My niece walked over to a window to look out. “It’s still coming down hard. It’s amazing how it lights up the night. I can see the ocean. It’s this black wall,” she said in a pensive tone.
“What you’re seeing is a wall,” Marino said. “The brick wall at the back of the yard.”
She did not speak for a while, and I thought of how much I missed her. Although I had seen little of her during her undergraduate years at UVA, now we saw each other less, for even when a case brought me to Quantico there was never a guarantee we would find time to visit. It saddened me that her childhood was gone, and a part of me wished she had chosen a life and a career less harsh than what hers must be.
Then she mused as she still gazed out the glass, “So we’ve got a reporter who’s into survivalist weaponry.
Somehow he’s poisoned with cyanide gas while diving around decommissioned ships in a restricted area at night.”
“That’s just a possibility,” I reminded her. “His case is pending. We should be careful not to forget that.”
She turned around. “Where would you get cyanide if you wanted to poison someone’?
Would that be hard?”
“You could get it from a variety of industrial settings,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Well, for example, it’s used to extract gold from ore.
It’s also used in metal plating, and as a fumigant, and to manufacture phosphoric acid from bones,” I said. “In other words, anyone from a jeweler to a worker in an industrial plant to an exterminator could have access to cyanide. Plus.
you’re going to find it and hydrochloric acid in any chemical lab.”
“Well,” it was Marino who spoke, “if someone poisoned Eddings, then they had to know he was going to be out in his boat. They had to know where and when.”
“Someone had to know many things,” I agreed. “For example, one would have had to know what type of breathing apparatus Eddings planned to use because had he gone down with scuba gear instead of a hookah, the MO would have had to be entirely different.”
“I just wish we knew what the hell he was doing down there.” Marino opened the screen to tend to the fire.
“Whatever it was,” I said, “it seems to have involved photography. And based on the camera equipment it appears he had with him, he was serious.”
“But no underwater camera was found,” Lucy said.
“No,” I said. “The current could have carried it anywhere, or it might be buried in silt.
Unfortunately, the kind of equipment he apparently had doesn’t float.”
“I sure would like to get hold of the film.” She was still looking out at the snowy night, and I wondered if she was thinking of Aspen.
“One thing’s for damn sure, he wasn’t taking pictures of fish.” Marino jabbed a fat log that was a little too green.
“So that pretty much leaves ships. And I think he was doing a story somebody didn’t want him to do.”
“He may have been doing a story,” I agreed, “but that doesn’t mean it’s related to his death. Someone could have used his being out diving as an opportunity to kill him for another reason.”
“Where do you keep the kindling?” He gave up on the fire.
“Outside under a tarp,” I answered. “Dr. Mant won’t allow it in the house. He’s afraid of termites.”
“Well, he ought to be more afraid of the fires and wind shear in this dump.”
“In back, just off the porch,” I said. “Thanks, Marino.”
He put on gloves but no coat and went outside as the fire smoked stubbornly and the wind made eerie moaning sounds in the leaning brick chimney. I watched my niece, who was still at the window.
“We should work on dinner, don’t you think?” I said to her.
“What’s he doing?” she said with her back to me.
“Marino?”
“Yes. The big idiot’s gotten lost. Look, he’s all the way up by the wall. Wait a minute.
I can’t see him now. He turned his flashlight off. That’s kind of weird.”