“It’s illegal to hunt, harass, or injure sea turtles.” Labella gets up, a drysuit folded under his arm. “How about a hundred-thousand-dollar fine.”
“How about jail.”
“I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of you.”
“Not today.”
“What we’re going to do is start up the engines so we can get within reach of the buoy line,” he tells me, while Kletty attaches an aluminum dive ladder to the transom and Marino opens the scene cases again, talking loudly with Sullivan about motorcycles and how bad the roads are up here in the Northeast. “But obviously we can’t be running while you’re in the water.”
“Thank you. I’m not fond of close encounters with props,” I reply.
“Yes, ma’am. Roger that.” Labella smiles, and I try to forget what he looks like and how it makes me feel.
Orange-and-black nylon rustles as he unfolds the drysuit and hands it to me, asking if I need help getting into it. I tell him no, thank you, and sit down on a bench to take off my wet boots and socks, tempted to remove my wet cargo pants and long-sleeved shirt. What would make the most sense is to strip to my underwear and put on a liner, but no way I’m going to do that on a boat that has no head and is full of men, and I’m aware of how self-conscious I suddenly am. Modesty is a luxury in a profession where one works in the worst conditions imaginable, including outdoor scenes with no toilet and encounters with putrid body fluids and maggots. I’ve cleaned up in gas-station sinks before and dressed in the back of a car or van, not caring who was around.
I’m conditioned to be stoical. I know how to be indifferent and impervious. I’m damned accustomed to male colleagues looking at me and thinking tits and ass, and it doesn’t bother me or it didn’t used to because I was able to be oblivious, to be single-minded about my mission.
It’s not like me to be so damned focused on myself, and I don’t like it one damn bit as I think of things that have nothing to do with my responsibility or legal jurisdiction or what unpleasantness might await me underwater. I’m aware of the recent comments Benton made, aware of Marino’s irritating bluster as he talks loudly with Kletty and Sullivan, about boats now, and what a good idea it would be for the CFC to have one, and what an experienced captain he is.
Insecurity, or maybe it’s hurt and anger, have thinned my skin, and I mentally run through what needs to be done and how it should be done. I map out strategies precisely while anticipating what could be both useful and harmful in court because I must always assume everything ends there.
“What about a liner?” I decide.
“I was going to suggest it.” Labella doesn’t add what I can tell he’s thinking, which is there is no place on board to change in private.
“Let’s do it.” I get up from the bench.
Inside the cabin he opens a diamond steel–plated locker and starts pulling out gray Polartec liners, checking the sizes until he finds the smallest.
“Are you sure you don’t want one of us to go in with you?” He pauses in the doorway, his dark eyes on me. “I’m happy to suit up. Any of us are. Living people can stink just as bad as the dead.”
“They probably can’t.”
“Trust me. We can handle it.”
I close the lid of the storage locker and sit on top of it and tell him no. It’s not a good idea legally. I explain that the death obviously is suspicious and I’m working it like a homicide, and every exposure alters the case, complicates and compromises and potentially ruins it. It doesn’t take much for a jury to let the guilty go free these days, and he says he couldn’t agree more. He’s followed plenty of such travesties on the news and hears complaints all the time about crime scenes destroyed by TV drama–addicted citizens who collect the evidence and investigate on their own, saving the cops the trouble. The CSI effect, he says. Everyone’s an expert.
Everyone is, I agree wryly, and I will dance this dance alone, and it will be a dance I’ve danced before, plunging into a dark coldness where I can scarcely see, moving with the currents and following tethers to bring home the dead. I tell Labella to make sure all of them don Tyvek and gloves, and to cover a portion of the aft deck with plasticized sheets and to spread open two body pouches inside the Stokes basket. Marino has sheets and pouches, new ones that aren’t contaminated, of course. I want nothing coming in contact with the body that could transfer any type of evidence to it, I instruct.
“Now, if you’ll just give me a few minutes,” I say to Labella. “Then you can come back in here and start the boat.”
When he is out of the cabin, back on the stern with Kletty, Sullivan, and Marino, I take off my cargo pants and shirt, undressing hastily with my back to the door, pulling on the soft absorbent liner. The drysuit is front-entry, and I work my bare feet through the neoprene ankle cuffs and pull up the legs. Sliding my arms into the sleeves, I ease my hands and head through the wrist and neck gaskets, finally pulling the metal-tooth zipper diagonally across my chest.
I emerge from the cabin as Labella returns to start the engines, and I look up at the big white helicopter. It’s still thud-thudding directly overhead.
“I don’t like it,” I comment loudly to no one in particular. “I hope to hell someone isn’t filming.” I think of Lucy again, but it can’t be her.
She’s off in Pennsylvania, rounding up rogue pig farmers, no doubt, and I ask Kletty and Sullivan for Gore-Tex dry socks and booties, and cold-water gloves, a dive knife, a hood, and a scuba mask. Buckling on a low-profile life vest with a quick-release chest harness, I stretch out the thin rubber gasket around my neck to purge air from the drysuit, to burp it, so air bubbles don’t build up in the lower legs and upend me in the water. Labella eases the boat close to the bobbing yellow fender, cuts the engines again, and drifts while Marino reaches a long-handled aluminum gaff and dips the hook in, snagging the nylon line before I can stop him.
“No, no, no.” I shake my head. “Don’t pull it. That’s not how we’re going to bring it in. Not from the boat.”
“You don’t want me to hook it? Probably a lot easier and safer than jumping in. Maybe you won’t need to.”
“No,” I reiterate. “I need to see what we’re dealing with. The body’s not budging until I see what we’ve got.”
“Okay, whatever you say.” He releases the line.
“We want to make sure nothing comes in contact with the body.” I spit in my mask to prevent it from fogging as he stows the gaff back in its holder. “Whatever damage it has, it won’t be caused by us.”
Kletty attaches a line to the rescue buckle on the back of my suit, between my shoulder blades, to keep me tethered, and I lower the dive mask over my eyes and nose and climb down the ladder, my neoprene booties feeling their way on the metal rungs. When the surf is up to my hips, I push away from the back of the boat, the drysuit suctioned to me as if I’m shrink-wrapped, and I swim toward the yellow fender.
I grab the buoy line in a gloved hand, the life vest keeping me afloat and balanced, and I submerge my masked face into the cold salty water and am startled by the body just below my feet. The dead woman is fully clothed and vertical, her arms and long white hair floating up, fanning and moving like something alive as she slowly tilts and turns in the current. I surface for air and dive again, and the way she’s rigged is grotesque and sinister.
A rope around her neck is tied to the yellow fender on the surface, while a second rope around her ankles drops tautly down and disappears in the darkness, attached to something heavy. A torture device that creates extreme tension by pulling, stretching, and dislocating the neck, the joints, ripping the person apart? Or is the purpose something else? and I suspect it is. She was tied this way for our benefit, and I look up again at the helicopter still hovering, then I hold my breath and drop below the waves.