by Carmen Faye
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental.
Wet Work copyright @ 2017 by Carmen Faye and Olivia Stephens. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
WET WORK
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
LASHED
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
WET WORK
Chapter One
My blonde hair whipped against my face as the boat coasted onward. I was starting to get pissed off. I’d brush the strands out of my eyes only to have them blow back across a second later. Between the wind and the spray off the water, I’d been fighting my new bob of hair all day. I should have left it long so I could tie it back in a ponytail like I’d always done.
I checked the coordinates on the plastic sheet, the pounding of the boat as it hammered through the swells making it difficult to read. I didn’t even need to see them, really, but I took pride in my work and wanted to hit my sample location dead on every time. I went out into the Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve three times a week as part of my job at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology to take water samples.
I’d gotten my master’s degree there, and my graduate degree advisor, Mark Suttman, had invited me to stay on as his lab manager. It had been the perfect start to a new life. Besides the fact that it was my job, I lived and breathed the ocean
Most people thought the wet, overcast weather, typical for the Oregon coast, was miserable and depressing. I disagreed. I liked it when the weather was gray and dreary like this, and it made me feel vibrant and alive. My colleagues had tagged me with the nickname Ducky because I loved the water and the rain even more than the sunny beach days the tourists hoped for.
I breathed in deep and tasted salt. This was home more than my birthplace had ever been. I turned my attention back to my clipboard with its plastic sheets covered with grease pencil writing, checking the coordinates written there against the GPS one more time. I adjusted my course a bit to starboard as I backed off on the throttles even more, slowing to a crawl as I approached my sample coordinates. It was the best way I’d found to record the sample information without the paper turning into so much mush from the spray and rain.
Mark was on a three-year study to research the effect of oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean on the Pacific ecosystem—something I would be doing one day if my life went as planned—and we were between research assistants. My tech, Paula, had returned to Cal-Tech when her classes had resumed. That meant I was the designated scribe for the weekly sample runs. I didn’t mind at all. I liked being out here on the ocean and in the thick of things. Any excuse to get out on the water was good enough for me.
I checked the weather every morning as a habit and dressed appropriately. Oregon weather was only horrible when you weren’t ready for it. My black raincoat was slick with the sea spray and rain, and underneath I had on my personal uniform of jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, red Wellingtons that my friends said I’d stolen from Paddington Bear, and binoculars looped around my neck in case something exciting popped up.
The ocean never slept, and you never knew when you were going to have a chance to see something special.
Even though I was a hydrologist, I spent too much of my time in a lab, and not nearly enough time with the ocean, which was what had gotten me to Oregon in the first place. These kinds of jobs, where I could be alone with the wind, weather, and water, were why I’d wanted to come to Oregon in the first place. I’d visited the area when I’d been in college, just after my father had died, and I’d fallen in love with the ocean.
It had called to me like a siren, offering me distance and refuge from my problems.
I checked the GPS and closed the throttles, the thirty-foot boat coasting to a stop in the water as the big twin Mercury Marine outboards fell to idle, then silence as I switched them off.
As the boat bobbed gently in the swells, I began collecting the samples, pulling up water from three different depths and carefully labeling the samples. Samples collected, I recorded the water temperatures from all three depths along with the air temperature. The rest of the analysis would have to wait until I got back to the lab.
I pushed my hair back, out of my face, with both hands and held it, willing it to stay in place, but the moment I removed my hands, it swirled in my face again. For at least the hundredth time since I pulled away from the dock, I wished I hadn’t chopped it off. Pulling it back into a ponytail had been so much easier for these sample runs.
I’d needed a change, so I’d gone to the hairdresser and told her to do whatever she felt like. She’d chosen a style that, rather than making me feel more mature and sophisticated and in charge of my own destiny, made me look wide-eyed and innocent. It made my blue eyes bigger, my cheeks rounder, my face younger.
It made me look pure and unscathed, which was a lie.
This was the last stop for the week, and once I had the samples secured, I cranked over the engines, and then pushed the throttles to their stops as I made a big looping turn for home. The boat bounded through the waves, and I was using my legs as shock absorbers, but at least I was heading into the wind, and my hair was finally out of my eyes. I was only six miles out, not
even off the continental shelf, and I was navigating home using the GPS until land came into view. If the weather were clear, I never lost sight of land and could navigate home using the mark one eyeball, but today I needed a little help from technology.
As the big boat roared toward shore, I smiled, loving the wind, rain, and salty air. If this wasn’t bliss, I didn’t know what was. I could relax and be myself out here. My past couldn’t catch me if it didn’t know where I was. If it didn’t know who I was anymore.
This was my safe place.
I’d grown up in Indiana, hundreds of miles from any beach. When life at Indiana State had taken a dark turn and my weekends had become blurred with one-night stands and too much alcohol, I’d come out here to visit a friend. It was love at first sight. For the first time in a long time, I could breathe again. This was where I wanted to be. I transferred the next semester to OIMB and stayed through my graduate degree.
From the corner of my eye, I caught movement in the water, two hundred yards ahead and to my left. I slammed the throttled closed and focused on the area as the boat dumped speed and settled into the water, waiting and watching with tingling excitement. A moment later it happened again. A geyser of spray shooting twenty feet up and the tingle became a rush. I’d only seen this one other time in my whole tenure at OIMB.
Today I was lucky enough to see it again.
I kept my eyes on the ocean, tracking the movement, afraid to even bring up my binoculars for fear of losing them in the expanse of the ocean. After a moment, the geyser appeared again, then another smaller one, slightly to the side and a bit behind. My heart pounded in my chest. There was only one animal in the world that made that kind of spray, a blue whale. And here were two, with one probably a calf.
Now that I had them located, I grabbed the binoculars around my neck and brought them to my eyes as a dark hump emerged from the gray water. The smaller hump surfaced, and I heard the rush of air as the calf exhaled and refilled its lungs. I continued to watch, tracking them with the binoculars until they disappeared, then without in case I’d lost them, but they were gone. What a way to top off my data collection and a week.
The vastness of the ocean was majestic, something I would never fully get used to. The animal was huge, and yet at the same time, so small. When I finally came back to myself, I felt light, energized, recharged by the sight of nature. The whale was pure, innocent and certain, taking little notice of man, or in this case, a woman.
The morning couldn’t get any better.
With a grin, I opened the throttles, and the big outboards shoved the boat toward home. Surprises like spotting the whales never got old. I was hoping there would be more, but the rest of the trip was uneventful.
I pulled the boat into the dock, working the throttles with one hand as I steered with the other, until the boat kissed the bright red fenders tied to the dock. I shut the engines down and scrambled out of the boat, rope in hand, before the wind blew it back away from the dock. I quickly lashed the boat secure and then gathered my samples and notes. The OIMB lab was well up from the dock, and I spent a moment adjusting my load for carrying.
As I followed the path to the lab, I scanned the water, taking a mental snapshot to tide me over as I worked in the lab, when I noticed something floating in a tidal pool. I slowed, but at this distance, and with the drizzle, I couldn’t make out what it was.
I continued to the lab and set the samples on the counter where I would test them, then stepped back out and made my way down to the pool. As I got closer, I could see it was some sort of black plastic bag wrapped in duct tape. I gritted my teeth, and my good mood began to fray at the edges. Garbage in the ocean really pissed me off. The thrill of seeing the whales was replaced by irritation that was like an itch in my chest that I couldn’t scratch. Humans were nature’s biggest threat and seeing shit like this made me ashamed to be one.
I waded into the pool. The water was nearly over my boots, but I had to get the bag out of there before the tide came in. I got to within two feet when I stopped and frowned, a sick feeling settling into my stomach. I could now see that it was much larger than I first thought, with more than half the bag stuck under a finger of rock. It was oddly shaped for a bag of trash, long and tapered at both ends. The more I looked at it, the more ominous it became. It looked a lot like… but it couldn’t be. Bodies didn’t wash ashore in real life, only on television and in mystery novels. Definitely not outside OIMB. I was being silly. Paranoid.
I grabbed hold of the bag and pulled, but it was much heavier than it looked. I tugged harder, trying to work it out from under the rock with tearing it open, but as I pulled and tugged, I heard the sound of tearing tape and the bag gave a little. I continued to tease it out, grimacing as I could feel the bag tearing open, but I had to get it out of there. If I had to spend an hour picking up bits of trash that spilled out, so be it.
I felt the bag give and I hauled it back.
A mutilated face stared at me with lifeless eyes. A bloated, pale, dead face. I stumbled back and fell with a scream and a splash.
Chapter Two
I sat in the chair in the lab, arms wrapped around myself, physically trying to keep myself together. I was freezing cold. I’d poured the water out of my boots, but my pants and shirt were still wet, and the horror of what I found wasn’t exactly warming, either. I’d stopped shaking, but I still felt like I was going to throw up. I stuck my hands in my armpits to try to get some warmth into them while still keeping my arms tight around my body as tried to concentrate on what the police officer was saying.
After half an hour of questioning, it felt like every sentence just left me colder. I’d been over it so many times I should have been numb to it by now. Some things just didn’t work that way.
The day I became numb when I thought about encountering a dead body was the day something was seriously wrong in my life.
Detective Reynolds seemed patient enough. He was willing to sit with me and give me the time to get it all out. I told him everything I knew and, bit by bit, more of the story came back until he had something real to piece together. I felt like an idiot for being traumatized.
“Take your time. You’re doing great,” Reynolds said.
Kind of him. I wasn’t convinced. I felt like breaking down in a mess of tears again. I felt like running and screaming. I felt like shaking the detective and asking him what the hell was wrong with this world. I hugged my arms tighter around my body, trying to make myself as small as possible. I glanced at the lab door to see Cindy peering into the lab. There had been a parade of faces in that little square of glass as Reynolds asked his questions.
“You didn’t know it was a body before you pulled it out from under the outcropping?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. I thought it was a bag of trash or something.” I looked into his eyes, and I could feel the tears filling my eyes again. “When I got close and could see the shape I thought about it being a person, but decided that was crazy.” I paused as I swallowed my bile. “Turns out I was crazy. I wish now I’d never touched it.” I rubbed my eyes with one hand, scrubbing away the tears before they could fall.
Reynolds fished in his pocket and produced a dry tissue that smelled like dust. It had been in his pocket for a while. Unlike the first officers that had responded to the scene after I’d called 9-1-1, Detective Reynolds wasn’t in uniform. He was a detective, and he didn’t have to wear the usual blues. His khaki pants were rumpled, and his jacket was worn albeit clean. In general, the man looked like he’d seen better days.
That had to ring true for most police officers, though. This was definitely the ugly side of life, and they chose to live it this way.
I looked up at the detective. He could have been an attractive man, once. Too many years of bodies in bags had taken its toll on him. I could understand why. Instead of tall dark and handsome, he looked stooped, frayed, and tired. Still, he was being kind and patient, and he didn’t try to accuse me of anything. The thought ha
d crossed my mind that I would be accused of the murder seeing as I’d found the body.
Reynolds flipped through the notes he’d been taking and sighed. “Do you have anything else you want to add?”
I shook my head. “I told you everything I can remember. I just want to go home.”
I was on the verge of a breakdown. I knew because this wasn’t the first time I’d felt like this. The last time I’d felt like I was going to come undone at the seams I’d been a little more personally involved with the death, but the presence of death always felt the same, no matter who was the victim. I didn’t like being reminded of that part of my past.
The detective nodded and stood up, flipping his notebook closed. “Thank you, Ms. Tennyson.” Reynolds dug in his pocket a moment before he produced a business card. I took it, the card vibrating slightly from the shaking of my hand. “If you think of anything else…” he gestured at the card.
I looked at the numbers. I didn’t want to call him. I wanted to forget this had ever happened. Bile rose in my throat, and I felt like I was going to throw up all over Reynolds’s shoes. I wondered if he would care. They weren’t shiny and polished. It looked like he made a habit of trudging around in the mud after lost clues.
He smiled at me. I wondered if he had a family, if he was a father or a grandfather or if he faced this dreary world of his alone in a dusty cabin at the edge of town where no one would find him unless it were an emergency. It fit the stereotype, but I’d read a lot of novels.
