The folks out of Fort Lauderdale really knew how to spruce up a tournament. Getting Sun Fin Inc. to come on board had been the work of Dr. Joel Wainwright, and it proved an ingenious move.
As for the institute’s prize, it now had a supply of specimens of various sharks to carry it through another year and a half of research, possibly two, not to mention the profits from selling off the parts to other research labs across the states.
Inside the mammoth facility, which had been designed to blend in with the surrounding palms and palmetto brush-even the brick was a sand hue to match the white- shell sands of the Keys-research into man’s amazing cousin, the predatory sharks of the Florida coast, was always ongoing. And it was the kind of research that necessitated a great number of shark corpses. Each ponderous shark body was now shoved onto a conveyor belt-each going down into the hold like so much luggage, thought Lynette Harris, except that this luggage had eyes that simultaneously appeared as lifeless as large glass beads and so hypnotic as to appear alive. Life and death mirrored in the milky cornea of a magnificent animal laid waste to. She felt the need for science and the need for life both at once, but as she had many times before, she shoved the thought to the back of her mind in order to carry on with the work at hand. And the work was considerable. They could use both Insley’s and Wainwright’s help, but God forbid the doctors should get their hands dirty at this stage.
The sharks were incredible, even the smaller species; the average weighed in at or near two hundred fifty pounds. It took some strain and effort to move the lifeless animals from their frigid moorings in the back of the truck to the conveyor belt. The work was cold, hard and thankless.
“ Grab ‘im by the dorsal and tail fin! Yank and I’ll push,” Aron instructed Lynette from where he stood at the head of a particularly huge monster.
“ Aren’t you going about this bass-ackwards, Aron? Why not turn ‘im around, then you grab the dorsal and tail? Then you push and I’ll pull ‘im by the jaw with my hook.” Lynette held up a huge meat hook, and given her protective wear, she looked like the creature from the remake of The Thing.
“ You sure you weren’t a longshoreman in another life?” She stifled a laugh. “Just do it my way, okay? It’ll be less strain on us both.”
“ Stop squabbling, you two!” came a voice from around the truck. It was Dr. Lois Insley, head of the institute, keeper of the keys and a demanding boss who insisted on blind obedience and deference to her arrogance. She’d even been angry with Wainwright for bringing in the Sun Fin people as sponsors, at least at first. Aron had told Lynette that it was because Lois hadn’t thought of it herself.
“ Have either of you seen Dr. Wainwright about?” Dr. Insley asked, her nervous eye twitch back like a bad rash. “Think he’s in his lab, Doctor,” replied Lynette, her gloves already slick with the juices exuded by dead fish, her toes and fingers freezing.
“ I’m so furious with that man,” announced Dr. Insley. “But why?” asked Aron. “Hell, this-sis-been one hell of a tournament, thanks to Dr. Wainwright.
” Lynette immediately agreed, smiling behind her protective wear. “We’ve got all the specimens we need, and it didn’t cost the institute or the university a dime. I think Dr. W. is a… well, a genius.” Lynette knew Aron and Dr. Insley must know how she felt about Dr. Wainwright, that she had an uncontrollable crush on the older man. “Getting Sun Fin to put up the prize was certainly a stroke of marketing genius,” Aron quickly added, knowing it needled the frumpy Dr. Insley to tell her that anyone but Her Majesty had any genius. He hoped that the use of the word marketing to qualify Dr. W.’s genius would keep Insley on an even keel. “The damned fool has called in outsiders about… about what we’ve been seeing in the lab.”
“ The human body parts, you mean?” Lynette unnecessarily asked, recalling vividly how several days before, with the first onrush of new specimens, Dr. Wainwright, with her and Dr. Insley beside him, had uncovered yet another stash of undigested human body parts and bones amid the usual stomach contents. There were some gruesome intact parts, from toes and fingers to whole hands and feet. And while this wasn’t totally unusual, the sheer amount, from the very first specimens opened up, gave everyone in the lab a chilled pause.
“ Keep unloading and don’t stop till you’ve emptied the truck. We’re paying that driver for his time as well, you know. I want him back on the road for the final cache and back here by tomorrow this time. So, move!”
“ But, Dr. Insley, this is the third and last load,” Aron corrected as gently as he could. Dr. Insley, however, had angrily waddled away, in search of Dr. Wainwright.
Lynette and Aron exchanged a long look from behind their goggles, Aron finally shrugging and Lynette saying, “She may know how to work with data and statistics and her computer program, but she hasn’t got a clue about the real world, does she?”
“ Know what gets me?”
“ What’s that, Aron?” Lynette worked as she talked, but Aron took a break with each word.
“ How she ever got in charge of this place in the first place.”
“ Wrote a grant, and grant money speaks volumes in ac- ademia. Anyhow, all you’ve got to know is that she is in charge.”
“ She’s in charge… but she’s not in control…
” Lynette watched the older woman, with her no-nonsense step and severely arranged hair, storm into the building, wondering what Lois ever did for fun, for frolic… for sex.
Inside the spacious facility of the laboratories. Dr. Insley found Wainwright studying the latest human body part to fall from the gut of a great white.
“ How dare you disobey me, Doctor?” she stormed at him. “To go over my head to the board members, and to call in the FBI after I assured you that there was no necessity here to do so, that these human body fragments are par for the course in our research and that-”
“ I tried reasoning with you, Dr. Insley,” Wainwright calmly replied, his body language rigid, unable to completely ignore his so-called superior. Still, he kept his eyes glued to the human bone and tissue specimen he was studying through the wide lens of the powerful magnifying glass, which he now swung away from himself, the glass careening away on its swivel arm, trying its best to strike Dr. Insley.
Finally, he could no longer ignore the woman, who stood like a pillar of salt before him in her white lab coat. Meeting her eyes, he said, ‘ These parts are extremely fresh, and the sheer number indicates an anomaly at best. You have to concede that much. Don’t you read the papers?”
“ What papers?”
“ The newspapers.”
“ I have enough to readjust keeping up with the literature in the field.”
“ The Miami Herald and even the Keys papers have been filled with missing persons cases lately, and some freak has been claiming responsibility, writing letters to the authorities about how he hates women, and all these parts appear to be petite… female parts? Get it. Doctor? I mean you have to concede that-”
“ Concede? I don’t have to concede a damned thing to you, Dr. Wainwright. In fact, you can pack your belongings and find the door. Your dubious services are no longer required.”
“ I’ll fight you on this, Lois.”
“ Goddamn you, Joel, do you really think that you can come in here and unseat me, a person of my standing, with my record and years?”
“ I don’t intend walking out of here without a fight, if that’s what you mean.
” She stared icily at Wainwright, a tall, imposing man with prematurely graying hair. She held her stare, as if hoping her eyes alone might destroy him.
Joel Wainwright looked back at Dr. Insley’s fleshy jowls and pink complexion, thinking again how unbecoming a woman she was, and how powerful she remained. Precisely why she had been given so much authority here was beyond Wainwright’s comprehension, but he had obviously won her wrath this time, regardless of how successful the Shark Research Fishing Tournament had been. It had been successful in large part thanks to him, but Dr. Insley didn’t wish to deal with reality, that they had twice the amount of specimens as last year; nor did she want to deal with the fact of the human body parts in the back freezer stacked like wrapped raw steaks from a deli-hands, arms, legs, shoulder bones, pieces of flesh that hadn’t yet been digested by the shark’s slow metabolic juices, they were that fresh. Neither had the body parts been properly categorized by the scientists on Islamorada, because everyone here majored in shark, not human, anatomy.