The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit)

by Andrew Mayne

  The governor thinks it over. “Okay . . . but I’m not sure if the legislature will pass this in the long run.”

  “They don’t have to,” says Irene. “Not as long as it’s self-funded.”

  “You have all the angles worked out, don’t you?”

  She smirks at George. “Of course.”

  The governor picks up a pen. “Fine. It’s only my career in politics if this goes south.”

  “Small loss,” says George.

  The governor lowers his pen and looks at me. “Can you teach him when to keep his mouth shut?” He slides the paper back to Irene. “Here you go.”

  “One more thing,” says George with a nod at me. “We need to make her legal.”

  “Oh right,” replies the governor. “Sloan McPherson, raise your right hand. Do you swear to uphold the laws of the state of Florida and the United States Constitution?”

  What’s going on here? “Um, yes?”

  “Close enough. Then as governor of the state of Florida, I deputize you to enforce said laws and have whatever responsibilities are, um, set forth in that document. Irene? Make it legal.”

  “Will do,” she replies.

  “Okay. Don’t come back unless you have a lot of money,” says the governor.

  George quickly ushers me into the hallway. I don’t say anything until we’re in the parking lot.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “You’re a cop again. Basically, an untouchable cop. The only person who can fire you is the governor.”

  “An unpaid cop,” I say.

  “Not if we find Bonaventure’s money. You still have your severance from Lauderdale Shores, and I’m sure Irene will figure something else out.”

  “You trust her?”

  “She was the district attorney I worked with back when I was arrested. We have history.”

  I climb into the passenger seat, still thinking things over. A realization hits me. “So, the governor just gave us a charter to seize assets in Florida waters?”

  “Criminal ones,” replies George. “That’s kind of an important detail.”

  “Right. Right. But do you know what this makes us?”

  “Cops?”

  “Not quite. That document he signed is basically a letter of marque.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It makes us privateers—we’re state-licensed pirates.”

  “Pirates, huh? I hadn’t thought about it that way. Maybe we use some other name for our unit?”

  “Fair point. Um, how about Underwater Investigation Unit?”

  “UIU? That works.”

  This is still the worst day of my life, but strangely, I feel somewhat better now. I don’t have to be Sloan McPherson, victim. I get to be Sloan McPherson, pirate cop.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  SALVAGE

  Dad has an anxious look on his face as I suit up in my dive gear. I wrestled with whether we should ask for his help. Despite his outburst at me and distaste for Solar, there’s nobody I could rely on more in a situation like this. Sure, Dad might have put me in harm’s way in the past by choosing risky dive locations, but once there, he was a master at understanding difficult conditions and handling emergencies. Also, Fortune’s Fool is the best-equipped boat in our little fleet for this kind of venture.

  When I suggested it to Solar, he saw the logic and took my word that Dad would keep his mouth shut about what we were up to. As long as the two aren’t perpetually at each other’s throats, I think we’ll be fine.

  The diving part doesn’t have me concerned this time. I’ll be using air and a set of bolt cutters to get inside the grate. It should be pretty straightforward. I’ve bagged dozens of bodies underwater. It’s old hat for me.

  What has me worried is the idea of getting apprehended again. Technically I won’t be going onto the property of ambassador what’s his face, but it doesn’t matter. DIA Jane could nab me in a shopping mall. If she let me go because she didn’t think I was a threat, I’m not stupid enough to believe she’ll make that mistake again.

  I blast air out of my regulator and make sure the body pouch is sealed tight inside the dive bag. Solar is watching Turtle Isle with night-vision goggles.

  “You sure we don’t look too conspicuous?” I ask.

  “We’re officers of the law doing our job. Stop acting like you’re sneaking into the neighbor’s pool on spring break.”

  “Yeah . . . it’s just that DIA Jane doesn’t seem to have too much respect for laws or the Constitution.”

  He senses I’m more scared than I’ve been letting on. “Irene’s keeping an eye on things. If either one of us disappears, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  I’m worried that George and Irene are underestimating what we’re up against. Jane’s people are used to operating in countries where the rules don’t apply to them.

  I step onto the dive platform. “Okay.” There’s no point in arguing with him. Either I do what I set out to do or I run away. I’m tired of being the one running from things.

  “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.

  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.”

  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.”