Cause of Death (3 page)

"This seat taken?" He was a handsome young man, black and built like an Olympic athlete.

"There are a lot of people who want it, but I don't know where they are." I fought with the wet suit some more.

"Damn. I hate these things."

"Just think of it as putting on an inner tube."

"Yes, that's an enormous help."

"I need to talk to you about underwater comm equipment. You ever used it before?" he said.

I glanced up at his serious face and asked, "Are you with a squad?"

"Nope. I'm just plain ole Navy. And I don't know about you, but this sure isn't the way I planned to spend my New Year's Eve. Don't know why anybody'd want to dive in this river unless they got some sort of fantasy about being a blind tadpole in a mud puddle. Or maybe if you got ironpoor blood and think all the rust in there will help."

"All the rust in there will do is give you tetanus." I looked around. "Who else here is Navy versus squad?"

"The two with the rescue boat are squad. Ki Soo down there on the dive platform is the only other Navy except our intrepid investigator with NIS. Ki's good. He's my buddy."

He gave an okay sign to Ki Soo, who gave it back, and I found all of this rather interesting and very different from what I had experienced so far.

"Now listen up." My new acquaintance spoke as if he had worked with me for years. "Comm equipment's tricky if you've never used it. It can be real dangerous." His face was earnest.

"I'm familiar with it," I assured him with more ease than I felt.

"Well, you gotta be more than familiar. You gotta be buddies with it, because like your dive buddy, it can save your life." He paused. "It can also kill you."

I had used underwater communication equipment on only one other dive, and was still nervous about having my regulator replaced by a tightly sealed mask fitted with a mouthpiece and no purge valve. I worried about the mask flooding, about having to tear it off as I frantically groped for my alternate air source, or octopus. But I was not going to mention this, not here.

"I'll be fine," I assured him again.

"Great. I heard you were a pro," he said. "By the way, my name's Jerod, and I already know who you are." Sitting Indian-style, he was tossing gravel into the water and seemed fascinated by the slowly spreading ripples. "I've heard a lot of nice things about you. In fact, when my wife finds out I met you, she's going to be jealous."

I was not certain why a diver in the Navy would have heard anything about me beyond what was in the news, which wasn't always nice. But his words were a welcome salve to my raw mood, and I was about to let him know this when he glanced at his watch, then stared down at the platform and met Ki Soo's eyes.

"Dr. Scarpetta," Jerod said as he got up. "I think we're ready to rock and roll. How about you?"

"I'm as ready as I'm going to be." I got up, too.

"What's going to be the best approach?"

"The best way-in fact, the only way-is to follow his hose down."

We stepped closer to the edge of the pier and he pointed to the johnboat.

"I've already been down once, and if you don't follow the hose you'll never find him. You ever had to wade through a sewer with no lights on?"

"That one hasn't happened to me yet."

"Well, you can't see shit. And that's the same thing here."

"To your knowledge, no one has disturbed the body," I said.

"No one's been near it but me."

He watched as I picked up my buoyancy control vest, or BC, and tucked a flashlight in a pocket.

"I wouldn't even bother. In these conditions, all a flashlight's going to do is get in your way."

But I was going to bring it because I wanted any advantage I could possibly have. Jerod and I climbed down the ladder to the dive platform so we could finish preparations, and I ignored overt stares from shipyard men as I massaged cream rinse into my hair and pulled on the neoprene hood.

I strapped a knife to my inner right calf, and then grabbed each end of a fifteen-pound weight belt and quickly hoisted it around my waist. I checked safety releases, and pulled on gloves.

"I'm ready," I said to Ki Soo.

He carried over communication equipment and my regulator.

"I will attach your air hose to the face mask." He spoke with no accent. "I understand you've used comm equipment like this before."

"That's correct," I said.

He squatted beside me and lowered his voice as if we were about to conspire. "You, Jerod and I will be in constant contact with each other over the buddy phones."

They looked like bright red gas masks with a five-strap harness in back. Jerod moved behind me and helped me into my BC and air tank while his buddy talked on'

. "As you know," Ki Soo was saying, "you breathe normally and use the push-to-talk button on the mouthpiece when you want to communicate." He demonstrated. "Now we need to get this nice and secure over your hood and tuck it in. There, you get the rest of your hair tucked in and let me make sure this is nice and tight in back."

I hated buddy phones the most when I wasn't in the water because it was difficult to breathe. I sucked in air as best I could as I peered out through plastic at these two divers I had just entrusted with my life.

"There will be two rescuers in a boat and they will be monitoring us with a transducer that will be lowered into the water. Whatever we say will be heard by whoever is listening on the surface. Do you understand?" Ki Soo looked at me and I knew I had just been given a warning.

I nodded, my breathing loud and labored in my ears.

"You want your fins on now?"

I shook my head and pointed at the water.

"Then you go first and I will toss them to you."

Weighing at least eighty pounds more than when I had arrived, I cautiously made my way to the edge of the dive platform and checked again to make certain my mask was tucked into my hood. Cathodic protectors were like catfish whiskers trailing from the huge dormant ships, the water ruffled by wind. I steeled myself for the most unnerving giant stride I had ever made.

The cold at first was a shock, and my body took its time warming the water leaking into my rubber sheath as I pulled on my fins. Worse, I could not see my computer console or its compass. I could not see my hand in front of my face, and I now understood why it was useless to bring a flashlight. The suspended sediment absorbed light like a blotter, forcing me to surface at frequent intervals to get my bearings as I swam toward the spot where the hose led from the johnboat and disappeared beneath the surface of the river.

"Everybody ten-four?" Ki Soo's voice sounded in the receiver pressed against the bone of my skull.

"Ten-four," I spoke into the mouthpiece and tried to relax as I slowly kicked barely below the surface.

"You're on the hose?" It was Jerod who spoke this time.

"I've got my hands on it now." It seemed oddly taut, and I was careful to disturb it as little as possible.

"Keep following it down. Maybe thirty feet. He should be floating right above the bottom."

I began my descent, pausing at intervals to equalize the pressure in my ears as I tried not to panic. I could not see.

My heart was pounding as I tried to will myself to relax and take deep breaths. For a moment I stopped and floated as I shut my eyes and slowly breathed. I resumed following the hose down and panic seized me again when a thick rusting cable suddenly materialized in front of me.

I tried to get under it, but I could not see where it was coming from or going to, and I was really more buoyant than I wanted to be and could have used more weight in my belt or the pockets of my BC. The cable got me from the rear, clipping my K-valve hard. I felt my regulator tug as if someone were grabbing it from behind, and the loosened tank began to slide down my back, pulling me with it. Ripping open the Velcro straps of my BC, I quickly worked my way out of it as I tried to block out everything except the procedure I had been trained to do.

"Everything ten-four?" Ki Soo's voice sounded in my mask.

"Technical problem," I said.

I maneuvered the tank between my legs so I could float on it as if I were riding a rocket in cold, murky space. I readjusted straps and fought off fear.

"Need help?"

"Negative. Watch for cables," I said.

"You gotta watch for anything," his voice came back.

It entered my mind that there were many ways to die down here as I slipped my arms inside the BC. Rolling over on my back, I snugly strapped myself in.

"Everything ten-four?" Ki Soo's voice sounded again.

"Ten-four. You're breaking up."

"Too much interference. All these big tubs. We're coming down behind you. Do you want us closer?"

"Not yet," I said.

They were maintaining a prudent distance because they knew I wanted to see the body without distraction or interference. We did not need to get in each other's way.

Slowly, I dropped deeper, and closer to the bottom, I realized the hose must be snagged, explaining why it was so taut. I was not sure which way to move, and tried going several feet to my left, where something brushed against me. I turned and met the dead man face to face, his body bumping and nudging as I involuntarily jerked away. Languidly, he twisted and drifted on the end of his tether, rubber-sheathed arms out like a sleepwalker's as my motion pulled him after me.

I let him drift close, and he nudged and bumped some more, but now I was not afraid because I was no longer surprised. It was as if he were trying to get my attention or wanted to dance with me through the hellish darkness of the river that had claimed him. I maintained neutral buoyancy, barely moving my fins for I did not want to stir up the bottom or cut myself on rusting shipyard debris.

"I've got him. Or maybe I should say he got me." I depressed the push-to-talk button. "Can you copy?"

"Barely. We're maybe ten feet above you. Holding."

"Hold a few minutes more. Then we'll get him out."

I tried my flashlight one last time, just in case, but it still proved useless, and I realized I would have to see this scene with my hands. Tucking the light back in my BC, I held my computer console almost against my mask. I could barely make out that my depth was almost thirty feet and I had more than half a tank of air. I began to hover in the dead man's face, and through the murkiness could make out only the vague shape of features and hair that had floated free of his hood.

Gripping his shoulders, I carefully felt around his chest, tracing the hose. It was threaded through his weight belt and I began following it toward whatever it was caught on.

In less than ten feet, a huge rusty screw blossomed before my eyes. I touched the barnacle-covered metal of a ship's side, steadying myself so I did not float any closer. I did not want to drift under a vessel the size of a playing field and have to blindly feel my way out before I ran out of air.

The hose was tangled and I felt along it to see if it might be folded or compressed in a way that might have cut off the flow of air, but I could find no evidence of that. In fact, when I tried to free it from the screw, I found this was not hard to do. I saw no reason why the diver could not have freed himself, and I was suspicious his hose had gotten snagged after death.

"His air hose was caught." I got on the radio again. "On one of the ships. I don't know which."

"Need some help?" It was Jerod who spoke.

"No. I've got him. You can start pulling."

I felt the hose move.

"Okay. I'm going to guide him up," I said. "You keep pulling. Very slowly."

I locked my arms under the body from behind and began kicking with my ankles and knees instead of my hips because movement was restricted.

"Easy," I warned into the microphone, for my ascent could be no more than one foot a second. "Slowly.

Slowly."

Periodically, I looked up but could not see where I was until we broke the surface. Then suddenly the sky was painted with slate-gray clouds, and the rescue boat was rocking nearby. Inflating the dead man's BC and mine, I turned him on his belly and released his weight belt, almost dropping it because it seemed so heavy. But I managed to hand it up to rescuers who were wearing wet suits and seemed to know what they were doing in their old flat bottomed boat.

Jerod, Ki Soo and I had to leave our masks on because we still had to swim back to the platform. So we were talking by buddy phone and breathing from our tanks as we maneuvered the body inside a chicken-wire basket. We swam it flush against the boat, then helped the rescuers lift it in as water poured everywhere.

"We need to take his mask off," I said, and I motioned to the rescuers.

They seemed confused, and wherever the transducer was, it clearly wasn't with them. They couldn't hear a word we said.

"You need some help getting your mask off?" one of them shouted as he reached toward me.

I waved him off and shook my head. Grabbing the side of the boat, I hoisted myself up enough to reach the basket.