Noting the rebuke, Qui waved at him before aligning the cruiser with trawler, gently bumping alongside the Sanabela.
“Help us tie off, Uncle!” Qui called to Estrada, who nodded to someone outside her line of vision.
Lines were tossed and Tino and Sergio coordinated with Estrada’s crew to lash the boats together.
From the side of the cruiser, Quiana looked up into the piercing eyes and the inscrutable face of Luis Estrada where he stood aboard the Sanabela. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, still robust but pale and uncharacteristically grim.
While Tino held the ladder steady, Qui handed off the evidence kit to Estrada. As she stepped aboard the foul-smelling fishing vessel, Qui immediately wished she hadn’t eaten that pork and rice lunch at the sidewalk cafe in the plaza.
“So Uncle, what sort of tragedy do we have? Accident?”
“This way. See for yourself.”
He maneuvered easily across the deck, while she cautiously picked her way past fishing paraphernalia and other obstacles. Streaked with an enormous yellow-brown stain, the deck had forty years of smeared and ground-in fish guts and tobacco. He suddenly stopped ahead of her, and she looked up. What she saw made her gasp and wince, her hand flying to her mouth. Suspended before them at eye-level dangled a heavily burdened net that slowly twisted with the shifting winds and seesaw motion of the boat.
Incrementally, by degrees, her brain made sense of what her eyes dared tell her, that the grid of the net held a mass of entwined bodies.
“Que horror…” muttered Sergio, beside Quiana, slipping a flashlight into her hand.
Tino joined them, standing stone-like, as fascinated as he was repulsed.
Estrada said, “I count three heads.”
For once Estrada had not exaggerated a situation. No one could exaggerate this. This was real, and in real life bodies smelled and tore at one’s senses like hungry ghosts screaming at the living.
The three officers began examining every nook and cranny of the net and visible portions of the bodies.
“Obviously, no accident,” muttered Sergio.
Tino added, “Pure chance…a trawler out here, raising the dead.”
“Curse of the Sanabela,” Qui muttered. As if to punctuate her words, more half-dead eels and crabs dropped from the net, scuttling slowly into the shadows near the railing.
Tino lifted a camera and began taking photos, saying, “Still life takes on new meaning.”
Estrada shook his head at the words. Qui said to him, “Uncle, it’s how we deal with traumatic death. Bad jokes.”
Qui took a deep breath, her nose already de-sensitized to the odor. She stepped closer to the winch and held onto the solid metal to mentally ground herself. The death net continued to sway ever so slowly below the hoist and hook, making a high-pitched, irritating sound-sandpaper against raw nerves. A sound that made Qui want to reach out and stop the swaying until she remembered what was in the net.
Qui again stared through the crisscrossed netting at the tangled bodies. Two white-skinned males and a paler, snowier-skinned female. All of them showing signs of torture: contusions, burns, and marks indicating some sort of binding of the wrists. Some of the bruising created a shadowed blush about the woman’s neck, and the chain had cut deep furrows in her thigh. Cigarette burns dotted the men. The same thick gray chain snaked around the lower legs, creating a knot of bodies bound together by a massive ornate lock of a type she’d never seen before. Qui noticed Estrada also staring at the lock, and she gauged his weathered face, his whiskers drooping in the damp night, the deep fissures of his wrinkles without his customary smile to lift them. She’d caught him in an unguarded moment of total despair.
“Qui…why don’t we just do what my men want?” Estrada asked.
“What exactly do they want?”
Estrada conspiratorially whispered, “Send them back to the deep, where they came from. It’d be so easy. It’s why I left them dangling in the net. Why I didn’t bring the boat in…why I insisted it be you.”
“Would solve our problem, wouldn’t it, Uncle? Pretend this never happened?”
“Yes. What do you think?”
She looked at Tino and Sergio. Each in turn raised his shoulders. Tino finally said, “Your call, Lieutenant.”
Sergio lit a cigarette for Tino, handed it to him, and then did the same for himself.
Now standing so close to the bodies that she again smelled the waterlogged decay that had taken hold, Qui asked Estrada, “Did you or your men touch any of them-or anything within the net?”
“Are you accusing me of stealing from the dead?”
She ignored his outrage. “Rings, watches, jewelry? I need to know. Such things help us to identify the dead.”
He gave her a pained look and a little shake of the head.
“I know, I know, but I have to ask, Uncle.”
“Sure…sure you do…you’re a detective now.”
The warm waters of the Caribbean, always kind to the living, were brutal to bodies left in the gulf. The normally sun-dappled waters made a poor preserver, bloating the bodies like parade floats-filling the lining between epidermal and sub-epidermal layers of skin with gases from rotting flesh that eventually pulled apart all semblance of outer cohesion, doing strange and surreal things to the features and the body. Floaters were a common occurrence in Cuban waters for many reasons, but not many were found in this manner, meant to be a forever-lost trio.
Captain Estrada stared at his crewmen before saying, “These are fishermen, Qui. Something like this comes out of the sea no one dares touch it, not even for a new watch. This is no gift from the depths. This is evil.”
Listening to him, she felt strangely disconnected, standing here on a gently rocking boat as if she were a gatekeeper between the dead and the living. All that ground her in the present was her queasy stomach, a constant reminder that she was still among the living, that this was not some horrid nightmare from which she might awake to bright sunshine and squabbling birds. She was here, the bodies were here, and it was up to her to find out why and how these once vital people had died. She was their advocate, and she began to feel both possessive and protective of them. Odd how this sense of ownership flashed through her mind, only briefly replaced by a repeating phrase: up to me…up to me…up to me. This was what she trained for, this was what she wanted, right? But she didn’t feel that sense of detachment she’d enjoyed in training, instead she felt a ball of emotions too complex to identify at the moment. Her father had spoken about similar feelings during the revolution, a war fought without a given battlefield, but rather guerilla-style, scattered across the island world of Cuba. Once he’d spoken of a day when he stood amid a field of bloodied bodies-still wired from an adrenaline high. He’d avoided speaking of it for years, saying no words existed for so eerie a sensation. But now, she knew what he’d meant-a co-mingling of gratefulness and elation at being alive, feeling an irrational invincibility-perhaps even invisibility to the enemy, and an overwhelming sense of guilt at surviving. He claimed the more bloodshed he’d seen, the more a profound sense of isolation set in along with depression and hopelessness, all due to a disagreement that had ended in mass death.
She mused: I don’t believe that a soldier’s death in guerilla warfare is the same as stone cold murder. A seagull’s shrieking dive to snatch an escaping crab ended Qui’s reverie.
She looked at Estrada. “Murder is an evil business, Uncle. No doubt of that.”
Clearing his throat, Estrada repeated, “I also asked for you, Qui…” he repeated, “’cause my men… they wanted to disobey me, to throw these children of God back into the ocean.” He raised his shoulders and frowned. “They fear for what will come of this.”
“I don’t blame them in the least,” she quietly replied, momentarily considering the possibility of her failing the dead, being unable to solve their murders.