She climbed into the backseat of Quincey’s departmental car, and once again noted how dull and bored the man’s partner was with the whole undertaking. She mentally made note of the fact that Samernow smelled of liquor from the night before and that he looked as if he’d slept in his clothes. Perhaps the case was taking a toll on the younger man.
Quincey seemed to know what she was thinking, having gazed up into the rearview mirror. “Mark’s going through a tough divorce,” Quincey said, covering for his partner. “It’s his first.”
“ Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Detective.”
“ Still, if the captain sees you in this condition, Mark, it’ll be hell to pay.”
Samernow scowled. “Mind your own damned business!” He sat sullen for the duration of the trip to Silver Bay.
“ Anything you can tell me, Detective Quincey, about how the body was discovered that might help me now?”
“ Same as the others, really. Naked, same signs of wear and tear, as if in the water for a long time. It’s bad, from what we’ve been told.”
“ Think I’m going to be sick, Charlie,” announced Samernow in a near whisper. “Pull over.”
“ We can’t pull over, Mark! We’re on our way to a crime scene.”
“ Then let me the hell out!”
“ What?”
“ You heard me, damnit! Either pull over and let me puke or let me outta the damned car.”
Quincey, exasperated, pulled hard into the curb, hitting it and jarring them all. He ordered, “Get out, partner! Go on!”
“ Just hold on a minute,” Samernow replied.
“ Get the fuck outta the car, Mark!” He glanced back at Jessica and added, “Pardon me, Dr. Coran, but lately all Mark responds to is cusswords.”
Samernow slammed the door hard and Quincey burned rubber, leaving his partner to alternately shake a fist at him and double over to vomit in the grass. Again Quincey was apologizing to Dr. Coran and blinking back at her image in the mirror.
“ Sometimes we all make asses of ourselves, Quince,” she assured him. “Not to worry on my behalf, Detective, really… I understand. The job takes a toll.”
“ Between Mark’s divorce and this case, he’s… well, he’s just stretched to the limit is all. I hope it… well, I hope you don’t have to say anything about this to anybody.”
“ You have my word.”
“ Maybe the captain’ll believe one more excuse…”
“ But you doubt it, right?”
“ So, you read minds, too?”
“ Not exactly.”
“ Experience, huh? Some teacher.”
“ The mother of all teachers.”
They passed over a beautiful, spiraling causeway, the water shimmering, even blinding in the morning rays, which danced like splattering nickels and dimes atop the water’s glimmering surface.
“ Here’s our turnoff just ahead. I’ll have you there in a jiffy.”
“ Part of me wishes I’d gotten out of the car with your partner back there, Detective,” she darkly joked.
“ Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“ So, who discovered the body?”
“ Some young couple on bikes, out for a predawn ride. Honeymooners, I hear.”
“ Uhgggg…”
“ Anyway, they rushed to the nearest phone and dialed 911; the paramedics and a couple of cruisers got there about the same time. The paramedics started toward the body, you know, to check it out, but one of the cops, a veteran, saw it for what it was and wouldn’t let them proceed. They got into a shouting match, but we got lucky and the veteran cop stood his ground, a guy named Frank Lombardi who’s seen a lot, used to be a cop in New York City. Anyway, he knew about the FBI request to leave floaters who’ve been in the water for any length of time alone until you guys passed on ‘em. So, here we go.”
He swung the car into an area where a Medivac van and several police cruisers stood silent sentinel over a stretch of palm trees and crescent beach. Already a mob of onlookers was at the scene, and police had snaked a yellow and black banner, flimsy in the wind, between the palm trees, daring anyone to cross the line.
At the back of the Medivac van a young couple, each in spandex wear, their English touring bicycles beside them, the woman weeping, held on to one another, speaking to each other in British accents. They looked up at Jessica, wondering about her as she snatched a lab coat from her black valise and kicked off her shoes, placing them in the back of Charles Quincey’s car. She prepared to go barefoot across the sand and to wade out to the body in the surf.
Santiva had pulled in alongside them, and he called out to Jessica that he would speak to the first on-scene cops and anyone who might shed any light on the situation. She went for the sand and the water and the body.
Jessica had done this before, trawling out into water with her black valise on a float-table for a close examination of the body before anyone else got their hands on it; the fear of allowing others to drag the body to shore, tumble it onto sand, lift it into a waiting body bag, then hoist it into an ambulance to be whisked away, was the fear of losing vital information and possible evidence which might not otherwise be had, as floaters were known to drop evidence all along the path of transportation. Waterlogged, the body was literally coming unglued cell by weakening cell.
Jessica was followed out to the body by a handful of curious seagulls and a crotchety old pelican, all wondering what she had in her bag that might be of interest to them. One or two of the seagulls dipped to the body to examine it, but knowing by some instinct that it wasn’t for them, they immediately fled back to the relative safety of buzzing about Jessica’s head as she continued toward the corpse, wading farther out into the hip-deep water, her lab coat floating around her now like a white Christmas tree skirt.
The body had come up against a jetty of jagged stones, where it washed like flotsam in a gentle, rocking tide. The situation was similar to an earlier floater case she’d supervised in D.C., but this time she didn’t need hip boots, a flashlight or a raincoat. This time the sun beat down on the awful waste and the waters surrounding her lapped against her skin with a warm tongue. In the earlier instance, the water had been frigid and black.
She recalled the other floater, a young teenager whose death had at first appeared the result of drugs and a stumbling accident. It was before her FBI days when she was chief of pathology for Washington Memorial, and it certainly hadn’t been her last floater case-as much as she would have liked for it to be. But an M.E. always remembered her first floater…
Jessica had proven the cause of death in fact to be a blow to the back of the head which had sent the teen into the water, causing his death by drowning-he had drowned while unconscious. Armed with this knowledge, the W’PD stepped up their investigation and learned that the boy’s so-called friends had attacked him and left him to drown, all over an argument involving a pair of sneakers- the only article of clothing missing from the body. Life, she mused, was as cheap today on the streets of America as it was in Hitler’s Germany or in the time of the Romans, who fed on the carnage of Christians thrown into the lions’ dens in their sporting arenas. While technology and weaponry had stepped into futuristic vistas, man himself had changed very little since the days of his caveman ancestor, who picked up the first femur to use as a club to strike down his neighbor.
This floater and everything around the victim was different. This floater-basking beneath bright sunlight on the lip of a vast, aquamarine and lush velvet horizon of sky and water-was altogether different from the starfishlike little boy found in that filthy, stagnant stone quarry in Washington, D.C., so many years before. The boy had died in a dark little hole, a watery cemetery; he’d felt no pain after the initial blow to the head which had rendered him unconscious. He hadn’t felt a thing after his school buddies had attacked.
But today’s corpse, this body on this bright Florida morning, lay in stark contrast here to the screaming life all around her, both above and below the water. Both killings were unconscionable; perhaps all killings were unconscionable, she reminded herself now, but in the light of so much life, this one seemed doubly so.
