The private investigator was completely flummoxed, maybe for the first time in his career.
He had been up and down the coast, to all the marinas where boats had burned. He found what was left of some of the roasted and toasted little boats, and he realized that it doesn’t take long in the salt water and sea air for the rust and corrosion to wipe away clues and secrets about what had happened.
Nobody was talking, either. He pretended to be an insurance adjuster, then an insurance investigator, then lied about being a state investigator. He was able to track down a handful of aspiring sea captains whose boats were destroyed by fire, but they had nothing to say. They had their insurance checks and probably had already spent them on something else they couldn’t afford.
There were some claim
