A Superior Death (20 page)

Jim tapped his watch. Seven minutes. Anna tapped his camera, then the porthole. He hesitated, hating to use the film, she knew. Jim was as miserly with government property as he was with his own. He stockpiled everything from toilet paper to engine oil, kept lists of how many of each. Numbers with which to feed his insatiable database programs.

Anna tapped the porthole again and he handed her his diving knife. She held it and the light while he clicked two careful shots.

Four minutes. With efficient haste, they started to swim back. At depth, exertion was a thing to be avoided lest one treble the effects of nitrogen narcosis.

The stern, with its tangle of pipe, rolled by beneath. Anna swept the light in an arc through the water. The snaking yellow of the line did not reflect back and panic pricked again at the back of her throat. Then, at the far right, she saw the faint yellow gleam. Jim saw it in the same instant and they swam.

One minute. Now that the time to ascend was near, Anna felt a crushing impatience. The knowledge that another sixty-four minutes must be spent incarcerated in gear, enveloped in the cold embrace of the lake, seemed almost insupportable. The U.S. Navy Standards would have insisted only on fifty minutes’ ascent time but Ralph had chosen to play it safe.

Anxious thoughts began circling in Anna’s mind like vultures smelling a corpse. If Ralph and Lucas had kicked up a silt storm and gotten lost, she doubted she would have the courage to go and look for them. Cold ached in the bones of her head.

As she counted her curses she became aware of a non-stop trickle of air through her regulator. It had frozen open. It had happened once before early in the season when she and Ralph dove the docks clearing out rubbish. Once open, it wouldn’t take long before the escaping air would fill her mouth with icy slush, numbing her lips with cold until she could no longer feel them to keep them on the mouthpiece.

“Come on, goddammit!” she demanded of Lucas.

Poking her light through the viscous twilight, she strained her eyes in the direction of the engine room. Twenty seconds bottom time left. The darker block that marked the doorway wavered, changed shape, then broke into two separate shadows. Ralph and Lucas swam toward the line. With them was Denny Castle. Eight days dead, he looked the most natural of the three. Jaunty in the uniform, relaxed, he drifted through the water between them, his eyes open and unblinking. The cap was still on his head, the shine still on the black leather boots.

Lucas took Denny. With watch and depth gauge, Ralph swam slowly to thirty feet below the surface. He stopped there, hung in the water. Ten fingers flashed. They waited.

The currents caused by their flippers made Denny’s dead hands move as if he, too, grew restless with the waiting. Anna couldn’t take her eyes off him. A childish fear that if she looked away he would reach out and touch her kept scuttling through her mind, trailing a nightmare quality.

Martini’s Law must have been coined before the advent of Timothy Leary, she thought. For her the experience was proving reminiscent of an acid trip threatening to go sour rather than a good honest drunk.

She glanced at her watch. Another thirty seconds to wait. She looked back at Castle’s body.

The dead eyes had not changed expression but the jaw was dropping. Denny was opening his mouth as if to speak. A froth of reddish-colored bubbles spewed forth and rose toward the lake’s surface.

Anna’s mind spun. She reached out instinctively for the person next to her as she’d done in countless dark movie theaters when blobs, mummies, and killer lepuses made their moves. Then she remembered: Ralph had warned her. In deep-water body recoveries they removed the mask before the corpse reached the surface to let the water wash away fluids brought forth by the changing pressure.

The phenomenon lasted only a few seconds. Ralph kicked once and floated up the line. Glad to be moving, Anna followed, leaving Jim, Lucas, and the mute but expressive Denny Castle to follow as they might.

Twenty minutes at twenty feet. As the silver of the promised sky grew closer so did Anna’s impatience to see it, to breathe deep of air filled with rain, gusts, and eddies, boat exhaust. To breathe again of the varying moods of life that cannot be canned.

The last wait, thirty-four minutes only ten feet below the surface, was provoking enough to amuse and Anna forgot the cold pooling inside her suit, stabbing at the fillings in her teeth, the vacant stare of Denny’s corpse.

Finally they reached the surface. Even Scotty’s cowboy countenance was a welcome sight. Jo Castle, wan and frightened, reaffirmed if only by way of pain that life went on. Thirty fathoms down, it had seemed a distant and fragile concept.

Jim Tattinger flippered over to the
Lorelei
’s water-level deck and was hauled over the stern like a landed fish by Jo and Officer Stanton. Anna was next, lifted clear of the water’s grasp. Ralph pulled himself up as far as the low deck and planted his butt on the two-by-four slats. Gently he took Denny’s body from Lucas and held it cradled in his arms while the Chief Ranger floundered on board.

Anna, sitting on deck, a flippered foot held clumsily between two gloved hands, was watching Jo as her wiry brown arms gathered her husband into a one-way embrace. The expression on Jo Castle’s face was familiar. Once Anna had seen it on Christina. She was watching her daughter sleep when Ally had been racked by a fever. A look that was equal parts tenderness and grief.

Either Jo was a complete psychotic, or she had not killed Denny. Remembering the strength in Jo’s arms as she had pulled her from the lake, Anna fervently hoped it was the latter.

Awkwardly, Jo bent and kissed her husband. Faint bruises ringed Denny’s mouth in blue. The captain’s cap, absurd now in the drizzling light of day, fell from his hair. Brass buttons winked as the collar of the uniform fell open. There was no shirt beneath the double-breasted jacket and the flesh of Denny’s shoulder was exposed. A livid bruise cut down between neck and shoulder. The discolored flesh was jarring on skin so white, and Anna turned away as if she would protect Denny’s modesty.

CHAPTER 13

A
nna was thinking about the bruise on Denny’s shoulder. Usually on her lieu days she liked to loose her mind from the often paranoia-inducing mental fetters of rangering. Not rangering, she reminded herself: law enforcement. It saddened her that the line between the two grew thinner every year. But recent events were too intrusive to allow her peace of mind.

Postmortem lividity left bruiselike marks on corpses. Blood, no longer circulating, pooled at the lowest point on the body. In Denny, supported by water, pressurized on all sides, lividity might possibly have shown faintly in the lowest extremities but not in hash marks across his chest. The autopsy would tell how much force had been used, if the bruise had been caused by a blow, and if the instrument of trauma had been edged. But it probably wouldn’t be able to tell what that instrument had been: baseball bat, crowbar, or just walking into a door.

What was troubling Anna was that the bruise configuration seemed unfamiliar. So, motoring across sparkling blue waters on her day off, she busied her mind flipping back through the endless slides of corpses paraded before her in law enforcement classes. Coroners, policemen, arson investigators, body recovery experts, all with color pictures, each picture telling a story of violent death. Anna dredged up the images, hoping to decode the story Denny’s corpse was trying to tell.

At the northern end of Five Finger Bay, the sheer beauty of the day drove the blood and gore from her thoughts. The shores were snowy with thimbleberry blossoms, a lacy skirting between the blue of the water and the green of the trees. The sky had cried itself out the night before and smiled down clear and warm. Anna pushed the
Belle Isle
’s throttles wide and enjoyed the sense of speed.

And of being on the lake’s surface, not its floor.

 

 

 

Rock Harbor was bustling. Compared to the great ports of the world, it was a mere hole in the island, but after a week on the north shore it felt like New York Harbor on the Fourth of July.

Heading for the slips reserved for NPS vessels on Mott, Anna maneuvered the
Belle Isle
down the narrow channel between a yacht and the wake of an impertinent eighteen-foot runabout. Only one slip was empty. Effectively preventing her from docking there was a tourist. He was sitting on the quay, white legs dangling over the side. “A tourist’s tourist,” Anna muttered, noting the soft fishing hat, madras shirt, Bermudas, white socks, and black leather shoes.

It was Frederick the Fed.

Government-issue punk; his superiors must be eternally off balance, unsure whether Stanton merely had bad taste or really was poking fun at them.

“Officer Stanton,” she called out the open window. He scrambled ungracefully to his feet and proceeded to louse up her docking efforts with his good intentions. She barely managed to shove her fenders out before he dragged the Bertram into the pilings.

“Yo, Anna,” he said as she stepped onto the dock. Anna had never heard anyone actually use “yo” except in jest. Maybe she still hadn’t. Stanton’s face was deadpan.

“Morning,” she replied neutrally as she tied off to a cleat.

The clatter of leather soles brought him up next to her. His features were overly large but finely shaped, giving him the appearance of a badly carved heroic figure. The goofy hat, the fifties shirt, the hard shoes—everything about him was a study in incongruity. It struck Anna that it might be intentional; it’s hard to know a man who defies patterns.

“I’ve been hoping to get a word with you,” he said.

“It’s my day off.”

“Good. Mine too. We’ll have oodles of time.”

Yo. Oodles. Anna smiled. “You answer mine, I’ll answer yours,” she said.

Frederick started to fold himself down again onto the dock but Anna shook her head. She’d had enough of water for a while. This weekend she planned to stay on terra firma.

Together they walked inland, following a well-trodden path lined with bluebead lilies and red eastern columbine. Above them, trees whispered across a narrow ribbon of sky.

Under a white pine, on ground kept bare by fallen needles, Anna sat down.

“Are there snakes?” Frederick asked suspiciously.

“Yup.”

“Ish.” He curled his muscular legs up close, knees under his chin as he squatted beside her. His slightly bumbling fastidious act put Anna in mind of the disarming foolishness of Lord Peter Wimsey.

“Do you read Dorothy L. Sayers?” she asked abruptly.

“Never heard of her.” There might or might not have been a gleam in his eye. “That was your question,” he said. “Now mine. Say somebody is trafficking in drugs between Canada and the U.S. Buying it here, selling it there. Your customs checks here are only a formality. Say maybe Isle Royale is the exchange place.”

Anna waited. “What’s the question?” she asked finally.

Stanton looked surprised, as if it had been obvious. “Who would it be?” he demanded.

Anna laughed. “You tell me.”

“Say somebody with a boat. Say somebody who’s here regularly. Somebody who’s got a reason for repeated trips. Maybe a commercial fishing guide boat, a sightseeing concession, a dive concession.” He opened his eyes wide and treated Anna to a friendly, guileless stare.

She looked away, let her gaze rest on the perfect mosaic of leaves and bark beyond the rusty circle of needles. Sun dappled through the foliage, catching and reflecting the living green. Even on dry land on Isle Royale there was a sense of being in a watery world.

“Why do you think it’s drug-related? Why a concession boat? Have you corroborating reports?”

“That’s three questions, Anna, and no answers. You’re running up your tab.”

Anna said nothing and after a moment he decided to tell her. “No evidence, just statistics. A border area, not heavily patrolled, an island full of coves, regular international boat traffic, a bizarre murder. I’m working profiles here. This is the profile of a drug-related murder.”

All law enforcement people worked with profiles whether they consciously chose to or not—like gamblers working the odds. So did businessmen and shopkeepers and receptionists and streetwalkers. A poorly dressed man, eyes watering, nose running, standing alone in a darkened doorway clutching a heavy object in his pocket, might be a lost country parson with hay fever grasping his Bible for comfort. Profiles said he was not. Given his profile, the police in some places would have probable cause to pull him in for questioning.

Anna rose and dusted off her rump. “I’ll let you know if I think of anybody who fits,” she said.

 

 

 

 

F
ree of Stanton, she found she didn’t know what to do with herself. The
Kamloops
dive was behind her.