The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit #1)(2)

“That doesn’t seem very safe,” he scolds before walking away to confer with his colleagues.

No. It’s not. Dad taught me everything about diving. First and foremost was to never dive alone. Sure, he did it. And I did it, but you weren’t supposed to. And Nadia wasn’t supposed to cancel on me today either.

She’s got a good heart, but my Brazilian friend is a little on the flaky side when it comes to morning appointments. I had drinks with her last night, and she’d begged me to go out dancing. I declined. My daughter, Jackie, was with her father at his parents’ mansion in Miami Beach, and I decided to binge Jane Eyre on Netflix and then get a full night’s rest.

Of course, I ended up texting with Jackie until past midnight as she relayed the latest outlandish things her grandmother said.

Jackie . . . Jackie deserves a mother who isn’t so stupid. A mother who isn’t standing fifty feet away from a corpse she bumbled into.

Palm Beach Deputy Macon, a middle-aged man with a kindly demeanor, tries to keep me distracted while various men wearing khaki pants and polo shirts with different department logos take turns looking at the body.

Some of them take photos. Others compare the body to images on their phones.

“That’s six,” I note as another vehicle pulls up with yet another cadre of cops from some agency or department.

“What’s that?” asks Macon. He’d been asking me what school my daughter goes to when Detective Levine walked over to tell me that diving alone was dumb.

Yep. Got it. Maybe I should make a sign and wear it?

I point to the SUV behind Macon as two men get out. “Miami-Dade PD,” I explain. “No markings, and the rims look like something a drug dealer would have, which means the vehicle was probably a seizure. So I’m guessing they’re narcotics.”

Macon turns around to glance at the two men dressed in light pants and loose-fitting silk shirts. Both of them have their badges out on lanyards. Undercover cops.

“Huh,” Macon replies. “You said you’re a part-time police officer? You looking to go full somewhere?”

The undercovers walk over to Detective Levine, who responded after Macon called it in.

“No. I’m working on my doctorate in archaeology. I prefer my bodies to be long dead.” I regret the joke immediately. It’s fine for hanging out with friends over beers. Here, maybe not so professional.

Macon gives me a half smile. “So, you dive mostly? Just for your department?”

“They loan me out a lot. Lauderdale Shores has the highest number of canals and waterways per capita of any city in America,” I reply, giving our rote response. We’re a tiny community that most police departments barely know exists. “We also have three bridges and a mile of canal in a high-trafficking zone. It was cheaper to put me on the payroll than keep hiring me freelance to pull guns and evidence out of the water.”

“So I guess this isn’t your first body.”

“Sadly, no.” Macon’s a nice enough man, and I decide to give him a fuller answer. “Remember that small jet crash six years ago in the Everglades? That was my first.”

“Mercy. Eight people died, right? That had to have been horrible.”

“The worst part was the jet fuel and the gators and snakes. I had to wear a dry suit. It was hot that summer.” I omit the part where I passed out from dehydration and the only thing that saved me was inflating my buoyancy compensator at the last minute.

I’d pulled a dozen more bodies from the water since then. Some only hours dead, others in such advanced stages of decomposition that I had to wrap them in plastic so parts didn’t fall off.

Today’s body is the latest addition to that morbid list—if you don’t count the people I rescued lifeguarding and spotting dive excursions. They’d all lived.

But today, I could tell the moment I saw her that she’d been killed recently. Maybe within hours.

Her. It’s the first time I’ve thought of the body as anything more than a body.

After dragging her to shore, I’d torn off my dive gear and tried mouth-to-mouth in case there was hope. The coldness of her lips told me it was too late. But I had to try.

Grandpa Jack used to tell stories about men being pulled into the boat who seemed like goners, only to be revived after a heroic bout of CPR. He had lots of stories like that. Fighting off pirates, giant squid, hammerheads with vendettas. Some were probably even true.

The woman I’d pulled from the water today looked to be about twenty-three. She was wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt and had a smattering of post-millennial tattoos and hair dyed dark red.

The most distinguishing mark on her was the angry red gash across her neck.

Her throat was so badly crushed I could hear a faint wheeze as I tried to force air into her lungs. But I’d kept trying anyway.

It’s what I would have wanted if it had been my . . .

Don’t go there, Sloan. Don’t go there.

The detective in charge, Ruiz, walks over to us. He’s got a stocky build, a thick head of hair with silver streaks, and a goatee. We’d spoken briefly when he first came to the scene.

“Do you have an ID on her?” I ask.

Ruiz squints at me for a moment, then recognition dawns on him. “Right. You’re the deputy for Lauderdale Shores?”

“Yes.” I’d explained this to him a half hour ago.