“I’ll be fine, Agent Cody. We do swim in Virginia. We do, in fact, have dive shops. We have rivers and lakes and yes, even direct access to the Atlantic. It’s just that not every kid in Richmond grows up to dive.” She hoped she managed to sound cool and disinterested in anything but the task ahead.
“Sorry,” he said curtly. He was staring out at the water, the sun gleaming down on his shoulders, those granite features facing into the wind, which seemed somehow appropriate. He turned to look at her. “Down here, it’s just…well, it’s just something most people are able to do. The reefs off the Keys are magnificent. They say there are prettier reefs other places, but I think ours compare to anything out there. In my opinion anyway. It’s just…”
His voice trailed off, and he shrugged. “It’s something you might want to look into, living down here. It’s magical. You move so easily in water you think you were born there. You hear your own air bubbles, the world is far away, and you see amazing creatures in their own universe.”
“Thanks. I’ll consider it,” she murmured, thinking how strange his words had been. It had sounded as if he actually cared whether she liked South Florida.
They weren’t more than a mile due south of the facility when one of the crew came around to join them.
“We’re going to drop anchor,” he told them. “You might want to gear up, sir.”
Agent Cody thanked him, then turned to Lara again. “How’s your dolphin doing?”
She looked overboard. Rick was still standing just down the deck and had been watching the water the whole time, keeping an eye on Cocoa as she accompanied them. She had to admit that it had been a very interesting morning so far. She and Rick had swum out of the lagoon toward the cutter, with Cocoa following, then he had talked to Cocoa before they had climbed up the ladder to the deck.
Cocoa had kept pace with them all the way. Lara was even more impressed with her intelligence, and gratified that such an amazing animal had decided to choose her as, well, a friend.
As if on cue, Cocoa surfaced, giving out her squeal.
“I believe she’s fine,” Lara said.
“You can manage snorkel gear?” he asked her.
It was a real question, she realized. She managed not to be totally sarcastic in her reply.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
He headed to the stern, where he, Diego, Rick and one of the crew helped each other with their dive tanks.
Then Agent Cody came back over to her. “There’s an embankment just that way, and we’ll be close to the surface until we reach it. The depth there maxes out at about twenty to twenty-five feet, so we won’t be far at any time. Do you need some type of flotation device?”
“I’ll be fine in a mask and flippers,” she said.
“You’re sure.”
“I am.”
“All right. Just keep telling her to fetch. One of the crew will be with you. You’ll never be out there alone.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded. That curt nod of his seemed to be his trademark.
As Agent Cody went over, sitting on the hull and falling backward into the water, Diego McCullough joined her. “You okay?” he asked her cheerfully.
“You bet.”
“I’m not so sure I would be,” he said. “The dead body side of it…it takes time.”
“I’ve had a few strange experiences in my life,” Lara told him. “I’ll be fine. And thank you, truly, for being concerned.”
He nodded. Rick had already gone into the water, and now Diego followed him. A crewman came over to Lara with the mask she’d already chosen and a pair of fins. He held them out to her.
“Miss Ainsworth?”
“Thanks.”
Five minutes later she was in the water. Thankfully, she had snorkeled before at Virginia Beach and on a vacation to Jamaica when she’d been younger. She knew that she was a strong swimmer and that the fins would help propel her. She loved to just have her face in the water to see everything below her while the snorkel let her breathe.
But first she treaded water and waited for Cocoa to come to her. Thanks to the events of the day before, she didn’t feel in the least bit silly talking to the dolphin.
“We’re going to play fetch, Cocoa. We’re looking for something this size.” She held her hands apart to indicate the approximate size of a human head. “Somebody killed a man, Cocoa. What we’re doing can help us catch that awful person.”
She wondered if human beings would ever really understand just how much other animals—mammals, especially—knew or understood. She just knew that she was on a mission, and Cocoa was on it with her.
The water was extremely clear; Lara could easily see the divers and Cocoa below her. Cocoa hadn’t actually decided that she didn’t like Rick anymore, but she definitely wanted to bring her treasures to Lara. Unfortunately they weren’t looking for a foam wig stand or a punctured football. After an hour at that location, they moved on.
The next stop was just ten minutes away, and their efforts were repeated.
This time Cocoa found something but couldn’t quite retrieve it. She chittered and squealed at Lara, trying to get her to come down and see it.
Lara tried, since the water was shallow. But when she reached Cocoa’s sand-and seaweed-strewn find, a diver was at her side.
Agent Cody.
And, thankfully, he took the object and quickly bagged it in a dive net.
She’d had time to see what Cocoa had discovered, though. Only a brief glimpse, but one she would never forget.
It was a human head.
* * *
Arnold Wilhelm stood beside the tracks at the Metrorail Station and looked down at the street fifty feet below. It was his first day out in three months, and he was only there because his family had threatened to put him in a nursing home if he didn’t start moving—living—again.
He’d taken the death of his friend Randy Nicholson hard. The two of them had been a few of the only truly old codgers left of the old days. They’d both been born at the long-gone St. Francis Hospital on the beach, and they’d gone through Shenandoah Junior High and Miami Senior High together. They’d fought in the Korean War together, had their families and remained friends since.
And then, three months ago, Randy had passed away. And while Arnold knew that he was lucky as hell—he was a man with two decent kids, five grandchildren and an ex-wife who was okay and had remarried a damned good guy—he was lonely. He and Randy had gone to the movies together and had lunch twice a week, gone to the old Elks Club together and…
Hell. Randy had been better than a wife. Randy just liked to hang, as the kids said. He never wanted anything in return. He’d shared every important experience in Arnold’s life.
Ah, well, that was getting old. Painful, but better than the alternative, or so people said.
But he wasn’t so sure. He loved his family; he was grateful for his family. Even so, the days seemed empty without his old friend.
He glanced at his watch. The damned Metrorail didn’t really go anywhere, in his opinion. It wasn’t like when you went to New York City and hopped on the subway. With the Metrorail, unless you lived right by a station, you had to drive there and look for parking, or have someone drop you off, or rely on a bus—which might or might not come at anything that resembled on time—to get you there. Even when you got on it, the Metrorail only ran north-south through the city, though with some switching around you could get all the way up to Palm Beach. It did go to the Jackson Medical Complex, though, which was where he needed to go every three months for his checkups.
Because he was an old vet.
Looking far south down the track, he thought he could see it coming. He was just about the only one waiting, except for a trio of teenage boys.
He glanced at
his watch and then the schedule.
He sighed. Big outing. He was traveling all by himself, a grown-up going for his checkup. Fun. He decided he would stop for coffee at a Cuban café somewhere, try to bone up on his horrible Spanish so he could better chat with the older Cuban woman at the convenience store.
“Arnold.”
He heard his name and thought that his kids might be right, that his inertia really was bringing on some kind of mental-deterioration disease. It had sounded just as if Randy had called his name.
He turned.
And to his amazement, Randy was there.
“Randy?”
He’d seen the man in his coffin just three months ago.
But he was standing there, as hale and hearty as ever. Well, maybe not hale and hearty. His color was awful.
As if he’d been in the grave for three months.
And his face… Something was wrong with his face. It didn’t really move. It was as if he didn’t have any expression—couldn’t show any emotions—at all.
“Randy?” Arnold repeated. He invented an explanation in his head for what might have happened. The family had pretended that he was dead. They’d buried some kind of an effigy. Why? Something to do with money, having money, needing money… They’d kept Randy a prisoner down in the basement, which would explain his awful color, while they spent their ill-gotten inheritance.
And now he’d escaped. Except that he was…confused, probably from being in solitary confinement for months.
“Randy, yes, it’s me, Arnold.”
He started toward Randy, arms out to embrace him, to assure him that he could make everything okay. He would take care of Randy, and his family would become his old friend’s family, too.
He dimly heard the sound of the Metrorail as he reflected, still stunned, that he really was seeing his old friend again.
He didn’t have to walk all the way to Randy, because Randy was coming at him. Coming like a bull.
Randy slammed into him and sent him flying backward onto the tracks.
And Arnold was still so stunned that he never knew what hit him.
He was dead within seconds of his impact with the arriving train, dead long before his broken body fell to the ground far below the elevated platform.
CHAPTER 5
There weren’t many good things to be said about finding a human head, Lara thought, although at least they had assumed the man was already dead, and Agent Cody believed that finding the head meant they would have a better chance of finding the killer. Rick called Grady to let him know they’d found what they were looking for, and Grady insisted that she go home, especially given her long night at the party and the stress of the morning’s discovery.
She barely saw Special Agent Brett Cody after the find. Other divers were headed to their location to continue the search, while Agents Cody and Diego headed back to shore with her and Rick—and their gruesome evidence. She gathered that more pieces of the victim were found—how many, she didn’t know, nor was she sure she wanted to.
When Cocoa seemed set, following the cutter home just as she’d followed it out to the bay, Lara sat in the galley with Rick, drinking the very decent cup of coffee one of the crew members had brought her.
“Dolphins,” Rick said. “They’re the most amazing creatures. I love our dolphins, and I wish people understood how much they enjoy working with us. The research we do is as much fun for us as it is enlightening for us, and even the entertainment side of things is enjoyable for them. They like people. Our guys, they’re the smartest. That’s why Cocoa could do this.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve done extensive training with them. They recognize far more of what we say than we do of what they ‘say’—though we do recognize what many of the sounds they make mean,” Rick told her. “You’ll learn more the longer you stay with us. They can actually count. They can imitate one another. You’ve already seen how they can find one kind of object versus another. And they know and prefer certain people, beyond a doubt. You should see the lagoons when Grady goes in. They flock around him like puppies. You could be a trainer, you know. Although you’d better not tell Grady I said that, because you’re good at what you’re doing already and we certainly need someone in that position.”
“Well, thank you,” Lara said, pleased by the unexpected compliment.
“Your work with Cocoa today was pretty amazing, though,” he said.
“Well,” she murmured drily, “hopefully we won’t be doing this often.”
“It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever worked with the dolphins in this capacity,” Rick said, then nodded toward the ladder to the deck.
Lieutenant Gunderson, who was captaining their cutter, was coming down. He nodded to the two of them and headed to the coffeepot. He poured himself a cup the way a man might pour himself a scotch after a trying day. His back was to them for a long minute before he turned around.
“Lieutenant, has something happened?” Rick asked.
Gunderson was about fifty, with steel-gray hair. He wore his uniform with dignity. He looked at them, shook his head, then let out a long sigh. “The press is at it again. Guess these days I should say the media is at it again.”
“In what way?” Lara asked.
“You’ll hear about it soon enough. A man was killed today. Thrown in front of a Metrorail train, body went flying down to the ground. Hope it was fast—his neck and half his bones were broken. Just happened an hour or so ago, but there were kids on the platform that saw the whole thing. They twitted or whatever it is that kids do, and the information was all over the place. Worst thing is, they described the man who killed the guy.”
“How can that be a bad thing?” Rick asked. “Won’t the police be glad to have eyewitness descriptions of the killer?”
Lieutenant Gunderson didn’t have a chance to answer them; others were coming down the ladder, including Diego McCullough and Brett Cody.
“Mike the chicken,” Diego was saying dully.
“What, another dead man rose to commit murder? You’re not really falling for that zombie crap, are you? Because—” Brett asked him. Suddenly he stopped, as if realizing others were listening.
One of the Coast Guard crew said, “I’ll get coffee for everyone.”
“Thank you, Seaman,” Lieutenant Gunderson said, nodding his approval.
Lara felt a strange tightening in the pit of her stomach. “What happened?” she asked. “What are you all talking about? Apparently it’s already all over the media, so you might as well tell us.”
“A man was killed when he was about to get on the Metrorail,” Agent Cody explained. “There were three teenaged boys on the platform at the time. They saw the killer go after the guy. They described him to a police sketch artist, and apparently the drawing looked just like a friend of the victim’s who died three months ago. So naturally the media are going on about a zombie king sending zombie henchmen out to kill for him.”
“It may not be zombies, but something is sure as hell going on,” Diego said, shaking his head and sliding into the seat next to Lara.
“Something we’ll nip in the bud. I’ve asked that they start making arrangements to exhume the dead friend,” Brett Cody said.
“Remember, we know Miguel Gomez was supposedly dead, too,” Diego reminded him.
“Exhumation,” Brett said. “Simplest way to know one way or another if the guy has been in his grave for three months or not.”
“How did the friend die?” Lara asked. “Natural causes or…?”
Brett looked directly at her. “Heart failure. Died at the hospital. And as soon as we’re back, I’ll be speaking with the doctor who signed the death certificate—and the funeral home where his remains were sent.” He was quiet for a moment. “And those boys at the Metrora
il station,” he added.
“If it’s just a drawing—even though it was done by a police artist—couldn’t it resemble someone but not be him?” Lara asked.
Diego looked at her. “It could, but right before the murder, one of the boys was taking a selfie, and the killer was caught on the kid’s phone.”
“Not a clear image,” Brett said.
“We haven’t seen it yet,” Diego reminded him.
Brett shrugged.
“I can only imagine what you and the police will be dealing with,” Gunderson said. He sighed and shook his head. “Well, we’re almost back, but of course we’re at your disposal again any time you need us.” He turned to Brett and asked, “You’ll see to the proper transfer of the remains?”
“Dr. Phil Kinny, the ME, will be meeting us at the dock,” Brett said.
Rick rose. “Time for us to see to our girl, Lara. Gentlemen, thank you.”
She rose, too, thanked the officers for their help and accepted their thanks in return, then followed Rick when he dived cleanly from the boat to join Cocoa. Together the three of them swam back toward the gate, which had been opened for them, and into the lagoon. Cocoa swept past Lara, then came back and swam through with her. Nearing the platform, Lara found the shallows and stood on one of the slippery steps, stroking Cocoa. She watched as the cutter slid up next to the farthest platform, allowing Brett and Diego to disembark. She noticed a group waiting for them on the platform. Men in suits and white coats. One official-looking man in a dark suit immediately fell into step with the two agents; she assumed he was their superior.
They left quickly, and Lara turned her attention to what was going on at the center, which had reopened to the public that morning. Several school classes were there, and Adrianna was in one of the middle lagoons conducting a dolphin swim with special-needs children. Other visitors were eating at the picnic tables by the café.
Krewe of Hunters Series, Volume 5 Page 37