Free The Whole Truth by Nancy Pickard

It was a big, beautiful Hatteras, Paul observed, estimating it (correctly) to be forty-seven feet long. The boat's name was scrawled across the back in flashy silver letters: Overboard. Paul smiled to himself when he read that. Did that mean the owners felt they'd been a bit extravagant— gone overboard—to buy it? It had a flying bridge all decked out for deep sea fishing. The gleaming, immaculate fishing yacht was tied up to a well-maintained cement dock at the rear of a private backyard from which you could climb a short but rather steep little grassy hill to the street and the bridge.
    Paul saw that a boater could have stopped beside the Hatteras, tied up to one of the big metal cleats on her deck, and then used her swim platform and ladder to climb onto the aft deck. He could have walked right across her gleaming white fiberglass deck, climbed out of the Hatteras onto the cement dock, and then made his way up to the bridge, streetside.
    In his imagination, Paul pictured a shadowy, anonymous figure doing just that . . . carrying a fishing pole, propping it between the railing of the bridge so the line hung down . . .
    "No," Paul corrected himself. "The killer would have cast the line out, snagging his own boat with the hook, because how else was he going to get hold of the line again to wrap it around her neck?"
    In the imagined scene, the killer then retraced his steps back onto the deck of the Hatteras, down into his own boat, where he grabbed the dangling fishing line, wrapped it several times around his victim's throat, and then lowered her into the water, letting the inflowing tide carry the body on the line toward the west, a bit under the bridge, until the line grew taut.
    "Of course," says Paul, "my ideas were all bull if he arrived by car, or had an accomplice in a car."
    But if the killer (he or she, at this point) had arrived by water, Paul worked it out that meant the killer had to have entered the canal from the east, or Intracoastal Canal side, because of the tide. (Later, that idea would connect with the fact that the Checker Crab Company was located only two and a half miles west of the Intracoastal Canal.)
    No one else at the crime scene had looked at the private yacht behind the house yet. Paul saw two people standing in a Florida room, peering out at all of the commotion around the bridge.
    He walked close enough to call out to them, "That your boat?"
    In Florida, just because there is a boat docked at a house doesn't automatically mean it belongs to the home-owners. Many of them rent out dock space to other people. But a man in shorts and no shirt, appearing to>be in his sixties, opened the screen door, and yelled back, "Yeah!"
    Within minutes, Paul had from them a signed consent-to-search form. They were a retired couple from Oklahoma City, in their sixties, and visibly upset by the nature of the crime at their back door. They hadn't heard a thing, they told the detective. "What a terrible thing," the wife said, with tears in her eyes. She told Paul they had moved to Bahia Beach to be near their own grandchildren. Whatever they could do to help, they were glad to do. And so, he was soon on his way down their backyard to their dock to look at their yacht. He stood on the dock to which it was snugged, and gave it the once-over.
    Nice, he thought, as who wouldn't?
    A saltwater fisherman, himself, he couldn't help but think how great it would be to steer a beauty like this down around Government Cut on a Sunday morning, throw out a live crab on the end of a line, drop it into 150 feet of water, and hope for about a seventy-pound tarpon, maybe some kingfish and barracuda. It was hard not to be envious in a place with more than thirty thousand boats, some of them big enough to accommodate their own helicopters. But Paul figured he could have a decent retirement, or a big boat, but not both. Anyway, a man could catch a damn big fish off an eighteen-foot ketch, and it was the size of the fish that mattered