Page 7 of Nightshade
“You know Abbott, the scraper?” she asked.
“I know who he is. First name is Denzel, right?”
“Right. He just called and said there’s a body down there under theAurora. He said it’s got an anchor chain wrapped around it. A human body. He couldn’t tell male or female.”
It took Stilwell a few moments to understand what Tash was saying. He got regular updates on what boats were moored in the harbor. He remembered that theAurorawas a seagoing yacht registered out of Venezuela. It had entered the harbor two days earlier and moored on the fourth line of buoys, where the big boats were staged.
“Okay, I’m on my way,” Stilwell said. “Tell Abbott to meet me at the skiff dock.”
“Will do,” Tash said.
“And Tash, when’s theAurorastaying till?”
“Today. They’re leaving today.”
“What time?”
“Anytime. They have the ball till sixteen hundred but can shove off whenever they want.”
“We might have to do something about that. I’ll probably want to hold them in port if what Abbott says he saw is true.”
“You want me to call the Coast Guard in? They could stop them.”
“I want to confirm the body before we start calling in the troops.”
“Gotcha. How you going to do that?”
“I’m going to have Abbott take me down.”
“Oh.”
“Problem?”
“No. Just be careful.”
“Copy that. I will.”
Stilwell went into the sub to get his wet suit.
3
THE WATER WAScold. 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 theAurorawhen 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 theAurora’sstern. 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 theAurora’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’tforget 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.
