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Keating looked toward Lieutenant Harper.

“Contact the evidence unit. Have them pull every photograph Miss Sinclair submitted.”

Harper nodded and stepped away.

Calle leaned closer to the tablet.

“Can I see the entire image again?”

Commander Keating restored it to its original size.

The cargo vessel sat inside Blackwater’s hidden harbor. Crates covered most of the forward deck, with three men standing near the loading crane. The silver-haired man watched from the bridge.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“Nothing yet.”

That meant she saw something.

She just didn’t understand it.

Calle never guessed when facts mattered. She waited until the pieces fit.

She took the tablet when Keating offered it and enlarged different sections of the photograph. First the vessel. Then the dock. Then the cliff behind it.

Agent Morales opened her notebook.

“Do you recognize the ship?”

“No. It isn’t Mariner’s Crown.”

“You’re certain?”

“The bridge is different. Mariner’s Crown had two forward windows on each side. This one has three.”

I looked at the grainy photograph.

I wouldn’t have noticed that.

Neither had anyone else.

Calle moved the image again.

“The hull is shorter too.”

“Can you read the name?” Morales asked.

“It’s painted over.”

A dark rectangle covered the stern where the vessel’s name should have been.

The Coast Guard lab could enhance the image, but there might not be anything beneath the paint to recover. Smuggling vessels were frequently renamed, reflagged, and transferred through shell companies until tracing their ownership became nearly impossible.

Calle enlarged the wooden crate.

The damaged compass marked its side.

“Thomas said Elias Ross used that symbol to identify a traitor.”