Barney had gone to check on his “noncompliant” crab traps. Instead, he’d discovered the body of a blond male tangled underwater in one of his lines.
“There—that’s the channel entrance.” Barney gestured toward a dark gap amid the mangrove trees. “You go in there.”
Mac slowed the launch, steering them carefully into the channel. Water slapped and chuckled against the prow. Heat grew wetter. Branches clawed at them from the sides, and twigs scraped softly against the hull. Mac slowed the engine further. It grew darker as they went in deeper. Hotter. Clouds of mosquitoes buzzed over the water, and tiny bugs got trapped in the orange frizz of hair that had sprung out around Lozza’s face in spite of her best efforts to marshal it all back into a tidy bun.
Mac switched on the spotlights, and eerie shapes and shadows jumped at them. A sense of a presence oozed out of the swamp, like something hidden, waiting, biding its time to clutch at them. The air smelled foul.
“You think it’s him—Cresswell-Smith?” Gregg asked.
“Would be weird,” she said.
“Right,” he said. “Because if he went overboard ten klicks out to sea, how could he have washed in here? Doesn’t make any sense.”
Lozza flicked a glance at the newly minted constable fresh off probation. He talked too much. Especially when nervous. Or anytime, really. It annoyed the hell out of Lozza. Her default on the job was to go silent. She also knew her irritation stemmed in part from the fact that Gregg was good-looking and she was secretly attracted to the surfer turned cop. He’d come to policing later than most. He still ran his surf school on the side, and he’d helped teach Lozza’s daughter to surf. But good-looking men tended not to notice Lozza in that way. Which tended to make her a little bitter toward them.
Thunder clapped and lightning pulsed, turning their surroundings into a sudden freeze-frame of black and white. A few plops of rain hit the water. Lozza’s mind turned to the day she’d first met Martin Cresswell-Smith’s wife on the beach. It would be Lozza’s task to inform Ellie if this was her husband tangled in Barney’s crab-pot lines. Ellie’s words from their earlier interview swam into her mind.
“I hope you don’t find him. And if you do, I hope he’s dead and that he suffered.”
“There!” Barney pointed suddenly. “I tied my crab pots to some roots behind that jetty jutting out over there.”
Mac cut the engine and they drifted with the current, listening to the small waves chuckle against the hull as they floated toward the jetty. Thunder cracked and silver light flashed. Everything turned darker as the sun slipped below the horizon and storm clouds shouldered across the sky.
Lozza took her flashlight from her duty belt, clicked it on, and panned her beam over the jetty. She saw where Barney had tied some frayed-looking ropes to mangrove roots. The jetty itself was new—constructed as part of the controversial Agnes Marina development, which Martin Cresswell-Smith and his wife, Ellie, were spearheading. Barney had explained to Lozza how he used decayed-looking ropes above the surface of the water to hide the fact that his illegal pots were down beneath. But underwater, the old rope ends had been affixed to bright-orange polypropylene—or polyprop—lines that led to the pots. When Barney had returned to check his pots earlier today, he’d pulled on his lines and one had stuck fast. Rather than cutting the rope and losing a pot potentially full of good muddies, he’d decided to return with a mate’s son to untangle the lines. The teen had gone into the water with goggles and fins, pulling himself down to the bottom along the orange polyprop. In the murky water he had come face-to-face with a body tangled in the line.
The kid had flailed wildly to the surface, gasping for air. Barney told him they couldn’t leave “it” down there. “It” could be someone they knew. So the poor kid had plucked up the courage to go down once more. He’d cut through the rope with a knife. The body had shot straight up to the surface like a gas-filled balloon, popping out into a small cove behind the jetty, where it had drifted up against the mangrove roots on the far end.
“It got lodged in the roots,” Barney had said. “That’s when we gapped it back to the open water of the basin, where we could get better mobile reception. And I called you coppers.”
Mac allowed the police launch to drift slightly past the jetty, angling his craft so that the spotlights illuminated the shallow inlet. They saw it almost instantly—the gleam of fish-belly-white skin. A khaki shirt. Yellow-blond hair. No pants. The white buttocks cutting like half moons just above the surface as the floater bobbed in the reeds against a tangle of roots, trapped there by the gentle push of the current.
Barney made a rapid sign of the cross over himself.
“Tie up to the jetty,” Lozza ordered Mac. “Gregg and I can bushwhack from the end of the jetty to the other side of that cove.” Mac fired up the engines, and with a growl of bubbles, the boat surged toward the dock, connecting with a bump. Shadows leaped. The water around the pilings and roots made a slopping sound. Thunder cracked right above them and lightning split the air. Rain started to pummel down steadily, pocking and splashing the dark water, droplets silvery in the glare of the spotlights.
Lozza and Gregg climbed onto the jetty. Both used flashlights to navigate from the end of the jetty into the swamp forest. Lozza expanded her baton and used it to thwack through the tangle of grasses and reeds. Snakes were a concern. She hoped the action would chase them off. Gregg stayed close behind her. He swatted at clouds of mosquitoes, cursing. The bugs seemed to prefer his blood to hers.
It gave Lozz a punch of satisfaction. It wasn’t only women who
