Free Isolation by Mary Anna Evans Page B

said, “You stay here. This is official business.”
    Faye would have considered his orders fair enough, if he hadn’t delivered them to her like she was a well-trained dog. Maybe Gerry was heading off on official business that had nothing to do with Faye, her property, and her livelihood, but maybe he wasn’t. She trained her own binoculars in the direction of that spot on the horizon, twiddled with the focus, and stood there an extra few seconds to be sure she understood what she was seeing.
    She knew that boat.
    It belonged to Tommy Barnett, the boat mechanic. If Gerry’s job was to track down chemicals that had been illegally dumped in the Gulf and on its islands, he would have to be interested in Tommy’s boat business. Tommy probably never did a job that didn’t generate used oil or solvents or paint, and all that waste had to go somewhere.
    Faye paused a moment to judge her level of personal interest in what happened to Tommy. The man wasn’t old enough to have buried the kerosene tank on her island. Probably nobody alive was that old. The arsenic? Maybe, but she couldn’t think of any boat maintenance chemicals that could have caused her arsenic problem. Maybe paint? She was going to guess no.
    Even if Tommy had dumped a trainload of pollutants—and, given Gerry’s level of interest, perhaps he had—Faye didn’t think he was the cause of her problem, because the tank was just too old.
    But this didn’t mean she had no personal interest in his fate. If Gerry was after Tommy for environmental crimes, it seemed likely that he’d used the marina as a base for committing them. Could this be why environmental specialist Gerry was working Liz’s murder case? Could Tommy’s crimes be the reason Liz was killed?
    Liz had been Faye’s friend. Therefore, Faye had a personal interest in anything that might be related to her murder. Gerry and the person on the other end of his phone call were, even now, trying to catch Tommy while he was still on the water. Maybe Gerry was within his authority to tell Faye to stay away from a rendezvous that might turn dangerous. But was he within his rights to tell her to sit and stay like a naughty cocker spaniel?
    Oh, hell no.
    Faye knew of no reason that she, as an ordinary citizen with civil rights, couldn’t get in her skiff, which was sitting a stone’s throw away in waters that belonged to the State of Florida and not to Detective Gerry Steinberg. She saw no reason that she couldn’t take it to the marina, getting a very decent head start on Gerry, whose boat was docked a ten-minute walk from where they stood. She could get even further ahead of him before he reached shore, since he would presumably be stopping to arrest Tommy on the way.
    Liz would not be at the marina to sell her a piece of pie to eat while she waited, but there was a perfectly nice wooden bench under a shade tree. And there was nothing to keep her from sitting on it until she saw Gerry and his fellow officers bring Tommy to shore.

Chapter Ten
    Joe looked more than a little like his father. Emma knew that Joe wished this were not so, but it was, and there was nothing he could do about it. She wished there were a tactful way to ask Joe to describe his mother, or even to ask him to show her a picture of the woman she now knew as Patricia, because Sly had mentioned her by name.
    She knew Sly had mentioned Patricia by accident. Emma sensed that he rarely spoke of his dead wife. She rested in a vault inside him that he rarely opened, and he’d kept her name locked in his mouth all these years. When he’d heard himself say, “Patricia,” the man’s flirtatious patter had sputtered, just for a second, then resumed. Emma wondered why he had opened his mouth for her. What had she done to make him look into that vault?
    They’d been talking about Joe and she’d said one of those things a father likes to hear. Something