She opened her mouth and a sheet of spray slapped her in the face, no bigger or harder than any such over the last week, but enough to ring two faces up before her eyes, side by side, wearing identical accusatory expressions, a macabre jackpot in a hellish casino.
Christopher Alcala.
And Stuart Brown.
That's all. Just two faces staring out at her from Jack Morgan's bulging file folder. Christopher Alcala, a thin, pale ascetic's face with big brown bedroom eyes, dark hair falling into them. He reminded Kate of her cousin Martin, when Martin was sober. And Stuart Brown, all fair curls and laughing eyes and wide grin. He looked cuddly, like an overstuffed teddy bear, and almost that mature.
Both Alcala and Brown had disappeared off the deck of the very ship upon which she was currently standing, more or less, not six months before, during the last fishing season. She was working Brown's spot.
Both of them very probably dead.
Both of them just twenty-one years old.
Kate looked at the mocking expression of the deck boss, who had been on board when Alcala and Brown disappeared and who may or may not have assisted in said disappearance, and let the furious words back up in her throat until she thought she might strangle on them. But it wasn't her job to tell the deck boss where he could get off, preferably into five hundred fathoms of North Pacific Ocean five hundred miles from Dutch Harbor, although, if God was good, that would come with time.
No, she was casual labor for the Anchorage District Attorney, for a price, and it was her job to find out what had happened to those two very young men. And Jack Morgan, one-time boss, part-time lover and full-time chief investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney, was paying her five hundred dollars a day, a hundred over his usual fee, to let the deck boss of this happy ship dump on her, if such was his pleasure. A hundred dollars extra was what it took to get her back on the deck of a boat again, and she knew a moment of bitter regret that it hadn't taken more. A lot more.