A Superior Death (19 page)

Denny’s face would be clean when Jo saw him again. No mask. No tanks. No suit. Did Jo know that? Would she be surprised? Could she feign surprise if she was not? Jo had tremendous strength for so small a woman. Years of tramping through forests and swamps with her laboratory on her back had seen to that. She was—or had been—a diver, Anna thought, remembering the distinctive scars on her arms. And she was a determined woman. She had determined to marry Denny Castle and against all odds had finally succeeded. Was removing Donna Butkus a prerequisite for success? Murdering Denny the price of a long madness? Or killing them both revenge for a life squandered on an unrequited love?

The tenor of the engines changed as Lucas throttled down. They were nearing the
Kamloops
’ marker buoy. Anna shook her head to clear it of the fog of unanswered questions. First she would dive, just dive.

The
Lorelei
glided gently up to the buoy and stopped. Anna took an instant away from fretting and dedicated it to admiration only slightly sullied by envy: Lucas Vega could sure drive a boat.

The first man out of the cabin was Frederick Stanton. The crew cut had been an optical illusion. His hair was cut close only in the back and over the ears. He wore the top long. When Anna was in seventh grade that configuration had indicated a fresh—and cheap—haircut. On Stanton it smacked of a mild punk rebellion in white socks and hard leather shoes.

Warmed by the possibility that she’d been wrong, that Frederick the Fed might have some redeeming social attributes after all, Anna started to smile.

“Fred Stanton.” Scotty, only his head poking out of the cabin, introduced the man from behind. Stanton shook, a sudden convulsion of the shoulders as if freeing himself from any proprietary claims Butkus was trying to stake.

“Frederick,” he said clearly and pulled off his glove to shake hands.

“This is Anna Pigeon,” Ralph said as she tried to balance her grip between insipid and faux machismo. “She’ll be on the wet end of the body recovery.”

“Better you than me,” Stanton said. His voice was light and gentle for a man. Pleasant and probably misleading, Anna thought. The FBI was a big stick and Stanton may have learned the value of walking softly.

“Excuse me.” Lucas was making his way past Scotty, who still hung in the narrow doorway. Butkus, muttering cowboy apologies, clomped to the stern. Vega’s eye followed his steps with a sour look, watching for black heel marks on the white deck.

Jim bumped out from the cabin and the Chief Ranger’s attention snapped back to the dive. “Ralph?” Raising a dark wing-shaped eyebrow, he officially turned the dive over to the District Ranger.

Quietly, efficiently, Ralph began directing traffic on the crowded deck, lending a hand where buckles needed buckling, rubber hoods straightening. He managed to suit up himself, keep Scotty’s great booted feet off the damageable goods, and exchange a few sentences with Jo.

With fingers that tingled, Anna pulled on the bulky suit with boots and hood. The anxiety that was robbing her fingers of feeling filled her throat with a bitter taste. The more she swallowed, the more nauseated she became. Her mind raced with cowardly alternatives: if she dropped a tank and broke her foot, she’d not have to dive; if she stumbled over a fin and rapped her head on the gunwale, she’d be excused with honor intact.

Still, she pulled and jerked and buckled and finally, without mishap, she was encased in gear. Hump-backed, orange-skinned, blue-flippered, they all looked like creatures from an unlikely lagoon.

“Okay,” Pilcher said. “Tasmanian cluster fuck.” From the corner of her eye, Anna saw a jolt of what could’ve been alarm or amusement electrify the FBI man’s dark eyes. Of the seven people on board, he alone had never before experienced Pilcher’s predive ritual. At another time, in another place, Lucas would have said a quiet word against the obscenity. But Pilcher was a first-rate dive leader. Vega was a manager first and a gentleman second: his District Ranger was free to establish trust and camaraderie any way that worked.

Anna, Ralph, Jim, Lucas, even Scotty and Jo closed ranks, forming a tight circle like a football huddle. Through the insulating layers, Anna could feel the bones of Jo Castle’s shoulder against hers. A fine mist beaded in her long straight hair, cloaking her in shifting silver. When Anna took her hand it felt clammy. Though it was probably due to the weather, Anna hoped Scotty would have enough sense to monitor Jo for shock.

Ralph’s hand closed over Anna’s, warm and dry. “Denny’s in the engine room,” he said, his voice somehow different without in any way being artificial. The pitch was slightly lower, the pace a little slower. Anna could almost feel everyone’s heartbeats slowing, respirations evening out.

Everyone except Jim Tattinger. His pale eyes, watery in their pink rims, wandered restlessly. Anna could see his limp fingers refusing to meet the pressure of Lucas’s hand on one side and Jo’s on the other. If Frederick Stanton was the noticing kind, being unaware this behavior pattern was Jim’s usual, he might find the actions suspicious.

Ralph was speaking. “We’ll go down pretty quick. I’ll lead, Anna will follow me, Jim follows Anna. Lucas, you bring up the rear. We keep each other in sight. Keep me in sight. I get lonely down there. We’ve plenty of time. We’ll be down an hour and twenty-nine minutes. Twenty-two minutes on the bottom’s all we got. And we all come up together. Lucas and I will go inside, photograph as best we can, look around a little, and bring Denny out. Jim, you and Anna will check the outside. Go no deeper than the engine room. Take pictures. Look. Stay together. Watch the time. We meet at the line twenty-two minutes exactly after we leave it. Dangers: You two”—he looked at Anna and Jim—“never deviate from the plan. Never lose sight of each other or the time.

“Us two: silt out. Lucas and I’ll watch our big feet so we don’t get lost in a mud storm inside the wreck.”

All this was repetition. Ralph had sought each of them out in the days since the body had been discovered and discussed what they were to do. In true governmental fashion, the plan had been typed up, approved, signed off, and copies given to everyone who needed to know and half a dozen people who didn’t. Yet hearing it again in this reassuring voice was visibly knitting the four divers and two tenders into a unit, a team with a single purpose, a single plan.

“Pay attention. Breathe.” He laughed. He was alive, excited. “Hey, we’re gonna cheat Death,” he finished with a dare that was only partly a joke. Anna breathed. Knots of fear in her belly began to loosen.

Once again Ralph checked the gear. They were diving with air. Some divers used roll-your-own heliox on
Kamloops
dives. Mixing gases was fundamentally risky business and the National Park Service stayed with air. The mixture of helium and oxygen eliminated the effects of nitrogen narcosis but compounded the effects of hypothermia.

Ralph gave the go-ahead. One by one they rolled off the port gunwale. For a moment the four of them bobbed in the pockmarked water, the only spots of color in a world gone gray. The lake wasn’t just cold but frigging, goddam cold, Anna thought as the frigid water struck her face like the slamming of a two-by-four and her sinuses began to ache. Beneath the layers of suiting she could feel her breasts tighten and shrivel.

With an effort she looked past the pain and concentrated on keeping her mind clear of the flotsam of thoughts washed loose by her intercranial storms.

Tattinger floated into view. With the regulator stretching his rubbery lips and the mask maximizing his watery eyes, he put Anna in mind of Gollum, the pale underearth creature that gave Bilbo Baggins the willies.

Pilcher made eye contact with each of his team, raising his hand in the “okay” signal. In Superior’s frigid water there was no chitchat. It hurt to take the regulator out; the cold drilled into teeth, could form ice in the mouthpiece. Each diver returned Pilcher’s “okay” and he turned his thumb down.

Time to dive.

Anna was unpleasantly aware that in ancient Rome a thumbs-down was a death sentence.

Pilcher turned bottom up. His iridescent blue flippers breached, a sudden flame suddenly quenched. He was gone.

Anna followed.

Without the sun, the lake was not light even near the surface. Below was complete darkness. It was as if she swam through the twilight toward a night in which there were no stars, no moon, no planets. From behind her, the light Lucas carried poked a beam through the water. Sometimes it caught the yellow line Scotty had dropped. As they descended Anna noted the flash of the marker tape every ten feet. Several yards ahead, she could see the flap of blue that marked Ralph’s progress.

Had she been diving alone—or with a less trusted leader—Anna’s eyes would have been darting from marker to watch the depth gauge, timing her descent. She’d timed Ralph on their first dives. Easy dives: eighty feet down on the
America,
forty to retrieve buoys tethered below ice level, seventy collecting photos. Ralph swam at a steady sixty-nine feet per minute and never glanced at his watch.

A minute passed: seven marks on the line. The uniform darkness of the lake bottom was changing. A pale form was beginning to take shape, a lighter smudge in the murky depths.

The
Kamloops.

It was so easy: the swim, finding the wreck, everything. Anna felt quite gay. All the elaborate preparations had been absurd. The dive was a breeze, a piece of cake, a milk run, a pushover. She laughed and air bubbled out, making a chuckling noise near her ears.

Anna was high. Every fifty feet down was like one martini. They were two, maybe three martinis under. She couldn’t remember. She had forgotten to watch the time, count the marks. Two? Or three? How many to put a small woman under the table? Six feet under. The moment of hilarity hardened into rising panic.

Ralph was by the line, standing on the lake floor, looking at his watch like a man waiting for a bus. Anna swam down, stood beside him. He touched her shoulders, looked into her eyes, breathed exaggeratedly. Anna mirrored his breath. He raised a circled thumb and forefinger. She’d be okay. In, out: she breathed again.

Jim arrived, then the poking finger of light with Lucas attached. Pilcher checked them as he had Anna. It was subtle, quick. Anna only noticed because she had needed it.

The
Kamloops
rested on her port side, her stern on the top of a slope, her bow one hundred and ninety feet away at the bottom—two hundred and sixty feet below the lake’s surface. Very few divers ventured there. Most of the information the NPS had on that end of the wreck—and it wasn’t much—they’d gleaned via a remote-control robot camera.

The increasing depth and darkness swallowing the bow gave the wreck the illusion of incredible length. One of the
Kamloops
’ twin smokestacks lay across midships. Lines tangled amid hundreds of feet of metal pipe that had spilled when the ship went down. Portholes and doors gaped black. Broken metal showed like bones. The
Kamloops
was a scabby old ghost, one whose soul seemed not to rest. Anna wasn’t disappointed that she and Jim would not be prying too deeply into her secrets, would not be the ones to snatch her most recently acquired corpse.

Ralph tapped his watch and flashed twenty-two: open hands twice, then two fingers. They would meet back at the line in twenty-two minutes. Anna flicked on her light. Jim would handle the underwater camera. Without looking at her, he swam off. She followed.

The ship was tipped to the north, the exposed keel line sloping west and sharply downhill. The lake bottom rolled away in every direction. The effect was dizzying. Tattinger moved quickly. He kicked up past the tilted propeller and swam along the hull. The flattened keel of the freighter dropped away into the darkness.

In such a shadowed world, there was little Anna could see at the pace Jim set. As she carried the light, he would be seeing even less. Evidently, his idea of an investigation was limited to feeding data into a computer.

Deliberately, she slowed, moved her beam from his trajectory and played it along the side of the ship, then down to the barren lake floor. No plants, no fishes, even very few stones. The sand lay smooth and untracked like the desert after a windstorm. A red and blue Pepsi-Cola can winked a vivid eye when the light struck it. Anna made no move to swim the fifteen yards to retrieve the litter. “No deviations,” Ralph had warned. “That’s when accidents happen.” Anna believed him and fear made her utterly obedient. Her light picked out a single shoe, colorless but in apparently good condition. It was an old-fashioned work boot, one that had fallen or been carried from the shipment on board. A coffee mug lay half buried in the sand. Bits of metal that had once served some purpose were strewn about. There was more pipe and a wooden crate broken in half with a bright paper sticker still intact.

A jarring clang brought her head up. Tattinger had rapped on the
Kamloops
’ hull with the butt of a diving knife. He was hovering near a porthole crooking an admonitory finger. Though she couldn’t see his face behind the rubber and plastic, she imagined his scowl.

Once again, she trained the light in his path and he swam on. The beam raked along the hull just ahead of him, across the portholes: blind eyes weeping rust. Between them, near where Tattinger had rapped the hull, something gleamed. Anna kicked once, floated nearer the hull. The rust around one of the portholes had been scraped away. Bright silver scratches as if someone had been hacking at the port with a sharp object. She felt around the edges of the porthole cover. There was just enough purchase to work a fingertip under it.

Jim, losing the light, had returned and hung at her elbow. Pushing Anna’s hands aside, he opened the blade of the red-handled knife he still held, and levered it under the metal. The porthole swung in easily. Whoever had pried it open before had broken the latch.

Monstrous and fish-eyed behind their masks, Jim and Anna exchanged a look. The hole was little more than eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. Too small for anybody in tanks to get through. Anna peered inside: the captain’s quarters. An out-of-reach heaven for thieves and vandals, but someone had made the effort.