay warm. Fucking rag baggers, she muttered, and always when you’re in a hurry. She killed the engine and settled back to wait.

  For the umpteenth time this morning, she called Hewitt’s number, only to hear his message machine pick up after four rings. She disconnected without leaving her umpteenth message. In her Contacts, she found the phone number for University Rare Books and Manuscripts, a bookstore Hewitt owned in the U District. His former lover, Ralph Hargrove, ran the store, and had slowly transitioned it away from rare books and old manuscripts to used books popular with the university students.

  On the second ring, a male voice answered, sounding as if he had just woken up to take the call. “Ralph, it’s Martha Whitaker.”

  “Yes, Martha. How may I help you today?”

  “Have you talked to Hewitt recently?”

  “Not in a couple of weeks. We had lunch. It was a Wednesday, I believe. Yes, Wednesday, the day Haley comes in early to the store. I picked him up and we went to the new Italian bistro on 65th and 15th, La Cucina. Hewitt said he had—”

  “How did Hewitt seem to you?” Martha interrupted.

  “Fine. Actually, he seemed kind of groovy.”

  “Groovy?”

  “Yes. I’d say he was borderline giddy, said he was wrapping up a big project. He even treated.” Ralph didn’t have to explain to Martha that such events were as rare as finding a first edition Shakespeare folio. After a pause, he asked, “Is everything okay?”

  “No,” she began and offered a condensed version of the morning’s developments.

  “That is disturbing,” he said, when she finished. “And he’s not home? Should I go check? I can close the store if you want me to run over to the boat.”

  “I’m on my way there now,” Martha said. The sailboat had passed and the bridge spans slowly inched their way down.

  Ralph knew nothing about the big project, had not heard from him since their lunch date. But that wasn’t unusual. They hadn’t talked business; Hewitt seldom did. Finally, Ralph said, “How may I help?”

  The spans closed with a final shudder. Martha restarted t
he Mini Cooper. The bells sounded again, and the light turned green. She shifted into gear. “Just let me know if you hear from him.”

  Once across the bridge, she dropped back down to the waterfront and sped past marinas and houseboats until she pulled into a parking spot at Pete’s Supermarket. A dark sky provided the backdrop to a row of houseboats that extended out along a dock into the dull, gray lake. She waited, scanning the empty road, the empty dock, the empty parking lot. Stop being paranoid, she chided herself, and pushed the door open.

  Inside the grocery store, she chose a “Gold Label” 1996 Ruffino Chianti Riserva from their well-stocked wine selection, a favorite of hers and Hewitt’s. She hefted the bottle, pleased with the weight and grip. Anything could be used as a weapon—an umbrella, an open hand, a closed fist, even a fine bottle of wine—one of the many lessons from Jonesy, the first of a series of teachers who had taught her how to protect herself. And if it turned out she didn’t need the bottle for her arsenal, she would relish every drop. Its coffee and tobacco and deep loamy earth scents triggered one of the few pleasant memories, one of the only memories she had, of her mother, a woman who was never without a cup of coffee in hand, a woman who had abandoned her husband and her seven children on Martha’s first day of kindergarten. Back home for lunch, full of excitement, with stories to tell, Martha had found the house empty except for the baby, Rachel, crying.

  Loss. Her mother. Rachel. Now, maybe Hewitt. At the cash register, she swiped her credit card and feigned good cheer. She recognized the thin, bald man in a green apron. His nametag reminded her that he went by “Brownie.”

  “Have you seen Hewitt recently?” she asked. “I don’t want to waste a good bottle of wine if he’s not home.”

  Brownie glanced up. His eyes went wide and he stared at her for a brief instant. Martha was accustomed to the look and let him study her one hazel eye and one blue eye without comment. The one remaining gift from her mother.

  Finally, he said, “Sure. Yesterday, day before I guess, he was in. Picked up a few groceries, and I helped him with a package. He should be around. Anything else I can help you with? Got some new postcards of the store you might be interested in.”

  “No thanks,” Martha said. “Just the wine today.”

  Disappointed, he handed her a receipt and a pen. “Hewitt’s a popular guy.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?” Martha struggled to keep her voice light.

  “Last night, a couple of guys came in looking for him. Said they were former students. They bought the 2008 Ruffino Chianti, so I believed them. That’s a good wine. This is a great wine. Hewitt will like it.”

  “Hewitt’s the one who introduced me to it. He just can’t afford to buy it. Did they find him?”

  “I assume so. It’s not like the old man is out dancing with the stars at night.”

  “Only because he can’t anymore.”

  Martha hurried down the wide wooden planks of the dock—a boulevard that reached out into the lake with houseboats crowded on either side, one off-kilter as if it had lost half its flotation. At another, a fat, bearded man stood at an open door talking to a couple of young men, their heads bare under a black umbrella. Clean-cut faces, the white shirts and dark ties just visible under their rain jackets. Mormon missionaries spreading their gospel. She hurried past decks with empty planter boxes and upside-down canoes and kayaks, and stopped at the last houseboat.

  Modest in comparison to its neighbors, it was a small wooden structure with a narrow deck—a tiny bungalow magically transported to its float on the lake. It had been Hewitt’s home since he had finished his stint with the Navy after World War II and had come to Seattle as an unemployed, indigent sailor, relegated to the cheapest housing available. But it was on the water and within walking distance of the University of Washington, and he had the GI Bill and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. So Hewitt never left. Now, millionaires vied for a berth along the dock—the farther out the better—where they could marvel at the breathtaking vistas of the Space Needle and the city skyline lights reflecting off the dark waters of Lake Union.

  An old ship’s wheel, varnish peeling, served as a gate. It stood ajar. Martha stepped onto the deck and felt the slight sway as it rocked in the water. Two pots containing the desiccated remnants of last summer’s tomato plants framed the front door. She knocked loudly, and then again. No one answered. She found Hewitt’s key on her key ring. There was no click or pressure of the deadbolt releasing.

  Martha eased the door open. The destruction nearly knocked her back. She froze, alert to any sound, the slightest movement. All was still. Was Hewitt’s body somewhere in the debris?

  She tightened her grip on the wine bottle and stepped inside. Winter jackets and parkas, their linings slit open, had been tossed in the corner of the tiny foyer. Cabinet doors hung ajar, boots and gloves and half a dozen berets were strewn about the floor. The bookcases were empty, books splayed open on the floor, magazines, newspapers, and clothes in a mad jumble. A picture frame sat propped against the wall, its backing torn off. It took her a moment to realize that the carpets had been pulled up. The desk had been overturned, its drawers pulled out and dumped. Martha’s heart sank at the sight of Hewitt’s first edition of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana buried in the pile, spine cracked. “A horrible man,” Hewitt had said of the early American puritan. “Without his influence, we probably would never have had the Salem witch trials. Religion has been the destruction of so much of civilization.” But he cherished the book and what it told him about early America. Now its yellow, brittle pages lay tossed on the floor with last week’s newspapers.

  She took it in like snapshots as she moved from room to room, careful not to touch anything. Former students? Hardly. Then she remembered they had known what wine to buy.

  The small kitchen looked like a bomb had gone off. Pickle juice permeated the air and puddled in broken glass among cans of tomato soup. The refrigerator had been pulled out from the wall, its back unscrewed and the insulation ripped out. More of the same greeted her in the bedroom and the bathroom. They had torn the stuffing out of the mattress, dumped the dresser, and slit open the lining on the window curtains. The contents of the medicine cabinet—with enough pills to start a pharmacy—had been thrown into the old porcelain bathtub. The trap door in the floor to the plumbing under the deck had been removed. Even the cover to the toilet tank had been tossed aside.

  But there was no body.

  Was he really adrift in the tides of Puget Sound? Martha shut the image down as grief threatened to consume her.

  She exhaled slowly and relaxed her grip on the wine bottle. What the hell were they looking for? From the extent of the search and the torn-off backing of the picture frame, it must have been something small and flat. Papers? A book? Several first editions, some quite valuable like Mather’s, lay scattered in the debris. A special book? Documents from Hewitt’s latest research project? They hadn’t stopped looking until they had searched everything and everywhere.

  The realization came to her suddenly—whatever it was, they hadn’t found it.

  Martha dug the cell phone out of her pocket and hit the Received Calls button. Hewitt had called her from the houseboat the night before at 5:58 p.m. Whoever did this had come after that.

  She slid through the broken patio door onto the deck. The dull water of Lake Union was pounded flat by the nonstop rain. Under the eaves, she dialed Lolich’s number. He picked up on the second ring, and she identified herself. “I’m at Hewitt’s place right now, Lieutenant. It’s a houseboat on the lake. It’s been ransacked.”

  “I’m sorry, hang on a sec.” His voice grew faint but was still audible. “Andy, you and Ronnie start sweeping grid six. Then you’re done. You’ve already spent too much time underwater.”

  While he was talking, Martha looked around. Hewitt’s smoking lounge, which is what he called the white plastic lawn chair tucked under the eave, was undisturbed. She sat down and looked across the lake. The flyi
ng saucer top of the Space Needle was just a faint outline in the clouds. At her feet, brown hand-rolled butts swam in the ashtray. She kicked it into the lake, which brought a curious duck over.

  “Have at it, dude,” she said. The police didn’t need to be distracted by Hewitt’s penchant for easing into the evening by with a little dope. As his body continued to fail, the once purely recreational habit had become medicinal, relieving the pain in both body and spirit. Martha had rolled plenty of joints for him, leaving them neatly lined up in an old silver case that even a one-armed stroke victim could manage.

  “What do you mean, ransacked?” Lolich said, coming back on the line.

  “Someone’s turned his houseboat completely upside down and inside out.”

  Silence followed. Finally, Lolich said, “Okay, I’ll get someone over there. Don’t touch anything.”

  She gave him the address. The image of his shoulders slumping with the news came to her. Lolich’s wish for a tidy little suicide wasn’t going to happen. Maybe he would believe her now.

  Just inside the patio door, Martha stopped at a double light-switch cover. The intruders hadn’t disturbed it, which indicated either they weren’t former students or they hadn’t been particularly good students. Hewitt had little use for hiding anything—being gay, smoking dope, teaching his students about fine wines. If you were among his favored few, he shared everything—his stash, his knowledge, even his bed if you were the right gender. She popped off the false cover plate, revealing a little compartment and a surprise. His marijuana and the silver cigarette case were gone. She scanned the floor. Nothing in the debris indicated they had found and scattered his stash with the rest of his possessions. She sniffed. No aroma of marijuana lingered in the air.

  Still puzzled, she searched the small compartment, feeling around the corners and edges. Then her fingertips brushed something tucked out of sight. She tried to loop a finger over the top and drag it out, but she could only get a fingernail on the front edge. She snatched up a hanger from the floor.