“Okay.”His voice was muffled by the blankets.
I left the house, making sure the door locked behind me.
At the station, I pulled up everything I had on the Pacific Lady and spread it across my desk.The case file was getting thick.Autopsy report.Interview transcripts.Camera footage summaries.Craig Barlow’s statement.Lena Castillo’s witness account.And now, thanks to Spencer, a theory I hadn’t considered: illegal fishing.
I started with the catch logs.
The ice house kept a chalkboard where fishermen logged their hauls, but there were also paper records going back months.The harbor was old-fashioned that way.I called Ray and asked if he could pull the logs for the Pacific Lady going back three months.He said he’d have them ready by lunch.
While I waited, I turned to the GPS unit.The trip data for the night Eddie died had been wiped.But the previous weeks of data were still on the unit.I’d noted the wipe early in the investigation but hadn’t dug into the older data because, at the time, I didn’t know what I was looking for.Now I did.
I pulled up the trip history on my laptop, coordinates and timestamps for every trip the Pacific Lady made in the three months before Eddie’s death.It was dense, a long list of dates and numbers that didn’t mean much on their own.I needed to know which coordinates corresponded to restricted waters.The numbers meant nothing without a map.
For that, I’d need help.I called the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and got transferred twice before reaching a field officer named Gutierrez, who sounded bored.I explained what I needed: a map of restricted fishing zones along the northern Oregon coast, overlaid with the coordinates from the Pacific Lady’s GPS.
“You’re looking at poaching?”Gutierrez asked, suddenly more interested.
“I’m looking at a homicide.The poaching might be connected.”
“Send me the coordinates.I’ll have something for you by end of day.”
I emailed the data and turned to the catch logs Ray had delivered while I was on the phone.He’d dropped them off with Bree, a stack of photocopied pages organized by date.I spread them across my desk and started cross-referencing.
The logs showed which days Eddie and Gil had brought in catch together versus days only one of them had logged a haul.For most of the three months, the pattern was consistent: Eddie and Gil went out together, logged their catch together, split the proceeds.Standard partnership.
But scattered through the records were days when only Gil had logged a haul.No Eddie.These weren’t frequent, maybe one a week, but they were there.On those days, Gil’s catches were noticeably larger than the catches he logged on partnership days.A two-man haul from a one-man trip.
That didn’t make sense.If Gil was fishing alone on a boat rigged for two, his catches should have been smaller, not bigger.He’d be working fewer pots, covering less ground.Unless he was fishing in areas where the catch was more plentiful.Areas that were more plentiful because they were protected.
I called Ray.
“Ray, quick question.On the days when Gil logged catches without Eddie, was there any pattern there?Like, was it always a certain day of the week?”
Ray was quiet for a moment.“Yeah, now that you mention it.He’d take the boat out on days when Eddie was off.I didn’t think much of it.Partners fish solo sometimes.”
“How often would you say that happened?”
“Once a week, maybe.Eddie only took one day off a week.”
“Did Eddie ever mention anything about those solo trips?”
Another pause.“No.”
So Gil had been taking the boat out without telling Eddie.If Eddie had noticed and wasn’t happy about it, he wouldn’t necessarily have said anything to Ray.But Eddie might have checked the GPS to see where Gil had been going, and he would’ve found coordinates that didn’t match their usual fishing grounds.Would he have gone out to see exactly where Gil had been fishing?
Gutierrez from Fish and Wildlife called back at 5:30 p.m.
“Chief Hale, I’ve got your overlay.You want the good news or the bad news?”
“Give me both.”
“The good news is your GPS data is very clean.Clear coordinates, consistent timestamps.Whoever was using that unit wasn’t trying to hide their routes on the earlier trips.”He paused.“The bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that on fourteen separate occasions over the past three months, the Pacific Lady entered Oregon Marine Reserve waters.Specifically, the zone off Cascade Head.That’s a no-take area.No commercial fishing, no crabbing, no exceptions.Whoever was running that boat in there was operating illegally.”
“Fourteen times?”
“Fourteen that I can see from the data you sent.Could be more if there were trips that didn’t log or if someone deleted specific entries.”
I thanked him and hung up.Then I pulled out the catch logs again and cross-referenced the fourteen dates Gutierrez had flagged with the haul records.Every single one of those dates was a day when only Gil had logged a catch.Eddie’s name wasn’t on any of them.
