Page 10 of Fated to the Fang

"Near them."

"Was there blood?" Flat. Clinical. "Equipment damage. The nets?"

"You should stay away from that stretch of water."

"That's not a no." She faces me again. "Two disappearances cluster on that exact stretch. Now a boat, two dead. And here you are at my door, wet like you were there, telling me almost nothing." She isn't afraid. She's adding me to a column. "You keep arriving…appearing when an ordeal happens, and every time it's nothing. Old fishermen's marks. A failing closure. A gearbox, I'd guess."

"You should stay off that coast. That's all I came to say."

"People keep telling me that." She holds the door. "They never tell me why. The wanting-me-safe and the wanting-me-quiet are starting to sound like the same damn thing."

I give the warning again, and she takes it the way she takes everything—by writing it down where I'll never see.

I leave before I make it worse. Later that morning Greer's report will exist, and she'll ask for it. She'll lay the boat's position against her own lines and find it sits on the pattern as if set there. She'll see the gearbox doesn't fit the water, that four men can't be made to agree, that the dead were left where any careful person would have to look.

They didn't hide tonight. They left it out in the open, so the tide would carry it straight to her door. I've kept her safe by keeping her oblivious, and that has just switched on a light for her to read by.

9

AVERY

The harbor master won't hand me the incident report, so I go to the man who signed it. Greer is on the public landing, watching the wrecked trawler get winched onto the slip.

"It's a gearbox, Dr. Quinn. Failed bearing, engine failure, one man lost overboard. The other died of his injuries before anyone reached them. That's the report."

"One man overboard." I stop beside him. "There are two dead."

"Heavy water does ugly things."

"It doesn't shred a net." The gear still hangs off the gantry, and I've handled enough of it to know a snag from a thing that was opened. "A failed bearing doesn't tear webbing four feet above the waterline. And your survivors can't agree on whether it was fire, a wave, or the rocks."

"Men rarely agree. You catalog seals, Doctor. Let me catalog men."

"The boat was found inside my survey grid."

"I know where it happened."

"Then you know it's the fourth bad thing. Two people missing, a seal opened up like that net, now this. You don’t have to believe me. I'm asking for the chart coordinates."

He gazes out to the ocean instead of to me. "They won't be released while the report is open." Then, lower: "And if you already know where to look, I'd suggest asking yourself why everyone keeps pretending you don't."

I leave Greer with questions circling and take a walk down near the trawler. A lanky photographer carrying a camera bag nearly backs into a stack of crab pots. He's tall and lanky with sandy blond hair, and glasses slipping down his nose.

"You're doing surveillance badly," I tell him.

He lowers the camera. "I prefer coastal documentation with a side of plausible innocence."

"That sounds much more professional."

"Owen Lark." He nods toward my field book. "You're the seal researcher. I'm shooting the decline for a conservation spread, until the harbor started behaving like it doesn't want witnesses."

That gets my attention. "Witnesses to what?"

He hesitates, then turns the camera screen toward me. The image is blurred, taken from the cliff path: the trawler offshore, the north headland behind it, and two warped vertical streaks near the rocks where no footpath exists.

"Long exposure?" I ask.

"One-fortieth of a second." He zooms in. The streaks bend toward a black notch in the cliff base. "I thought it was lens flare until I checked the sequence. They move between frames."