“Like the number of feet that washed up. The count’s broken one hundred—how’s that? And they’ve been in the water a long time, close to a month.”

“Holy shit. Where are they from?”

“Nobody knows. They’re doing DNA and all kinds of other tests.”

Smithback could hear the creak of the chair as Kraski rolled it up to his desk. “What else?”

“That’s more than anybody else has.” And I had to spend an entire evening getting a shell-shocked technician drunk just to get that. But he’d decided to hold back the really big scoop—or at least, what he hoped was going to turn into the big one.

“Okay.” Kraski knew better than to ask for Smithback’s source. “You’ll write it up and send it to me, pronto?”

“On it now.”

“That’s some good work, Roger. Keep it up.” And Kraski hung up.

Smithback sat back. It was good work.

But he’d done more. Much more. When Paul Rameau was at his drunkest and friendliest, Smithback had heartily suggested they exchange phone numbers. Rameau gave Smithback his number. Then Smithback suggested getting his contact info into Rameau’s phone by calling it from his own.

Which accomplished exactly what he hoped: Rameau took out his phone to check it and kept it out when Smithback gushed about how much he liked the OtterBox case. That led to Rameau talking about how, in his line of work, he dealt with a lot of disgusting and corrosive fluids, which made the rugged OtterBox ideal, especially since he had to use it for work almost every day.

And then he laid the phone on the bar.

It was surely crammed with information. But how to get his hands on it? That was where Smithback got really clever: he made a series of urologic references, including how drinking beer made him piss like a racehorse, which was why he drank only scotch—which in short order had the desired effect of sending Rameau lurching off to the men’s room.

As soon as he was out of sight, Smithback tapped the screen on the technician’s phone to make sure it wasn’t about to lock up, then pulled it over. He had sixty seconds to mine this baby. Email would be too time-consuming. He quickly dismissed voice mail or text for the same reason. But photos—did Rameau take photos of his work? Smithback tapped the photos app, and there they were: dozens of them. Smithback whipped through them—a whole slew of crisp, gruesome pictures of feet in every stage of dissection, from first incision to flayed and skeletonized. Rameau was a damn good photographer, too, every picture crisp and well framed.

They were all repulsive, but none revealed anything noteworthy. And then, with seconds to go, he struck gold. Three amazing photos, all in a row, of the same thing.

With his own phone, he quickly took photos of Rameau’s pictures: one, two, three. And now as he mentally reviewed his coup, he was so pleased that, in the darkness of his “suite,” he once again woke up his phone and scrolled through the shots he’d taken of Rameau’s screen. The three pictures were close-ups of the top outer part of a foot, from the ankle up to where the leg had been severed. The skin around the amputation was shriveled and ragged, and the bone protruding from the sea-bleached flesh was revolting. But there, clearly visible on the skin, was a tattoo—almost all of one, anyway. It was a cross, surrounded by lightning bolts and some lettering. The lettering was a little blurry, but he could do something about that.

He wasn’t going to go off half-cocked and tell Kraski about this. He needed to develop the lead. He’d download the photos to his laptop, then manipulate and sharpen them so he could read those letters. And then he’d ask around on the down low, hoping to identify the tattoo and maybe even where it had been inked. Because something about it looked familiar. And if he was right, this could lead to the biggest scoop of his career. It had to be said, Kraski was nearing retirement…and “Roger Smithback, editor in chief” had a nice ring to it.

Pushing himself out of the chair, he shut off his phone, then made his way toward the room’s lone table, where his laptop—and the story he’d promised Kraski for the Herald—was waiting.

10

PAMELA GLADSTONE GUIDED the R/V Leucothea from the Caloosahatchee River into the entrance of the Legacy Harbour Marina, heading toward the dock. It was a tricky landing, made worse by a twenty-knot offshore breeze. As she approached the pier, the High Point Place towers rose on her starboard side, casting late-afternoon shadows across the water. Approaching at the barest headway, she eased the bow of the vessel toward the dock and gently pinned it against the bumpers to keep it from blowing off, while throttling down and turning to starboard.

“Put over the aft tending spring line,” she called to her postdoc and unwilling first mate, Wallace Lam, ready at the gunwale.

The line went over, a perfect throw for a change, and a pier crewman cleated it neatly.

“Hold the spring, I’m coming ahead on her,” Gladstone said, keeping the starboard ahead and the port backing slow, bringing the forty-six-foot research vessel up snug against the pier face. She pulled the throttles into neutral. As the rest of the lines were cleated, she breathed a sigh of relief that the maneuver had gone well and she hadn’t made a fool of herself, like last time, when she had smacked a piling with her stern. Total jackass carelessness, and naturally everyone had seen it and she had to fill out an accident report, even though neither pier nor ship had sustained any damage beyond an unsightly streak of black rubber on the boat’s white gelcoat.

It had been a good trip. They had successfully retrieved both acoustic Doppler current profilers. To lose one of those twenty-thousand-dollar babies would be a disaster. Now she was eager to download the data and see if it finally confirmed her mathematical models.

She set the rudder to zero, and as she was putting all the controls on the helm to bed, she noticed through the bridge windows a man standing on the dock, tall and pale, the wind whipping his white suit. With a Panama hat on his head, he looked like an albino drug lord waiting for his shipment to come in. He was peering up at her boat and seemed to be looking directly at her through the bridge windows. She wondered how a weirdo like this had gotten onto the private pier, because he obviously was no mariner.

Once everything was in order and she’d filled out the electronic log and shut down the breakers, she stepped out of the wheelhouse. Lam was finishing up as well, transferring the ADCP devices to a two-wheeled cargo carrier on the pier. The man in white was now approaching her directly. She turned her back, busying herself with straightening up a muddy bight, hoping he would go away.

“Dr. Gladstone?” came a smooth voice.

She turned. “Yes?”

“I am Special Agent Pendergast.”

His hand was extended, but instead of shaking it, she held up both of hers, wet and smeared with tidal mud from the dirty line. “Sorry.”

The man withdrew his hand and fixed a pair of glittering eyes on her. “I should like to have a conversation with you.”

“Go ahead.” She stood there. Special Agent. Did that mean he was FBI? “Wait—you got a badge or something?”

A hand slid out a billfold, displayed a shield, then returned it to his suit. “If we could perhaps withdraw to your laboratory, where we could speak in confidence?”