Slowly the fog lifted, and Harley realized the ringing was his alarm clock, not the phone on his office desk. He’d been dreaming about Jasmine lying back across his desk. He reached over and fumbled blindly on the nightstand, finally finding the source of the offensive noise and knocking it over before he could turn the thing off.
Slowly opening his eyes, Harley looked around his bedroom, his eyes finally coming to where Jasmine lay next to him, her long black hair tangled and spread all over the pillow. The blanket was pulled down, twisting over her hip and disappearing between her thighs. It covered only one leg, the rest of her hard little body on display for his eyes only.
This could get complicated, he thought.
“Never screw the talent,” his dad had told him a million times.
Dad had never had the talent available that Harley had today. There weren’t many men’s clubs in Key West, but there were a lot of drop-dead gorgeous young women to choose from. Though Rafferty’s was mostly a local’s dive, every night there were at least a dozen half-drunk tourists, eager to part with their dollars. If a girl wanted to make good money fast, she took off her clothes.
There weren’t many jobs in the world where a man in his mid-forties could bed a different hard-body, half his age, every week. He leered at the naked Jasmine. Five-nine and maybe one-twenty-five, she had legs that could wrap around a man twice and was almost flexible enough to do it. He considered waking her up for another round, but didn’t think he’d survive it.
Instead, Harley rose and put on a clean pair of boxers from his dresser. He walked stiff-legged to the bathroom, rolling his shoulders, trying to get the kinks out of his spine.
Leaving Jasmine to sleep off the effects of the booze and coke, Harley went into the living room and turned on the TV. She was smaller than him, at least in weight, but had matched him shot and line, all through the night.
He clicked the channels until he found the local station, which usually showed a short news update at noon. The lead-in story was about a missing twenty-two-year-old. Harley thought it weird that they were showing an artist’s sketch instead of the woman’s actual photo.
“Hey, that’s that girl from last night,” Jasmine said, coming into the living room.
She wore only the silk button-down shirt that Harley had worn the night before. The shirt was completely unbuttoned, exposing her flat belly and tiny exclamation-point-shaped pubic hair. Harley was distracted from the news story.
“You remember,” Jasmine said, pointing at the screen. “The hot one that just got to town. The one that turned me on so much I gave you a handjob under the table. She had a French name. What was it? Janet something?”
Harley looked back at the sketch on the TV screen again and the memory of the tiny, athletic dancer came back. She’d done only one set, turned a few quick tricks in the back room and left at midnight. He’d wanted to talk to her about coming back, but Jasmine delayed him and when he’d gotten to the dressing room later, she was already gone. Duke had left at about then, though Harley hadn’t noticed at the time. Jasmine had held his full attention.
Had to be a coincidence, Harley thought. Duke was no lady’s man, though he had muscles on muscles. The French girl was way out of his league.
It dawned on him that the cops might be using a sketch because the girl wasn’t missing. Maybe her face was too fucked up to show on TV, he thought. Duke had a mean streak sometimes, and when he was a kid, he’d killed a couple of stray cats in the neighborhood with a BB gun. But Harley doubted he’d hurt a person, especially a girl.
“Says she’s missing, huh?” Jasmine said. “Hey, I thought someone had to be missing for twenty-four hours before you could do a missing persons thing.”
“They do,” Harley said, reading the description. Four-eleven, blond hair, blue eyes, ninety-five pounds. Damn, it is her.
“Think we should, like, call the cops or something?”
“And tell ’em what?” Harley said. “That she was dancing and turning tricks in my club, while you were tooting coke off my dick?”
“Yeah,” Jasmine said, pushing him back on the couch and straddling him. “Probably not a good idea, huh?”
It was two in the afternoon and Harley was an hour late when he got to the club. Kenny and Wendell were already there and waiting.
“Sorry, guys,” he said, unlocking the back door. “I got held up. Kenny, I noticed some hiss in one of the speakers last night.”
“Yeah, one of the sub-woofers is about gone,” the DJ replied. “I got a new one on order. Should be here before five.”
“If you can’t get it hooked up in time,” Harley said, “how about just cutting the one speaker out completely?”
“Sure thing, Boss,” Kenny replied, wandering toward the DJ booth.
Wendell went straight to the bar and started checking the beer coolers and liquor shelf, making notes in his notebook. Kenny put on a CD and turned the volume to about half what he usually had it on. It wasn’t the techno crap he played when the girls were dancing. Instead, a local trop-rocker started singing about drinking Mekongs, missing his girlfriend, and screwing four-dollar Thai hookers.
Harley went to his office and opened the door. The only thing on his desk was a nearly empty bottle of Patrón Añejo, two shot glasses, the mirror, and little gold tube. He closed the door and shook his head, surveying the mess. Everything that had been on his desk, had been swept to the floor and a red G-string hung on the closet doorknob.
There was a knock and Jasmine stuck her head in. “Shit, Boss, did we do this?” She came into the office and snatched the G-string, looking around at the disheveled office. “Sorry, I got kinda carried away.”
The phone started ringing and Harley looked around for it. Seeing the cord disappear into a drawer, he yanked it open and answered the phone, motioning Jasmine out the door. He listened for a minute, then said, “Thanks for letting me know. Stop by anytime to collect.”
Harley removed the phone from the drawer and put it on the desk. He dialed Duke’s number and waited.
When his brother finally answered, Harley said, “Where the hell are you?”
“At home,” Duke replied. “What time is it?”
“It’s after two. You shoulda been here an hour ago.” If Duke had been on time, Harley would have been the one arriving late. “Where’d you disappear to last night?”
“Sorry, Harley. I was partying with a girl I met.”
“The girl from last night? The little spinner with the French name?”
There was silence on the other end. Duke was a pitiful liar, and Harley really didn’t want to know the truth.
“Look, I just got a call. Someone’s snooping around the spot.”
“Who?” Duke asked.
“That’s what I wanna know,” Harley said. “Rent a boat from the marina and head out there. I at least want to know who it is. Scare ’em off if you can.”
“I was beginning to worry,” Devon said, when we surfaced at the swim platform. “You were down there a long time.”
I looked at my dive watch. “Twenty minutes isn’t all that long,” I told her, handing my fins up. She took them and tossed them on the deck.
“Did you see anything?”
I unhooked my BC, dropped underwater to get out of it, and levered myself up onto the swim platform. “Yeah, I think this is the spot,” I replied, pulling my BC and tank out of the water and laying it on the deck in the cockpit. “There’s red-and-white grid pipe assembled on the bottom, about two-hundred feet ahead. That’s what salvagers use to survey a possible site. We’ll move the boat so it’s directly over the spot, and dive it again.”
Reaching down, I took Tony’s fins and tossed them on top of mine, then grabbed his BC and tank by the regulator’s first stage and laid it on the deck next to my own.
Devon and I climbed up to the bridge, and I started the engines as Tony went forward and untied the line holding us on the mooring ball. Slowly, I idled straight ahead, watching Tony o
n the foredeck.
He turned and yelled, “We’re over the grid now.”
As we passed over the spot, Tony released the brake on the anchor chain. I continued idling forward until we were about a hundred feet beyond the site. There, I released the lock on the windlass and dropped the anchor. Tony went aft and stood on the swim platform, looking down into the water. The current slowly carried us back toward the survey site.
“That’s good!” Tony shouted.
I locked the windlass, and Tony went back up to the foredeck and set the brake on the anchor line. The Revenge drifted back slightly further, lifting the line, dragging the chain, and setting the hook. I reversed hard, to make sure it was set, then looked down over the starboard rail. The survey grid was almost directly below us.
“I don’t suppose you dive, do you?” I asked Devon.
“No,” she replied. “I’m a good swimmer, but I’ve never even tried snorkeling.”
“Tony and I are good divers, but we’re not investigators. What should we be looking for and what do we do with it when we find it?”
“I have some evidence bags and latex gloves in my gym bag,” she said, heading to the ladder. Tony and I joined her in the salon. “Ideally, this would be done by forensics tech divers,” she explained. “But, as you pointed out at dinner, we’re outside territorial waters and the sheriff doesn’t have jurisdiction out here. So it’s us or bring in the FBI and Coast Guard.”
“I doubt we’ll find anything that might be useful in the shooting,” I said. “I understand the gun was a revolver, so there won’t even be a shell casing. If the girl was also drowned here, what should we be looking for?”
“I know it’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Devon said. “But, you saw her, right?” I nodded and she continued. “She’s missing a tooth, one eye, and quite a bit of tissue from her face.”
“Find a tooth on the bottom of the ocean?” Tony asked.
“Or whatever blunt object he used to smash her face,” Devon replied, digging into her gym bag. She placed a box of latex gloves on the settee. “Wear these,” she continued, pulling out another box, “and take a few of these evidence bags. Anything you find goes into a separate bag. Usually the forensics people will write where the object was found on the front of the bag, but I guess we’ll just put ‘Survey Site’ on all of them.”
I looked at Tony and pointed with my chin toward the water. “Southwest corner of the grid is square one and we go left to right, bottom to top?”
“Top right corner will be number six-twenty-five?”
“Good idea,” Devon said. “Write on the bag what the grid number is where you find anything. If you find something outside the grid, just estimate the distance to the nearest one.”
“We could be here a few dives,” I said. “Maybe a few dives for several days.” I took a number of the evidence bags from the box and stuffed them into my pocket. “Why the gloves? Can you get fingerprints from something that’s wet?”
“They can in the lab, at least sometimes. I read about a case where they were able to lift prints from a postcard that’d been mailed in the nineteen-forties. Mostly, the gloves keep you from cross-contaminating evidence.”
Snagging several pairs of the gloves, I stuffed them in another pocket and headed out to the cockpit.
“We only have about three hours of daylight left,” Tony said, following behind me. “Two more dives, and we’ll have to start doing some deco stops.”
“What’s that?” Devon asked, following us out into the sunlight.
“Air is mostly nitrogen and oxygen,” I explained, as Tony changed the tanks out and hooked the empties to the compressor hoses. “Too much of either isn’t good. At depth, you’re breathing compressed air at a greater volume, equal to the water pressure. At thirty feet, the pressure’s almost twice the normal atmospheric pressure we breathe at the surface. Oxygen is burned off easy enough in the muscle tissue, but a decompression stop at a shallower depth is needed when the nitrogen level gets too concentrated in the body. No big deal. We’ll just cut the third dive short and hang out ten feet below the boat for a few minutes, to bleed some nitrogen off.”
“What?” she asked, looking puzzled. “You have to test your blood or something?”
Tony and I laughed. “Nah,” I said, lifting the gauge cluster attached to my regulator. “Dive computers calculate all that now. But once you’ve done a few thousand dives, you know the depths and limits.”
We geared up and were back in the water in minutes, agreeing that we’d work the grid from opposite sides. We descended to the bottom, then split up. I went over to grid one, and Tony started at grid twenty-five.
Visibility was nearly a hundred feet, but when I got to the first grid and actually studied the bottom, I realized the enormity of our task. On pleasure dives, you’re just looking around to see what can be seen. I’d never really studied the sea-floor through the eyes of a person looking for something out of the ordinary. As I adjusted my buoyancy and pulled on the latex gloves—not an easy task in the water—I realized it would be difficult to find anything at all. Studying the bottom beneath the first grid, I didn’t see anything at all that shouldn’t have been there, and moved on to number two.
Tony and I soon met in the middle, both shaking our heads. We moved up one grid to the north and then started moving apart. Isaksson and Marshall had obviously taken a lot of time to set the survey grid up so that it was perfectly square on a north-south axis. Knowing Isaksson’s dad a little better than the son, I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the corners was at a precise one-hundredth of a second in both latitude and longitude. Now Isaksson’s and Marshall’s grid was being used to find clues to who killed them.
I slowly moved back to my left, studying the bottom closely. We did this sideways thing several times, meeting in the middle and going back the other way. When I was down to four hundred pounds of air, I signaled Tony and we headed up to the boat. The next dive would require a safety stop, and if there was a fourth dive we’d need a fifteen-minute decompression stop.
Without getting out of the water, we quickly switched the tanks out and connected the empties to the compressor, telling Devon that we hadn’t seen anything. Five minutes later, we were back at the grid square each of us had left off at.
It wasn’t until we were ten minutes into the fourth tank that I heard a clanking sound and looked to find Tony motioning me to him. He was at the fifteenth row, near the east side of the grid.
Tony pointed as I got closer. Laying below the grid was an underwater camera with a double strobe attachment. I noticed that the pipe I had my hand on was bent slightly downward. Before I could examine it, I saw a small brain coral, no bigger than a ripe cantaloupe. It was more the position of it than the dome shaped coral itself that caught my eye; most people might not have noticed it, but I saw instantly that it had been disturbed. One side was pushed down into the sand, and there was a crack in the dome.
I motioned Tony closer. We each stuck our heads down into adjacent grid squares. I could see that something had discolored the area between several polyps and quite a few of the tiny animals were dead.
Tony scribbled on his dive slate and showed it to me.
Skin?
Holding a dive knife against a dead spot on the small brain coral, I was able to keep it from being further disturbed, while Tony carefully used his own dive knife to remove as much of the soft, spongy substance between the coral polyps that he could. Somehow, we managed to get most of it into an evidence bag. We had plenty of air and worked cautiously, trying to collect as much of the substance as we could without doing any more damage to the fragile little coral.
This was one of the many things that Tony and I had in common, and something we both took very seriously: a deep, abiding love of the sea and all its creatures. This small cluster of polyps, grouped to resemble a human brain, had taken years to reach this small size, starting from just one or two polyps clutching onto a clam she
ll or rock. I’d seen brain coral domes that were up to fifteen or twenty feet across, covered with millions of tiny polyps, which are the living part of the coral. Successive generations are added onto the calcium skeleton of earlier generations. Large brain corals could be thousands of years old.
So, yeah, we were being careful. Probably not what the forensics guys might have done—they’d likely have bagged the whole coral—but we were watermen first.
Then I saw it. At first, I thought it was just a broken piece of long-dead coral turned white. But when I picked it up I realized it was a human tooth. One of the smaller front teeth from the bottom jaw, if I had to guess.
We bagged the tooth and had to take the camera and strobes apart to fit either into the largest evidence bag. I looked closely at the bottom. I remembered Doc Fredric saying that he’d found microscopic plant life and small sand crystals in the girl’s lungs. I didn’t know if he could compare them or not, but I decided to put some sand into an evidence bag, then I closed and sealed it.
Hovering there, I shuddered with the realization that this was where the girl had died. Several grid squares to the north, I spotted something unusual. While Tony continued sifting through the sand where the tooth was found, I finned over to the object.
I knew what it was before I even got close. I know a thing or two about guns, and a black-and-silver revolver looks way out of place on the sea bottom. It was just a few feet from where I was now sure Jennifer Marshall had been murdered. I looked up and realized I was probably thirty feet below where James had been shot to death. I carefully put the revolver in a bag, but instead of putting the bag in one of the deep cargo pockets of my shorts, I shoved it into the inside pocket of my BC and swam back over to Tony. He was inspecting the grid pipes around where we’d found the tooth and what we’d guessed was skin tissue.
He looked up at me, then pointed to two parallel sections of the grid and made a motion with his hand like a bridge. I nodded and pointed to the pipe I’d noticed was bent and made the same motion, but inverted, telling him that it was bent downward.
Fallen Hero: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 10) Page 16