Dead in the Water by Shannon Mason

Author:Shannon Mason [Mason, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

15

The next day at the field office, we started the day with a briefing just like we did every morning. Ben typically wasn’t one to lead the meeting or have a plethora of information to share. His expertise was really related to the crime scene itself and the initial gathering and analysis of evidence. But he did have other skills in relation to our job that sometimes went under the radar. Because of that, this morning was very different. As I got to Ben and gave him the opportunity to share any additional findings or thoughts, he stood up and took out a notepad, where he had taken three pages of notes.

"So I couldn’t stop thinking about the GPS and the most recent route that Walt took the night before he was killed. The timing was well after dark, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about what he would have been doing. I looked further into it and, with the help of Jackson, pulled as many routes off of that GPS history as we possibly could and tracked them against maps. We found several unusual routes. Some made sense, like typical trips out on the water, fishing trips, whatever have you, but some of them just didn’t. Many of them were taken in the middle of the night or early in the morning before anybody else would be on the water, and there were several stops at remote locations that really got us thinking. We decided to start talking to some of the other fishermen in the area, people that would have known about some of these locations, or maybe had worked with Walt before. We also spoke to some charter service owners, as well as the Coast Guard to try to understand the nature of these trips. What we have determined is that Walt Mason was definitely leading a double life."

"Elaborate," I said.

"What I mean is this guy was a celebrated fisherman, right? We’ve heard it over and over again. This is the guy that went on solo expeditions and risked it all for rare catches and was celebrated and carried through the streets on the backs of everyone around him. But we’ve also discovered that this guy was in deep debt to loan sharks, that he was involved in secret affairs, and that he had a bunch of enemies. Now, having analyzed the GPS information, we also can determine that he was definitely engaged in some secretive, potentially illegal activities. And based on our conversations with people, I’m going to go so far as to say that those activities might have revolved around illegal fishing, poaching, smuggling of endangered species or maybe worse. It’s no secret that Miami is a hotspot for cocaine. It’s possible that he was smuggling drugs. The only thing I can think is that he was meeting up with someone, or maybe picking up a package that had been dropped. We’ve seen it before. These biplanes fly over the water just low enough for someone to boat out and pick up the package, which usually has a tracking device on it.

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