The Bone Bed

nine

WORKING SHOE COVERS OVER MY BOOTS, I CLIMB DOWN the ladder while Marino and Jack continue to banter.

I pick my way around equipment and rescuers, the deck heaving slowly in the swelling surf, waves breaking over the edge of the dive platform and rushing around my feet. The beating of helicopter blades is distant but relentless, and I feel the coldness of the water through my Tyvek-covered boots as I move close to Pamela Quick, who is completely preoccupied and in no mood for my company.

In her mid- to late thirties, I estimate, she is pretty in an off-putting way, with wide gray eyes, a square chin, and hard-set mouth, her long pale blond hair tied back and under a cap. She’s surprisingly small and delicate for the large creatures she routinely handles, and as steady as a professional surfer on the rocking platform, emptying a syringe into a green-top Vacutainer tube that has the additive heparin to prevent blood from clotting.

I’m Dr. Scarpetta.” I remind her we talked briefly on the phone earlier today. “I need to get some basic information and take a look, and then I’ll be out of your way.”

I can’t permit you to examine him.” She is as brisk and chilly as the water and the wind. “He’s stressed enough as is, and that’s the number-one danger right now. Stressing him.” She says it with emphasis, as if I might be the source of it. “These animals aren’t used to being out of the water and touched by humans. Stress will kill them. I’ll send you my report, and that should answer any questions you have.”

I understand, and later I’d certainly appreciate a copy of your report,” I reply. “But it’s important I know anything you can tell me now.”

She withdraws the needle from the rubber top and says, “Water temp is fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit, the ambient temp fifty-seven.”

What can you tell me about him?” I have no choice but to be insistent.

About him?” She glances up at me as if I have just offended her. “Not exactly relevant for your purposes.”

At the moment, I consider everything relevant. He may be part of a crime scene.”

He’s a critically endangered turtle who almost died because of reckless, careless human beings.”

And I’m not one of those reckless, careless human beings.” I understand her hostility. “I want him to thrive as much as you do.”

She glances up at me condescendingly, angrily.

Let’s do this,” I then say. “Tell me what you know.”

She doesn’t reply.

I’m not the one wasting time,” I add pointedly.

HR thirty-six, RR is two. Both times by Doppler,” she says. “Cloacal temp is seventy-four degrees.” She drips blood into a white plastic i-STAT cartridge.

Is it unusual that his body temperature is some twenty-five degrees higher than the water he was in?”

Leatherbacks are gigantothermic.”

Meaning they can maintain a core temperature independently of the environmental temperature,” I reply. “That’s rather remarkable, and not what I’d expect.”

Like the dinosaurs, they can survive in waters as warm as the tropics or cold enough to kill a human in minutes.”

Certainly defies what I understand about reptiles.” I squat near her as the boat sways back and forth and water laps.

Reptilian physiology is unable to explain the biology of dinosaurs.”

You’re not really calling this a dinosaur?” I’m baffled and strangely unsettled, considering how my day began.

A gigantic reptile that has been here for more than sixty-five million years, the earth’s last living dinosaur.” She continues to act as if I’m to blame. “And like the dinosaur is about to become extinct.”

She inserts the cartridge into a handheld blood analyzer while frigid water splashes over the platform and soaks the cuffs of my coveralls and begins to wick up the legs of my pants underneath.

Fishing gear, ignorant people digging up their eggs, illegal poaching, speedboats, oil spills, and plastic pollution,” she continues, with undisguised disgust. “At least one-third of all leatherbacks have plastic in their stomachs. And they don’t do one damn thing to us. All they want to do is swim, eat jellies, and reproduce.”

The leatherback slowly lifts his watermelon-sized head and looks directly at me as if to emphasize his caretaker’s point. Nares flare as he exhales loudly, his protruding eyes dark pools on either side of a beaklike mouth that reminds me of a crooked jack-o’-lantern smile.

I understand the way you feel better than you’ll ever imagine, and I’m eager to get out of your way,” I say to Pamela Quick. “But I have to know about his injuries before I can finish up here.”

Moderate abrasions circumferentially around the skin-carapace line of left distal shoulder extending about three centimeters on distal posterior margin of the left-front flipper,” she describes with steely affect. “Associated with an abraded area of the distal leading edge.” She reads the blood test results on the digital display.

And his values?” I ask.

Typical for entangled leatherbacks. Mild hypernatremia, but he should be fine. Until he encounters some other human detritus or a boat that kills him.”

I can understand how you feel about it. . . .”

You really can’t,” she says.

I need to ask if you saved the fishing gear.”

You can have it.” She reaches inside a ski bag.

Based on your expertise, can you reconstruct what happened?”

Same thing that always does to these animals,” she replies. “They run into a vertical line, freak out and start spinning around, and get wrapped up in it. The more they struggle, the worse it gets, and in his case, he was dragging a heavy pot and a body for God knows how far.”

And dragging the buoy.”

Yes. Dragging that, too.” She hands me a transparent plastic bag that contains tangled monofilament, several leads, and rusty hooks.

What makes you assume the body and pot were dragged? It seems you’re assuming they weren’t originally where they are now. Any reason to suppose he might have gotten entangled here, where he was found?” I label the bag with a permanent marker.

Leatherbacks are in perpetual motion,” she answers. “The monofilament probably was entangled with the buoy line. What we do know for a fact is he hit the fishing lines, and his left flipper got wound up, but he’s programmed to keep swimming. The more he swam, the tighter the lines wrapped around him, it would seem. By the time we got to him, he could barely move his left flipper, and he was going under.”

Any estimate of distance based on how fast leatherbacks can swim?” I ask.

We could have this conversation later.” She barely looks up at me.

Any information I can get now is really important,” I say firmly. “It could help us determine where the body might have entered the water.”

That person is gone. He’s not.”

This could be a homicide investigation. I don’t think anyone wants to interfere with that.”

All I can tell you is the top speed for a leatherback is about twenty miles per hour,” she replies flatly, “but no way he was going anything close to that dragging what was attached to him. It’s not possible to say where he might have run into the line except that I’m thinking he didn’t get very far after he did. Maybe a few miles at most, until he was running out of steam and getting pulled down by his load, barely able to keep his head above water.”

It’s not likely he got entangled in the open ocean.” I scan the horizon, the outer harbor separated from the open Atlantic Ocean by some sixty-five miles of bays, peninsulas, and islands. “It’s too far from here.”

Absolutely no way,” she agrees. “I’m estimating hours, not even a day, based on his injuries and what good shape he’s in. There’s nothing wrong with him that saltwater won’t heal. Just moderate abrasions to this one flipper, a mild abrasion to the dorsal head, as you can see. Don’t confuse the pink spot.”

Her latex-gloved hand pats a pinkish splotch on the top of his dark mottled head, and she seems to have relaxed a little, to find me not quite as objectionable.

Each leatherback has a unique fingerprint,” she explains. “We actually can ID one of these by the spot on its head; not sure what it’s for, but maybe a sensor of sorts that detects light or helps the animal determine its location in the ocean.”

Let me look at his injuries. And then I promise I’ll get out of your way.”

She pulls back the wet sheet from his neck, and I can smell his clean fishy smell as I get close to him, just inches from his restrained left flipper, which is at least six feet long. Then I smell the strong ammonia of urine.

That’s a good thing.” She obviously smells it, too. “The more alert and active, the better. We want all-systems-go. Like I said, nothing all that serious. The worst offender is this. Part of a barnacle that’s embedded in this ridge right here. I was about to extract it.”

She shows me a fragment of what looks like white shell or white glass that she assumes was driven into the carapace close to his neck, where the leathery skin is inflamed and abraded.

You’re thinking he struck something that had barnacles on it,” I infer.

I’m thinking something with barnacles on it struck him,” she replies, and already I’m not sure I agree with her, as I notice a scattering of clamlike barnacles that have colonized on the rubbery outer skin of the turtle’s exposed carapace. “While he was entangled in the line and dragging all that weight, maybe a boat grazed him or he knocked into a channel buoy, a piling, a rock, who knows what. Something, at any rate, that has barnacles attached. Normally I would collect this and preserve it in formalin.”

It’s better if I do it.”

She seems reluctant and starts to protest.

Really,” I insist.

She falls silent, and I motion for Marino to bring a scene case to me, the Pelican 1620, I let him know, and I assure Pamela Quick I will collect the necessary evidence in a manner that does no harm to the turtle and do so as expeditiously as possible. I tear open a packet of disposable forceps and am surprised by the smooth, cool surface of the carapace, what feels like polished stone or an oily hard cured leather.

The dense texture of the flipper is unlike anything I’ve ever touched, maybe similar to ballistic gelatin, and I bend close, wearing a binocular magnifier, dual 3.5X acrylic lenses in a lightweight eyeglass frame so my hands are free. I feel the tension of life and struggle and hear the blasts of his breaths and am aware of his power, were he to break his restraints, his flippers as dangerous as whale flukes. His scissorlike jaws look capable of crushing or amputating a limb, were he to clamp hold of it.

In the magnification of the lenses, the protruding white shell is pearlescent and clam-shaped, with a dark muscular stalk that I gently clamp into the tips of the plastic forceps while I gently rest my right hand on top of the turtle’s huge head. It is as cool and smooth as petrified bone, and I feel him slowly, heavily stir. I’m constantly aware of where his jaws are in relation to me, and I hear the blasts of his respiration and feel the softness of his pink-tinted neck against my leg as he puffs up and emits a loud groan followed by a low growl.

Now, don’t be such a grumpy old man,” I say to him. “No one’s hurting you, and you’re going to be fine.”

I’m careful not to break or damage the barnacle as I work it out of the leathery skin, and then it is free and I move out of the way so Pamela Quick can attend to the wound, which isn’t what I’d expect if the turtle was struck by something covered with barnacles and stabbed or punctured by a glasslike shell. She swabs the shallow wound with Betadine, and I place the barnacle in my gloved palm. I can see a trace amount of a substance on it, what looks like a hint of bright yellowish green paint on the plate farthest from the stalk, just a faint swipe on an edge of shell that is broken.

I imagine an object covered with barnacles coming into contact with the leatherback, the force of the impact sufficient to drive the tip of the shell into the hard leathery ridge and unseat or pry the barnacle from whatever it was cemented to. But the transfer of paint or what might be paint doesn’t fit with such a scenario, and I envision the natural-gas tanker that passed us less than an hour ago. A number of them I’ve seen are painted garish colors, chartreuse and teal green, neon blue or orange.

Something painted yellowish green,” I ponder out loud, as I place the barnacle into a small plastic evidence container. “Not likely a rock or a piling. More likely he struck a boat, a Jet Ski, or something like that struck him.”

A rather insignificant glancing blow, if that’s the case,” she puzzles. “Certainly not the usual thing we see in a boat strike. When these animals surface for air and get hit by a speeding boat or a tanker, usually the damage is profound. He must have been barely bumped by something, or he barely bumped into something.”

With bright green paint?”

I got no idea,” she says.

I label the evidence container and feel the boat heave from side to side, the surf getting heavier. The temperature is dropping, and I’m chilled by cold saltwater flowing around my feet, my pants soaked up to my knees underneath white Tyvek.

Well, if whatever he ran into or ran into him is a boat, for example, that’s a little curious,” I continue, “since most are protected with an antifouling paint, some type of coating to prevent barnacles or other organisms from attaching to the hull.”

Ones that are properly maintained. Yes.” She is terse again and wants me gone.

I suspect the barnacle was attached to the turtle and not to whatever struck him,” I conclude. “And paint or something greenish yellow was transferred to part of the shell.”

Maybe,” she says distractedly, and I can tell she doesn’t think it matters and is eager for me to leave her alone.

We’ll get this analyzed in the labs and see what it is,” I add.

Marino takes photographs while I look over the leatherback a final time, placing a gloved hand under his head to keep his bony jaws from opening when I’m close to them. I peel the soaked sheet back from his massive body, which unlike other turtles has no lower flat bony shell, the leatherback barrel-shaped and disproportionately wide around the shoulders and tapering off to short rear flippers and a long tail. I see nothing else that might be of forensic interest, and I let Pamela Quick know I don’t intend to interfere with her patient a moment longer.

Just tell me how you want to go about things, because I’ve got to go into the water,” I say to her. “What I don’t want is to go in at the same time he does, and I certainly don’t want him running right back into the same line and getting tangled up again.”

You’re doing your recovery from here? Or over there?” She indicates the Coast Guard boat.

I stand up and steady myself as the fireboat rocks harder. The wind is biting, and saltwater has soaked through my shoe covers and is seeping inside my boots. Of course I have no intention of recovering a dead body from a boat crowded with marine animal rescuers.

I’ll tell you what,” I decide. “Marino and I will get back on board the Coast Guard boat and pull the buoy line in close to it so we can take care of what we need to do. And the minute we’re off this boat I suggest you get Lieutenant Klemens to move some distance from here so you can release our leatherback friend out of harm’s way.”

I climb back up the transom steps and retrieve my coat from the upper deck while Marino collects the scene cases. Then we return to the bow.

Nice to look at, but she sure as hell doesn’t win any personality awards,” he says.

She’s just trying to do her job and wants no interference,” I reply. “You can’t blame her.”

Yeah, except she doesn’t give a shit someone’s dead. Not even interested.”

Marino looks back in Pamela Quick’s direction as we remove gloves, shoe covers, and Tyvek, stuffing them into a red biohazard bag.

Some of these animal lovers are like that, though,” he says. “Fanatics. Certified whackos who will throw red paint on you or beat you up for wearing a fur collar or snakeskin boots. I got me a pair of rattlesnake-skin boots, and you think I don’t get a lot of shit when I wear them?”

He hands the cases over the rail to Labella as the two boats plunge together and apart like an accordion.

Tanned rattlesnake skins bought off eBay and custom-made,” Marino continues to gripe.

Sounds disgusting.” I swing one leg over the first rail, and Labella reaches for me.

Well, don’t wear them in f*cking Concord or Lincoln, in Thoreauville”—Marino is right behind me—“where you go to jail for cutting down a damn tree,” he adds at the top of his lungs.