The Harbor Investigator Put A Name Beside My Dive Log

I did not answer Ada with a guess.

I wrote, I saw someone. Police are here. Then I gave the officer my phone.

He copied the message and called his supervisor. By dark, I was sitting across from Leona Grant in a plain interview room near the harbor.

She was thirty-five, a Black woman with deep brown skin, steady eyes, and short twists pinned away from her face. She wore a gray sweater beneath her badge. There was creek mud on one shoe.

"Harbor investigations," she said. "Tell me what you know, then what you think. We'll keep those separate."

I liked that enough to become careful around it.

"I know he broke a recorder. I think he needs a less expensive hobby."

She waited.

My joke fell flat between us. She did not step on it.

"I have another copy," I said.

Her pen stopped.

"Where?"

"Inside the compressor housing. A separate surface unit. The helmet feed runs up the cable. It was saving while I was down."

"Who knows?"

"My crew. It's on our equipment sheet."

She asked me not to open anything myself. We drove to the secured float with an evidence technician. Mara met us there. The technician photographed the yellow thread, the panel, the cable, and the unit before removing it.

I signed a receipt with its serial number. He sealed it in a bag.

For once, handing something over made me feel less helpless.

Back at the office, Leona placed a missing-person report beside my dive log.

Noel Pike. Thirty-six. Payroll and dispatch clerk at Creel Marine Services. Missing for nineteen days.

"His sister filed this the next morning," she said.

"Why was she buying a sunken boat?"

"She wanted access. Her brother had mentioned the Mercy Bell before he disappeared. Creel told her she could own his headache for forty-eight hundred dollars."

"Then he hired me."

"She insisted on choosing a qualified diver. He agreed to pay. He may have expected an ordinary outside survey."

I stared at the report.

"Or he expected me to take his money and stop."

"That may be true. We still have to prove what he did."

They had not identified the person underwater. Leona said that twice, gently, because I kept looking at Noel's picture as if the paper could settle it.

In the photo, he stood beside a folding table full of crab mallets. His smile pulled higher on one side.

"Creel said he quit," she told me. "He gave the first officer a resignation email. We have questions about it."

"Such as?"

"Why it was sent from an office computer after his sister says he vanished."

She did not promise an arrest. She explained the next steps: secure the wreck, seek the proper court orders, recover the person safely, compare records.

"And the threat?" I asked.

"It goes in your statement. His exact words. We can arrange patrol checks. Call if he contacts you. Don't meet him alone."

"I don't meet most people alone. I'm barely fit company with witnesses."

She looked up.

"You told your crew to stop when you saw a person. That's useful company."

I looked at the table until my face cooled.

The next morning, Ada came to my shop. She was a bus mechanic with a stiff left knee and grease under two nails. She brought the original sale folder in a grocery bag.

"I wasn't trying to trick you," she said.

"You asked for every frame. I figured there was a reason."

"He offered me twelve thousand dollars to sell it back last night."

She put the offer down.

It required delivery of the boat, all inspection material in her possession, and a promise to make no further claims about its condition. The deadline was noon Friday.

"Did you sign?"

"No. But raising her could cost thirty thousand. I spent my savings buying a hole in the creek."

I knew that kind of math. My rent was $1,150. A slow month could make it look like a mountain.

We called Leona together. She asked Ada to bring the offer and said she would explain available help without promising money she did not control.

After Ada left, I found Leona's card beneath my coffee mug.

She had written her direct number on it. Under that: You can call before something happens.

I put it inside the drawer where I kept good replacement glass.

That afternoon, Ada called again.

"I found an invoice in Noel's papers," she said. "It lists your dive business."

"I've never worked for Creel before yesterday."

"I know. This says he paid you eighteen thousand six hundred dollars last month."