“If her head appeared first, she’s upright.”
“Well, she definitely was headfirst,” he says.
“If the conch pot, the body, and the buoy are all part of the same line or rig, I find that very curious,” I insist. “It’s contradictory. One is pulling her down while the other is pulling her up.”
“I’ve got everything on video if you want to duck into the wheelhouse and take a look.”
“If you could get me a copy, I’d really appreciate it,” I reply. “What I need to do now is to take a look at the turtle.”
It isn’t mere curiosity on my part. From where we are on the upper deck I can see a wound near the leatherback’s black-and-grayish-white mottled neck, on a ridge at the upper edge of its carapace, an area of bright pink abrasion that Pamela Quick is wiping with Betadine pads.
“I’ll leave the body in the water until I’m ready to recover it and transport it to shore,” I tell Klemens, as Marino climbs up the ladder with white Tyvek coveralls, boot covers, and gloves. “The longer it stays cold the better,” I add. “I’m certainly no aficionado of fishing tackle,” I then say, as I take off my down jacket, “but why would someone pick a boat bumper as opposed to fishing floats for a conch or lobster pot?”
“These watermen are like magpies and collect all sorts of things,” Klemens says.
“We don’t know that a waterman has anything to do with this,” I remind him.
“Detergent and soda pop,” he continues, “and Clorox bottles, Styrofoam, bumpers that come loose from docks, anything you can think of that will float and is easy to find, not to mention cheap or, better yet, free. But you’re right. That’s assuming this has anything to do with fishing.”
“It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with fishing,” Marino says bluntly.
“More likely, the point was to use a line with a lot of weight and dump her overboard,” Klemens agrees.
“You wouldn’t use a float of any type if that’s what you were up to.” Marino has no doubt about it as we suit up in protective clothing. “You sure as hell wouldn’t attach a big yellow bumper unless maybe you wanted her to be found damn fast.”
“And hopefully she has been,” I comment, because the better shape the body is in, the better chance I have of finding out what I need to know.
“Using a bumper or float at all? I agree. I think someone wants her found,” asserts the firefighter named Jack. “And I bowled against you before,” he says to Marino. “You’re not half bad.”
“Don’t remember you, and I would if you were half decent.”
“The Firing Pins. Right?”
“That’s us. Oh, yeah, now I’m remembering. You’re the Shootin’ Blanks.” Marino picks on him.
“Naw.”
“Could’ve sworn it.”
“You mind I ask why?” Klemens watches me pull on heavy-duty black nitrile gloves. “How come you’re treating my fireboat like a crime scene?”
“He’s part of one.” I mean the turtle is, and that I intend to handle him like evidence.
nine
WORKING SHOE COVERS OVER MY BOOTS, I CLIMB DOWN the ladder while Marino and Jack continue to banter.
I pick my way around equipment and rescuers, the deck heaving slowly in the swelling surf, waves breaking over the edge of the dive platform and rushing around my feet. The beating of helicopter blades is distant but relentless, and I feel the coldness of the water through my Tyvek-covered boots as I move close to Pamela Quick, who is completely preoccupied and in no mood for my company.
In her mid- to late thirties, I estimate, she is pretty in an off-putting way, with wide gray eyes, a square chin, and hard-set mouth, her long pale blond hair tied back and under a cap. She’s surprisingly small and delicate for the large creatures she routinely handles, and as steady as a professional surfer on the rocking platform, emptying a syringe into a green-top Vacutainer tube that has the additive heparin to prevent blood from clotting.
“I’m Dr. Scarpetta.” I remind her we talked briefly on the phone earlier today. “I need to get some basic information and take a look, and then I’ll be out of your way.”
“I can’t permit you to examine him.” She is as brisk and chilly as the water and the wind. “He’s stressed enough as is, and that’s the number-one danger right now. Stressing him.” She says it with emphasis, as if I might be the source of it. “These animals aren’t used to being out of the water and touched by humans. Stress will kill them. I’ll send you my report, and that should answer any questions you have.”
“I understand, and later I’d certainly appreciate a copy of your report,” I reply. “But it’s important I know anything you can tell me now.”
She withdraws the needle from the rubber top and says, “Water temp is fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit, the ambient temp fifty-seven.”
“What can you tell me about him?” I have no choice but to be insistent.
“About him?” She glances up at me as if I have just offended her. “Not exactly relevant for your purposes.”
“At the moment, I consider everything relevant. He may be part of a crime scene.”
“He’s a critically endangered turtle who almost died because of reckless, careless human beings.”
“And I’m not one of those reckless, careless human beings.” I understand her hostility. “I want him to thrive as much as you do.”
She glances up at me condescendingly, angrily.
“Let’s do this,” I then say. “Tell me what you know.”
She doesn’t reply.
“I’m not the one wasting time,” I add pointedly.
“HR thirty-six, RR is two. Both times by Doppler,” she says. “Cloacal temp is seventy-four degrees.” She drips blood into a white plastic i-STAT cartridge.
“Is it unusual that his body temperature is some twenty-five degrees higher than the water he was in?”
“Leatherbacks are gigantothermic.”
“Meaning they can maintain a core temperature independently of the environmental temperature,” I reply. “That’s rather remarkable, and not what I’d expect.”
“Like the dinosaurs, they can survive in waters as warm as the tropics or cold enough to kill a human in minutes.”
“Certainly defies what I understand about reptiles.” I squat near her as the boat sways back and forth and water laps.
“Reptilian physiology is unable to explain the biology of dinosaurs.”
“You’re not really calling this a dinosaur?” I’m baffled and strangely unsettled, considering how my day began.
“A gigantic reptile that has been here for more than sixty-five million years, the earth’s last living dinosaur.” She continues to act as if I’m to blame. “And like the dinosaur is about to become extinct.”
She inserts the cartridge into a handheld blood analyzer while frigid water splashes over the platform and soaks the cuffs of my coveralls and begins to wick up the legs of my pants underneath.
“Fishing gear, ignorant people digging up their eggs, illegal poaching, speedboats, oil spills, and plastic pollution,” she continues, with undisguised disgust. “At least one-third of all leatherbacks have plastic in their stomachs. And they don’t do one damn thing to us. All they want to do is swim, eat jellies, and reproduce.”
The leatherback slowly lifts his watermelon-sized head and looks directly at me as if to emphasize his caretaker’s point. Nares flare as he exhales loudly, his protruding eyes dark pools on either side of a beaklike mouth that reminds me of a crooked jack-o’-lantern smile.
“I understand the way you feel better than you’ll ever imagine, and I’m eager to get out of your way,” I say to Pamela Quick. “But I have to know about his injuries before I can finish up here.”
“Moderate abrasions circumferentially around the skin-carapace line of left distal shoulder extending about three centimeters on distal posterior margin of the left-front flipper,” she describes with steely affect. “Associated with an abraded area of the distal leading edge.” She reads the blood test results on the digital display.