Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“This is insane.” Marino stares in disbelief. “Holy fucking shit!” he exclaims, as I get out of my seat.

eight

ENGINES THROB IN IDLE AS WE EXIT THE CABIN TO THE deafening thud-thud of a helicopter so low overhead I can easily make out the TV station’s tail number and the pilot in the right seat. Sunlight is bright on the water, the sky perfectly clear, but off to the northeast cumulus clouds roll in like a vast herd of sheep and I feel the dropping barometric pressure and the wind blowing harder. Later today it will be much cooler and rain.

“Fifteen feet! Ten feet!” Sullivan and Kletty tie off fenders to handrails, yelling distances to Labella as he uses the wind to ease in portside, and we tie off.

“Let me get on first, and you guys hand stuff over,” Marino says, and he climbs aboard the fireboat, reaching back for the scene cases.

Labella places the flat of his hand protectively against my back and tells me to watch my fingers so they don’t get crushed between fenders or rails and to be careful where I step. The space between the two boats yawns wider and narrows as he steadies me over one rail, then the next, and I walk across the fireboat’s swaying bow, where a heavy steel anchor chain feeds from a storage locker on the nonskid gray deck, running between two red fire guns in the front of the boat and dropping straight down into the ruffled blue water.

Marino sets the cases near an aluminum ladder leading up to the wheelhouse, and from its deck Lieutenant Bud Klemens waves and seems happy to see me. He motions for me to climb up as spectators circle the fireboat like shorebirds, and Marino scowls at the helicopter hovering not even five hundred feet directly over us.

“Asshole!” He rudely flaps his arms as if he has the power to direct air traffic. “Hey!” he yells to the Coast Guard boat, to Kletty, who is stacking drysuits and other equipment inside a Stokes basket. “Can’t you radio them or something? Make their asses get the hell out of here?”

“What?” Kletty yells back.

“They got to be scaring the shit out of the turtle, and they’re gonna blow the hell out of everything with their damn rotorwash!” Marino bellows. “They’re too fucking low!”

He opens the scene cases, and I climb up to have a word with Klemens, the commander of the marine unit, which is stationed at Burroughs Wharf, not far from the Coast Guard base and the New England Aquarium. At the top of the ladder a second firefighter whose name I can’t recall offers me his hand and I steady myself on the upper deck as it dips and rises in the heaving bay.

“It’s only going to get rougher, I’m afraid,” says the fireman, thickly built, with white hair clipped close to his scalp, a tattoo of a bear on his bulging left calf. “The sooner we get this done the better.”

Both men wear summer uniforms of navy cargo shorts and T-shirts, their portable radios slung over their shoulders. On a strap around Klemens’s neck is a remote steering station, what looks like a high-tech PlayStation console, that he can use from any area of the boat to steer its four jet engines when they’re running.

“I’m Jack.” The fireman with the bear tattoo reminds me we’ve met before. “The Sweet Marita , the trawler that burned up near Devils Back last year? A bad one.”

“Yes, it was.” A liquefied petroleum gas leak caused an explosion, and three people died. “How’s it going?” I ask Klemens.

“Too much of a carnival for my taste,” he says, and I do my best to ignore the uncanny sense of familiarity he always makes me feel.

Tall and rawboned, with sharp features, vivid blue eyes, and a mop of sandy hair, he looks exactly the way I imagine my father would have, had he lived to see his forties. When Klemens and I work cases together, I have to resist openly staring at him as if the most dominant figure from my childhood has come back from the dead.

“I’m afraid we’re attracting quite a crowd, Doc, and I know you don’t like that.” Klemens looks up, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Not a damn thing I can do about it, but at least this jerk’s backing off, so maybe we can hear again.”

We watch the helicopter ascend vertically, leveling off at about a thousand feet, and I wonder if the Coast Guard radioed the television news pilot and told him to gain altitude immediately. Or do we have the fire department to thank for it?

“Much better,” I agree. “But I wish it would buzz off.”

“It won’t.” The fireman named Jack scans the water with field glasses. “One hell of a story. Like capturing Nessie, and the media doesn’t even know the half of it yet.”

“What does the media know, exactly?” I ask him.

“Well, they know we’re out here, obviously, and the sooner we get this big boy back in the water, the better.”

“Should be releasing him in a few, which is damn good, for a lot of reasons,” Klemens says to me. “You can see how low we are.”

The dive platform is level with the bay because of the weight of the turtle and the rescuers attending to it, water rolling around them as the boat lifts and settles on swells.

“Rated for twenty-five hundred pounds and maxed out, never seen anything like the size of this one,” Klemens says. “We run into entanglements and strandings all the time, and it’s almost always too late, but this one’s got a real good chance. What a monster.”

Klemens balances himself against the tender, a rigid-inflatable rescue RIB with a gray tube hull and a 60-horsepower engine. I note that on the other side and still under its red tarp is the A-frame and hydraulic winch that can be used to retrieve people or other deadweight from the water, including a monster turtle. Obviously the winch isn’t what got this creature on board, I remark to Klemens, and I’m not surprised. Whether it’s an eight-hundred-pound gray seal or a huge loggerhead or dolphin, marine rescuers won’t run the risk of causing further injury and typically refuse the help of a winch.

“Anything that might cause the slightest transfer of trace evidence or artifacts.” I remind Klemens I need to know everything that’s been done.

“Well, I don’t think the turtle killed anyone,” he says, with mock seriousness.

“Probably not, but all the same.”

“No machinery was used,” he confirms. “Of course, my feeling about it is if we can sling human beings on board without hurting them, we sure as hell can do a turtle. But they did it their usual way, pulled him in close, harnessed him, got a ramp under him, and inflated the float bag. Then it took all of them and us to pull him on the platform. That was after they got his flippers restrained, obviously. He gets going with those things, he could tear the damn boat apart and knock a few of us into last year.”

I direct his attention to a yellow boat fender. Not far from the boat, it’s attached to a buoy line, and I ask if that was what the turtle was entangled with. I notice that nothing has been cleated off.

“Nope,” he says. “Some kind of fishing gear, possibly snoods from a longline or a trolling line that got wrapped around his left-front flipper.”

“He wasn’t entangled with the same line the body is attached to?” I don’t understand.

“Not directly. What he got wrapped up in was about fifty feet of monofilament lines, three of them, and wire leaders with rusty hooks. I’m guessing the rig got free of its fisherman float at some point, drifted on the current, and got snagged up with that buoy line.”

He points to the one attached to the yellow boat fender.

“And then the turtle got snagged in the fishing line. But like I said, that’s just a guess,” Klemens says. “We won’t know until everything’s recovered, and I’m assuming it will be you doing that?”