Deeply frustrated, I went back to the Second Chance where I thumbed in the numbers on the four combination wheels and opened the lock with one hell of a yank. I threw open the door carelessly, leaving the opened lock dangling on the hasp. To hell with non-productive activities. It was time to get back to salvaging the yacht. The batteries were holding their charge, and when I pushed the button the starter motors worked fine and the twin diesels fired right up. Basta! While the diesels were running, I sprayed them down again and washed down the yacht's interior once more, including the damaged electronics.

      While spraying around the patch, I found the bullets that had made the hole. I found five of them where the hull curves and joins the floor. Banging through the fiberglass had deformed them but Sgt. Townsend and his people could still determine their weight, which would be useful as evidence. I also searched the cockpit and found one casing. That had to be from the executioner's shot. I picked it up with great care. I put all the evidence on a chart table by the piloting station.

      I searched the boat a second time, from stem to stern. I looked for evidence of drug trade -- a scale, paraphernalia, or even another gun. In the corner of a locker, I found a box of ammunition under a set of Bahamas charts. The chart bore no marks that would give a clue as to what "Steve" had been doing that night. Why hadn't he kept a log book?

      I turned off the diesel engines.

      With another half hour to wait before high tide, I turned my attention to the yacht's electronics. The depth sounder, VHF marine communications radio, and GPS navigation instrument are standard for any boat doing serious cruising. I flipped them on and they worked, just like the day before. The depth sounder gave me a lot of signals from the pallets under the hull, the VHF was working fine, and the GPS gave our latitude and longitude, within a few feet. I flipped through its functions and found no stored waypoints nor any other information that would tell me where "Steve" had been going.

      Radar is also standard equipment for a yacht like the Second Chance. I punched its power button. The circular screen lit up with returns from the nearby sailboat masts, yacht railings, tin roofs, the water tower, and everything else that was made of metal. As I'd noticed the day before, "Steve" had the gain turned up to the highest sensitivity. After a couple of sweeps, the individual signals coalesced into a meaningless sea of green. Why had this guy been trawling slowly in the night with his radar's gain turned up so high? Was he looking for floating tin cans?

      Now to look at the bank of low-mounted radio modules that had gotten badly sloshed by the high water in the cabin. I pushed the main power button and nothing came on. What a shame. Apparently the salt water had penetrated so deeply that Rebecca's fresh-water-in-a-fine-mist treatment hadn't brought it out. My theory on salt removal by capillary attraction, surface tension and dilution seemed to have been refuted. Too bad, because the label on the main unit identified it as an Electrocom Spectrum, which is top of the line. Its LCD displays stayed blank, the function buttons didn't light up and the speakers that were plugged into it didn't sound. The unit looked so sad, with an unconnected coaxial cable dangling over the top like a severed vine in the forest. I pushed the cable back so that it could do its dangling behind.

      The culprit was the power button on the regulated power supply. The power supply was making a click inside every couple of seconds, and the green indicator light flashed with it. Apparently the electronics weren't seeing enough voltage to commit to start. Or maybe a capacitor was shorting out. Or maybe the relay was too wet to function. Well, I would just let the power supply go on struggling. With a little bit of luck, the short-circuit would generate enough heat to dry itself out, or maybe the clicking relay would snap itself dry.

      My attention turned to the hand-held VHF marine radio sitting on the bench. The eight hours of total immersion in salt water had obviously ruined it. But I did take a nostalgic interest in the old radio direction finder -- the RDF unit -- that Rebecca had sprayed and hung up to dry. Could that big dish be salvaged as a non-functioning antique? In the late 1970s people quit using them for navigation when the price of Loran units came way down. A couple of decades later, everybody abandoned Loran when the price of the more accurate GPS units came down.

      A radio direction finder is not much more than an FM radio with the antenna placed inside a parabolic dish. I pitied the pre-1970s navigators who had to wear those uncomfortable earphones and point those bulky antennaes in different directions to pick up a radio station. When they found one, they had to identify it on the map and write down its compass direction. Actually they had to get two stations and plot their directions on the map -- performing a so-called triangulation. The intersection of the lines gave the navigator his position, which could be off by as much as 20 miles.

      Out of curiosity, I plugged the RDF unit into a 12-volt power socket and flipped it on. Its power light went on, but the dial didn't show that it was picking up any stations. Its soggy earphones didn't produce any music. I couldn't figure out what to do with the short length of coaxial cable that was dangling from it. I considered leaving the relic plugged in to burn itself dry. Instead, I pulled the plug and set it on the bench.

      I didn't hear or feel him come aboard. The pallets must have been still supporting the boat, dampening any telltale rocking. It was Wade Daniels, the guy with the Caesar haircut. I first noticed him as he stood in the companionway looking at the door frame.

      "Hey, Wade," I called out, "thanks for helping me with crowd control last night."

      "No problem," he said, turning towards me. "But with all the excitement I missed your name."

      "I'm Ben Candidi." I moved towards him, reached up and shook his hand. "Say Wade, I'd like to chat with you but we can't do it here. Have to go back onto the dock. Sgt. Townsend made me promise I wouldn't let people on board. He didn't want me on board, either. I had to twist his arm pretty hard to make him understand that it's my right as salvage captain."

      "Are you making a salvage claim?" Wade asked, ignoring my polite suggestion but seeming friendly enough. He stood there, running slow eyes over the main salon, taking it all in.

      "Damn right. I'm taking this tub to Miami as soon as Sgt. Townsend gets through with it."

      Wade stood there like an insurance adjustor who had seen this sort of thing before and saw nothing to get excited about. "Looks like you had high water."

      How had he gotten past Constable Ivanhoe? I showed Wade a flattened palm as a signal to turn around and get off. But I gave him a friendly answer. "Water up to my waist. If I'd found this boat any later, I couldn't have saved it."

      Wade acknowledged my hand signal but didn't move back very fast as I went up the steps to enforce it. That put us at close quarters. I got a better look at him. He was wearing dock shoes, floppy blue shorts, and a nondescript gray T-shirt. He seemed 30 pounds overweight, which wasn't too bad for a heavy five-eleven frame and 50-some years. Under his T-shirt, his big chest united seamlessly with a still bigger stomach, producing an upper-body shape reminiscent of a perched owl. The impression was reinforced by a long nose and large green eyes with loose, puffy lower lids, and by the hang of his gray hair over his forehead.

      "The Sergeant was very emphatic about not wanting people on the boat," I said.

      Before moving back, Wade threw one last glance into the cabin. Not wanting to seem unfriendly to Wade, I stepped up onto the dock with him. Although he didn't seem the least bit athletic, he kept his balance well and he clearly knew his way around boats.

      "With the water that high, it's amazing that the boat didn't sink." He spoke in middle range and sounded vaguely Southern in pleasant tones like you might hear around suburban Virginia.

      "The diesels had only two inches to breathe. If they'd stopped, everything would have been lost."

      "Electrical system fried?"

      "No, but all of the electronics were."

      Wade shrugged his heavy shoulders and then looked me straight in the face for the first time. "If you've got your engines and your electrical system, you can get it back to Miami."

      "Yes, we're just keeping my fingers crossed."

      The corners of Wade's mouth turned up to produce a weak smile. "What I came over here for, Ben, is to invite you to a fish fry tonight. You and your partner."

      "Great!"

      "A group of us get together a couple times a week. Around six o'clock. I guess you can imagine how you're the talk of the town and everyone will be interested to hear what you . . ."

      "Sure, Rebecca and I will be glad to meet them. But after we told Sgt. Townsend everything we know -- which isn't much -- he instructed us to not talk to people about it. So I won't be able to tell your friends any sea stories. Not about this trip, anyway. But I'm looking forward to meeting everyone. And if you can excuse me now, I have to hose the salt out of the starter motors so the boat will start the next time I turn the key."

      Wade cupped his hand over an ear. "It sounded like you have saltwater damage to a relay." Obviously he was referring to the clicking relay in the dead radio.

      "And how!" I answered.

      Looking around in hopes of changing the subject, I noticed a wholesome-looking woman sitting topside on the neighboring Bayliner. She had to be Martin Becker's girlfriend, Beth Owens. I waved to her but she didn't acknowledge it.

      I used a stupid question to cap off the conversation with Wade. "Is that your boat there?" I pointed across the water lane to his big cabin cruiser directly behind us.

      "Yes, the Wholesale Delight."

      "Right! I remember you standing on its bow ready to fend me off while I was pulling in last night. Sorry if it seemed a little close. I'm not used to steering big motor yachts."

      "No, you did good."

      I reboarded and waved the guy off. "Got to get back to work."

      After reaching the seawall in front of the marina office, Wade turned to me and hollered a question. "What are you going to do after you take the Second Chance back to Miami?"

      "I'll come back here and resume our vacation," I hollered back.

      "Here at West End?"

      "No, actually we were planning to work our way eastward, to the Abacos."

      With a little luck he would tell that to the other people around the marina.

      The tide was now at its peak, and it was the time to get rid of the pallets. I took off my T-shirt, retrieved my mask and snorkel from the corner of the main salon and went over the side. My solid red-and-blue Old Navy surfer jams were really practical for around here: You're presentable when you talk to Customs officers and you don't have to change to go for a swim. Of course for any serious swimming or diving, I'd need my tighter-fitting Speedo-type trunks.

      The Second Chance was floating free. I untied the ropes that held the pallets together and began the work of sliding them out and setting them on the seawall. During a pause in the work, I noticed that Beth Owens was gone from the upper deck of the dive boat and that boyfriend Martin Becker had taken her place. I caught glimpses of him through my foggy mask, but I didn't spit out my snorkel to say hi. He was watching me like he was afraid I'd mess something up. He seemed especially anxious when I worked on the side of the boat that faced his.

      When I came up for air on the other side, I received a more pleasant kind of attention.

      "Hey there," she called from the seawall where the crowd had stood the previous day. Actually I had noticed her a lot earlier. Even my fogged-up mask hadn't kept me from noticing her sashaying to the showers in high-heeled sandals. And now, with the shower taken and everything tucked back in its place, she was presumably on her way back to her boat. Except that she had made a little detour for my benefit.

      I spit out my snorkel, waved, and shouted back, "Good morning."

      She warmed me with a big smile. "Why, you're working away like a beaver! So industrious. Taking away all that wood." She shifted her weight to one leg and tilted her hip, as if to emphasize the clever connection she'd made between beavers and wood.

      I might have smiled to myself while taking off my mask. Actually I was thinking of myself as more of a sea otter than a beaver, but she didn't leave me time to say so.

      "Well, I guess it's a beaver," she said with a flat-handed gesture over her chest. That was probably a half-expressed comment on my chest hair.

      "I'll settle for any amphibious mammal," I replied.

      She was certainly not lacking mammary qualifications. They were suspended nicely inside a floral-print half-blouse that stopped at the midriff, exposing an expanse of acceptably flat tummy. Tight-fitting white shorts completed the fashion statement. At around five-foot-three you might say she was a little short-changed in height, but since Mother Nature had issued her everything else in normal size or width, she seemed the 3-D enhanced picture of sexiness. And she knew how to put it all in motion. After throwing a defiant glance towards the flybridge of the dive boat behind me, she swung her frilly beach bag and sauntered along the seawall to a spot where we could talk without shouting.

      "You know a lot about boats, I can see," she said, twisting wet strands of mid-length blond hair around a finger. " I like it when a gentleman can do everything. Then all the lady has to do is look pretty. Ha, ha."

      I mumbled something in agreement and smiled back. She had such an engaging smile and so many other expressions that she could switch between.

      "Where do you come from that you can swim so good? You were holding your breath so long that you got me to worrying if you would ever come up again."

      "Miami."

      "Oh, you come from Miamah! I guess you were swimming year round. In Beaufort, South Carolina -- that's where I grew up -- you can only swim in the summer. And the water's not as nice as in Miamah Beach. We visit there every once in a while. Boy, was it hot. And I'm not talking about the water, either! I mean have you seen some of the suits that those women are wearing there? 'Tangas' is what they call them. In South Carolina they'd arrest you for wearing something like that on the beach. That's what they call the Bible Belt --"

      "The Republican South?"

      "-- which used to mean that you could get belted if you didn't read the Bible on Sunday. Ha, ha! No, in South Carolina a girl couldn't wear something like that and still call herself a lady. But in Miamah with all those Brazilian Ipanema girls and Latin American firecrackers . . . well, that's something else!"

      "Do you live in Beaufort?"

      "No, we live in Boca. Boca Raton." She paused, maybe to look me over without the self-distraction of talking. "I'm Angie. Angie Sumter."

      "I'm Ben Candidi. Pleased to meet you, Angela."

      "No, just call me Angie. That's what everybody does. Actually they christened me 'Angelica,' but the only time I ever use it is when I'm signing checks."

      "Who are you with, here, Angie?"

      In what could have been a dance step, she fell back on her right foot and brought up a limp left hand. She was showing me her wedding ring and her big diamond engagement ring. "With my husband!" She said it with exclamation and feigned indignation, to which I did not react. Well, I might have cracked a smile.

      Angie abandoned her pose quickly and tossed her shoulders, one at a time. "With my husband, Cal," she said, softly.

      "Great. Looking forward to meeting him sometime, Angie. What's the name of your boat."

      She told me it was Sumter's Forte, and she spelled it out for me. "And we pronounce it 'For-Tay.' You know, like your strong point or something you're really good at."

      "Right!" I said.

      "And you have that two-masted sailboat with a Greek name. We saw it from the end of our dock. And you're with that slim, black-haired girl who looks like she could be Greek, too."

      "Mediterranean anyway," I said. "Her name's Rebecca Levis. She's my fiancée."

      "I understand." Angie's ring hand came up a few inches. Then she looked beyond me and inhaled, and the hand came all the way up and waved. "Hi, Beth, did you meet Ben yet?"

      Beth had replaced Martin on the flybridge. She was hanging a blouse to dry. "Hi, Ben. Nice to meet you," she said, with shy eyes and an embarrassed wave.

      "Same here," I called up to her.

      Suddenly Beth was looking like something below deck required her immediate attention. Socially she might be a shrinking violet, but physically she seemed quite capable. She had a lifeguard's body (ocean rescue type): a strong, ovoid torso and a big rib cage for high lung capacity; short arms with plenty of muscle to clamp a guy to the side of her body; high breasts that wouldn't get in the way; and strong thighs that could generate lots of propulsive force in a scissors kick.

      "Beth's like you," Angie said. "She takes to the water. She's like a be--"

      "Like a sea otter," I said, quickly.

      Beth had already disappeared into the Bayliner.

      "Ben, you are such a gentleman," Angie exclaimed.

      "And now if the lady would grant me leave," I said, with a hint of drawl. "I must return to my underwater duties before the tide lays the boat back down on the platform."

      "Well, of course," she said, as an echo. She hoisted her bag and walked off, her sleek legs and transparent high-heeled shoes making a charm-school beeline to the center dock.

      There was no problem of the Second Chance getting hung up again, but there was still a lot of work to be done. As if by magic, Edgar and his sidekick appeared at the seawall.

      "Great, guys," I said to them, "you're hired again. And hose the pallets down once with fresh water before taking them back."

      Edgar retrieved the hose, and I concentrated on removing the rest of the pallets efficiently. My stepped-up activity brought hairy-chested Martin Becker to his flybridge again. With the two-foot dive flag painted on the side of his cabin, there was no question that he was into diving. And big letters on the boat's transom identified it as the Rapture of the Reef. Once again, he watched me intently, especially when I was working close to our shared dock.

      "Careful about getting under the dock," he yelled down at me. "The cross-braces have lots of nails sticking out. Especially on my side."

      I spit out my snorkel and looked up at him through my mask. "Yes, and they have barnacles, too."

      Usually any mention of barnacles around docks will get a laugh out of anyone. But Martin didn't seem to have a sense of humor. He kept on staring down like a dive instructor who'd just caught me going for a two-tank dive without a decompression meter. He was athletic enough to be a dive instructor, or a weight lifter for that matter. Physically, he looked like a scaled-up, pumped-up version of me.

      "Right," I answered. "Thanks for the tip."

      I put the snorkel back in my mouth, blew it out, and went back to work removing pallets from the bow and from the port side of the boat. I slowed my work deliberately, making like the pallets were hard to get loose. Slowly, dive master Martin Becker relaxed his vigilance. Sitting up on his flybridge, he really couldn't see between his boat and the dock. Before removing the last pallet, I lingered in the shadow of my boat's port side and hyperventilated for a long time. Then I went for a little exploratory dive, crossing under the Second Chance, under the cross-members of the dock, and under the Rapture of the Deep. I got a good look at the dive boat's hull before returning, under water, to the far side of my own boat.

      On that dive, I discovered no dangerous nails coming out of the dock. But I discovered four through-the-hull bolts projecting from Martin's hull. They were one-half inch diameter with threaded sides sticking out to finger length. They were under water, arranged as two pairs, about three feet apart along the centerline in the area where the bow does its important business of pushing down the water to keep the boat up on plane. And I wondered what those four bolts might be useful for -- besides catching seaweed.

      My helpers were much slower at removing the pallets from the seawall than I had been at setting them there. They were paying very special attention to the hose-down, acting like this would be a full-day project. I dug in the zipper pocket of my jams and handed each of them $15, saying I hoped that this would be enough for taking the pallets back to the commercial harbor and that I would soon need the hose back to desalt the cushions.

      A quarter of an hour later the pallets were gone, as were Edgar and his friend, and I was standing on the dock, amusing myself with squishing fresh water into the cushions. Towards the end of my vintner's dance, Sgt. Townsend reappeared.

      The uniform was the same as before and so was the command body language, but this time he sounded a little more cordial. "I would like to ask you some questions about your discovery."

      He said it in a soft voice, and he had a spiral notebook in his hand. Alleluia!

      "Fine," I said, matching his tone. "And let's get ourselves out of this hot sun." I climbed aboard and directed him to the main salon where the bare dinette benches were dry enough for him to sit. Sitting down, we were low enough in the main salon that nobody could see us through the yacht's windshield and side windows, even if they could see past the surface reflection. And since we were on the port side, the angle was bad for Martin or Beth to look down on us.

      "Could you tell me, once again, the whole story -- from the very beginning?" He put it to me like a polite request and tension stayed low when we met each other's eyes.

      "I'd be glad to."

      I told him the whole story, starting with my predawn work at the navigation station with Rebecca at the helm. I covered every detail -- everything Rebecca and I had done and noted from that moment on, up to the time when he appeared at the dock. For this telling, I left out my calculations and theory.

      Sgt. Townsend didn't ask me any leading questions, but he listened patiently and took careful notes. And as he did, I wondered what brought about the change in attitude. Yesterday he was ready to write it off as a routine drug murder, but today he was treating it as something important enough to consider in detail.

      With my story told, I waited for his questions. But he didn't ask any. He fingered the notebook, like he was ready to close it. It was time to start feeding him conclusions:

      "The holes were blasted at ten-forty in the evening."

      He wrote that down and asked, "How do you know that?"

      I told him about the flooding experiment I'd done at the dock, taking off the foam patch. "That time is accurate within one-half an hour."

      "What else do you know?"

      "As Dr. Levis told you last night, our temperature readings establish the time of death as ten-forty. That time should also be accurate within one-half an hour."

      He wrote that down. "She will have to be interviewed."

      "Okay, but like we agreed, Rebecca and I are trying to play this low key. We're not telling anyone that she is a medical doctor or about the temperature measurements. She's preparing a detailed medical affidavit that should be ready to be handed over to you tomorrow. Maybe that will do."

      "Okay."

      I took the Sergeant over to the table where I'd put the evidence: five slugs and a single casing. "These are the slugs that made the hole. They're pretty bashed up but you should be able to weigh them and compare them with the ones in the victim's chest and skull."

      He pulled a sandwich bag from his pocket and put them in.

      "And here is a casing I found on the cockpit floor. It is obviously the one from the execution shot to the head. Obviously it has been wet, but it is possible that fingerprints can be developed on it. I was careful not to touch it when picking it up."

      Sgt. Townsend raised his eyebrows. I told him more. "Dr. Levis' affidavit will include my estimate that the chest shot was from an upward angle. That would fit with the murderer having shot the victim from the cockpit, or at least from that elevation."

      He wrote that down.

      "But my finding of only one casing in the cockpit suggests that the chest shot was from another boat."

      He frowned. "Why do you say that?"

      "Because the executioner's shot was most definitely made from the boat, and the casing accounts for it."

      The Sergeant's frown deepened for a couple of seconds. But he wrote my answer down.

      "Now let's talk about the shots through the hull. My observations of the holes show that the shots were angled down."

      He recorded that, too.

      I asked him a question. "Do you know if the slugs in the victim were from a handgun or a rifle?"

      "We do not know," he said. Now, it was my turn to frown. Townsend noticed and said, "The results have not been returned."

      "If it were a handgun, the shots to the hull had to be fired from a short distance."

      Townsend responded with a greasy chuckle, almost a laugh. "And how would you know that?"

      "The pattern was close, about the size of my hand. Only two of the shots hit outside of the pattern. It would be hard to do that with a pistol from a distance."

      "And what would you say if the shots had come from a rifle?"

      "I would say that the shots could have come from a greater distance."

      A sarcastic smile came over his face. "And nobody has any trouble shooting on the water?"

      "Rifle shots from a greater distance would have had to come from a skilled marksman on a large boat that wouldn't rock so much." After saying that, I waited a long time for him to comment. Was he inexperienced, dumb, or just unwilling?

      "What else do you have to say?" he finally asked.

      "It is unlikely that it was rifle shots from a greater distance because the shots seemed to be angled down."

      "Very well," he said, in a tone that conveyed the exact opposite.

      "I have more observations. The fact that the murder and the sabotage occurred at the same time is relevant. We can eliminate several scenarios. The simplest to eliminate was that it was done by an acquaintance of the victim and that he did it all by himself. You can rule that out by asking around whether the victim took people out and whether he carried or towed an auxiliary boat that the murderer would have needed to escape."

      Sgt. Townsend didn't write any of that down. He looked to the door.

      I asked, "Did he have a friend or an auxiliary boat?"

      Sgt. Townsend looked pained. "Apparently not. Now, what is your next scenario?"

      "The next and more likely scenario is that people unknown to him approached on their own boat, shot him and --"

      "Stop right there. Why would they be unknown to him?"

      "Because he wouldn't have had a cocked revolver in his hand if he really knew them." The Sergeant was getting pissed off but that didn't stop me. "As I was saying, Sergeant, people unknown to him approached on their own boat, shot him, and then boarded the Second Chance to dispatch him."

      The sarcastic smile returned.

      "But that is just theory."

      "It's an hypothesis that can be checked. And the hypothesis is useful because it has implications which can also be checked. First, I didn't see any scrape marks on the Second Chance. You would expect them from the rub rail if a big yacht tied up to the Second Chance in the open sea. There'd be scrape marks even if they used fenders."

      "So what does that prove?"

      "If the murderer came on a big yacht, there had to be at least two of them -- one to board and one to pilot the boat. Maybe he jumped on, or maybe he used a small auxiliary. And, if he used a small auxiliary then --"

      "This is just speculation. You are just spinning stories on top of stories that have no meaning."

      "It is called an hypothesis, Sergeant. A good hypothesis generates a theory that can be tested. My small boat hypothesis says that if you get your fingerprint kit and dust around the inner edge of the transom by the aft cleats, you might find the murderer's fingerprints. That's where he would hold on while tying on a line from his boat. He would have to secure his boat before boarding."

      Sergeant Townsend put on a stone face. "Dr. Candidi, you are not welcome to involve yourself this deeply in the investigation."

      I stared at him. Maybe I was wrong to have shown him all my cards -- the ones that I'd been playing in my head. Maybe he wasn't just a lazy cop who didn't want to get involved in an investigation. What if he was in tight with the bad guys? Maybe I should fear him more than anyone else at the marina. But somehow, I couldn't stop myself from telling him more.

      "Just one final thing to tell you -- the people who shot him know something about boats but they don't know all that much. They knew enough to shoot the holes in a tight pattern just below the waterline, but they didn't know enough to weight down the float switch to defeat the bilge pump. Or if they did know, they were in too big a hurry to get out of there."

      Townsend had closed his eyes. "Will that be all?"

      "Yes, that will be all. Tomorrow you are going to get a written statement and a medical affidavit from Dr. Levis. After that, we will wash our hands of the criminal matter."

      This seemed to relax him. He got up to leave. But I needed more from him.

      "Did you make any progress in identifying the victim? I need that information for my salvage claim."

      "No, I cannot report any progress to you." He stepped towards the door, acting like no further explanation was necessary.

      "What did the marina records say?"

      "They have been transferred to higher authority. I cannot tell you."

      His double-talk and stonewalling were making me mad. I followed him out to the cockpit. "Very well. It sounds to me like you should be through in two or three days so I can take the boat to Miami."

      I broadcast that with a loud voice.

      Sgt. Townsend stepped up on the dock and turned on his heel. "You will not take the boat until I release it as a crime scene."

      He executed a quarter-turn on his heel and walked off. I watched as he passed the Constable, climbed in his jeep and drove off. I paced the cockpit, deep in thought. It was now late in the afternoon. Time to call it a day. As if on cue, my back-door neighbor Wade Daniels moved to the bow of his yacht and called to me across the water. "Remember to come and help us eat the fish. Six o'clock."

      "We'll be there," I called back.

      I locked up the Second Chance and left it.

      Walking towards Ivanhoe, I realized that I had a question for him. "When the Sergeant was here with me, did anybody come out on the dock?"

      "No, man," he said. "Nobody come."

      "Thanks."

      "No problem."