Page 55 of Presumed Dead

“He gave me the same story at the bait shop this morning. Shakedown after engine work. Friend’s slip up the channel. Word for word.”

She heard that.

She’d known there was no friend with a slip up the channel the moment Doyle had said it to her. Now Ethan was telling her Doyle had given him the same lie later, and the same lie told twice to two different people on the same day was a lie a man had prepared in advance, and a man who prepared his lies in advance was a man who’d had reason to think both his marina owner and his marina neighbor were going to ask him where he’d been.

Doyle suspected people were watching.

“Ethan.”

“Yes.”

“Has he been watching me?”

“He’s been watching the marina. You’re part of the marina. So, yes.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know exactly. The AIS history we have goes back twenty-eight days. The full pull from the federal data warehouse comes tonight. I’ll know more in the morning.”

“AIS.”

“Automatic Identification System. Vessels over a certain size carry transponders. We see where they go.”

“So you know where he went?”

“We know exactly where he went. He left your slip at three fifty-seven this morning, ran due west for fifty-two minutes at twenty-three knots. He stopped for fourteen minutes in open water forty-one nautical miles offshore, and ran back at twenty-six knots and was on his cleats at six thirty-eight.”

Sloane heard that.

She did the math without doing it on purpose. She’d been on her dock at four-twenty-six. She’d walked Pier Two at four thirty-six and looked at his empty slip and had not known he was already an hour out into the Gulf at twenty-three knots in a fifty-knot wind. She’d walked it again at six twenty-eight and stood at the head of slip nine.

She’d been on the dock the whole time.

The dock she’d been running for years had been the operational geography for a federal investigation for eight months and she hadn’t known.

Her hands on the counter were still. Questions bombarded her brain.

“What was he carrying?”

“We don’t know yet. Cargo or people. The Bertram will carry small loads short distances if the man at the helm knows what he’s doing, and Doyle was a Navy boatswain.”

“People.”

“Possibly.”

She closed her eyes. Her chest hurt. Tears threatened to flood from her eyes. When she opened her eyes, Ethan was looking at her with the careful, steady look of a man who had brought this sentence into her office and was now waiting for her to do with it whatever she was going to do with it.

She swallowed to wet her throat and to give herself just a bit more time. “Ethan.”

“Yes.”

“The piece you can’t give me for two weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Is it about people?”

He took two breaths.