“You’re a pain in my ass, you know that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re working for Mr. Dippy Boots?”

“Marta, please, give me some credit. I told him straight out that if you were on the case, then you ran it like it should be run. But if Mr. Dippy . . . ugh . . . Jung can get a grip on what happened, he can start to put this whole thing behind him. Five minutes. Just the highlights, and I’m a ghost.”

“Until next time you want a favor,” Marta groused.

“Just remember, that door swings both ways,” I said.

She let out the mother of all exasperated sighs, followed by the sounds of muffled footsteps and a door opening and closing. “You get this on one condition. You keep whatsahoozits away from me. Deal?” Marta’s voice carried with it an echo, like she was standing in a wind tunnel. I figured she’d gone looking for a private spot, and had ended up in a stairwell or the women’s bathroom.

“Easiest one I’ll make all day.”

“Listen good, because you’re only getting one pass, and I’m not diving deep. You’re also not getting a look at any departmental files. Understood?”

I rolled my eyes. So much drama. “Got it.”

“First off, Ayers was wasted. His blood alcohol was off the charts, and if that weren’t enough, he had enough prescription meds in him to kill a moose. All kinds—I won’t bore you with the Latin. We bagged a ton of med bottles for the ME, most of them almost empty. Ayers really went to town. We left almost as many duplicate bottles as we took away, which shows the volume we were dealing with. ME puts time of death between nine PM Sunday and midnight.”

“No signs of force?”

“Contusion on the right side of his head, likely banged himself going over, unsteady on his feet. No evidence of trespass, nothing stolen. Nobody saw him take the boat out and nobody saw anybody come anywhere near it the night he died.

“We got nothing from the marina’s security cameras. The storm obscured everything for the time window we looked at. We couldn’t have made out Jack the Ripper in that downpour. The cabin was clean. Immaculate, in fact, every surface polished, the carpet freshly vacuumed. It was like Ayers cleaned up for company, and then decided not to wait for it. The marine unit found the boat drifting ten miles out, like a ghost ship. Bottom line, one minute Ayers is on it, the next he’s off it, and the boat floats away like it had a mind of its own. We didn’t find a single print.”

“How’d you get tox screens back so fast? It’s only been a couple days.”