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  Turning her back to the wind, she called Carrie, who answered immediately.

  “Eva here. I found Thom’s boat, but not him. I called the Coast Guard for a search.”

  “What? A search? Why?”

  “No need to worry. Thom probably swam into shore. He’ll show up soon.” Naslund stopped. She didn’t feel like lying. Besides, Carrie had one of the sharpest minds she knew.

  “Then why search for him?”

  She had no good answer. She held back the information about the blood. “His skiff came ashore near Cape Commodore. Now we need to find him.”

  “Find him then. Find him!”

  “We will.”

  “I want to help. Where are you?”

  “You can’t come here.” Naslund knew the Coast Guard would call in the OPP Marine Unit from Wiarton. “Phone the station,” she told her. “They’ll be organizing search teams.”

  “Okay.” Carrie hung up.

  Naslund sighed. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t join the search. She had an investigation to run. Worse still, she felt sure Thom was dead. Her friend wouldn’t simply walk out of the bay, laughing off the northwesterly.

  She inhaled deeply, held her breath for three seconds, exhaled slowly, and repeated the cycle five times--a trick she’d learned from Pete, a sports-therapist. It stilled her mind.

  She eyed the skiff again. If the blood was human, they’d need a full forensic team. In the meantime, she needed one constable to secure the site and another to canvass the neighborhood to the east. After they arrived she’d revisit Rathbone then take the west. She glanced up at Rathbone’s kitchen window. The man was watching her. She called the station. The dispatcher answered.

  Naslund identified herself and gave the address. “Got a CS. Send two PCs.”

  Chapter 3

  Wiarton, July 9th:

  Naslund poured a coffee, slid her porch door open, and walked out into a humid morning with a sagging sky. The sun hadn’t appeared. Colpoys Bay lay flat and sullen, darkened by leaden clouds. LaFlamme had identified the blood on Tyler’s boat. It was human, Type O+, the same as Tyler’s. When his DNA was available, the lab would determine if the blood was a match. Four white coats--a team lead, a CS video-photographer, and two forensic scientists--had arrived at the scene yesterday afternoon. They’d set up a MU, a mobile unit, next to Rathbone’s barn.

  Naslund dropped into a Muskoka chair and eyed the bay. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since she’d called in the Coast Guard. Hundreds of people had joined the search. From what she’d heard, Carrie had been tireless; she hadn’t stopped all day. A PC had sent her home at 0400. No one had found any sign of Thom, or of his body.

  Yesterday, Naslund had interviewed Rathbone again and cleared him of any suspicion.

  The farmer had a “double” alibi. He hadn’t been in bed with one supposed girlfriend; he’d been in bed with two. The two hookers independently corroborated his story.

  Naslund had also interviewed dozens of residents along Highway One. No one had seen or heard anything. Unlike in Toronto, there were no CCTV or surveillance cameras near Commodore. She was starting her investigation blind and deaf. She sipped her coffee and swallowed hard. She’d been working the case in her mind all night. Due to the powerful northwesterly, there was only one direction a body could have traveled. Southeast toward a shore that had been searched and re-searched. Three times. She hated to admit it, but it seemed that the time had almost come. The time to switch to a recovery mission. Thom Tyler was likely at the bottom of the bay.

  Naslund was familiar with recovery missions. A dead body normally sank to the bottom unless stopped by an obstruction like a net. If there were no currents, it settled close to where it went under. It was usually found within a radius equal to the depth of the water. In her view, Thom had probably been concentrating on his fishing, which made him susceptible to being knocked overboard by the boom or, as appeared likely, assaulted.

  Assuming Thom reached his usual fishing spot, off White Cloud Island, she pulled up the local marine chart on her phone and drew a mental line from the northeast corner of White Cloud to the place where Thom’s skiff grounded. The depth along the line ranged from a maximum of seventy-two meters to three meters close to shore. Thom’s body likely lay anywhere from three to seventy-two meters on each side of the line.

  She noted the geographic co-ords of Thom’s fishing spot and the skiff’s grounding spot. The distance between the two co-ords was 5.2 kilometers. She fed three numbers into her phone’s calculator: 5.2 * .072 * 2. Result: .7488, about .75 square-kilometers. Well, she thought, a large search area, but a lot smaller than the mouth of Colpoys Bay extending into Georgian Bay proper, over twenty square-kilometers. The OPP handled recovery missions, not the Coast Guard. She rechecked the co-ords and called the chief of the Underwater Search and Recovery Unit.

  “Morning, Superintendent Coulson. Detective Sergeant Naslund, Bruce Peninsula.”

  “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “I’m calling about the Thom Tyler search. I don’t mean to interfere, but I have a thought.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I suspect Mr. Tyler is at the bottom of Georgian Bay.”

  There was a pause. “Quite possibly.”

  “If the mission gets turned over to you, I might be able to save you some time. I know where the skiff likely drifted from and where it ended.” She supplied the geographic co-ords. “The maximum depth between the two co-ords is seventy-two meters. I think the body will likely be closer to the first co-ord, near the island.” Enough said. Coulson’s team could do the math.

  “Might be,” Coulson replied. “In any case, thank you. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “Thank you, Superintendent.”

  Naslund downed her coffee, went inside, and got dressed: dark green slacks and blue-and-green short-sleeve shirt. Eight years ago, as an undercover narc in Toronto, she’d worn only black. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, she brushed her auburn hair off her forehead. Two unruly locks fell back down. On the way out the door, she grabbed a stale Danish and left for Rathbone’s property.

  As she headed up Highway One, the sky darkened. Passing through Oxenden, population 162, she sensed every soul was asleep. When she parked next to the MU, the team lead, Forensic Sergeant Lance Chu, was opening the door. For someone who’d spent all night at a CS, he looked good. But he always did. She stepped out of her car.

  “Morning, Chu. How goes the battle?”

  “Howdy, Naslund.” He shrugged. “Sometimes you get lucky. Most times you don’t. We’re on the don’t side.”

  She followed him inside. It was one of the new units, with a brightly-lit workroom, whiz-bang kitchenette, compost toilet, and two supposedly tastefully decorated bedrooms, each with an upper and lower bunk. It reminded her of an up-scale house trailer. Not that it smelled like one. Instead of air freshener, she smelled cyanoacrylate, a compound used to help process FPs--fingerprints. It seemed Chu’s team had worked some prints.

  “Any matches?” she asked.

  “Not yet. Got five FPs. All partial. Plus two hairs. Long strands, black. No follicles.”

  She nodded. Probably Thom’s hairs, but they couldn’t be conclusively linked to him. Only hairs with follicles, which held nuclear DNA, yielded individualization.

  “Found them in the blood pool in the bottom of the boat, the...”

  “Bilge,” she said.

  After videotaping the skiff and going over it with a proverbial fine-tooth comb yesterday, the team called in a mobile crane to haul it out of the bay. Now it sat on blocks well above the shoreline, protected by a CS tent, cordoned off by police tape.

  “And the blood, of course,” Chu said. “Gina Domani is on it.”

  “Good.” Domani was the OPP’s best blood-splatter analyst.

  “Domani’s completing her measurements. Will probably take her a few more hours.”

  “Do you mind if I go down to the boat?”

  “Al
l right, but don’t get in her way. I know you, Naslund.” He smiled. “Don’t hound Domani.”

  “I won’t.”

  He pointed a warning finger at her. “Hold your questions for later.”

  She nodded. Chu and company were painstakingly brilliant. It was the painstaking part that sometimes frustrated her.

  Three hours later, she left the scene, no closer to knowing what had happened, but partially mollified. Except for the hairs and one FP, she’d detected everything the white coats had found. But she needed to know more. While they delivered dots--facts and details--her job was to connect them. Although she suspected murder, the evidence didn’t yet support it. She was working a possible assault, not a homicide.

  Thinking of Thom’s size, she drove toward Owen Sound. Thom was a powerful man. She’d met him at a sailing regatta, where he’d single-handed a CS 33. He’d beaten everyone, including her and Pete, and they’d been a helluva team. On the water. She turned her mind back to Thom. It would take a strong person to assault him. Very strong. Then again, he might have been accidently knocked overboard by the boom. She re-thought both scenarios. Besides the blood splatter evidence pointing to two weapons, a blunt instrument and a sharp one, the boom had a high clearance. Five-and-a-half feet. She’d just measured it. Thom was used to maneuvering under it. Which pointed to an assault, not an accident.

  Naslund concentrated on the road. She needed to set her mind free, to give herself a break. The traffic was light; the air, muggy yet clean. Southern Ontario smog rarely reached the Bruce. As the kilometers passed, the day brightened. Early afternoon sunlight bounced off the bay. She attempted to stay focused on the day but her mind wouldn’t let her. It returned to the case. She envisioned someone attacking Thom. One attacker didn’t seem likely. What if there were two? That’s more like it, she reasoned. That made an assault possible.

  Having entered Owen Sound, she pulled into her favorite Chinese takeout. After eating chicken Kung Pao next to the harbor, she decided to return to Cape Commodore and systematically re-visit yesterday’s interviewees. Surely someone would remember something new they’d seen or heard, some tiny detail that might begin to connect the dots.

  By 1900, Naslund gave up. No dots, tiny or otherwise. No connections. She headed toward Wiarton.

  Ten minutes along Highway One she received a call. She switched her cell to hands-free. “Sergeant Naslund, OPP.”

  “Superintendent Coulson, USRU. We found your man.”

  She didn’t know what to say. “Good,” she eventually replied.

  “I understand you knew Mr. Tyler?”

  “I did.”

  “My condolences.”

  “Thank you.”

  “By the way, he was near the island. About a hundred meters offshore. Looks like a suspicious death. They’re bringing the body into Wiarton Marina.”

  “I’ll be there,” she said.

  “A coroner’s been called. A Dr. Kapanen. He’ll join you there. One more thing. Good work, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you.”

  Naslund ended the call, feeling absolutely numb. She pulled off the highway and hung her head. She’d sensed Thom was gone, and yet now she couldn’t believe it. It seemed impossible, Thom Tyler dead at the age of thirty-nine, the same age as her. He’d been larger-than-life. He was famous, and not only locally. He was a world-renowned painter. She’d once watched him paint the sky in less time than it took to dream it. Two sweeps of cobalt blue, a few dabs of cadmium red, finished with quick strokes of thalo blue--and he was done.

  Now, looking up, she saw a car in her side mirror approaching very quickly. As the car zipped by, Sergeant Lance Chu waved at her. She retook the road and followed him. In Wiarton, he turned right on Claude Street and headed to the marina.

  Naslund parked next to Chu’s car and caught up with him on foot.

  “Hey, fast car,” she said as they walked to the OPP jetty.

  He grinned. “Yep. By the way, who’s the coroner?”

  “Rudi Kapanen.”

  “Huh. I heard he’s friendly with Finnish vodka.”

  “How can you say that?” she protested. “He’s not friendly, he’s enamored.”

  Chu chuckled. “Another pickled coroner.”

  “Exactly.”

  Reaching the jetty, Naslund spotted an officer from her station, Constable Chandler of the Marine Unit, plus a USRU sergeant and two USRU divers. She took control, motioning for the USRU team to wait and assigning Chandler to block off the jetty. Journalists were already gathering at the marina clubhouse, hovering like vultures. There was no sign of Kapanen.

  She and Chu boarded the OPP boat. Thom’s body lay on its back in the cockpit. Forcing herself to concentrate, she bent down on one knee and studied the corpse. Thom’s arms and legs were pinkish-white, the color of trout flesh. He looked like a wrinkled version of himself. His auto-inflatable vest hadn’t inflated.

  Purposefully bypassing Thom’s head, she scanned the body. No evidence of trauma. Her eyes settled on the right ankle. There was a line wrapped around it. Even after hours in the lake, it was unmistakable. It was the new anchor rode. The anchor lay at Thom’s feet, attached to the end of the rode not around his ankle. She did a double-take. The anchor was attached to him. Christ, he’d been dragged down by his own anchor. Not even the best swimmer could fight the pull of an anchor. She bent closer to the anchorless end of the rode. It hadn’t been cut. Maybe the knot tied to the skiff’s bow worked itself free? She dismissed that idea. She’d seen Thom tie the knot. Perhaps someone untied it and he hadn’t noticed? Not likely. To add oats to a bubbling porridge pot, there was the malfunctioning life vest, which appeared equally suspicious.

  Taking a deep breath, she turned to Thom’s head. His mouth was open. His tongue had disappeared. His upper face was a bruised, swollen mess. His right eye could’ve been hit by the boom. But not the left one. She shook her head. It seemed to have been punctured with what looked to be a rapier, a thin one. She looked away. From what she’d seen, her friend wasn’t only dead, he’d been murdered.

  She felt momentarily lost. Almost immediately, her training kicked in. She turned away from the body and called Bickell. No radiophone this time. She didn’t want civilians listening in.

  “Naslund here. They found Tyler’s body. I can vouch for that. We don’t need anyone to ID it.”

  “All right.”

  “Looks like a murder. Pending the coroner’s findings.”

  “I see.”

  “I have to attend the coroner’s exam now, but I’ll inform Carrie MacLean later.”

  “I’ll do it, Naslund. And visit his parents as well.”

  “I should do it, sir. I knew him.”

  “You can’t be everywhere, Detective.”

  Occasionally, Bickell surprised her. He was a good man at heart. “Ah, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t mention the murder angle.”

  Chapter 4

  Naslund stepped aside as Forensic Constable Noreen Ross, the MU video-photographer, boarded the boat and snapped dozens of shots. Thom’s face was completely in the shadows. In the dwindling light, his body looked one-dimensional, more an outline than a person. Eventually, Ross edged back and took a series of wide-angle shots. Job done, she signaled to Naslund and left.

  Naslund turned to the USRU sergeant and asked for a summary of his findings.

  “The body was recovered sixty-point-two meters down,” the sergeant reported and then referred to his notes. “Latitude forty-four degrees, fifty-one minutes, twenty-one seconds north. Longitude eighty degrees, fifty-seven minutes, forty-two seconds west. Which translates to one-hundred-one-point-four meters southeast of the first co-ord you gave us.”

  She nodded. “Water temperature?”

  “Six Celsius.”

  “Thank you. We appreciate your work.”

  “And yours, Detective.”

  The USRU team took their gear and headed to land. With the area cleared, Naslund and C
hu waited for Kapanen. The sun dipped below the western horizon. In the cedars ashore, doves cooed wistfully, marking the end of the day. She felt wistful as well. Chu seemed to know her frame-of-mind. He spoke quietly about the FPs. There were three different sets.

  The coroner huffed up to the boat a few minutes later. His face was red, his nose, redder. As usual, regardless of the weather and his weight, he wore a tight three-piece suit. “I was just starting dinner,” he complained. “Detective Naslund, are you in charge?”

  “Of the case,” she said. “FID Sergeant Chu is in charge of the presumed crime scene, the victim’s boat.”

  “I didn’t ask about the CS, did I?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir.”

  “Sorry, Doctor.”

  She didn’t smell any alcohol on Kapanen’s breath or body. But that didn’t mean he was dry. It often took hours for alcohol to be emitted through one’s pores.

  Kapanen and Chu boarded the boat. The coroner seemed steady on his feet. Naslund followed, switched on the boat’s twin searchlights, and pointed them aft. The deck was instantly lit in stark white light. Kapanen blinked and then blinked again. Giving himself a shake, he pulled on a pair of gloves and knelt beside the body.

  “Looks like a wet drowning,” he soon said. “Note: I said, looks like. We need an autopsy to confirm that. Most drownings are wet. Eighty-five percent.” He eyed Naslund. “Do you know the difference between a wet drowning and a dry drowning?”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, yes Doctor.” She often felt like a schoolgirl around Kapanen. She didn’t mind occasionally joking about him but also wanted to impress him. “In a dry drowning, fatal cerebral hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, does not result from water blocking the airway, but from throat spasms. Water never enters the lungs.”

  “Very good. You’re learning.” Kapanen pointed at Thom’s mouth. “See that foam?” Naslund and Chu nodded in unison. “It contains blood and mucus, which usually signifies a wet drowning.”