The Bone Bed ks-20

by Patricia Cornwell

  “No, no, no.” I shake my head. “Don’t pull it. That’s not how we’re going to bring it in. Not from the boat.”

  “You don’t want me to hook it? Probably a lot easier and safer than jumping in. Maybe you won’t need to.”

  “No,” I reiterate. “I need to see what we’re dealing with. The body’s not budging until I see what we’ve got.”

  “Okay, whatever you say.” He releases the line.

  “We want to make sure nothing comes in contact with the body.” I spit in my mask to prevent it from fogging as he stows the gaff back in its holder. “Whatever damage it has, it won’t be caused by us.”

  Kletty attaches a line to the rescue buckle on the back of my suit, between my shoulder blades, to keep me tethered, and I lower the dive mask over my eyes and nose and climb down the ladder, my neoprene booties feeling their way on the metal rungs. When the surf is up to my hips, I push away from the back of the boat, the drysuit suctioned to me as if I’m shrink-wrapped, and I swim toward the yellow fender.

  I grab the buoy line in a gloved hand, the life vest keeping me afloat and balanced, and I submerge my masked face into the cold salty water and am startled by the body just below my feet. The dead woman is fully clothed and vertical, her arms and long white hair floating up, fanning and moving like something alive as she slowly tilts and turns in the current. I surface for air and dive again, and the way she’s rigged is grotesque and sinister.

  A rope around her neck is tied to the yellow fender on the surface, while a second rope around her ankles drops tautly down and disappears in the darkness, attached to something heavy. A torture device that creates extreme tension by pulling, stretching, and dislocating the neck, the joints, ripping the person apart? Or is the purpose something else? and I suspect it is. She was tied this way for our benefit, and I look up again at the helicopter still hovering, then I hold my breath and drop below the waves.

  Sunlight filters through the surface, the water green and clear just below, then turning darker shades of blue that become murkier and as black as coal. I don’t know how deep the bay is here, but whatever the rope around her ankles is attached to most likely isn’t resting on the bottom, which could be thirty feet or more below the surface. The rope runs straight down, as if there is plenty of tension in it, and I lift my face out of the water. I take a deep breath and motion for Marino to get ready with the gaff.

  “I can’t do anything with her right here,” I shout. “We’re going to have to somehow get the entire rig to the boat without causing a lot of damage to her.”

  “What entire rig?” Marino asks. “Just move her and the buoy line at the same time. Can’t you do that?”

  “No,” I reply. “What we’ve got to do is pull her abeam the boat, right up to the side of it, so we can cut her free without losing anything and get her in the basket.”

  I float on the rough surface, the drysuit clinging tightly to me, and I can feel the chill of the water through it.

  “The problem’s going to be cutting the rope around her ankles,” I explain. “I don’t want to lose what she’s attached to, the conch pot or whatever it is.”

  I want it. There’s not a chance I’m going to let it settle out of sight to the bottom of the bay. I will recover every damn thing in this case, whether it is a barnacle or a pot, cage, container, or cinder blocks. I ask how deep the water is, and Labella tells me forty-two feet, and I’m aware of the helicopter beating overhead. Someone is watching our every move and probably filming it, dammit.

  “So the line attached to the conch pot may not be that long.” I blow water out of my mouth, the waves splashing up my neck and over my chin. “It’s pulling her down while another line pulls her up.”

  “What other line?” Marino shouts. “It’s just one line, right?”

  “What we’ve got are two lines pulling her in two directions,” I emphasize. “The one tied to the fender is a separate line.”

  “You mean she’s entangled with something else?” Kletty puzzles.

  “No. I mean she’s been tied to two lines,” I repeat slowly, loudly. “One around her neck that’s attached to the fender, and the other around her ankles that leads down to whatever she’s weighted with, a conch pot or who knows what.” I spew out water as I talk.

  The life vest keeps me on the surface like a cork, but the chop is getting stiffer, the wind gusting sharply. I work against the current so it doesn’t carry me farther away from the boat.

  “So if you pull too hard her head’s going to pop off,” Marino says, with his usual diplomacy.

  “She’ll come apart if we’re not really, really careful,” I reply, and by now I’m certain that whoever orchestrated the dumping of the body booby-trapped it.

  I’ve no doubt it was deliberate. The person responsible wanted her discovered and intended for someone like me to be in for a gory shock when the body was pulled apart like a wishbone. I can’t imagine any other reason to tie her up this way, and I envision tugging hard on the buoy line the way Marino was about to do a few moments ago and inadvertently decapitating her. We would have recovered only her head or, more likely, no part of her at all.

  We’d be forced to call in a dive team or to put on scuba gear ourselves and search the bottom of the bay, finding what we could, maybe nothing, until whatever was left surfaced and washed ashore. The fact is she might never have been found. I can only imagine how such a grisly scenario would play out in court, especially if it were caught on film by a television crew hovering over us in a helicopter. Such a scenario is unthinkable.

  A jury would be repulsed, as if what happened was due to callous carelessness or complete incompetence on our part. I’m not sure anybody would understand that some diabolical individual has all but assured that this dead woman will not be recovered intact or possibly ever. Some malignant murderer wanted us to get a close look at his handiwork before it vanished right before our eyes, maybe wanted to make sure we never know who she is, and we might not if we don’t safely get her body out of the water.

  What to do? My thoughts race through different possibilities, but there really is only one that seems workable, and nothing we try is foolproof. We need to be patient and careful, and we need to be lucky.

  “What if we cut the line around her neck?” Kletty suggests, and I notice that all of them are in white Tyvek, and what a strange sight that must be from the air. “Cut her free from the fender so nothing’s pulling on her neck?” he suggests.

  “I can’t,” I answer. “I can’t guarantee I could hold her up. I’m afraid whatever’s attached to the line around her ankles will pull her down and out of reach. We’ve got to somehow secure the line that’s tied around her neck without doing damage to her.” I say this to Marino as I tread against the current.

  “You and I are going to have to ease her to the boat, do it perfectly in sync, and hope she holds together,” I continue. “I’ll move her close enough so you can hook the line with the gaff and get hold of it, but don’t pull it. The point is to pull me, not her, and I’ll swim her in, keeping the line around her neck as slack as I can. Get the basket rigged and down, and gently pull me, not her,” I repeat, and I feel tension increase on the line between my shoulder blades.

  They lower the Stokes basket, the bottom of it covered by two spread-open black body pouches, and I help guide the hook of the gaff until Marino has the buoy line. He coaxes it closer to the boat, reaching down to grab it, and her pale fingers with their painted nails suddenly are visible just below the surface. Her white hair floats up, and for an instant her face appears in the trough of a wave.

  eleven

  “EASY!” I EXCLAIM TO MARINO. “HOLD IT! HOLD IT! Don’t pull.” I push my mask up. “Just hold the line and let me do the rest.”

  I smell her odor, moldy and foul, and I reach down to grab her under the arms, turning my back to the boat. I hold her firmly from behind.

  “Keep her rope as slack as you can,” I call out, and I dip my right shoulder
under the yellow buoy line, taking on some of its tension so it’s not pulling hard on her neck. “Bring me in very, very slowly as I swim with her. Pull me, not her.”

  I feel the tug at my upper back and can feel the weight of whatever the line around her ankles is attached to. She is cold, at least as cold as the sea, her skin wizened and hard. Her arms are relatively limber, but the rest of her is stiff from the cold, as stiff as she will get. Rigor mortis bypassed her weeks, possibly months, ago while she languished somewhere in storage, a place very dry and frigid.

  When she begins to warm up there will be no postmortem artifacts forming to give me the usual hints about when and where she died and exactly what position she was in, because it is much too late for that. Whatever is present right now is as much as I will see, and she will rapidly go from being cold and well preserved to putrid.

  Parchmentlike tallow scalp shows through her wet white hair, her ears and the tip of her nose discolored brown, and there’s the slightest frost of patchy white mold on her face and neck. She’s been dead long enough to begin mummifying, was kept somewhere quite a long while before she ended up underwater. I move her very slowly, the crown of her head under my chin, and I worry about her holding together as I keep the buoy line on top of my shoulder and feel it hard and rough against the side of my jaw.

  I do anything I can to keep the fender from pulling on her, and it bobs in front of us like a fat yellow fish in lazy pursuit, and then we reach the Stokes basket rocking against the side of the boat and I maneuver both of us around, facing the men. I tell Marino to hold his line steady, to keep the body close to the surface, and I ask Sullivan and Kletty to slacken the ropes attached to the basket’s harness and the back of my drysuit.

  “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.”