Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“A rather insignificant glancing blow, if that’s the case,” she puzzles. “Certainly not the usual thing we see in a boat strike. When these animals surface for air and get hit by a speeding boat or a tanker, usually the damage is profound. He must have been barely bumped by something, or he barely bumped into something.”

“With bright green paint?”

“I got no idea,” she says.

I label the evidence container and feel the boat heave from side to side, the surf getting heavier. The temperature is dropping, and I’m chilled by cold saltwater flowing around my feet, my pants soaked up to my knees underneath white Tyvek.

“Well, if whatever he ran into or ran into him is a boat, for example, that’s a little curious,” I continue, “since most are protected with an antifouling paint, some type of coating to prevent barnacles or other organisms from attaching to the hull.”

“Ones that are properly maintained. Yes.” She is terse again and wants me gone.

“I suspect the barnacle was attached to the turtle and not to whatever struck him,” I conclude. “And paint or something greenish yellow was transferred to part of the shell.”

“Maybe,” she says distractedly, and I can tell she doesn’t think it matters and is eager for me to leave her alone.

“We’ll get this analyzed in the labs and see what it is,” I add.

Marino takes photographs while I look over the leatherback a final time, placing a gloved hand under his head to keep his bony jaws from opening when I’m close to them. I peel the soaked sheet back from his massive body, which unlike other turtles has no lower flat bony shell, the leatherback barrel-shaped and disproportionately wide around the shoulders and tapering off to short rear flippers and a long tail. I see nothing else that might be of forensic interest, and I let Pamela Quick know I don’t intend to interfere with her patient a moment longer.

“Just tell me how you want to go about things, because I’ve got to go into the water,” I say to her. “What I don’t want is to go in at the same time he does, and I certainly don’t want him running right back into the same line and getting tangled up again.”

“You’re doing your recovery from here? Or over there?” She indicates the Coast Guard boat.

I stand up and steady myself as the fireboat rocks harder. The wind is biting, and saltwater has soaked through my shoe covers and is seeping inside my boots. Of course I have no intention of recovering a dead body from a boat crowded with marine animal rescuers.

“I’ll tell you what,” I decide. “Marino and I will get back on board the Coast Guard boat and pull the buoy line in close to it so we can take care of what we need to do. And the minute we’re off this boat I suggest you get Lieutenant Klemens to move some distance from here so you can release our leatherback friend out of harm’s way.”

I climb back up the transom steps and retrieve my coat from the upper deck while Marino collects the scene cases. Then we return to the bow.

“Nice to look at, but she sure as hell doesn’t win any personality awards,” he says.

“She’s just trying to do her job and wants no interference,” I reply. “You can’t blame her.”

“Yeah, except she doesn’t give a shit someone’s dead. Not even interested.”

Marino looks back in Pamela Quick’s direction as we remove gloves, shoe covers, and Tyvek, stuffing them into a red biohazard bag.

“Some of these animal lovers are like that, though,” he says. “Fanatics. Certified whackos who will throw red paint on you or beat you up for wearing a fur collar or snakeskin boots. I got me a pair of rattlesnake-skin boots, and you think I don’t get a lot of shit when I wear them?”

He hands the cases over the rail to Labella as the two boats plunge together and apart like an accordion.

“Tanned rattlesnake skins bought off eBay and custom-made,” Marino continues to gripe.

“Sounds disgusting.” I swing one leg over the first rail, and Labella reaches for me.

“Well, don’t wear them in fucking Concord or Lincoln, in Thoreau ville”—Marino is right behind me—“where you go to jail for cutting down a damn tree,” he adds at the top of his lungs.

ten

AN AIR HORN BLARES THREE TIMES, AND THE FIREBOAT backs away from where it was anchored, pivoting on its stern, nosing toward a lighthouse jutting up whitely on the horizon. Jet engines gush and churn foamy water that dissipates into a lacy wake as firefighters move the leatherback and its rescuers toward the open sea, leaving us to take care of the rest of it.

The task I face is one I hope the media and the curious don’t know about, and I survey the water heaving in the sunlight, looking for any sign that spectators and TV crews will move on to witness the turtle’s release. I want everyone gone. I want whoever is dead recovered discreetly, respectfully, and at the same time I feel very protective of the huge old turtle and furious at human selfishness and ignorance.

Leave him alone, for God’s sake , I think, and I could easily worry myself sick about it, imagining any number of awful fates that might befall an almost extinct creature that lives simply to eat and swim and breed. I know the stories of people who motor too close to great whales and other magnificent animals, taking pictures, trying to touch or feed them, and inadvertently maim or kill them. I’m dismayed, then outraged, as I watch boaters pull up anchor and start their engines, the news helicopter already pursuing in a high hover.

“At least they’re not going to hang around here,” Labella says.

He’s crouched next to the Stokes basket, checking the restraint straps and the harness, making sure everything is functioning properly. What we don’t need is to have the body tumble out back into the water while we’re trying to hoist it in on board the boat.

“Which tells me they don’t know the reason we’re here,” he adds.

“Maybe they don’t, but what do you make of that?” I look up at the white twin-engine helicopter a thousand feet above us, I estimate. “It seems to be hanging around.”

“Not a news chopper.” He stares up, shielding his eyes. “Not MedFlight. Not Boston or state police or Homeland Security. Maybe a Sikorsky, something big, but for sure not one of ours, so I’m guessing it’s private. Someone who’s out flying and maybe wonders what’s going on down here.”

“It’s got a camera mounted on it.” I get an uneasy feeling as I watch the gleaming white machine hover steady as a rock, the nose pointed at us, the sun glaring on the windscreen.

“Maybe a TV camera. But it could also be a FLIR,” Labella says. “I can’t tell from here.”

The only private pilot I know who might have a Forward Looking Infrared Radar system thermal imager mounted on his or her helicopter is my niece, Lucy. But I don’t mention such a possibility, and it bothers me that I haven’t seen her new ship, a twin-engine Bell that was delivered to her barely a month ago. Lucy wouldn’t have a white helicopter, I reassure myself. Black or shark gray, but not white with red and blue stripes festooning the tail boom, and I don’t recognize the tail number on this one, either. I wonder if Marino has seen her new helicopter, but he seems oblivious, is busy with Sullivan and not paying any attention to what’s thudding overhead.

“Well, it’s disgusting and shouldn’t be permitted.” I’m back to being upset about the turtle, about the ugliness of human nature, as I watch rubberneckers motoring after the fireboat. “People have no respect or common sense. If some goddamn idiot runs over that leatherback after all he’s been through . . .”

“It’s illegal to hunt, harass, or injure sea turtles.” Labella gets up, a drysuit folded under his arm. “How about a hundred-thousand-dollar fine.”