Chapter 39
THIRTY-NINE
Stomach muscles. Leg muscles. Chest muscles. All were working but none well enough to keep her afloat. Ferd held her breath and tried to relax. Maybe if she did, she would find the surface. Her body sank farther. Farther. The water darkened around her. Grit suspended in the depths floated by.
A solid hand gripped her collar and yanked her up. The force and shock released the rest of the air she’d held hostage.
If I scream now, I’m dead.
The ascent seemed to take so much longer than the descent. She tried to work with her rescuer to kick and give some momentum, but she couldn’t seem to match his movements. When she was sure her lungs would burst, her head crested the surface.
Blessed air! She breathed and choked.
Through blurry vision, Heath’s boat sailed away.
Her rescuer still held her above the water while struggling with something, then sliced through the rope around her wrists, nicking her palm in the process. Blood curled into the water as she finally took a few strokes on her own to keep herself afloat. She spun and came face-to-face with Carl.
Without his raincoat, and with all his clothes sticking to him, he looked small. Not nearly so frightening as a murderer should be. She paddled toward Carl’s boat, since George had taken theirs, and used the ladder off the back to climb out. Duke met her there, his hands still tied tightly.
Carl wobbled up onto the boat and slowly cut Duke and Kevin loose. “I never meant to be a murderer.” A sob shook his shoulders. “I wanted to help my girl. That’s all. Every time I thought I was done, George wanted one more thing.”
He slowly shook his head and landed on his knees. “You’ve got to believe me. When he tossed her into the water and I heard that scream, it was like something flipped in me. I couldn’t watch that. I couldn’t be a part of that.”
He held up his hands in front of him, wrists together. “Go ahead. Take me in.”
“We need an ambulance to meet us at the dock. You assaulted a federal agent and he’s going to need stitches. In his face,” Kevin said.
“My phone is in the pocket of my slicker. Over there.” He pointed at his pile of clothes abandoned before he’d jumped in the lake after her.
She’d convinced herself he had to have been pushed or prompted in some way, but he’d made the choice. All on his own.
She sat slowly on the deck and waited for the shaking and dizziness to stop. Duke grabbed Carl’s phone and called for an ambulance and police to take Carl into custody, then he lowered to a squat in front of her.
“I don’t want to make a big deal if you don’t want me to, but your neck is still bleeding. So is your hand. I’d like to go through this boat and look for some first aid, if you’ll let me?”
She looked around at the other three men on the boat. Heath still lay knocked unconscious, but thankfully there wasn’t much blood, even with a head wound. Kevin tended to his friend while Carl sat on his knees with his wrists cuffed in front of him.
“He’s going away for a long time. Isn’t he?” she muttered.
“Maybe. Probably. He likely killed Bailey. He made the same move on Heath. Don’t know if he planned to kill both or accidentally killed Bailey but we’ll have to figure that out.” He rose to his feet and headed inside.
“You believe me, don’t you?” He looked at her, his eyes watery. “I saved you. You believe me. Right?”
His pleas seemed even more pitiful coming from a man who, not fifteen minutes before, had knocked a man clean out. With a vase. “I believe you helped me. Everything else is up for debate.”
His shoulders sagged. “She’s going to be all alone. Bailey’s gone. I’m gone. Who’s going to take care of her now?”
“Monica?”
“Well, yeah.” He didn’t look up.
She wasn’t sure how long she could stand to be on her knees like he was, especially with the wounds to her knee and thigh. Her conscience prickled and she went over to help him to his feet, then to a chair.
“I think her parents will have to look out for her. She made choices in her life, Carl. Did you know Bailey was still paying her this whole time?”
His gaze met hers in an instant. “That’s a lie.”
“I saw one of the payments and I talked to his new girlfriend. She confirmed it, though the money was going to stop when he remarried and left Piper’s Ridge.”
“She told me he’d stopped. She said she had nothing. Couldn’t eat. I did all this because, what kind of man marries a woman fresh out of high school, tells her not to work, leaves her without skills or resources, then abandons her? Who does that?” His volume rose.
“I’m not going to say what he did was right, but neither of us know the whole story and we likely never will,” Ferd said.
Duke tended to her cuts quickly then helped Kevin move Heath to Carl’s boat.
Once all of them were seated, Kevin drove the slower vessel back to the dock.
A police car and ambulance waited in the small parking lot with a small group of onlookers from Ahab’s Restaurant waiting to see what all the fuss was about.
Ferd couldn’t wait to get off and never see a lake again. She made a beeline for the ambulance without a second thought. While they checked on her and Heath, she watched Duke hand Carl over to one police officer, then talk for a good ten minutes with another.
They had to catch George before he got on a plane and flew back to California, away from ever getting caught. Because other than assaulting her, they had no evidence against him.
Duke finally came over and stood by her feet where she lay on the gurney. “You okay?”
“As much as I can be. With all this, I can’t exactly hide what I’ve been doing. Coupled with the injury to my knee, it doesn’t look like rest.” Helping today would take away any ounce of choice she may have had.
“You’re worried they’ll think you’re taking advantage of them.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do. I’m afraid if I wrote a letter of thanks to them for letting us use one of their finest, it probably wouldn’t go over any better.”
She snorted. “Finest is a longshot. I was, and am, a rookie.”
“You did great today. Didn’t look like a rookie.”
After working with Duke, she didn’t feel like a rookie either but that didn’t change facts. “Thanks. I’ll let them know.”
“And your sarcasm is still on point.” He grinned. “We’ll catch him, you know. Kevin was already putting in a call to the FBI field office in Denver. He’ll be caught. If he tries to fly, that’s it.”
“But what would they charge him with? Assault with a deadly weapon?” She focused on staying emotionally disengaged. “He’s so much worse than that.”
“Carl was already spilling the beans as they put him in the police car. He waived his rights and they’re recording everything. Now, a confession still needs proof, but what I heard lines up exactly with all we found.”
“What about the missing two days?”
“I’m no ME but it was really rainy and cold.
He laid in a wet boat, wrapped in his fishing gear, in what was essentially cool enough weather to be just above a refrigerator.
Time of death determination was probably as exact as they could be, but they could also be wrong.
Carl waited for Bailey to come back from his fishing outing after returning the stolen boat to the dock where he’d found it.
He’d already filled the hull with the drugs, so he knew it would affect the speed and depth of the craft. He was worried Bailey would notice.”
“And did he?” Ferd could almost imagine the interaction.
“Yeah. In fact, as soon as he docked, Bailey checked the hull that night for leaks and found the hidden compartment Carl had installed to toss the wrapped bricks inside. It was harder for him to get them out to load into the storage spot in the middle of the lake, but that was how he’d been doing it all along and the plan worked. ”
“Bailey was angry someone put a hole in his boat?” she guessed.
“I don’t know. Carl didn’t say. He said he chased Bailey around for a bit and they scuffled.
He drew a knife, but that was lost in the lake.
When Bailey ran inside, Carl thought Bailey was getting a gun.
They both fought so hard it broke all the windows out.
Carl finally ended it with a smaller boat anchor coiled in the corner of the wheelhouse. ”
“What about the navigation equipment?” How could all this fit together?
“That, he did on his own. The nav system was to help him when he moved the boat out to the ocean. It was for safety.”
“So, the drugs came in, probably by truck?” How was that missed?
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “That’s where the other side of the lake comes into play. That small brewery where Carl got all his beer . . . turns out, that was a kickback.”
“So the brewery is involved?” she asked.
Duke shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know yet.
Someone had the bricks of dust delivered and dropped into the parking lot at Ahab’s, in beer cases.
Carl would move them to his boat and because he often did deliveries, no one questioned it.
That’s why he had all those empty cases sitting around and why Kevin and Heath were looking through them.
They weren’t all full of beer when they arrived. ”
“I’m assuming there’s a car headed over there now?”
“I was about to go join them. Want to come?”
She pushed free of the gurney. “Yeah, what’s one more adventure. We need to see this through to the end, right?”