The Narrows by Michael Connelly Read Free Book Online Page B

the sheriff then?”
    “Yeah, I called and told them he was the guy. They didn’t act too excited. I called back the next week and they said they talked to the guy—by phone. They didn’t even bother to go out there for a face-to-face. He denied it like of course he would and that was that as far as they were concerned.”
    “What’s this guy’s name?”
    “Robert Finder. His operation is called Isthmus Charters. In the ad he calls himself Robert ‘Fish’ Finder. My ass. More like ‘Fish Stealer.’”
    I looked down at the photo on the screen and wondered if this meant anything at all to my investigation. Could the missing GPS box be at the center of Terry McCaleb’s death? It seemed unlikely. The idea that someone would steal a competitor’s fishing spots was understandable. But then to engage in a complicated plot to also kill the competitor seemed on the far limit of belief. It would require a hell of a plan and execution on Finder’s part, that was for sure. It would require a hell of a plan on anyone’s part.
    Lockridge seemed to read my thoughts.
    “Hey, you think this bastard could’ve had something to do with Terror going down?”
    I looked up at him for a long moment, realizing that the idea of Lockridge being involved in McCaleb’s death as a means of gaining control and location of the charter business and The Following Sea was a more believable theory.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll probably be checking it out.”
    “Let me know if you want somebody to go with you.”
    “Sure. But listen, I noticed on the sheriff’s report that the GPS was the only thing reported stolen. Did that hold up? Nothing else ever turned up missing?”
    “That was it. That’s why me and Terry thought it was so strange at first. Until we figured out it was Finder.”
    “Terry thought that, too, that it was him?”
    “He was coming around to it. I mean, come on, who else could it have been?”
    It was a worthy question, but not one I thought I needed to put front and center at the moment. I pointed at the laptop screen and told Lockridge to keep moving back through the photos. He did so and the procession of happy anglers continued.
    We came across one more curiosity in the photo series. Lockridge backed up to a set of six photos that depicted a man whose face was not shown clearly at first. In the three initial shots he was posed holding a brilliantly colored fish up to the camera. But in each shot he held the fish up too high, obscuring most of his face. In each of these shots his dark glasses peeked over the ridge of the fish’s dorsal fin. The fish appeared to be the same in each of these three shots, which led me to assume that the photographer was repeatedly trying to get a photo that included the fisherman’s face. But to no avail.
    “Who took these?”
    “Terror. I wasn’t there on that one.”
    Something about the man or maybe the way he had avoided the camera in the trophy photo had made McCaleb suspicious. That seemed obvious. The next three photos in the series were shots of the man taken without his knowledge. The first two were taken from inside the salon, shooting out into the cockpit where the fisherman leaned against the right gunwale. Because the glass on the salon door had reflective film on it, the man would not have seen or known that McCaleb had taken photos of him.
    The first of these two photos was in profile. The next a full-on face shot. Take away the setting and McCaleb had instinctively gotten mug shot poses, another confirmation of his suspicion. Even with these photos the man was still obscured. He had a full beard of brownish gray hair and wore dark sunglasses with large lenses and a blue L.A. Dodgers hat. What little could be seen of the man’s hair appeared to be close cropped and matching the colorations of his beard. He had a gold hoop earring in his right ear.
    In the profile shot his eyes were crinkled and hooded, naturally hidden even with the dark