Black Coral Read online

  “That’s not an implausibility. Kids do weird stuff.”

  Don’t I know it. I think Jackie was conceived on a golf course. But she doesn’t need to know that.

  “All I’m saying is that the forensic report intentionally leaves out anything that contradicts the simple story. Aguilló knows this, but he probably thinks it doesn’t much matter whether it happened at midnight or four in the morning.”

  “Okay. They did sloppy work. Now what?”

  “I want to look into this some more,” I reply.

  “It sounds like you already have.”

  “I mean I want to talk to Aguilló. I want to get all the notes. I want to see the van again.”

  “Okay. Marquez will be annoyed, but I’ll deal with that. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. I want Hughes to help me. He’s smart. He pointed out the ring in the first place.”

  “Nope. You can work on this, but I need his attention on the Bandits. In case you forgot, this is our priority right now. The van is as cold a case as they come. I’m treating it as a training exercise.”

  “Fine. But I wouldn’t be too sure.” I don’t know why I blurt out that last remark.

  “Now what?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that if someone else saw those kids before they died, they never told anyone. Why?”

  “So now you’re assuming they saw someone?” asks George.

  “Maybe they parked on the side of the road for five hours while they got it on. Maybe not. Maybe they were up to something else. Like I said, it’s just odd. That’s all.”

  There’s another factor I haven’t mentioned to George. I don’t dare say it out loud, because I don’t want word to get back to the families unless it’s corroborated. But the one note I saw in the confidential report that wasn’t given to the press, which was removed from the final report filed by the coroner, was a tiny detail with huge implications.

  Both Caitlin and Grace had their underwear on inside out—which is one of the signs of rape and murder being covered up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SECRETS

  I glance over the top of my laptop screen and tap on Jackie’s world history textbook on the table in our kitchen galley. She’s sitting with her knees up, playing on her phone—a phone she wasn’t supposed to have until next year but that her father decided she could have on her last birthday.

  I would have put up a protest, but it wasn’t that long ago that two men tried to kill me aboard my last boat. I have no reason to think my daughter is in any kind of danger, but you never can be sure. When I weighed the risk of that handheld electronic portal to a parent’s nightmares versus the man who tried to drag me into the bow of my own boat to murder me, I decided to leave it to Jackie’s judgment as to how to use her phone responsibly.

  One of the conditions for having the phone was that Run and I could inspect it and her text chats at any time we chose. While neither of us wants to invade the privacy of our child, she’s still a child.

  She thought she’d be clever by using a texting app and burying the icon in a folder on the second page, but I showed her how I could pull up her most frequently used apps and find what she’d been using. I also explained that if she pulled a stunt like that again, she’d have to retrieve her phone from the bottom of a canal.

  She’s a great kid, but she’s entering that phase of life in which she has secrets. When I tap on her textbook and tell her to put the phone aside, she places it so the screen is facing down. I also notice that she always holds the phone so I can’t see who she’s talking to.

  I try to remind myself that not every secret a twelve-year-old has is something I need to know about. I’ve got to give her room to be herself with her friends and do their goofy things without being too worried about parental judgment.

  “What are you working on?” she asks me, trying to turn the conversation away from schoolwork. She’s a good student, but she just got her first C. It doesn’t seem coincidental to me that happened at the same time the girls’ and boys’ swim teams started practicing together. I can only hope that boys are a mere curiosity to her for now.

  “Just schoolwork,” I reply. I close the PDF viewer with the details about Caitlin Barrow’s forensic exam and open my browser window with a research paper about Paleoamericans. I experience a brief moment of self-consciousness as I realize that I’m keeping secrets from my daughter as well.

  The biggest one that I feel guilt over is not being truthful about why I sold my last boat and bought this one instead. It’s almost the same model and actually a year older. But nobody was ever killed on this one.

  While I don’t lose much sleep over having had to defend myself and fatally wounding the man who tried to kill me, even after all the blood was cleaned up and the boat looked new again, there was no way I could keep living on it and not recall what happened every day—me clawing at the carpet, grabbing anything I could to avoid getting dragged belowdecks . . .

  The sensible thing would have been to move into the apartment at the marina that was mine to use for watching the place. But the apartment went away when I no longer had the time to play superintendent. In theory, I could have rented an apartment somewhere else, or moved in with Run, but there’s salt in my veins. I like the gentle rocking of the boat at night, and for some reason I feel safer at sea.

  When I bought this craft, The Comet, I decided to keep it docked in the marina where Dad keeps Fortune’s Fool. It’s nice to have him around to look after Jackie—and keep an eye on me as well, I guess.

  “Anything exciting?” asks Jackie.

  “Nadine sent me some articles on minimally invasive archaeological excavation. She wants to know how much of it can be used underwater.”

  My PhD adviser, Nadine Baltimore, has cut me a tremendous amount of slack as I’ve taken on the workload of the UIU. When I told her I might have to drop out of the program, she had a few choice words for me. After she consulted with the academic department heads, a compromise was reached: I could use my investigative casework as credit toward my doctoral requirements. At first the other professors balked, but then Nadine pointed out that they risked losing the one candidate accumulating more underwater archaeological experience than anyone else in the state, or possibly the world. This was an exaggeration, but maybe not that far off.

  I’ve been asked to do an interview for the alumni magazine, detailing my recovery of the Pond 65 van—something Nadine told me will go a long way toward shutting up my critics.

  We’ll see.

  Jackie cracks open her textbook and stares at the pages. I reopen Caitlin’s forensic report, then pull up the police reports on Tim Kelly and Dylan Udal. Neither appeared particularly rapey, but what does that mean? Reading between the lines, both couples had probably been sexually active for a while, and since both Caitlin and Grace had their underwear replaced inside out, it would suggest that Tim and Dylan were the perpetrators.

  Or, more simply, there could have been some innocent teen activity and the girls put their clothes back on in a hurry, both of them managing to get their underwear on inside out. I’ve done that more than a few times.

  Although, the forensic report indicates there may have been tearing at the bands, suggesting that they may’ve been stripped and redressed by someone else. The problem is that thirty-year-old forensic data is mostly fuzzy guessing.

  The other curious point is what’s not in the inventory list: condoms or condom wrappers.

  Sexually active kids in the late eighties wouldn’t have had any trouble getting access to them. At the height of the AIDS crisis, schools were handing them out in nurses’ offices like college pamphlets.

  The more I read into the report, the more sympathetic I am to Aguilló and Marquez censoring the final version—I disagree with the choice, but I understand where they’re coming from. If the girls were raped by the boys but there’s no way to prove it, whom does it help to put that information out there? The perpetrators are dead and the families of the girl
s would be left to deal with a horrible truth, while the parents of Dylan and Tim would be made to feel guilty for something that wasn’t their fault.

  I place the mouse cursor over the close button. Maybe I should just let it go . . .

  Jackie giggles, and I see that she’s placed her phone in her textbook. She glances up, her cheeks flushing at the realization that I’ve caught her in the act.

  “If I were to look at your phone right now, what would I see?” I ask.

  Jackie pauses, her eyes glancing down at the screen. She then picks it up and swipes a finger across the display, erasing the conversation. “Nothing,” she says and tosses the phone on the table, where it skids across and hits my computer. She knows her phone privileges are over for the foreseeable future. “Can I go see Grandpa?”

  I close my laptop, take a deep breath, and try to recall what mommy blog had the right advice for this situation. None comes to mind. No matter. McPhersons aren’t known for conventional parenting.

  Jackie is a good kid, most days. Maybe it’s time for some of that unconventional parenting. She’s an exceptionally bright and mature twelve-year-old, but she doesn’t understand how scary the real world is and what keeps her mother up at night.

  “You asked what I was working on. I lied. I was looking at the forensic report about the kids in the van. Maybe you can help me with an ethical question.”

  I then horrify my daughter and probably commit some form of child abuse by giving her the details of the forensic examination—slightly sanitized, but not sparing the horror of what might have happened.

  Fifteen minutes later, tears are welling in my daughter’s eyes. She’s seen R-rated movies and senseless violence, but she’s a deeply compassionate soul. While she’d heard the general news about the kids in the van, they didn’t feel real to her. Now they do. And I made her cry, traumatized by that kind of first-person empathy young girls can turn on or off like a switch.

  “Those boys . . . Dylan and Tim . . . do you really think they could have done that to their friends?” she asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m not sure if we can know. I was thinking I should just let it go.”

  “You can’t, Mom!” she blurts out and pokes my closed laptop. “What if they did it? Or . . . or . . . what if someone else did it?”

  Hearing her mention the possibility of someone else sends a shiver down my spine.

  “There was nobody else in the van. Just the four of them.”

  “Their parents need to know,” she says with certainty.

  “If you were Caitlin’s mom, what would you want me to tell you? That her boyfriend may have harmed her before she died?”

  She shakes her head. “No. I’d want someone like you to find out first. I’d want someone like you to find out the truth. It’s what you do. I’d want you to tell me what you find out.”

  The plaintive sound of her voice moves me. She’s speaking out of pure empathy. This was probably the voice I needed to hear.

  “Okay,” I reply.

  “You’re going to look into it? You’re going to find out?”

  “I’m going to try.” In an act of justifiable parental manipulation, I pick up her phone. “What would I find if I pulled up the backup of your messages?”

  Her mouth opens at the thought that I might still be able to see her messages. Her eyes drift away as she mutters under her breath. “Stacey said Conner needs to start shaving his pubes because they stick out of his swim trunks during practice.”

  Horrified but relieved, I slowly hand her phone back to her. “Let’s never talk about that again.” I also make a mental note to call her swim coach and make sure they’re giving the kids proper personal grooming advice—and to keep this Conner kid as far away from Jackie as possible.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CAITLIN

  Diane Morera, formerly Diane Barrow, sits next to her husband on the patio of their Sunrise town house. She’s aged well, and I can see traces of her teenage daughter in her tanned face. Her husband, Benson Morera, is sitting by her side, not too close, but leaning into her, watching his wife’s reactions.

  I can’t imagine what she’s going through. How do you deal with grief you tried to put away thirty years ago? For me, at least, half of dealing with grief is trying to figure out what I’m supposed to show the outside world.

  “Thank you for coming in person,” says Diane. “It was a little jarring to get a phone call about Caitlin’s body being found.”

  “Yeah. That was . . .” I decide now is not the time to go into agency rivalry. “That’s not the best way to handle these things.”

  “Did you see her body?” she asks. “The coroner recommended we shouldn’t because of the state it was in.”

  “She was down there a long time,” I reply. No mother should see what I saw.

  “I kind of imagine her down there looking the same, frozen in time. But I know that’s not the case. The doctor said she died painlessly. Is that true?”

  Time to be circumspect. “I don’t have any reason to think otherwise.”

  She nods. “It’s been so long. She wanted to be an actress. I used to hope that she’d just run off to Los Angeles and I’d see her someday on a soap opera. Silly, I know. I used to tape them. She loved those shows. At first, I taped them because I wanted her to have them when she came back. Then I did it so I could watch them when I got home, watch and look for her. I never saw her. I finally gave up.” She glances over at her husband.

  “As a mother,” I reply, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”

  “It’s the past. I knew she was gone a long time ago. The first time she ran away . . . well, it set a precedent.”

  “I read that in the original police report. She’d run away a few times?”

  “Yes. Things were difficult. After her father and I broke up. And she didn’t exactly adjust well to . . .” She pauses. “She didn’t adjust well to having Benson around.”

  “Diane . . .” Her husband puts his hand on her arm.

  This is new. “I didn’t realize you two were seeing each other back then.”

  “After her husband left,” Benson clarifies.

  Diane shakes her head. “No point now. We were seeing each other before Caitlin’s father and I separated. That was part of the stress.”

  I’ll say. Her mom goes out with this guy while still married to her dad? Arguments in that house must have been intense. The police reports mentioned a pair of domestic-disturbance calls prior to Caitlin’s disappearance, but they weren’t specific.

  Benson seems uneasy about the entire discussion. Understandable, although I’m not seeing any kind of guilt from the guy.

  “I’m trying to get a little more background on the kids. Is there anything more you can tell me?”

  “Sure. I didn’t keep much, but I still have an album. Let me get that.” She excuses herself and goes into the house.

  “What was her boyfriend like?” I ask Benson Morera.

  “Dylan? I never really talked to him. He’d pull up in the van, and Caitlin would hop in. The few times I talked to him, he was all ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir.’ Some kids do that as an act,” he adds.

  “You weren’t bothered by an older boy taking Caitlin off in a van?”

  He makes an apathetic shrug. “Caitlin was Diane’s kid. I wasn’t her father.”

  Way to step into the role. Either he legitimately feels no emotion regarding Caitlin, or he’s concealing something. Out of curiosity and while Diane is still in the house, I decide to probe a little. “Did Caitlin ever act inappropriately around you?”

  His shoulders tighten and his jaw clenches as he leans forward. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  Well, asshole, if you never crossed boundaries with the attractive teenage girl you were living with but deny any parental connection with, you’d shrug off the question—but if you’d said something or acted in a creepy way, you’d react exactly like you just did.

&nbs
p; What I say instead is, “Did she have violent outbursts? Tell you she wanted to kill herself? That kind of thing?”

  “Oh.” He sits back in his chair. “No. Nothing like that.”

  Diane walks back onto the patio and sets a large Trapper Keeper portfolio on the table. “This was hers. I put a photo album in here.” She opens the Velcro flap and turns the pages to face me.

  Caitlin’s life in photos is revealed as I flip through the album. I see her first birthday. A bath with her mother. Riding a bike with training wheels. Hugging Chip and Dale at Disney World. When I get to the teenage years, I see the same experiments with too much eye makeup that my mother suffered through. Caitlin has short hair and baggy shirts for a while. Then she’s wearing concert T-shirts and flipping the peace sign.

  In these later photos, she seems less interested in the camera. Probably because the mother she disapproved of was holding it.

  I turn the page and see a photo of all four kids dressed in tuxedos and cocktail dresses. “What was this?”

  “Dylan’s older brother got married. Don’t they look adorable?”

  They do. The girls look mature beyond their years, and the boys look like they’re trying to be men comfortable with themselves.

  “What did you think about Dylan?”

  Diane sighs. “That boy. They knew each other since middle school. He could be a handful. Always polite. He treated Caitlin like a princess. She wasn’t always nice to him, to be honest. She took him for granted sometimes.”

  I wonder where she got that from.

  “But she always came back to him. He had his mood swings. When he was on his medication, he was fine. But that family of his.” She rolls her eyes. “Anyway, he was a good kid. Good for her.”

  “Until he drove her into the canal,” adds Benson. “Is it true he was on drugs at the time?”

  “The bodies . . .” I almost say were too decomposed. “. . . weren’t in a condition where we could determine that.” But my money is on yes.

  I pull out a stack of photos tucked into the binder’s back pocket. Most of them are duplicates of what I’ve seen. I push through them and see a few others, including photos of her friend Grace in a park that I recognize. They’re a teenager’s attempt at glamour shots. I slide through them and find a Polaroid. This one is of Grace in a bedroom. Her bare back is to the camera and her head is turned toward it as she cups her breast with her hand. It’s the kind of thing a lover might take, or two teenage girls playing around with an instant camera. At the bottom in magic marker is the word Slut in a girl’s handwriting with a winking smiley face. I show it to Diane.