Peter Clement
Mortal Remains
The fourth book in the Earl Garnet series, 2003
The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the following: “Stand By Me” by Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, Ben E. King © 1961 Mike & Jerry Music, LLC, Jerry Lieber Music, Mike Stoller Music. Copyright renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” by Bob Dylan © copyright 1966 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
To Vyta, Sean, and James
Chapter 1
Monday, October 22, 10:00 A.M.
Near Hampton Junction in the
southern Adirondack Mountains
Mark Roper followed sheriff Dan Evans down, staying so close to the man’s flippers that they occasionally brushed his face mask. But he didn’t want to get too far behind the tunnel of light from Dan’s headlamp, which led them ever deeper into the darkness. Unable to see anything but black outside its range, Mark couldn’t tell up, down, or sideways unless he focused on the illuminated streams of algae streaking at them. Like snow against a windshield, they heightened his sense of speed.
The cold penetrated his hood, giving him a doozy of an ice-cream headache; it burrowed through the vulcanized rubber of his dry suit and a double layer of thermal underwear, then through skin, muscle, and bone to settle directly into his marrow. Despite diving gloves, even his fingers threatened to freeze up, but he kept his grip on the safety line, kicking and propelling himself ever lower, moving hand over hand. God, when would they get there? he wondered, repeatedly having to pinch his nose through his mask, then blow to relieve the painful pressure in his ears.
He’d been down this deep before, but in the warm blue ocean off Hawaii. Here he might as well have been swimming in ink. Though the water was clear, the mountain lake, nestled in a steep gorge, was so narrow and deep that it swallowed most of the sunshine from the surface. Other dives they’d made in the district were shallow, but with this one claustrophobia pressed in with smothering force. He couldn’t let himself get far from Dan, who carried the big handheld spotlight. If he ended up alone, his own headlamp would be too feeble at this depth, and Mark wasn’t at all sure that he’d be able to hold panic at bay. A dangerous situation, because down here cold and disorientation were killers. Already he was breathing too hard, the sound rushing loudly through his ears, and he made a conscious effort to slow it down.
A white cord trailed out in front of them to nothingness. If it hadn’t been there, the end abruptly marking where the bottom lay, they might have hit the thick layer of silt and muck that covered the lake’s floor and thrown up such a cloud of debris they’d be in a virtual blackout that not even a lamp could penetrate. As it was, their arrival kicked up plumes of dirt that hung suspended around them like giant gray fronds.
Dan looked at the dive computer on his sleeve. Mark did the same, barely able to read the screen. According to the numbers – measurements of the cold, the pressure, the depth, the altitude of the lake – the calculation told him they could only stay about fifteen minutes before having to head back. Their ascent would be no faster than a half foot per second, and they would have to make a three-minute safety stop fifteen feet from the surface to allow the release of excess nitrogen from their bloodstreams. The clinical consequences if he got it wrong – multiple emboli, pneumothoraces, mediastinal emphysema, subcutaneous emphysema, all of them air bubbles where they shouldn’t be – were nasty enough that he’d die screaming. As county coroner, in the last four years Mark had seen three dive victims with just such injuries, and he sure as hell was going to be careful.
With so little time, he wanted to get going. But the silt remained – in fact, seemed to grow worse – making it impossible to see at all, cutting him off from Dan. Waiting for it to settle felt like an eternity, and he began to doubt his senses, unable to make out even his own bubbles or tell if the rope in his hand led to the surface or the bottom.
Stop! Think! Act! he said to himself. It was the diver’s credo to stay out of trouble. He breathed deeply, slowly, to gain control. Then he adjusted the pressure in his suit with a small squirt of compressed air to maintain neutral buoyancy.
Dan came into view, floating just below. Mark suspected that he, too, was trying to conquer a sense of panic and probably regretting the day they’d flown off to Hawaii together for the week of scuba training that would qualify them for these forensic dives. But Mark had pushed the idea so they’d no longer have to wait around for an outside team every time someone drowned.
Finally, the particles in the water cleared.
The area around them hadn’t so much as a strand of seaweed on it. But it wouldn’t be easy to spot what they were after, he decided, surveying the little he could see of the barren landscape. The hooks from the search-and-rescue boat must have snagged their catch deep within this soft mush because anything of any weight would have buried itself under its surface.
Unless the pulling had rooted up the rest of the remains before the limb tore off, he knew they’d never find them.
Dan slowly turned and swept the surrounding area with the probe of his lamp. It barely penetrated ten feet before the thick, absolute darkness sucked it up.
Hopeless, Mark thought.
Indeed, after a complete rotation, they had seen nothing.
Mark took a reading from his compass. The draggers had told him the target should lie approximately north to northeast from the anchor line. He oriented himself so that what they were looking for should be in front of him, if the men above had been right in their guesstimates. He handed Dan his headlamp, took the powerful handheld light, and started forward.
He’d gone only twenty feet when it loomed up before him.
A headless thorax, rib cage included, protruded out of the soft mud, resting at a slight angle. The left humerus and a more or less intact right arm trailed into the black sediment, making it seem as if the skeleton were trying to push itself up out of its grave. The bottom half, the pelvis and legs, remained out of sight. There was no sign of the skull.
Earlier that morning Dan’s volunteers had been dragging the lake for the body of a seventy-nine-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease who’d wandered off the previous weekend. Retrieval should have meant a simple transfer to the undertakers in Saratoga Springs, the paperwork to follow. Instead they hauled up the bones of a left forearm barely attached to the remnants of a fingerless hand. They called Dan and Mark, but not before dropping an anchor with a line attached.
Up top Dan had shown Mark the limb as they prepared for the dive. It was pretty well stripped of flesh, but enough cartilage and connective tissue held it together that one of the grapple prongs had caught the space between the ulna and radius, the long bones running from the elbow to the wrist.
To Mark’s amazement, the bones’ owner appeared equally intact. Except down here the strands of remaining tissue waved in the water like tattered clothing. Using the beam, he signaled Dan to swim over.
Everything had been colored brownish green by a heavy overgrowth of algae. That the flesh and organs were otherwise mostly gone certainly meant many years had passed since this person went in the water. That some of the bones were still connected at all, he thought, had to be from the preservative effects of cold and mud on gristle. Certainly the absence of a head was no surprise. The bony portion that joined a skull atop a spine was a small peg no bigger than the end phalanx of the little finger. In life it took a neckful of muscle, sinew, and cartilage to hold everything together, more than for any other joint in the body. No amount of cold mud could preserve that much connective tissue and keep everything in one piece. The skull would have detached from the spine and stayed in the sludge at the first yank of the grappling hooks. Better not go rummaging about for it either. There’d be other much smaller bones scattered about in the sediment, such as the fingers. One of them might have a ring on it that would help with identification. They’d have to get a forensic dive team with specially insulated suits to sift through the gunk and, using a modified scopes basket, do a proper retrieval. And they’d have to do it pronto – or wait until next spring to finish. Freeze-up could occur by late October, early November around here, and no one in his right mind would go diving for a skeleton once it meant cutting through ice with a chain saw.