“How’d it go?” Lampley asked.
“I found blood on a saw handle,” Stilwell said. “I’ll get it to the lab and see what happens.”
“Don’t hold your breath on that.”
“I won’t. You handle court?”
“Yeah, it went quick.”
“What happened with Kermit?”
“Harrell gave him three months’ community service. Told him to work it off in the sub.”
“Perfect. I’ll make a to-do list and put it on the board. Everybody can add to it.”
“Okay.”
“Where are you going now?”
“Just doing the circuit. No calls yet. The calm before the storm.”
“Copy that.”
Stilwell threw him a mock salute and pulled his cart into its assigned parking space. Before he got to the door of the substation, he took a call from the harbormaster’s office.
“It’s Tash. We need you over here on the skiff dock right away.”
Tash Dano was the assistant harbormaster. Stilwell had met her on his rounds when he was first assigned to the island. He had met with everybody in any position of power or authority in the small community, from the mayor of Avalon down to the assistant harbormaster. Most were standoffish because deputies assigned to Catalina seemed to come and go quickly; they left as soon as they were rehabilitated in the eyes of the mainland command staff. The island was known as a way station for the department’s freaks and fuckups and therefore it was not worth the residents’ investment of time to get to know any of its personnel. Tash was different. She had invited Stilwell to lunch and even gave him her own tour of the island. She had lived there her entire life and had no plans to leave. Stilwell immediately liked her.
“What’s up over there?” he asked.
“You know Abbott, the scraper?” she asked.
“I know who he is. First name is Denzel, right?”
“Right. He just called and said there’s a body down there under the Aurora. He said it’s got an anchor chain wrapped around it. A human body. He couldn’t tell male or female.”
It took Stilwell a few moments to understand what Tash was saying. He got regular updates on what boats were moored in the harbor. He remembered that the Aurora was a seagoing yacht registered out of Venezuela. It had entered the harbor two days earlier and moored on the fourth line of buoys, where the big boats were staged.
“Okay, I’m on my way,” Stilwell said. “Tell Abbott to meet me at the skiff dock.”
“Will do,” Tash said.
“And Tash, when’s the Aurora staying till?”
“Today. They’re leaving today.”
“What time?”
“Anytime. They have the ball till sixteen hundred but can shove off whenever they want.”
“We might have to do something about that. I’ll probably want to hold them in port if what Abbott says he saw is true.”
“You want me to call the Coast Guard in? They could stop them.”
“I want to confirm the body before we start calling in the troops.”
“Gotcha. How you going to do that?”
“I’m going to have Abbott take me down.”
“Oh.”
“Problem?”
“No. Just be careful.”
“Copy that. I will.”
Stilwell went into the sub to get his wet suit.
3
The water was cold. It felt like ice poking into his ears as he descended. Most of his body was insulated by the wet suit he’d kept from his days on the sheriff’s dive team, but his feet, his scalp, and his ears were exposed to the chill.
Stilwell felt a sense of déjà vu as he went down. The cold. The sound of his own measured breathing in the mask. The slow motion and silence of things underwater.
He followed Denzel Abbott down, both tethered by the hookahs connected to the compressor up on the hull scraper’s skiff. The air piped through the hose was foul, stale, and oily in Stilwell’s mouth and lungs. He fought back nausea as he sank with the help of the weight belt borrowed from Abbott.
The sun had burned away the marine layer by the time Stilwell got back to the harbor after Tash Dano’s call. Abbott told him that he had been scraping barnacles off the Aurora when the glint of shiny metal caught his eye from twenty-five yards away. He went farther down to investigate and was repelled by what he saw. He was pretty sure it was a body wrapped in something black and anchored, but he did not go closer to determine further details.
They went into the water about thirty feet off the Aurora’s stern. Rays of light shot through the tall branches of the kelp forest rising from the bottom, otherworldly strands of green leaves languidly reaching for sunlight and swaying in the current like a line of dancers in sync. Stilwell could now see a reflection off a polished metal anchor.
They moved through the shadow of the Aurora’s hull as they dropped farther into the depths of the harbor. The body — if it was a body — was thirty feet down. It was as Abbott had described: A human figure bloated and bursting from an opening in what looked like a large black bag that was wrapped in braided anchor line and a heavy galvanized chain. The chain extended three feet down to an anchor snagged on a coral outcropping. Long dark hair had come through the opening in the black plastic and floated free in the current. Stilwell could see that it was attached to a white scalp. As he approached, he realized that it looked like a macabre balloon arrangement buffeted by the bottom current of the harbor.
Stilwell wore diving gloves he had retrieved with his wet suit from his locker at the sub. He used a finger to spread the drawstring opening in the black bag until he could see a face. It was waxy and misshapen from bloating caused by decomp gases. It was almost unrecognizable as human, but he knew from his experiences in the blue world that it was indeed a person.
He noticed a streak of purple dye in the dark hair and guessed he was looking at the remains of a woman. There were fissure lines in the face that could have been caused by decomposition, postmortem sea-life predation, or injury sustained prior to death. The image brought back memories of victims he had seen as a body-recovery diver — horrors he’d thought he’d put behind him. In the vernacular, they were called floaters or sinkers, depending on the circumstances — words used to dehumanize and compartmentalize what was seen in the murky depths. But Stilwell couldn’t forget them. The girl at the bottom of Lake Piru, with eyes cast up toward the light and a god that hadn’t saved her. The man in the suit and tie, his sunglasses still in place, with concrete blocks tied to his feet at the Bouquet Reservoir. The baby in the back seat of the car driven intentionally down the boat ramp at Castaic Lake. All found in the depths of a blue world that was calm and quiet and yet so deadly.
He could tell that this one had been in the water a while. Four days, at least. His eyes left the blanched eyes of the dead woman and moved down the chain to the anchor that had kept the body from floating to the surface. It was a plow anchor that had caught snugly on the coral ledge.
Stilwell knew the stages of decomposition in cold water. The body had been weighted and submerged. It had been anchored to the bottom until microorganisms in the intestines began creating gases, leading to bloat and buoyancy that started to lift the body despite the weight of the anchor and chain. Whoever had dropped the woman into the water had not anticipated these changes.
The body and the anchor chain would become buoyant enough to move easily with the currents, skipping across the coral and kelp beds until it finally rose to the surface or was snagged by something on the bottom. Stilwell had once recovered a body from Apollo Lake that had gotten entangled with an old washing machine that had been dumped off a boat. This anchor’s snag on the coral ledge was only temporary. Stilwell knew it could loosen and break free with the change of current in the next outgoing tide.