Medusa nf-8 Page 16

  “Yes, Dooley, but I’m a friendly scientist,” she said with her engaging smile. “And I know what you mean. I talked to Dr. Mayhew on the phone.”

  “Preachin’ to the choir,” Dooley said with a grin like an old picket fence.

  He reached into his work-shirt pocket and pulled out a worn business card that he handed to Gamay.

  “I don’t live on the island,” he said. “Call me if you want to get off it. Phones don’t work there unless you climb up the water tower.”

  “Dr. Mayhew called me from the island.”

  “They got a radiotelephone setup for emergencies and for the mucky-mucks to use.”

  The boat left the open water and wound its way through a green maze of mangroves. Gamay felt as if she were heading into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Eventually, they rounded a turn and headed to an island that was mounded higher and appeared more solid than its surroundings. The pointed top of the white water tower Dooley had mentioned rose above the trees like a coolie hat. He tied the boat to the small dock and turned off the motor.

  A grassy slope rose up to a patio and the veranda of a white-stucco building. It was practically hidden in the sun-baked palmettos, the light breeze carrying their damp perfume to Gamay’s nostrils. A snowy egret waded along the shore. It was a picturepostcard perfect Florida scene, but the place gave her an uneasy feeling. Maybe it was the remoteness, the burned-up look of the vegetation, or simply the unearthly stillness.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said, unintentionally speaking in almost a whisper. “Almost spooky.”

  Dooley chuckled.

  “The lodge’s built on an Indian mound. The island belonged to the Calusa before the white man killed them off or made them sick with disease. People still pick up on the bad stuff.”

  “Are you saying the island is haunted, Dooley?”

  “No Indian ghosts, if that’s what you mean. But everything that’s been built here seems to have come to a bad end.”

  Gamay picked up her duffel bag and climbed up on the dock.

  “Let’s hope that doesn’t include my short visit, Dooley.”

  She had tried to leaven the gloomy mood with her joke, but Dooley wasn’t smiling when he followed her up on the dock.

  “Welcome to paradise, Dr. Gamay.”

  CHAPTER 18

  AS DOOLEY ESCORTED GAMAY DOWN THE DOCK TO THE ISLAND, they encountered a young Asian woman coming their way.

  “Afternoon, Dr. Song Lee,” Dooley said. “I got your kayak all ready for you before I made my run to Pine Island.”

  “Thank you, Dooley.”

  Lee’s eyes darted to Gamay, who assessed her expression as neither friendly nor unfriendly. Neutral, maybe.

  “This is Dr. Morgan-Trout,” Dooley said. “She’s visiting the island for a couple of days. Maybe you two could go kayaking together.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lee answered without enthusiasm. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor. Enjoy your stay.”

  Lee brushed Gamay’s extended hand with hers, and continued along the dock.

  “Has Dr. Lee been here long?” Gamay asked.

  “A few months,” Dooley said. “She doesn’t talk much about what she’s doing, and I don’t ask.”

  He stopped at the end of the dock.

  “This is as far as I’m allowed to go,” he said. “Give me a call if you need me. Remember, the only phone service from the island is from the top of the water tower.”

  Gamay thanked Dooley, and watched his boat until it was out of sight. Then she picked up her duffel bag and climbed the stairs to the patio. The front door of the lodge burst open just then, and a man in a white lab coat came springing down the stairs from the veranda to the patio. He had the painfully thin physique of a runner. The stiffly extended handshake he gave Gamay was as limp and damp as a dead fish.

  “Dr. Morgan-Trout, I presume,” he said, flashing a quick, precise smile. “I’m Dr. Charles Mayhew, the acting keeper of this madhouse while Dr. Kane is away.”

  Gamay guessed that Mayhew had been watching for her arrival from the lodge. She smiled. “Thank you for having me as a guest on the island.”

  “Our pleasure,” Mayhew oozed. “You have no idea how thrilled we were to learn that NUMA had invited Dr. Kane to dive in the bathysphere. I watched him make the dive. Too bad the television broadcast was cut short.”

  “Will I get a chance to meet Dr. Kane?” Gamay asked.

  “He’s involved with a field project,” Mayhew said. “I’ll show you your room.”

  They climbed to the veranda and passed through wide double doors to the wood-paneled lobby. Beyond the lobby was a large, sunny dining room furnished with rattan chairs and tables of dark wood. Screened-in windows wrapped around the room on three sides. A smaller room off the dining room was called the Dollar Bar, harkening back to the days when guests signed dollar bills and stuck them on the wall. The bills got blasted off in the hurricane, Mayhew explained.

  Gamay’s room was off a hallway a few steps from the bar.

  Despite Mayhew’s earlier claim to having a full house, she was the only guest staying in the lodge. Her simple room had natural wood walls, an old metal-frame bed, and a dresser, and it projected a look of seedy comfort. A second door opened onto a screened-in porch that offered a view of the water through the palmettos. Gamay put her duffel on the bed.

  “Happy hour starts in the Dollar Bar at five,” Mayhew said. “Make yourself at home. If you’d like to take a stroll, there are nature trails all over the island. A few areas have been restricted to avoid contamination from the outside world, but they are clearly marked.”

  Mayhew bounded off with his bouncy Reebok stride. Gamay flipped open her cell phone, to let Paul know she had arrived, only to remember that Dooley said the only place with service was the water tower.

  She followed a crushed-shell pathway past a row of neat cabins to the foot of the tower. After climbing to a platform at the top, she got a signal, but then she hesitated. Paul was most likely in a seminar, and she didn’t dare interrupt him again. She tucked the phone in her pocket.

  She took in the view from the tower. The long, narrow island was shaped like a deformed pear. It was one of a group of mangrove islands whose rough texture looked like scatter rugs when seen from the air.

  Gamay climbed down from the tower, working up a good sweat in the humidity with little exertion, and walked until she came to a tangle of mangroves where the trail ended. Turning around, she explored the island’s network of trails before returning to her room. After a refreshing catnap, she took a shower, and was patting her body dry when she heard laughter. Happy hour had started.

  Slipping into white shorts and a pale green cotton blouse that complemented her dark red hair, now twisted up on the back of her head, she made her way to the Dollar Bar. About a dozen people in lab coats were sitting at the bar or around tables. The conversation came to a near stop as she entered, like a scene in an old Western where the gunslinger pushes through the swinging doors into the saloon.

  Dr. Mayhew got up from a corner table, came over to the bar, and greeted Gamay with his quick smile.

  “What can I get you to drink, Dr. Trout?” he asked.

  “A Gibson would be fine,” she replied.

  “Straight up or on the rocks?”

  “Straight up, please.”

  Mayhew relayed the order to the bartender, a well-muscled young man with a military-style brush cut. He shook the gin, poured, and put three onions on a toothpick, making it a Gibson martini instead of a martini with olives.

  Mayhew guided Gamay and her drink back to a corner table. Pulling out a chair, he introduced her to the four people seated around the table, explaining that they were all part of the center’s development team.

  The lone female at the table had short hair, and her pretty face was more boyish than feminine. Dory Bennett introduced herself, and said she was a toxicologist. She was drinking a tall mai tai.

  “What brings you to the Island
of Dr. Moreau?” asked the woman.

  “I heard about this wonderful bar.” Gamay glanced around at the practically bare walls, and with a straight face added, “It seems that a dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

  There was a ripple of laughter around the table.

  “Ah, a woman scientist with a sense of humor,” said Isaac Klein, a chemist.

  “Dr. Klein, are you saying I don’t have a sense of humor?” Dr. Bennett asked. “I find your scientific papers very funny.”

  The good-natured ribbing drew another round of laughter.

  Dr. Mayhew said, “Dr. Bennett forgot to mention that the center’s assistant director is a woman as well: Lois Mitchell.”

  “Will I get to meet her?” Gamay asked.

  “Not until she gets back from-” Dr. Bennett caught herself midsentence. “She’s away . . . in the field.”

  “Lois is working with Dr. Kane,” Mayhew said. “When she’s here, the island is not as male dominated as might appear at first glance.”

  Gamay pretended she hadn’t seen Mayhew gently nudge Bennett’s arm and looked around at the other tables in the room.

  “Is this the lab’s entire staff?” she asked.

  “This is a skeleton crew,” Mayhew said. “Most of our colleagues are working in the field.”

  “It must be a very large field,” she said in a lame attempt at humor.

  There was deafening silence.

  Finally, Mayhew showed his teeth.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” he said.

  He glanced around at the others, who took his comment as a signal to force grins on their faces.

  Gamay had the feeling that they were all connected to one another with wires and that Mayhew had the switch in his hand.

  “I met another woman on the dock,” she said. “I believe her name was Dr. Lee.”

  “Oh, yes, Dr. Song Lee,” Mayhew said. “I didn’t count her because she’s a visiting scientist and not regular staff. She’s extremely shy, and even dines in her cabin by herself.”

  Chuck Hallum, who headed the immunology section, said,

  “She’s Harvard educated, and one of the most brilliant immunologists I’ve ever met. Speaking of off islanders, what really brings you to Bonefish Key?”

  “My interest in marine biology,” Gamay said. “I’ve read in the scientific journals about the groundbreaking work you’ve been doing in biomedicine. I was planning to visit friends in Tampa and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take a firsthand look.”

  “Are you familiar with the history of the marine center?” asked Mayhew.

  “I understand that you’re a nonprofit funded by a foundation, but I don’t know much beyond that,” Gamay said.

  Mayhew nodded. “When Dr. Kane started the lab, his initial funding came from the bequest of a University of Florida alumna who had lost a close relative to disease. There were some legal challenges to the will from disgruntled family members, and the funding was about to dry up when he formed a foundation and started attracting money from other sources. Dr. Kane envisioned Bonefish Key as the ideal research center because it would be away from the hubbub of a busy university.”

  A bell rang to announce dinner, and they moved into the dining room, the bartender taking over as waiter. The meal prepared by the chef was fresh-caught redfish, with a pecan crust and seared to perfection, washed down with a delicate French sauvignon blanc. Conversation around the table was on the light side, with little talk about the work being done on the island.

  After dinner, the scientists moved out onto the veranda and the patio. There was more chatter, almost none of it having to do with the lab. As darkness deepened, most drifted off to their cabins.

  “We hit the sack early here,” Mayhew explained, “and we’re up with the sun. We close the bar, so there’s not much action after ten o’clock.”

  Mayhew asked Gamay a few more polite questions about her work at NUMA, then excused himself and said he would see her at breakfast. Any remaining staff followed, leaving Gamay alone on the veranda to absorb the sights and sounds of the subtropical night.

  Gamay decided to call Paul, and she followed the same path to the water tower that she had taken earlier. The crushed white shells glowed under the brilliant moon. She started up the tower, only to stop in midstep. A female voice was coming from the platform. Speaking in what sounded like Chinese.

  The conversation ended after a minute or two, and Gamay heard soft footfalls descending. Gamay backed down the ladder and hid behind a palmetto. She watched Dr. Lee descend the ladder, then hurry off down the path.

  Gamay followed the path to the cabins. All were dark except for one, and, as she watched, the light in its window went out. She stood there looking at the darkened cabin, wondering what Nancy Drew would do in a case like this.

  She decided to go back to the water tower. There, she left a voice mail on Paul’s phone, saying she had arrived safely, then headed back to her room.

  She sat on her screened-in porch and tallied up the impressions of the few short hours she had spent on the island. Her natural powers of intuition had been honed by years as a scientific observer, first as a nautical archaeologist, then as a marine biologist.

  She had picked up on Dooley’s suggestion that there was more than meets the eye on Bonefish Key. The man who had mixed her drinks looked as if he had stepped out of the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Then Mayhew and his people were laughingly clumsy in their attempts to be evasive whenever talk touched on Dr. Kane, the center’s mysterious field project, and the whereabouts of the rest of the staff. She was intrigued, too, by the young Asian scientist who had given her the cold shoulder at the dock, and how Mayhew had conveniently forgotten to mention Dr. Song Lee. And how the other scientists avoided Gamay as if she were a leper.

  Austin told her to look for anything funny on the island.

  “How about weird, Kurt old boy?” she muttered to herself.

  Based on Austin’s standard, Bonefish Key should be a barrel of laughs. But as she sat in the darkness listening to the sounds of the night, Gamay was beginning to understand why Dooley hadn’t smiled when he welcomed her to paradise.

  CHAPTER 19

  DETECTIVE-SUPERINTENDENT RANDOLPH’S GOOD-NATURED nonchalance was misleading. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He hovered over the forensic experts who photographed the crime scene and collected evidence, listened to the witness interviews for discrepancies, and went over the Beebe with a very large fine-tooth comb.

  All he needed to complete the picture was a deerstalker hat and meerschaum pipe.

  The detective-superintendent and his team worked late into the night before they took advantage of the temporary sleeping quarters that Gannon had arranged for them. The next day, at Randolph’s request, the captain moved the ship closer to the Marine Police Service station on the mainland. The bodies were transported to the pathology lab for autopsies.

  After Austin and Zavala gave their interviews, they cleaned up the bathysphere and inspected it for damage. Except for places where the paint had been scraped away from the unexpected plunge to the bottom of the sea, the doughty little diving bell had come through its ordeal in fine fashion.

  Austin wished the same could be said for the Humongous. He supervised the removal of the wreckage by crane from the deck of the Beebe to a flatbed truck, then to a garage on the mainland.

  Satisfied that this last piece of major physical evidence was in police hands, Detective-Superintendent Randolph thanked Gannon and his crew for their cooperation and said the ship was free to leave. He said he would handle the questions from the dozens of reporters who were swarming around the station now that word of the attack had leaked out.

  Randolph gave Austin and Zavala a ride in his police car to the airport, where the NUMA jet they would travel on to Washington was parked. Zavala was an experienced pilot certified to fly small jets, and by late afternoon he was taxiing the plane up to a hangar at Reagan National Airport reserved
for NUMA aircraft. Austin and Zavala then went their separate ways, agreeing to touch base the following day.

  AUSTIN LIVED IN A converted Victorian boathouse, part of a larger estate that he bought when he commuted to CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. At the time, it was what the real-estate agents called a fixer-upper. It had reeked of mildew and old age, but its location on the banks of the Potomac River persuaded Austin to open his wallet and spend countless hours of his own fixing it up.

  Following his usual ritual, Austin dropped his duffel bag in the front hall, went in the kitchen and grabbed a cold bottle of beer from the refrigerator, then walked out on the deck to fill his lungs with the damp-mud fragrance of the Potomac.

  He tossed back the beer, then went into his study and plunked himself down in front of his computer. The study was an oasis for Austin. He likened himself to ship captains who grow sick of the sea and retire to Kansas or anyplace other than the ocean when their careers are over. The sea was a demanding mistress, and it was good to get away from her strong embrace. Except for a few paintings of ships by primitive artists and photos of his small fleet of boats, there was little in his house that would indicate his connection to the world’s premier ocean-study agency.

  The walls were taken up by bookshelves housing his collection of philosophy books. While he liked to read the old philosophers for their wisdom, their writings also provided the moral anchor that kept him from going adrift. The men on the Beebe were not the first he had killed. Nor, unfortunately, would they be the last.

  Over the fireplace was a matched pair of dueling pistols, part of an extensive collection that he considered his main vice. While he admired the pistols for their technical innovations, they also reminded him of the role that chance plays in life-or-death situations.

  He plucked a Miles Davis record from his equally extensive jazz collection and put it on the turntable. He sat back in his chair, listening to a couple of cuts from the seminal Birth of the Cool, then flexed his fingers and began typing. While the details were still fresh in his mind, he wanted to pound out a first draft of his report on the attack on the B3.