Lise Described the Cases Hidden Beneath the Live Fish

Nadine told me to stay home until she called back.

“Don't answer Marcel. Don't go to the gate.”

I put the phone on the table and watched the minute hand move. At nine forty, she gave me an address and asked me to bring a blank tank diagram.

Lise had already given her account before I arrived. Nadine explained that they wanted her memories recorded before she saw any of my charts.

The interview room had no windows. Lise sat beneath a soft light, holding a paper cup with both hands. She looked thinner than I remembered. A blue brace covered one wrist.

“You still draw your plumbing?” she asked.

I held up a clean napkin.

She laughed once. Then she cried.

Nobody hurried her.

Her sister sat close enough for their shoulders to touch. An agent recorded the interview, and Nadine asked Lise whether she wanted me to stay.

“Yes,” she said. “He'll know what I mean.”

I laid the tank diagram between us. Lise pointed beneath the fish rack.

“He took the service trays out. Put three flat cases there. The lids had seals.”

“Who?” Nadine asked.

“Wade. Marcel stood on the dock and checked numbers against a sheet.”

She had worked the landing scale. She knew seafood weights and fish weights. A tank marked empty had gained 286 pounds after a restricted container was opened.

When she asked, Wade said the extra weight was seawater.

“Some was,” she said. “I watched him fill it. But I also watched those cases go under the rack.”

I looked at the drawing.

The cases would displace water. My meter would still read the wet well around them. A few fish in the upper space would make the load look like an ordinary fish transfer.

“What happened when you objected?” Nadine asked.

“Marcel asked me to call it packing material. Just on the weight slip.”

A small lie. The same test.

Lise had refused. Later that shift, Wade had crowded her on the narrow dock while demanding her phone. She had fallen into the water trying to get past him. He had walked away without throwing the ring.

She had reached a ladder farther along the pilings. A boat mechanic had found her there and driven her to Celia's house.

“I thought they'd come looking,” she said. “Then Wade called Celia. Said I should stay dead if I wanted her safe.”

The mechanic's name and number were already in Nadine's notebook. Her team would seek his account separately.

“They kept using my employee number,” Lise said. “I saw it on the papers you showed me.”

“Did you authorize that?”

“No.”

She opened a cloth purse and took out a folded carbon copy.

It was the weight slip from the day she fell. She had put it in her purse before going onto the dock. The paper had stayed dry in a zipped inner pocket.

Empty tank weight. Loaded tank weight. Container reference. Three case numbers written in Marcel's narrow hand.

Nadine had Lise explain each mark before an agent placed the slip in an evidence sleeve.

I had brought weeks of water readings. Lise had brought one piece of paper small enough to hide behind a grocery list.

Together, they told a much larger story.

Before she signed her statement, Lise stopped at the page about the fall.

“I didn't see him push me,” she said. “He blocked me. I tried to pass him.”

Nadine checked the wording with her and made sure it said exactly that.

I watched Lise read the page again. Even after everything, she would not give Marcel a false sentence he could use against her.

After the interview, Nadine brought me water.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“I keep thinking about that ladder.”

“She's here now.”

“Because Celia answered.”

“Because several people did one useful thing.”

She sat beside me, leaving a little space. I wanted to lean across it. I stayed where I was.

“When this is over,” I said, “could we have coffee without separate receipts?”

Her face softened.

“Ask me when I'm no longer working your part of the case.”

“I can wait.”

“I believe you.”

Before midnight, the investigators checked the container reference on Lise's slip against the missing cargo list. It matched. The landing's current transfer schedule showed another shipment of the same modules due that night.

Tank Nine had not returned to the warehouse reader. Its newest water history was still aboard.

A flush could destroy that history, wash away traces inside the rack, and send the next load toward the export terminal.

Nadine took a call, stepped into the hall, and returned with a different look.

“The judge signed the search warrants,” she said. “We'll need you available to explain the life-support system after the building is secure.”

At four fifty-eight, headlights crossed my curtains.

An agent had arrived to take me to the warehouse.