"Maybe."

Lockridge set his jaw tightly with resolve. It looked genuine to me.

"You need any help?"

"I might need some, yeah. I'm going over to Catalina tomorrow morning. I'm going to look at the boat. Can you meet me there?"

"Absolutely."

He seemed excited and I knew I would eventually drop a rock on that but for now I wanted his full cooperation.

"Good. Now let me ask a few more questions. Tell me about the charter party. Did you know this guy Otto beforehand?"

"Oh, yeah, we take Otto out a couple times a year. He lives over there on the island, that's the only reason why we got the multiday charter. See, that was the problem with the business but Terror never cared. He just was happy to sit there in that little harbor and wait on half days."

"Slow down a second, Buddy. What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about Terry keeping the boat over there on that island. What we got over there were people who are visiting Catalina and want to go fishing for a few hours. We didn't get the big charters. The three-, four-, five-day jobs where you make the good money. Otto was the exception because he lives over there and he wanted to go fishing off Mexico a couple times a year and get his ashes hauled in the process." Lockridge was giving me more information and avenues of questioning than I could handle at once. I stayed on McCaleb but would definitely come back to Otto, their charter client.

"You're saying that Terry was content to sort of be small-time."

"Exactly. I kept telling him, 'Move the charter over here to the mainland, put out some ads and get some serious work.' But he didn't want to."

"Did you ever ask him why?"

"Sure, he wanted to stay on the island. He didn't want to be away from the family all the time. And he wanted time to work on his files."

"You mean his old cases?"

"Yeah, that and some new ones."

"What new ones?"

"I don't know. He was always clipping articles out of the newspaper and sticking them in files, making phone calls, things like that."