Dan’s reaction was spontaneous and immediate. Adrenelin surged through his body and his muscles clenched as his mind flashed back three years to the Snow Queen, and to Harry Coombs and the men who had been chasing Claire. And it didn’t stop there. It moved back further still, to the man he had been chasing when Susan was killed. That man too had been tall and slim, with dark hair worn in a ponytail. Why hadn’t his subconscious made that connection before? Had his denial been that complete? And why now when there was no reason, other than a superficial similarity in appearance?

  “Something I can help you with?”

  The young man, whose nametag identified him as Kevin and whose hair had been artfully streaked and styled, had finished his task.

  “I hope so.” Dan struggled to force his mind back to the present. He pulled his badge out of his pocket and held it out.

  “I was wondering if you’ve seen this guy around.” With his other hand he held out a copy of Jimmy’s photograph.

  Kevin looked at him warily for a moment and then reached for the picture.

  “Wow, man. Is he a bad guy?” he asked. “Whad’he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything,” Dan answered. “He seems to be missing and his family is worried about him.”

  “Oh shit. That’s seriously nasty, man.” Kevin moved his head from side to side as he stared at the photo. He reminded Dan of a brightly feathered bantam rooster his neighbor had had when he was a kid.

  “Doesn’t look familiar, man, but I really can’t be sure. You know how it is. There’s a lot of people go through here at this time of year and I barely have time to look at any of them.”

  “Anyone else I could ask?”

  Kevin shrugged. “Maybe check at the bar or the restaurant. Some of the chicks there might remember him.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.” Dan slid the photo back into the envelope and turned to go, but then turned back. “One more question. Have you heard anything about any men going missing? Native men?”

  “Native men? You mean like Indians?” Kevin look of incredulity matched his tone of voice.

  “Yes. Like Indians. Indigenous men.” Dan heard the sarcasm in his response and struggled to keep his voice level. Kevin’s ignorance had triggered a surge of resentment that caught him by surprise. The sarcasm, like his response to the man on the yacht, were both reactions that were inappropriate and unacceptable given both his training and his profession and both worried him.

  “They’re actually Kwakwaka’wakw,” he said, knowing that the term would mean nothing to the young man in front of him. “This their territory.”

  “Oh wow, we don’t get many of them here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.” Kevin sounded as if he thought Natives were alien creatures from a distant planet, and the confusion on his face made him look even younger and more naïve than he had previously appeared.

  “So you haven’t heard anybody talking? No gossip of any kind?”

  “No, man. No way. Nothing.”

  The kid looked so earnest Dan felt almost sorry for him, but the thought that Kevin would use this brief conversation to entertain his buddies for the next several days quickly took care of that.

  BACK UP AT THE VILLAGE he found Claire sitting on a bench between two hanging baskets filled with bright pink petunias and trailing fuschia.

  “Wish I had a camera with me,” he said as he smiled down at her. “You look beautiful.”

  She looked up at him but didn’t return his smile.

  “You need to talk to Belinda,” she said. “She might have seen Jimmy.”

  TEN

  Belinda Travers was a short and vivacious with a mass of brown curls piled on top of her head and an infectious smile. She worked as a waitress in the restaurant and looked to be several years younger than Kevin, which Dan figured probably meant she was still in school. She wiggled her fingers at Claire when she saw them enter and pointed to an empty table by the window.

  “What makes you think she saw Jimmy?” Dan asked as he slid onto a bench seat.

  “I came in for a coffee and she asked me which boat I was on,” Claire replied. “I explained that we were here looking for a young man who was missing and she asked his name. I told her it was Jimmy but I didn’t know his last name, only that he had come from Toronto to work on one of the fish farms, and she got this weird look on her face. She asked me if I knew what Jimmy looked like so I told her you had a photo of him.”

  Dan nodded and watched as Belinda worked her way back towards them. It was obvious she was good at her job: she smiled and chatted as she took orders and cleared dishes and she seemed to know most of the clientele. By the time she arrived at their table, over five minutes had passed.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling brightly at Claire before turning to look at Dan. “I guess you must be Dan. Claire said you had a photo of a guy you’re looking for?”

  “I am, and I do,” Dan answered. “And Claire said that she thought you might have met a guy named Jimmy recently?”

  Belinda flashed a quick glance at Claire, and her smile faltered just a little before she answered. “Yeah. I did—at least he said his name was Jimmy, but he also said he’d call me and he didn’t so who knows?” She shrugged her shoulders and hugged her tray to her chest.

  Her quick, forced grin was intended to show how little she cared, but it proved exactly the opposite, and her eyes held both hurt and confusion. Watching her, Dan figured there was an insecure little girl beneath the bright exterior and Jimmy was probably just one of a number of men she had been disappointed by, but then she straightened her shoulders and held out her hand for the photo. Tough too, he thought as he pulled it out of the envelope and handed it to her, watching her eyes widen as she looked down into Jimmy Fulton’s face. The young man had been laughing into the camera when the photo was taken, not a care in the world, probably excited by the knowledge that he was headed for a new adventure.

  Belinda’s lips trembled as she stared down at the image and she blinked a couple of times before she looked up and handed the photo back.

  “Is that the guy you met?” Dan kept his voice gentle as he watched the emotions play across her face. “Is that Jimmy?”

  Belinda looked at him for a minute before she answered, her eyes bright with tears, but then she tossed her head and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s him. Is he really missing?”

  “Yes, he is, but we’re trying to find him. His mother said he was planning to work on a fish farm. Did he say anything about that to you?”

  The girl shrugged. “He said he had a job lined up with one of them, but I didn’t ask him which one it was. There are lots around here so I figured it wasn’t far. He was trying to find a ride with one of the boats—they come and go every day so he figured maybe one of them could just drop him off.”

  Another waitress, this one dark and plump and about the same age as Belinda, came up to her and whispered something in her ear while she looked over towards the kitchen. Belinda nodded and turned back to Dan and Claire.

  “I gotta go. I got an order ready. I sure hope you find him. He’s a really nice guy.”

  SHE TURNED TO LEAVE, then turned back. “You should ask that lady with the dog. He was talking to her just before he left. She might know where he was going.”

  “The dog?” Dan wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. Surely she couldn’t be talking about the woman he had seen walking some giant animal on the wharf at Port McNeill. The same woman he had seen just minutes ago on the deck of the large yacht. That would be quite a coincidence—and coincidence was not something he tended to put much faith in.

  “Yeah, it’s a weird looking thing—Jimmy said it’s an Afghan Hound or something. It’s huge. She told him they were bred to hunt stuff in the desert.” Belinda looked out the window at the yachts crowded along the floats and the stretch of water beyond and laughed. “Not much desert here!”

  “DO YOU THINK IT’S THE same woman,” Claire asked as they left the restaurant.

  “Gotta be,” Dan answered. “How many dogs like that are you going to find on a boat—and she’s here. That yacht we saw anchored back at Port McNeill is tied up at the end of one of the floats.”

  He left Claire to continue exploring the village while he retraced his steps. The woman and the dog had disappeared from the deck and the yacht sat quiet, apparently unoccupied. A flight of stairs led up from the wharf to an open gate in the bulwarks and Dan went up and rapped on the hull. There was no response.

  After waiting several minutes he climbed the stairs and stepped through the gate. A covered side-deck ran the length of the ship and Dan walked aft, peering through the windows into a vast salon decorated entirely with angular chrome and white leather furniture that he thought looked both cold and uncomfortable, more like a showroom than a place to relax.

  The yacht appeared to be totally deserted, although the glass doors leading from the deck into the salon were wide open. He knocked a second time, then leaned in and shouted, but it still remained eerily quiet. If there was anyone aboard, they must either be in a stateroom well forward in the bow, or perhaps on a lower deck, but it seemed odd there were no crew around.

  Dan slid a card from his wallet and set it on a glass coffee table just inside the door. It was probably a waste of time. Experience told him it was unlikely anyone finding it would actually call him.

  He glanced around once again at the immaculate salon. The glass was so clean it was almost invisible and the chrome gleamed. There had to be an army of staff on board to keep it looking the way it did, so where the hell were they?

  He turned to leave and came face to face with the man he had seen out on the deck earlier. Dan hadn’t heard him approach so there was no way of telling how long he had been standing there or where he had come from and he didn’t speak now. Instead he simply stood, silent and still, no more than a foot away, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses.

  “Hi. Sorry to intrude,” Dan said, recovering from his surprise and holding out his hand. “I knocked but no one answered. Are you the owner?”

  The man neither shook the proffered hand nor answered the question, but continued to stand there almost preternaturally still. Something about the way he held himself, seemingly relaxed yet somehow poised for action, suggested he might be a practitioner of martial arts and Dan wondered if perhaps he was Oriental. Certainly his hair was dark enough although the color of his skin pointed more towards South America or the Middle East. In any case he didn’t appear to understand English, and after a few seconds had passed Dan took a slow step back and reached into the salon where his card lay on the table. He picked it up and held it out.

  “Dan Connor. I’m with the RCMP. The police. I need to speak with the owner.”

  There was a flicker of movement behind the dark glasses.

  “The owner is not available.”

  So he did speak English—and excellent English at that.

  “Well it’s actually his wife I want to talk to. Is she around?”

  “He does not have a wife.”

  Dan sighed. He was already beginning to tire of this game.

  “But there is a woman aboard. A woman with a dog. I saw her out on the foredeck about an hour ago. Who is she?”

  There was a shrug and the faintest suggestion of a sneer. “She is a friend of the owner.”

  “Then I need to talk to this friend.”

  The sneer became more pronounced. “She is not here.”

  The two men stared silently at each other, locked into an unspoken challenge, each waiting to see if the other would flinch. It was Dan who moved first. There was nothing to be gained by forcing the issue. He leaned back and returned his card to the table. There was something going on here and he needed to figure out what it was, but that would have to wait. He had no reason to force his way in and no valid excuse to take on the man in front of him, although they were both well aware that he would dearly love to do just that.

  “The owner needs to call me. Please make sure he does,” he said as he pushed his way past his unknown enemy and climbed back down onto the float.

  “DID SHE KNOW WHERE Jimmy went?” Claire asked when Dan returned from his futile search.

  “She wasn’t there,” he answered. “I don’t suppose you saw her and her dog come up this way?”

  She shook her head, a puzzled look on her face. Like Dan, she knew that there was really nowhere else the woman could have gone. Even if she had decided to visit another yacht, the dog should have been clearly visible out on deck or on the float.

  “Perhaps they went out on that big launch they use as a dinghy. It would be a whole lot easier to explore the area in that than with the yacht.”

  Dan nodded. It seemed to be the only feasible explanation, but it meant that the woman could be gone for hours—or even days. The ‘dinghy’ was big enough to have several berths, although he didn’t think she looked like someone who would enjoy anything less than the comfort and convenience provided by the yacht.

  “No use waiting for her. I left my card so maybe someone will call. It’s not likely they took Jimmy anywhere—they don’t look like the kind of people who would pick up a hitchhiker and I doubt they would want to hang around a fish farm.”

  As they passed the yacht on their way out, Dan saw the same man standing out on the deck. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he was watching them.

  ELEVEN

  On the other side of Vancouver Island, halfway up the coast off the entrance to Esperanza Inlet, a fish boat ploughed through a heavy swell. The weather in the area had been good for the past two days, but the swell was the result of a storm that had recently pounded the shores of Japan, almost five thousand miles to the west. The boat bucked and twisted as it quartered the sea, angling up the smooth face of the wave only to teeter precariously on the crest before starting its plunge down into the trough. It was a fishing troller with a length of just thirty-nine feet, small in comparison with the steel monsters that now dominated the fishing industry. Big business had replaced the independent fishermen that once made a good living on the sea and few small boats remained.

  The old-growth fir planks and the oak ribs that formed the hull of the Betty Jean did not show up well on radar, but her metal rigging and the radar reflector mounted on the mast made her clearly visible on the coastguard satellite system. She had logged into Canadian Marine Traffic Control when she first appeared off Cape Flattery and started north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca towards Carmanah Point in the early hours of the morning. Registered in the United States with a homeport of Sitka, Alaska, she had been regularly recorded in transit through the area over the past several years as she followed the diminishing numbers of wild salmon on their return to the rivers of their birth.

  Now more than one hundred and twenty-five miles north, the boat changed course and headed in. The captain, a man by the name of Tommy Estrada, again called up Marine Traffic Control and informed them of the course change as was required, adding that they were headed into Zeballos to take on fuel. That too had happened many times in the past. A small boat heading up as far as Alaska had to cover large distances between refueling stations and this one had come all the way from the Columbia River.

  The new position was once again logged into Marine Traffic and the technicians there turned their attention to other things: there were nine freighters anchored off Vancouver Harbour waiting their turn to load or unload goods, three more waiting at Roberts Bank for coal and wheat, three inbound in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and two outbound in that same body of water. If that wasn’t enough to keep the overworked staff busy, there were also two cruise ships headed down the Inside Passage plus all the regular tug, tow and barge combinations and the ferries that criss-crossed the waters between the mainland and the myriad off-shore islands. No one even tried to count the recreational boats that dotted the screens like a virulent rash.

  Even if the technicians had been paying close attention it was doubtful they would have noticed the insignificant splash made by the small inflatable lowered off the stern of the Betty Jean as she entered calmer waters. Within minutes the dinghy became just another local boat moving up and down the inlet, another couple of guys out for a day of fishing in one of the best salmon fishing spots in the area. By the time the old troller turned into Zeballos Inlet, the dinghy had already disappeared into the narrow sliver of water the charts identified as Port Eliza.

  An hour and a half later, sitting lower in the water now that she had a full load of fuel and fresh water in her tanks, the Betty Jean headed back out. She barely slowed as she picked up the same two men and lifted the inflatable out of the water. It was a little heavier than it had been when they launched it, and they carefully removed six packages, each one tightly wrapped and sealed in black plastic, and placed them into the hold.

  The Betty Jean continued on her course and when she had rounded the point and was once again feeling the swells of the Pacific under her keel, the captain changed his heading and set a course for the Scott Islands off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. From there he would angle across to Rivers Inlet and then enter Fitz Hugh Sound and the calmer waters of the Inside Passage on his way to Alaska.

  Later that same day another inflatable with two men aboard plus their fishing gear and a couple of coolers presumably to hold their catch, returned to Zeballos. A heavyset man with short blond hair operated the boat, but it was the much smaller dark-haired passenger who directed its course.

  They loaded it into a blue pickup and by midnight, driving slowly over the rough, gravel roads, the truck arrived in Port McNeill and was backed into the garage of a house located high on the hill above the town. Before the door was closed, the dark-haired man walked out to the end of the driveway and stared into the night, his eyes scanning the houses lining the quiet street. After a couple of minutes he turned and walked back inside, the garage door rolled down again and the lights were turned off. The house returned to silence, like all the other houses around it.

 

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