'What blue tent?' she asked, blowing a white plume of smoke into the air.
I pointed. 'See that patch of blue over there on the face of the cliff?'
'Where?'
'Just above the timbers of the retaining wall. The blue you see is actually a tarp. It looks as though someone may be living there. I was hoping someone from here in the neighborhood might know who that person is or where I might find him.'
The woman frowned. She gave me a doubtful look-as though she thought I was some kind of nut-and then looked in the direction I was pointing. 'You mean somebody actually lives over there?' she asked finally. 'No kidding?'
'No kidding.'
'Well,' she said. 'I wouldn't know anything about that. Besides, why would somebody want to live down there in that hole with all those trains going past? They'd have to be crazy. What a stupid idea!'
She was young and more than slightly arrogant. She had a warm coat, wore a small diamond engagement ring on her left hand, and had enough extra money to squander two bucks per pack on her daily ration of cigarettes. Her whole attitude irked me. I suspected that she believed the reality of homelessness would never touch her personally. For her sake, I hoped she was right.
'What do you want him for?'
'There was a fire this morning over at Fishermen's Terminal, and…'
'I heard about that. Somebody died in it, didn't they?'
'Yes…'
She stood up, ground out her cigarette in the hard-packed earth beneath her feet, then pulled her coat more tightly around her. 'My boyfriend will have a fit when he hears about the fire,' she said. 'He's from Bellevue. He keeps telling me I should find another job, someplace over on the East Side. He thinks my working in the city is too dangerous and stuff, know what I mean?'
I could have explained to her that every neighborhood has its own peculiar dangers, even ones on the East Side of Lake Washington, but her cigarette/coffee break must have been over. She headed across the street toward a tiny insurance office without giving me so much as a backward glance. No doubt there was a desk inside where she toiled away feeding letters and numbers into the keyboard and memory of some computer.
I found Sue already in the car when I showed up back at the Mustang, shaking my head in frustration. 'Nothing?' she asked.
'Less than.'
'Are you ready to give up and call it quits?'
'I guess,' I admitted. 'For the time being. We sure as hell aren't getting anywhere doing this.'
By the time we got back to the Isolde, the crime-scene perimeter had been narrowed. The official off-limits area was now small enough to allow people access to other boats along the dock. While crime-scene investigation is important, it wasn't the only business that needed to be conducted on Dock 3 of Fishermen's Terminal that cold November morning.
We returned to the scene of the crime and learned that Audrey Cummings had already loaded Gunter Gebhardt's body into her gray van and had taken him back to the Medical Examiner's Office up at Harborview Hospital to await an autopsy. Janice Morraine was busy lifting prints from the guardrail of the boat. With her glasses pushed up into her hair and with her brows furrowed in concentration, Janice was making her way along the rail of the boat, examining what she saw there under a beam of light from the wand of an Alternative Light Source box.
An ALS, as it's called in the trade, is an expensive but handy crime-fighting tool that allows crime-scene technicians to locate and lift prints from places and materials-tire irons, for example-where previously they would have been impossible to detect. Everything Janice did was under the watchful eye of the arson investigator, Lieutenant Marian Rockwell.
Janice didn't seem at all happy with that arrangement. I guess it goes with the territory. I suspect she's like a lot of people I know who spend their lives peeling back progressively worse layers of humanity's dark side. Most of us are loners who don't do well when it comes to working under the scrutiny of a closely observing audience, not even an admiring one. And I knew from personal experience that Janice loses all patience with anyone or anything that gets in the way of crime-scene progress.
When Janice glanced up and caught sight of Sue and me standing together on the dock next to the Isolde, she scowled. 'Now what do you two want?' she demanded irritably.
I knew better than to take her exasperation personally. 'Just looking for a progress report,' I returned lightly.
Janice Morraine was not amused. Without stopping what she was doing, she motioned curtly with her head in Lieutenant Rockwell's direction. 'Why don't you ask her?' Janice suggested. 'She seems to be standing around with nothing to do but watch me.'
With a number of people working on one homicide team, it stands to reason there'll be fireworks sooner or later, but this was much sooner than I would have expected. Marian Rockwell raised one eyebrow at Janice's surly comment, but she didn't rise to the bait.
'I've already collected my samples,' Marian said reasonably. 'It'll take lab verification, of course, but I'd say this was a communicating fire with two points of ignition. One of them was in the lower bunk on the starboard side. The other was on the victim's clothing itself. My first guess is that the accelerant was charcoal lighter, but it's too soon to tell about that for sure.'
'What two places?' Sue Danielson asked with a puzzled frown.
'The mattress was lit first and allowed to get a good blaze going. That's the main source of ignition. The man was poured down with flammable liquid, probably about the same time the mattress was lit, but the victim didn't catch fire until sometime later, until after the other fire got going good. Eventually, because of the fumes, flames flashed over from the bunk area to his clothing. When that happened, that poor bastard was history. It looks to me as though terrifying him was as important as killing him. And if whoever did it was hoping to use the fire to cover up the murder, they didn't do a very good job of it.'
Isolde was riding low in the water. We were talking over the rumble of supplementary bilge pumps that had been pressed into service. They were hard at work purging the fish hole and engine room of all the excess water that had landed there as a result of the fire hoses.
Their ominous rumble was almost as dark as the thought that entered my head. 'You said terrify. Do you think the victim was conscious when the first fire was set?' I asked.
Sue Danielson shot me a quizzical look. 'Does that matter?'
I shrugged. 'It seems like if he was, he could have called out for help. Isn't there a chance someone might have heard him?'
Janice Morraine and Marian Rockwell exchanged meaningful looks. 'I'm sure he was unconscious part of the time,' Janice said. 'At least I hope he was. But even if he had been wide awake when the fire was set, he wouldn't have been able to say a word.'
'Why not?'
Janice sighed. 'Because somebody whacked off the poor bastard's family jewels and stuffed them in his mouth, that's why! Now will you two please get the hell out of here and let me concentrate on what I'm trying to do?'
'You bet,' Sue breathed. 'We'll be glad to.' And she hustled off down the dock. I followed more slowly, with my hands stuffed deep in my pockets. If I could have crossed my legs, I would have.
'It's hard to imagine hating someone that much,' I said to Sue, when I found her leaning against the Mustang. Marian Rockwell was there as well.
Sue nodded. 'It sure as hell goes a step beyond the usual execution-style killing,' she said.
'What it says to me,' I added, 'is that Gunter Gebhardt made himself an enemy. A serious, son of a bitch of an enemy. And someone with that kind of hard-assed grudge shouldn't be all that tough to find. People don't keep that kind of feud secret.'
'All we have to do is ask the right questions, right?' Sue asked with just the smallest hint of sarcasm.
'Right,' I answered.
I'm sure Sue Danielson had heard one version or another of this speech several times before. That's the big
