Seawitch Read Online Free Page B

twin engines were massive to my mind, the size of Smart Cars crouching in the middle of the boat, isolated from the rest by walls lined in foamed-lead sound insulation, according to the report. It looked like dirty cappuccino foam under a layer of aluminum foil. They, too, had a drapery of dried seaweed, but the engine room was not nearly as filthy as the room with the strange, bloody circle on the floor, in spite of having a patina of old oil and engine dirt on the floor and ceiling. I spotted a dense black coil of ghost energy roiling in one of the back corners, but with Solis present and my clothes still damp and itchy, I didn’t have time to investigate it thoroughly. Nothing as obvious as a face or figure presented itself in the time I was staring at it. I made a mental note to come back and take a closer look. . . .
    We passed out of the engine room through another narrow door and into the aft, where the guest accommodations awaited us. Here the signs of something gone wrong were more present, if strangely inconsistent. In one cabin we found a collection of more of the pitted bits of glass and a few round white objects I thought might be either bones or pearls, but they were so crusted with dirt it was hard to tell and we were both unwilling to move them without gloves and evidence bags. Everywhere we found mildew, muck, and stains that ranged from green to rust-red to grainy black. Every room held the sense of disarray and hasty, unexpected departure—and the smell—and yet nothing seemed to be missing besides the people themselves. Personal possessions had been abandoned in situ—even duffel bags with clothes and supplies packed inside and a woman’s purse with its 1980s contents intact, as far as I could tell. The bed in the master suite at the back had been torn to shreds by something with claws and teeth. We finished with the cabins and moved to the stairs. Near the aft companionway, I saw a clump of shiny dark brown fur caught in a crack in the handrail.
    I pointed at it. “Any idea what that came from?” I asked Solis.
    He frowned. “No confirmation from the lab, but I thought, perhaps, a dog.”
    “Doesn’t feel like dog fur,” I said, fingering a few strands. They were thick and soft like something torn from an expensive fur coat. “And there was no dog aboard. So . . . you’re thinking someone boarded the vessel and brought an attack dog of some kind to drive the passengers up on deck?”
    “It is a possibility. Though I don’t like the theory.”
    I humphed under my breath. Solis didn’t usually advance a theory he didn’t favor. Both of us were a little out of our depth here. I returned his frown and studied him in silence a moment, waiting to see if the creeping disquiet I felt was unsettling his nerves, too.
    Finally he added, “There are no Somali pirates raiding shipping in Puget Sound.”
    “Not right now,” I agreed. Besides, pirates used guns, not dogs, and they didn’t worry about bloodstains—of which we’d found so few. We’d also found no bullet holes, and the boat was still intact and appeared to have been unused since the day the passengers and crew had vanished. Pirates don’t just let their prizes float off to be found later like bottles cast up on the shore.
    From the foot of the companionway I looked back into the aft corridor and its strangely empty rooms. “It looks like they left in a hurry—possibly under threat, considering the mess—but they didn’t take anything and the boat doesn’t appear to have been sinking. . . .”
    I frowned, wondering why they’d left and where they’d gone. The final report of the original loss investigator was that
Seawitch
must have had hit some bad weather near the Strait of Juan de Fuca and been wrecked, sinking with all hands on board and so swiftly no one had even seen her go down. It’s not unheard of for pleasure boats to be ill prepared for the kind of severe weather and adverse currents the strait can dish