Before Scarnum could answer there was a knock on the door.
A constable nodded at MacPherson, who walked out.
Léger kept staring at him. “Was there anything on the boat?” she asked. She had a thick, musical French accent. Scarnum said nothing.
“What did you buy a new anchor for?” she asked. “What happened to the one on your boat?”
When MacPherson came back he didn’t look happy. “Get up, Scarnum, your lawyer’s here.”
“Praise the lord,” said Scarnum.
“It was an illegal search,” said Mayor, as they walked to the lawyer’s car. “They didn’t have ‘reasonable and probable grounds’ to search it without a warrant. So it was an illegal search, unless you gave them permission, and I don’t believe you’re dumb enough to do that, not when there was a pillbox of cocaine sitting in the front pocket of your pants.”
“Nope,” said Scarnum. “I’m not that dumb.”
“That’s the good news,” said Mayor. “They haven’t dropped the coke charge but I can’t imagine a Crown prosecutor agreeing to go ahead with it, since the only evidence was obtained through an illegal search. The bad news is they’ve impounded the Kelly Lynn, so there’s no cheque for you until it’s returned to SeaWater, and who knows when that’ll be, given that the boat appears to be a murder scene.”
Scarnum nodded. “I was afraid of that.”
The lawyer turned and looked at him. “Look,” he said. “I’m not really a criminal defence lawyer. If you’re in real trouble here, you’d be better off getting another lawyer.”
Scarnum looked out the window. “S’far as I know I’m not in real trouble,” he said. “I don’t know who killed Jimmy Zinck.”
He looked back at the lawyer. “What did they tell you about that?” he asked Mayor.
“Zinck was found washed up on the beach at Sandy Cove, near where you found the boat. The Mounties think he was shot on the water, then ran the boat up on the reef and swam ashore. They think he died on the beach.”
“I guess he was a tough one,” said Scarnum.
“I guess so,” said the lawyer. “They say he had a couple of bullets in him. It looked like a machine gun, they said. Christ. A machine gun. Here in Chester. You know any people who go around with machine guns?”
Scarnum looked at him and laughed. “Nope,” he said. “Christ.”
But the lawyer didn’t laugh, and when he dropped Scarnum off at the boatyard, he took a business card and wrote a name on the back: JOEL FREEMAN.
“You get yourself arrested on something like this again, this is the guy you want,” he said. “This cocaine and machine gun stuff is not my, um, speciality. That OK with you?”
Scarnum said it was and shook his hand, and the lawyer drove off.
Annabelle hugged him when he stepped up onto the Isenors’ porch, and pulled him into the house. Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table, with a disassembled gearbox spread out in front of him on newspapers.
“There’s our jailbird!” he shouted. “They let you out of the big house, did they?”
Scarnum smiled. “I told them before we left that it wasn’t cocaine,” he said. “I put a bit of baking soda in a pillbox to use cleaning a winch on the Cerebus. I told them it weren’t cocaine but they didn’t believe me until we were down at the detachment.”
“I told them!” said Annabelle, hugging Scarnum’s lean body against her generous bosom.
“I told that maudite Québécoise constable that you weren’t the type to mess around with drugs.”
“She gave her a good going-over,” said Charlie, giggling. “I didn’t understand a word, but it didn’t sound good.”
“I told her!” said Annabelle. “The idea that Phillip could be mixed up with something like that! I told her she should be out catching real criminals, not locking up an honest boy.”
Scarnum looked out the window at the empty mooring where the Kelly Lynn had been.
“They took her away, did they?” he said.
“Yes,” said Charlie. “They brought in Steve Oikle to tow it away. Wouldn’t even let him on the deck. Took it down to the town wharf. Gerald told me they got a Mountie sitting watch on it.”
Scarnum nodded. “Terrible thing that happened to Jimmy Zinck,” he said. “Makes my skin crawl to think he might have been killed on the boat not long before I went through the ledges.”
Charlie nodded at that. “Terrible thing,” he said. “Now, we don’t know the whole story, what he might have been mixed up in, but whatever it was, it sure didn’t end up too good for him. I wouldn’t be surprised to find there was drugs behind this.”
Scarnum nodded. “Awful business,” he said. He looked out the window.
“Well,” he said. “I guess I’d better go down there and see what kind of mess they made aboard Orion.”
“I’ll walk down with you,” said Charlie.
Scarnum gave Annabelle a hug and a kiss and the two men walked down to Scarnum’s boat.
It was a mess inside, with all Scarnum’s sailing gear and tools pulled out of the drawers and cupboards where he’d stowed them.
“Holy Christ,” said Charlie, surveying the mess. “Hard to believe you have this much shit on the boat. Want a hand cleaning it up?”
“No thanks,” said Scarnum. “You wouldn’t know where anything goes.”
Charlie laughed at that and turned to leave.
Scarnum stopped him. “Charlie,” he said. “You remember last night when I said I was going out to have a look at the Kelly Lynn?”
Charlie nodded.
“In the end, I decided not to bother and I went to bed,” he said.
Charlie looked him up and down. “I kinda thought that you might of decided not to go out and have a look,” he said.
Scarnum looked away.
“I’ll tell you something, Phillip,” said Charlie, suddenly speaking with a serious voice that Scarnum had never heard him use. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve managed to do that without getting mixed up with the kind of fucking people who settle their arguments with machine guns. I’d just as soon it stayed that way. Whoever killed that jackass Zinck wasn’t funning. What you’re doing is your business, and I don’t mean to stick my nose in it, but I can tell you Annabelle would be upset if you were to turn up full of holes.”
He locked eyes with Scarnum for a moment, and Scarnum nodded.
“And I’d lose one of my paying customers here,” Charlie said, and giggled, and left.
The digital clock next to Scarnum’s V-berth said that it was 2:30 a.m. when he was awoken by the sound of a car grinding to a stop in the gravel by the dock. By 2:32 he was on his feet in his underwear, on deck, holding a long hunting knife, hunched down behind the cabin of his boat, peeking at the car.
When Angela Rodenhiser got out of the driver’s side, he slipped back