The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit #1)(60)

I use my extra weight belt to make him less buoyant, and he settles down to the bottom of the tunnel.

“I have the body. Returning now.”

“Okay. Standing by. Let us know if you want the boat closer.”

“I’m good.”

I pull the body back out of the tunnel and lower the gate. I can’t do anything about the lock, but at least the grille should keep alligators from swimming into the secret basement.

I kick toward Fortune’s Fool and try to compensate in my kick count for the load I’m carrying. Worst-case scenario and I get lost, which would be embarrassing, I can always surface and look for the boat. But the plan is to avoid being spotted crossing the bay dragging a body bag. That could lead to more questions than we want to answer. We do plan on turning the body over to the medical examiner in a few hours—but only after we’ve had a chance to examine it.

I spot the green glow of the light stick we tied to the anchor, but something is wrong. There’s also light coming from above; I make out the shadows of at least two other boats besides ours.

“I’m at the anchor.”

My dad gets on the radio. “Honey. We have a little situation here. How much air do you have?”

I used a smaller tank because I didn’t think it would take that long.

“I’ve got ten minutes. What’s up?”

“Solar’s arguing with the police.”

“Which police? Palm Beach? FBI? DEA?”

“All of them.”

Damn it. I’m running out of air and have a body they’ll seize the moment I surface. I can try weighting him down to the sea bottom—but if we get towed in, that would be very, very bad.

Think fast, Sloan. You may be about to lose the most important piece of evidence yet.

Damn it. I know what I have to do.

I slide my weight off my waist and wrap it around the ankles of the body. It sinks to the seafloor in an upright position. I then pull back the body bag, exposing the corpse.

I use my knife to cut open his shirt.

This is sloppy, Sloan. Real sloppy. But it’s now or never.

Autopsies should never be conducted underwater.





CHAPTER FORTY

DROWNED

The boats are only a few feet over my head. Propellers churn the water while their flood lamps cast a dark-green glow all around me. If someone were to look closely, they might spot me, so I pull Raul—I’m sure it’s him—into the shadow of the Fortune’s Fool.

I pull my camera out and take photos of the neck. There’s no deep gash like the ones on Stacey and her father, but from the expression on his face, he clearly died in pain.

When I feel around the back of his skull, fractured bones shift under my fingers. I check for an entry wound and find a hole the size of my finger.

He was killed execution-style, but that wasn’t the only injury he suffered. There’s a dark contusion on his right cheek, like someone hit him. When I touch that area, I can feel chipped bones. Blunt-force trauma from something like a hammer—or maybe the diving weight I found at the bottom of the tunnel.

His chest shows numerous bruises, and the ribs feel fractured. There are also small red-and-black burns, the kind you’d get from cigarettes pressed into your skin.

When I take photos of his right fingers, I notice they’re twisted at odd angles. They’ve been broken.

Good lord, Raul was tortured . . . extensively.

When I check the left hand, I notice that a pinkie and middle finger have been severed entirely.

This is cartel-level evil, torture methods you use when you want someone to talk. Cutting off the tongue and gouging out the eyes are what you do when you simply want to hurt a person before you kill them.

This wasn’t a message or anything personal. It was simply business. They wanted what Raul knew.

When they were done, they put a bullet in his head and dropped him in the tunnel to handle later, probably because moving a corpse under police surveillance would be a challenge. The tide dragged him to the locked gate, where he remained until I found him.

I search his pockets. There’s no wallet, no phone, no keys. They picked him clean.

If I were on land and had a kit, I’d try to get scrapings from under the fingernails. I’ll have to leave some open questions for the other investigators. My goal is to make sure we don’t miss anything big that they might not tell us about. I assume that whoever inherits Raul’s body won’t tell us what they found until they’ve chased down any leads it points them to—which means I need to be extremely thorough now.

I stare into his vacant eyes and tell myself this is not a person. It’s just a meat puppet—a moist robot. The person is gone.

I double-check the mouth. The tongue is intact, but a tooth is missing. Jesus wept. These people didn’t miss a trick.

“Sloan?” calls Dad over the radio.

“Here.”

“How much air?”

“Three minutes.”

“Why don’t you come up now?”

I glance up at the silhouettes of the boats. “Is it clear?”

“Not really. But Solar just gave me the signal. And you can’t breathe underwater.”

“What about the . . . package?”

“They have their own divers coming. They’re going to do their own search. Solar’s been stalling them, but they know something’s up.”