“Seems like he’s got very minor injuries, so they won’t be trying to transport him, not that they could have,” Klemens says. “You’d need a flatbed truck, and he probably wouldn’t have survived rehab anyway. There’s never been a leatherback from around here that did. All they know is the open ocean, swimming from continent to continent. You put them in a tank and they just keep swimming into the side of it until they beat themselves to death. Pelagic creatures don’t understand what a wall is. Kind of like my sixteen-year-old son.”
I watch the rescue team in green Windbreakers and latex gloves, the leatherback puffing out his throat and making ominous sounds, whistling and clucking, and I scan the bright choppy water. I think about what I need to do. There must be at least a dozen boats around us now, people attracted by the strobing red lights and the stunning creature on board, and no telling what’s already hit the Internet.
I don’t want an audience when I recover the body, and I sure as hell don’t want it filmed by smartphones and the media. What terrible timing for me to retrieve a dead body from water, and I think uncomfortably of Mildred Lott and my idiotic comment about her turning into soap.
“The blond girl there.” Klemens nods at Dr. Pamela Quick. “She says he’s the biggest one they’ve ever seen, maybe even the biggest on record, close to ten feet long and more than a ton, and could be a hundred years old. Take a good look, Doc, because you’re not likely to ever see something like this again. They don’t survive long enough to get this big anymore because of boat strikes and entanglements and ingesting trash like plastic bags and party balloons they confuse with jellies. It’s just one more example of us wrecking the planet.”
Two transom steps lead from the dive platform up to the recovery deck under us, which is crowded with four marine biologists, and piles of towels and sheets, and tough plastic cases, ski bags, and other field kits containing emergency drugs and rescue and medical equipment. From where I’m standing, downwind of the leatherback, I detect his briny smell and hear him scraping the platform as he strains against his yellow harness, his every movement slow and heavy and suggestive of enormous physical power. The loud blasts of his breaths remind me of air moving through a scuba regulator, and then his throat expands again and he emits a deep guttural roar that makes me think of lions and dragons and King Kong.
“You hear that behind you on a dark beach, it would be a heart attack,” Klemens says.
“What else have they done so far?” I ask.
“Cut the lines off of him.”
“I hope they saved them.”
“I’m not sure what you could tell from them.”
“You never know until you look,” I reply.
“PIT tagged him right before you got here, and I can tell you he doesn’t like needles,” he adds.
Pamela Quick works a spinal needle deep into the neck for a blood draw, while a second rescuer, a young man with brown shaggy hair, reads a digital thermometer and announces, “Temp’s up two degrees. He’s starting to overheat.”
“Let’s get him covered and wet him down,” Dr. Quick decides, and she glances up at me and for a moment we are eye to eye.
They drape the ridged carapace with a wet white sheet, and I recall her tone to me on the phone earlier, her adamant way of telling me what she needed to do. It was my distinct impression that she didn’t believe she required my permission and didn’t want my involvement, and now she just looked at me resentfully it seemed, as if I have something personal with her that I know nothing about.
She squeezes ultrasound gel on the turtle’s neck, moving around a handheld Doppler probe with a built-in loudspeaker to monitor the heart rate. The sound of the massive reptile’s blood flowing is like the roaring of a river or a rushing wind.
“Normosol to replenish his electrolytes.” She tears open the packet of a solution set, a twenty-gauge needle attached to an IV line. “Ten drops per one mil. He’s stressed.”
“Well, I would be, too. He’s probably never been around humans before,” Klemens observes, and I’m aware of the weird familiarity I feel that isn’t about him.
A sad curiosity runs through me like a low-voltage current, then is gone, and I imagine my father seeing such a marvel. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think of the person I’ve become.
“They say a turtle like this one’s been on land only once in his life. Right after he was hatched on some beach halfway around the world and crawled across the sand and into the water. And he’s been swimming ever since.” Klemens talks expressively with his hands the way my father did until he was too weak from cancer to lift them from the bed. “So he’s not happy resting on top of something, in this case, the platform. Not to be crude about it, but the only other time he’s got something under him is when he mates. What do you want to do about her?”
He looks at the heaving water where the large yellow sausage fender bobs, which strikes me as quite odd, and I say so.
“You think it’s attached to a conch pot or cinder blocks?” I point out. “Why?”
“When they were pulling the buoy line close with the grappler to cut the fishing line and get the turtle on board?” he says. “For a couple of minutes the body was at the surface. Her head was.”
“Jesus. I hope we’re not going to see that on TV.” I look up at a second helicopter that has moved in, hovering directly over us, a white twin-engine, with what appears to be a gyrostabilized camera system mounted on the nose.
“I think all they’re interested in is the turtle and got no clue what else is on the line.” He follows my gaze up. “The first chopper got here just as we were pulling him on board, so I don’t think they filmed the body or know about it. At least not yet.”
“And what’s gone out over the radio?” I ask.
“Not a distress call, for obvious reasons.” He means any calls about the dead body didn’t go out over the usual channels that might be monitored by mariners and the media.
“Did anybody touch it with the grappler or disturb it in any way?”
“Nobody got anywhere near it, and we recorded the whole thing with our onboard cameras, Doc. So you got that if you need proof in court.”
“Perfect,” I tell him.
“When the body was just at the surface you could barely make out the shape of a wire mesh pot about four foot square, I’m guessing.” He continues staring at the sausage buoy, as if he can still see the pot he’s describing. “It’s attached by maybe twenty, thirty feet of rope and obviously has something in it that’s heavy as hell. Rocks, cinder blocks, I couldn’t tell.”
“And the body’s tethered to this line? We’re sure it still is? We’re sure there’s no way it got loose when they were pulling the turtle in and cutting him free?”
“I don’t think it’s possible that poor lady’s going anywhere. Tied around the lower part, possibly the legs, the ankles.” He stares at the yellow bumper moving brightly on the water and the yellow line dropping taut and straight below it, disappearing into the dark blue bay. “An older woman with white hair is what it looked like to me, and then when they got the turtle cut free, she dropped below the surface again, the weighted conch pot pulling her back down.”
“She’s tethered to the buoy line, which is tied around her legs, possibly? Yet she’s upright?” I’m having a hard time envisioning what he’s describing.
“Don’t know.”
“If her head appeared first, she’s upright.”
“Well, she definitely was headfirst,” he says.
“If the conch pot, the body, and the buoy are all part of the same line or rig, I find that very curious,” I insist. “It’s contradictory. One is pulling her down while the other is pulling her up.”
“I’ve got everything on video if you want to duck into the wheelhouse and take a look.”
“If you could get me a copy, I’d really appreciate it,” I reply. “What I need to do now is to take a look at the turtle.”
It isn’t mere curiosity on my part. From w
here we are on the upper deck I can see a wound near the leatherback’s black-and-grayish-white mottled neck, on a ridge at the upper edge of its carapace, an area of bright pink abrasion that Pamela Quick is wiping with Betadine pads.
“I’ll leave the body in the water until I’m ready to recover it and transport it to shore,” I tell Klemens, as Marino climbs up the ladder with white Tyvek coveralls, boot covers, and gloves. “The longer it stays cold the better,” I add. “I’m certainly no aficionado of fishing tackle,” I then say, as I take off my down jacket, “but why would someone pick a boat bumper as opposed to fishing floats for a conch or lobster pot?”
“These watermen are like magpies and collect all sorts of things,” Klemens says.
“We don’t know that a waterman has anything to do with this,” I remind him.
“Detergent and soda pop,” he continues, “and Clorox bottles, Styrofoam, bumpers that come loose from docks, anything you can think of that will float and is easy to find, not to mention cheap or, better yet, free. But you’re right. That’s assuming this has anything to do with fishing.”
“It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with fishing,” Marino says bluntly.
“More likely, the point was to use a line with a lot of weight and dump her overboard,” Klemens agrees.
“You wouldn’t use a float of any type if that’s what you were up to.” Marino has no doubt about it as we suit up in protective clothing. “You sure as hell wouldn’t attach a big yellow bumper unless maybe you wanted her to be found damn fast.”
“And hopefully she has been,” I comment, because the better shape the body is in, the better chance I have of finding out what I need to know.
“Using a bumper or float at all? I agree. I think someone wants her found,” asserts the firefighter named Jack. “And I bowled against you before,” he says to Marino. “You’re not half bad.”
“Don’t remember you, and I would if you were half decent.”
“The Firing Pins. Right?”
“That’s us. Oh, yeah, now I’m remembering. You’re the Shootin’ Blanks.” Marino picks on him.
“Naw.”
“Could’ve sworn it.”
“You mind I ask why?” Klemens watches me pull on heavy-duty black nitrile gloves. “How come you’re treating my fireboat like a crime scene?”
“He’s part of one.” I mean the turtle is, and that I intend to handle him like evidence.
nine
WORKING SHOE COVERS OVER MY BOOTS, I CLIMB DOWN the ladder while Marino and Jack continue to banter.
I pick my way around equipment and rescuers, the deck heaving slowly in the swelling surf, waves breaking over the edge of the dive platform and rushing around my feet. The beating of helicopter blades is distant but relentless, and I feel the coldness of the water through my Tyvek-covered boots as I move close to Pamela Quick, who is completely preoccupied and in no mood for my company.
In her mid- to late thirties, I estimate, she is pretty in an off-putting way, with wide gray eyes, a square chin, and hard-set mouth, her long pale blond hair tied back and under a cap. She’s surprisingly small and delicate for the large creatures she routinely handles, and as steady as a professional surfer on the rocking platform, emptying a syringe into a green-top Vacutainer tube that has the additive heparin to prevent blood from clotting.
“I’m Dr. Scarpetta.” I remind her we talked briefly on the phone earlier today. “I need to get some basic information and take a look, and then I’ll be out of your way.”
“I can’t permit you to examine him.” She is as brisk and chilly as the water and the wind. “He’s stressed enough as is, and that’s the number-one danger right now. Stressing him.” She says it with emphasis, as if I might be the source of it. “These animals aren’t used to being out of the water and touched by humans. Stress will kill them. I’ll send you my report, and that should answer any questions you have.”
“I understand, and later I’d certainly appreciate a copy of your report,” I reply. “But it’s important I know anything you can tell me now.”
She withdraws the needle from the rubber top and says, “Water temp is fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit, the ambient temp fifty-seven.”
“What can you tell me about him?” I have no choice but to be insistent.
“About him?” She glances up at me as if I have just offended her. “Not exactly relevant for your purposes.”
“At the moment, I consider everything relevant. He may be part of a crime scene.”
“He’s a critically endangered turtle who almost died because of reckless, careless human beings.”
“And I’m not one of those reckless, careless human beings.” I understand her hostility. “I want him to thrive as much as you do.”
She glances up at me condescendingly, angrily.
“Let’s do this,” I then say. “Tell me what you know.”
She doesn’t reply.
“I’m not the one wasting time,” I add pointedly.
“HR thirty-six, RR is two. Both times by Doppler,” she says. “Cloacal temp is seventy-four degrees.” She drips blood into a white plastic i-STAT cartridge.
“Is it unusual that his body temperature is some twenty-five degrees higher than the water he was in?”
“Leatherbacks are gigantothermic.”
“Meaning they can maintain a core temperature independently of the environmental temperature,” I reply. “That’s rather remarkable, and not what I’d expect.”
“Like the dinosaurs, they can survive in waters as warm as the tropics or cold enough to kill a human in minutes.”
“Certainly defies what I understand about reptiles.” I squat near her as the boat sways back and forth and water laps.
“Reptilian physiology is unable to explain the biology of dinosaurs.”
“You’re not really calling this a dinosaur?” I’m baffled and strangely unsettled, considering how my day began.
“A gigantic reptile that has been here for more than sixty-five million years, the earth’s last living dinosaur.” She continues to act as if I’m to blame. “And like the dinosaur is about to become extinct.”
She inserts the cartridge into a handheld blood analyzer while frigid water splashes over the platform and soaks the cuffs of my coveralls and begins to wick up the legs of my pants underneath.
“Fishing gear, ignorant people digging up their eggs, illegal poaching, speedboats, oil spills, and plastic pollution,” she continues, with undisguised disgust. “At least one-third of all leatherbacks have plastic in their stomachs. And they don’t do one damn thing to us. All they want to do is swim, eat jellies, and reproduce.”
The leatherback slowly lifts his watermelon-sized head and looks directly at me as if to emphasize his caretaker’s point. Nares flare as he exhales loudly, his protruding eyes dark pools on either side of a beaklike mouth that reminds me of a crooked jack-o’-lantern smile.
“I understand the way you feel better than you’ll ever imagine, and I’m eager to get out of your way,” I say to Pamela Quick. “But I have to know about his injuries before I can finish up here.”
“Moderate abrasions circumferentially around the skin-carapace line of left distal shoulder extending about three centimeters on distal posterior margin of the left-front flipper,” she describes with steely affect. “Associated with an abraded area of the distal leading edge.” She reads the blood test results on the digital display.
“And his values?” I ask.
“Typical for entangled leatherbacks. Mild hypernatremia, but he should be fine. Until he encounters some other human detritus or a boat that kills him.”
“I can understand how you feel about it. . . .”
“You really can’t,” she says.
“I need to ask if you saved the fishing gear.”
“You can have it.” She reaches inside a ski bag.
“Based on your expertise, can you reconstruct what happened?”
“Same thing that a
lways does to these animals,” she replies. “They run into a vertical line, freak out and start spinning around, and get wrapped up in it. The more they struggle, the worse it gets, and in his case, he was dragging a heavy pot and a body for God knows how far.”
“And dragging the buoy.”
“Yes. Dragging that, too.” She hands me a transparent plastic bag that contains tangled monofilament, several leads, and rusty hooks.
“What makes you assume the body and pot were dragged? It seems you’re assuming they weren’t originally where they are now. Any reason to suppose he might have gotten entangled here, where he was found?” I label the bag with a permanent marker.
“Leatherbacks are in perpetual motion,” she answers. “The monofilament probably was entangled with the buoy line. What we do know for a fact is he hit the fishing lines, and his left flipper got wound up, but he’s programmed to keep swimming. The more he swam, the tighter the lines wrapped around him, it would seem. By the time we got to him, he could barely move his left flipper, and he was going under.”
“Any estimate of distance based on how fast leatherbacks can swim?” I ask.
“We could have this conversation later.” She barely looks up at me.
“Any information I can get now is really important,” I say firmly. “It could help us determine where the body might have entered the water.”
“That person is gone. He’s not.”
“This could be a homicide investigation. I don’t think anyone wants to interfere with that.”
“All I can tell you is the top speed for a leatherback is about twenty miles per hour,” she replies flatly, “but no way he was going anything close to that dragging what was attached to him. It’s not possible to say where he might have run into the line except that I’m thinking he didn’t get very far after he did. Maybe a few miles at most, until he was running out of steam and getting pulled down by his load, barely able to keep his head above water.”
“It’s not likely he got entangled in the open ocean.” I scan the horizon, the outer harbor separated from the open Atlantic Ocean by some sixty-five miles of bays, peninsulas, and islands. “It’s too far from here.”
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