Page 46 of Presumed Dead

A small pause. Caleb was at his desk, pulling something up on a screen. Ethan could hear the soft tap of a keyboard on the other end, which was Caleb collecting his sentence before he said it.

“Doyle took her out at three fifty-seven this morning.”

Ethan didn’t move.

The wind had dropped to ten knots, and the rain had eased to drift, and the cockpit deck was warm under his hand on the gunwale, and Catherine was below on her houseboat making her second pot of coffee, and the man on the other end of the encrypted line had just told him the Bertram had moved through the worst hour of the storm.

“Three fifty-seven.”

“AIS shows her off the cleats at three fifty-seven. She ran due west for fifty-two minutes at twenty-three knots, slowed to four for fourteen minutes, then turned around and ran back at twenty-six. Back on her cleats at six thirty-eight.”

“Six thirty-eight.”

Ten minutes after he and Sloane noticed the Bertram was still out.

Ethan looked across at Pier Two. The Bertram was on her cleats now. He could see the bow from the cockpit if he leaned half a step to the left, which he didn’t do, because a man on Pier Three leaning to look at Pier Two at six fifty-three on a Thursday morning was a man making an unforced error.

“Where did he stop?”

“Forty-one nautical miles offshore. Open water. No fixed structure within twenty miles.”

“He met somebody.”

“I assume. Whoever he met ran without an AIS.”

“Yes, and there’s no satellite pass on a thirty-foot vessel in fifty knots of wind and rain. The transfer happened in the storm. The storm was the cover.”

Ethan let that sit. He took the count of three breaths and let the sentence settle into the place where it was going to live.

“Fourteen minutes at four knots.”

“Long enough to bring a boat alongside, transfer cargo or people, push off.”

“Cargo or people.”

“The Bertram’s a forty-footer and she’s not built for either at speed, but she’ll carry small loads short distances if a man knows what he’s doing. Doyle was a Navy boatswain. He knows what he’s doing.”

“How long has he been doing this?”

“We don’t know yet. The AIS history goes back twenty-eight days. Three runs in that window, all in heavy weather, all between midnight and four. We’re pulling the prior twelve months from the federal data warehouse this morning. I’ll have it by tonight.”

“Okay”

“Vale.”

“Yeah.”

“Does she know the boat wasn't there?”

“She knows. She saw the empty slip with me at four thirty-six during the storm. She saw it again with me at six twenty-eight when we walked the dock together. The second time we stood at the head of the slip for a beat.”

“Where was she when he came in?”

“She left me at six thirty. She said she was going to walk the rest of the dock by herself. The Bertram came in eight minutes later.”

“So she saw him come in?”

“Probably. Pier Two was clear and she was on it. The angles work.”