“We did,” Laura said, now looking decidedly unimpressed. “Have you discovered anything since you sent that over?”
“Not really,” the Sheriff said. “Once we knew you were coming, we held off.”
Nate wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose, throw the Sheriff off the side of the boat, and go back home to D.C. for a break. But they were professionals, after all, so he did none of that.
“Who found the body this morning?” he asked.
“Oh, that was Charlie,” the Sheriff said.
“And who, or where, is Charlie?” Nate asked.
The Sheriff turned and pointed to someone standing nearby on the deck just as he took a few steps forward.
The poor man had been sitting there since dawn. He looked shaken and tired. Probably hungry too.
“Thanks,” Nate said, in a tone that was intended to be as dismissive as it was sarcastic and walked away from the Sheriff before he said something that he would regret.
CHAPTER SIX
Laura tried her best reassuring smile on the ship’s worker who had found the body that morning and was rewarded by a weak smile in return.
“Charlie, is it?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Charlie said. He looked more than a little relieved to be talking to someone who knew what they were doing at last. “I was the one who called the Sheriff.”
“Please tell us anything you can about your discovery this morning,” Laura said. “Let’s start with whether you saw anyone else around?”
“No, no one,” Charlie said, shaking his head. “I was up on top of the upper deck, I would have noticed if there was someone nearby. There definitely wasn’t.”
“Not even at any of the other boats, or back in the parking lot?” Laura asked.
Charlie shook his head. “I’m the first one here most Monday mornings,” he said. “I have to get started before everyone else. It was dead silent, but I’m used to that. I didn’t think anything was wrong. I just saw the birds.”
“The birds?” Nate repeated.
“They were gathering along the railings,” Charlie said, turning to point. “Gulls and some land birds. They were waiting to eat her, I think. Waiting to see if it was safe.”
Laura made a mental note. That could give them some idea of when the body was placed there. If the coroner found that the birds hadn’t yet tried to eat the flesh of the dead woman, then maybe she hadn’t been there long.
“Did you recognize her?” Laura asked. It was one of the biggest questions. Who here knew the victims? Who would have a reason to want to harm them? What was the thread that connected this young woman and the middle-aged man?
“I did,” Charlie admitted. “Not to speak to, or anything. But I’d seen her around the town.”
“Did you know her name?” Nate asked.
Charlie shrugged. “I just knew her as the lifeguard down on the south beach. And I think she might be the daughter of someone from the old days, I don’t know.”
“The old days?”
“You know, like school and all,” Charlie said. “It’s a small town here and a lot of people stay. I would have gone to school with people around the age of her parents, I’m thinking.”
It was a close-knit community, then. That was both a blessing and a nightmare, Laura knew from experience. On one hand, it was easy to find suspects. On the other hand, you would be likely to have too many—and rumor would be rife. When you were trying to get to the truth, rumors were rarely useful.
“Can you describe the body?” Laura asked.
Charlie looked a little green, and she was sorry she had asked. “She was lashed to the figurehead,” he said. “But it was all wrong. She was just hanging there. Limp. You could see right away that it wasn’t the real thing. Well, not right away. For a minute, I actually…but it was early, and my brain wasn’t working yet. She was all grey too. Not like a living person. Grey and wrong.”
Laura nodded. More detail. That could help a lot. It seemed to suggest that the body had been dead and cold a while, but that clashed with the hungry birds. Was the victim killed elsewhere and then brought here? Was this someone planning out specific scenes?