The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit #1)(61)

Damn.

Okay, what do we know?

Raul was tortured for information. But what? By whom?

Is there anything else on the body I’m missing?

I give him a final pat down. When my hand hits his left pocket, I feel a small bulge I didn’t notice before.

I pull the pocket inside out, and a small blue ball of what seems like plastic or rubber starts to float upward.

Damn it!

I chase after the ball and shove it in a pocket inside my vest.

Since all my weights are on Raul, I have to swim extra hard to avoid rising to the surface. My suit is too buoyant for this shallow a depth.

I grab the edge of the body bag, which is floating behind Raul’s head, and pull myself back to eye level.

Anything more?

I contemplate trying to get the bullet out of his head, but using a dive knife to do that would be a little too barbaric.

Okay, what else?

One minute of air.

The missing tooth . . . something about that . . .

The angle of the bullet . . .

I open his mouth again and feel around inside, but the gloves are too thick.

Do it.

I take off my right glove and stick my bare fingers into his mouth, probing the hard and soft palate.

There’s an exit wound . . .

I reach under the tongue.

Bingo.

There’s the bullet.

I hold it up to my measuring stick attached to my vest and take a photo. The bullet is small. Not quite as small as a .22. There’s something odd about it.

I wrestle with keeping it but decide that might be asking for trouble. Their forensics people will be able to tell somebody took it.

I place it back by the tongue and close the jaw. The slug lost so much momentum after it shattered the tooth, it’s plausible that it landed where I put it. I guess.

I check my gauge. I’m effectively out of air. Time to surface.

I zip Raul back up, remove the weight belts from his body, and place them back on me. I use my remaining air to inflate my vest and drift back up the surface.

The moment I emerge, a spotlight shines in my face, and a voice shouts over a bullhorn, “Hands up!”

George shouts back. “Oh, fuck yourselves. She’s trying to swim. Don’t put your hands up, Sloan.”

I ignore the men with the pistols aimed at me and swim toward the dive platform. Dad and George take the body onto the landing and then help me aboard.

After I remove my tank, I look out at the mini flotilla that’s surrounded us. There’re two Palm Beach sheriff’s office boats, a US customs craft, and a small coast guard ship.

“We’re towing you in,” says a man in a DEA jacket on the nearest PBSO boat.

“Like hell, you are,” says George. “You have no jurisdiction over us. Besides, we’re bigger than you.”

“Who the hell are you?” asks the DEA agent.

“I already told you, UIU.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Call the Florida attorney general.” Under his breath, George murmurs to me, “I hope Irene called her.”

The man lowers his megaphone and resorts to simply shouting. “Well, we don’t have her on speed dial. Why don’t we go into the harbor and straighten it out?”

“It is straightened out,” says George. “If you want, you can follow us back to our HQ and sort things out there.”

There’s a heated discussion on board the PBSO boat. A deputy sheriff calls over to us. “Are you George Solar?”

“That’s Captain George Solar of the UIU, as appointed by the governor of Florida.”

I hear someone groan, “Fucking Solar.”

More heated discussion takes place, and the PBSO boat pilot gets on the radio. A few minutes later, the DEA agent gets back on his megaphone.

“You can go, but you have to leave the body with us. Jurisdiction of that is very clear. It goes to the county medical examiner.”

“Fine,” George replies and kicks Raul’s body bag off the dive platform. “Come get it.” He turns to my father and says, “Take us home.”

“Jesus,” I whisper under my breath.

The whole thing is a pompous act, but it served its purpose. Once we’re out of range of the other boats, Solar says, “I hope I didn’t screw that up too much. Find anything?”





CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHART HOUSE

I scroll through the photos I took underwater on the television in the galley. Dad went to the grocery store to let us do our “cop stuff.” I think he mostly needed a break from the drama he has no control over.

George has the small blue wad I retrieved from Raul’s body in a plastic container and is using tweezers from a tackle box of forensic tools he keeps in his truck to unfold it. The scene reminds me of when I was a kid and we’d pull things up from wrecks, set them in tanks of water, and use toothpicks to carefully separate the dirt from the artifacts.

Our process wasn’t as thorough as my professor’s lab, but we were pretty good. Most of what we found were mundane objects like food tins, tools, and occasionally belt buckles and buttons. To my young eyes, they were every bit as cool as any emerald or ruby.

Probably the biggest disagreement I had with my grandfather and father was the fact that I was far more interested in where the treasures came from. I wanted to know about the people the gold was taken from.