Page 3 of Nightshade
THE WATER WAS cold. It felt like ice poking into his ears as he descended. Most of his body was insulated by the wet suit he’d kept from his days on the sheriff’s dive team, but his feet, his scalp, and his ears were exposed to the chill.
Stilwell felt a sense of déjà vu as he went down. The cold. The sound of his own measured breathing in the mask. The slow motion and silence of things underwater.
He followed Denzel Abbott down, both tethered by the hookahs connected to the compressor up on the hull scraper’s skiff. The air piped through the hose was foul, stale, and oily in Stilwell’s mouth and lungs. He fought back nausea as he sank with the help of the weight belt borrowed from Abbott.
The sun had burned away the marine layer by the time Stilwell got back to the harbor after Tash Dano’s call. Abbott told him that he had been scraping barnacles off the Aurora when the glint of shiny metal caught his eye from twenty-five yards away. He went farther down to investigate and was repelled by what he saw. He was pretty sure it was a body wrapped in something black and anchored, but he did not go closer to determine further details.
They went into the water about thirty feet off the Aurora’ s stern. Rays of light shot through the tall branches of the kelp forest rising from the bottom, otherworldly strands of green leaves languidly reaching for sunlight and swaying in the current like a line of dancers in sync. Stilwell could now see a reflection off a polished metal anchor.
They moved through the shadow of the Aurora’ s hull as they dropped farther into the depths of the harbor. The body—if it was a body—was thirty feet down. It was as Abbott had described: A human figure bloated and bursting from an opening in what looked like a large black bag that was wrapped in braided anchor line and a heavy galvanized chain. The chain extended three feet down to an anchor snagged on a coral outcropping. Long dark hair had come through the opening in the black plastic and floated free in the current. Stilwell could see that it was attached to a white scalp. As he approached, he realized that it looked like a macabre balloon arrangement buffeted by the bottom current of the harbor.
Stilwell wore diving gloves he had retrieved with his wet suit from his locker at the sub. He used a finger to spread the drawstring opening in the black bag until he could see a face. It was waxy and misshapen from bloating caused by decomp gases. It was almost unrecognizable as human, but he knew from his experiences in the blue world that it was indeed a person.
He noticed a streak of purple dye in the dark hair and guessed he was looking at the remains of a woman. There were fissure lines in the face that could have been caused by decomposition, postmortem sea-life predation, or injury sustained prior to death. The image brought back memories of victims he had seen as a body-recovery diver—horrors he’d thought he’d put behind him. In the vernacular, they were called floaters or sinkers, depending on the circumstances—words used to dehumanize and compartmentalize what was seen in the murky depths. But Stilwell couldn’t forget them. The girl at the bottom of Lake Piru, with eyes cast up toward the light and a god that hadn’t saved her. The man in the suit and tie, his sunglasses still in place, with concrete blocks tied to his feet at the Bouquet Reservoir. The baby in the back seat of the car driven intentionally down the boat ramp at Castaic Lake. All found in the depths of a blue world that was calm and quiet and yet so deadly.
He could tell that this one had been in the water a while. Four days, at least. His eyes left the blanched eyes of the dead woman and moved down the chain to the anchor that had kept the body from floating to the surface. It was a plow anchor that had caught snugly on the coral ledge.
Stilwell knew the stages of decomposition in cold water. The body had been weighted and submerged. It had been anchored to the bottom until microorganisms in the intestines began creating gases, leading to bloat and buoyancy that started to lift the body despite the weight of the anchor and chain. Whoever had dropped the woman into the water had not anticipated these changes.
The body and the anchor chain would become buoyant enough to move easily with the currents, skipping across the coral and kelp beds until it finally rose to the surface or was snagged by something on the bottom. Stilwell had once recovered a body from Apollo Lake that had gotten entangled with an old washing machine that had been dumped off a boat. This anchor’s snag on the coral ledge was only temporary. Stilwell knew it could loosen and break free with the change of current in the next outgoing tide.
He noted that the anchor wasn’t from a large boat like the Aurora . He guessed its weight at twelve pounds. The stainless steel that had initially caught Abbott’s eye was for show. It wasn’t an anchor galvanized against corrosion and stored in a boat compartment. It most likely sat on rubber rollers on the prow, shining clean and on display, attached to a windlass that would drop and raise it at the push of a button from the boat’s helm. The anchor hadn’t come from a working boat. It was from a pleasure boat, maybe a sailboat. The kinds of vessels that filled the harbor every weekend.
He had seen enough. He needed to move to the surface to get the gas fumes out of his lungs and to call out the dive team as well as the homicide unit and coroner’s investigators. This would not be his case and he was glad for that.
He turned and saw Abbott standing on the bottom several feet away from the body. His eyes were wide and scared behind his dive mask. Stilwell unsnapped his weight belt and turned back to the body. He wrapped the belt around the anchor, hoping to keep the body from wandering with the current should its mooring break loose from the ledge. He had not checked the tide chart that morning and wasn’t sure when the current would change direction. He wanted to make sure the body did not surface in the harbor on the first day of Memorial Day weekend.
Stilwell’s lungs were now burning from fuel-contaminated air. He pointed to the surface and Abbott nodded and started up. Stilwell followed, and they broke surface on either side of Abbott’s skiff. Stilwell threw an arm over the side and yanked his mask off. He gulped in clean air and looked across the boat at Abbott, who held on to the other side.
“You’ve got a leak in your compressor,” he said.
“I know,” Abbott said. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“No, it’s bad. I’m going to get a seven-point-oh headache out of it.”
“Sorry, man. I guess I’m just used to it.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“So, what happens now? You going to just leave it where it is?”
“For now. I’ll call out the recovery team as soon as I get to my phone. You’ll get your weight belt back once they recover the body.”
“I’m not worried about it.”
Abbott hoisted himself over the side and into the skiff, causing it to rock violently. Stilwell was almost clipped on the chin when the rail rose. He waited until the boat calmed and then pulled himself up and over the side as well.
“Look who we got waitin’ on us,” Abbott said.
Stilwell turned to look back at the skiff dock and saw Tash Dano standing next to Lionel McKey. With them was Doug Allen, the four-term mayor of Avalon.
“News travels fast,” Abbott said.
Stilwell nodded.
“Here we go,” he whispered to himself.