“Randy Nicholson is out there somewhere. Zombie, dead man...who knows? The bay is as good a place to look as any.”
“I have no problem with spending the rest of the day diving,” Diego assured him. “The Bureau and county legal departments are still wrestling with Diaz-Douglas, but they tell me they’ll win in the end. It will just take time. I’m with you, certain those people sent an empty casket to the cemetery. They have to answer for it. But the paperwork is killing me. Don’t you wish we could go rogue sometimes? We could say screw the law and make the bad guys talk. Or not. I don’t really see me torturing old Mr. Douglas.”
“No, but bureaucracy is a pain in the ass,” Brett agreed. “Still, if we find Antoine Deveau in this casket, that’s another step toward finding out what’s going on. I’m really hoping we can find at least part of Randy Nicholson in the bay somewhere, because that will give Kinny three bodies to work with. Matt is with Pierre Deveau now. We’re hoping he can identify ‘Boss Man’ from a sheaf of photos Bryant has been keeping on suspected members of the Barillo family. If he can, we can make an arrest and just maybe get him to talk.”
“Yeah—if torture was legal. No one in that family talks.”
Brett shrugged. “They may not talk, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be tripped up. And we have to solve this one.”
The good thing was that no one intended to let up. Even without the paranoid populace, they had the full support of the powers that be.
Murderous zombies were not good for tourism.
They reached Sea Life ahead of their ten o’clock appointment to meet the Coast Guard and headed up to the offices, where Rick, Lara and Meg were waiting. So were their wetsuits, and the two men changed quickly; the rest of their gear would be supplied onboard.
“How’s Cocoa doing?” Brett asked, trying not to look at Lara, because it was impossible to look at her and not smile like an idiot.
“She’s swimming around and around. It’s as if she knows. As if she’s waiting for us to get the show on the road,” Rick said.
“We should probably head down, then,” Brett said. “Lara can start talking to her to calm her down or even get in the water with her.”
“Sure,” she said.
He noticed from the corner of his eye that she didn’t look directly at him, either.
He was eager to get out there, praying that they could find a needle in a haystack. He realized he was also anxious for the day to go by and for it to be night again.
The Coast Guard cutter Vigilance, again with Lieutenant Gunderson captaining, arrived at precisely ten. Rick and Lara started off in the water, leading Cocoa out of the lagoon.
Brett was grateful to the geeks once again; they’d run the calculations for the night Antoine had been buried the first time, adding in the coordinates where they’d found the other body parts and taking into consideration the different timing, the tides, the currents and the weather.
Their first two dives proved to be futile, but on the third Cocoa chittered away at Lara, trying to lure her down. They were just off a sandbar. Seaweed and sea grasses grew around broken branches of old coral. The water here was deeper than he’d expected, because at one time the area had been dredged to allow for the passage of larger boats. Lara managed to free dive down to about twenty-five feet, but the dolphin still seemed agitated, as if she was trying to lead them farther. Lara went up for air, but Brett, with Rick and the Coast Guard divers, headed down to the area that seemed to be disturbing Cocoa.
He wasn’t the one to find the decaying and half-eaten torso, and neither was Rick. It was one of the Coast Guard divers.
They bagged the torso and headed up with it. Breaking the surface, Brett lifted his mask and looked over at Lara. She was treading water without any trouble, even though it was choppy, waiting for them. He could see one of Miami’s infamous almost-daily summer storms on the horizon.
He nodded at her without smiling and told her quickly what they’d found. The nod she gave in return was equally serious. The find had been a grim one.
Cocoa broke the surface, squealing loudly, and Lara praised her effusively.
Back on the boat, Lieutenant Gunderson warned them that they had time for just one more dive that day, because the storm was coming in quickly. “That dolphin is amazing, like a cadaver dog,” he said.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs. But dolphins are much smarter,” Rick said.
“How much time do we have?” Brett asked Gunderson. “Another hour?”
“About that,” Gunderson told him.
“Good. We have one more sandbank where we think something might have gotten caught. If we move, we can make it.” He looked questioningly at Lara.
She nodded. “I’m game.”
They sat drinking coffee until the cutter reached the specified coordinates.