The kitchen was dark and empty, its big, stainless steel fridge lurking beside a monster oven. Most hours there was a trio of heavyset West Indian women sweating it out in there, making conch fritters, swordfish sandwiches, or jerk chicken.
Cooper picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
“Eh, Cooper, dat you, mon?”
The words came out fast, like the lyrics to a reggae track. Cooper knew the lyricist all too well-Captain Roy Gillespie, of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force. Known locally as Cap’n Roy.
“It’s six o’clock in the goddamn morning,” Cooper said.
“And you telling me.”
“Boy says you got something can’t wait. If in fact that’s the case, Roy, I’d recommend you go ahead and tell me what it is.”
Cooper refused to call Roy by his nickname.
“There something here I thinking you maybe wanna see, mon. We down the Marine Base way. Come by ’bout an hour. I know dat boat get you here quick.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, mon. The Police Force,” Roy said, “we be obliged to you, you make the trip.” Roy fell silent, waiting for a response.
After two or three seconds, Cooper grunted and hung up on him.
The island of Tortola got up early, its native population of roosters braying out wake-up calls from about four o’clock onward. Narrow Mitsubishi pickups began to speed along the roads as early as five, overloaded with locals making their way to work, everybody carpooling: load up, drop off, repeat. There existed no need for public transit in the British Virgins, since all transit was public.
Tortola’s two hills rose abruptly from the sea, one on each side of Road Town. Most visitors came to the BVIs by plane through Beef Island’s Terrance B. Lettsome International-twenty minutes east of Road Town by way of a treacherously steep road and locally famous bridge, it possessed one runway, a recently remodeled terminal, and maybe twenty-five cabbies loitering beside a convoy of Mitsubishi minivan taxis. Come by boat, though, and you’d do it through Road Harbor, a quaint blend of colorful oceanfront shops, industrial piers, a single, oddly massive cruise ship berth, and a brand-new ferry terminal beside the old marina.
Cooper passed the vacant cruise ship berth and eased up on the throttle, obeying the harbor’s five-knot speed limit. As he quieted the engines, the sounds of the marina floated to him-the ping of cable against mast, the slap of waves against hull. Cooper’s hull was a forty-one-foot Apache with twin 572-CID 850-horsepower blowers and MerCruiser drives, a championship racing boat he’d obtained at a price significantly below its market value a few years back. He moved out to the bow, flipping a pair of bumpers over the gunwale, returned to the pilot’s seat, kicked the Apache into reverse, gunned the throttle, and killed the engines. Gliding in like an old man of the sea. The boat touched delicately against the Marine Base dock, easing to a halt without so much as a squeeze of its bumpers.
A lanky West Indian in a grubby white T-shirt was already there on the dock, busy dealing with the contents of an orange bucket. The man automatically took the bowline when Cooper tossed it to him; Cooper handled the stern line himself, hopping off and nodding his thanks. The man grinned, nodded back, and returned to his bucket.
Another, shorter man approached the dock. The singular feature of this man was his rigid posture-back held ramrod straight, his chest and shoulders thrust stiffly up and out. Cooper had always thought Cap’n Roy looked like a guy with a stick up his ass, but what the hell, it worked for him, coming down the dock now in his uniform, the pressed white polo shirt bright against his blue-black skin, the gray slacks with the sharp crease, the shiny black cap with a checkered band, even the patent leather shoes. Roy offered an enthusiastic handshake as they came together; at five nine in his shoes, he had to look way up at Cooper, whose tall, slouching profile cut an S-hook against Roy’s stick.
“Lemme-be-de-first wida warm welcome for the spy-a-de-island,” Roy said. He kept his left hand busy, using it to slap Cooper on the shoulder while conducting the business of the handshake with his right.
“Roy.”
“Yeah, mon, we got us some trouble. Lucky findin’ it when we did, know what I mean, mon? It still a while now till the Turquoise Queen show, all them tourists taking a look.”
Roy walked across the dock, reached down, unlashed a line, and tossed it into a hard-bottom inflatable dinghy. He motioned for Cooper to step into the boat. When Cooper did, Roy gassed the fifty-horse Evinrude and nosed the little craft out from the dock, heading deeper into the harbor, around the yacht slips.
“Shortcut,” Cap’n Roy said with a wink.
He took them through the outlet stream, tilting the engine to power through the shallow water without grinding the propeller on the rocks. When they came around the breakwater, Cooper saw five, no, six locals, four of them in standard Royal Virgin Island Police Force dress, same as Roy, and two of them wearing what Cooper knew to be the Marine Base uniform: royal blue polo shirt and khaki shorts. The cops were gathered around a heap of soiled rags lumped together on the rocks, the cops keeping active-one taking notes, one with a camera, another shielding his eyes against the sun with his hand, keeping watch. To Cooper, the swirl of activity displayed all too familiar a rhythm.
Cap’n Roy beached the boat on the rocks, shutting down the Evinrude and kicking it out of the water.
“Need to do it on foot from here,” he said.
The outlet continued, two or three inches deep, through a bed of rocks, snaking around the breakwater and out into the ocean. Behind them, between the breakwater and the harbor, lay open, overgrown brush, with industrial leftovers peeking through tall grass-the rotting hull of a boat, the rusted body of an original VW Beetle. Walking over the sharp rocks, wearing a yellow T-shirt that said LIVE SLOW across the back, Cooper was thinking that under ordinary circumstances, he’d consider pulling off his Tevas and crossing the bed of rocks barefoot, just to show these soft-skinned white-collar cops what he was all about. Out of respect for what he figured awaited him at the end of the outlet, though, he shrugged off the impulse. While he walked, Cooper contemplated a few different ways to reject the favor Roy was about to ask of him. The man was a sneaky bastard; Roy would figure a way to guilt, or possibly even blackmail him into it if he weren’t careful.
Cap’n Roy led him to where his fellow cops were gathered on the beach. They faced the channel now, the breakwater behind them, and at this range, Cooper didn’t need the guided tour to understand that the pile of rags was not, in fact, a pile of rags.
Wrapped in shredded clothes, frail and emaciated, with bloated, wrinkled skin that might once have been dark but had by now deteriorated to a bleached jaundice, the semiexposed torso of a man lay sprawled beneath a scrap of wood. The upper body was covered with what appeared to be sores, though it was difficult to tell-with the body soaking in the sea, the sores were pale and indistinct, little more than jagged, whitish mushrooms on the skin. Both legs were broken below the knee in compound fractures. Cooper tried to remember the name of the bigger bone below the knee-probably either the tibia or fibula-but whichever it was, the bone protruded grotesquely from the skin, the torn flesh whitish and waterlogged like the sores on the torso.
Once Cap’n Roy observed that Cooper had enjoyed a thorough study of the scene, he straightened whatever bend remained in his spine and motioned to a thick cop wearing the Marine Base gear.
“Riley here,” he said, “he come across the body first thing this morning.”
Cooper knew Riley a little. Heavy in the face and legs with a flat stomach, he looked like a running back, his skin the color of caramel, a shade or three lighter than the rest of the gang.