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“There a problem?”

“Just helping a local investigation. Some of the guys welding that rig might’ve had a good view four nights ago.”

“This about the woman got killed?”

“You know anything about that?”

“What I read in the paper.”

“Any of the guys say anything?”

“No. But I don’t mix with the crew much.” He pointed at the Wackenhut security badge on his shirt. “I’m not like a regular employee here, you know?”

Westfield nodded. “You know where I can find Broussard?”

“You hurry, you might catch him in the office. He’s usually in the yard at the start of each shift. I can hear him on the radio.”

“Where’s the office at?”

The guard took a printed map from a cubby hole in the booth and leaned out the window.

“It’s in a portable building, you know like a trailer? Here, next to the tank farm.”

“What’s Broussard look like?”

“Big guy. Hard to miss.”

“Thanks.”

He put on the hard hat and started down the drive towards the repair yard.

The shift was changing when he parked on the bed of crushed oyster shells fronting the channel between Pelican and Galveston islands. He could see men moving along the catwalks on the rig towards elevators supported by scaffolding—the night shift crew coming down. The drilling rig was at least twenty stories high, not counting the derrick that rose from the side of the platform. A helicopter pad leaned off the rig like a book on the edge of a high table. Sparks from a cutting torch cascaded through the massive steel support columns and fell onto one of the giant pontoons that held the entire structure afloat. Westfield stepped out of the rental car and walked to the dock.

A giant man in a sweaty T-shirt and suspenders was waiting for the elevator at the base of the scaffolding. He saw Westfield coming and turned, needing to take three steps instead of simply pivoting.

“You the fella from OSHA or the new EPA guy?”

“FBI, actually.” He held out his badge, but Broussard didn’t even look at it.

“Whatever it is, we didn’t do it.” He burst out laughing, then held out his hand and shook Westfield’s. “Cliff Broussard. Whatcha want?”

“I was wondering if I could borrow your office ten minutes, talk to the night-shift guys. That’s them coming down?”

“Sure. That’s them. What for?”

“You hear about Allison Clayborn?”

“Girl in Galveston, got killed last week.” Broussard now looked serious. “Look, we do background checks on every employee. No drugs, no jail time, no bad credit checks. And I keep all their time sheets myself. So I’d know if someone was skipping out nights—”

“I’m not looking for a suspect. I’m looking for witnesses.”

“Witnesses?”

Westfield pointed across the channel at the renovated warehouse on the other side.

“Allison lived right over there. Third floor. Anyone working on the rig at night could look across the channel and see through her window.”

Broussard looked across the channel for a moment and then back at Westfield.

“That’s gotta be three hundred yards.”

“It’s worth a shot.”

Broussard shrugged. “Take enough shots, you’ll hit something.”

“That’s the idea.”

Broussard took a handheld radio off his belt clip. “Del, you copy?”

“I read you.”

“Have crew three go to the mess hall. I need you guys about half an hour. Then ya’ll can go home.” Then he looked at Westfield. “There’s ten of them on the crew. We get a lot of turnover, but this crew’s been steady the last month, so they was all up there that night. We’ll go up and meet ’em. It’s better than my office if you wanna talk to everyone at once, plus it’s got the view.”

They stepped into the cage of the elevator and rode along the scaffolding that rose parallel to one of the rig’s four main support columns. Westfield had stepped aboard his fair share of colossal naval warships, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anything afloat as large or as strange as this rig.

“What’s the yard doing to it?”

“Just reinforcing some of the welds. Took some hurricane damage.”

“The crew’s mostly welders?”

“Night crew’s all welders. Daylight, we work other trades.”

Westfield hadn’t come here with an overdose of hope, and now he was even less optimistic. If every man was wearing a hooded welding mask with a narrow, smoked-glass lens, he doubted any of them saw a thing. Even if a man lifted his mask for a few moments, or took a break, Westfield knew welders had poor night vision. He used to tell his junior officers if they had a choice between a welder and someone else to stand a night watch, choose someone else.

The elevator came to a stop and Broussard pushed the cage door to the side. They stepped onto a catwalk that ran underneath the rig’s main platform. Orange spray paint marked areas on the support columns which required re-welding. They followed the catwalk to a ladder and climbed up to the main deck. As far as Westfield could tell, they were standing underneath the heart of the drilling rig. A derrick climbed skyward from a nest of pipes and machinery. Broussard led them out from beneath the pipes along a pathway painted onto the steel deck. They came to a structure that looked like a house trailer. Broussard opened the door and let Westfield go inside first.

The nightshift men were sitting around two long tables on one end of the crew cafeteria. Westfield didn’t take off his sunglasses when he stepped into the room because he didn’t want to explain his black eyes. The nose was bad enough. He looked at the crew. Ten tired men in sweat-stained work clothes looking at a man in a suit and wondering when they could go home. He pulled the badge from his jacket pocket, letting them all see his side arm in the process, and held it up.

“I’m Special Agent Sanderson with the FBI, assisting local police investigate the killing of Allison Clayborn.”

The men stirred and looked at each other, then back at him. Now they were looking at him warily, whereas before they’d just looked tired. He waited a moment and then went on.

“Her apartment’s just across the channel from this rig. I could see her windows on the elevator coming up here, and I could see them from the catwalk where I got out. It looked to me like a lot of the workspaces up here have a fair view of the apartment. It happened Friday night, five days ago. Any of you men see anything strange that night?”

Nine of the men turned and looked at the tenth. The tenth man was tall and thin. He wore steeltoed work boots, coveralls, and a denim shirt with the sleeves ripped off. A green cross was tattooed on his right biceps and was fading away into his tan. He had wispy hair that reached his shoulders. He carried the look of a man who might have cancer but kept smoking anyway.

“You saw something?”

“Yeah.”

“Any of you other men?”

They shook their heads or looked at the tables where they sat. Westfield turned to Broussard, who was just inside the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to another and wiping sweat from his brow with a wadded paper towel.

“Can I take this man and speak to him in private awhile?”

“Go right ahead. You need any these others?”

“No, they can all go.”

“All right. Ya’ll heard him. Hutch, you tell this man whatever he needs to hear and show him whatever he needs to see. Then you bring him down when ya’ll are done.”

Hutch nodded.

“Don’t leave him alone up here and don’t let him take off his hard hat. Last thing we need is a missing FBI guy on this job site. You think OSHA and the EPA are pains in your ass.”

The other nine men on the crew left the room and Broussard stepped out and closed the door. Westfield sat down across the table from the man and shook his hand.

“David Sanderson,” Westfield said.

“Jimmy Hutchinson. Crew mostly calls me Hutch.”

“You know what night I’m talking about?”

“Yeah. Fourth of July. We worked that night same as any other night. But I didn’t see her that night.”

“You saw her other nights?”

“Sure. You see her, you
notice
her, you know?”

“You knew her?”

“Not exactly. Not her name or nothing like that. We recognized each other, is all.”

“Explain.”

Jimmy Hutchinson had been fidgeting with a crumpled box of cigarettes. A plastic lighter was wedged between the cellophane wrapper and the cardboard box.

“Mind if I smoke?”

“Signs everywhere say you can’t.”

“Let’s go outside. I’ll show you where I was working.”

Westfield followed the man back out onto the main platform. They followed another painted pathway through the machinery until they reached a stairway that led up to the helicopter landing pad. Hutchinson spoke over his shoulder.

“I was welding a new cargo boom up here. You know, so they can unload a chopper and swing stuff to the main deck without having to carry it down the stairs? Anyway, this is where I was that night.”

They climbed the staircase and walked across the painted markers for the helicopter. Red lights on small white posts protruded from the deck around the landing circle. They went to the far side of the deck and leaned against the bright yellow railing. They were twenty stories above the greenish-brown channel water. Tug boats churned up mud as they pushed a barge around a corner into a berth. Across the water was the warehouse where Allison had lived.

Hutchinson pointed, not to Allison’s apartment, but to another old brick building on Strand Street.

“I live over there. I been at Newpark since they bought out Todd’s Shipyard, and I was at Todd’s for fifteen years before that. Been a welder and industrial diver. Got my harbor pilot’s license but the money here’s better. I bought a condo over there a couple years ago, right after my divorce. Neighbors on either side seen my work clothes and figured I was trouble.” He lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke. “Fuck ’em, though, right?”

“Let’s talk about Allison Clayborn.”

“I started seeing her around Strand Street and Warf Street right after I moved there. Sometimes on Seawolf Park Road on Pelican Island. She’d jog in the mornings, see? I put in for daytime shifts in the winter time, so it must have been winter. Sometimes I get up early and walk to work—it’s only a couple miles—and I’d see her jogging. Beautiful girl. I’d wave, she’d wave back.”

“Ever talk to her?”

“Later we talked a few times. You know Sampson & Son’s?”

“Seafood place, right behind her condo.”

“Yeah, right there.” Hutchinson pointed across the channel and they could see the low concrete building. Fresh red paint advertised shrimp, crabs and fish.
Direct from the boat to you
, the sign said.

“I go in there sometimes in the morning. These days, for me, that’s like dinner time. I might pick up half a pound of shrimp and some gumbo crabs. Some oysters. Stuff like that. I’d run into her sometimes. She’d be in her jogging clothes still, probably shopping for dinner. They’re only open in the morning, so if you want to go there, you go in the morning.”

“And you talked?”

“Sure, I’d say hi. We recognized each other by then, passing on the bridge over to Pelican Island so many times. She liked stuffed flounder. She’d get that a lot.”

“How’d you know where she lived?”

“We walked out of Sampson’s once. Me with my shrimp and crabs and her with her flounders. You know, I’m in my fifties, look like a working man, just got divorced. She’s in her twenties, probably educated as hell. Looks like a movie actress. I know it’s not going anywhere and I’m not trying to make it go anywhere. Just passing the time of day, being friendly. She’s friendly back. It’s a clear morning, smells like salt and ocean. I been up all night on a rig—different rig, not this one—and I’m going back to my new place to put in some cabinets. I’m tired, but I feel good. You know, here’s this pretty girl walking beside me, talking with me, next day is my day off so I can stay up late into the morning. Maybe have a shower and go down onto Strand Street and get a beer. I remember because it felt good talking to her.”

“Talking about what?”

“I guess recipes. Seafood recipes. I asked her how many miles she jogs every morning, she tells me five or six. Then I tell her she might want to consider going back and getting a few more of them fillets if she’s burning calories like that. She laughs. She asks how I’d cook them and I tell her, and then she asks if I’m a fisherman. No, I say, I’m a welder but I work on rigs and ships. Then she lifts her hand to wave and turns towards her building. She says something like see ya, and I say yeah. I see her around some after that, but that was probably the longest conversation we had. From up here on other nights I could sometimes see her through her windows, even from way up here and this far back, I could tell it was her. She had red hair and I could see that. But I didn’t watch her like that. That wouldn’tve been right, you know, like peeping. I just looked out and saw her a few times. Knew which windows were hers. And that was fine, felt fine, you know?”