Larsen squinted at the screen on the back of the camera, again exaggerating the fleshy moonscape on his cheeks. “That’s weird. It’s a pressure suit.”
“For diving? Like a wet suit?”
“No, it’s semi-pressurized. It allows you to float up from, I dunno, two hundred feet or so without as much danger of getting the bends. Basically, you use it to escape from a crippled sub.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I stared at the shell casings, each one a glimmering, golden reflection of the lights overhead, and somehow fought off the itch to snap the rubber band. In Larsen’s flinty eyes, the neurosis, however minor, would be a weakness.
“He was trying to escape,” I said, hearing Larsen take a breath. But I plowed ahead. “How? What, does he just open up the conning tower and start swimming?”
“Not the conning tower. The escape tower is in the torpedo room. On the ceiling just aft of where he’s lying. You open the inner door, pull yourself into this tiny compartment, close the hatch, flood the space, then open the outer hatch.”
“And float away.”
“You got it. Looks like he didn’t make it that far, though.”
“He wouldn’t have survived even if he had made it out of the submarine. But wait: If he were trying to get out, why was he still holding the pistol? Wouldn’t he have to put it down to put on that suit?”
“Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to putting the gun down.”
“He took the time to remove his shoes and pull on the legs of the suit. Can’t do that while holding a gun.”
“Yeah. I guess he picked the gun back up, then.”
“There was no one else around! Why would he pick it back up? He wanted to get out of the submarine. There’s no reason to hang around.”
“Something scared him.”
“Scared him? What?” The pages of the dossier fluttered as I pulled it off the table in front of him. “Everyone in here is accounted for. And except for Ahn, they’re all on the lower deck. Some of them may have died from other injuries, but most are clear chlorine victims.”
Larsen crossed his arms again and leaned back. “Fine, then. You tell me: what makes a man pick up his weapon when he’s in the middle of trying to escape?”
“I’m saying this is a situation where we have to examine the circumstances. And the circumstances dictate that there was no one alive to pose a threat to him. Or if there were, they were in as bad shape as he was, if not worse. Something obviously made him grab the gun again, but it wasn’t… hold on.”
“What?”
I closed my eyes, trying to allow my subconscious to piece together the scene. It was like watching an old newsreel, the details jumping in and out of focus.
“Keep in mind that he crouched and shot through the hatch. He didn’t climb into the control room before he fired. He couldn’t wait that long to shoot. There was time pressure.”
“I’m not sure-”
“Let me finish. Ahn was facing away from him when Lee pulled the trigger. So why rush? Because he had to shoot before Ahn reached the diving controls… he was moving toward that panel when he was hit, remember. Lee shot him, saw him fall and stop moving, then continued through the compartment and went to the torpedo room.”
Larsen shifted in his seat.
“Once he got there,” I continued, “he was ready to escape the sub, but something happened. Something that made him strip off the top half of the suit and grab the gun again.”
“Ahn wasn’t dead.”
“Yes. Ahn had gotten back up and hit the emergency surface switches. Lee heard the tanks blow, felt the submarine begin to rise. He says ‘Oh, shit,’ picks up the gun and tries to get back to the control room. But he doesn’t make it.”
“And that was all she wrote,” Larsen finished.
I opened my eyes. Larsen had a half-smile on his face, like a man who had just finished a steak at a five-star restaurant.
“Goddamn, Christine,” he said. “I understand why General Patterson wanted you onboard. You might as well have been here videotaping everything while it happened.”
“But look at all this,” I said, sweeping my arm in the air over the table full of evidence. “We might have a good idea of what went down in the actual shooting, but we don’t know why Ahn was trying to surface the ship, we don’t know why Lee wanted to stop him, and we sure as hell don’t know what happened to the other 90 percent of the crew.”
“It’s true. That stuff on the lower deck is a clusterfuck. It looks like the world’s deadliest bar brawl. I know you’ve probably never seen that kind of violence, but in my… what?”
He had caught me rolling my eyes this time.
“Please. I study violence for a living. And I’m guessing that you’ve never seen thirty dead people on a submarine before, either.”
“OK, then, what’s your opinion? What happened?”
“Specifically? I’m not sure yet. Generally, though, there was a big fight. I realize you could have told me that.” Larsen had targeted me with an exaggerated shrug, his eyes wide and mocking. “But I can tell you this much: violence always has a motive. I don’t know if we’ll be able to pin down who was on what side at this point, since all the bodies have been moved around, but I think we can figure out what they were fighting over. And I’ll bet it has something to do with that biohazard locker thing in the forward battery bay. Did you see that?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. Why do you think it’s important?”
“It just seems to be at the epicenter of the worst violence, it’s in the compartment where the chlorine was generated, the captain was lying a few feet away, and it’s not a standard fitting on a submarine. Didn’t you say the sub was carrying weapons research?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Now that I think about it, it was General Patterson.”
“Well, I have no idea what the research was, or what the locker was for. But I do know that as long as I’m in control of this boat, we’re not opening anything that is marked a biohazard. Period.”
“Don’t worry. No way I’m poking my head in there. My investigation from this point is pretty much going to be sifting through the evidence I’ve already collected. But I think that refrigerator, or whatever it is, is too out-of-place to just ignore.”
“Fine. Sift all you want. But you’re going to have to ignore it until we get back to shore and get a biohazard team on the boat.”
“I said I wouldn’t open it. It’s locked with a keypad, anyway.”
“Just so we understand. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I need to go make sure the boat’s not sinking or anything.”
Larsen used the beverage hutch to pull himself to his feet, then opened the door and stepped out without shutting it behind him. I heard his footsteps disappear down the corridor.
Young still was standing across the hall, picking at something under his index fingernail. He laughed.
“You got the case solved yet?”
“No, but you’re the prime suspect,” I said, staring at the ceiling.
There was something else nagging at me, an out-of-place thread in the scenario I had woven. The locker… the bodies… injuries, chlorine… and… the torpedo room. Something was out of place. The door to the battery bay wouldn’t open but not because it was jammed.
“Shit. They locked it.”
I browsed through the digital images until I found my documentation of the torpedo room. Yeah, there it was: the closed hatch.
Standing up, I grabbed my bag, pushed past Young and headed forward.
The SEAL in the torpedo compartment was sitting on the edge of one of the torpedo racks. Dark-brown skin, perfect white teeth. Long face, matching thin nose that flattened toward the tip. Superorbital ridge marked by at least two small irregularities-waves, almost-over each eye.