The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit #1)(21)

I should have stayed underwater.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LIGHTHOUSE

After an awkward goodbye with my uncle, I go back to my car and check for messages. The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office still hasn’t asked me to come in and make a statement. That’s either sloppy or odd.

I could call them, but that would be asking for trouble. I’m also at the point where I think I might need an attorney if they want to question me. I’ve heard too many whispers about me already to believe I’ll be given a fair shake.

It doesn’t matter if I had nothing to do with Stacey’s murder other than discovering her body. A good prosecutor will find something to hang a case on. Did I have my dive tanks properly stored in my truck? Have I been keeping proper track of my personal versus professional tank refills? Did I use a federally funded magnetometer for personal purposes? Did I keep all the appropriate records? The list goes on.

I need a moment of normalcy and decide to text Jackie.

How’s it going?

A minute later she replies.

VG gonna drop by house with Dad and get some clothes ltr k?

Okay. I’ll be home in a couple of hours. Love you.

Love you more.

Those three little words make me relax and feel a little glow inside. In telling me that she’s picking up some clothes, Jackie’s made it clear she knows I need a few more days and Run is on board with this.

We make a good team, for a fractured family unit that was never really a whole family.

If only Run . . .

Stop it.

I check my email and see that Nadine Baltimore, my supervising professor, has asked for a checkup on the canal site she asked me to take a look at.

Clearly, she hasn’t been following the news. Nadine spends most of her time in the lab separating pieces of linen from dredged-up mud and very little time paying attention to anything that happened in the last couple of centuries.

I decide to give her a call.

“Hey, Sloan,” she says in a monotone manner. She probably has her earbuds in as she stares into a microscope at a specimen.

“What are you looking at?”

“Could be a baby’s leg or a parrot thigh bone.”

“Really?”

“Of course not. The parrot bone would be smaller and more porous. But that’s what it looks like on first glance.”

Nadine has an odd habit of giving you her stream-of-consciousness thinking when you ask her a less-than-direct question.

“Find anything in the canal?” she asks.

“Yeah. A body.”

“Really?” she replies with an excited change of tone.

“Um. A recent one.”

“Classic? Postclassic?”

“This week.”

“What?” she replies.

“The person was killed and dumped while I was in the water.”

“Oh my god. At my canal spot?”

“Yeah. Long story short, it’s a murder scene.”

“Well, that’s inconvenient. Did you find anything before you found the body? Why are you laughing?”

God bless Nadine. She’s not going to let something like a tragic murder and ensuing homicide investigation get in the way of science. I think this is why I called her in the first place.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh. Will you be able to go back and have a look? It’s a really interesting area. From the aerial photos, it looks like the bend on that stretch was only recently connected to the canal and was a pond for a long time before that. I’ll bet anything that just below the muck there’s a clay layer that’ll yield something.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you. Anything else?”

“You get a chance to look at the paper I wrote?”

“Yes. Your spelling is atrocious, and your references were mismatched.”

“Oh . . .”

“I submitted it to the Journal of Underwater Archaeology.”

“Wait? What?”

“I cleaned up the errors. Other than that, it was good. A little dry, but good.”

I’m confused. “You submitted it? Coauthored?”

It’s pretty common for professors to slap their name on their grad students’ work to increase their publication count.

“No. Of course not. I was looking at the academic calendar and realized that you needed to have a paper published this semester. I decided to go ahead and submit it.”

“Thank you.”

“It’ll run. I know the reviewer who’s handling it. They’re looking for something like this. So, congratulations.”

That’s Nadine for you. One moment she’s a thousand years away, aloof to your worldly problems, then at three a.m. she remembers something and saves your ass. Part of my education is being paid for by an obscure scholarship she discovered that was funded by a philanthropist who made his fortune selling dive gear to the navy.

“You’re the best,” I reply.

“Then get me some sediment. The boys over in the genomics lab say they’ve got a multichannel sequencer they want to test out on something unusual.”

That sounds more like a musical instrument to me than a piece of scientific equipment, but I don’t admit my ignorance.