his line steady, to keep the body close to the surface, and I ask Sullivan and Kletty to slacken the ropes attached to the basket’s harness and the back of my drysuit.
“I need to get the basket under her. She’s got to be on the surface as much as we can manage so I can push the basket down and slide it under her.” I spit out water as waves slap my face and rush inside my mouth and nose. “But first we’ve got to get the conch pot up, got to free her from the ropes to prevent any further damage, and so I can manipulate her.”
Taking a deep breath, I pull my mask down and duck back under the surface, pushing my way beneath the body and grabbing for the line that connects her to the weighty ballast that dangles at the bottom of the bay. A dark jacket and blouse blossom up from her waist, and her gray skirt billows out around her hips, revealing panties and bare legs that are pale and thin, moving as the water moves, fanning and swaying. The yellow line around her ankles is wrapped multiple times and drops straight down, vanishing in water that gets dark and impenetrable.
I tug the rope and feel what is attached to it move freely, which isn’t an accurate indication of how heavy it is, because mass doesn’t change underwater, but weight does, due to buoyancy. I’m able to run the rope over my shoulder and swim with it to the surface, where I take in gulps of air. I swim to the Stokes basket, where Marino reaches down to assist, his big hand outstretched as he bends over the boat rail. Kletty holds the buoy line while Marino secures the one I just gave him, and I turn her over facedown in the water and move the basket so that it and the body are side by side.
Struggling with waves pushing and the current pulling, I roll her over into the basket so that she is on her back. Her shriveled face stares blindly through cloudy eyes that are dry and shrunken by dehydration.
“Hold everything tight!” I slide the dive knife out of the rubber sheath strapped around my lower left leg. “I’m cutting her loose. The buoy line first, then the other. Hold tight!”
I saw through both lines a good twelve inches above the knots at her neck and ankles, and I zip her up, double-pouching her.
“Make a note that the buoy line was around her neck, the conch-pot line was around her ankles,” I call out, and the morbid black cargo is hoisted up. “We also need to label the cut ends.” I swim around to the back of the boat. “Maybe someone could go ahead and do that, please, and we need to capture the GPS coordinates.”
I climb up the ladder, and the basket is on top of a sheet near the big yellow sausage fender and its severed yellow rope, which someone has neatly coiled. I pull off my mask, hood, and gloves as Marino hauls in the second yellow line, and a square shape comes into view, silvery and foreshortened in the water, then bigger. It breaks the surface, water pouring through the wire-mesh sides of some type of cage. A snarl of manila rope and monofilament lines are snagged on a slide-locked door that is bowed out and impaled by a broken bamboo pole.
“I could use a hand!” Marino shouts, and Kletty and Sullivan rush to help him hoist up a heavy-gauge wire crate that looks fairly new and has a pan on the bottom stacked with green-and-black bags that are filled with something.
“What the fuck?” Marino exclaims, as they set down what appears to be a folding dog crate or kennel snarled with fishing tackle.
“Cat litter?” Marino says, incredulous.
“World’s Best Cat Litter,” he reads what’s printed on the black-and-green bags. “Five thirty-four-pound bags of fucking clumping cat litter? Is this supposed to be some sicko joke?”
“I don’t know what this is supposed to be.” I recall what Lucy said in my office early this morning, what seems a lifetime ago.
Someone cunning but too smug to realize how much he doesn’t know.
“Maybe using what was on hand to weigh her down?” Labella suggests. “Someone with pets? A lot easier than finding a conch pot, if you’re not a commercial fisherman.”
“Not to mention ubiquitous.” I take a closer look. “Good luck tracing where a dog crate and cat litter were