pair of empty eye sockets, like mirrors removed from frames, the soft tissue of the eyes having been first to disintegrate or become a meal for feeding microbes, fish, crabs and the like. Nose, chin, cheeks, ears and forehead had all congealed into one puffy, featureless putty mask. No one could safely or routinely identify what the sea had sculpted from flesh. Santiva looked as if he were ready again to lose it, but he obviously had nothing left to chuck.
“ The body has had long exposure to the air as well as the water,” she informed him. “If it’d remained underwater, at some depth, the decay would have been forestalled to a greater degree than we see here, pressure at greater depths being equal on all sides. The flesh would’ve remained firmer, more intact. As it is, with the slightest touch, the skin sloughs off.”
Santiva watched as a piece of the dead girl curled away with the outgoing tide, like oil spilling into the water. “What does that say
… ahh, tell you about the body, about how it came to be here like this?”
It was a good question. “Come back at me with that one when I know more, will you, Eriq?” she asked.
“ Can’t get over what water does to flesh,” he said, even his words creep-crawling as he spoke.
“ Kinda like centuries-old books,” Jessica replied. “You know, how they crumble at the slightest touch, even at the threat of a touch,” she added, both fascinated and pitying at once.
“ How can you be so damned clinical?” he said, and immediately regretted it, apologized and fell silent again.
She shrugged both the remark and the apology off, searching the bloated rolls of skin about the throat and trying a peek below the rope for what she might find there. Santiva, perhaps in an attempt to further mask his earlier remark, now asked, “How can you be so sure of the age, or even the sex for that matter?” The woman’s torso, stomach to sternum, was one large blimp, swallowing the breasts in bloated mimicry of the female form. The crotch area, too, was inflated beyond recognition. What they had was hardly human. Jessica dared not, at this time and place, attempt to remove the tightly twisted rope from the bloated neck to reveal what awful bruises lived beneath. “The other bodies before Jane Doe here were discovered without rope around their necks.”
Santiva blinked and nodded. “That’s exactly right.”
“ Did Coudriet say anything about ropes on his victim of this morning?”
“ No, no… but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any. I’ll check when we get back ashore.”
Jessica loosened the rope about the neck with some care, looking to find the bruises she had come to expect about the Adam’s apple, the thumb impressions of the murderer. They were clearly present, and so she mystified Santiva once again by saying, “This is no copycat killing, Eriq.
This is the real thing; all the marks of our boy.”
“ You’re sure of that?”
“ I am.”
“ Then why the ropes left on the neck and why’d he leave the hands tied? You think he did on the others, too, maybe, but then the rope came loose and was claimed by the sea?”
Her most doubtful glance told him she didn’t believe that theory for a moment.
Santiva tried to salvage the question. “Or do you think the bastard is taunting us with the rope?”
“ Probably… yes, I’d guess he intentionally left the rope for us to find.”
“ Then he damned sure is starting to play games with us. Three bodies in one day, intentional clues left behind. He’s grown bored with the game as it was being played and has changed the rules, hasn’t he?”
She quietly said, “I put my fingers in her mouth.”
“ What?”
“ You asked me how I can be sure of her age.”
“ You can tell by putting your fingers in her mouth?”
“ Earlier, I placed my fingers into what’s left of her mouth; actually, it’s easier to do with her face down if you want the top molars. I felt out the dental work.”
“ And?”
“ She’s got a full set of wisdom teeth, very few caps and fewer spaces. She’s a young woman, in her late teens or early twenties.”
“ Wisdom teeth, huh?”
“ They usually emerge between sixteen and seventeen years of age. It follows that since hers are fully formed that-”
“ All right…. I get it…”
“ I can also tell by the skeletal size and makeup, but this is all guesswork, as you know. It’ll take a complete autopsy to be certain of anything. ”She looks much older… so damned large.”
“ How many floaters have you seen, Eriq?” she asked again. “I confess… not many who’ve been in the water this long, obviously “
“ The tissues expand far beyond normal.”
The skin tone was bleached, stark, bloodless, albino in nature. Santiva couldn’t rise above the awful hue, the bloating, the sloughing away of skin, as if the sea owned her now and was not willing to allow her to be taken, at least not wholly.
Jessica began helping Eriq understand what was going through his mind. “It’s the glue… the bond between the outermost layer of flesh and the corium below. It has weakened so much that the blood has seeped out through the corium, escaping a trace bit at a time.”
Eriq shivered in the blistering sun and the warm water. “You mean like osmosis?”
She nodded. “Precisely, osmosis and diffusion… just like in a high school chemistry class experiment, except this one’s due to murder.”
“ You just enjoy grossing me out, don’t you, Jess?” She managed a wane smile. “Let’s say you make it too easy for me. Eriq.”
“ I need a drink.”
“ You’d only spew it up, Eriq.”
“ I hope you’re not forgetting that I am your superior, Agent Coran. Talk like that could get you into trouble. No Cuban can be told he can’t hold his liquor.”
“ A thousand pardons. Chief.”
“ How much longer?” he asked again.
“ Okay… Okay, you win. Let’s get her bagged, but please, please see to it that those clowns on shore don’t drag her out using the damned ropes or her hair, so her hands or her head doesn’t pop off.”
“ They’ll take every precaution. I’ll see to that.”
“ I mean it. The ropes have cut and burned their way near through the wrists and neck, and there’s really not much holding them on.”
“ I’ll make them apprised of it.”
She stopped him with a hand on his forearm. “Eriq, this bastard takes delight in dragging his victims’ bodies through the water at high speeds.”
Eriq gulped at the image this notion once again caused inside his head. “I recall you saying as much the other night over dinner.”
“ It’s pure conjecture, but I think one, maybe two of the victims weren’t so much victims of shark attack as victims of the ropes, which cut off their heads and hands, allowing them to pull free of their moorings unbeknownst even to the killer. I think that’s why some have come undone, as it were.”
“ But these ropes didn’t come loose from anywhere?” She held up the end of the rope that trailed from the dead girl’s throat. “No, no… This was cut with a knife.”
“ Don’t worry, I’ll make sure the medics know the score.”
“ Without giving too much away?”
“ Right. Of course.” They both knew they had to keep some information about the killer and his private moments with his victims a complete secret from the press and public. How else to know him when they were standing across from him in an interrogation room?
“ And make sure they take her to the right morgue, Eriq, and-”
“ All right, I get it.” Eriq didn’t need a second telling. He was now quickly wading toward shore, solid ground and the other men. He looked back only once, when he heard Jessica saying a prayer over the dead.
