Free Plum Island by Nelson DeMille

the light is better.”
    “Yeah …” He was playing with the computer again, which he found more interesting than me. I left.
    Out in the living room, the latent fingerprint lady was still dusting and lifting prints. She glanced at me and asked, “Did
     you touch anything?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    I walked over to the bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. To the left was fiction, mostly paperbacks, a nice mixture
     of trash and treasures. To the right was nonfiction, and I studied the titles, which ranged from technical biology stuff to
     standard health and fitness crap. There was also a whole shelf of locally published books about Long Island, flora, fauna,
     history, and so forth.
    On the bottom shelf was a row of sailing books, navigational charts, and such. As I said, for land-locked Midwesterners, the
     Gordons had really gotten into boating. On the other hand, I’d been out with them a few times, and even I could tell they
     weren’t great sailors. Also, they didn’t fish, clam, crab, or even swim. They just liked to open up the throttles now and
     then. Which brought me back to the thought that this was a drug thing.
    With that thought in mind, I put the computer printouts down and using my handkerchief took an oversized book of navigational
     charts from the shelf and propped it up on the mantelpiece. I flipped through the pages, my finger wrapped in the handkerchief.
     I was looking for radio frequencies, cellular phone numbers, or whatever else a drug runner might mark in his chart book.
    Each page of the navigational charts showed an area of about four miles by four miles. The land that appeared on the charts
     was basically featureless except for landmarks that could be seen from the water. The seas, however, were marked with reefs,
     rocks, depths, lighthouses, sunken wrecks, buoys, and all sorts of aids and hazards to navigation.
    I scanned page after page looking for “X’s,” I guess, rendezvous points, or grid coordinates, or names like Juan and Pedro
     or whatever, but the charts seemed clean except for a yellow highlighter line that connected the Gordons’ dock with the Plum
     Island dock. This was the route they took to work, passing between the southern shore of the North Fork and Shelter Island,
     keeping to the deep and safe part of the channel. That wasn’t much of a clue to anything.
    I noticed that on Plum Island, printed in red, were the words, “Restricted Access—U.S. Government Property— Closed to the
     Public.”
    I was about to shut the large book when I saw something nearly hidden by my handkerchief—toward the bottom of the page, in
     the water south of Plum Island, was written in pencil, “44106818.” Following this was a question mark, similar to the one
     that just popped out of my head like a little cartoon balloon—
44106818?
Make that two question marks and an exclamation point.
    So, was this a standard eight-digit grid coordinate? A radio frequency? A disguised Dial-A-Joke? Drugs? Bugs? What?
    There is a point in homicide investigations when you start to assemble more clues than you know what to do with. Clues are
     like ingredients in a recipe with no instructions—if you put them together in the right way, you have dinner. If you don’t
     know what to do with them, you’ll be in the kitchen a long time, confused and hungry.
    Anyway, I held the chart book with my handkerchief and took it to the latent fingerprint lady. I asked her, “Could you do
     a real thorough job on this book for me?” I smiled nicely.
    She gave me a tough look, then took the book in her latex-gloved hand and examined it. “This map paper’s hard to do … but
     the cover is good glossy stock…. I’ll do what I can.” She added, “Silver nitrate or ninhydrin. It’s got to be done in the
     lab.”
    “Thank you, professionally competent woman.”
    She cracked a smile and asked, “Who has the most fingerprints? FBI, CIA, or EPA?”
    “What’s EPA? You mean Environmental