Backwater Bay

by Steven Becker

  The Park Service shared resources with both Miami-Dade and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Although I preferred working with the FDLE, the lab and morgue in South Florida were run by Miami-Dade.

  I heard Sid’s nasal New Jersey whine after the second ring and I relaxed. Even after only a brief acquaintance we were on a first-name basis. It didn’t hurt that we shared a friendship with Justine from the crime lab. Sid was something of a father figure and mentor to her. At the moment, I wasn’t sure what he thought of me. I did get the feeling that he liked me, maybe because I had suffered through the better part of an autopsy of another floater without losing my lunch. I imagined him staring over his reading glasses as he hunched above his desk, leaning too close to his pad of paper as he wrote down the particulars.

  I gave him the GPS numbers, which served as an address out on the water. The satellite system, originally dedicated to the military, was public now and could pin down a location anywhere on the planet to about thirty feet. Water was as much a part of South Florida law enforcement as land. When Sid said he’d be there in an hour, he knew what was involved.

  With the Power-Pole holding the boat in place and nothing to do but wait, I clipped off the end of the leader and set the rod aside. From a small box in the console, I pulled out another section of fluorocarbon and tied it to the line. There were only two flies left. I chose the chartreuse-and-white pattern and tied that to the end of the leader. Glancing over at the body, just to check that it was still there, I moved to the bow and started casting into the current.

  I wasn’t expecting much, just trying to kill some time, when the first bite came. A few minutes later, I had a keeper-sized mangrove snapper aboard for dinner. Two more followed, and I had almost forgotten about the body when I heard the whine of a motor approach.

  The sound stopped just about where the deepwater channel ended, and I heard a call for the Park Service come through the speakers on the VHF radio. Per Park Service protocol, I was monitoring channel 16. After I answered, we switched to channel 17 and I was able to guide the sheriffs’ boat into the small channel.

  I cringed when Sid saw the rod. Before I could offer an explanation, he called over.

  “That it there?” he asked, pointing to the black lump in the water.

  “Yeah, pulled it out and left it as soon as I saw what it was,” I said. With Sid, at least, I wasn’t too concerned about the circumstances that had led to my finding the body. Even Martinez would probably become so sidetracked by the paperwork required for finding a dead body in the park that he’d forget to ask. I pointed to the floater with the rod tip, surprised how quickly I had become acclimated to death. A month ago, when I’d first arrived there, I would have spent the time staring in morbid fascination at the body; now I fished.

  He leaned over the gunwale of the sheriff’s boat and said something to the deputy that I couldn’t hear. The deputy walked around the center console, opened the hatch, and pulled out two sets of waders. Both men suited up, and I took their cue to slide into my own. I grabbed the waterproof camera and measuring tape, then checked my pocket to make sure I had a pad and pencil, something I had forgotten the last time we danced with a dead body in waist-deep water. We all looked at each other and eased into the water. The deputy reached over the gunwale and pulled down a red backboard.

  I was right behind Sid, close enough that he swatted at me as if I were a mosquito as he started to examine the body. The last time we had been in this situation, I had been a virgin. Since then, I had learned my lesson, and after snapping a dozen or so pictures, I got out the pad and started to take notes. The deputy was doing the same and we had an awkward standoff when Sid was ready to roll the body.

  With an eye on each other, we both put our pads back in our pockets and moved toward the corpse. There had not been much to see when it was facedown, just a body covered by a wetsuit. We all turned away simultaneously when we got our first look at the anterior.

  Sid was the first to recover, and I snuck a look at the deputy, taking our unspoken feud to the next level by facing the body before he did. Almost immediately, I wished I hadn’t and had to choke down the bile in the back of my throat. After several deep breaths, I had recovered enough to start recording what lay in front of me.

  By the length of the hair, I guessed it was a woman, but from the crab-eaten face, I couldn’t be sure. “They get the eyes and lips first,” I said like I was some kind of authority. In fact, I was repeating exactly what Sid had said after we recovered the body of an anonymous Cuban refugee on the mainland side of the park a few weeks ago. He let the comment go and started speaking.

  “Looks like a propeller got her,” he said.

  I took my eyes off what had been her face and looked down at the huge gash where her stomach had been. The wetsuit had been slashed open and an empty cavity showed where the stomach and other internal organs had once lived.

  I was behind the curve now and took several quick pictures before pulling out the notepad and pen. “How do you know it was a propeller?” I asked.

  Sid looked over his glasses and I could see the deputy grinning behind him. Score one for the opposition. I thought he was going to ignore me, but with a pencil, he pointed at the perimeter of the wound. “The water did us a favor in cleaning the wounds. The gashes are regular like the blades of a propeller. Around a thousand RPMs would be my guess. Anything faster would have shredded her.”

  I wasn’t about to embarrass myself by asking how he knew this. I could figure out the math later. “Looks like a diving accident then?” I asked, confident that I had nailed it.

  Before Sid spoke, I saw the look on the deputy’s face and added another point for him. Two to one. “We’re a long way from the cause of death. I would’ve thought there’d be some gear if that was the case,” he said, giving me that look again.

  The deputy was showing teeth now. If I could just get him to laugh, I could recover a point. “Right. Mind if I sit in on the autopsy?”

  “I guess that’d be okay. You held your lunch last time.”

  In fact it had been dinner, and I had left before he started the internal examination. He hadn’t yet made the diagonal incisions in the man’s chest and removed the internal organs. That body had been in the water for only a few days. This one appeared to have been in for much longer. There was no bloating or gases. I figured this was due to the empty space where the woman’s stomach should have been, but I wasn’t in a position to voice my opinions. I was too far behind to lose another point. Three points down would be too hard to come back from.

  “There’s nothing else here for me,” Sid said.

  As if on cue, the deputy pulled the backboard to the woman’s side and together we rolled the corpse on and strapped it down. He moved first, pulling the body behind him, and I followed. When we reached the boat, he climbed aboard, and I helped push the body over the gunwale. Once aboard our respective boats, we pulled off our waders, and with the deputy in the lead, I followed them across the bay and into Government Cut. Shadows cast by Miami’s skyline gave us some shade as we coasted up to the dock on Dodge Island.

  Fortunately, the tide was slack, and with a light southeasterly breeze, I was able to execute an acceptable docking maneuver and keep the score two to one. I did forget to put the fenders out before docking, but the huge tires used to cushion the large freighters that often docked here worked for my boat as well. After tying off, and adding a spring line to keep the boat from being pushed forward when the tide started going out, I walked over to the deputy’s boat and helped him load the backboard into the medical examiner’s van.

  We said a guarded goodbye and I went to the passenger side. Sid crawled into the driver’s seat. I climbed in and buckled my seat belt then grabbed for any handhold I could find, knowing what was coming. He looked almost cartoonish. Sitting too close to the dashboard, with his head above the wheel, Sid pulled out of the parking lot, jumping the curb with the rear wheels as he turned onto the road, and ign
oring the three cars that he had cut off as they honked and cursed. The rest of the ride was more of the same, and shaken, I climbed out of the van when we reached his office.

  “Guard the body while I get some help,” he said, climbing down from the van. As he walked to the entrance, I went around to the back doors. I was going to check that the body was all right after the wild ride there but decided that was stupid, almost giving the deputy that third point even though he was absent. Instead, I pulled out my phone.

  “Justine Doezinsky,” she answered after the receptionist routed my call to the crime lab.

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Hey, Me,” she answered.

  I totally deserved that and decided to counter with the one line that would work with her. “Got another body,” I said.

  3

  “Don’t you dare start without me. I’m on my way,” Justine said.

  So what do you do when you suspect the woman you’re interested in gets more excited over dead bodies than live ones? You take her to an autopsy, and that’s exactly what I did for our third date. I wasn’t sure if it counted as a real date or not, but I had called and asked her and she had said yes. Some women would react the same way if you offered up a Jimmy Buffett concert; Justine liked her work.

  After waiting for two attendants to take the body, I headed into the building and nodded to the security guard. Although I dislike wearing a uniform, it does have benefits. I’d been here once before and knew the way. After descending the stairs, I followed the starkly lit corridor to the morgue, wondering whether fluorescent fixtures were mandatory in subterranean spaces. Inside the first room, I saw Sid through the glass partition and knocked. He came to the door and I told him Justine was on her way. This brought a smile to his face, and I remembered the jealousy I’d felt the last time I was here.

  There were a few easy conversation starters in South Florida. The weather was usually at the top of the list. With no tropical storms threatening, we moved on to fishing. Sid called himself retired now but had once been an avid bluefish and striper fisherman in the Northeast. I knew that an invitation to fish the bay would result in the end of his retirement and put that one in my pocket for a future favor. We made it through the twenty minutes it took for Justine to drive from Doral to Miami.

  “Hey. You didn’t start, did you?” Justine called out as she entered.

  Before I could answer, she came over and pecked my cheek. I felt the blood rise to my face, partially from the contact, but also from the surprise. The medical examiner’s office is not exactly the place you expect that kind of thing. She wasted no time donning the required gown, mask, and safety glasses. I caught a glimmer in her eyes through the acrylic shield that showed how excited she was.

  I followed her into the room and the three of us stood around the stainless steel table. Sid smiled at Justine and started the recorder. It was all business from here. The basic measurements and data were all noted. Although he wouldn’t comment, the body looked to me like it had been in the water a long time. He bagged and tagged samples of the woman’s hair and nails, carefully inspecting what was left of her hands in the process.

  “No sign of a fight,” he said, laying down the right hand.

  “How could you tell after she was in the water for so long? There are no fingernails.” I stated the obvious, worried he would sense that my education on forensics came from an in-depth study of CSI: Miami. I had binge-watched every episode in preparation for my assignment.

  “No bruising,” he noted without further explanation, and moved on to her toenails. After inspecting every exposed part of her body, he took pictures of her face and wounds, then asked for help to turn her over. In comparison to her front, with her decimated face and the gash across her stomach, her back was fairly benign.

  Using a pair of surgical shears, Sid started to remove the wetsuit. Cutting in a straight line from her neck to her legs, he peeled away the neoprene and started to examine what was left of her skin. If you had told me what I would be looking at before I saw it, I would have been worried, but it was so clinical it didn’t really faze me. First, all the blood had long since left her body, leaving the torso china white. It just didn’t look like a person anymore.

  We rolled her back over and Sid cut off the arms of the wetsuit. He removed the remaining pieces and placed them in a large clear evidence bag. With that off to the side, he continued by making the standard diagonal incisions across her chest. Devoid of blood, the cavities seemed sterile, and I was losing interest, watching Justine more than the autopsy. Unlike her, I liked live bodies. My mind started to drift to the other two live women in my life.

  It had been months since I had seen or heard from my ex-wife, Janet, or our fourteen-year-old daughter, Allie. I had stirred up a hornet’s nest by finding the pot grow, and a week before the trial was scheduled to start, our house was firebombed. It had been the last straw in a crumbling relationship, and the next day I found myself in a judge’s chambers for an emergency custody hearing.

  Maybe I should have fought harder, but Janet’s attorneys’ argument made sense to me as well as the judge. If they hadn’t gotten me this time, there would likely be a next. Both my family and I were in danger.. I suspected they were in Orlando with Janet’s sister but had no proof of that. Part of my decision to come to Miami had been the proximity to where I thought they were; the other was the lure of the water.

  I’m reclusive by nature and had no problem living in a neighborhood of two houses on an island five miles from the mainland. It all sounds romantic, but in reality, even for me, it could be boring. Fishing got me through most of those times. As I looked at Justine, I wondered how this tendency of mine to seek the perimeter of civilization would affect our relationship. It was exactly this that had caused the rift between Janet and me. We both wanted to live in small towns; the only problem was our conflicting definitions of “small”. The population sign on her idea of a small town had five figures; the one on mine had three.

  A humph from Sid brought my attention back to the table. I saw the lung in his hands. He turned it sideways and inspected it, then placed it on a scale and recorded the weight.

  “Lungs show signs of expansion,” he said.

  I let it pass, not wanting to interrupt, but started paying attention. The other lung was on the scale and with its weight recorded, I looked at what was left of the woman’s face. Squinting, I tried to get a picture of what she had looked like and succeeded to some degree, although whether my fantasy matched reality, I had no idea. What I did see was a faint blemish on the side of her neck. Moving closer, I saw what I thought was the faintest outline of a tattoo.

  “You see something?” Justine asked, coming beside me.

  “Here.” I pointed to the area on her neck.

  “Hey, Sid, take a look at what Sunshine found.”

  The three of us stood together. “Looks like a bruise to me. The body is covered with them. After being chewed by the propeller, it would probably have been slammed by the hull; it’s exactly what I would expect.” He moved the overhead light. Looking at the surrounding areas, there were indeed light bruises all over the body.

  I looked at things from different angles than Sid and Justine, who were methodically working their way through the autopsy protocol. It was my job to find out what had happened, and the first thing I needed to do was establish her identity. The mark on her neck was no help now that I knew it was a bruise, but there might be something else.

  “Can we get dental records or fingerprints?” I spurted out, knowing I had crossed some kind of invisible boundary when they both stared at me. Leaving the body to the professionals, I picked up the plastic bag holding the pieces of the wetsuit and stared at the material.

  It didn’t take long for a green slime coat to grow on anything in the water, and the wetsuit was no exception. It looked to be a lightweight suit. For a minute I just stared at it, remembering the scene in my mind when I had pulled the body from the mangroves. S
omething wasn’t right. It didn’t take the towering anvil-shaped clouds or the thunder from the late-afternoon storms to remind me it was summer. I didn’t need to be a Florida native to know that the wetsuit was overkill in these waters this time of the year.

  I looked back over the autopsy table and saw Justine taking fingerprints from the permanently wrinkled fingers. I felt stupid for asking about the fingerprints earlier and now held my tongue for a minute before she caught me staring at her.

  “Yes?”

  “How do you tell how long the body has been in the water?”

  “Now the detective is thinking,” Sid answered, his heavy accent making the comment seem more sarcastic.

  I wasn’t sure if this was a promotion or not and didn’t tell him my title was actually special agent. He probably didn’t care. “It’s just the need for a wetsuit. The water, even out on the reef, is in the eighties this time of year.”

  “It’s hard to determine, but I’d say only a few weeks at the most. I’ve seen a lot of bodies pulled from these waters over the years. All I have is anecdotal data, but you know when they went missing and you know when they were found. There’re more precise methods, like the life cycle of a fly, to determine how long a body on land has been dead. Unfortunately, the water erases everything.”

  Despite his vagueness, it was my first lead. “Can we examine the suit?”

  Justine set aside the fingerprint materials and looked at the evidence bag. “What are you expecting to find?”

  “I don’t know. Right now, it’s the only evidence we have.”

  She looked at Sid, who shrugged. “I can’t call this anything other than an accidental death at this point. There are no signs of a struggle. It looks like a boating accident, and I have seen enough of them to know what they look like,” he said.