Skimming Over the Lake, page 7
“How fast did you say those things could go?” Siever asked.
“The woman I talked to said two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. We could talk to one of the other guys in the boat club to verify that or look it up online.”
“It’s good enough for an estimate. Something that can move like that over the water, it could cause some pretty good bruising.”
“Bruising?” Jones asked. “It could take your face off. It obviously wasn’t going that fast.”
“But his boat wasn’t operational. He wouldn’t go after it in the raft if it was working.”
“Maybe something else was wrong with it,” Cruz suggested. “Maybe the controller wasn’t working properly. Or the brakes. Maybe he couldn’t get it to stop, and he didn’t want to run it aground.”
The shoreline had been very rocky. Trying to run the boat aground at a high speed would have destroyed it.
“But even then, he wouldn’t have been in the water with it. He would be in the boat.”
“He reached out to grab it and overbalanced, just like we thought in the first place,” Siever suggested.
It could fit. Almost. But Margie still couldn’t play it out in her head. Hustler ended up in the water, and the boat kept hitting him? Multiple times from different sides? How could that have happened? He was using the controller to drive it toward himself, but couldn’t catch it and just kept smashing it into himself? He wanted to drown? The RC boat developed sentience and decided to kill its creator?
“What?” Cruz asked, studying Margie’s face.
“There’s only one solution that fits,” she said finally.
“Which is?”
“Someone else was there with another boat.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
They all looked at her and thought it through.
Margie played it through in her head. It was the only scenario that made sense. He wasn’t there by himself. He wasn’t controlling the RC boat and it wasn’t trying to kill him by itself. Someone else was there with another boat, and that was the boat that had hit him multiple times.
Hit him over and over again until he could no longer fight back or escape it, out there on the water, far from the shore.
“And… it was intentional,” Margie said. “It wasn’t an accident.”
“It would fit,” Siever admitted.
“Yeah.”
“The people in his club seemed pretty nice. I didn’t get the sense that any of them had anything against him. Not anything serious. Just that he was annoying.”
“Then I guess we’d better dig deeper and see if we can figure out who wasn’t so nice.”
Siever talked to the medical examiner on the phone and described the RC boats and their theory in as much detail as possible. The pathologist agreed that it was a possibility. The bruises could very well have been sustained from an RC boat while Hustler was in the water. It wouldn’t have needed to get up to top speeds to have caused the bruising they had seen. And it would have been very painful. It would easily be enough to make someone panic and drown, even if they were an experienced swimmer.
While Siever was talking to the medical examiner’s office, Margie started running the names of the members of Hustler’s RC boat group through the computer to see what she could find on them. She saved each report to a folder with the person’s name. Driver’s licenses to start with, which established their addresses. Any criminal charges against them. Credit checks. Complaints made by them against someone else. General background, including their social media accounts.
Everybody seemed pretty clean. Larry had a couple of drunk and disorderlies, but Margie figured that probably spoke against his being in the park at six o’clock in the morning.
There were others who were part of the group too, though. People who might have attended other meetups and just hadn’t happened to be there when Siever and Margie showed up to talk to them. They could get the names of some of the other members of the club. Maybe there was someone with a grudge against Hustler who had judged it better not to show up at the club’s next few gatherings. Or someone who happened to have work on a Tuesday morning and couldn’t adjust his schedule to give him the time to attend.
Some of the participants had been carrying quite a bit of equipment. It had to take time to get everything together and set up, play for a while, and then take everything back down and pack it away. And maybe then to take it home and put it in the garage until the next time. It would take a half day. Hustler could apparently take off a morning each week, but not everyone could. There would probably be more people there for the Sunday meets.
And it was customary to give employees in Calgary parade day morning off.
“Anything promising?” Siever asked, hovering over Margie’s shoulder.
“Well… nothing that really points one direction or the other. I’ve started to get a clearer picture of the group, but I wouldn’t put my money on anyone at this point. There might be other members of the group that we don’t know about yet. We can start by re-interviewing some of the people we talked to this morning and ask each of them for the names of other people who are regular members of the group.”
“It’s too bad there’s no members roster. At least an email list that they give out for people who want to be notified of the next meet-up.”
“That would be helpful,” Margie agreed. She sighed, leaning back from the computer screen into her chair. “Do you have anyone in mind who you would like to interview first?”
Siever shook his head slowly. “I’m not great with people. I would just pick someone at random.”
“Then I’m going to say Monica first. I think she might have said more if she had been alone.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Thanks for having us here to talk to you,” Margie told Monica. She looked around at the inside of the house. It was neat and tidy. Not quite a “little old lady” house. Way too many RC and model boats around for that. Margie could see that the dining room table was not set with dishes for company, but held a case, with tiny individual drawers containing different parts for building or repairing the boats, and a roll-up tool case.
The nautical theme extended to paintings on the walls and the white-on-white wainscoting around the living room. Monica appeared to be just a little obsessed with boats. Margie hoped that she had grandchildren to share her passion with. What little boy wouldn’t love a grandma who built and played with boats?
“I don’t think there’s anything that I can tell you that we didn’t already cover this morning,” Monica said. “So I’m hoping that this won’t take too long.”
“Our investigation has been proceeding, and new facts have come to light. With each new fact, there are new directions for us to investigate, new questions for us to ask,” Margie explained.
“You can take those masks off. I find it really hard to understand what people are saying with them on. They aren’t required anymore, and I, for one, never saw the need for them.”
They were far enough away from Monica that there really wasn’t much of a chance of infection unless she started singing or screaming, and she didn’t look likely to do either. The CPS rules were flexible enough that they could use their own judgment and take off their masks despite strong recommendations to continue using them.
Margie looked over at Siever, saw that he agreed that it would be appropriate since she had trouble understanding them otherwise. They both removed their black masks. Margie smiled at Monica. “How’s that?”
“So much better. I never realized how bad my hearing is until people started wearing the darn things. Between people’s words being muffled and me not being able to see their lips, it makes it really difficult to communicate sometimes.”
Margie gave a nod. “Anyway, as I was saying, new facts have come to light…”
“What new facts?”
“I can’t give you that information. But if you could answer my questions, we would really appreciate it.”
Monica leaned back in her seat, giving a shrug that indicated ask away.
“I gathered from our discussion this morning that there wasn’t anyone who was particularly close to Simon?”
“No… not that close. I mean, we all talked to each other and boated together, but… we weren’t particular friends with each other. Sometimes someone brought a little Christmas cheer or we marked an important holiday, but it was just… a meetup. A couple of times a week, we got together and played with our boats.”
“Was there anyone who was antagonistic toward him?”
“No.”
“The men that we talked with this morning didn’t seem to have much of a connection with him. Were there any… ongoing feuds or arguments? Even just a feeling of not being able to click together?”
With her finger, Monica traced the piping in the arm of the couch she was sitting in, frowning slightly.
“I don’t think so. Not really. You know how men are, they enjoy being competitive. Badmouthing your friend isn’t really badmouthing them. It’s just something you do to show that you like them.”
“So you think they were just teasing each other? Being macho?”
Monica nodded. Her eyes slid to Siever, analyzing what he thought of this suggestion. Siever didn’t look like the macho type, but you couldn’t always tell by looking at a person. Someone might have to wear a suit to work but still be a redneck with his buddies.
“What kind of things did they say about him? What things did they compete in?” Margie asked.
“I don’t know. Just being sarcastic, saying silly insults to ‘burn’ each other. And as far as competing… we were all competing with each other all the time. Not just Simon. We try to build our boats to be lighter, faster, and more maneuverable. We tweak them with different ignition systems, replacing this valve with that, trying a new fiberglass shell. Getting a new boat with all of the latest advancements… electrics, computer controls, AI. You wouldn’t believe the number of options. It’s what keeps us going back year after year, tweaking, and buying new stuff and testing it out. Just like a kid with a new toy. There’s always something shiny to grab our attention and then we aren’t happy until we have that too. I have a garage full of old boats. And some of them were barely even used before I jumped onto the next thing. I’ve got old wooden boats with gasoline engines. Fiberglass with nitro. Electrics of all sorts.” She shrugged. “It’s more than just a hobby for me. Some of the guys have families, work, school, wives, and all kinds of other commitments and the only time they can take for themselves is Sunday morning. I don’t have a lot of other things to occupy my time.”
“You sound like you’ve got a really good collection,” Siever said. “I don’t suppose we could see them…?”
Margie hadn’t heard him say anything about enjoying boats during the investigation, so she glanced over at him, trying to analyze his angle. She decided that he just wanted to have a chance to see if any of her boats could have inflicted the damage that they had seen on Simon Hustler’s body. Chances were, most of the boats would have been capable of such damage. And if she’d gotten Simon’s blood on the boat, chances were that she would have washed it well afterward. Probably with bleach.
“Yes, maybe,” Monica agreed. She looked a jeweled watch on her wrist. “We’ll see how the time goes.”
“You’re sure that there wasn’t anyone who had a particular grudge against Simon?” Siever asked. “No one who you thought… was going overboard on the insults. Or who seemed to mean them more. Or just that you thought… things were off between them, more than normal.”
“Simon wasn’t an easy guy to get along with.”
Margie nodded understandingly. “Maybe there were a few people who would rather not be around him or to have to hold a conversation with him.”
“I really couldn’t say. I always thought that… he tried to get along. He had goals that would require him to get along with people. But he just… didn’t have the right personality to make friends”
“But there was no animosity?”
Monica stared off into space. She wasn’t denying it, and Margie thought it best to wait and see what came out if Monica were left in silence for a while.
“I thought…” She was still hesitant. Margie and Siever gave her time, both sitting still and waiting for her to get it out. As much as Margie wanted to jump in and offer suggestions, she knew that it wasn’t the right time. Monica had to come up with it on her own. They didn’t want to be accused of implanting memories or suggesting what testimony they wanted her to give. “I thought that Terry Hall was kind of… He really didn’t want Simon around. Avoided him rather obviously… said things sometimes that were… more than teasing. Kind of cruel.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“I don’t know if I can think of anything specific right now… I tried to ignore that kind of thing and just go on with my own stuff. There’s no point in worrying about anyone else’s issues. We have enough to do dealing with our own.”
“There wasn’t anything particular that you thought Terry had against him?” Siever asked.
“No. I don’t know. I thought maybe that they’d had an argument, something outside of the meetup. But no one ever said what it was.”
“Did the others notice this tension as well?”
“I don’t know what anyone else noticed. We didn’t talk about it. ‘Oh, what’s going on between Terry and Simon?’ No, nothing like that.”
Margie thought that Monica was done, but as she prepared herself to ask another question, Monica said as sort of an afterthought, “Terry did damage one of Simon’s boats once.”
“He did?” Siever asked. “I don’t imagine that was looked on too kindly by the others.”
“No. Like I said, we were competitive, but damaging someone else’s boats, that’s going beyond. We don’t do that. We’re always very careful, we have rules about how many boats can be in the water at a time, and about taking turns and such. And of course no one ever touches anyone else’s boat without permission. You wouldn’t just walk up to someone’s table and pick up their boat or take it out of the water. Nothing like that.”
“What did Terry do to damage Simon’s boat?”
“They were both in the water at the same time. I’m not sure what Simon did to get Terry’s goat, but it seemed like Terry was really upset about something. He had his kids there that day, and maybe Simon had said something that he shouldn’t have in front of them. I don’t know. He was the kind of guy that would do that, and then look at you and ask what your problem was, because he really was clueless.”
Margie and Siever nodded, encouraging Monica to go on and explain what had happened. “They both had crafts out on the water, and Terry was in a bad mood. He knocked Simon’s boat off course and made it run into one of the rocks on the shore. Damaged one ski pretty badly. Simon freaked out, said that it had been on purpose… we all told him that it was just an accident, but I think we all knew that it wasn’t.”
“Did Terry apologize? Give an explanation?”
“No. Didn’t say sorry or that it was an accident. Just said that Simon had better keep his boats to himself and watch where they were going?” Monica’s voice rose at the end of the statement, turning it into a question. “That’s paraphrasing, I can’t remember his exact words. It was sort of strange, anyway.”
“And you weren’t aware of any incident leading up to this? Simon having bumped one of Terry’s boats or cut it off? Nothing that you think would have explained Terry’s words?”
“No. Nothing that I knew about. But something could have happened the week before that I didn’t remember. Or something might have even happened there that morning, and I just hadn’t noticed it. I do tend to get pretty wrapped up in my own boats.”
“Sure,” Siever nodded. “We all do that sometimes.”
He waited for a few seconds, letting the silence grow. Monica looked uncomfortable but didn’t seem to have anything else to offer. She looked at her watch. “I really should be getting back to things now. I’ve done my best to answer your questions, but I’m still not sure where they’re supposed to be going. Whatever happened to Simon, I’m sure it couldn’t have had anything to do with our boat club. It wasn’t even one of our days.”
“Maybe we could see your boats before we leave?” Siever asked, voice slightly wheedling. Margie was surprised. She’d never heard that tone from him before. Was he really interested in the boats? As someone who was into technology, he too might be attracted by shiny objects and want to try his own hand at the RC boats game.
“I don’t think so,” Monica said stiffly. “This has really taken enough of my time. I didn’t expect to be taken away from my work for so long.”
She had told them that she didn’t have much else to do, so Margie couldn’t feel too bad about the amount of time they had taken. Monica was just trying to express her displeasure at having to talk to them again when she didn’t know what it was all about.
Siever and Margie stood to go. Siever gave Monica a grave nod. “Thank you for your time, ma’am. We do appreciate it.”
Her cheeks turned slightly pink, and she escorted them to the door.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They were not able to schedule an interview with Terry until Wednesday. Margie felt like they were right on the edge of figuring out what had happened to Hustler but tried not to let it affect her. If they could discover the truth from Terry Hall, that was great. But he might not know anything. He might have some petty reason for holding a grudge against Hustler and yet never have mentioned it to anyone else.
There was no guarantee that their discussion with Terry Hall would lead them any closer to Hustler’s killer.
While they usually like to invite people in to the homicide department meeting rooms for interviews, that wasn’t always possible. Sometimes people didn’t want to come in. It was inconvenient. Parking was terrible. They didn’t want to deal with traffic. Or maybe they didn’t even have a running vehicle and it was a pain to get there on the bus or on foot. Terry said that he could not spare enough time to make it all the way downtown, and if they wanted to talk to him, they could come to his house. So they did.
