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but I had seen stranger things in my time. At the moment I had no suspects and that meant I had to suspect everybody.
    "Make the call and then come downstairs to see me."
    I left him there and headed down the short set of steps to the lower part of the boat. I had been here before and knew the layout. The two doors on the left side of the hallway led to the head and a storage closet Straight ahead was a door to the small stateroom in the bow. The door on the right led to the master stateroom, the place where I would have been killed four years before if Terry McCaleb had not leveled a gun and fired on a man about to ambush me. This had occurred moments after I had saved McCaleb from a similar end.
    I checked the paneling in the hallway where I remembered two of McCaleb's shots had splintered the wood. The surface was heavily varnished but I could tell it was newer wood.
    The shelves in the storage closet were empty and the bathroom was clean, the overhead vent popped open on the forward deck above. I opened the master stateroom door and looked in but decided to leave it for later. I went to the forward room and had to use a key from the ring Graciela had given me to open the door.
    The room was as I had remembered it. Two sets of V-bunks on each side, following the line of the bow. The bunks on the left still functioned as sleeping compartments, their thin mattresses rolled up and held by bungee cords. But on the right the lower bunk had no mattress and had been converted into a desk. The bunk above was where four long cardboard file boxes sat side by side.
    McCaleb's cases. I looked at them for a long and solemn moment. If someone had murdered him, I believed I would find the suspect in there.
    "Anytime today."
    I almost jumped. It was Lockridge standing behind me. Once again I had not heard or felt his approach. He was smiling because he liked sneaking up on me.
    "Good," I said. "Maybe after lunch we can head over there. I'll need a break from this by then anyway."
    I looked down at the desk and saw the white laptop with the recognizable symbol of an apple with a bite out of it in silhouette. I reached down and opened it, unsure of how to proceed.
    "Last time I was here, he had a different one."
    "Yeah," Lockridge said. "He got that one on account of the graphics. He was getting into digital photography and stuff."
    Without my bidding or approval Lockridge reached over and depressed a white button on the computer. It started to hum and then the black screen filled with light.
    "What kind of photography?" I asked.
    "Oh, you know, amateur stuff mostly. His kids and sunsets and shit. It started with the clients. We started taking their pictures with their trophy fish, you know? And Terry could just come down here and print out eight-by-ten glossies on the spot. There's a box of cheap-ass frames in here someplace. The client catches a fish, he gets a framed photo. Part of the deal. It worked pretty good. Our gratuities went way up with that."
    The computer finished booting up. The screen was a sky of light blue that made me think of McCaleb's daughter. Several icons were spread across the field. Right away I noticed one that was a miniature file folder. Underneath it the word profiles was printed. I knew that was a folder I wanted to open. Scanning across the bottom of the screen I saw an icon that looked like a camera set in front of a photo of a palm tree. Since the subject had just been photography I pointed to it. "Is that where the photos are?" "Yup," Lockridge said.
    Again he moved without my request. He moved his finger on a small square in front of the keyboard, which in turn moved the arrow on the screen to the camera icon. He used his thumb to depress a button below the square and the screen quickly took on a new image. Lockridge seemed at ease with the computer and it begged the questions why and how. Did Terry McCaleb allow him access to the computer-after all, they were in business together-or was this something