The smell of the alligator didn’t bother me. I found it heavy and distinctive. There was a musky sweetness that reminded me of the way a fresh tarpon smells-a delicate, vital odor that was mixed with an acidity that I presumed to be cavity fluids and blood.
I said, “Do you mind if I use that extra pair of gloves and help you with the stomach when you get it open?”
“Sure,” the woman replied. “You sound more than casually interested. Are you looking for something in particular? Last night. .. the person the gator attacked, he didn’t lose any-”
“No,” I said. “The man still has all his parts. Just puncture wounds.”
She was nodding. “That’s what I thought or the police would have insisted on being here. Or EMTs would’ve opened the belly last night.”
I said, “What I’d expect to find is the stomach empty. Or almost empty. We’re only, what, a month or so away from their dormant season?”
“The last real cold front was in January,” Marston corrected me. “This animal has certainly eaten since then.”
“Even so,” I said, snapping on a surgical glove, “he had to be pretty hungry to attack a full-grown man. Not only that, he came back and tried to attack a second man, even though I had already wounded the thing. What I’m interested in finding is those rocks I’ve read about. The ones you find in a gator’s belly. Gastroliths? I’ve never seen one.”
“How’s the man doing?” the woman asked, meaning Carlson. “I haven’t heard anything since last night. In fact, I’d love for you to tell me the whole story sometime-if you ever have time. I’ve been studying alligators for seven years and I can’t imagine anyone jumping into the water at night and wrestling around with something this size. I certainly wouldn’t have tried it. That takes a very unusual man, in my opinion.”
I caught the friendly implications. I also sensed that the woman was providing me with an opening to ask her out. It was in the airy way she said it-something I would act upon but later. In reply, I told her I hadn’t gotten an update on Carlson and turned the conversation back to gastroliths.
“We still don’t know for certain that alligators swallow rocks for ballast,” the woman told me, sounding more relaxed and in charge now. “But I can’t think of any other reason they’d bother. In an animal this size, I would expect to find quite a few. They don’t look like much until you clean off the patina. But then some of them can be quite interesting.”
She was right. With the grad student filming, Emily slit the animal’s stomach lining, then held it open as I fished my hands in. At first, I thought there was nothing to find. But then, closer to the intestines, I found several hard, globular objects. I removed one that was about the size of a baseball and handed it to Emily. She appeared pleased.
“This is one of the larger gastroliths I’ve seen,” she told me as she used the knife to scrape part of it clean.
I used a paper towel on my glasses, then knelt beside her to see. I’m not a geologist, but there was no mistaking the crystalline facets of the rock, soon glittering in the morning sunlight. It was a chunk of gypsum.
Marston caught the significance immediately.
“This is very strange finding a stone like this,” she said softly, studying the thing.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
The grad student had zoomed in on the rock. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” the girl said. “It’s pretty-sort of. But what’s so special about a rock?”
Emily asked me, “You found this animal in a pond on San Carlos Island, right? It’s really is quite surprising.”
I told her it was a brackish lake, only a few miles from Fort Myers Beach, before telling the grad student, “In Florida, the only gypsum I know of comes from the highland regions in the north and central parts of the state. Alligators travel, I understand that. But is it possible this thing could have crossed a hundred miles of swamps, then crawled through cities, across highways, this far on its own?”
The woman was thinking about it, lips pursed. She was wearing safety goggles, and I liked the nerdy dissimilarities of her elegant jaw, the sweep of autumn-shaded hair. Only a male biologist is capable of undressing a woman with his eyes and then completing the fantasy by projecting how she would look naked, sprawled on white sheets, all the while kneeling on a tarp beneath buzzing flies, his hands slick with gastric fluids.
That’s exactly what I was doing. But then my conscience intervened by reminding me that this woman had been divorced for only a couple of weeks. No matter how confident Emily Marston appeared, she was vulnerable, probably an easy target for just about any decent-looking, unprincipled jerk who came along. Although I am, admittedly, an occasional jerk, I do embrace the conceit that I am a jerk with at least a few principles.
I listened to the woman say, “If the gastrolith was a lot smaller, and when you consider how old this animal must be, I wouldn’t have a problem with the distance. Over a period of thirty or forty years, yes, it could have traveled a hundred miles on its own. But my guess is, only a large alligator would ingest a rock this size, which suggests to me that someone may have transported the animal-”
The grad student, still filming, interrupted, saying, “Maybe a dump truck hauled a load of gravel to the beach. You know, from around Lake Okeechobee, as fill or something. That would explain a chunk of gypsum being this close to the Gulf of Mexico.”
I smiled at the girl, pleased by her quick reasoning, and I told her exactly that as I fished my hands into the gator’s stomach again.
I removed several more gastroliths. Then I found a chunk of what appeared to be a turtle skull. Then several more bones, bleached white from acid, that were not so easily identified.
Not at first, anyway. It wasn’t until I had placed the bones on the tarp in an orderly fashion that I began to suspect what we had just found. Collectively, they resembled the delicate flange of a primate’s hand-not necessarily a human hand, because feral monkeys are common in Florida
I became more certain they were primate bones when I added a radius bone and pieces of what might have been metacarpal bones.
“My God,” Marston said, voice soft, “I think we need to call the police. This isn’t fresh, obviously. It has to have been in the gator’s stomach for at least a few months, but even so…”
I told the woman, “Wait. There’s something else.”
I had been holding my breath while I felt around in the animal’s stomach and started breathing again as I leaned into the stomach, then placed yet another bone on the tarp.
This one was unmistakable. The grad student stumbled for a moment, almost dropped the camera, but then she leaned to zoom in on what we all could identify.
It was a wedding ring. Cheap and brassy, but set with a minuscule stone that may or may not have been a diamond The ring had been crushed, probably by the gator’s teeth, so that it was crimped into the bone of what had once been a human finger.
“A woman’s hand,” the female biologist said, and had to work hard to keep emotion out of her voice.
“A woman’s ring, anyway,” I replied, holding the bone close to my eyes, seeing what might have been a bit of inscription. “The medical examiner will know.”
At sunset, I was on my back porch, lathering beneath the outdoor shower, when I felt the vibration of unfamiliar footsteps. Tomlinson was in the house, probably guzzling the last of my beer. Plus, the snowshoe slap of his big bare feet is distinctive. It wasn’t him.
The person approaching was decidedly female. Wearing hard-soled shoes, I guessed, possibly high heels.
With a bar of soap, I attempted to cover what I could cover as I turned to see Emily Marston, although I didn’t recognize her at first. True, I wasn’t wearing my glasses. True, I only got a glimpse before the lady sputtered an apology, then ducked behind the corner of my house. Still, I did not associate the long glossy hair and a white tropical suit with the boot-wearing biologist I had worked with that morning.