The Bone Bed

ten

AN AIR HORN BLARES THREE TIMES, AND THE FIREBOAT backs away from where it was anchored, pivoting on its stern, nosing toward a lighthouse jutting up whitely on the horizon. Jet engines gush and churn foamy water that dissipates into a lacy wake as firefighters move the leatherback and its rescuers toward the open sea, leaving us to take care of the rest of it.

The task I face is one I hope the media and the curious don’t know about, and I survey the water heaving in the sunlight, looking for any sign that spectators and TV crews will move on to witness the turtle’s release. I want everyone gone. I want whoever is dead recovered discreetly, respectfully, and at the same time I feel very protective of the huge old turtle and furious at human selfishness and ignorance.

Leave him alone, for God’s sake, I think, and I could easily worry myself sick about it, imagining any number of awful fates that might befall an almost extinct creature that lives simply to eat and swim and breed. I know the stories of people who motor too close to great whales and other magnificent animals, taking pictures, trying to touch or feed them, and inadvertently maim or kill them. I’m dismayed, then outraged, as I watch boaters pull up anchor and start their engines, the news helicopter already pursuing in a high hover.

At least they’re not going to hang around here,” Labella says.

He’s crouched next to the Stokes basket, checking the restraint straps and the harness, making sure everything is functioning properly. What we don’t need is to have the body tumble out back into the water while we’re trying to hoist it in on board the boat.

Which tells me they don’t know the reason we’re here,” he adds.

Maybe they don’t, but what do you make of that?” I look up at the white twin-engine helicopter a thousand feet above us, I estimate. “It seems to be hanging around.”

Not a news chopper.” He stares up, shielding his eyes. “Not MedFlight. Not Boston or state police or Homeland Security. Maybe a Sikorsky, something big, but for sure not one of ours, so I’m guessing it’s private. Someone who’s out flying and maybe wonders what’s going on down here.”

It’s got a camera mounted on it.” I get an uneasy feeling as I watch the gleaming white machine hover steady as a rock, the nose pointed at us, the sun glaring on the windscreen.

Maybe a TV camera. But it could also be a FLIR,” Labella says. “I can’t tell from here.”

The only private pilot I know who might have a Forward Looking Infrared Radar system thermal imager mounted on his or her helicopter is my niece, Lucy. But I don’t mention such a possibility, and it bothers me that I haven’t seen her new ship, a twin-engine Bell that was delivered to her barely a month ago. Lucy wouldn’t have a white helicopter, I reassure myself. Black or shark gray, but not white with red and blue stripes festooning the tail boom, and I don’t recognize the tail number on this one, either. I wonder if Marino has seen her new helicopter, but he seems oblivious, is busy with Sullivan and not paying any attention to what’s thudding overhead.

Well, it’s disgusting and shouldn’t be permitted.” I’m back to being upset about the turtle, about the ugliness of human nature, as I watch rubberneckers motoring after the fireboat. “People have no respect or common sense. If some goddamn idiot runs over that leatherback after all he’s been through . . .”

It’s illegal to hunt, harass, or injure sea turtles.” Labella gets up, a drysuit folded under his arm. “How about a hundred-thousand-dollar fine.”

How about jail.”

I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of you.”

Not today.”

What we’re going to do is start up the engines so we can get within reach of the buoy line,” he tells me, while Kletty attaches an aluminum dive ladder to the transom and Marino opens the scene cases again, talking loudly with Sullivan about motorcycles and how bad the roads are up here in the Northeast. “But obviously we can’t be running while you’re in the water.”

Thank you. I’m not fond of close encounters with props,” I reply.

Yes, ma’am. Roger that.” Labella smiles, and I try to forget what he looks like and how it makes me feel.

Orange-and-black nylon rustles as he unfolds the drysuit and hands it to me, asking if I need help getting into it. I tell him no, thank you, and sit down on a bench to take off my wet boots and socks, tempted to remove my wet cargo pants and long-sleeved shirt. What would make the most sense is to strip to my underwear and put on a liner, but no way I’m going to do that on a boat that has no head and is full of men, and I’m aware of how self-conscious I suddenly am. Modesty is a luxury in a profession where one works in the worst conditions imaginable, including outdoor scenes with no toilet and encounters with putrid body fluids and maggots. I’ve cleaned up in gas-station sinks before and dressed in the back of a car or van, not caring who was around.

I’m conditioned to be stoical. I know how to be indifferent and impervious. I’m damned accustomed to male colleagues looking at me and thinking tits and ass, and it doesn’t bother me or it didn’t used to because I was able to be oblivious, to be single-minded about my mission.

It’s not like me to be so damned focused on myself, and I don’t like it one damn bit as I think of things that have nothing to do with my responsibility or legal jurisdiction or what unpleasantness might await me underwater. I’m aware of the recent comments Benton made, aware of Marino’s irritating bluster as he talks loudly with Kletty and Sullivan, about boats now, and what a good idea it would be for the CFC to have one, and what an experienced captain he is.

Insecurity, or maybe it’s hurt and anger, have thinned my skin, and I mentally run through what needs to be done and how it should be done. I map out strategies precisely while anticipating what could be both useful and harmful in court because I must always assume everything ends there.

What about a liner?” I decide.

I was going to suggest it.” Labella doesn’t add what I can tell he’s thinking, which is there is no place on board to change in private.

Let’s do it.” I get up from the bench.

Inside the cabin he opens a diamond steel–plated locker and starts pulling out gray Polartec liners, checking the sizes until he finds the smallest.

Are you sure you don’t want one of us to go in with you?” He pauses in the doorway, his dark eyes on me. “I’m happy to suit up. Any of us are. Living people can stink just as bad as the dead.”

They probably can’t.”

Trust me. We can handle it.”

I close the lid of the storage locker and sit on top of it and tell him no. It’s not a good idea legally. I explain that the death obviously is suspicious and I’m working it like a homicide, and every exposure alters the case, complicates and compromises and potentially ruins it. It doesn’t take much for a jury to let the guilty go free these days, and he says he couldn’t agree more. He’s followed plenty of such travesties on the news and hears complaints all the time about crime scenes destroyed by TV drama–addicted citizens who collect the evidence and investigate on their own, saving the cops the trouble. The CSI effect, he says. Everyone’s an expert.

Everyone is, I agree wryly, and I will dance this dance alone, and it will be a dance I’ve danced before, plunging into a dark coldness where I can scarcely see, moving with the currents and following tethers to bring home the dead. I tell Labella to make sure all of them don Tyvek and gloves, and to cover a portion of the aft deck with plasticized sheets and to spread open two body pouches inside the Stokes basket. Marino has sheets and pouches, new ones that aren’t contaminated, of course. I want nothing coming in contact with the body that could transfer any type of evidence to it, I instruct.

Now, if you’ll just give me a few minutes,” I say to Labella. “Then you can come back in here and start the boat.”

When he is out of the cabin, back on the stern with Kletty, Sullivan, and Marino, I take off my cargo pants and shirt, undressing hastily with my back to the door, pulling on the soft absorbent liner. The drysuit is front-entry, and I work my bare feet through the neoprene ankle cuffs and pull up the legs. Sliding my arms into the sleeves, I ease my hands and head through the wrist and neck gaskets, finally pulling the metal-tooth zipper diagonally across my chest.

I emerge from the cabin as Labella returns to start the engines, and I look up at the big white helicopter. It’s still thud-thudding directly overhead.

I don’t like it,” I comment loudly to no one in particular. “I hope to hell someone isn’t filming.” I think of Lucy again, but it can’t be her.

She’s off in Pennsylvania, rounding up rogue pig farmers, no doubt, and I ask Kletty and Sullivan for Gore-Tex dry socks and booties, and cold-water gloves, a dive knife, a hood, and a scuba mask. Buckling on a low-profile life vest with a quick-release chest harness, I stretch out the thin rubber gasket around my neck to purge air from the drysuit, to burp it, so air bubbles don’t build up in the lower legs and upend me in the water. Labella eases the boat close to the bobbing yellow fender, cuts the engines again, and drifts while Marino reaches a long-handled aluminum gaff and dips the hook in, snagging the nylon line before I can stop him.

No, no, no.” I shake my head. “Don’t pull it. That’s not how we’re going to bring it in. Not from the boat.”

You don’t want me to hook it? Probably a lot easier and safer than jumping in. Maybe you won’t need to.”

No,” I reiterate. “I need to see what we’re dealing with. The body’s not budging until I see what we’ve got.”

Okay, whatever you say.” He releases the line.

We want to make sure nothing comes in contact with the body.” I spit in my mask to prevent it from fogging as he stows the gaff back in its holder. “Whatever damage it has, it won’t be caused by us.”

Kletty attaches a line to the rescue buckle on the back of my suit, between my shoulder blades, to keep me tethered, and I lower the dive mask over my eyes and nose and climb down the ladder, my neoprene booties feeling their way on the metal rungs. When the surf is up to my hips, I push away from the back of the boat, the drysuit suctioned to me as if I’m shrink-wrapped, and I swim toward the yellow fender.

I grab the buoy line in a gloved hand, the life vest keeping me afloat and balanced, and I submerge my masked face into the cold salty water and am startled by the body just below my feet. The dead woman is fully clothed and vertical, her arms and long white hair floating up, fanning and moving like something alive as she slowly tilts and turns in the current. I surface for air and dive again, and the way she’s rigged is grotesque and sinister.

A rope around her neck is tied to the yellow fender on the surface, while a second rope around her ankles drops tautly down and disappears in the darkness, attached to something heavy. A torture device that creates extreme tension by pulling, stretching, and dislocating the neck, the joints, ripping the person apart? Or is the purpose something else? and I suspect it is. She was tied this way for our benefit, and I look up again at the helicopter still hovering, then I hold my breath and drop below the waves.

Sunlight filters through the surface, the water green and clear just below, then turning darker shades of blue that become murkier and as black as coal. I don’t know how deep the bay is here, but whatever the rope around her ankles is attached to most likely isn’t resting on the bottom, which could be thirty feet or more below the surface. The rope runs straight down, as if there is plenty of tension in it, and I lift my face out of the water. I take a deep breath and motion for Marino to get ready with the gaff.

I can’t do anything with her right here,” I shout. “We’re going to have to somehow get the entire rig to the boat without causing a lot of damage to her.”

What entire rig?” Marino asks. “Just move her and the buoy line at the same time. Can’t you do that?”

No,” I reply. “What we’ve got to do is pull her abeam the boat, right up to the side of it, so we can cut her free without losing anything and get her in the basket.”

I float on the rough surface, the drysuit clinging tightly to me, and I can feel the chill of the water through it.

The problem’s going to be cutting the rope around her ankles,” I explain. “I don’t want to lose what she’s attached to, the conch pot or whatever it is.”

I want it. There’s not a chance I’m going to let it settle out of sight to the bottom of the bay. I will recover every damn thing in this case, whether it is a barnacle or a pot, cage, container, or cinder blocks. I ask how deep the water is, and Labella tells me forty-two feet, and I’m aware of the helicopter beating overhead. Someone is watching our every move and probably filming it, dammit.

So the line attached to the conch pot may not be that long.” I blow water out of my mouth, the waves splashing up my neck and over my chin. “It’s pulling her down while another line pulls her up.”

What other line?” Marino shouts. “It’s just one line, right?”

What we’ve got are two lines pulling her in two directions,” I emphasize. “The one tied to the fender is a separate line.”

You mean she’s entangled with something else?” Kletty puzzles.

No. I mean she’s been tied to two lines,” I repeat slowly, loudly. “One around her neck that’s attached to the fender, and the other around her ankles that leads down to whatever she’s weighted with, a conch pot or who knows what.” I spew out water as I talk.

The life vest keeps me on the surface like a cork, but the chop is getting stiffer, the wind gusting sharply. I work against the current so it doesn’t carry me farther away from the boat.

So if you pull too hard her head’s going to pop off,” Marino says, with his usual diplomacy.

She’ll come apart if we’re not really, really careful,” I reply, and by now I’m certain that whoever orchestrated the dumping of the body booby-trapped it.

I’ve no doubt it was deliberate. The person responsible wanted her discovered and intended for someone like me to be in for a gory shock when the body was pulled apart like a wishbone. I can’t imagine any other reason to tie her up this way, and I envision tugging hard on the buoy line the way Marino was about to do a few moments ago and inadvertently decapitating her. We would have recovered only her head or, more likely, no part of her at all.

We’d be forced to call in a dive team or to put on scuba gear ourselves and search the bottom of the bay, finding what we could, maybe nothing, until whatever was left surfaced and washed ashore. The fact is she might never have been found. I can only imagine how such a grisly scenario would play out in court, especially if it were caught on film by a television crew hovering over us in a helicopter. Such a scenario is unthinkable.

A jury would be repulsed, as if what happened was due to callous carelessness or complete incompetence on our part. I’m not sure anybody would understand that some diabolical individual has all but assured that this dead woman will not be recovered intact or possibly ever. Some malignant murderer wanted us to get a close look at his handiwork before it vanished right before our eyes, maybe wanted to make sure we never know who she is, and we might not if we don’t safely get her body out of the water.

What to do? My thoughts race through different possibilities, but there really is only one that seems workable, and nothing we try is foolproof. We need to be patient and careful, and we need to be lucky.

What if we cut the line around her neck?” Kletty suggests, and I notice that all of them are in white Tyvek, and what a strange sight that must be from the air. “Cut her free from the fender so nothing’s pulling on her neck?” he suggests.

I can’t,” I answer. “I can’t guarantee I could hold her up. I’m afraid whatever’s attached to the line around her ankles will pull her down and out of reach. We’ve got to somehow secure the line that’s tied around her neck without doing damage to her.” I say this to Marino as I tread against the current.

You and I are going to have to ease her to the boat, do it perfectly in sync, and hope she holds together,” I continue. “I’ll move her close enough so you can hook the line with the gaff and get hold of it, but don’t pull it. The point is to pull me, not her, and I’ll swim her in, keeping the line around her neck as slack as I can. Get the basket rigged and down, and gently pull me, not her,” I repeat, and I feel tension increase on the line between my shoulder blades.

They lower the Stokes basket, the bottom of it covered by two spread-open black body pouches, and I help guide the hook of the gaff until Marino has the buoy line. He coaxes it closer to the boat, reaching down to grab it, and her pale fingers with their painted nails suddenly are visible just below the surface. Her white hair floats up, and for an instant her face appears in the trough of a wave.