Barry checked the letter ‘M’ with his other businesses.Only the hotel chain had the ‘MB.’His business dealings in oil were listed under Smart Reliable Holdings, so that was no help.
Maybe Miles hadn’t been involved in Charlie’s death after all.It could have been someone who just wanted Charlie’s money, but it didn’t explain the paper.
Barry got up from his chair to go through the box when there was a knock on the door.He checked the time on his watch.Where had the day gone?The sun was already setting.It must be Mac.
He checked through the peep hole first and let her in.Mac looked like someone had just run over her cat.
“Come on in.”
Mac walked in on leaden steps, not even looking up at him, just walking into the room and plopping down into his recently vacated desk chair.She looked like she had just come from the boat.She was in the same clothes he’d left her in, and she smelled of the sea and fish.Now didn’t seem the time to point that out.
Barry closed the door and came over to her, squatting down so he could look up at her face.“What happened?”Asking if she was okay was a rhetorical question.
“We found another shark,” she said hollowly.Her eyes closed, and Barry could see the pain on her face from that statement.
“I thought you would be happy about that,” he responded gently, feeling he had to choose his words with care.
Her eyes snapped open, and he could see them rimmed with red as if she had been crying recently.“It was trapped in a gill net.”
“Oh,” he said as if he knew fully what that meant.He was still learning about the sea world.He knew what a gill net was, but some fish survived them; couldn’t the shark?
“Gill nets are set up for catching fish as they try to swim through.It’s common in fishing and not as harmful as bottom trawling to the ecosystem, but when bigger animals like sharks get caught, they can’t move, and when sharks can’t move, they die.”
That explained her upset.“Oh shit.And you found him?Her?It?”Mac hadn’t told him what it was; he shouldn’t just assume the sex.
“She, and she was pregnant.”Mac’s hand tightened into a fist, looking like she wished she could slam it into the person’s face who was responsible.
“Is there any way to find out who did it?”
Mac scoffed.“There should be a marker on the net to identify the owner, but—shocker—there wasn’t.”She threw her hands up in anger.Barry rocked back on his heels to avoid a hand to his face.
“Do you think someone did it on purpose to kill the shark, or did she just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
Mac looked away, her lip twitching to the side in a look of annoyance.“The second would be my guess.No one here hunts sharks.It was probably a local person just trying to catch some fish to feed their family.It just upsets me.The sharks are already depleting in this area and to see one killed so needlessly.”Mac closed her eyes and took a deep breath as if trying to calm herself down.
Barry rubbed his hands over the top of her thighs in a soothing gesture, remaining silent and allowing her this time.
After a moment, she opened her eyes and appeared more grounded.“Please tell me you found something.”
Barry cringed, knowing it wasn’t going to be the news she wanted.“Nothing good.I went through the data on Annabelle’s phone, and it led me to a name.The same name of a fisherman that packed up from the north side two months ago.He got rich and disappeared.Well, now I know the reason he disappeared.”
“He’s dead,” Mac guessed.
“Yeah, a while now.Judging from the autopsy report, only a week after he got paid a million dollars.”
Mac’s eyes widened in shock at the amount.“That’s a lot of money for a fisherman.Even here.I know most of the fishermen here do well, but not that well.”
“I saw the fishing boats.They’re nice but not multimillion dollar nice.”
“I wouldn’t even know what to do with that kind of money,” she remarked, looking off into nothing over his left shoulder.
“Well, this person sold their fishing boat and bought a yacht.”
Mac’s eyes focused back on him, her eyebrows puckering together in confusion.“That’s it?”
“They died within a week.Not a lot of time to spend money.”And when one only had two hundred thousand dollars left over, what else did you get?Who knows if he bought anything before it either?Cash was impossible to track unless you had the serial numbers.
“But why another boat?Why not just keep the one they had?”
