Dangerous Depths (3 page)

“You know me, Calvin. I have to ask.”

Calvin swung the van into the gravel at
Pickering’s Landing and cut the engine. It had to be close to four
in the morning.

“I be real worried ‘bout Elyse,” he said.

“Yeah, me too,” I said, touching his arm.
“Good night, Calvin.”

Sadie saw me coming down the dock. She’d been
sitting on alert anxiously waiting for me. She ran toward me,
smelled my bandaged hand and whined.

“Sweet Sadie. It’s okay,” I whispered. I
stood on the dock looking out to where the
Caribbe
had been.
The line was still tied to the dock, the other end floated in the
water, frayed and blackened. Debris floated nearby, and a few tiny
flames still lingered. The island fire trucks would have come and
gone. Nothing to do but watch the flames burning. I’d called Dunn,
the head of Tortola PD and my boss, from the hospital. He’d have a
couple officers and another diver over here at first light.

I wasn’t waiting. Until I knew better, I was
treating this like a crime scene. By morning, the stuff floating in
the water might be drifting halfway to Cuba. I forced exhaustion
aside and headed back to the
Sea Bird
. Gathering flashlight,
a net, evidence bags and jars, and the boat hook, and loaded it all
into in my dingy. Sadie clambered in next to me. There was no
leaving her behind this time.

I untied the dinghy and rowed toward the
wreckage, shining the light into the water. Long skinny ballyhoo
drifted just below the surface, their silvery bodies reflecting in
the beam from my flashlight. I rowed slowly through the litter.
There wasn’t much worth retrieving—just a lot of ruined pieces of
wood, the top from a Styrofoam cooler, a life preserver. Everything
Elyse owned was down on the sea floor.

I spotted something orange floating in the
water. As I got closer I realized it was Elyse’s baseball cap, the
one she always wore, orange with the
Society of Ocean
Conservation
script encircling a turtle. My breath caught in my
throat. I remembered the last time I’d seen her in it. It had been
just a couple days ago when we’d sat at the end of the dock
laughing. Right now the joke eluded me and I knew it would be a
while before I found anything that funny again.

I wondered if she’d had the hat on when the
boat exploded. Not likely. It had probably been hanging on the hook
where she always left it, with her rose-tinted granny glasses
perched on the bill.

I shone the light into the water, looking for
anything else that might be important. The beam glanced off a small
brown bottle bobbing on the surface near what looked like part of a
door. I rowed over, scooped the bottle out of the water and into an
evidence jar along with the sea water, and capped it. I could see
the label, something called Ambien. It had
SAMPLE
stamped
across it and a few white tablets inside. I found nothing else
worth retrieving.

“Come on, Sadie, I need some sleep.” I rowed
back to the
Sea Bird
, tied the dingy up, and went below. My
boat was a mess. Books, broken dishes, and dog food littered the
floor—the aftermath of the explosive seas that had tossed the
Sea Bird
like a toy boat.

I was pulling the last of the glass and dog
food from under the salon table, when the broom came out with the
bright green sticky note attached to a bristle. I recognized the
Society of Conservation logo. It was a note from Elyse.

Hannah

Come by the Caribbe when you get home
tonight. Doesn’t matter how late. I need to talk to you.

Elyse

Christ. I hadn’t seen the note when I’d
gotten in last night. I had been out sailing all day with O’Brien.
He owns SeaSail, the largest and most successful charter company in
the British Virgin Islands. I met him the first time I came to the
islands. I’d suspected him in the murder I was down there
investigating. He started making passes the day we met. I pride
myself on the fact that I was
almost
convinced of his
innocence before I jumped into bed with him.

When O’Brien dropped me off at the
Sea
Bird
, I’d never turned on the salon lights—just gone straight
to bed. Elyse would have stuck the note on the chart table,
thinking I wouldn’t miss it. And I wouldn’t have if I’d turned on
the damn lights. What the hell had Elyse wanted to talk about?

I was assembling my dive gear when the police
boat, the
Wahoo,
came roaring into the bay, engines cutting
back at the last possible instant. The boat slid up to the dock in
a spray of water.

“Snyder!”

“Hey dar, Hannah. How you be doin’ dis fine
day?” Deputy Jimmy Snyder smiled, that damned smile. Jimmy was the
youngest member of the Tortola Police Department, just a skinny kid
really, with hair in tangled corn rows closely knotted against his
scalp.

Stark was with him. He threw me a line and I
tied the
Wahoo
to the cleat where the
Caribbe
had
once been secured. Stark was a detective in the department and had
been for almost ten years. He was big, black, and bald, his shiny
head usually sporting a pair of sunglasses. He looked more like a
drug dealer than a cop.

Stark and I had clashed in the past,
interactions that went from passive aggression to outright
hostility. Finally, we’d made peace. Stark was a soft touch. I’d
actually talked him into taking one of Nomad’s kittens. He’d named
her Camille. Old girlfriend, I figured.

Stark helped Snyder climb onto the dock.
Jimmy still wasn’t a hundred percent. He was hobbling because he’d
stepped in front of a bullet meant for me a few months back.

Since Jimmy’s brush with death, Chief Dunn
had kept him on a short leash in the office, doing paper work. He’d
also managed to find some extra funds to send Jimmy to the local
college for training in computers. No one was sure Jimmy would ever
recover completely from his injuries and even if he did, the kid
needed to be kept out of harm’s way for a while. Otherwise he’d
never see nineteen. And a little education never hurt anyone. God
knows why Dunn had let him behind the wheel of the
Wahoo
today.

Edmund Carr was with them. He was a small
man, about thirty-five, balding, with delicate hands but a firm
grip. When he wasn’t diving, he could usually be found sitting
behind his desk at Central Bank, dressed in a conservative business
suit.

I remembered the first time I ever dived with
Carr. He’d gone down with me to retrieve the body of a tourist who
had been shot in the head and dumped into the water. Before it
could drift out to sea, the body had gotten caught in the coral off
of a tiny island called Sandy Cay near Jost Van Dyke just north of
Tortola. Carr had helped me secure the underwater evidence, bag the
body, and take it to the surface.

Ever since, Carr had made himself available
whenever I needed help with a recovery. I’d given him some
rudimentary training in underwater investigation. I was doing my
best to build a reliable team. Diving alone was foolhardy, and I
trusted Carr by my side at depth. At least now he knew better than
to retrieve anything at all under the water until I gave him the
okay. And he was cool-headed and competent, not one of these Type A
divers out to prove how good they are.

Carr handed me full tanks and his equipment
and stepped onto the dock. I was already in my wetsuit. Getting
into it earlier this morning had been a delicate operation because
of the burns. Tilda had helped with the process when I had gone up
to the marina for assistance—but not before she’d insisted on
cutting my hair.

“It’s got to be done,” she said. “Some of
it’s not two inches long. You can’t be going around with short
clumps of burned hair all over your head.”

She was right. The long hair that I’d been so
adept at pulling into a ponytail in the heat and up into sexy wisps
for a date with O’Brien had to go. She cut. And cut. Long strands
of chestnut hair dropped around my feet as the two girls looked on
giggling.

“Done,” Tilda said, handing me a mirror. It
wasn’t bad. She’d cropped my hair to two inches all the way around.
A couple of curly strands bounced onto my forehead. The whole
effect might be considered sophisticated, if you thought about it
the right way.

“Oh Hannah, you look so cute, like a movie
star,” Rebecca chimed.

“Cute?” I said. Rebecca was jumping around my
chair on one foot, singing a song about a hare. Clearly she didn’t
know the difference between
hare
and my new hairdo.

Tilda rebandaged my hand and the spot on my
shoulder with lots of extra tape. Then I’d put on a light Lycra wet
suit to keep the bandages in place. My heavier wet suit had slid on
more easily over the Lycra but now it irritated my shoulder.

Carr had brought full air tanks, four of
them. I clipped one into my buoyancy compensator vest, abbreviated
BC in a world full of abbreviations. Then I attached my hoses to
the vest and the tank. I twisted the air valve and checked my
pressure—3100 psi. Then I breathed through the regulator. I’d done
this so many times, I could do it in my sleep—the important
preliminaries for a safe dive.

I put on my weight belt, with enough weight
to take me to the bottom, sat down on the edge of the dock and
pulled on my fins. Stark helped me into my BC. I tried to ignore
the pain as the equipment settled onto my burned shoulder. I needed
to get into the water where the weight of the tank would be
lessened. I spit in my face mask, smeared the saliva over the lens
to keep it from fogging, rinsed it in sea water, and snugged it in
place. Then I grabbed my underwater camera gear and flashlight and
stepped off the boat and into the ocean. Carr followed me.

Once in, I filled my BC with air so I could
easily stay on the surface until we were set to descend. Though the
shoulder pain had eased, once I hit the salt water the burning on
my hand was like hot needles poking me. The water was still slicked
with oil and littered with pieces of the
Caribbe
. The smell
of diesel was overpowering. We needed to go under.

We gave one another the okay
signal—fingertips on top of heads—released air from our BCs, and
started down. This would be a shallow dive, just out past the dock
in about thirty feet of water.

We could see the
Caribbe
on the
bottom. She was tilted on her side. The center section of the
starboard side was entirely demolished. The roof and three of the
four walls that had enclosed Elyse’s living quarters were gone,
exposing the interior and a gaping hole in the hull. Most of the
port side of the boat was still intact, including the head with the
toilet still bolted to the flooring, sink and medicine chest
attached to the wall.

In the galley the stove was still affixed to
the port side wall. Everything else was a shambles. The
refrigeration unit lay in the sand ten feet away. Not far from it
were mangled cupboards with pots and pans, scattered and twisted
among shards of broken rose-patterned china. Elyse’s grandmother
had given her the old dishes.

One fine boned china cup lay on its side in
the sand a few feet away. I felt sick seeing Elyse’s few treasures
lying in ruins. I swallowed hard and kept going.

It looked like the explosion had blasted out
the bottom and right side of the cabin, demolishing everything in
its path. A school of blue tangs were circling the wreck, nibbling
on anything edible—a water-laden loaf of bread, a bag of saltines,
God knows what else. I took several long-range photos of the boat
where it lay; then we moved in for a closer look.

I led, hoping to find some clue as to why the
boat had exploded. It didn’t take long. The gas stove was a
blackened, gaping shell, the oven door hanging by one hinge and
swaying in the current. I took photos of the stove—close-ups of the
charred interior and the top where the burners had been. The knobs
were completely gone.

Then I joined Carr who was busy shining his
flashlight into the gaping hole in the floor. The propane, heavier
than the air, would have settled down in the bilge. It had been
just a matter of time. Eventually the bilge pump would have kicked
in. The spark would have ignited the propane, the subsequent
explosion blasting through the hull and out the side. That Elyse
had survived at all was miraculous. She must have been somewhere on
the port side. If she’d been in her bed, I had no doubt she’d be
dead.

We continued our search, swimming back to the
stern section and locating the hold that contained the propane
tanks. The top of the compartment had been destroyed and the
interior was a shambles. One of the tanks was still intact, the
line screwed tightly down on the valve. The other tank was hanging
off the side of the boat, the valve section completely blown away.
Clearly, the second explosion—the one that had thrown me into the
sea—had occurred when this tank went. I shot photographs and then
we swam to the engine compartment. Again I took pictures and we
examined the system, which looked intact.

These checks complete, we made our way around
the inside of the boat, taking samples of charred wood and fabric.
The lab would check for hydrocarbons that would be present if
gasoline or kerosene had been splashed inside the boat.

I opened the compartments and drawers that
were still intact—flares, tools, rain gear. An empty wine bottle
was wedged into a shattered floorboard. I wondered where it had
come from. Had someone else been aboard? I had never seen Elyse
drink. I worked the bottle out of the splinted wood with my knife
and dropped the bottle into an evidence tube that Carr had
retrieved from one of the mesh dive bags.

We continued to swim through the salon and
started back toward the stern section, our fins brushing against
debris. The passageway back into Elyse’s cabin was narrowed by the
collapsed ceiling and walls of the boat. I took the lead and we
made our way into it, our tanks clanging against fiberglass. The
hall was a maze of sharp twisted metal and dangling wires. One
slice in my regulator hose and my air would be bubbling out into
the water instead of into my mouth piece, and I’d be trying to
scramble to the surface before I drowned. I moved slowly, bending
back the jagged pieces as I went, so that Carr and I could swim
through.