he says right off. “No big surprise, since the turtle obviously was in the water when he bumped into something or something bumped into him. An antifouling paint loaded with copper to retard the growth of barnacles, mussels, and so on. Also zinc, which would be consistent with primer.”
“And consistent with the color,” I reply. “That yellowish-green brings to mind a zinc-based primer.”
“Microscopically, you got more than one color,” he says. “In fact, you got three.”
We cross Massachusetts Avenue, City Hall up ahead, Romanesque, with a bell tower and stone walls trimmed in granite, and Ernie explains that the traces of paint transferred to the barnacle and also to the broken end of the bamboo pole came from the bottom of a boat. Possibly the prop or an anchor or anchor chain that at one time, he says, probably a number of years ago, was painted black.
“Often whatever is used to paint the bottom of a boat is also used on other areas that remain submerged when the boat is moored,” he adds.
“A quick-and-dirty way of doing it,” I reply, as Benton turns at the YMCA. “Use the same paint on everything.”
“Quick-and-dirty is what a lot of people do, and then there are those who don’t give a damn and are really sloppy and irresponsible,” Ernie says. “Whoever painted the boat you’re looking for falls into that category.”
It doesn’t fit with what I think of him, a killer tidy and meticulous, who plots and plans in his malignant fantasyland.
“The zinc-based primer went on top of the old paint, which wasn’t sanded off; someone couldn’t be bothered.” Ernie continues to describe what he found on a swipe of color almost invisible to the unaided eye.
A boat this person uses for his evil but not for his leisure, not for his pleasure.
“And over that a deep red coating with copper or cuprous oxide, which is usually used on wood,” he says. “I have a feeling the boat you’re looking for has a lot of chipped, peeled, or damaged red topcoat, some areas of exposed primer. In other words, something not well maintained at all.”
An old boat in ill repair that probably isn’t registered in his name or docked where he lives or even near there.
“If it were a prop, wouldn’t you have expected more damage to the turtle?” I ask.
“If the prop was turning, yes. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the person cut the engine while he did what he did.”
Did what he did.
Which was stopping the boat and shutting down the engine so he could push the dog crate, the boat fender, and the body overboard. I try to envision it and can’t imagine hoisting a crate containing more than a hundred and fifty pounds of cat litter, dropping it and a body over a high side rail. A dive platform, a boat with an open transom, I consider. The cut-down transom of lobster boats around here that make it easier to launch pots and buoys, boats that are ubiquitous at all hours and in all types of weather, attracting no attention, and I try to reconstruct it.
The open transom of an old wooden boat that’s been repainted, and the crate, the fender, the body pushed into the water at the same moment a gigantic leatherback became entangled with fishing tackle, with an old bamboo pole, is there. I see the strike, the encounter, I almost can. The turtle surfacing for air, dragging the fishing gear wound around him, and running into the bottom of a boat, perhaps glancing off its prop, and now he’s dangerously trussed up in yellow nylon buoy line, weighted down, slowing down, pulling his burden until it almost pulls him under.
It’s quite likely the killer wasn’t aware of the leatherback, knew nothing of what occurred. For one thing, I suspect it was dark, and I imagine the boat near Logan, where the e-mail was sent from Emma Shubert’s iPhone on Sunday at six-twenty-nine p.m., and then this person waited, possibly for hours, until he was sure no one would see him.
“What makes you say a number of years ago?” I ask Ernie. “You’re able to date when the hull originally was painted black?”
“Traces of TBT,” he says.
The paint contains tributyltin oxide, he explains, an antifouling biocide that has decimated marine life—shellfish, in particular—killing them off, causing them to mutate. TBT is one of the most toxic chemicals ever deliberately released into the world’s water and has been illegal in high-traffic areas such as harbors and bays