Flesh and Blood

by Patricia Cornwell

  “He wasn’t scared. But I reminded him that the Pentagon wouldn’t be pleased if he conducted an underwater search and recovery on a high-profile case when he doesn’t meet the physical fitness standards. In fact he admitted his Army doc ordered him not to even think about diving unless he gets a pacemaker.”

  I follow Benton out of the cabin as the two police divers take their giant strides off the dive platform, one of them holding a lift bag in case he gets lucky and finds Rosado’s missing BDU and the perforated tank, which would have filled with water. It would be quite heavy and less likely to have been relocated by the current, and I squirt defog in my mask. I check the inspection stickers on a filled tank clamped into the side of the boat, and I remove the valve cap and release a quick hiss of air.

  “Well it’s sounding pretty hopeless but I have to say I tried.” I loop my BCD strap around the tank and clamp it tight. “As usual we have to worry about the trial and some dream team focusing on the missing pieces of skull, the mandible and teeth and how finding them would have changed the interpretation of things.”

  “It’s such bullshit.” Benton swishes his mask in a drum of clean water.

  “Unfortunately it’s not. If I were a defense attorney it’s exactly what I’d ask.” I line up the top of my vest with the upper rim of the scuba tank and then I sit down on the bench. “The question will be distance. By the time they’re done the jury will doubt the shot could have been fired from the yacht, that instead it was a sniper a great distance away on another boat, possibly from the top of a high-rise onshore. They’ll compare it to the other cases and say it couldn’t have been Troy.”

  “Or they’ll blame it on the person who’s supposed to be dead. Carrie.”

  I scan the sparkling blueness all around us and the closest boat I can make out is maybe a mile south of us. I notice it’s moving very slowly in our direction.

  “A shark could have eaten the bones I guess.” Benton fastens his BCD and pulls the straps tight.

  “I doubt it.” I lean over to slip my feet into the fins.

  “There’s nothing down there anymore and I think for good reason,” he says. “A lot of old tires. I saw plenty of those this morning.”

  “Why bother? Assuming you’re thinking what I suspect you are.”

  “We know for a fact she was on Rosado’s jet yesterday morning,” Benton says.

  “Well Sasha Sarin was.”

  “If she’s still protecting Troy and the family then it would have been a shrewd move to make sure any evidence on the ocean floor was gone by the time we started looking.”

  “Like wiping down beer bottles and the gun and using bleach to destroy DNA.” I pick up my regulator, the mouthpiece in my right hand, the computer in my left and I mate the valves, tightening the connectors on top of the tank.

  “That’s right, Christ when you know who it is. That’s probably exactly what she did,” he says. “It fits the pattern and there’s nothing left down there to find so why the hell are we still bothering? And we have your birthday condo all ready. If ever I was tempted to scrap a mission it would be this one.”

  “That would be ungracious.” I attach the low-pressure hose to the nozzle of the inflator. “Our police friends are down there waiting for us.”

  I place my regulator in my mouth and inhale, and the membrane resists, moving forward, exactly what it’s supposed to do and I turn on my air. My attention continues to be drawn out into the blueness everywhere, to the small boat I noticed earlier. It isn’t moving now but I can hear the outboard motor running and see someone sitting in the back. The dive flag is moving through the water, someone drift-diving the artificial reef.

  Benton follows where I’m looking and says, “Don’t worry. If any other divers get close Rick and Sam will shoo them off.”

  “They’ll flash their badges under water?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ll make one sweep around the wreck, in and out of the immediate area and then we’ll quit.”

  “All so you can say you did.”

  “That’s ninety percent of it these days.” I dig into my bag for my dive computer watch, for my knife, blunt tipped and short bladed. “Come on. We haven’t been dive buddies in a while.”

  Rinsing my mask with its mounted minirecorder, I work my arms into my vest. I try my regulator and octopus again, making sure I’m getting air. Then I purge them. I put my mask on and recheck my computers, and I lean forward to dislodge the tank from its holder and I stand up. I pull on my gloves and walk carefully in my fins to the platform. My regulator is in my mouth and I place one hand over it, the other over my mask. I take my big step in.

  THE WATER IS WARM and I add air to my BCD and float, waiting for Benton, giving him plenty of room as I ease my way to a mooring line attached to the dive buoy. He’s in with a splash and we meet each other’s eyes and nod. I bleed all of the air out of my vest and we begin our descent, the water full of light near the surface. It gets darker and cooler as we go down.

  My breathing blasts loudly in my head and I pinch my nose, clearing my ears as we go deeper, and I feel the water weighing heavily and cooler as the pressure increases and the light dims. I look for the two police divers, Rick and Sam, for their bubbles or their movements and don’t see them. I check my computers repeatedly and then I see the sunken freighter, a broken hulk of a silhouette on the murky bottom. I can make out the bow facing north, the angles of twisted metal. I don’t see anyone around.

  At ninety feet a large shape is a sea turtle on the rusty hull and a toadfish deflates its bladder, flattening on the brown silt bottom. An orange-striped triggerfish makes kissing movements with its mouth as it glides past, and I see a conch that looks exactly like a rock until it moves along like an old Winnebago.

  A sea fan waves and I see a large gray grouper with spots, a sea bass, a broad-snouted shark that aren’t the least bit interested in the two of us. A crowd of yellow angelfish swim close to my mask as if I’m part of the artificial reef, their round eyes cartoonish. A sea horse hovers. A venomous lionfish has fins that look like feathers, and I adjust my buoyancy with my breathing.

  I sink down to dark holes in the ship’s side, and I drop lower into an opening that had a hatch cover in an earlier life. I shine my light and it’s a reflex when I flutter my fins to back off from the other diver and what I notice doesn’t register at first. A barracuda zigzagging out from under him, and there are no bubbles as he’s floating inside the hull. I paint my light over his arms and hands, and his masked face is down. I move closer.

  I touch his neoprene-covered back and he moves a little, and I see the hoses hanging down and the straight line of a spear embedded in his chest. There’s someone else below him inside the bulkhead. The second one, both police divers dead inside the hull, and I bolt up with powerful kicks.

  I find Benton inches from the bottom, moving along, searching with his light and I tap my knife against my tank to get his attention. A faint sharp clank, clank and he looks up at me. I urgently point toward the barge, and its gaping holes in the dark greenish blue water where particles are suspended in my light. Then I hear the sound. A faint rapid vibration like a distant power saw. I turn in its direction as I catch something move darkly around the hull, what I think at first is a large fish but it can’t be, and the vibration gets louder.

  The shape moves rapidly toward me and I shine my light into a face with eyes wide and wild, framed in a sinister black mask and she has a black torpedo shape on her tank, like a turbine engine, whining on and off as she stops and starts, moving unnaturally fast. I don’t see the spear gun until she swivels and points. I hear a spit and feel the hit like a jolting punch.

  EPILOGUE

  ONE WEEK LATER

  BAL HARBOUR

  THE DOUBLE LOUNGER IS made of a tropical wood I can’t identify, possibly teak but the driftwood finish confuses me, sort of pickled, sort of plastic. The cushion is ivory and the bright throw pillows are in an abstract cubis
m design that reminds me of Picasso, also sort of.

  Day in, day out I sit on the wraparound terrace of my birthday condo, looking at the ocean change color, at the shapes of clouds that shadow the rolling surface, waves rising and crashing softly, sometimes louder and violently when they hurl themselves on the beach as if they’re angry. I gaze at them with sunglasses on and I listen. I don’t miss anything, not a helicopter that goes by, not a low-flying banner plane, not people on the boardwalk ten floors below. I don’t say much as I watch what goes on.

  Everyone around me has the best of intentions, first Lucy and Benton, then Marino got here, and day before yesterday Janet and Desi showed up. Their efforts are relentless, and they don’t listen when I say it’s enough. It’s as if I died and am in a different dimension. I see them rearranging towels as if they’re shrouds. They place pillows behind my lower back and under my knees. They worry about my neck, my hair, do I need a different hat and what about a manicure as if I’m about to be put on display at a wake. My only noninvasive friend, all seven years and four feet tall of him, is Desi, who sadly and soon enough will be adopted. At least it will be by Janet, his mother Natalie’s only sister.

  He has huge blue eyes and pale brown hair that grows in different directions, cowlicks everywhere. Very small for his age, he was born three months prematurely, carried by a surrogate but it was Natalie’s egg. She’s dying of pancreatic cancer. In hospice in Virginia, it’s a matter of weeks and she doesn’t want Desi to see her like this.

  Janet and Lucy don’t push back about it and they should. He should see his mother. He should be with her when it happens and already I can imagine how things will go. Lucy and Janet will need my help until I give it. Then they’ll say I interfere. It will be true. I’ll interfere on a regular basis and they’ll have to get used to it.

  “Quiz time,” I say from my lounger, and as usual Desi is perched on the edge of it.

  He doesn’t take up much room, and the sun is giving him freckles all over the place.

  “Where’s your Avenger special cream? Remember we talked about it?” I nudge up one of his sleeves to remind him as I reach for the lotion for babies, SPF 50 on the small square pickled-looking table. “What happens if you get sunburned?”

  “Cancer like Mommy has.” His back feels narrow and bony pressed up against me.

  “She has a different type of cancer. But too much sun exposure isn’t good, you’re right about that. I can’t remember who you are this minute. Is it Hawkeye or Iron Man?”

  “That’s silly.” But he loves it.

  “It’s not silly. We have to help people, don’t we?”

  “We can’t save the world, you know.” He’s very wise all of a sudden.

  “I know but we have to try, don’t we?”

  “You tried and got shot.”

  “I’m afraid it’s the thanks I got.”

  “It must have hurt.” He says the same thing on and off all the time and my answer isn’t enough. “What did it feel like? Nobody ever really says what it feels like and it’s not the same as a movie.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Maybe it’s like getting stuck with an arrow.”

  “That would seem right but it didn’t.”

  We continue to have this conversation because it’s important to him. It’s not really about me.

  “What then?” He presses against me like Sock.

  I try to think of a different description and come up with one. “It felt like I was punched by an iron fist.” I rub his back and it’s very warm because of the sun, because he’s a little boy with so much life in him.

  “Were you scared of dying, Aunt Kay?”

  He already calls me that and of course he can, and he uses the scared word a lot and it’s not a new question. Both of us look at the ocean, at a squadron of pelicans flying past our terrace, so close I can see their eyes as they spy for fish.

  “What do you think dying is?” I ask him what I have before and no discussion will take away the sadness.

  “Going away,” he says.

  “That’s a good way to think of it.”

  “I don’t want my mommy to.”

  “Going away like on a trip but that doesn’t mean she’s not around anymore. It just means she’s not where everybody else is right now,” I reply.

  “But I don’t want her to.”

  “None of us do.” I rub lotion on an arm he holds straight out like a stick.

  “It would be lonely.”

  “Maybe it isn’t for the person who left.” I start on the other arm. “Wouldn’t that be a good thought? It’s lonely for us but not for them.”

  “I would have been scared if someone shot me under the water,” he says, and there’s little I remember but what I don’t doubt is that I knew exactly what was happening at the time.

  I heard the spit and the spear as it hit my scuba tank, glancing off, and I couldn’t get away as she placed the butt of the gun against her hip, jamming another shaft into the barrel. Then I was slammed in my right thigh and she was rushing on top of me and the vibration was loud, the propulsion vehicle like a lightweight jetpack mounted on her tank, battery charged, controlled by a handheld switch. What I remember most vividly is Benton’s face, the water pressing his cheeks flat. He was unnaturally pale, as pale as death.

  I don’t remember struggling. I have no recall of stirring up the bottom, deliberately creating a brownout. I don’t remember slashing at her with my knife, cutting open her face from her temple to her chin, through her left cheek. Then she was gone as if she’d never been there, and I don’t remember the blood clouding out in her wake.

  I don’t remember anything. I wasn’t aware of Benton getting me to the surface, holding my regulator in my mouth. My mask-mounted camera ran the entire time. It captured at least some of what happened. I don’t know how much. The FBI has my mask, my tank, my knife, everything. I’ve not been shown the list of what they’ve seized. I’ve not been allowed to review the recording yet for reasons not even Benton will tell me. What I’m left with for now is a black hole as if Carrie Grethen is dead again but I’m told she’s not.

  It’s like a weather report I get on the hour. The latest prediction of the heat and humidity, the latest storm moving in or out and what to expect next and should we go somewhere else. I look for her as I convalesce, taking an inventory of how I feel and what I’ve been through, details I won’t share with Desi until he’s much older, maybe as old as Lucy was when I began talking openly about life’s ugliness.

  In truth it’s been awful. A punctured quadriceps above the knee and a debridement surgery not to mention decompression sickness as gases came out of solution, migrating to areas of my body where bubbles don’t belong. Severe joint pain as if I didn’t hurt enough, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy in a recompression chamber which I have no idea about. Except I have vague impressions, ephemeral like gauze, and that’s probably the origin of my comic book theme with Desi.

  I think I believed I was in a space warp or on a Galactus ship. Since he got here he rarely leaves my side. He reminds me of Lucy at his age, a hovercraft constantly staring at me and asking the same questions repeatedly that are hard to answer honestly.

  “How about you roll the Ferrari over here?” I say to him.

  “It’s not really a Ferrari and pretty soon you won’t need it.” He trots to get it.

  “When my leg is better you’re in big trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can catch you,” I reply.

  He rolls it over to the lounger and the walker isn’t bad for such a thing, racing red with black swivel wheels and handbrakes.

  “It’s like an old person,” he teases yet again and he’s enormously amused by himself.

  “It’s not.”

  “Like a cripple person.”

  “What would be a nicer word, Desi?”

  “An old cripple person!” He shrieks somewhere in the range of two octaves above high C.

 
“You owe me another quarter.”

  “When we had a dog he got hit by a car and couldn’t walk anymore. He had to be put to sleep.” He follows me through the open slider.

  I push the walker along, moving my wrapped-up right leg without bending it much.

  “That bad lady should be put to sleep,” he says. “What if she comes here?”

  The living room with its earth-tone furniture is empty and quiet. Benton, Marino, Lucy and Janet went to the Taco Beach Shack to pick up dinner and after that they picked up my mother, and I’m annoyed. Take-out food every night and it depresses me. I look for Sock. He’s probably snoozing on the bed again. When everyone gets back Benton needs to take him out.

  “You may not know this about me yet but I’m a very good cook.” I roll the walker to the kitchen and open the refrigerator door, then I maneuver myself to the pantry. “What would you think of spaghetti with tomato and basil, a little red wine, olive oil and some garlic with a dash of crushed red pepper?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I’ll write your name on the plate with a noodle.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “So it’s tacos again. And that root beer you like so much. When I was your age they had birch beer. Have you ever heard of it?” I get a root beer out of the refrigerator and twist off the cap. “In a glass?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I didn’t think so but it’s nice to ask.” I hand it to him. “They had a place down here called Royal Castle. There might still be one on Dixie Highway near Shorty’s Barbecue. I’m going to have to find you a birch beer somewhere. We have birch trees in New England. Lucy has a lot of them on her property. They have peeling bark like white paint peeling off.”

  “Am I going back to Virginia?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Mommy’s sleeping I think.”

  “It would be fun if all of us lived closer, wouldn’t it?”

  “Were you ever seven, Aunt Kay?” He lifts the bottle and takes a sip as I hear a key in the front door.