Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

“Negative.”

Loran took Anna to the buoy. Radar kept her from ramming the Venture . None of the Chris-Craft’s lights were on and she was all but invisible in the fog. Anna rafted the Belle Isle off her starboard side. Taking the precaution of removing her Smith and Wesson from the briefcase and putting it in her raincoat pocket, Anna climbed over the gunwale. “Carrie! Carrie Ann!”

The cabin door opened slowly. A kid’s sleeping bag wrapped around her against the chill, Carrie Ann Bittner shuffled out.

“What’s happened?” Anna asked. “Where’s your mother?”

“She went diving,” Carrie replied in the sulky tone Anna was accustomed to. “She dived down a while ago. She must be hurt or caught on something.”

Anna couldn’t see the child’s face clearly and could read nothing from her voice. Without explaining why, she moved past her and checked the cabin. It was empty.

Why would Patience come out in the fog, dragging her daughter with her? The question jogged Anna’s memory and she remembered the click on the line when she was on the phone with Molly-the click Molly had thought was another call but had turned out not to be. Patience could have picked up the phone in Carrie’s room, heard of the death of the gourmet clad in yellow suspenders, and known Anna would put it all together sooner or later.

If Patience did know, it made sense she would rush the last dive, try and get the remainder of the wine out before she was stopped. Carrie must have been brought along in the capacity of prisoner. Left alone, she would undoubtedly have found her way to Mr. Tattinger’s for solace.

“How long has your mom been down?” Anna asked.

“I said,” Carrie grumbled, “awhile. Maybe half an hour.”

At first Anna thought Carrie was unaware that half an hour at depth could be her mother’s death warrant but the girl had said on the radio, “I think she’s dead.”

“Why is she diving here?” Anna asked.

Carrie shrugged. “How would I know?” She sounded more aggrieved than concerned. “Anyway, she’s down there.”

Anna radioed Scotty of her intentions. “I’m going to do a bounce dive,” she said and thanked the gods that her voice did not betray the fear that was spreading through her veins like poison.

“Ten-four,” Scotty replied. “I’ll stay on this damn engine. Hell of a time to have your horse go lame.”

Anna repeated her earlier obscenities. Focusing on anger to keep the terror at bay, she struggled into dry suit, fins, weights, and tanks. “Turn on every light on the Venture ,” she ordered Carrie, who’d stood bundled and silent watching the process.

Before she entered the lake, Anna raked the surface carefully with her handheld lamp looking for bubbles, disturbance, anything that smacked of ambush and watery graves. Fog impeded her investigation.

Finally, there was nothing left but to dive. The water was black and looked for all the world like death. Concentrating only on breathing, she clutched her light and rolled backward off the Belle Isle’s stern.

Cold cracked in her sinuses with such force it felt as if her eyes were being gouged out from inside her skull. For several seconds pain left her breathless and disoriented. The universe shrank to the single paralyzing sensation of utter, damning cold.

Forcing her ribs to expand, accepting the icy stabs and letting them pass through her, she righted herself and located the line Patience had dropped. With “follow the yellow brick road” singing irritatingly through her mind, Anna pursued the lemon-colored line down into increasing darkness. Ten seconds, fifteen, two white depth markers flashed by on the line. Anna kept her eyes on her watch and counted. The bright line weaving gently in the probe of light, black pressing close, the world was no bigger than her gauges.

Atmospheres crushed in and terrifying giddiness tried to spin her mind away from counting. An ache started at the base of her skull. Stringing her thoughts together cohesively became increasingly difficult. Fear that had been murmuring at her aboard the Belle Isle shrieked through all the organs of her body. Sixty-three seconds had elapsed since she had left the lake’s surface.

The snaking of the line through liquid space began having a hypnotic effect and Anna found herself forgetting the dangers not only of the icy depths but of the woman she swam to save. Somehow, she must fix her mind on Patience as an enemy, a killer of persons. Denny had not, and Denny’s mind worked better at six atmospheres than hers ever would.

Two minutes, fifty-six seconds: the bottom blocked the beam of her light. She stopped, stood with one hand on the yellow line for security and switched off her lamp. In her years with the Park Service, she’d worked on a dozen or more searches and rescues. Habit demanded she blow a whistle, shout a name. All she had in the malevolent shadow world was light or lack of it. Cloaked in darkness, Anna searched the lake bottom.

A flash, another, then burning steady: Patience was on the south side of the wreck. Without relighting her own lamp Anna swam toward the light.

As she closed the distance down the side of the ship, she could see that Patience’s lamp had been set on the hull. In the wedge-shaped beam it threw, Patience-or at least a heavily suited person she assumed was Patience Bittner- was kneeling, slipping efficiently into dive tanks. The tanks were unlike any Anna had ever used. They fit singly, one to each side of the dive harness. Beside Patience was a net bag filled with dark objects.

For a moment Anna’s nitrogen-befuddled brain refused to grasp the situation. Then, with a suddenness that made her feel a fool, it fell into place. The porthole into the captain’s cabin was too small to get through in tanks. Patience, hardly bigger than a child even in the bulky dry suit, used side-mounted tanks, each with its own regulator, and clipped on for easy removal. They were the kind worn by cave divers who needed to squeeze through small spaces. She could take them off, feed them through one at a time, then follow them.

Anna’s flippered foot trailed against the hull, making a faint metallic sound as the buckle scraped the ship’s skin. Patience’s head jerked and Anna stopped her glide, waited, realized she had stopped breathing, began again.

Bittner’s flicker of interest was only momentary. With the mask and the darkness it was impossible to tell, but Anna didn’t think Patience realized she was no longer alone.

Dive tanks in place, Patience grasped the neck of the sack and began swimming up the hull. Her light was trained toward the tilting deck. She was obviously in no need of rescue, nor did she look as if she was expecting company. Clearly she had not been down half an hour. Like Anna, she would have chosen bounce dives. Dangerous but doable for the kind of money she would get for the wine in the net bag. Bottom time would have dictated more than one dive; one load at a time. Carrie had never been worried for her mother, she had informed on her, getting revenge for the loss of her first lover.

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, Anna thought.

With time so short, Anna assumed Patience would head immediately back to the surface with her prize, but she swam for the deck.

Safe in her shroud of darkness, Anna followed, grateful for once for the depths. Stalking in absolute silence was not difficult.

Without pausing even an instant at the lightless portal, Patience swam into the engine room.

Anna glided up to the right of the door, shielded from view from within, and waited. One minute passed, then two. From far back in the tangle of equipment and narrow passages, she could see a flicker of light on the bulkhead.

There could be little of value in the engine room, nothing worth the precious time Patience was spending. Anna wondered what she needed to do with a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of wine and five sixty-four-year-old corpses. She looked at her watch: in minutes her bottom line time would be used up. Any longer and she would be into twenty to forty minutes’ decompression time.