by Todd Borg
“I also found one behind Janeen Kahale’s sink.” I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it to him.
Mallory turned it over in his hands. He chewed on his cheek, then pointed down the beach. “Body was found just over there, where the forest comes down to the water. Corpse washed up right next to where his clothes had been neatly piled. There were two sets of tracks in the woods. One set matched the boots of the victim. Other set may be our shooter. They haven’t found a shell casing. The diver is looking for the slug. But that scuba tank’s gotta be getting pretty near empty. A guy could start to worry.” This seemed out of place for someone who had never seemed to worry about anything in his life.
Mallory pointed out at the water. “Here we are. Bubbles. Had me going there a minute.”
An arm broke the surface. The diver swam toward the dock. Mallory and I reached out as the diver carefully positioned a large swim fin onto a ladder rung. We grabbed the diver’s elbows and heaved.
Even with the scuba tank, the diver was about half the weight and size I expected, and the curves were unmistakable in the black neoprene suit.
She pulled off her face mask and breathing hose, disconnected a hose that attached to her suit, then unstrapped her tank and set it on the pier. There was a small tank hooked on her belt. It wasn’t much bigger than Mallory’s Coke can. She left it attached.
She peeled off her gloves, then bent down and removed her swim fins. Her black hood was last. She shook her blonde curls until they bounced about her face. She was beautiful and could have been a model. Maybe she was.
Mallory stared at her, unquestionably more interested in her than in what she may have found on the bottom. Now I knew why he’d been worried. Mallory was of a chivalrous old school. He wouldn’t stress over a male diver.
“How does your hair stay so dry in a wet suit?” Mallory asked in a hard voice. His frown, permanently in place ever since he quit smoking several years ago, was deep enough to hold pennies in the folds of skin.
“This type of suit is sealed and pressurized by air from the tank,” she said. “Keeps me dry and warm. Although I also wear a wet suit for extra warmth.” Her voice had just enough Southern Belle in it to make it seem unnatural for her to be dressed in anything without lace trim.
“I don’t get it,” Mallory said.
“The wet suit goes under the pressurized suit. See?” She grabbed an edge of the black suit at the base of her neck and pulled down. Peeking out was the trim of bright green fabric. She pulled it out a half inch. “A wet suit is designed to let water in next to your skin where it eventually warms up. But this lake is so cold, you’d die of hypothermia even with a wet suit. So we wear a pressurized suit over it to keep the water out. The wet suit never gets wet. Some people wear long underwear under the pressurized suit. But I like this wet suit because it fits perfectly.”
“So I see,” Mallory said. “What if you poke the suit on a sharp rock or something and spring a leak?”
“Then I’ll leak air out, not water in. Replacement air comes from the tank through this valve here and into my suit. If I get a leak, the air will bubble out.”
“Maybe we should peel it off and check,” Mallory said. “Make sure you’re not getting hypothermia.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be okay.”
“Right,” Mallory said. “Oh. You should meet Owen McKenna. He’s the dick hired by the victim’s mother. Doesn’t look it, but he’s okay. You can even answer his questions after you answer mine.”
She stepped toward me and shook my hand. “Morella Meyer of Meyer’s Commercial Diving and Salvage.”
Up close I could see that her eyes, which were a bright viridian and crinkled enticingly at the corners, did not line up. They pointed somewhat outward from one another. First the left one looked directly at me, then the right. “Pleased to meet you,” I said, deciding that the left eye was lined up more in my direction.
“Don’t let it bother you,” she said, “but you’re looking at my glass eye.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, I’m in residence over here. This one.” She tapped at her temple next to her right eye which seemed to be looking off to the side of my head.
“Oh,” I said, finding it awkward to look at that eye when it was staring into space and the other was looking directly at me.
“My problem, too,” Mallory said as if reading my mind. He turned to Morella. “So, did you find the slug?”
“No. Sorry. I swam a grid pattern, but saw nothing.”
“You think it could have been there and you maybe missed it?”
“No doubt about it,” Morella said. “You said it was only about this big.” She held her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “And it would be all munched up, right?”
Mallory nodded. “Yeah. The slug would have been deformed blasting through both sides of the skull. It wouldn’t look much like a bullet, more like a flattened chunk of metal.”
“So I looked for anything metallic. Of course, given the sandy bottom, it may be impossible to find,” Morella said. “I could have swum right over it, but if a slug slipped under a little sand when it hit bottom I wouldn’t have seen it. All I found was this.” There was a long pocket on her thigh. She popped open a Velcro flap, reached in and pulled out a toy dagger. She handed it to Mallory.
He flexed the rubber blade back and forth and rapped his knuckle on the tin handle. “Scary,” he said. “This all you found?” disappointment obvious in his voice.
“Sorry.”
“Is it dark down there?” Mallory asked.
“No,” Morella said. “Even if I’d gone to one hundred feet it would still be fairly bright. Now, down at two hundred feet near the edge of the drop-off would be another matter. It would get very dim. Of course, the sun is close to setting, so we’re through for today.”
“How deep did you go?” Mallory asked.
“Sixty feet. A little more for a bit,” she said. “Not too smart considering the time involved.”
Mallory scowled. “How come no deeper?” he said, irritation in his voice.
“Mallory,” I said. “I mean, Captain Mallory, sir.”
Mallory shot me a quick look.
“She can’t because of the no-decompression limits,” I said. I was thinking back several years to my last dive, flirting with the giant rays off Grand Cayman. “If she goes deeper, she’s able to spend much less time searching. Otherwise she’d get the bends.”
Morella was nodding. Her eyes seemed to be taking in most of the terrain to either side of me. I couldn’t remember which eye I was supposed to look at.
I turned toward Mallory. “She can spend about sixty minutes at sixty feet without having to decompress. Any deeper and she wouldn’t be able to spend more than a few minutes down there.” I turned to Morella whose face showed relief at my interjection. “Did I get it right?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Much deeper and you go down and come back up with no time on the bottom at all.”
Mallory looked suspicious. “So what are the bends, anyway?”
Morella looked at me with a touch of a smirk on her face. “Seems like you know the captain better than I. Should I give him the details or just tell him that it hurts like hell?”
“He’s always struck me as a detail man,” I said.
She addressed Mallory. “Each thirty-three feet of depth adds another atmosphere of pressure which is nearly fifteen pounds per square inch. The more pressure, the more nitrogen from the air you breathe dissolves into your tissues and blood. If you go down too deep, for too long, and then come up to the surface where the pressure is dramatically less, the dissolved nitrogen bubbles out of your blood just like when you pop the top on a can of Coke and the carbon dioxide bubbles out.”
Mallory glanced down at the Coke in his hand. “What happens then?” he asked.
“In a bad case, the bubbles block the blood flow to your brain and heart and you die.”
Mallory looked like he needed a stif
fer drink. “Sixty minutes at sixty feet, huh?”
“Actually, it’s a lot less in Tahoe,” Morella said. “It’s the high altitude factor. We’ve got about twenty percent less air pressure than at sea level. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when you pop open a Coke in Tahoe, it bubbles about twenty percent more than it does in San Francisco. Same with the nitrogen in your blood. A sixty foot dive in this lake is like a seventy-five foot dive at sea level. The bottom line is that we can’t go as deep in Tahoe, nor can we stay down as long.”
Mallory turned, paced a few steps down the pier, then came back. As I watched him I noticed movement in one of the windows of the Rubicon Lodge. Brock Chambers was watching us. When he saw me looking he pulled away. Mallory drank the last of his Coke and crushed the can in his hand. “If you wanted to search deeper, how would you do it?”
Morella pointed to her tank which lay on its side on the pier. “If I went down with two of those tanks, I could spend a little more time at a greater depth. But most of my extra air would be used up making the decompression stops.”
“Meaning?”
“On my way up I’d have to stop at a certain depth for a period of time, then rise farther and stop at a shallower depth for another period of time. The decompression stops let the dissolved nitrogen in my system out slowly so my blood doesn’t bubble.”
Mallory grunted. He turned and looked out at the lake which was turning a deep blue-black in the setting sun. The backdrop of snow-covered mountains was now lit with a golden alpenglow. Turning back he said, “You make it sound like searching any large area deeper than a hundred feet is impractical.”
“Definitely,” Morella said. She faced Mallory squarely, aware that he didn’t want to hear this. Her walleyed eyes flashed in the last of the sunlight.
“Tell me about the bottom of the lake,” he said. “What is it shaped like off this point?”
“Rubicon Point is one of only two places in Lake Tahoe where the bottom drops off so steeply,” Morella said. “The other is up near Incline Village. Here at Rubicon is the steepest underwater cliff in Tahoe.” She turned and pointed at the water. “Just off the end of this pier the bottom goes down at a steady angle until it reaches a depth of two hundred feet. That point is less than a quarter mile offshore.”
“What happens there?” Mallory asked.
“At that point the bottom drops off straight down.”
“How far?”
“One thousand four hundred feet. Remember, Lake Tahoe is the tenth deepest lake on the planet. Where Rubicon Point drops off under water, it is one of the more spectacular cliffs in the world, in or out of the water.”
Mallory stared at his feet, then looked out at the deep blue of the lake. “Any slug that fell off that underwater cliff would be completely beyond the reach of any diver?”
“Correct,” Morella said. “You’d need a deep sea submersible to get down that far.”
“Like those steel spherical things on TV?”
“Exactly,” Morella said.
“Anybody in the basin got one of those things?”
“Actually, there is a remote-controlled one aboard the research vessel that the University of California at Davis uses to study the lake. But its video camera doesn’t have the resolution to pick up a small object from any distance.”
“What about a submarine?” Mallory asked. “Something people could go down in?”
Morella shook her head. “There isn’t one. Even so, you could never find anything tiny from a sub unless you knew exactly where to look for it. Think of when they search for the black boxes from airline crashes. It often takes days to find them, and those boxes are relatively large. No such luck with a bullet.”
Mallory frowned. “It sounds like you’re telling me that there isn’t any chance at all of finding the slug.”
“If it is deeper than fifty or sixty feet, then yes, I believe that is correct,” Morella said.
“And if it is less than fifty feet deep?”
Morella turned toward the water and held her hands out, palms facing each other about two feet apart. “You said I should concentrate on this area just out from the side of this dock. Based on what I saw of the bottom, I could spend another tank’s worth exploring. More than that much time would be pointless.”
“When could you do the next dive?” Mallory asked.
“How about first thing tomorrow morning?”
“Okay,” Mallory said. His cell phone rang. He held up a finger as he answered it. “Just a minute,” he said into the phone, then spoke to Morella. “If I’m not here when you go in tomorrow, call me at one of those numbers on my card. Whether or not you find anything.” He was trying to use his official, stern voice, but it had little effect on Morella.
She grinned. “Yes, sir, officer.” She gave a little salute, but Mallory was already turning and walking up the pier, talking on his phone.
TEN
“Can I help you with your tank?” I asked.
Morella looked at me with her wild eyes. “Is this one of those help-the-little-woman things?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Good,” she said. She reached down and picked up her swim fins. “Been a long time since anyone carried a tank for me. They weigh a ton.”
I picked up the tank while she grabbed her other gear, and we trod up the pier, around the side of the lodge on a shoveled sidewalk and over to her van.
“So what happened to the buddy system? I thought divers were always supposed to go in pairs for safety.”
“They are. But I have to make a living. I couldn’t possibly afford an assistant. Besides, I always have my spare air.” She patted the little tank strapped to her waist. “You’re not going to call the scuba police, are you?”
I shook my head. “I know you were looking for a slug down there,” I said. “But I’m wondering if you saw anything else.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Anything out of place. Any item that looks as though it hasn’t been down there long.”
Morella frowned and shook her head. “Nothing that I recall besides the toy knife. Do you have reason to suspect that anything else would be down there? If I had a clue what I was looking for, I’d be more likely to find it.”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But in a murder investigation, one looks for anything out of place. The more imaginative the search, the better.”
“Wow, that’s great, imagination as part of a murder investigation. And here I thought you’d be a ‘just the facts, ma’am,’ kind of guy.” She looked up at me, her grin mischievous. “But as Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’”
“Ah,” I said. “Is the scuba diver revealing an interest in physics beyond what one needs for diving?”
“It’s how I got into diving in the first place. I was majoring in physics at UCLA. and realized that even though I was getting good grades, I didn’t have the brainpower to pursue it as a scientist. The physics jocks are very intimidating. So I sort of took an inventory of my other interests and scuba diving seemed a way for me to indulge myself in both physics and sport. I took the various courses and eventually became an instructor before getting into the commercial side of diving. I’ve been doing it professionally now for seven years.”
We got to her van and she slid the side door open. I set the tank into a rack that held several others while she peeled off the rest of her black dry suit. The tight wet suit underneath glowed an eerie green in the shadowy light between sunset and twilight and made her look something like a comic book superhero.
“On your dive tomorrow,” I said, “while you’re looking for the slug, will you please keep an eye out for anything unusual?”
“Which eye?” she said, mischief in her grin.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot.”
“I was kidding,” she said and gave me a little smack on my arm.
I looked again. Even now I couldn’t tell which of the wayward eyes was seeing me and wh
ich was not.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It happens with everyone. If I do find anything, how do I reach you?”
I gave her my card.
“I’ll get you one of mine.” She opened the passenger door of the van. A day planner was on the seat. She flipped to the back page and slid my card under a paper clip. A see-through pocket next to it was empty. “Am I out of cards?” Morella said. “I can’t be. Let me look in my purse.” She got it out from under the seat and dug inside.
I was looking at the facing page of the day planner which held a small pad of paper. A note was scrawled on it. The handwriting was large and very messy, the smeared, blotchy lines those of a cheap ballpoint pen. It looked something like, “Call Strict ASAP after Rubicon dive. Leave message on machine.” There was a phone number with the prefix of 543 which was a local South Shore number. But the last four digits were so sloppy I couldn’t make them out. Two of them may have been sevens or else ones with long flags at the top. There was an eight. Or maybe it was a five drawn in one stroke like an S, only with an unruly ink trail attached. Looking at the 543 prefix, I could see that the five there also had a trail which could have made it a weak eight. In fact, I realized that the only reason I thought it was a five instead of an eight was because it would then match a local prefix.
“This person you’re supposed to call after your dive,” I said. “Is it about what you found on the bottom?”
Morella looked up from her purse. I pointed at the day planner.
“Oh, that,” she said, discomfort intruding into her tone for the first time since I’d met her. “That’s nothing.” She reached over and shut the book. “It was another dive, anyway. Last week.”
“You were diving in Tahoe last week? In that long snowstorm?”
If she hesitated it was for only the shortest moment. “No, no. Down in Folsom. The reservoir. I was inspecting the dam. Routine stuff.” She turned back to her purse and pawed through it some more. “Here it is.” She turned and handed me her card.