Read Misery Bay: A Mystery for Free Online Page A

hell’s going on?”
    “You know as much as I do,” said Garrett. “I’ve only been here for two days. Haven’t even seen my house yet, but I sure want to thank you for easing my way into retirement.”
    There was silence on the line. Then Tuttle’s tone changed. “Look, I’m not throwing you to the wolves, okay? We’re going to investigate the hell out of this—see if we can find out which of the services might have been expecting some new blood. The public is up in arms. It takes things to a new level when these lowlifes start executing little girls.”
    “Yeah, right. They don’t mind that little girls are raped by filthy old men on a regular basis. That’s just business.”
    “Maybe you have been working this sort of thing too long,” said Tuttle. “You’re not going to change human nature, you know that. All we can do is hold the line.” He paused. “You got anything on that fishing boat yet?”
    “The registration number on her bow was false, of course. We’re trying to track down the serial numbers on the engine. She must have slipped outside the legal limit and retrieved her human cargo from a freighter offshore. Next step was to offload the girls to a smaller boat that could dock at any of several hundred wharves along the Eastern shore between Halifax and Canso. It’s a needle in a haystack. We’ll have autopsies by day after tomorrow, and the fingerprints have been sent to CPIC, for all the good that will do.”
    CPIC was the Canadian Police Information Center, a computerized index of criminal justice information. The US equivalent was NCIC, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.
    Tuttle just grunted. Young girls of thirteen or fourteen, from mainland China or maybe Thailand originally, had almost certainly never been fingerprinted in their brief, tortured lives. Another dead end.
    “Just let me know if you find anything I can feed these blood-sucking reporters.”
    Tuttle signed off and Garrett headed to his car. He hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. His head felt like the inside of a trash compactor.
    He headed down the coast road and turned into Misery Bay. A few minutes later, he was bumping slowly up the hummocky lane to the old Barkhouse homestead. The house was set in a meadow filled with wildflowers and surrounded by tall spruce.
    Despite the traumatic events of the day, a kind of peace settled over his shoulders. There was a lot of family history in this place. It was good to be home.
    As Roland had promised, the old house listed even farther into the meadow than he remembered. The building consisted of two steep-sided roofs connected by a low passageway. The passage had been the source of most of the leaks over the years. He could see where Roland had put on new tar paper. Despite his arthritis and limp, which would seem to limit his movement, the fisherman remained a damned good carpenter. The job was well done, and the inside was dry and relatively clean for a place that had been boarded up for years.
    He carried his belongings into the downstairs bedroom and spread out his sleeping bag on the aging spring mattress. It would have to do until he could find time to replace the bed and get proper bedding. Despite his near exhaustion, sleep was slow to come. The face of the girl who had died in his arms danced before him when he closed his eyes. A pretty girl, only a child. It took a long time for the why? to drift away.
    When he woke, he had slept through the evening and into early morning. In contrast to Halifax, where a hundred sounds threatened to wake him, the quiet of the sleepy meadow in the deep spruce was like a narcotic.
    He lay in bed, gradually becoming aware of what could only be described as a gnawing sound. Then he caught movement and watched as a gopher poked its head out from an opening in an old wall panel.
    “Well, hello. Nice to have company. Even yours.”
    His foot ached. He would never get over the strangeness of an ache in a part of his body that no