The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit #1)(59)

“Hey, remember, we’re the good guys,” says George.

“Well, that’s a first,” Dad replies from the captain’s chair.

“Present company excluded,” George answers back.

I jump into the water before the conversation goes any further. It’s even odds that when I come back, they’ll either be drinking beers together or knife fighting.

“Is this thing working?” George asks over the underwater radio.

I click the transmit button on my glove. “Affirmative.”

We anchored far enough away from Turtle Isle to not look suspicious but close enough for me to swim there easily.

I’ve carried enough equipment underwater to know what’s practical and what’s not. This swim shouldn’t be a problem, even though I’m carrying extra weights to keep the corpse underwater while transporting it back to the boat.

Right now it’s low tide, which means there’s only eight feet of water over my head. Closer to the tunnel, it’ll get a bit deeper. My biggest concern is my usual one: staying deep enough that I don’t get prop-chopped by a random speedboat.

The bottom has poor visibility because of all the sediment. My flashlight cuts about ten feet and disappears in the brackish dark.

Tufts of seagrass stick out from the floor. A school of minnows swims off to my right, and a grouper makes a quick exit when he spots me.

Night is my favorite time to dive. There are just as many fish down here—it’s not like they have any other place to go—and your flashlight carves out your own little world. You forget about the surface and the sky above. The sea is your world on a night dive.

I keep track of my progress by counting my kicks and referring to my compass, more out of habit than anything else.

When I reach the dredged-out area, I spot more than the usual fish hanging out in the deep recession. They give me room to pass but don’t display any sense of urgency.

I make my way through, and my light catches the entrance to the tunnel. The grille is still in place. When I get closer and shine my light inside, the body is visible.

“At the entrance. Body’s still here,” I report.

“Good news,” George replies.

Either K-Group doesn’t know the body’s there or it doesn’t care. The latter seems unlikely. The former is promising—it implies that this person might have been killed by Bonaventure. My suspicion is that it’s Raul Tiago.

I use my marine bolt cutters to cut the lock. It snaps open on the second attempt. If that hadn’t worked, we have a special tool back on the boat that’s basically a car jack used to pry locks open. It’s heavy and takes forever, so I opted for regular cutters.

“I cut the lock.”

“Okay. There’s some boat traffic. We’ll keep you posted.”

If that didn’t work, I’d have had to slip off the tank and try to squeeze my body through the bars. That option didn’t excite me. It was a narrow fit the first time. Who knows what kind of damage it could do to a corpse?

I once had a coroner call me up and yell at me for a postmortem bruise inflicted by a rope used to drag a body out of the water. I bit my tongue and told her that she was welcome to retrieve the bodies herself next time and, furthermore, the bruise came from her own lab techs, who told me they could take it from there and proceeded to lasso the corpse over the edge of the canal.

Folks, this ain’t as easy as it looks.

I lift the grille and realize I have no idea how they dealt with it when the sub came and went. Did they send a diver down the tunnel?

A bar drops down on the side and props the gate open, answering my question.

I give my fins a kick and glide down the tunnel toward the body.

The corpse appears bloated from gases and is now clinging to the ceiling of the tunnel like a birthday balloon. There’s enough of a current that no cloud of blood or fluids surrounds the body, an odd phenomenon I’ve witnessed in still environments. It also appears that serious decomposition hasn’t yet begun.

In another day or two, when the body settled to the bottom, the scavengers would start gnawing on it. Crabs might have trouble getting up into the tunnel opening, but they’d figure it out eventually.

I pull my camera from its cord and snap a few photos of the face, hands, and clothing. I then put it into video mode and take a movie of the body and everything else around.

I learned to use this video technique long before I became a police diver. Sometimes the most important items aren’t the ones you decided to photograph. We once found a couple of silver coins at a picked-over wreck because we watched a video of our dive afterward and noticed a funny-looking rock that gleamed from a certain angle.

One of the biggest treasure finds on land was made not too far from here, when a geologist stopped to examine a large rock on a public beach. Everyone who’d been to that beach had seen the odd, dark-black rock and just thought it was a curiosity. He recognized that it was actually corroded metal—several hundred pounds of silver coins that had been welded together by corrosion and washed ashore. You never know what’s right in front of you.

I gently turn the body so I can see the face and get a good photo. It looks like Raul but could be a lot of people, given the puffiness of the features and paling skin.

After I get my photos and search the floor for anything that could have fallen out of his pockets, I unfurl the body pouch and pull it over his head and down to his feet.