I thanked him profusely, wondering as I did if he was going to use me as an example the next time somebody asked him about guests’ strange requests, and hung up the phone.
“What does that mean?” asked Luisa after I shared what the operator had told me.
“It means he wasn’t planning a romantic outing to pop the question,” I said. “At least, not anymore. He made these calls well after Hilary broke up with him and went missing.”
“But then why would he still want to rent a boat?” she asked.
“Because now he might have something far less romantic in mind,” said Peter. “That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I think you’re right to be worried,” said Abigail. She’d pulled a chair over to the closet while we were talking, apparently to reach something she’d seen on the uppermost shelf. Now she stepped down lightly from the chair, and I saw she was holding another box, but this one was covered in leather, not velvet, and it was considerably larger than the one I’d found. “If this is what I think it is, and if it’s as empty as it feels, then he definitely had something less romantic in mind,” she said.
She set the box on the desk and lifted the top. If we’d been hoping to discover another piece of jewelry, perhaps a necklace to match the ring, we were out of luck. The box was empty, but the molded indentations of the inner padding clearly indicated what it usually housed, and its very emptiness was cause for alarm.
It looked as if Ben had decided to take his gun with him on his little maritime jaunt.
25
All but one of the calls Ben had made were to marinas right in the city. The exception was the last phone number, the entry with the check next to it. This had been for the Bayside Yacht Club, a marina near Coyote Point in San Mateo, roughly halfway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. That Ben had selected a relatively out-of-the-way location couldn’t be a promising sign, and it also seemed logical to assume that it was the last number Ben had dialed because he learned this marina could meet a need the other marinas could not. And while none of us wanted to think too hard about precisely what need it met, we agreed that the best course of action would be to get to Coyote Point as soon as possible.
Maddeningly, the highway we’d taken back from Palo Alto passed right by Coyote Point, and, even more maddeningly, the brief window when there wasn’t rush-hour traffic in the Bay area had closed while we’d been searching Ben’s room and tracing his phone calls. Soon we found ourselves sitting again in the Prius, stuck once more in heavy traffic and heading south at a plodding pace over ground we’d already covered twice that day. We were learning from experience just how good the hybrid’s gas mileage was.
“Ben can’t be that far ahead,” said Peter, who’d been trying to reassure us ever since we found the empty gun case. “First of all, if he’s smart, he’ll wait until dark, when there’s less of a chance anyone will see him doing anything out of the ordinary. And even if he doesn’t wait, it’s not like he could take a taxi or public transportation if he’s trying to move Hilary from wherever he had her hidden to the marina. He probably had to rent a car, which meant finding a rental agency and then dealing with the paperwork. That must have added at least half an hour and probably more like an hour to his trip, and then he still had to pick her up. Who knows? We might even beat him there.”
“But what if he’d already made arrangements for a car before he made the calls to the marinas?” asked Luisa. “He might have rented a car days ago, and that’s what he used to take Hilary wherever he took her in the first place.”
She had a point, and it wasn’t a terribly comforting one.
According to the GPS, our destination was less than twenty miles away, but those miles were ticking away far more slowly than the minutes, and the mood in the car was tense. If we’d had any songs stuck in our heads before, this latest turn of events had wiped them clean, though I doubted any of us was able to fully appreciate the lack of a soundtrack.
“I just don’t understand. What can Ben possibly be thinking?” demanded Luisa suddenly, interrupting the silence into which we’d lapsed. “Is he really planning to get Hilary onto a boat, take the boat out to sea, kill her, dump her overboard, and then simply hope nobody either saw him or finds her body? All because she broke up with him?”
“I guess so,” I said. It sounded irrational, but except for the breaking-up part, somebody had tried to do something similar to me just a few months earlier. I hadn’t enjoyed the experience, but now I was wondering if my misadventure was what had given Ben the idea. Realizing I might have served as the inspiration for how my friend would be murdered was more than a little discomfiting.
“Wouldn’t there be all sorts of forensic evidence? In the car and then on the boat?” asked Abigail. “Could he really get away with it?”
“Presumably Ben knows how to cover his tracks. He is a trained law-enforcement professional, after all,” said Peter, who had temporarily forgotten he was trying to reassure us.
“A completely unreasonable one,” grumbled Luisa. “I’m sure the jeweler would have let him return the ring.”
We lapsed back into tense silence after that, inching through the traffic around the airport and continuing south. The sun was still glistening on the Bay, but it no longer looked as cheerful as it had a couple of hours ago, and its deepening slant merely served to remind us that time was passing. I tried to distract myself by counting hybrids, but I gave up in frustration after I reached fifty and discovered we’d traveled only six miles. When the pleasant, authoritative voice of the GPS finally alerted us to our exit, I felt several years older than when we’d started out.
At least traffic was no longer a major obstacle once we were off the highway and onto surface streets. A few minutes later we saw a sign for the Bayside Yacht Club painted in blue letters on a white shingle, and the GPS instructed us to turn from the road and into the parking lot before congratulating us on reaching our destination.
The slams of our doors closing echoed in the open air when we got out of the car, and in front of us, beyond the parking lot, water lapped at a narrow beach. A wood-plank walkway connected the beach with four long piers stretching into the bay, each lined with docked boats, but there was an air of weekday desolation to the place, punctuated by the occasional cry of a seagull and the low hum of traffic from the nearby highway. If a person was trying to transport a hostage in broad daylight without being seen, apparently Monday afternoon wasn’t such a bad time to do it. Nobody else was in sight, and there were only three other cars in the lot: another hybrid, an SUV and a lone Ford Taurus in a telltale neutral color. I took a moment to peek inside, and the car was empty, but I could see the rental agreement resting on the dashboard, and I could even make out Ben’s name at the top. Feeling self-consciously sleuthlike, I put my hand on the car’s hood. The metal felt warm, though it was also parked in direct sun.
A small clubhouse stood to one side of the parking lot, and this was where we went first, hoping we’d be able to learn which of the boats Ben had engaged so we could then intervene, ideally before he left the dock and put whatever devious plans he had for Hilary into motion. Of course, what we’d hoped for and what we got were two entirely different things.
“This is a private club,” said the staffer we eventually found, sounding only slightly snotty about it. “We don’t rent boats. The boats here belong to our members and are not available for hire to the general public.” He said general public the way some people say pondscum, and I had a feeling he lumped anyone who did not regularly dress in yachting attire into that category, but I also had a feeling we’d awakened him from a nap, so he was already disinclined toward us. Nor could he recall a man showing up and asking to rent a boat that day, let alone a man who looked like Ben. “Everybody knows this is not a rental facility.”