The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(73)

The clouds were laced with lightning on the eastern horizon. Vic Lopez, Maia, the lieutenant, and I stood on the twolane pedestrian road that ran atop the milewide dam. We were about a third of the way out from the east end, where the cement railing turned to riveted steel.

On the west end, the slope to the water was a gentle mountain of gravel, but here it was a sheer drop two hundred feet. Below, the lake's surface rippled in windsheets of green and silver. Lower Colorado River Authority and Travis County Sheriff's boats made a dotted line from shore to shore. Marker buoys and diverdown flags bobbed in the wind.

I had a clear view of Point Lone Star—the marina, Ruby McBride's tower on the hill.

The point would be a steep but short hike from here, down the hill through underbrush and woods.

"The Ruby, Too left from there," the lieutenant said. "We found it moored over yonder—Defeat Hollow."

He pointed toward a small wooded cove. "My men dived the area around the boat, then moved down here and started working a compass pattern upcurrent."

"Too rough for a jackstay?" Lopez asked.

The lieutenant nodded.

"Can they search in the rain?" Maia asked him.

"Rain, yes. Not lightning. We've got about fifteen more minutes before I have to pull them out. But a storm is good. It brings bodies to the surface."

The observation failed to comfort me.

I thought about Ruby McBride in her bloodsmeared clothes, barefoot, the small automatic pistol slipping from her purse. "She could be somewhere else. Not even on the lake."

Lopez and the lieutenant exchanged glances.

The lieutenant said, "You gentlemen excuse me? Miss Lee."

He walked back toward the east end of the dam, the wind flicking tiny brown waves off his coffee cup.

Lopez said, "Cheer up, Navarre. Maybe you're right."

He spoke with all the optimism of a Russian economist.

Down on the lake, the tiny blackhooded head of a diver came to the surface. Then another. I might've mistaken them for turtles or snakes. Neither diver made any sign that they'd discovered anything, but my stomach tightened anyway. I walked across the road to the opposite railing.

This was the Colorado River side. Here the hills were dotted with luxury homes, garlanded with power lines. A whitecolumned highway bridge spanned the river to the south.

Maia leaned next to me on the railing. "Don't beat yourself up."

"I let her go," I said. "I could've stopped her."

"That wasn't your job, Tres. It wasn't your decision to make—it was Ruby's."

The problem was, I didn't agree with her. Some guilty, chauvinistic part of me believed that maybe, this one time, the damsel really had needed a knight. And perhaps she'd run straight into the arms of the wrong one.

Lopez joined us. "I'll need to get a list of Garrett's friends. Also his hangouts."

"You're treating him as a fugitive?"

Lopez rubbed his chin. "Well, let's see. He's out on bail for murder. His own lawyer can't locate him."

"You don't believe your own case anymore," Maia told him. "You know Garrett didn't kill anyone."

"What I know is that the machinery is in motion. It's not about me anymore, counsellor.

I couldn't stop it if I wanted to."

The river was so clear I could see the bottom—a series of broken limestone sheets that looked like a submerged set of child's blocks. Against the base of the dam, a multicoloured beach ball bobbed and dipped, stopped from its meanderings by three million tons of concrete.

"Ruby's boat," I said. "I want to see it."

Lopez looked over. "You want to say why?"

I didn't answer.

He sighed. "I'll see what I can do. They should be through processing it by this afternoon."

"What are the odds they'll find her, Vic?"

He planted his elbows on the cement wall. "The waterline is low. That works in the divers' favour. I don't know . . . the area they're searching, the current ..."

"You used to dive recovery?" Maia asked.

"When I was a cadet. Sounded like a cool cop thing to do, right? Search and recovery.

You think that before you run into your first body underwater. Most frightening thing I've ever done—a hundred and thirty feet deep in some places, down in the old river basin—"

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"Another landmark?"

His expression hardened. "The reason I got out of recovery was a kid who drowned.

Down that way—the public park, just before Point Lone Star."

"Kids must be the hardest," I said.

"Thirteenyearold son went into the water after lunch—I mean, this is a small swimming area, marked with buoys and everything. He went in, and the family said it was like he was sucked underneath. Family was Asian. They kept trying to tell us about some Chinese superstition—a dragon got him, an evil spirit or something."

"That's an old belief." Maia's eyes were on the beach ball, trapped and still pushing against the dam. "Every body of water has its own spirit. You always run the risk that the spirit will take a liking to you, make you pay a visit to the bottom."