“He’s not on board,” said Brody. “No two ways about it.”

“What’s that stuff?” said Hendricks, pointing to a bucket in the corner of the stern.

Brody walked to the bucket and bent down. A stench of fish and oil filled his nose. The bucket was full of guts and blood. “Must be chum,” he said. “Fish guts and other shit. You spread it around in the water and it’s supposed to attract sharks. He didn’t use much of it. The bucket’s almost full.”

A sudden noise made Brody jump. “Whiskey, zebra, echo, two, five, niner,” said a voice crackling over the radio. “This is the Pretty Belle. You there, Jake?”

“So much for that theory,” said Brody. “He never turned off his radio.”

“I don’t get it, Chief. There are no rods. He didn’t carry a dinghy, so he couldn’t have rowed away. He swam like a fish, so if he fell overboard he would’ve just climbed back on.

“You see a harpoon anywhere?”

“What’s it look like?”

“I don’t know. Like a harpoon. And barrels. Supposedly, you use them as floats.”

“I don’t see anything like that.”

Brody stood at the starboard gunwale, gazing into the middle distance. The boat moved slightly, and he steadied himself with his right hand. He felt something strange and looked down. There were four ragged screw holes where a cleat had been. The screws had obviously not been removed by a screwdriver; the wood around the holes was torn. “Look at this, Leonard.”

Hendricks ran his hand over the holes. He looked to the port side, where a ten-inch steel cleat still sat securely on the wood. “You imagine that what was here was as big as the one over there?” he said. “Jesus, what would it take to pull that mother out?”

“Look here, Leonard.” Brody ran his index finger over the outer edge of the gunwale. There was a scar about eight inches long, where the paint had been scraped away and the wood abraded. “It looks like someone took a file to this wood.”

“Or else rubbed the hell out of it with an awful tight piece of heavy rope.”

Brody walked over to the port side of the cockpit and, aimlessly, began to feel his way along the outer edge of the gunwale. “That’s the only place,” he said. When he reached the stern, he leaned on the gunwale and gazed down into the water.

For a moment, he stared dumbly at the transom, unseeing. Then a pattern began to take shape, a pattern of holes, deep gouges in the wooden transom, forming a rough semicircle more than three feet across. Next to it was another, similar pattern. And at the bottom of the transom, just at the water line, three short smears of blood. Please, God, thought Brody, not another one. “Come here, Leonard,” he said.

Hendricks walked to the stern and looked over. “What?”

“If I hold your legs, you think you can lean over and take a look at those holes down there and try to figure out what made them?”