This floater and everything around the victim was different. This floater-basking beneath bright sunlight on the lip of a vast, aquamarine and lush velvet horizon of sky and water-was altogether different from the starfishlike little boy found in that filthy, stagnant stone quarry in Washington, D.C., so many years before. The boy had died in a dark little hole, a watery cemetery; he’d felt no pain after the initial blow to the head which had rendered him unconscious. He hadn’t felt a thing after his school buddies had attacked.
But today’s corpse, this body on this bright Florida morning, lay in stark contrast here to the screaming life all around her, both above and below the water. Both killings were unconscionable; perhaps all killings were unconscionable, she reminded herself now, but in the light of so much life, this one seemed doubly so.
The others onshore stood watching her approach the victim. A second and enormous pelican with more life in its webbed step than the first perched on the jetty rocks, squeaked and walked back and forth in anticipation that she’d feed it. The old pelican seemed resigned simply to stare at Jessica’s advance. She gave neither the men behind her nor the fowl ahead of her any mind, but she could hear the muttering men at her back, and she could sense their absolute discomfort at having to stand idly by while a woman did their work for them.
Reaching the body, she found what appeared to be a pair of black serpents swimming lazily about a bloated, jellyfish version of a large rubber doll, slick and ballooned up. She instantly realized that the black asps coiled near the body were in fact lengths of hefty nylon rope, one coiled tightly about the neck, the other wound about the wrists, which Jessica could only surmise since she could not see the wrists. The corpse floated facedown, on its stomach, the hands somewhere below. She’d either have to fish for them or tug on the detestable rope that had been used to kill the victim.
She instantly saw that the body had been in the water from two to possibly three weeks, and she was grateful both that it hadn’t been there longer and that the corpse lay facedown for now.
There appeared to be no superficial gashes to indicate shark attack. Even as a child, Jessica had been both horrified and shockingly fascinated by the sort of quick death the powerful jaws of a shark might bring, like the mindless devastation of a lightning strike or a blow from a speeding truck. She had always been interested in the myriad shapes and convolutions taken by the Grim Reaper to ply His trade of finality. This eerie predilection had led her to push and push her father for details about his time in the war, what he had seen, experienced and done as a medical officer. For many years, he ignored her requests, denying her any such information, not wanting to relive the horrors of the war, but when he realized that she was serious about going into medicine, about following in his footsteps to become a medical examiner, he began to come around. He began to tell her the truth, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupery, saying, “Horror really can’t be talked about because it’s alive, because it’s mute and goes on growing: Memory-wounding pain drips by day, drips in sleep.” When she continued to prove her genuine interest, he had told her that he had seen every kind of wound imaginable, had seen bodies without limbs or heads; but the bodies which disturbed his sleep the most, he had confessed, were the floaters. He had been in both Korea and Vietnam, where he was part of a M.A.S.H. team, and he’d seen the result of many a battle; he had also seen many a man whose body had gone waiting for attention as the war raged on, many dying in rivers and lagoons deep in the jungle, a world from anywhere.
Here in sun-drenched Miami Beach, there were no long, dark lagoon shadows beneath which to bury the floating corpse, and the water was warm and alive-teeming with life. It saturated Jessica’s jeans and wrapped itself about her, catlike, filling her pores with its touch, this living saline ocean surf which foamed about her waist now where she stood. It wanted to be friends.
It also wanted to revive the dead girl, this life-asserting cradle she was nestled atop in a mockery of the fetal position, this amniotic fluid. That was why it kept lapping at this dead parcel, kept caressing it, licking at it like a favored pet anxious over its master. Yet this seemingly concerned licking was removing small parts of the deceased in infinitesimal increments with each incoming and outgoing tide. Neither time nor the tide was on Jessica’s side.
Jessica stared down at the body again, leaned in over it and tried to work, steeling herself against the awful appearance death had sculpted here. The saltwater had preserved the body to some degree, and this did cut down on the stench, which would otherwise have been overwhelming. Small favor, she mused as she set to work, first studying the hands, which she’d had to tug free from below. There had been a strange reluctance, as if something was weighing the hands down and didn’t want them revealed, but this inertia was followed by the equally unnerving ease with which, once freed, the hands began to float in her direction. She saw them as huge, white blowfish coming at her now.
Settling her nerves, Jessica saw that only two nails remained on the right hand, one on the left. All the other nails had popped from the combined pressure of expanding flesh and moving water. Even the few nails remaining, however, had been washed entirely clean by the ocean, and were rather useless as a result. Even if Jane Doe had fought her attacker and taken scrapings from his face or arms, the skin tissue and hair was long ago lost. But she did note that both remaining nails were jagged, torn and split, as if the victim had attempted to bare-handedly rip her way free from a stone hole, or quite possibly to pull her way up alongside the hull of a boat, obviously without success.
“ Poor young devil,” Jessica lamented, giving thought to who she was, what her dreams and aspirations might have been, who loved her and why.
Jessica took the two remaining nails from the right hand, and as she did so, one was caught by the tide pool and whisked into invisibility. “Damnit, God… give me something to work with here,” she mournfully cursed.
With the extreme care that comes only of long experience, she carefully, gently twirled the body so that it floated closer to her and away from the jagged rocks abutting the victim’s left side. She now examined more closely the left hand nail. There was only the one remaining, the sea having peeled away the others. This one, like the other two on the right hand, was broken and jagged. She carefully grabbed hold with her tweezers and with a quick pull, the sun-and-water-bleached nail silently, easily came away from the rippled skin at the fingertip. This time, Jessica lifted it out of reach of the nipping surf.
Each of the victim’s fingers now resembled a bloated snake, the fat thumbs like turtles. Little wonder a shark, even a small one, might find such parts of the floater an appealing strike. The hands were like pillow-sized jellyfish, squishy to the touch.
Jessica mentally placed the time in the water at between twenty and twenty-five days, something shorter than that of earlier victims, and she wondered about the difference, whether it was significant or simply a fluke. Jessica stowed away the second of the two nails she’d recovered into a vial which contained a pink gel fixative. She placed this deep into her valise and felt the pontoon platform bang against her ribs, as if the sea were upset with her for taking that which belonged to it.
She considered the stroke of luck she’d had when the right cop had come along and kept the gung-ho Rescue 911 paramedics from wading out here and dragging the unfortunate victim to shore. All her nails would’ve been gone had that taken place, not to mention another layer of skin. She alone would give the body the care and attention required, like a marine archeologist with an ancient artifact.