In the bottom drawer there was a bad-check file. There were only a few and they were spread out over time, none so large that they could seriously damage the business. I noticed that in the checkbook and with most of the business records either Buddy Lockridge's or Graciela's name was listed as the operator of the charter business. I knew this was because, as Graciela had told me, Terry was seriously limited in what he could earn as official income. If he made over a certain level-which was shockingly low-he was not eligible to receive state and federal medical assistance. If he lost that, he would then end up paying medical expenses himself-a quick route to personal bankruptcy for a transplant recipient.

In the bad-check file I also found a copy of a sheriff's report unrelated to bad paper. It was a two-month-old incident report stemming from an apparent burglary of The Following Sea. The complainant was Buddy Lock-ridge and the summary indicated that only one thing was taken from the boat, a handheld global positioning system reader. Its value was placed at $300 and the model was listed as a Gulliver 100, An added note said that the complainant could not provide the serial number of the missing device because he had won it in a poker game from a person he could not identify and he had never bothered to write the tracking number down.

Once I had made a quick check through all of the drawers in the chart station I went back to the client files and started going through them more thoroughly, looking carefully at each customer McCaleb and Lockridge had taken on board in the six weeks before Terry's death.