“Hey, Doctor, do you need a hand?”
“No, I’m fine. The bag is slowing me down, that’s all.” By that time it was dangling into the control room. I felt him grab it. “Thanks.”
I was on the floor a few seconds later.
The first thing that struck me about the submarine was its smell, a stiff cocktail of sweat and machinery. It almost masked an odor I was more familiar with: death.
I turned to Grimm. The overhead lights made him seem more tangible, more human than he had in the helicopter’s carmine interior. He looked about my age, older than I expected. Mid-30s, maybe. Dark eyes, square jaw, clean-shaven. His tanned face was punctuated by a Roman nose, which swooped down to thin lips.
A small scar-less than a centimeter-sliced through his left eyebrow, just above his pupil. His right ear was set a tiny bit higher than the other. But that nose would be what set him apart when he was lying in a morgue.
He held my bag out to me.
I took it, slung it over my shoulder, unzipped it and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a box within. “Could you stand behind me as I turn, please? Be careful to step only on empty floor.”
The flash from my digital camera exploded in the cramped room as I documented its layout and contents. The ladder I had climbed down was at the aft end of the compartment. At the forward end was a bank of dials and gauges, their faces looming over a six-spoked wooden control wheel that looked like it belonged on a square-rigged galleon. To the right of the wheel was an open hatch to the next compartment forward. The opening, mounted at knee height, looked about the same diameter as a sewer cover. Moving clockwise from the hatch, I snapped pictures of a wall choked with red valve wheels and dials.
Just about all the surfaces that could be painted were the same utilitarian gray, a tone that ate up the timid light radiating from caged bulbs set above us at three-foot intervals. Running along the ceiling at the sides of the compartment were a tangle of pipes, valves and thick wires. The two periscopes were mounted in the center of the compartment, polished metal pillars that, in their “down” position, rested in a well in the floor.
In the left-hand corner of the aft bulkhead was another open hatch. A back-lighted table similar to one a photographer would use to examine negatives was positioned in a niche to the right of the door. It looked like a transparent navigation chart was clipped to its dark surface.
Continuing to my right, I photographed what looked like the sonar station-two chairs in front of the usual dials and switches, plus two rectangular displays mounted on the bulkhead and two circular ones mounted on a counter. The last two workstations were studded with bulkier valves and toggles. Crammed among them were thin, vertical glass gauges and a silhouette of the submarine punctuated with red and green lights.
But the most noticeable aspect of the final crew station was the dead man lying on the floor in front of it.
“What are those controls for?” I asked Grimm without turning to look at him.
“Diving and surfacing.”
The life vest’s puffy embrace was complicating every movement, so I unsnapped it and draped it on the ladder, then hung the camera around my neck and reached back for my tape recorder. Holding the cigarette box-sized black device by my mouth, I spoke.
“In control room, deceased lying prone eighteen to twenty-four inches from diving and surfacing control panel.”
The man was about five and a half feet tall, his jet-black hair trimmed short on top and shaved to stubble on the sides. His blue jumpsuit was streaked with dark smudges. One arm-his right one-lay at his side, bent ninety degrees at the elbow, fingers splayed amid streaks of blood. His left arm stretched out straight toward the console. Both knees were bent a few degrees.
The floor around him was devoid of blood, although I could see a few smears near the aft periscope. I moved a few steps toward the body, scrutinizing the deck to make sure I didn’t trample any evidence.
“Two entrance wounds in back, left side, superior to spine of scapula.
No powder marks visible. No blood pooling evident.” I switched the recorder to my left hand and rummaged in my bag until I found a collapsible ruler. “Wounds spaced approximately… 12.25 centimeters apart. More medial wound located approximately… 1 centimeter above scapular spine and… 8 centimeters laterally from midline. Second wound located… 4 centimeters directly lateral to first wound. Wound diameter approximately 9 millimeters.”
I took a picture of the ruler next to the wounds, then turned to the smears on the floor. I snapped a close-up picture of them, let the camera dangle again and stuck the ruler in my pocket. The next thing out of my bag was a bottle of Hemastix. I swabbed one of the strips near the edge of the nearest stain, waited a few moments and checked it against the results diagram on the bottle. It was blood.
“Blood stains near center of room, approximately 3.5 feet behind deceased. Smeared parallel to deceased’s body.”
I stood back up. The room was rife with evidence. But with Larsen counting the seconds until he and the rest of the SEAL team could storm down the ladder and take control, I had to ignore the impulse to scrutinize every surface, document every detail.
“OK,” I said. “Grimm, I need your help. Without touching anything, can you tell me which controls would need to be activated for the submarine to surface, and what position those controls are in?”
Behind me, I heard the SEAL shuffle in a few feet closer.
“Well, you’d need the whole engineering crew to do a normal, controlled surface. The trim and ballast controls are on the bulkhead to starboard. Your right. But you could do an emergency blow and surface from here. Um… that lever there, the one with the red plastic grip, that toggles the diving tanks. Those five switches in a line underneath it control the sub’s ballast tanks. They look… yeah, they’re all in the ‘emergency blow’ position.”
“Thanks,” I said, stuffing the ruler back in my bag and digging out some static print-lift sheets. Leaning in, I could see that although some fine droplets of blood had been sprayed across the entire panel, I was going to have to check for latents on the smaller switches. But the diving tank switch… yep, there it was. Smears of blood on top. There would be some nice visible prints on the bottom of the grip.
I took one-handed pictures of the switches, zooming in as far as possible. Their sides were flat. Flipping them would be a two-fingered operation; the thumb would fit on one surface and the first finger on the other.
Pressing a lift sheet against the first switch, I pulled the sheet’s cover off, waited for the print to take, then removed it and held it up to the light. It was pretty much what I expected-a hash of interlacing prints. Tough to determine which was most recent. The rest of the switches yielded the same result. I photographed all the sheets, framing each next to the ruler’s metric scale.
The red handle, though, was going to tell us a lot more. I crouched and looked up at its underside. Even from a few feet away, I could see the contours of three pristine prints. I took separate pictures of all three. Lifting them might be a little trickier. Under different circumstances, I’d have a technician come in and remove the whole handle.
I held the tray of fingerprint powder in my left hand like an artist’s palette, dipping a finger-sized brush into its contents. Trying not to breathe, I swabbed the prints with the brush until the bottom of the handle seemed coated with years’ worth of gray dust.
Now I could exhale. I blew the excess powder off the prints and put the brush and powder away. A piece of clear tape pulled each of the three prints, their intricacies mapped by the powder, off the handle. I snapped images of them beside the ruler and filed them in separate evidence envelopes. The center of one print was marred by a thick vertical streak.