Flesh and Blood: A Scarpetta Novel (Scarpetta Novels Book 22) by Patricia Cornwell
“Ninety feet is a long way to go to do a recon,” I reply. “Rosado would have to wait on the surface for at least ten minutes and that’s a long time too, especially when he’s already got the regulator in his mouth. He’s going to suck in a lot of air in ten minutes.”
It occurs to me that the dive master may not have wanted to be anywhere near him. Maybe he was involved in the homicide. I suggest this to Benton.
“There’s no evidence of it and I don’t think so,” he says. “Apparently it was S-O-P for him to check out a site first to make sure no one else was diving it and that everything seemed safe, the visibility adequate etcetera. An Australian guy who works on the yacht full-time, he’d filled the tanks the day before, checked all the gear.”
“How much air was in Rosado’s tank?”
“He started out with thirty-three hundred PSI.”
“And when he died?”
“We don’t know and in a few minutes you’ll see why.”
I resume the video, and Rosado is floating alone. He looks at the dive computer on his wrist. His head jerks slightly forward and to the right, and next he’s facedown in the water. He’s just been shot. I back up, watching that part of it again and again as I remember what Jack Kuster said about starting out test fires at a thousand yards. If it was too far we could always “walk it in.” Sniper terminology.
When a shooter is attempting to hit a target he might fire multiple times, recalculating the DOPE, each shot landing closer and I look for water splashing. I scrutinize the rolling swells around Rosado, the dark blue water rising and falling, lifting and settling smoothly as he bobs with his mask on, his regulator in his mouth, waiting, leaning his head back, looking around.
There. A tiny splash, like a small fish breaking the surface. I back up and play it again, a splash, as if someone threw a rock. About ten feet from Rosado and I see another splash, this one closer and he seems to sense it. He turns to the left and instantly he’s facedown. Three seconds later there are two loud pops.
He’s lifted completely out of the water and spun through the air like a limp frog, and I study this for a while, zooming in, detecting the spray of blood in the bright blueness as his body is propelled by pressurized gas blasting. The regulator is out of his mouth, its hoses whipping around as he pirouettes before his mask and BCD rip off. He sinks into the water, his head caved in, one side of it gone.
“Bob? Oh my God! Bob! What’s happening!” his wife screams and then there are no images, no sounds, and I open another file, this one a CT scan from the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The entrance wound is in the back of the skull, just to the right of the lambdoidal suture, a small tangential hole. The solid copper open tip bullet expanded on impact, its four petals causing devastating damage as they buzz-sawed through the occipital, temporal and frontal lobes. The bullet exited through the left side of the mandible, which is missing as are most of the teeth and part of the skull.
“The flight path is downward from right to left,” I say to Benton. “It required at least four shots. If you replay the video clip and look closely you can see the shooter walking the bullets in closer until Rosado is hit. Then two more rapid shots struck the tank. That doesn’t sound like the other cases. Granted Rosado was a moving target, bobbing in a heavy surf but it doesn’t seem the same. I don’t believe it is.”
“Troy,” Benton says. “Someone who’s not experienced or skilled with a PGF or firearms in general.”
“A shooting gallery,” I decide. “Almost an entire magazine at only sixty feet.”
“I suspect taking out the scuba tank was deliberate, intended to horrify those watching and to mock and degrade the victim. Carrie would have found it entertaining watching him lifted up and twirling in the air. She probably told Troy to do it.”
“Well I don’t think it was her who fired those shots. At that distance and with a tracking scope it was someone who didn’t know what he was doing, someone who was even worse than I was yesterday. Why kill him?”
“Why kill any of them?”
“Are you going to dive?” I then ask.
“We’ll be looking for a number of things. His mask, his BCD and tank, the magazine missing from the rifle and any cartridge cases. The marine unit’s Moose Boat is going to pick us up as soon as it’s light.”
“On your way out did you grab everything?” I envision our bags of dive gear, our luggage by the front door where we left them early Thursday morning.
“I thought we’d leave it down here in the condo. So I grabbed yours too. Why?”
“Take mine on the boat with you.”
“No, Kay.”
“You can’t let John dive. At his most recent physical he wasn’t given a clean bill of health, Benton. Far from it. We don’t want anything happening to him and we don’t want further complications with this case if he has an unfortunate episode while he’s helping collect evidence.”
“Good luck stopping him.”
“I’m going to call him but you need to tell him too. I’m fine to handle what needs to be done.”
“You don’t need to come down here. I don’t want you to.”
“Teeth and bone are somewhere down there.”
“I can look,” Benton says. “You don’t need to.”
“Biological evidence is my jurisdiction.”
“Are you giving me orders now?”
“Yes.”
“You really think you’re going to find anything? Christ almost a hundred feet down . . .”
“I’m going to try,” I reply. “I’m heading to the airport. I’ll see you early afternoon.”
CHAPTER 47
TWO P.M.
FORT LAUDERDALE
HIS SILVER HAIR IS pushed off his forehead, dry and messy. He’s slightly sunburned and the impression in his skin made by his dive mask has faded.
He’s been out of the water for hours when I step inside the cabin of the Moose Boat, drop my bags and kiss Benton hello. His lips are salty from the sea. Behind him is the electronics display, including a GPS plotter that shows where we are off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, almost a mile out. He’s sitting in a pilot’s seat, the twin engines turned off and the boat rocks gently. I hear water softly lapping.
“I feel like I’ve really inconvenienced everyone.” I open my bag on the fiberglass floor. “But I had no idea you’d be done this fast.”
“It’s not a good thing that we are.”
“I know.”
“But we have the boat. You’re always worth waiting for. We’ll give it one more try.” Benton stares off and I can tell he’s bothered.
His black dive skin is pulled down to his waist. The sleeves are tied around him, what he always does during surface intervals and this has been a long one. Outside on the bow two police divers are drinking water and eating fruit. I already know they’ve found nothing so far, not one damn thing and I also know this is unexpected if not inexplicable.
“How does a forty-pound tank disappear?” I sit on a bench and pull out a wet suit, dive socks and fins.
“You’re talking about tons of rusting iron at the bottom.” He watches me take off my cargo pants, my shirt.
Underneath are the spandex yoga clothes. I came here straight from the airport. I dig around some more and find my mask.
“We obviously can’t get near it with a metal detector. The vis is maybe thirty feet. But I agree with you. Three of us spent the morning doing a circular search, doing sweeps out from the wreck, shifting the center point and starting again until we were well beyond where I would expect anything to be.”
“There’s a lot of silt and sand that could have covered things.” I reach behind me to grab the long tab, zipping up my wet suit, and then I pull on the socks. “What about sonar?”
“We found all sorts of crap with the side scan but
“Searching after dark?” I say dubiously as the police divers get ready to go back in.
“With the right equipment, sure. In a perfect world a dive team would have been deployed right away but there was so much pandemonium and confusion. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone until after Briggs and I showed up. So here we are. Or at least I am.” Benton’s eyes smile at me. “Whatever you said scared him back to Delaware.”
“He wasn’t scared. But I reminded him that the Pentagon wouldn’t be pleased if he conducted an underwater search and recovery on a high-profile case when he doesn’t meet the physical fitness standards. In fact he admitted his Army doc ordered him not to even think about diving unless he gets a pacemaker.”
I follow Benton out of the cabin as the two police divers take their giant strides off the dive platform, one of them holding a lift bag in case he gets lucky and finds Rosado’s missing BDU and the perforated tank, which would have filled with water. It would be quite heavy and less likely to have been relocated by the current, and I squirt defog in my mask. I check the inspection stickers on a filled tank clamped into the side of the boat, and I remove the valve cap and release a quick hiss of air.
“Well it’s sounding pretty hopeless but I have to say I tried.” I loop my BCD strap around the tank and clamp it tight. “As usual we have to worry about the trial and some dream team focusing on the missing pieces of skull, the mandible and teeth and how finding them would have changed the interpretation of things.”
“It’s such bullshit.” Benton swishes his mask in a drum of clean water.
“Unfortunately it’s not. If I were a defense attorney it’s exactly what I’d ask.” I line up the top of my vest with the upper rim of the scuba tank and then I sit down on the bench. “The question will be distance. By the time they’re done the jury will doubt the shot could have been fired from the yacht, that instead it was a sniper a great distance away on another boat, possibly from the top of a high-rise onshore. They’ll compare it to the other cases and say it couldn’t have been Troy.”
“Or they’ll blame it on the person who’s supposed to be dead. Carrie.”
I scan the sparkling blueness all around us and the closest boat I can make out is maybe a mile south of us. I notice it’s moving very slowly in our direction.
“A shark could have eaten the bones I guess.” Benton fastens his BCD and pulls the straps tight.
“I doubt it.” I lean over to slip my feet into the fins.
“There’s nothing down there anymore and I think for good reason,” he says. “A lot of old tires. I saw plenty of those this morning.”
“Why bother? Assuming you’re thinking what I suspect you are.”
“We know for a fact she was on Rosado’s jet yesterday morning,” Benton says.
“Well Sasha Sarin was.”
“If she’s still protecting Troy and the family then it would have been a shrewd move to make sure any evidence on the ocean floor was gone by the time we started looking.”
“Like wiping down beer bottles and the gun and using bleach to destroy DNA.” I pick up my regulator, the mouthpiece in my right hand, the computer in my left and I mate the valves, tightening the connectors on top of the tank.
“That’s right, Christ when you know who it is. That’s probably exactly what she did,” he says. “It fits the pattern and there’s nothing left down there to find so why the hell are we still bothering? And we have your birthday condo all ready. If ever I was tempted to scrap a mission it would be this one.”
“That would be ungracious.” I attach the low-pressure hose to the nozzle of the inflator. “Our police friends are down there waiting for us.”
I place my regulator in my mouth and inhale, and the membrane resists, moving forward, exactly what it’s supposed to do and I turn on my air. My attention continues to be drawn out into the blueness everywhere, to the small boat I noticed earlier. It isn’t moving now but I can hear the outboard motor running and see someone sitting in the back. The dive flag is moving through the water, someone drift-diving the artificial reef.
Benton follows where I’m looking and says, “Don’t worry. If any other divers get close Rick and Sam will shoo them off.”
“They’ll flash their badges under water?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll make one sweep around the wreck, in and out of the immediate area and then we’ll quit.”
“All so you can say you did.”
“That’s ninety percent of it these days.” I dig into my bag for my dive computer watch, for my knife, blunt tipped and short bladed. “Come on. We haven’t been dive buddies in a while.”
Rinsing my mask with its mounted minirecorder, I work my arms into my vest. I try my regulator and octopus again, making sure I’m getting air. Then I purge them. I put my mask on and recheck my computers, and I lean forward to dislodge the tank from its holder and I stand up. I pull on my gloves and walk carefully in my fins to the platform. My regulator is in my mouth and I place one hand over it, the other over my mask. I take my big step in.
THE WATER IS WARM and I add air to my BCD and float, waiting for Benton, giving him plenty of room as I ease my way to a mooring line attached to the dive buoy. He’s in with a splash and we meet each other’s eyes and nod. I bleed all of the air out of my vest and we begin our descent, the water full of light near the surface. It gets darker and cooler as we go down.
My breathing blasts loudly in my head and I pinch my nose, clearing my ears as we go deeper, and I feel the water weighing heavily and cooler as the pressure increases and the light dims. I look for the two police divers, Rick and Sam, for their bubbles or their movements and don’t see them. I check my computers repeatedly and then I see the sunken freighter, a broken hulk of a silhouette on the murky bottom. I can make out the bow facing north, the angles of twisted metal. I don’t see anyone around.
At ninety feet a large shape is a sea turtle on the rusty hull and a toadfish deflates its bladder, flattening on the brown silt bottom. An orange-striped triggerfish makes kissing movements with its mouth as it glides past, and I see a conch that looks exactly like a rock until it moves along like an old Winnebago.
A sea fan waves and I see a large gray grouper with spots, a sea bass, a broad-snouted shark that aren’t the least bit interested in the two of us. A crowd of yellow angelfish swim close to my mask as if I’m part of the artificial reef, their round eyes cartoonish. A sea horse hovers. A venomous lionfish has fins that look like feathers, and I adjust my buoyancy with my breathing.
I sink down to dark holes in the ship’s side, and I drop lower into an opening that had a hatch cover in an earlier life. I shine my light and it’s a reflex when I flutter my fins to back off from the other diver and what I notice doesn’t register at first. A barracuda zigzagging out from under him, and there are no bubbles as he’s floating inside the hull. I paint my light over his arms and hands, and his masked face is down. I move closer.
I touch his neoprene-covered back and he moves a little, and I see the hoses hanging down and the straight line of a spear embedded in his chest. There’s someone else below him inside the bulkhead. The second one, both police divers dead inside the hull, and I bolt up with powerful kicks.
I find Benton inches from the bottom, moving along, searching with his light and I tap my knife against my tank to get his attention. A faint sharp clank, clank and he looks up at me. I urgently point toward the barge, and its gaping holes in the dark greenish blue water where particles are suspended in my light. Then I hear the sound. A faint rapid vibration like a distant power saw. I turn in its direction as I catch something move darkly around
The shape moves rapidly toward me and I shine my light into a face with eyes wide and wild, framed in a sinister black mask and she has a black torpedo shape on her tank, like a turbine engine, whining on and off as she stops and starts, moving unnaturally fast. I don’t see the spear gun until she swivels and points. I hear a spit and feel the hit like a jolting punch.
EPILOGUE
ONE WEEK LATER
BAL HARBOUR
THE DOUBLE LOUNGER IS made of a tropical wood I can’t identify, possibly teak but the driftwood finish confuses me, sort of pickled, sort of plastic. The cushion is ivory and the bright throw pillows are in an abstract cubism design that reminds me of Picasso, also sort of.
Day in, day out I sit on the wraparound terrace of my birthday condo, looking at the ocean change color, at the shapes of clouds that shadow the rolling surface, waves rising and crashing softly, sometimes louder and violently when they hurl themselves on the beach as if they’re angry. I gaze at them with sunglasses on and I listen. I don’t miss anything, not a helicopter that goes by, not a low-flying banner plane, not people on the boardwalk ten floors below. I don’t say much as I watch what goes on.
Everyone around me has the best of intentions, first Lucy and Benton, then Marino got here, and day before yesterday Janet and Desi showed up. Their efforts are relentless, and they don’t listen when I say it’s enough. It’s as if I died and am in a different dimension. I see them rearranging towels as if they’re shrouds. They place pillows behind my lower back and under my knees. They worry about my neck, my hair, do I need a different hat and what about a manicure as if I’m about to be put on display at a wake. My only noninvasive friend, all seven years and four feet tall of him, is Desi, who sadly and soon enough will be adopted. At least it will be by Janet, his mother Natalie’s only sister.