A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  “I couldn’t tell who it was either-or if it was an effigy,” Vega said finally. “And I’d hate to guess at this stage of the game. I expect it’s a hoax. Martini’s Law taking effect. A lot of these guys have a sense of humor that’s not of this world. The ecstasy of the deep? Too much weightlessness?”

  Anna shrugged. She knew what he meant. Divers, the serious ones with a lot of dives to their credit, had a different way of looking at life. Not as if it were cheap-they strove to stay alive and risked a great deal to keep each other alive- but they seemed to grasp a connectedness that eluded most people, a sense that life and death were two parts of the same whole, like the crests and the valleys of a wave emerging from the same sea.

  This realization-if it was a realization-created as many behavior patterns as there were divers; from protective zealots like Denny Castle to hard-living, hard-drinking party divers. The kind who would make a sixty-year-old corpse flip the bird.

  The kind who might dress up a mannequin in turn-of-the-century finery and put it in an engine room nearly two hundred feet beneath the water.

  “Those Canadians, Jon Diller and Bobo Whatsisname, did they strike you as the type?” Vega’s mind seemed to be following in the same channels as Anna’s.

  She shook her head. Wrestling a mannequin down into the Kamloops was dangerous, expensive, and disrespectful-not of human life or human remains but of the lake.

  “They seemed fairly legit,” Anna said. “And I doubt they’d have the money for that kind of elaborate joke. Bobo had some expensive equipment but their boat had that repaired and polished look boats get when love and hard work take the place of money.”

  “We’ll go back through the permits. Yours, ours, and whatever Windigo’s got. There can’t have been that many divers on that wreck.”

  The Kamloops scared off all but the best or the boldest. She was not a casual dive. “Not that kind of girl,” Anna agreed. The corner of the Chief Ranger’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile.

  “This isn’t my favorite dive,” Lucas said. “Too much can go wrong. You get too stupid at six atmospheres. And you’re in too much of a hurry to get home.”

  Every fifty feet down hit the human brain like one dry martini-hence Martini’s Law. It had something to do with nitrogen forced into the bloodstream. No one knew exactly how it worked, just as no one knew why laughing gas made people laugh. But two hundred feet down in frigid waters, the lake usually had the last laugh.

  “This’ll be a bounce dive,” Lucas went on. “Ralph and I’ll scoot down, look around. Keep our bottom time to the bare minimum. Keep our decompression time on the ascent as short as we safely can. If it turns out I’m risking the lives of two rangers because somebody played a bad joke, we’ll find our jokers and slap them with everything the law will allow, including Piracy on the High Seas and Not Working and Playing Well with Others.”

  Anna smiled. Lucas Vega was just the man who could make the charges stick.

  “What’s that?” Vega asked suddenly. “There.”

  Anna looked where he pointed. Softened by veils of mist, the north shore rose up out of the lake. Cliffs, formed when the island’s bedrock was fractured and tipped to the southeast, showed dark and forbidding. A litter of boulders chewed the waters at their base.

  “Down at waterline, among the rocks,” Vega said.

  Anna saw what he was looking at then: a boulder, smoother, blacker than the others. As she stared at it she realized it was moving ever so slightly, a barely perceptible bobbing with the breath of the lake.

  Anna ducked into the cabin and borrowed Ralph Pilcher’s field glasses. Protocol required she hand them to the Chief Ranger and she did so. He took them without comment, his eyes never leaving the shore.

  “It’s a vessel all right. A little runabout. Maybe sixteen, eighteen feet long. Black fiberglass hull, red upholstery. I can’t see the name, but unless there’s another just like it, that’s the Blackduck.” The Blackduck was the Resource Management Department’s boat. They had lent her to Jo Castle for the duration of her research on the island.

  “Tell Ralph to change course.” Lucas never altered the tone of his voice, never raised it, but there was that about the man that when he wished to be obeyed instantly, he was. Anna went back into the cabin and pointed the vessel out to the District Ranger. “Shit,” he whispered, cut left throttle and pushed full right to turn the Lorelei more sharply.

  Anna rejoined Lucas on deck. He kept the field glasses, giving a running report as they neared the vessel. “She’s not swamped. There’s some water on the seats and the dash from this drizzle but the deck’s not awash. There doesn’t seem to be any damage to the hull. Maybe some scratches where she’s been nudging against the rocks.”

  The timbre of the inboards changed as Ralph eased the Lorelei gingerly into the shallower water along the base of the cliff. Anna and Lucas each took a side of the boat and stared intently down at the unrevealing surface for any telltale shadows of submerged snags or boulders.

  Ralph cut power completely and the boat drifted slowly forward. “That’s it,” he shouted. “I’m afraid to take her any further in.”

  “Close enough,” Lucas replied.

  A few yards off the Lorelei’s bow, moving up and down on the Bertram’s fading wake, the Blackduck sat in the water. Her outboard motor made a delicate scritching sound as it scraped against a rock.

  Feet on the gunwale, Anna eased around the cabin using the chrome railing on the roof to steady herself. Vega passed her the boat hook and she knelt to fish up the Blackduck’s bow line where it trailed down from the cleat. She pulled it dripping from the shallows and Lucas secured it to the Lorelei’s stern. As Anna worked her way back aft, the Chief Ranger reeled in their catch.

  The Blackduck had one full tank of fuel; the other was a quarter full. The engine fired up at a touch of the starter. There was no damage to the hull or the propeller. A complete complement of life jackets was stowed under the pilot’s seat. She appeared simply to have been abandoned, left to drift.

  They hooked her to the tow line and Pilcher started back out toward the burial place of the Kamloops. The light-haired mannequin in the engine room no longer seemed a practical joke.

  Pilcher took the Lorelei to the long-range navigational, or loran, coordinates where the buoy marking the Kamloops‘ location was secured. Once again Anna and Lucas studied the water.

  Pocked by fine rain, the water looked to be made of granite. Anna was glad she was not going down. Technically she was qualified, but she knew there were miles of road between “qualified” and “ready.” The scrap of paper with its gold curlicues and typed-in names that certified her as a diver was merely a promissory note. One day, with practice and experience, she might become a diver.

  With luck, Anna thought, she’d make it back to a desert park before that fate befell her.

  Jim Tattinger dropped a two-hundred-foot line marked off at ten-foot intervals with bright blue bands. When the body swam through cold dark waters and the brain swam through six of Neptune’s martinis, getting lost or ascending faster than the prescribed feet per minute were very real dangers. The line helped orientation and timing. On a longer dive it would also hold spare tanks at intervals along the way.

  Ralph and Lucas began the cumbersome process of suiting up. Both wore polypropylene long Johns and two pairs of heavy socks. Over these they zipped khaki-colored quilted overalls, then added balaclavas. To Anna they resembled nothing so much as Peter Pan’s little lost boys. All that was missing were the round ears and fuzzy tails. Next came the thick rubber dry suits with attached booties and rubber hoods, then flippers, weight belts, masks, tanks, gloves. Blue-and-black-bodied, faceless, humped with yellow metal cylinders as they were, all trace of humanity was buried under layers of protective gear.

  Anna eyed it askance. She didn’t much care to go someplace Mother Nature had gone to such lengths to keep her out of.

  Pilcher rolled off the waterline deck at th
e Lorelei’s stern and was swallowed by the liquid granite. Seconds later he surfaced and Anna handed him the underwater light. Vega settled his mask and mouthpiece and followed Pilcher into the lake. When he bobbed back up, Anna gave him the still camera. Tattinger, leaning over the starboard gunwale, deployed the red and white flag that indicated there were divers down. He was remaining on the surface with Anna as a dive tender.

  In a pale roiling of bubbles, Pilcher and Vega were gone. There was nothing more to do but wait. Anna went into the cabin where it was dry and, relatively speaking, warm. She settled lengthwise on the bench, her back against the cold plastic of the side window. The divers would be down only ten to twelve minutes. Descending at sixty-five to seventy feet per minute, they’d be at the wreck in about four minutes, then in and out of the engine room and back up. If they stayed down much longer they would have to make prolonged stops on the ascent or they’d risk the bends. The only cure was to go into a hyperbaric chamber and start the long re-compression process. The nearest chamber was in Minneapolis, two hours away by low-flying plane.

  As the abandoned Blackduck, Jo’s boat, bobbed gently to the starboard, Jim tried to raise Mrs. Castle on the radio. Sandra Fox answered, reminding him Jo had not yet been issued a handheld Motorola radio.

  “Try Scotty,” Anna suggested. “He could stop by Davidson and see if she’s there.” Davidson Island had a lovely rustic cabin the NPS set aside for visiting researchers. Permanent NPS staff had more prosaic quarters with flush toilets and electricity on Mott. Seasonal rangers had lusted after the Davidson house but it was much too nice for seasonals.

  “Scotty’s off today,” Jim said. His voice was nasal and fiat, so much in keeping with his traditional nerd exterior that Anna wondered if all the pencil-neck-geek genes were housed on the same chromosome.

  “He got yesterday and today off and he took another day of annual leave so he could go to Houghton and have his ear looked at.”

  “What’s wrong with his ear?” Anna asked because Jim expected her to.

  “Scotty’s part deaf in his left ear. He wears one of those little bitty hearing aids in it. Did you know that?” Jim asked so sharply Anna wondered if he was telling Scotty’s secrets.

  “Nope.” She’d guessed Scotty was hard of hearing on one side by the way he cocked his head and the number of times he asked people to repeat things, but she’d never given it any thought.

  “That damn Denny Castle hit him on his bad ear,” Tattinger went on. “Scotty had that little thing in there and it hurt him.” Jim sounded angry but had a vocal range that expressed perpetual discontent and Anna wasn’t sure if he had something against Denny or was just making conversation.

  “How did Denny happen to hit him?”

  “He didn’t happen to hit him,” Jim snapped. Anna didn’t take offense. Jim had never learned how to win friends and influence people. “Castle hit him on purpose. After that stupid reception, Castle came over to Mott. I wasn’t there, but I guess he was looking for Donna. Scotty wasn’t taking any of his crap.”

  And Scotty was drunk, Anna thought. “A fight?”

  “More like a shoving match. Denny Castle doesn’t have the gonads to fight.”

  “Gonads.” Not “balls.” Anna swallowed a smile. She pictured a little, skinny, red-haired Jimmy Tattinger practicing swearing in the bathroom mirror and never managing to get it quite right.

  For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book’s inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.

  “I feel sorry for Jo,” Jim said, staring out the window to where the Blackduck had nudged up beside the Lorelei. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was no accident, if she got upset and came out here and killed herself. It’d be one way of getting away from that damned Denny Castle.”

  Anna was a little surprised at his vehemence and at his echoing Scotty’s words. Why was Tattinger so down on Denny? Jim didn’t have any wife to steal. Maybe it was enough that Denny openly expressed the opinion that Tattinger was a lousy diver, an incompetent manager, and showed no concern for the resources he was hired to protect.

  She decided to prod a little. “I don’t know why anybody would feel sorry for Jo,” she said. “There’s not many women who’d throw Denny Castle out of bed for eating crackers.”

  Jim snorted, a sound like old pug dogs make. “Oh, women fall for that crap Denny dishes out.”

  The insult to Denny and all of womankind seemed to be in about equal proportions. Jim exposed a moist ruffled underlip as he smiled at a delicious memory.

  A number of retorts came to mind but Anna left them unsaid. She wondered if Jim was trying to needle her into an argument. For a moment she just watched him; the pale restless eyes staring at the gray nothing beyond the windscreen, the bored wanderings of his white-skinned fingers picking at the vinyl seat cover where it was worn through.

  No, she decided, he wasn’t trying intentionally to provoke her. He was just naturally irritating. At his age-somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-he probably knew he rubbed people the wrong way. Anna suspected he’d never figured out why and somewhere along the line had given up trying and retreated into his computers.

  “I used to work on St. John in the Caribbean,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t mind diving so much there. It’s warm.”

  “Why did you leave the Virgin Islands National Park?” Anna asked. Tattinger was a GS-5 making less than nineteen thousand a year, an entry-level position, so it hadn’t been for a promotion.

  “The District Ranger was a prick,” he said succinctly.

  “Ah.” He didn’t elaborate and Anna said: “A Submerged Cultural Resource Specialist who doesn’t like diving? What happened? Shark bite you?”

  “They made me do it in the Navy,” he said. “It’s a job.”

  A secure government job with health and retirement benefits. Easy to get for an ex-Navy man with veteran’s preference in hiring. Dig a comfortable little air-conditioned niche and wait out the years until retirement while hundreds of overqualified people worked as seasonals, scraping by winters doing odd jobs, because they wanted to save the world- or at least one little corner of it.

  It wasn’t hard to understand how Denny had come by his contempt for Jim.

  Anna picked up Ivanhoe again, determined to answer only in grunts until any further attempts at conversation were effectively squashed.

  The respite was short-lived. Ralph and Lucas surfaced. She and Jim helped them crawl aboard. For half a minute the divers lay in a puddle on the boat deck like a couple of unpleasant monsters dragged in with the day’s catch.

  With a popping, sucking noise, Vega pulled off his rubber hood and dropped it on the deck. Anna tossed it against the cabin and knelt to help him with his tanks. Vega’s face was almost the same shade of gray as the lake.

  “Not a joke?” Anna asked.

  Lucas shook his head. “Not a joke. It’s Denny, Denny Castle.”

  Anna rocked back on her heels. She felt as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus. It confused her.

  She hadn’t known she cared.

  SIX

  Jim Tattinger did most of the talking and he was asking questions that neither Ralph nor Lucas wanted to answer: What did Denny look like? Could they tell what killed him? Did they touch him? Were his eyes open? He talked rapidly and his usually pale skin was flushed up to his ears. He babbled like a man trying to cover up a social faux pas.

  As a reaction to the death of a colleague, guilty embarrassment seemed singularly inappropriate. Anna wondered if Tattinger was ashamed of having spoken ill of the dead when the dead floated thirty fathoms beneath his feet.

  She and Jim had talked of Castle as if he were alive. In their minds-at least in Anna’s-he had still lived. It was as if no one could die until she had been informed. In a way that was true. Even now, years after Zachary had been killed, Anna would sometimes fo
rget he was dead. She’d think of a joke she wanted to tell him, a place she wanted to show him, and for that moment he would be alive again, utterly alive. So much so that the next moment, when she remembered, was always a fresh grief, though now blessedly shortlived.

  Anna made a mental note to tell Jo Castle that things did get better eventually. She did not expect Jo would believe her.

  Lucas Vega thought of Denny’s wife at that same moment. He and Ralph were back in dry clothes sitting on the engine box drinking hot coffee from a thermos while Anna and Jim stowed gear and reeled in line. “Anna,” Vega said, “I’d like you to come with me to Davidson and give the news to Jo. I’d like a female officer to be present.”

  Anna nodded. She never felt particularly comfortable when called on to be a female officer. Some arcane, instinctual talents were expected and she’d never figured out exactly what they were. “What then?” she asked.

  Lucas wiped a fine-boned brown hand over his face, dragging down the flesh of his cheeks. “I’ll call the Feds. This clearly is no accident. The man didn’t bump his head diving off the high board and drown. He’s a couple of hundred feet down floating around in a Halloween costume.

  “Then I guess we go get him. It’s a hell of a crime scene to investigate. The standard techniques aren’t going to help much. I doubt there’s an FBI man in a thousand miles who could even get to the scene, much less function after he did. We’re stuck with this one. At least for a while.”