Sunlight filters through the surface, the water green and clear just below, then turning darker shades of blue that become murkier and as black as coal. I don’t know how deep the bay is here, but whatever the rope around her ankles is attached to most likely isn’t resting on the bottom, which could be thirty feet or more below the surface. The rope runs straight down, as if there is plenty of tension in it, and I lift my face out of the water. I take a deep breath and motion for Marino to get ready with the gaff.
“I can’t do anything with her right here,” I shout. “We’re going to have to somehow get the entire rig to the boat without causing a lot of damage to her.”
“What entire rig?” Marino asks. “Just move her and the buoy line at the same time. Can’t you do that?”
“No,” I reply. “What we’ve got to do is pull her abeam the boat, right up to the side of it, so we can cut her free without losing anything and get her in the basket.”
I float on the rough surface, the drysuit clinging tightly to me, and I can feel the chill of the water through it.
“The problem’s going to be cutting the rope around her ankles,” I explain. “I don’t want to lose what she’s attached to, the conch pot or whatever it is.”
I want it. There’s not a chance I’m going to let it settle out of sight to the bottom of the bay. I will recover every damn thing in this case, whether it is a barnacle or a pot, cage, container, or cinder blocks. I ask how deep the water is, and Labella tells me forty-two feet, and I’m aware of the helicopter beating overhead. Someone is watching our every move and probably filming it, dammit.
“So the line attached to the conch pot may not be that long.” I blow water out of my mouth, the waves splashing up my neck and over my chin. “It’s pulling her down while another line pulls her up.”
“What other line?” Marino shouts. “It’s just one line, right?”
“What we’ve got are two lines pulling her in two directions,” I emphasize. “The one tied to the fender is a separate line.”
“You mean she’s entangled with something else?” Kletty puzzles.
“No. I mean she’s been tied to two lines,” I repeat slowly, loudly. “One around her neck that’s attached to the fender, and the other around her ankles that leads down to whatever she’s weighted with, a conch pot or who knows what.” I spew out water as I talk.
The life vest keeps me on the surface like a cork, but the chop is getting stiffer, the wind gusting sharply. I work against the current so it doesn’t carry me farther away from the boat.
“So if you pull too hard her head’s going to pop off,” Marino says, with his usual diplomacy.
“She’ll come apart if we’re not really, really careful,” I reply, and by now I’m certain that whoever orchestrated the dumping of the body booby-trapped it.
I’ve no doubt it was deliberate. The person responsible wanted her discovered and intended for someone like me to be in for a gory shock when the body was pulled apart like a wishbone. I can’t imagine any other reason to tie her up this way, and I envision tugging hard on the buoy line the way Marino was about to do a few moments ago and inadvertently decapitating her. We would have recovered only her head or, more likely, no part of her at all.
We’d be forced to call in a dive team or to put on scuba gear ourselves and search the bottom of the bay, finding what we could, maybe nothing, until whatever was left surfaced and washed ashore. The fact is she might never have been found. I can only imagine how such a grisly scenario would play out in court, especially if it were caught on film by a television crew hovering over us in a helicopter. Such a scenario is unthinkable.
A jury would be repulsed, as if what happened was due to callous carelessness or complete incompetence on our part. I’m not sure anybody would understand that some diabolical individual has all but assured that this dead woman will not be recovered intact or possibly ever. Some malignant murderer wanted us to get a close look at his handiwork before it vanished right before our eyes, maybe wanted to make sure we never know who she is, and we might not if we don’t safely get her body out of the water.
What to do? My thoughts race through different possibilities, but there really is only one that seems workable, and nothing we try is foolproof. We need to be patient and careful, and we need to be lucky.
“What if we cut the line around her neck?” Kletty suggests, and I notice that all of them are in white Tyvek, and what a strange sight that must be from the air. “Cut her free from the fender so nothing’s pulling on her neck?” he suggests.
“I can’t,” I answer. “I can’t guarantee I could hold her up. I’m afraid whatever’s attached to the line around her ankles will pull her down and out of reach. We’ve got to somehow secure the line that’s tied around her neck without doing damage to her.” I say this to Marino as I tread against the current.
“You and I are going to have to ease her to the boat, do it perfectly in sync, and hope she holds together,” I continue. “I’ll move her close enough so you can hook the line with the gaff and get hold of it, but don’t pull it. The point is to pull me, not her, and I’ll swim her in, keeping the line around her neck as slack as I can. Get the basket rigged and down, and gently pull me, not her,” I repeat, and I feel tension increase on the line between my shoulder blades.
They lower the Stokes basket, the bottom of it covered by two spread-open black body pouches, and I help guide the hook of the gaff until Marino has the buoy line. He coaxes it closer to the boat, reaching down to grab it, and her pale fingers with their painted nails suddenly are visible just below the surface. Her white hair floats up, and for an instant her face appears in the trough of a wave.
eleven
“EASY!” I EXCLAIM TO MARINO. “HOLD IT! HOLD IT! Don’t pull.” I push my mask up. “Just hold the line and let me do the rest.”
I smell her odor, moldy and foul, and I reach down to grab her under the arms, turning my back to the boat. I hold her firmly from behind.
“Keep her rope as slack as you can,” I call out, and I dip my right shoulder under the yellow buoy line, taking on some of its tension so it’s not pulling hard on her neck. “Bring me in very, very slowly as I swim with her. Pull me, not her.”
I feel the tug at my upper back and can feel the weight of whatever the line around her ankles is attached to. She is cold, at least as cold as the sea, her skin wizened and hard. Her arms are relatively limber, but the rest of her is stiff from the cold, as stiff as she will get. Rigor mortis bypassed her weeks, possibly months, ago while she languished somewhere in storage, a place very dry and frigid.
When she begins to warm up there will be no postmortem artifacts forming to give me the usual hints about when and where she died and exactly what position she was in, because it is much too late for that. Whatever is present right now is as much as I will see, and she will rapidly go from being cold and well preserved to putrid.
Parchmentlike tallow scalp shows through her wet white hair, her ears and the tip of her nose discolored brown, and there’s the slightest frost of patchy white mold on her face and neck. She’s been dead long enough to begin mummifying, was kept somewhere quite a long while before she ended up underwater. I move her very slowly, the crown of her head under my chin, and I worry about her holding together as I keep the buoy line on top of my shoulder and feel it hard and rough against the side of my jaw.
I do anything I can to keep the fender from pulling on her, and it bobs in front of us like a fat yellow fish in lazy pursuit, and then we reach the Stokes basket rocking against the side of the boat and I maneuver both of us around, facing the men. I tell Marino to hold his line steady, to keep the body close to the surface, and I ask Sullivan and Kletty to slacken the ropes attached to the basket’s harness and the back of my drysuit.