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8.
The owners of a private patrol company notified the police that one of their elderly security guards, a retired U.S. Navy petty officer, had disappeared from his duty station. The relief, a young college student, had arrived at 7:45 a.m. and found the gate unlocked, lights on despite the misty daylight, radios playing, and no sign of the old man. The college student did find the old man's watch clock lying, dew-covered, on a gravel walk.
A company patrol officer, arriving soon after, opened the clock and determined that the old man had been making his rounds. San Diego Police turned the investigation over to the Harbor Police.
Two Harbor Police officers, a man and a woman, arrived in a patrol car. For a time, they waited by the padlocked gate, making cell phone calls, and looking out over the waters. After a while, two more vehicles arrived. One was a San Diego Police Department car with a dog, called in for backup and search. The other was a utility truck, whose operator cut the lock with a heavy-duty clipper before leaving. The police went in with the dog, and searched high and low. The absence of a living soul, and the eerie lights on in the ship and the Mexican music cheerfully playing on the ship, somehow did not hang together.
The supervisor, Lieutenant Linsey Simon, arrived to take over the investigation. She was greeted at the dock by the initial officer on the scene, Patrolman Cleve Bartlett, a dark-skinned young man with a slight Southern accent. They'd worked many hours together, and were comfortable in each other's company, with never a jealous moment by Linsey's husband Jack.
Linsey rumpled her nose. "What's that smell?" There was a vague odor, like mushroom soup starting to rot.
Cleve shook his head and grinned, with the macabre humor that emergency personnel regularly summon to mask their feelings about a disquieting situation. "We checked the galley first thing. Nothing but some rotten food."
"So what's with the missing guard? Sleeping off a hangover somewhere?"
Cleve shook his head. "Guy has never been drunk on duty. Very regular old Navy man, set in his ways. Been with the company several years, never missed a day of work, steady as a rock. That's why they are alarmed."
She nodded. "Got all the bases covered?"
"Sure. Normally, we wouldn't be concerned until he's been missing at least 24 hours, but this is in a sensitive Federal area, and there is the proximity of water which could suggest an accidental drowning. We walked the dock and down along the little gravel beach further down, but nothing turned up."
"You found his time clock."
"Yeah, their supervisor did. Lying on the gravel. The old man wouldn't have just dumped it there and left. If we can't find him here, dead or a live, there is some possibility someone might have snatched him for some reason—ransom, who knows—and might be in Mexico with him by now."
"Is he Mexican or Mexican-American?"
Cleve shook his head. "Regular old white Lutheran from the Midwest, settled here after retiring, 30 years in the Navy. His wife died some years ago, and she was WASP also."
"Then I don't think Mexico is a good bet. Guy had no money, no family to speak of, or we'd know it by now." She frowned. "Why is this ship sitting here with radios and lights on, and nobody home?"
"That's what everyone's wondering."
"What is the history?"
"Ship docked yesterday afternoon. We have a Coast Guard report that they checked it out at sea. Nothing suspicious, just the dog handler says their dog went nuts. Couldn't figure out why."
"Like that?" She pointed to the SDPD dog team. The young African-American handler looked expert, and the dog looked sharp, but he was having a hard time reining the whining, salivating animal in.
"Yeah," Cleve said. "I imagine so."
"Probably the smell," she said. "Maybe some illegal chemical. I'm going to check that out." Her gaze lingered on the poor animal. Amid the strangely disquieting smell that seemed neither natural nor manmade, but had a discomforting sharpness—an odd tang—the dog whined and growled and licked its lips nervously. The dog kept its ears pricked, tail between its legs, keeping a low, spread-legged stance very close to its handler.
"Hey," she told the handler, "can you run her through the ship, one good pass, and then take her home? She's not happy."
"She's very unhappy," the strapping young man said. He wore yellow leather gloves and a dark blue jump suit. He spoke comfortingly to the animal, but she barely calmed down. "Man," he said, "something is wrong here, Linsey."
"Yeah, I'm starting to think so more and more." Linsey had gotten to her present rank not so much because of any political savvy—she just knew how to look good, keep her mouth shut, and not seem like a threat to any of the more aggressive movers-up in the department—but because she had a nose for trouble, and once she sank her teeth into a case, nothing could make her let go. This was starting to look like one of those.
Right now, she had to make some field decisions. She told the utility guy: "Thanks for popping the gate. I'll let you go." She told Cleve, "Let's get on deck and back up the dog team."
They strode up the metal gangway and emerged on the freighter's eerily quiet deck. "Man," Cleve said, "I sort of get the creeps here, or is it just me?"
"It's creepy all right," she said. Mexican mariachi tunes blared happily, and the lights blazed. She had no intention of changing anything for the moment. "I guess," she told Cleve, "we need to treat this as a crime scene until or unless the old man shows up. But there's more. Something about this ship isn't right. Where is she from?"
Cleve checked his PDA, which uplinked to a database downtown. "Been to Brazil and Peru, then made straight for San Diego. The cargo is listed as machine parts, going from a Fuentes Ltd in Lima to an Anaconda Chemicals in San Diego with headquarters near Brawley, California."
"Has the cargo been touched at all? Still secure?"
She heard the dog barking loudly inside the ship—savage, scared hacking barks that echoed amid all those dark steel corridors.
"I have way of knowing if anything has gone out the Navy gates at 32nd Street."
"No way?"
"This is a private, civilian ship at a private, civilian dock."
"Why do they own a dock in the middle of all this Navy acreage?"
"Because Anaconda Chemicals has been a defense contractor since World War II. They are grandfathered in here. "
The dog and her handler appeared at the top of a stairwell. "I've never seen her like this," the handler said. The handler looked sweaty and flustered. The dog's hackled were spread, and she had foam dripping from her muzzle. She looked at Linsey and barked loudly. Linsey understood: the dog was telling her this was a bad gig, and wanted to get let the hell out of here. The dog seemed to be saying You humans are nuts for hanging around this place. Linsey had been around working dogs for many years, and this was a message she rarely received. She nodded to the dog and raised a palm in acknowledgement. "See anything unusual?"
"Ship's empty. Nothing in the cargo holds," said the handler.
"Nothing?" It immediately made her wonder if there had been a drug shipment that got ditched somehow when the Coast Guard drew near. "Why would Anaconda Chemicals pay to have a freighter come from Peru and dock here—empty?"
"You got me," the handler said, barely able to restrain the dog, who eagerly pulled toward the gangway to leave the ship. "Not our job."
"Do me a favor and take a good look around the grounds before you stop to write your report. That will be the benchmark for whatever investigation goes forward. Remember, our immediate concern is a missing persons case."
"Right," the handler said as he let his dog tow him off the ship on her lead.
She called after the handler: "We're going down for a look. Come back and make sure we're okay." He waved, and she said: "Come on, Cleve, let's take a look around below."
She and Cleve descended into the darkness below. It was spooky, walking among the corridors, whose lights were off. The air conditioning was off, too, leaving that dank smell that penetrated everything. She said: "Let's make a preliminary run through and then get out. If the old man turns up somehow, we'll cancel the investigation and I'll write a report that someone higher up can take up with Anaconda Chemicals."
The only thing that struck her notice were some unusual looking growths along the baseboards in some especially dark cargo holds. She knelt beside one and ran her flashlight beam over it. "That's a huge mushroom," she told Cleve, who hung back with a dubious face. "No, I'm serious, Cleve, this ship came up from the tropics and seems to have brought with it some fungus thing."
"That thing looks gross," Cleve said at last, looking pained.
"It's a mushroom," she said. "A fungus. This is a bracket fungus, the kind I used to see along the bottoms of downed redwood trees up in the Olympic Peninsula rain forest when I was a college student in Seattle." She ran her fingers over the long, multi-tiered growth. Its surface felt cool and tough, but spongy and springy. "This is where the smell is coming from. They got a bad case of the fungus-among-us."
"That why they abandoned ship?"
She frowned. "Good point, Cleve. I'm going to wash my hands real well after touching this specimen. Lord, it's six feet long and a foot tall. Just big enough to hide a human body."
When they arrived on deck, she took a quick look through the bridge and the officers' quarters. She found nothing unusual—just not a soul anywhere, and that music and those lights. She tugged Cleve's arm, and they started down the gangway. The dog handler appeared on the dock below. "Hey, Linsey, we found another of those long mushroom things."
"Where?"
"Under a little wooden walkway near here. The only reason I noticed it was because the dog started going nuts again. I climbed down underneath and got some samples." He held up several plastic baggies in a gloved hand. "Looks like the same sort of mushroom things on the ship."
"Good, get those to the lab," she said.
She walked across the dock, down a path, and clambered under the wooden walkway. Sure enough, there it was—a bracket fungus just like those on board. The dog team had taken samples, so she didn't feel the need to. She ran her fingertip along the powdery edge of its several shelves. If these things were on board, she could explain them. It was a reach—the jungles were filled with weird life forms, and a ship coming out of the tropics might pick up something weird like this. But why would this appear less than a day later under a dock nearby on land?
"You okay?" she heard Cleve said somewhere behind her.
"I'm deep in thought," she snapped, and immediately regretted it. "I'm sorry, Cleve. That came out wrong."
"That's okay," he said. "I'm still getting used to your style after all these years. I see that you're onto one of your bulldog capers and this won't end until we either find the old man or the UFO that ate his lunch."
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