Lemon Reef (20 page)

“Dr. Beasley?” She stopped, nodded. “I'm Jenna Ross. I'm here with Adeline Soto's sisters. We were hoping we could talk to you.”

Shaking her head, she said, “I already told you that it wouldn't be possible today.”

“Well, I know, but I need to talk to you. I thought if we just came over you could give us a few minutes.”

Walking quickly in the other direction, she tossed over her shoulder, “I don't have a few minutes right now. I'm already running behind. The preliminary report is done—I've made my findings. If you'd like me to explain them to you further, you'll have to make an appointment.” She strutted off in brown saddle shoes with toe and heel playing the terrazzo floor like a queer incarnation of clog dancing.

“Dr. Beasley.” It just came out. “She was my first love. In high school. We were lovers in high school.”

Beasley stopped, turned, and fixed her sight on me.

Her clenched brow and tight lips suggested she was grappling with the implications of what I had just revealed. She nodded her head slightly, and her expression softened to sadness. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ida and Nicole looked shocked. I realized they were hearing me say this for the very first time. I had never actually told them Del and I had been lovers. No doubt they assumed it. Nicole had seen us kiss once, made Del do her chores for a week under threat of telling. But I had never talked with Del's sisters about us.

Beasley ushered us into her office, which was small for four people. There was a bookshelf on one wall, a large desk, and a couple of chairs. Beasley went behind her desk. I stood across from her. Nicole and Ida were shoulder to shoulder behind me.

She began, “I'm sorry for your loss.” I looked at Ida and Nicole before I realized she was talking to me. “I'm not sure what else I can tell you.”

“We have reason to believe that there's more to this death, that it might not have been by natural causes.”

Nicole seemed surprised and relieved to hear me say I thought Talon might have killed Del. She stepped in closer to my side and rested her hands on her hips, emphasizing her chiseled biceps. Ida stepped back to the wall, her expression impassive. Lipstick redder than her hair and dark, bowed eyebrows made her appear both silly and sad—like a Pierrot clown.

Beasley was immediately unimpressed, maybe even irritated. “Based on what?”

“Based on what we know about the marriage Del was in, about the man she was married to.”

Nicole said, “He beat her. We saw bruises. He has an insurance policy on her. That should tell you everything you need to know right there.” She was stepping side to side, grimacing, and clenching her fists. As she talked, she became increasingly amped. “And he's got a girlfriend. He brought her over today. She smelled like gardenias over death.”

I planted my hand firmly on Nicole's shoulder and left it there, hoping it would help her to be quiet. Every time she started to speak, I squeezed and she halted. If I knew her symptoms were from antipsychotic medications, Beasley would definitely know. We needed Beasley to believe us, and we had no margin for error. My primary goal was to convince Beasley to hold the body and stop Talon from going to Texas with Khila for as long as possible. But something else took hold that surprised me about myself in that moment. I placed such a high premium on being rational, yet I wanted this person and the institution she represented to care about Del and about what had happened to her. It was the friggin'
Miami morgue
. They processed 2,500 bodies a year, 50 bodies a week, 7 bodies a day. But suddenly, I couldn't help it. I wanted Beasley to give a damn about Del. I wanted anyone who touched Del's body to care about her.

“Del called the police on Talon four times in the last year alone for domestic violence,” I said.

“I'm aware of those reports. The police reports were part of why we expedited the autopsy. Not only was this a drowning,” she said, “there was a disturbing history.” Beasley avoided eye contact, giving me the feeling she was saying only a little bit of what she knew. I wondered if she was thinking then about his juvenile history. She gently added, “A lot of men beat their wives. It doesn't mean he killed her. Del had no new injuries that could be associated with her death.”

New?
The word floated like a zeppelin between us. “She was thirty-one years old, and she had a heart attack? You're satisfied with that?”

“You should listen to her,” Nicole said, swinging a thumb in my direction. “She's a—”

Extra hard squeeze and a threatening glare on top of it. I didn't want Beasley to know I was a commissioner because it would make her far less likely to relate informally with me. And it would make it much harder for me to interact with her without it seeming like I was using my position to influence the outcome of the investigation.

Nicole took hold of the strap of her leather purse and began pinching and rolling it between her thumb and index finger, which helped to pacify her.

More patiently than perhaps I deserved, Beasley said, “Your friend did not die in a struggle. She had no bruises to suggest there had been any kind of assault connected with her death. Not conclusive until the final toxicology report is in, but basic blood analysis suggests no drugs except for tobacco—and laxatives. She weighed ninety-eight pounds—I'm guessing the laxatives she was consuming in large doses had something to do with that. And by the condition of her lungs and the percentage of COHb in her blood at the time of her death, I'm guessing she was a heavy smoker and had smoked probably a pack or more before she dove that morning. Not a good combination—smoking and diving. We try to tell people that, but we still get these kinds of deaths more often than you'd believe.”

I felt appreciative of Beasley, because it was evident that, busy as she was, she had Del's details clearly in mind. I stopped myself from repeating what Doug had explained to me about the tenuous connection between smoking and diving; I didn't want her to feel second-guessed by another expert. I couldn't say anything about whether Del had died on the reef, since our only point of contact for that information at the moment was a heroin addict.

“The weight belt.” I landed on it like a stone I had leaped to in crossing some great gap. “Del was an experienced diver. If she was drowning, she would have dropped the weight belt.”

She pressed her lips together and raised her brows acknowledging I was right. Then she said, “We considered that.” Palms up, Beasley added, “She probably panicked. There is enough here to easily explain this death. I'm sorry for your loss, but…”

“Please give us a little more time,” I said. “Another day or two before you close the investigation and release the body to be buried.” I was in the strange position for the first time in a while of making a plea rather than receiving one.

“I'm not going to hold the body longer than the usual forty-eight hours without a very good reason and,” Beasley said with some care, “I haven't heard one yet. The autopsy is done, the preliminary report is written. It's been released to the family. Her husband wants her body released. He has control in these matters.” She held the door open for us to leave.

“Just give me until Saturday.” I walked backward; Beasley was walking at a quick pace toward me on her way down the hall. She passed me and I followed her. “Friday,” I bargained to her back. “Give me two days. Friday.”

From behind me someone yelled, “Look!” It was Nicole. “My sister never got a single break in her entire life. Can she just have a few more days in the fucking morgue?”

Beasley stopped and turned, her expression one of annoyance. “She was scheduled to go this afternoon.”

“I know. Please.” I held her gaze, forced her to tell me no again to my face.

She shook her head and looked at me curiously, as if to ask why this mattered so much.

“If you release Del's body, he'll cremate her and then leave with their daughter for Texas. Once Khila goes, I'm afraid we won't be able to get her back. If we're right about him…If he murdered this child's mother…” I stared at her, overwhelmed by the implications and unable to complete the thought. “Give us a few more days.”

“To do what? What are you going to do that the police and the crime-scene team haven't already done?”

“I don't know.”

She breathed in and out. “Your first love, huh?” I nodded. She stared at me, and I could see a kind of recognition in her eyes as she began to nod her head along with mine. “I'll give you until Friday morning—Friday eight a.m.—to do whatever it is you think you're gonna do. In the meantime, I've got other work to do.” She walked away, calling behind her, “You girls be careful, now.”

*

Our next stop was Pascale's house. Pascale was shut away in her room with the lights off and the shades drawn. She did emerge, likely having heard us come in. She seemed frail, her complexion waxen, and she moved and spoke slowly. “Any news about Khila?” She held on to the wall for balance.

We shook our heads.

Pascale went back into her room.

Ida was standing at the picture window. She shrugged and matter-of-factly informed Nicole and me, “There's a black car out there that's been following us since we left this morning.”

That got Nicole's attention. She went to the window. “Which one is it?” Ida started to point. Nicole caught her hand. “Just describe it, Ida. If someone is following us, we don't want them to know we know that.”

“That black thing across the street.”

“The Jeep?” Nicole's eyes narrowed. “Wasn't there a black Jeep at bay side last night?”

“There's a million of those cars,” I said.

“I'm just saying,” Ida was turning away from the window, “It's out there now, and it's been following us.”

“I'll see if I can get the license-plate number.” Nicole left out the back door.

Ida disappeared down the hallway without saying anything. I knew she'd been upset since Beasley's office, and I had some idea why, but I didn't feel like talking to her about it. Instead, I turned my attention to the question of where Del had died.

Talon told the police Del went into the water with him around 10:30 that morning for a quick dive on the reef before breakfast. Her heart failed about twenty minutes in. He told the police he tried to do CPR in the water. When that didn't work, he dumped the air from her buoy compensator, took her tank off, and then pulled her onto the swimming ramp and tried again. Then he swam to shore to get help. In response to why he'd left her, as opposed to calling in over the radio, he said, and it was confirmed, the radio was broken. His first contact with the police from shore was reported to be 11:05 a.m.

Maybe the boat had been anchored on Lemon Reef and the divers just hadn't seen it. But why would anyone anchor a boat at a site where a drug trade was taking place if the whole point of choosing an underwater-dive exchange had been to avoid Coast Guard scrutiny? Boats were stopped and searched routinely in those waters. Talon knew that.

What Talon likely did not know: it was possible to trace the trajectory of a human body in an ocean current. In the eighties and nineties, controlling the influx of “illegals” had become a national obsession, and the navy had been given a huge amount of money to monitor the more vulnerable national coastlines, including Miami's. The Naval Oceanographic Office, using the science of geophysical fluid dynamics, could now trace the path of a dead body in an ocean current.

And I was familiar with this brand-new science because, last year, Jake Mansfield—a scientist working for NAVO testifying as an expert in a murder trial—had applied it to track the trajectory of a boy's body in the bay; his testimony led to the father's acquittal. When I subsequently represented the father in family court, I used Jake's testimony to confirm the father's story that the boy had fallen into the water from the dock near their home and not from a boat some distance away, as Margaret Todd, who was representing the mother, had theorized. In the process of figuring all that out, I had spent a lot of time talking with Jake, and I had his private cell-phone number. I called it now to ask him for help.

“I hear congratulations are in order, Commissioner.”

“I've missed you.” I was picturing his receding hairline and hazel eyes, and the way his eyebrows lifted when he tried to keep a straight face. “How have you been?” As I asked this, I found myself looking out the window to see if the black Jeep was still there. It wasn't.

“I've been fine.” Jake's voice was soft and inviting. “I've missed you, too. I got used to talking to you every day, then the case ended and…occupational hazard, I guess. So, what's up?”

“I need a favor.”

“What is it?”

“I'm in Miami,” I said, and then I told him why.

“Well.” Jake sounded as if he was just settling in. “First of all, I'm sorry about your friend.” The following silence was brief but thoughtful and vital. “I'll make her part of my study. I need real-life applications to consider.” He hesitated for a moment and then added, “You do know that this is experimental. We're getting more reliable with replications and a larger sample size, but it is very new. The navy is letting me testify, but only California civil courts as of yet.”

Nicole came in through the front door and announced, “The Jeep took off before I could see the license plate.” She plopped down on the couch.

I cleared my throat, swallowed some water from the cup beside me, and then gave Jake what information I had.

*

Jake said he would run the calculations and call me back when he knew more. In the meantime, I prepared to move on to the next item on my mental list: Sid. What Tar Baby had said—
Sid went to prison and Talon killed her anyway
—meant he thought Sid had gone to prison to protect Del. I had to talk to Sid. I wasn't sure he'd remember me, so I wanted Nicole or Ida to come along, and because of Nicole's criminal history and navigating prison security, Ida seemed like a better choice. I found her asleep in Del's old room.