"No Buddy yet?"

"No. Is he coming?"

"I wanted to go over things on the boat with him. He said he would be on the first boat but he didn't show."

"Well, they're running two ferries. The next will be here in forty-five minutes. He's probably on that. What would you like to do first?" "I want to go to the boat, start there."

We walked over to the tenders dock and took a Zodiac with a little one-horsepower engine on it out into the basin where the yachts were lined in rows, tied up to floating mooring balls and moving with the current in a synchronized fashion. Terry's boat, The Following Sea, was second from the end of the second row. An ominous feeling came over me as we approached and then bumped up against the fantail. On this vessel Terry had died. My friend and Graciela's husband. It used to be one of the tricks of the trade for me to find or manufacture an emotional connection to a case. It helped stoke the fire and gave me that needed edge to go where I had to go, do what I had to do. I knew I would not need to look for that in this case. No manufacturing necessary. It was already part of the deal. The largest part.

I looked at the boat's name, painted in black letters across the stern, and remembered how Terry had explained it to me once. He had told me that the following sea was the wave you had to watch out for. It came up in your blind spot, hit you from behind. A good philosophy. I had to wonder now why Terry hadn't seen what and who had come up behind him.

Unsteadily I stepped off the inflatable and onto the boat's fantail. I reached back for the rope to tie it up. But Graciela stopped me.

"I'm not going on board," she said.

She shook her head as if to ward off any coercing from me and handed a set of keys toward me. I took them and nodded my head. "I just don't want to be on there," she said. "The one time I went to collect his meds was enough."