Finally, it was Mina who took up the thread of the conversation. “We don’t know what Karl found. A few days before he went off to Moscow he had been surveying the lake bed north of here as part of his job. He came back very excited about something but wouldn’t tell me what he had found until he had verified his discovery.”

“He wouldn’t tell me either,” Arkin Kamsin added. “But he managed to convince me to authorize the travel expense. Karl was like that. I trusted him completely. Any man who spent five minutes with him would.”

“How far north?” Juan asked. With the Aral Sea shrunk to a quarter of its size, there were tens of thousands of miles of exposed seafloor between here and the Kazakh border.

“We do not know.”

That statement hung in the hot air for several seconds.

“But there is someone who might,” Mina said.

Juan cocked an eyebrow in her direction.

“He often traveled with old Yusuf,” she explained. “He was once a fisherman on the Aral before the waters went away. Now he is just an old man, but Karl claimed that Yusuf knew the lake bed as sure as he’d once known its surface.”

“Did you question him about where Karl had gone?”

“Of course,” Kamsin said. “But like many of the old-timers, his directions were vague. He talked about certain islands and winds and how the earth felt. He could give us nothing concrete.”

“And you didn’t want to go out and look for yourselves?” Juan asked, already suspecting the answer.

“If what Karl found got him killed . . .” Kamsin replied, his voice trailing off.

“I understand,” Juan said to both of them. Kamsin had a job, a life he would not want to jeopardize, and had probably been living in fear that his ignorance might still not keep him safe. Mina’s motivation for not investigating further was nibbling chocolate in the next room. “What about Yusuf? Would he be willing to go back?”

Kamsin had to think for a moment. “It is possible. He didn’t volunteer when Mina and I first questioned him, but we didn’t exactly ask to be shown either.”

“Of course,” Juan said, knowing both were embarrassed by not following through on what had gotten Karl Petrovski murdered.

The Uzbek people had only been independent from Russia for twenty years. These two were old enough to remember what life was like under a Stalinist regime. People didn’t ask questions, didn’t make eye contact with strangers, and never made themselves noticeable to anyone else. It was the only way to stay safe. As much as Karl’s death hurt both Mina and Kamsin, they wouldn’t—couldn’t—do anything but accept the official ruling from Moscow and move on.

“Does the term ‘eerie boat’ mean anything to either of you?” Cabrillo asked in the uncomfortable silence.