Chapter 5

Mack was under the travel lift with a grease gun, but he set it down when Wren came in, like a man who had been waiting for somebody to ask him the question.

"I need to see the Meridian's fuel assembly," she said.

"Insurance took it. It's in the salvage cage."

"Can I see it?"

He wiped his hands slow, thinking. Then he walked her back past the boathouse to a chain-link pen full of dead parts: bent props, a burnt winch, a heap of scorched rail.

The fuel assembly sat on a pallet. Mack hunkered down beside it and pointed with the grease gun, not touching.

"See that?" he said. "That's the feed line."

It was a fuel hose, black and stiff, its cut end clean as a fresh weld, the fabric braid inside sliced flat, no fray, no pinch, no crush. Around it, the rest of the assembly was melted and black-weather and fire had chewed everything else.

"A heat crack goes jagged," Mack said. "A chafe frays. An impact tears. This was cut with a blade and left hanging. That's the reason she fed air and caught. That's not storm, Wren. That's hands."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"Because the man who pays my wages is the man who doesn't want it said." Mack's jaw worked. "I told myself it was the coast guard's job. I told myself fourteen months is fourteen months. But I sat in that crowd and I heard it, same as you, and I decided I'm tired of being a coward in a ball cap."

Wren crouched beside him and looked at the cut line a long time.

"There was a man with Grant on the tape," she said. "Big. Burnt. Works outside."

Mack's face changed. "Dell Rourke."

"Who?"

"Deckhand. Hired out of Duluth that spring. Ran the yard skiff, did the rough work. Quit about a month before your father's accident." Mack's mouth twisted. "Except he didn't quit. He just stopped coming. Told me he was owed money and he'd get it. Then nothing."

Wren went cold all over.

"Where is he now?"

"Nobody's asked. That's how this town works. A rough man leaves, a rough man was always going to leave." Mack looked at her. "You go find him, you'll find money and no man. You want my guess, Dell Rourke knew what he cut, and Dell Rourke got paid, and Dell Rourke is under twenty feet of Lake Superior with a rope and a stone and no name."

Wren thought about the girl in the tarped boat, reciting a dead man's conversation word for word.

"Then she's the only one," Wren said.

"Who?"

"The only living person who heard it besides the two of them. And one of the two is gone." Wren stood up, dusting her hands. "Which means the loose end on that tape isn't a loose end anymore. It's a target."

Mack looked at the clean-cut line, and then at the water, and for once the old man didn't have anything to say.