This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by La Mesa Fiction, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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  eISBN: 9781542036542

  Cover design by Damon Freeman

  Chapter One

  Seattle, Washington

  November 20, 1995

  If Del Castigliano didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all.

  Melodramatic? Hardly.

  His first shift as a member of the detective team on call in the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit and his first investigation would involve two bodies fished from the water near a marina. A shrink had once diagnosed Del with a form of aquaphobia, an irrational fear of water, and related Del’s fear to a near drowning incident as a child—a deduction Del’s parents had steadfastly disputed. Regardless, Del didn’t like the water.

  Not that Del was complaining about catching a homicide investigation just a week after he’d transferred into SPD from Madison, Wisconsin. He preferred to be busy. The alternative was waking up to a sparsely decorated apartment and painful memories. He’d left the furniture and just about everything else in Wisconsin, along with Gianna. In Seattle, he’d bought a bed, a couch, and a television to accompany the folding card table and chair he’d brought with him. The walls remained empty.

  As Del quickly dressed, he felt the familiar nerves, like being a rookie again, the new kid on the block looking to hold his own. The homicide sergeant, Gene Halloway, had called just before two in the morning and told Del that a man living on a houseboat spotted two objects floating in Lake Union. The man said he thought the objects might be logs, and worried they could damage a boat in the marina during the pending storm. He went out to investigate, and quickly realized the objects weren’t logs. He called the marina harbormaster and together they had pulled the bodies from the water. No easy feat, given these had been dead weight.

  In Madison, Del had worked patrol six years before sitting for the detective exam. He’d had stints in narcotics, arson, sexual assaults, and robbery, but his goal had always been homicide. He’d planned to wait for an opening in his hometown city, but then Gianna announced she didn’t want to marry a cop. She said her father had been a cop, became an alcoholic, and it destroyed their family. Nothing Del could say could convince her he would be different. With good reason. The father had only been an excuse. Two days after Del moved out, he saw Gianna downtown on the arm of a lawyer.

  Seattle homicide was hiring and offering good money, which Del certainly could use. It was the memories that awaited him around every Madison corner he could do without. He packed up his clothes and moved to Seattle sight unseen. No family. No friends. No memories. A fresh start.

  He grabbed his wallet, ID, and keys from the floor beside his bed and headed out, determined not to look like some cherry-ass rookie. Moss Gunderson, the partner assigned to break Del into homicide investigations, was a legend at Seattle PD. Vic Fazzio, also a section rookie, said he knew Gunderson had arrived at the Public Safety Building—PSB, as the officers called it—ten minutes before Gunderson reached his cubicle desk. Half a dozen people called out to greet Moss or to give him crap, for which the veteran detective always had a retort. A guy like that could make or break Del’s career.

  Del drove from the parking garage into a blustery and cold November morning—cold being relative. In Madison, anything above freezing was balmy for November, though Del was starting to understand what Seattleites meant when they said it wasn’t the temperature that chills you; it’s the dampness. He could feel the cold in his bones. A stiff wind rocked his metallic-blue Oldsmobile Cutlass. The wind had started blowing late the prior evening; branches of a tree scraping against Del’s bedroom window had kept him awake half the night.

  He drove from Capitol Hill with the defroster on high and worked his way around the southern edge of Lake Union, noting marinas and water-based businesses. He pulled into a parking lot where Moss stood alongside a black Buick LeSabre, sipping coffee and towering over a uniformed officer. Moss was almost as big as Del, who stood six foot five and weighed 250 pounds.

  Del pulled up the collar of his coat against the howling wind and approached the two men. He recognized the green logo on Moss’s Starbucks coffee cup, the company name taken from Captain Ahab’s first mate on the Pequod, the whaling ship Moby Dick sent to the bottom of the ocean. The logo, a green siren, tempted sailors to jump overboard, causing them to drown. Neither was a good omen.

  “Look what the cat dragged out. Did we wake you, Elmo?”

  “Funny.” Del had heard iterations of Elmo since his teens, when the beloved puppet first appeared on Sesame Street. Moss introduced Del to Mike Nuccitelli, the patrol sergeant. “How’d you get here so quick?” Del asked Moss. He understood Moss lived in West Seattle, twenty minutes farther from the marina than Del’s apartment.

  “I didn’t take time to do my hair.” Moss rubbed the bristles of a crew cut. “I’m like my name. You know. A rolling stone.”

  Del knew. More than once, Moss had told him his parents bequeathed him the moniker because, as a child, he never remained still. Vic Fazzio had said it was more likely Moss gave himself the nickname. His Norwegian first name was Asbjorn.

  “Halloway here?” Del asked.

  “At this hour of the morning?” Moss scoffed. “Stayaway doesn’t come out this early on a cold morning unless he thinks the brass might show up and he can shine their badges with his nose.”

  “What do we got?” Del asked.

  “Two grown men. Looks like they drowned,” Nuccitelli said. “We’re waiting for the ME.”

  “What more do we know about the victims; anything?” Del asked.

  Nuccitelli raised the fur collar of his duty jacket against the wind. “Hispanic is my guess, though the bodies are pretty bloated and their skin the color of soot. I’m guessing roughly late twenties to early thirties, but again . . .”

  “They didn’t have any ID?” Del asked.

  “Not on them,” Nuccitelli said.

  “That strike you as odd—they didn’t have ID?”

  Nuccitelli smiled. “Not my job, detective. That’s your job.”

  “How far out is the ME?” Moss looked and sounded disinterested.

  Nuccitelli checked his watch. “Should be here in ten.”

  “We’ll take it from here. No sense all of us freezing our balls off,” Moss said.

  “Harbormaster and first responder are on the dock,” Nuccitelli said. “You boys have fun.”

  Moss dumped the remains of his coffee on the ground and handed Nuccitelli his cup. “Make yourself useful and throw that away for me,” he said.

  Nuccitelli took the cup without protest, which surprised Del. Seniority or not, he would have told Moss to dump the cup his own damn self.

  He followed the veteran detective toward three stucco buildings. Two had signs indicating an affiliation with the marina. “Let’s be efficient this morning so we’re not standing out here turning to ice,” Gunderson said. “You get me?”

  “I get you.”

  They stepped between two of the buildings, catching a short reprieve from the wind. Emerging on the other side, Del looked down on a marina lit beneath pale-yellow light. Boats of all kinds moored in slips at finger piers, some beneath boathouses. The ships bobbed and pitched on the wind-driven waves.

  At the end of the concrete path leading to the dock, a uniformed officer spoke to a man who looked to be midthirties, his hair pulled tight in a ponytail.

  “I’m Detective Gunderson. This is Detective Castigliano. You’re the first officer on the scene?”

  “Dan McArdle. This is the harbormaster, David Slocum.”

  Slocum removed his hand from the pocket of a fur-lined jean jacket just long enough to shake their hands.

  “What’s a harbormaster do?” Gunderson asked.

  “I take care of the marina for the owners, collect everyone’s moorage fees, make sure they adhere to marina rules,” Slocum said over the howl of the wind.

  “Like a security cop at a parking lot, except on water,” Gunderson said. “You live here also?”

  “Just on the other side.” Slocum pointed to the darkened outline of what looked like dozens of houseboats.

  “Were you the one who found the bodies?” Moss asked.

  “Me? No. I was asleep. That was one of the other houseboat owners, Bob Nease.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “In his house. He has neuropathy in his feet and hands and says the cold exacerbates it.”

  “Lucky him.” Moss turned to Del. “Get a statement from him and anyone else who knows anything. I’ll send the ME when he gets here. Where are the bodies?” he asked McArdle.

  “End of the pier. Same direction,” the officer said.

  “Kill two birds with one stone,” Moss said to Del.

  The officer sta rted down the dock. Del hesitated at the sight of everything pitching and rolling on the wind-whipped water.

  “What?” Gunderson asked Del.

  “Huh?”

  “Something else?”

  “No. Nothing.” Del stepped through the gate to the dock, following the officer beneath the cover of a boathouse and keeping his eyes on the dock. At the end of the dock a second officer stood with his hands thrust deep in his coat pockets. At his feet, beneath blue plastic tarps, lay the two bodies. A gust of wind flipped the plastic against the officer’s leg, and he reached and caught it before it sailed airborne. Del saw the victim’s face. The man did look young, and he did look Hispanic, though his skin was mottled blue, more like marble than soot.

  “Any bullet wounds or contusions?” Del asked.

  “Nothing at first glance,” McArdle said. “ME might find something we missed.”

  The officer motioned over Del’s shoulder, causing him to turn. Paramedics rolled two stretchers single file behind King County medical examiner Stuart Funk. Del had never met Funk, but detectives had described him as both a mad scientist and an odd duck. With the wind blowing, Funk’s hair did make him look like something from a Mel Brooks movie. He peered at Del from behind thick, silver-framed spectacles too big for his head. Blue scrub pants extended from beneath a long down jacket to purple plastic clogs.

  Funk didn’t wait for an introduction. “I understand this is not the scene of the crime.”

  “We’re just getting started,” Del said.

  “One of the houseboat owners found the bodies floating in the water,” the officer said.

  “Right. But they weren’t killed on the dock, were they?” Funk said.

  “They don’t appear to have been,” the officer said.

  “So there’s no reason I can’t take the bodies to a more civilized location to conduct my examination?”

  The uniformed officer looked to Del, but Funk didn’t wait for Del to answer. He spoke as he stepped past them. “I talked to Moss. He approved.”

  “Okay then . . .” Del turned to the officer. “Take me to the person who found the bodies.”

  He hoped the houseboat was more house than boat.

  Chapter Two

  Back on solid ground at the Seattle Police Department downtown, Del dropped his briefcase at his cubicle desk and went to use the bathroom. In the sink mirror he examined the road map of red lines crisscrossing his eyes from a lack of sleep, then lowered his head and splashed cold water on his face. He pulled coarse, brown paper towels from the dispenser as the bathroom door swung open.

  “You, too, huh? I have to pee like a racehorse,” Moss said. “Got to quit buying the Grande when I’m out of the office.” He stepped to one of the urinals. “Seems all I do now is pee. The joys of getting old. What did you find out?”

  Having taken separate cars, Moss and Del had not had a chance to talk or exchange information. “Not much,” Del said. “Pretty much what the responding officer told us. Boat owner is an insomniac.” He dried his face and hands and dropped the paper towels in the garbage.

  “Man, that would suck,” Moss said.

  Del told him what the owner had said about believing the two bodies were logs.

  “Bet that scared the shit out of him,” Moss said.

  “He was pretty shaken up,” Del said.

  Moss zipped up and stepped around the pony wall to the sink to wash his hands. “You believe him?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You believe him? Can we eliminate him as a suspect?”

  “Yeah, I think we can.”

  “You want to handle this one?”

  “You mean the interviews?”

  “Lead detective.” Moss pulled out several paper towels and dried his hands. “I got a lot on my plate at the moment and could use the help.”

  Del hadn’t expected this on his first file. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can run with it.” He wanted Moss, and the other detectives, to know he was a team player.

  Moss tossed the towels into the garbage. “Get the responding officer’s incident report and any statements he took. I’ll type up and send over my notes of my interview with the harbormaster later this morning.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “Pretty much what he told us. So where do you go from here?”

  Del hadn’t given it a lot of thought, but he didn’t want to sound totally unprepared for the question. “Talk to Funk. Try to get a cause of death, maybe IDs. Beyond that, try to find out where the two men came from. Figured I’d call the Harbor Patrol and ask if anyone reported a boat going down, or adrift somewhere.”

  “With this wind and waves, a boat could have capsized,” Moss agreed.

  “Happened all the time back in Madison. I also noticed a lot of marinas and marine businesses in the area when I drove in this morning. Thought I’d ask around, try to find out if maybe they lived at one of them or worked a boat. Maybe they were out fishing when the storm hit, you know? At least check it off our list.”

  Moss shook his head. “I’m betting they’re illegal.”

  That struck Del as too quick a judgment. “Why’s that? The lack of identification?”

  Moss nodded. “I’m thinking they likely came down from Canada.”

  “Canada?” Del said.

  “Some of the Mexicans come in from Canada. It’s safer and cheaper than crossing the southern border, where the coyotes can charge a fortune,” Moss explained. “I’m thinking these two tried to skirt the border, maybe came down in a dinghy, got caught in the storm, and couldn’t get anyplace safe.”

  If that were the case, Harbor Patrol might know more.

  “Get ahold of Funk. Find out when we can expect his initial report,” Moss instructed. “Toxicology will be important. If they were drinking or doing drugs, it wouldn’t take long to drown in water that cold, especially with the wind churning.”

  “Yeah, I’ll give him a call,” Del said. The theory made sense, though he wondered again why Moss had gone there so quickly.

  Moss moved to the door. “Keep me posted. And don’t file anything until I’ve had a chance to review it—make sure you dot your i’s and cross all your t’s, so the captain is happy. I’ll let him and Halloway know this is your case and you’re running with it.”

  “I appreciate that, Moss.”

  Moss pulled open the bathroom door. “Not a problem. Try to get a nap. Your eyes hurt me just looking at you.”

  Chapter Three

  Two weeks after his visit to the marina, Del was getting nowhere fast. Moss had sent over his interview with the harbormaster, David Slocum, which Del quickly read, and which coincided with what the boat owner had told Del. He’d checked with personnel at the other marinas on the lake, but the two men had not lived or worked at any of them. The Harbor Patrol had no calls that night of a boat in distress or capsizing anywhere in Elliott Bay, Puget Sound, Lake Union, or Lake Washington, nor had it located any boats adrift or received any reports of two men falling overboard. Funk’s toxicology results revealed both men had tested positive for alcohol and cocaine, as Moss had suggested, though not in an amount that would have been fatal. It added yet another wrinkle to an already frustrating case.

  In his conversation with the Harbor Patrol, Del brought up the subject of tides. Not being from Seattle, he wondered if the bodies might have drifted into Lake Union from someplace else. The Harbor Patrol rejected that idea outright. The officer he spoke with explained that Lake Union was connected to Elliott Bay and the Puget Sound by passage through the Ballard Locks, which raised and lowered boats to get to or from the saltwater Puget Sound into the fresh waters of the Lake Washington Ship Canal leading to Lake Union. To the east, boats passed between Portage Bay and Lake Washington, but neither had a tide. The officer said it would have been next to impossible for two bodies to get through the locks, and that it was far more likely the two men had gone overboard in Lake Union or possibly Portage Bay to the east, and the bodies had been pushed into the marina by the wind-churned waves.

  As to Moss’s speculation that the two men might have come down from Canada on a boat, Del’s next course of action was to identify boats that entered the locks that evening, but again he struck out. The lockmaster told Del the locks were nothing more than a stop sign. They kept no records of boats passing through in either direction.

 

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