” Lynette watched the older woman, with her no-nonsense step and severely arranged hair, storm into the building, wondering what Lois ever did for fun, for frolic… for sex.
Inside the spacious facility of the laboratories. Dr. Insley found Wainwright studying the latest human body part to fall from the gut of a great white.
“ How dare you disobey me, Doctor?” she stormed at him. “To go over my head to the board members, and to call in the FBI after I assured you that there was no necessity here to do so, that these human body fragments are par for the course in our research and that-”
“ I tried reasoning with you, Dr. Insley,” Wainwright calmly replied, his body language rigid, unable to completely ignore his so-called superior. Still, he kept his eyes glued to the human bone and tissue specimen he was studying through the wide lens of the powerful magnifying glass, which he now swung away from himself, the glass careening away on its swivel arm, trying its best to strike Dr. Insley.
Finally, he could no longer ignore the woman, who stood like a pillar of salt before him in her white lab coat. Meeting her eyes, he said, ‘ These parts are extremely fresh, and the sheer number indicates an anomaly at best. You have to concede that much. Don’t you read the papers?”
“ What papers?”
“ The newspapers.”
“ I have enough to readjust keeping up with the literature in the field.”
“ The Miami Herald and even the Keys papers have been filled with missing persons cases lately, and some freak has been claiming responsibility, writing letters to the authorities about how he hates women, and all these parts appear to be petite… female parts? Get it. Doctor? I mean you have to concede that-”
“ Concede? I don’t have to concede a damned thing to you, Dr. Wainwright. In fact, you can pack your belongings and find the door. Your dubious services are no longer required.”
“ I’ll fight you on this, Lois.”
“ Goddamn you, Joel, do you really think that you can come in here and unseat me, a person of my standing, with my record and years?”
“ I don’t intend walking out of here without a fight, if that’s what you mean.
” She stared icily at Wainwright, a tall, imposing man with prematurely graying hair. She held her stare, as if hoping her eyes alone might destroy him.
Joel Wainwright looked back at Dr. Insley’s fleshy jowls and pink complexion, thinking again how unbecoming a woman she was, and how powerful she remained. Precisely why she had been given so much authority here was beyond Wainwright’s comprehension, but he had obviously won her wrath this time, regardless of how successful the Shark Research Fishing Tournament had been. It had been successful in large part thanks to him, but Dr. Insley didn’t wish to deal with reality, that they had twice the amount of specimens as last year; nor did she want to deal with the fact of the human body parts in the back freezer stacked like wrapped raw steaks from a deli-hands, arms, legs, shoulder bones, pieces of flesh that hadn’t yet been digested by the shark’s slow metabolic juices, they were that fresh. Neither had the body parts been properly categorized by the scientists on Islamorada, because everyone here majored in shark, not human, anatomy.
So Wainwright had begun to collect the human anatomical parts, after at first simply discarding the occasional piece as “expected remnants of shark attacks” which occurred up and down the coast of Florida every season. Dr. Insley had made inane assurances that most victims of shark aggression, while scarred for life, lived past such attacks, but then the number of body parts became too high- and the sheer size of those parts too large- to ignore a moment longer. Ignore it and it will go away seemed Lois Insley’s management style, her modus operandi. Meanwhile, an entire pelvic section dropped from one shark, and there were twenty-five more sharks now being dumped in the cold tanks, forty-seven in all, some ten thousand pounds. How many more human parts might they expect, he wondered and calculated, his prediction frightful.
As for the FBI, who else was he going to call? The frigging EPA? The coast guard? His phone call was put through to the FBI’s forensic laboratories the day before, and he found himself talking to a charming voice on the other end which turned out to be that of Dr. Jessica Coran, who was immediately curious and interested in what they had found. “Dr. Insley,” Wainwright began slowly now, deliberate in his every word, “you might well ignore this heinous, unpleasant side effect of our tournament if you wish; you may have no problem concentrating on the prize for Florida’s Abbott School of Marine and Atmospheric Science laboratory, on the plentiful specimens, more than we possibly know what to do with, but God bless it, woman, I’m a simple man with simple ethics, and I am not willing to ignore the obvious-at least not in this case.”
“ Show me what is so obvious, Doctor!
” He took firm hold of her and moved her to and through the freezer doors, where a vaporous cloud engulfed them, then fought past them to escape into the lab.
Inside the freezer, Wainwright pointed at shelves stacked with body parts and bones. “Look, look closely, Dr. Insley. Do you need the problem put on a string and tied about your neck? This is an uncommon phenomenon, an incredibly high incidence of human parts found in a relatively small, concentrated shark population. It’s neither incidental nor anything less than an abhorrent anomaly. Something had to be done about it. This information could not stay inside these walls. And that’s what I intend to put in my report to the board of governors.” The threat was clearly unveiled.
Checking his now frozen watch, he added, “So, I expect that something will be done when Dr. Coran of the FBI arrives, and I expect that will be soon now.”
“ I cannot believe that you invited FBI operatives into this facility.”
“ Just what’re you afraid of. Doctor? This is the U.S. Government, their official police arm.”
“ I’m afraid of nothing. I… I detest military and paramilitary types of any sort.”
“ They’re coming to see if there’s any connection between our discovery and those missing young women, that’s all.”
“ Suppose they want records? Copies of our work here?”
“ I can’t believe the level of your paranoia, Doctor.” She clenched her teeth and glared up at him. “Our work here must remain secret. Do you know how many others are desperate for our research?” Insley spat her words at him, and as she stormed from the cooler, Wainwright thought he sensed in the cold gloom of the place a warming trend. And rightly so, he thought, the place having rid itself of the woman. He wondered how he might rid himself and the institute of her. She was right to feel a threat, but not from the outside.
Jessica Coran stared out through the thick bubble of the helicopter at a world so far removed from D.C.-and civilization as she knew it-that the place emerged in her sifting mind as a primordial playground set in a time warp. The chopper was generally following the Overseas Highway, built to connect the string of Florida Keys that snaked out into the Gulf on the one side, the Atlantic on the other. The gleaming white strip of sand, concrete and steel that marked bridges and roadways looked, from up here, to be a string of spaghetti, a tenuous connection of palm- sprouting island hideaways without K marts and superstores, only the sporadic shell shop for unique Florida collectibles might be found alongside Texaco signs and near-deserted strip malls at which the bare necessities-bait and beer, tackle and bread, buckets and bologna-could be bought.
There was no want of traffic, however, along the single lanes going north and south, and the sheer expanse of the bridges over the greenest, purest-looking water she’d ever seen was in itself amazing. The bridges were thin connective tissue between the islands, long and narrow and sizzling beneath an unmercifully hot sun.
For as far as Jessica could see, there were dozens upon dozens of low mangrove islands floating on the luminous green mirror of the sea. Above and around the islands, ancient gulls and egrets, pelicans and white- winged ibises played, cart wheeling through the primitive sky-the same birds as had flown here a thousand years before, she imagined. The endless blue-green panorama conspired to make the beating helicopter and the pulsing cars on the highway below seem like just so many reverse anachronisms, things out of sync, out of time and out of place.
By some uncanny miracle, the development wars had left the land here between Key Largo and Key West virtually untouched; there were no Hiltons, Marriott’s, Holiday Inns or other resorts, not a single gleaming monument to man save the occasional house, shack, marina and dive shop.
The pilot called it the “backcountry” and nailed his estimation of the place with a few choice phrases: “devoid of fresh water”; “not suitable for housing”; “a breeding ground for mosquitoes the size of my mother-in-law”; “a dumping ground for gator-baiters and drunken fishermen.”
