“I need to get the basket under her. She’s got to be on the surface as much as we can manage so I can push the basket down and slide it under her.” I spit out water as waves slap my face and rush inside my mouth and nose. “But first we’ve got to get the conch pot up, got to free her from the ropes to prevent any further damage, and so I can manipulate her.”
Taking a deep breath, I pull my mask down and duck back under the surface, pushing my way beneath the body and grabbing for the line that connects her to the weighty ballast that dangles at the bottom of the bay. A dark jacket and blouse blossom up from her waist, and her gray skirt billows out around her hips, revealing panties and bare legs that are pale and thin, moving as the water moves, fanning and swaying. The yellow line around her ankles is wrapped multiple times and drops straight down, vanishing in water that gets dark and impenetrable.
I tug the rope and feel what is attached to it move freely, which isn’t an accurate indication of how heavy it is, because mass doesn’t change underwater, but weight does, due to buoyancy. I’m able to run the rope over my shoulder and swim with it to the surface, where I take in gulps of air. I swim to the Stokes basket, where Marino reaches down to assist, his big hand outstretched as he bends over the boat rail. Kletty holds the buoy line while Marino secures the one I just gave him, and I turn her over facedown in the water and move the basket so that it and the body are side by side.
Struggling with waves pushing and the current pulling, I roll her over into the basket so that she is on her back. Her shriveled face stares blindly through cloudy eyes that are dry and shrunken by dehydration.
“Hold everything tight!” I slide the dive knife out of the rubber sheath strapped around my lower left leg. “I’m cutting her loose. The buoy line first, then the other. Hold tight!”
I saw through both lines a good twelve inches above the knots at her neck and ankles, and I zip her up, double-pouching her.
“Make a note that the buoy line was around her neck, the conch-pot line was around her ankles,” I call out, and the morbid black cargo is hoisted up. “We also need to label the cut ends.” I swim around to the back of the boat. “Maybe someone could go ahead and do that, please, and we need to capture the GPS coordinates.”
I climb up the ladder, and the basket is on top of a sheet near the big yellow sausage fender and its severed yellow rope, which someone has neatly coiled. I pull off my mask, hood, and gloves as Marino hauls in the second yellow line, and a square shape comes into view, silvery and foreshortened in the water, then bigger. It breaks the surface, water pouring through the wire-mesh sides of some type of cage. A snarl of manila rope and monofilament lines are snagged on a slide-locked door that is bowed out and impaled by a broken bamboo pole.
“I could use a hand!” Marino shouts, and Kletty and Sullivan rush to help him hoist up a heavy-gauge wire crate that looks fairly new and has a pan on the bottom stacked with green-and-black bags that are filled with something.
“What the fuck?” Marino exclaims, as they set down what appears to be a folding dog crate or kennel snarled with fishing tackle.
“Cat litter?” Marino says, incredulous.
“World’s Best Cat Litter,” he reads what’s printed on the black-and-green bags. “Five thirty-four-pound bags of fucking clumping cat litter? Is this supposed to be some sicko joke?”
“I don’t know what this is supposed to be.” I recall what Lucy said in my office early this morning, what seems a lifetime ago.
Someone cunning but too smug to realize how much he doesn’t know.
“Maybe using what was on hand to weigh her down?” Labella suggests. “Someone with pets? A lot easier than finding a conch pot, if you’re not a commercial fisherman.”
“Not to mention ubiquitous.” I take a closer look. “Good luck tracing where a dog crate and cat litter were purchased unless whoever did it was kind enough to leave a price sticker for us. But maybe whoever did this didn’t think we’d get this far. I’m not sure we were supposed to recover this or anything.”
“I don’t think we were,” Marino agrees. “A friggin’ miracle she didn’t pop apart, and she would have if you hadn’t gone in after her. If you hadn’t done exactly what you did.”
I look up at the helicopter still hovering over us, and then the big white bird noses around to the west and flies off toward Boston. I watch it get smaller in the distance, its noise diminishing, and I wait to see if it swoops toward Logan Airport, but it doesn’t. It continues toward the city, headed toward the Charles River, and then I can’t see it anymore.
“What about the rest of this?” I point out the mess of fishing tackle, leads and swivels and hooks, all of it brown with rust. “Do you think it’s part of the same gear the turtle was entangled with?”
“Looks like it. Commercial longlining,” Marino tells me.
He says that a longline literally is a long horizontal line attached by box swivels to vertical lines, possibly rigged for mackerel, based on the way the hooks are bent. The bamboo is a pole marker.
“See the piece of scrap iron tied to one end?” he explains. “That’s what kept it upright in the water, and probably there was a bundle of corks attached at some point, and a flag.”
All of it looks very old and could have come a long way from here. He guesses the turtle bumped into it, got wrapped in a couple of the lines, and dragged the gear, maybe for a while, before getting snagged in the buoy line.
“Could even be he was diving or coming up for air when the crate and the body was dumped in and all of it got tangled up together,” he supposes.
I ask him to retrieve my magnifier from the Pelican case and hand me a pair of gloves, and I take a moment to survey every inch of the crate and the soggy bags of cat litter inside it. The bamboo pole is about five feet long, the top part of it snapped off rather recently, based on the appearance of the broken end, which isn’t weathered the way the rest of it is. The bamboo impales the crate, spearing it at a thirty-degree angle through the top and out the slide-locked door, and I try to envision how that might have happened.
I imagine someone shoving the crate full of cat litter and the tethered dead body and the boat fender overboard. Instantly the crate would have sunk and the fender would have floated, submerging the body vertically very much the way I found her. How did the collision with the longline rig and bamboo pole occur and when?
Maybe Marino’s right. The leatherback was dragging the fishing gear and could have been coming up to sound at the exact time the crate and body were dropped. I examine the exposed ends of the pole through acrylic binocular lenses that magnify what I’m looking at, and I see the same greenish-yellow paint. It’s a faint swipe on the broken edge of the bamboo end that protrudes through the top of the crate.
I direct that we photograph the crate, the fender, and the tackle in situ. Then we’ll protect all of it with large plastic bags and transport it to my office.
“Let’s make sure Toby’s waiting for us with the van,” I say to Marino, as I unzip the drysuit and stretch the gaskets over my head and wrists. “We need to get her to the office as quickly as we can, because she’s going to begin decomposing really fast now that she’s out of the water. I don’t know if she’s been frozen, but she might have been.”
“Frozen?” Labella frowns.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Frozen or almost frozen. This lady’s been dead for quite some time, and I suspect we were supposed to recover her just long enough to lose her. I suspect the goal was to really frustrate us. Rigged up like that and pushed overboard, and then she’s decapitated, drawn and quartered, so to speak, as we try to get her into the basket. A dismembered body that slips away and is gone. Well, too bad, whoever you are,” I say, and I’m not talking to the dead woman but to the person who did this. “We have her, and hopefully a lot more than someone anticipated.”