And came up short on a scream as Renaldo's bloated head swooped into my field of vision, the flash from my camera highlighting the deathly pallor of his skin.
A jerk on my fin had me screaming into my regulator again, as panic raced up my spine and clawed at my throat, tearing the air from my mouth.
Chapter Twelve
I whirled, ready to do battle, only to find Trace pulling me to him, turning me from Renaldo and pinching my hand, forcing me to look into his eyes. Tears blurred my vision as I struggled to catch my breath to fight down the panic attack that so desperately wanted to take over my body. Trace reached out and held his hand over my regulator, making sure I kept it lodged in my mouth.
Losing my shit at 120 feet would be a quick way to die.
I blinked the tears back and forced my breathing to become shallow and slow. Trace watched me, keeping an eye on my bubbles to see how quickly I was expelling air. He reached over to pull my computer to him to see how much air was left in the tank before he motioned to my hand.
Confused, I held up my camera in question.
Nodding, Trace took the camera from me and then flashed me the okay sign.
I realized that he wanted to take pictures of the body.
It felt like my heart was clambering to get out of my chest, but I nodded. Trace was a search-and-rescue diver, so this was not his first rodeo. I moved behind him, reaching out to hold a piece of rock on the wall to steady myself as I took a closer look at the scene.
Murder scene, I should add as the details of Renaldo's final gruesome moments became apparent. The term “sleeping with the fishes” had just taken on a very real meaning for me.
I flinched as the flash seemed to make Renaldo's body jerk, and I shivered inside my suit, trying desperately to swallow the bile that threatened to rise in my throat.
Renaldo bobbed gently in the water, a chain affixed to his ankle, a heavy anchor locked to the end of the chain. Red marks radiated up his leg where he must have tried to claw his way out of the chain as the anchor sank over the drop-off. His clothing billowed loosely around him and I cringed as I saw a fish swim up and take a nibble at his mouth.
The sea never rejected free food, I thought dimly, knowing that I was about two beats away from giggling hysterically into my mask.
Trace turned and nodded at me, signaling to go up the wall.
I took one last glance at Renaldo and said the only Catholic prayer that I knew as my eyes found the gold cross at his throat. He hadn't deserved this, I thought as I turned and began to follow Trace up the wall.
Or had he?
There was very little I knew about him aside from that my best friend jumped his bones the other night. My reading for him had revealed nothing aside from a deep-rooted fear.
And that is precisely what I need to figure out, I thought as we reached our fifteen-foot safety stop where we would stay for the next several minutes, allowing decompression to work on our bodies. I swam in mindless circles as I thought about his fear from the other day.
Renaldo had known that he needed to leave his job. It had been clear from his question, and the fear surrounding it, that something had happened with his work to make him scared. Wishing he had listened to my suggestion that he leave his work, guilt began to creep up on me as I wondered if I had done enough to prevent his death. Tremors began to rack my body as the full effect of what I had just seen washed over me. I needed to get out of the water. Now.
Cutting my safety stop a few seconds short, I swam for the ladder and took my fins off, chucking them onto the boat and pulling myself up. I waddled over to the bench and sat, desperate to have my tank off, needing to just let it all out as I slipped from the bench to the floor.
Wrapping my arms around my knees, I buried my head in my thighs as the shaking overtook me and I bawled into the little ball of safety I had made. I heard Trace get on the boat but didn't look up, couldn't speak – couldn't think – as I continued to tremble, sobs seeming to tear from deep inside me.
“Thea,” Trace said, coming to sit on the ground next to me. He wrapped his arms around the ball I had made and pulled me into his lap. A dim part of my mind was surprised at his strength, but instead I let him hug me, needing his warmth.
Needing to feel alive.
“That's so messed up,” I blurted out, my teeth chattering.
“I know. Trust me, I know. It's awful. I've…well, I've seen a lot of dead bodies. But never a murder,” Trace said.
I craned my head to look at him, meeting his beautiful blue eyes that were filled with sadness.
“How do you do it? How do you see that and remain unaffected?”
“I'm always affected. It makes me incredibly sad. I just try to look at it as a service to the family and to the deceased. I believe they would want me to find them…to give closure to their story.”
“I don’t think I could do it,” I whispered.
“It's part of what makes me so desperate to live my life to the fullest. Sure, I could be making a ton of money being in a cubicle somewhere in New York or going into investing, but I chose to live my life doing the things that I love. I consider it a tribute to the bodies I've found that don't get that chance anymore,” Trace said, his mouth at my ear as I stared out at the water, the boat bobbing in the waves.
“I could have saved him,” I blurted out and then stilled, waiting to hear what Trace would say, wanting to know if he would judge me.
“You know him?” Trace's voice went up several octaves.
“Yes, his name's Renaldo. He was working with an investment group or something. Luna just had a date with him.”
“Oh shit,” Trace said, his voice heavy with emotion.
“I gave him a reading. He wanted one…and he was just full of fear. Like it radiated from him. He asked if he should leave his job and go home. And then he pulled the death card. And it was the first time in all of my readings that I knew the death card really meant he was going to die. I urged him to leave his job, but I didn't tell him that he would die. I just – I couldn't, you know?” I said, turning to look at Trace again, pleading my case.
He ran his hand down my arm and pulled me tighter to his chest, pressing my face into his neck.
“Shh, this isn't your fault. Whatever the hell he got mixed up in is what caused this. You told him to leave. He didn't take your warning. There's nothing else you could have done. You didn't cause this,” Trace reassured me.
I hung on to those words as we waited on the boat for the Coast Guard to arrive. Trace handed me a banana and insisted that I eat it as he continued to make calls to the local police and the Coast Guard. I could see their boats in the distance, three of them, coming at us like a wave of doom.
You didn't cause this.
Trace's words floated through my mind and I reminded myself, again, that this wasn't my fault.
“She was right,” I said bitterly as I took a swig of water from my bottle, my eyes trained on the boats on the horizon.
“Who was?” Trace pulled the phone away from his head and looked at me.
“Miss Elva. She was right. The day you don't have your gris-gris bag is the day you need it.”
Trace just shook his head at me and went back to his call as I closed my eyes against the promise of awfulness that the three boats on the horizon carried.
It was going to be a long day.
Chapter Thirteen
The bobbing of the boat was beginning to make me a little sick, though I couldn't be certain it wasn't from the fact that I had just seen my first dead body.
Well, not technically my first, I thought as I flashed back to my great-grandmother's funeral when I was ten years old. I remembered the weight of sadness from the people in the room, and my shock at seeing my lifeless nana laid out in a coffin. At the time, all I had wanted to do was pull her from the coffin and force-feed her baked goods until she returned to being the sweet nana I had known.
Shaking the memory from my head, I focused on Trace, who was
speaking with the Coast Guard and the local police at the back of the boat. The trio of men kept casting glances my way.
“What?” I finally asked, rising from where I huddled on the bench with a towel over my shoulders to go stand with them.
“Thea, you know Chief Dupree,” Trace said, gesturing to the town's chief of police. A large mustache snaked across his face, just beginning to curl at the tips, and mirrored aviators concealed his eyes.
“Chief,” I said, nodding at him and trying to decide if I wanted to take a dip into his thoughts or not.
“And this is Senior Chief Petty Officer Thomas,” Trace said, declaring the rank of the man who stood next to him.
I smiled at him and held out my hand. “Althea Rose.”
A white smile flashed briefly in a tanned face, his blond hair cut military short and Oakleys shading his eyes. He was built like a tank and stood like he was ready to salute at any moment.
“Ma'am,” Chief Thomas said, politely addressing me, and I liked him immediately. He seemed to give off an “I can take care of this” confidence that I admired.
“So, what's the consensus? Do you need to take a statement?” I asked, not sure what the procedure in a situation like this was. I pulled the towel more tightly around me, trying to comfort myself like I was diving under my blankets at home.
“Yes, we'll need to take a statement and look at those photos that Trace said he took,” Chief Dupree drawled.
“If Trace has his laptop out here, I can hook the camera to it and pull the pictures,” I offered and Chief Thomas smiled.
“We'd be mighty appreciative of that. We just have one other problem at the moment,” Chief Thomas said.
“What's that?”
“We need to bring the body up,” Trace said, turning to meet my eyes and I suddenly realized why they had been side-eyeing me before.
“You want me to go back down?” I squeaked.
“I can do it alone,” Trace protested and Chief Thomas just shook his head at him.
“You know you can't go down alone.”
“You're absolutely right you can't! Not at that depth,” I protested. I moved closer to Trace and he automatically reached out and put an arm around my shoulders, rubbing his hand on my back to soothe me.
“Aren't you the Coast Guard? And the police? Don't you have someone who can do this?” I asked defensively and Chief Dupree sighed and shook his head.
“Trace is a search-and-rescue diver, if I need to remind you, Althea,” Chief Dupree said, tugging on his mustache. “The boat's here, we have the dry lift bags, the scene has been photographed. We just need the body.”
I shivered, thinking about going back down to see Renaldo's body eerily floating in the water, the fish enjoying him as a meal.
“Aren't you a diver?” I asked Chief Thomas, a little angry that he seemed to be belying my impression of him as a Take Charge Man.
“I am, but unfortunately I just came from two recovery dives this morning. I'm at surface for at least two hours,” he explained.
“So can't we wait?” I asked, not wanting to go through this with Trace, not wanting him to have to go through it either.
“Thea, let's just do this. You've already seen the worst of it. You'll be better prepared for it when we go down,” Trace said.
“I don’t know if I'll ever be prepared for seeing a murdered body,” I spat out and moved away to where my wetsuit was laid out in the sun.
“Why do you say he was murdered?” Chief Dupree asked.
“Gee, I don't know? Maybe the chain around his ankle along with the anchor attached?” I shot over my back as I shrugged the towel off and quickly slipped into my wetsuit, trying to minimize the time that I stood in my bikini around the men.
“One can't make assumptions,” Chief Dupree said and I whirled on him.
“Oh? You think this is a suicide? What a joke,” I said, my eyes wide in disbelief.
Chief Dupree shrugged.
“We won't declare anything until we have cause of death,” he explained.
“You've got to be kidding me,” I muttered, turning back to check my dive computer to see if I was clear to dive again, hating Chief Dupree in that moment.
“I've got my laptop here,” Trace said and I nodded, reaching into the freshwater bin to pull my camera out and detach it from the rig. Using my towel to wipe the camera off, I silently handed it to Trace, confident that he knew how to transfer the photos.
Watching as the men huddled around the computer, I sat on the bench and dropped my shields, not caring if I was intruding on their mental privacy. I had a murder to solve, didn't I?
I slipped into Chief Thomas' mind and caught a glimpse of him carefully considering every aspect of the pictures he was seeing, while running procedures in his head before I lost the image. Moving on, I tried to get a read on Chief Dupree's thoughts and my eyebrows rose as a flash of his thoughts reached me.
Make this go away.
What the hell?
I couldn't understand why Chief Dupree would want to squash this. Tequila Key hadn't had a murder case in years. I would think he'd be juiced up to do something other than fining tourists for littering and giving out the occasional speeding ticket. What was he hiding, I wondered, glaring at him as he tugged on his mustache again.
“From my estimation, I would say this looks like murder,” Chief Thomas finally said and I nodded at him, putting him back into the man-who-gets-things-done category.
“Oh? Are you a coroner?” Chief Dupree asked, and the other man turned to look at him.
“No, but I've seen my fair share of murdered bodies over the years, and this reeks of foul play,” Chief Thomas said.
“See!” I couldn't help but exclaim and the men all turned to me.
“What?” I asked, raising my shoulders.
Trace sighed and moved back from the computer, walking over to crouch in front of me. I searched his eyes, wishing we didn't have to deal with this.
“You okay to do this?”
“I have to be,” I said, my voice flat.
“Then let's talk about what has to be done,” Chief Thomas said and I turned to look at him.
“Sorry you have to do this, Ms. Rose,” he added and I offered him a half smile, nodding my acknowledgement. “You'll need to take bolt cutters down to snap the chain. After that, you'll need a lift bag for the body and a lift bag for the anchor. We'll want to preserve as much evidence as we can.”
I grimaced as I thought about the work we would have to do to get Renaldo's body to the surface, but nodded my understanding. Silently, I slipped my arms into my BCD vest, strapping it closed and slinging my mask onto my head. Trace had already rigged up new tanks for us, but I double-checked my dive computer to be sure that I had air. Trace did the same and together we stood, hobbling to the back of the boat awkwardly with the tanks on our back, until we could sit and put on our fins.
“Do you need any more pictures?” I asked over my shoulder.
“No,” Chief Dupree said.
I was handed two lift bags from Chief Thomas and Trace got another lift bag and a bolt cutter. We looked at each other and when the boat dipped low into the water, we jumped.
I bobbed for a moment at the surface, flashing an OK sign to Chief Thomas on the boat. Watching them for a second, panic flashed through me.
What if Miss Elva hadn't been warning me about finding a body? What if these two men were in on it and they were about to drive off in our boat? Leaving us stranded in the ocean? I gasped as these questions whirled in my mind, my breath coming in little puffs as I tried to debate whether we should continue our descent.
“Hey, what's wrong?” Trace asked, having swum to my side. Turning to look at him, I just shook my head.
“I think I'm going a little crazy. I was just imagining what would happen if they drove off in our boat and left us here.”
Trace laughed and then sobered instantly.
“Is that what you read on them?” he asked, hi
s blue eyes serious behind his mask.
I thought back to my previous impressions.
“I don't trust Dupree. Thomas seems like a solid dude. Plus he looks like he would take Dupree down in two seconds if he tried anything.”
“Okay. If you're sure?”
Coming to a resolution, I nodded and then flashed the men on the boat another OK. Turning to put my face in the water, I clamped my mouth over the regulator and began my descent.
This time as I floated into the underwater world, I thought about how unforgiving the sea was. What was typically my oasis had shown her sinister side today. It was something that I was constantly reminded of – one must have a healthy respect for the ocean, as she threatens as much as she soothes.
A fickle woman is the sea.
We reached the bottom and I mechanically followed Trace along the sand chute and through the tunnel, barely paying attention to the same lobster that jutted out from his ledge to see what all the bubbles were about. Swimming out over the drop-off, I stared down into the deep blue abyss that yawned beneath me, knowing that but for a few feet of rocky outcropping, Renaldo's body would've been lost forever. I wondered how many others had succumbed to the same fate, coming to rest thousands of feet below us in a world yet undiscovered.
Snapping out of it, I looked up to see Trace waiting patiently for me. He motioned for me to follow him over the ledge and down along the wall to where the rocky ledges spiked out from the wall. As we neared where Renaldo's body was, I felt my shoulders begin to tense again.
You've already seen this. It can't get worse than what it already is, I reminded myself.
We turned the corner just as a grouper pulled Renaldo's eyeball from his face. I shrieked into my regulator before turning away, forcing myself to breath normally.
Mary had a little lamb, Mary had a little lamb, I sang to myself in my head, forcing my thoughts away from what I had just seen.
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