Now You See Him (Roy Ballard Book 4) Read online

“Because I’m charismatic and good looking,” I said.

  “And delusional. Dive team was at it all day yesterday and they’re back out there today. No luck, but sometimes that part of the lake doesn’t give up its dead. That’s deep water, and one of the flood gates is open at the dam, so the currents are pretty strong.”

  “What exactly happened on the boat?” I asked.

  Ruelas made a scoffing noise. “Had forty-six passengers aboard, and every last one was pretty much shitfaced. And they—”

  “Including Jeremy?” I asked.

  “His buddies said he was hitting it just as hard as everyone else, and from what I gather, he wasn’t much of a drinker, so he was plowed.”

  This was running counter to the picture of Jeremy that Heidi had painted for me.

  “Heidi says he supposedly jumped off the upper deck of the boat,” I said.

  “He did that a bunch of times,” Ruelas said. “They were all doing it, which is pretty routine on one of those barges. And they kept doing it after dark, which ain’t the smartest idea. All it takes is one log floating just under the surface. You hit that—bam—it knocks the air out of you, or if you dive in headfirst, you bust your head on it. I know a guy who dove in, then came up fast and slammed his head into the bottom of the boat. Lucky he didn’t drown, but his neck is all fucked up and always will be.”

  “So is that how Jeremy drowned? Jumping off the upper deck?”

  “It’s a good guess, but we might never know for sure, even if we find the body.”

  An onlooker might wonder why Ruelas would freely share all of this information with me, considering our mutual disdain for each other. The reason was simple: reciprocation. In the course of our investigations, Mia and I often discovered valuable evidence of fraud and other crimes that we shared with the police. We had provided Ruelas and other cops in the area with some great leads in the past. Ruelas was an arrogant SOB, but like many police detectives I knew, he was driven by practicality and the ability to get results. He knew that if he helped me now, I might help him close a case later. And it worked both ways. Of course, he wouldn’t share privileged information with me, but most of this stuff I could pick up by interviewing some of the partygoers. Ruelas was saving me some time and possibly mitigating the need for me to investigate Jeremy’s drowning any further.

  “Just seems weird that he went missing without anybody seeing anything,” I said.

  “You ever been on one of those boats?” Ruelas asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, it can be hard to keep track of everybody. You’ve got some people on the bottom level, some on the top, everybody talking, drinking, eating. Somebody jumps into the water every few minutes, then climbs back onto the boat. Nobody is keeping track of anybody else in particular. They should do a buddy system out there, but they don’t. There were only two completely sober people on the boat—the captain and the deckhand—and they can’t watch everybody, right? Plus, everybody signs a waiver acknowledging that there isn’t a lifeguard on board. Anyway, not long after sundown, suddenly one of his friends, Randy, notices he’s gone.”

  “How long had Jeremy been gone?”

  “Talking to Randy, it’s pretty obvious it could have been a few minutes or half an hour. He thought it was just a few minutes, but he couldn’t be sure.”

  “Was the boat drifting or anchored?” I asked.

  I could picture a scenario where Jeremy jumped in, the boat moved, and then Randy noticed he was gone. If that were the case, they would’ve been looking for Jeremy in the wrong location.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Ruelas said. “The boat was moving when Randy noticed Jeremy missing, but it had been anchored earlier. They stopped the boat where it was and four guys jumped in to look, but what’re you gonna do fumbling around in the dark like that, especially when you’re drunk? We’re lucky we didn’t lose a couple more. The captain had some spotlights, but they couldn’t find him.”

  I hated to admit it to myself, but it sounded like Heidi’s instinct had been wrong. Her nephew had been the victim of a typical drowning. Alcohol and poor judgment had combined to end in tragedy.

  “I guess you’ve interviewed everybody that was on board?” I said.

  Ruelas snorted. “No, genius, I’m using a Magic 8 Ball.”

  I deserved that. Ruelas was a thorough detective. Thoroughly unlikeable, too, but good at his job.

  He said, “The deputies interviewed them Friday night, and when I got the case yesterday morning, I talked to everybody a second time, either in person or by phone, including Randy. Most of ’em didn’t see anything. All they knew was suddenly everybody was looking for Jeremy. It took ’em a few minutes to even make sure he wasn’t on the boat. They were thinking he was in the john, because the door was locked, but it turned out to be a guy in there getting a blow job.”

  Ruelas had few filters, at least when speaking to other men.

  “Man, I hope they didn’t hit any waves,” I said.

  “You and me both.”

  “So as far as you can tell, it was purely an accident?” I asked.

  He hesitated for just a moment, then said, “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Pretty much?”

  “There was this one guy named Harvey Selberg on the boat. Totally fried, to the point that even after the initial freak-out, with everybody screaming for Jeremy and searching the boat, and then a couple of deputies showing up, Harvey still didn’t know what was going on when the deputy talked to him. He was like, ‘Somebody’s missing? What happened?’”

  “That’s really drunk,” I said.

  “So the deputies eventually let everybody go home. Most of ’em had sobered up enough to drive, but Harvey was still pretty hammered, so his girlfriend drove him home. Anyway, Harvey crashes hard, and then he wakes up at about four-thirty with a burglar in his bedroom.”

  I hadn’t known where this little side story about Harvey had been going, but I hadn’t expected that. “What happened?”

  “Moron should’ve kept quiet and let the burglar leave, but no, he gets up, yelling, and goes after him. Got his ass kicked bad, and now he’s in Brack. Gonna be there a couple days. Fractured orbital socket and a concussion. They just moved him out of the ER and into ICU.”

  “Brack” was Brackenridge Hospital, the oldest public hospital in Texas.

  “Where was his girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Lucky for her, she dumped him at home, then went to her own place because she was pissed about him getting drunk.”

  “That’s a pretty eventful night for Harvey,” I said. “He’s out on a party barge where a person drowns, or appears to have drowned, and then he gets beat up by an intruder in his house.”

  Ruelas only grunted in response.

  “You’re as skeptical as I am,” I said. “That’s why you told me about it. It’s bothering you, because you figure it can’t be a coincidence.”

  Ruelas still said nothing.

  “Right?” I said.

  “If there’s a connection, hell if I know what it is. You think you’re a smart guy, so I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  “Did the burglar get anything?” I asked.

  “Wallet and phone.”

  “Did you try—”

  “Of course we did,” Ruelas said. “Nothing.”

  He knew what I had been planning to ask. Did you try tracking the phone?

  I said, “I assume you’re going to—”

  “Yep,” he said.

  I was going to ask if they were going to monitor the cell phone for future usage, just in case. This was more effort than the sheriff’s office would normally put in for a stolen cell phone, but when you factored in the resulting assault—and the possibility that the theft might have something to do with the disappearance of Jeremy—it was worth the extra effort.

  “Any chance Jeremy swam to shore?” I asked. “Maybe it was a practical joke that got out of hand, and now he’s too embarrassed or scared to come forward. He
thinks he’s going to get charged with something.”

  “We put the word out with his friends and family that if that’s what happened, it’s not a problem. We just need to know so we can quit wasting time on it. Not that I wouldn’t give the little dickhead a hard time.”

  I had run out of questions.

  “I don’t know Jeremy’s parents,” I said, “but Heidi is a really great lady. So, when you find the body—if you find the body—”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Just don’t be, uh, your usual charming self,” I said. I wanted him to take special care with the notification.

  “You really are an idiot,” he said. “You think I’d just walk in there and say, ‘Sorry, ma’am. By the time we found him, the turtles were already snacking on his toes.’”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I don’t think you’d say ‘ma’am.’”

  “You got any more questions or can I get back to doing real work?” he said. Before I could answer, he added, “Yeah, I thought so. Now just remember you aren’t an actual detective and we won’t have any trouble.” Then he hung up.

  I sat for a moment and wondered how I should proceed.

  If I’d been doing this favor for someone I didn’t like and respect as much as Heidi, I probably would’ve stopped there. I hadn’t learned anything that made me think this was anything other than an accidental drowning. It happens about ten times a day in the United States. Nearly four thousand a year. Many of those people are experienced swimmers. And they aren’t drunk. And they still drown. So why should I assume anything different had happened to Jeremy?

  But this was for Heidi, so I decided I was going to speak with at least one person on that boat and hear a firsthand account of the evening. And I figured it might be better if that person had been sober when Jeremy went missing.

  4

  Instead of making a phone call and probably getting brushed off, I took a chance and drove out to the marina where the party barge was docked. This particular marina had five piers running like long fingers into Lake Travis, and there must have been at least forty or fifty motorboats of various sizes and models docked in each pier, for a total of nearly two hundred boats.

  Still, from where I stood in the crowded parking lot above the marina, the Island Hopper was easy to spot, because it dwarfed every other boat in the marina. It floated in a special slip—twice as long and three times as wide as the other slips—at the end of the center pier.

  I walked down some concrete steps to the pier area and saw that the place was bustling, mostly with families preparing their boats for excursions. Dads and moms did most of the work while the kids fidgeted or ran back and forth on the piers, making a nuisance of themselves. There was one group of college kids just departing in a large ski boat, rap music blasting.

  As I walked along the pier and neared the barge, I saw a guy in his mid-twenties on the upper deck. Looked like he was mopping.

  When I reached the near side of the boat—I had no idea if it was port or starboard—I called up. “Hey, there.”

  The guy was bigger than I first thought. Maybe six-three and about two-twenty. He stopped mopping and looked down at me. “You’re a little early. Can’t board until two o’clock.”

  So the boat was going out today. Well, why not? It had been only forty hours since one of their customers had disappeared into the murky depths of Lake Travis, but they had a business to run, right? No reason to be all maudlin about it.

  “I’m not a customer,” I said. “But I am wearing a Speedo underneath my clothes, just in case.”

  He looked at me with absolutely no expression on his face. “What?”

  “My name is Roy Ballard,” I said. “Were you on the boat Friday night?”

  “You a cop?”

  “No, I work with the insurance company,” I said.

  That was plenty vague. Which insurance company? The one that covered the Island Hopper? Well, no. It was the one Heidi worked for, which otherwise had absolutely nothing to do with the death of Jeremy Sawyer. It wasn’t my fault if this guy misconstrued what I meant, was it?

  “You should talk to my boss,” he said.

  “The captain?”

  “Yeah, him or the owner.”

  “Was he on the boat Friday night?” I asked. “The owner?”

  The big guy grinned a little. “No. Not likely. I don’t think he’s ever set foot on it.”

  “Then I’d prefer to talk to you, if you don’t mind,” I said. “You were on the boat Friday night, right?”

  “Unfortunately, yeah.”

  The boat itself didn’t match well with the name Island Hopper. Tan carpet, beige seats, white fiberglass hull. Shouldn’t it be all blues and greens?

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “They call me Meatball.”

  Appropriate. Meatball had a thick torso and humped shoulders. His head was large and round. I was guessing you could punch him real hard and only hurt your hand.

  “Interesting,” I said. “What’s your actual name?”

  “Who are you again?”

  “Roy Ballard.”

  “And you’re like, what, investigating the drowning?”

  Technically, that was true. So I said, “I’m looking into it, yes. Jeremy’s aunt is my client.”

  “I thought you worked for the insurance company,” Meatball said. He was leaning on the mop handle, and it looked awfully small in his hands. He was wearing khaki cargo shorts and a teal-colored shirt with an Island Hopper logo on the left breast.

  “I’m a freelance legal videographer,” I said. “Jeremy’s aunt is my client. She works for the insurance company and she asked me to check into it.”

  All true, although a lawyer or pedant might argue that by saying “the insurance company,” I was intending to be deceptive, since Heidi’s insurance company had nothing to do with the party barge. I’m a scamp that way.

  “Dude,” Meatball said, “I feel like you’re jerking me around. I don’t like being jerked around.”

  “Who among us does?” I said. “And that’s why I always promise a one hundred percent jerk-free experience. Just a couple of questions, that’s all.”

  “The cops already asked me questions,” he said.

  My neck was starting to tighten from looking up at him.

  “Can I come up there for a minute?” I said.

  “Nope. Nobody is allowed on the boat except during cruises.”

  “Can you come down here?”

  “Nope. Got work to do, so you’d better start asking if you’re gonna ask.”

  “Did you interact with Jeremy much the other night?”

  “Interact, like, how?”

  “Talk to him,” I said. “Did you and Jeremy have any conversations?”

  “A little bit. I talk to everybody on board at some point.”

  “Did he seem drunk to you?”

  “Dude, everybody seemed drunk. That’s what happens on these boats. People get drunk. They screw around. Sometimes bad things happen.”

  “Would you say he was just drunk or totally wasted?”

  “No idea. I probably didn’t talk to him for more than thirty seconds.”

  “What did y’all talk about?”

  Meatball shook his head, clearly exasperated with my questions.

  “Seriously?” he said. “How the hell am I supposed to remember that? I talk to a lot of passengers. Usually it’s like, ‘Hey, how much does this boat weigh? How fast can it go? This is a weird toilet. How do you flush it?’ Bullshit like that.”

  I could feel the planks vibrating under my feet as a couple of kids ran toward us along the pier, but they stopped at a ski boat several slips closer to shore.

  “Where were you when Jeremy jumped off the boat?” I asked.

  “I don’t know exactly when he jumped off, so I’ve got no idea where I was. Besides, I’m usually too busy doing stuff to keep track of everybody.”

  “Like what? What are your duties on the boat?�
��

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just curiosity, really.”

  He let out a sigh. “I run the passengers through the safety orientation before we leave the dock. I distribute life jackets if anyone wants one. I pass out the water toys when we anchor.”

  “Water toys?”

  “Yeah, like floating noodles and that stuff. When we anchor for a while, people like to jump in and swim around. They usually like to float with a noodle. We also have some water blasters, which are basically big squirt guns. I do all the head counts—before we leave the dock, when we anchor, when we lift the anchor, and when we get back to the dock. I turn the gas grill on and off if anybody wants to use it. Some people bring meat to grill. If anyone hurls, I have to clean it up. I get ten bucks extra for that.”

  “Sweet deal,” I said.

  “You think I like cleaning up puke?”

  “Well, probably not as a hobby,” I said. “What do you think happened to Jeremy?”

  “I think the dude drowned,” Meatball said. “Sucks, but it happens. It’s our first one, luckily.”

  “How long have you been working on this boat?”

  “Four years.”

  “Did you know anybody on the boat that night?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “No repeat passengers or anything?”

  “Who knows? Not like I remember them all.”

  I saw a short, stocky guy at the far end of the pier, coming in our direction. He was also wearing a teal-colored shirt.

  I said, “If Jeremy didn’t drown—if something else happened instead—what do you think that would’ve been?”

  “Man, I got no idea. Why would you want me to make a guess like that? What’s the point?”

  “Using your imagination can be fun,” I said.

  “Are you making fun of me?” Meatball asked.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  Meatball thought about it and said, “Seems like he was flirting with a lot of the women. Maybe somebody got pissed off.”

  I said, “Who was he—”

  “Dude, I got to get back to work,” Meatball said, because he noticed the other guy in the teal-colored shirt, who was now twenty yards away. Meatball turned and walked to the other side of the boat, where I could no longer see him.