The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit)

by Andrew Mayne

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course. We look out for our own. Speaking of which, you’re headed to Miami Beach, right?”

  I’d nearly forgotten. It was in an email this morning. I’m supposed to do a dive for Miami-Dade police. Someone tossed a gun into the canal three days ago. Their divers couldn’t find it, and Chief Kate offered me out as a favor.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “I need to get my gear.”

  “Be careful. Watch out for mermen with bad intentions.”

  “Thanks,” I say, getting up.

  “Oh . . .” She hesitates for a moment. “You should know, the dive you’re heading to?”

  I nod.

  “Detective Alameda mentioned that Miami-Dade brought in a consultant on the case. George Solar. I think you know him.”

  Ice goes through my veins at the sound of that name. I know exactly who George Solar is: he’s the cop that sent Uncle Karl to prison and nearly put my father there too.

  Growing up in a family full of sailors, we had no fouler curse word than the name of George Solar.

  “I thought he retired,” I say calmly. Rumor had it he was forced out after some kind of internal affairs scandal.

  “He did. They brought him in to consult.”

  “Interesting,” I reply, failing to hide my anger.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MUCK

  The Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway is a low bridge that connects the middle of Miami Beach to the mainland. The small islands that dot the route are a mix of commercial real estate and suburbs. A half mile to the west of where I’m standing is the Pelican Harbor Seabird Sanctuary, where I once thought about working after a middle school field trip.

  Watching rescuers pull a fishhook from one of the enormously beaked pelicans made me realize that these creatures weren’t just the fat buzzards of the sea I’d always thought them to be.

  That notion changed a week later when a pelican gulped a mackerel I’d been reeling in after snapping my rod.

  Nothing teaches you the laws of nature like a bird swooping in and eating your lunch. I bear no ill will toward the big birds, but I still harbor a slight grudge.

  I’ve had porpoises steal bait off my hook, but they at least pop out of the water and throw you a playful taunt, which somehow makes the theft more tolerable. Pelicans are simply an ungrateful mouth on wings. Of course, I never tell my daughter, Jackie, that.

  No pelicans in sight, and I’m already in my wet suit checking my tanks when Miami-Dade Lieutenant Cardiff and Officer Swanson pull up in an SUV. Both are wearing khakis and department polo shirts.

  It’s nice to be at a crime scene where I’m not the center of attention. Each day is something new and different as a police recovery diver who gets loaned to different departments. It’s hard to keep track of all the faces, and the cases themselves tend to run together—which is why I’d probably make a horrible detective. My skill is finding things in the water.

  I know this pair of detectives fairly well. Cardiff has what we refer to as the SICM—Standard-Issue Cop Mustache—while Swanson is clean shaven. I’ve pulled evidence, mainly guns, out of the water for them before. I think Swanson has a thing for me, but he’s too much of a straight arrow ever to say anything. Cardiff, on the other hand, throws the kind of glances that creep me out.

  “McPherson,” says Cardiff, greeting me.

  Today there’s something different about the way he’s staring at me. Not the usual leer. More hesitant, almost suspicious. I reach into my gear bag and feel an unfamiliar object and pull it out. It’s a handheld radio. I must have forgotten to give this back on a dive working with another department. I shove it back in, reminding myself to call around tomorrow and find out whom I boosted it from.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” I say. “I read the report. But can you give me the CliffsNotes?”

  Swanson pulls a map out of his case and lays it on the hood of their truck. “I was finishing up a call here at about ten p.m. when I saw a late-model Mercedes drive by real fast with no lights. I decided to follow, and when I got to the next light, he saw me and gunned it through the intersection. I chased him over the causeway but lost him in traffic. A patrol unit found the car ten minutes later in a CVS parking lot.”

  “Any camera footage?” I ask.

  “Parking lot. Not very good. Hispanic male between twenty and fifty,” he replies.

  “Half of Miami,” mutters Cardiff. “Five minutes before Swanson saw the car, a witness put it at a shootout in the parking lot of the Carolina Bar.”

  “Any other witnesses?”

  “Only the waitress in the bar. The suspect and the victim all fled. We got some blood, but that’s all.”

  “What makes you think the gun was tossed here?” I stare down the length of the bridge. It’s a good two hundred feet long. We have fairly accurate estimates for how far a gun is likely to be thrown, but that still leaves me a mighty wide search area.

  “Because we didn’t find it in the car,” Cardiff replies. He kicks a toe at my underwater magnetometer. “We thought we’d send you out with that thing and you might find it.”

  “Didn’t your diver try?”

  “He spent about an hour,” says Swanson.

  “This same exact area?”

  “Are you trying to avoid going in or what?” Cardiff growls impatiently.

  “I’m just trying to keep my search pattern from being something larger than the county.” This guy irritates me. Swanson I can handle.

  They both look over my shoulder as an old blue pickup truck pulls onto the grass near the bridge entrance.

  Damn. I’d almost forgotten about George Solar. I don’t know if it shows in my face, but I can feel my blood pressure rising.

  I continue to check my gear, making sure my breathing regulator gets a fifth look, a totally unnecessary inspection, and do my best to pretend that George Solar being here is no big deal. With DEA asking questions about me this morning and Solar showing up now, I can’t help but feel a little paranoid.

  “Need any help?” Swanson asks.

  I glance up and give him a weak smile as I vent air from the regulator. “Nope. All good. Just checking.”

  I catch Solar’s shadow as he walks over to us. There’s something spooky about the perfectly still way he stands there watching me.

  Watching . . . I remember his eyes most clearly. As we sat behind my uncle in the courtroom—I must’ve been thirteen at the time—George Solar occasionally glanced in our direction from the witness box. His dark-green eyes scanned each of us, trying to figure out how much we knew.

  Nothing. That was the plain truth. I could recall a few arguments between Dad and Uncle Karl but not the context. Dad admitted to me later that he knew Karl had been running around with some people from Everglades City known for trafficking, and he wasn’t happy about that. For his part, Karl had told his older brother to mind his own business.

  Uncle Karl wasn’t the first outlaw in the family. Great-Grandfather McPherson was a rumrunner, and it was a poorly held secret that his son had been involved with the trade of archaeological artifacts whose provenance was in some dispute. As serious as those crimes were, they sounded almost quaint compared to Uncle Karl getting arrested smuggling cocaine in the false bottom of a boat.

  The family rallied around him, in no small part because the newspapers impugned us all with headlines about World-Famous Treasure-Hunting Family Fingered in Cocaine-Smuggling Plot.

  It didn’t matter that my uncle was the only one charged, or that when the son of the governor got busted for selling MDMA on campus around the same time, the matter was quickly dropped. There was no headline about the governor’s mansion being a potential center for drug trafficking, even though it’s a near certainty that his son was dealing while living there.

  When I complained to Dad about the injustice, he explained that the rich and the powerful had better lawyers and could fight such accusations. It didn’t seem fair, especially when I heard whispers around sch
ool about my family’s involvement in Karl’s crime.

  To be honest, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I was still going to private school at the time, and there were dozens of kids there with parents who made headlines for everything from Ponzi schemes to the overthrow of foreign governments.

  Well, I can’t pretend to inspect my gear forever, so I stand up, acknowledging the presence of George Solar.

  He’s older now. Grayer, more wrinkles, more weathered. The green eyes still sit behind tinted glasses, silently judging.

  “McPherson,” he says with a nod.

  It sounds like something between a greeting and an accusation—as if he’s just reestablished his label for me. McPherson: White-Trash Drug Smuggler.

  “Mr. Solar,” I reply. Probably a little too coolly.

  “Ah, that’s right, I forgot you two know each other,” says Cardiff with restrained glee.

  If Cardiff was waiting to see my reaction, he’ll be disappointed. Instead, I throw it back in his face.

  “It’s good of you to come out of retirement to help Cardiff with his work.”

  “George is just here to advise,” Cardiff responds, a little defensively.

  Swanson jumps in. “I was thinking we should start the search at the far end of the causeway. The last diver was in a bit of a hurry. A few of the streetlights are out at that point, and that seems like the most probable spot for the gun to be tossed.”

  I notice that Solar’s head tilts to the side a little as if he’s about to say something, but he doesn’t. That’s the other thing I remember about George Solar—the way he used silence.

  When Uncle Karl’s attorney had him in the witness box, he took his time answering each question, sometimes creating long, drawn-out moments during which he simply stared at the attorney like a monkey in a cage.

  This drove Uncle Karl’s lawyer nuts, and he asked the judge on several occasions to make Solar answer the questions more quickly. The judge demurred.

  At one point, Karl’s attorney even called Solar out on it in front of the jury, saying he should answer the question before they fell asleep. Solar only stared and took his sweet time. I saw smiles in the jury box and felt a pang of frustration, realizing that Karl’s lawyer might have lost the case right there by making them take sides. Between Uncle Karl and his sun-bleached surfer looks that screamed rich-kid drug dealer and the working-class Solar, who could have come straight out of a Tommy Lee Jones movie, it was no contest for the jurors. Solar was in control.

  I hand Swanson a rope tied to a small inflatable raft with a dive flag and a line that will extend to the bottom of the waterway. The flag’s to warn boaters I’m down there, and the line gives me something to keep my bearings underwater. These channels are pretty murky, and it’s easy to find yourself fifty yards from where you thought you were searching.

  “Let’s start at the far end, like you said. But first I’m going to do a surface swim and look for anything shiny. Got it?”

  Swanson nods and takes the line over to the railing on the causeway. I pull myself over the seawall and drop into the water next to the small raft while Cardiff and Solar watch from the causeway sidewalk above.

  I pull my mask down, purge my regulator, and go under, putting them behind me.

  Things are so much simpler underwater.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHINER

  In the two hundred feet from one end of the causeway to the other, nothing shines or gleams back at me. At the deepest part, the water is about fifteen feet deep. It’s clearer than usual, and the sun is out, which means I can see about twelve feet.

  Besides the fact that the gun—if there even is one—probably isn’t chrome plated, there’s the problem that the muck at the bottom is a thick haze barely penetrated by light. I didn’t expect to see the gun from right below the surface, but it’s always a good idea to get an overview of the area first.

  Tossing a gun from the driver’s seat means throwing it through an open passenger window and managing not to hit the guardrail. With a strong enough arm, the gun could be anywhere from right below the bridge to fifteen feet away or more.

  I’d plotted a graph on a map showing the probable areas along the bridge. I’ve done this so many times I can create a search pattern with my eyes closed. The tricky part is if there’s a strong current and sediment flow on the bottom.

  Guns generally tend to stay where they land. Bags of cocaine, bodies, and cell phones drift. Although bodies have a habit of gassing up and floating to the surface, which makes them easier to recover, it’s not always the case. Bullet and knife wounds can keep a corpse underwater.

  One of the first things they teach you in forensic-diving classes is that there are exceptions to everything, but in 90 percent of the cases, follow the tables and rules of thumb.

  I reach the end of the causeway and touch the seawall. Swanson’s shadow is above me, still holding the line.

  “No luck?”

  “Nope. I’m going to go deeper and try the magnetometer.”

  I reach down to the cable at my belt and realize that the device is not attached. Damn. I turn back to the shore where I went in. It’s not sitting there either.

  I must have dropped it during my swim.

  Not good.

  Congratulations, expert police diver Sloan McPherson, you just lost a five-thousand-dollar piece of equipment while trying to conduct an evidence search.

  “Everything okay?” asks Swanson.

  I give him a thumbs-up. “I’m going to start here,” I lie. What I’m really going to do is go to the bottom and quickly backtrack to the other side of the causeway to try to spot my bright-yellow metal detector before anyone realizes I dropped it.

  Ace move, as my brothers liked to say any time you made a bold attempt to cover your ass.

  I kick off from the seawall and keep my body close to the bottom of the channel in case a speedboat decides to rip through here and chop me in half.

  While I have a cold relationship with pelicans, I’ve swum close to manatees and seen firsthand the scars on their backs from boat propellers. Other than seeing Jackie get hurt, nothing twists my heart like one of those big-eyed, gentle giants with a wound from a careless boater.

  I skim along the bottom, creating eddy currents of muck like an airplane swooping over a dusty field. To the left I see the swish of a tail. It probably belongs to a grouper lurking in the shadow of the bridge. I’ve seen some pretty large ones in some of the out-of-the-way places I’ve dived. But I keep my mouth shut about the really large ones, the potential record breakers. The last thing I want is to tip off some trophy hunter.

  I spot the yellow handle of the magnetometer sticking out of the sediment only a few feet from where I entered the water. A grimy layer of dirt covers the rubber controls, so I surface to clean it off.

  At the same time that I pop my head out of the water, a small Boston Whaler glides by carrying a suntanned elderly woman and a little dog.

  She doesn’t see me but waves at someone over my head. That’s when I spot the shadows of Cardiff and Solar on the rippling water. They’re directly overhead on the causeway.

  “. . . there are no coincidences,” Cardiff is saying. “Isn’t that how it goes?”

  I’m about to dive back in and mind my own business when I catch a reference to me.

  “We’re supposed to believe that she was just out randomly diving? Bullshit.” Cardiff’s shadow grows animated as he explains this to Solar. “You know her family. What they do. My money’s on her and that Miller girl going out there because they had some inside info. Then one of Bonaventure’s people caught up with them.”

  Miller. Why does that name ring a bell? And Bonaventure? I know that one. He’s a Miami lawyer who reps drug dealers.

  Cardiff thinks I’m tied up with them? I’ve half a mind to tell him to go fuck himself right now. Fortunately, the rational side of my brain keeps me from going all McPherson on him. I take a slow breath and put the regulator back in
my mouth as I slip under the waves.

  From beneath the surface, I can see Cardiff gesturing wildly as Solar stands perfectly still watching the water . . . staring at me.

  How much does he know I overheard? How much should I care?

  I don’t know.

  It seems like everyone knows more about what happened yesterday than I do—yet somehow, I’m allegedly at the center of this murder?

  Only it’s more than a murder. Bonaventure is a serious name. The shipment my uncle got busted for belonged to one of his clients. I distinctly recall Dad saying to my oldest brother that his biggest fear wasn’t the feds; it was the people Karl owed money.

  I suspect the reason he didn’t plead to a lesser crime was because he knew if he did, there’d be a bill due when he got out of prison—one he couldn’t hope to afford.

  I swim back to the side, where Swanson is still waiting, and emerge from the water.

  “Anything?” he asks.

  I hold up the magnetometer. “I’m just getting it calibrated.”

  Out of the corner of my mask, I can see Solar still looking at me. That damn stare.

  I look at the device meaningfully. “Okay,” I tell Swanson. “I’m good. What I need you to do is move the line ten feet every five minutes. Okay? We’ll stop at the midway point, and I’ll grab a new tank.”

  “Got it.”

  I dive back to the bottom and drag the device just above the muck and feel the buzzing in the handle as it picks up various metallic objects.

  There are dozens here. Aluminum cans, bottle caps, coat hangers, wire, you name it. I’ve done this enough times to know the familiar pulse of a large piece of metal; I only have to stick my knife into the muck a few times to pry out a rusted wheel rim and a metal fence post.

  Halfway to the midpoint, I find an entire automobile bumper. Reluctantly, I call it out to Swanson so he can use a line to drag it to shore.

  While it probably broke off years ago when a car collided with the guardrail, there’s a chance it was in a hit-and-run and still bears a visible serial number.

  I finally finish my sweep and climb out of the water where I started. Cardiff and Solar are talking to Swanson.