purchased unless whoever did it was kind enough to leave a price sticker for us. But maybe whoever did this didn’t think we’d get this far. I’m not sure we were supposed to recover this or anything.”
“I don’t think we were,” Marino agrees. “A friggin’ miracle she didn’t pop apart, and she would have if you hadn’t gone in after her. If you hadn’t done exactly what you did.”
I look up at the helicopter still hovering over us, and then the big white bird noses around to the west and flies off toward Boston. I watch it get smaller in the distance, its noise diminishing, and I wait to see if it swoops toward Logan Airport, but it doesn’t. It continues toward the city, headed toward the Charles River, and then I can’t see it anymore.
“What about the rest of this?” I point out the mess of fishing tackle, leads and swivels and hooks, all of it brown with rust. “Do you think it’s part of the same gear the turtle was entangled with?”
“Looks like it. Commercial longlining,” Marino tells me.
He says that a longline literally is a long horizontal line attached by box swivels to vertical lines, possibly rigged for mackerel, based on the way the hooks are bent. The bamboo is a pole marker.
“See the piece of scrap iron tied to one end?” he explains. “That’s what kept it upright in the water, and probably there was a bundle of corks attached at some point, and a flag.”
All of it looks very old and could have come a long way from here. He guesses the turtle bumped into it, got wrapped in a couple of the lines, and dragged the gear, maybe for a while, before getting snagged in the buoy line.
“Could even be he was diving or coming up for air when the crate and the body was dumped in and all of it got tangled up together,” he supposes.
I ask him to retrieve my magnifier from the Pelican case and hand me a pair of gloves, and I take a moment to survey every inch of the crate and the soggy bags of cat litter inside it. The bamboo pole is about five feet long, the top part of it snapped off rather recently, based on the appearance of the broken end, which isn’t weathered the way the rest of it is. The bamboo impales the crate, spearing it at a thirty-degree angle through the top and out the slide-locked door, and I try to envision how that might have happened.
I imagine someone shoving the crate full of cat litter and the tethered dead body and the boat fender overboard. Instantly the crate would have sunk and the fender would have floated, submerging the body vertically very much the way I found her. How did the collision with the longline rig and bamboo pole occur and when?
Maybe Marino’s right. The leatherback was dragging the fishing gear and could have been coming up to sound at the exact time the crate and body were dropped. I examine the exposed ends of the pole through acrylic binocular lenses that magnify what I’m looking at, and I see the same greenish-yellow paint. It’s a faint swipe on the broken edge of the bamboo end that protrudes through the top of the crate.
I direct that we photograph the crate, the fender, and the tackle in situ. Then we’ll protect all of it with large plastic bags and transport it to my office.
“Let’s make sure Toby’s waiting for us with the van,” I say to Marino, as I unzip the drysuit and stretch the gaskets over my head and wrists. “We need to get her to the office as quickly as we can, because she’s going to begin decomposing really fast now that she’s out of the water. I don’t know if she’s been frozen, but she might have been.”
“Frozen?” Labella frowns.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Frozen or almost frozen. This lady’s been dead for quite some time, and I suspect we were supposed to recover her just long enough to lose her. I suspect the goal was to really frustrate us. Rigged up like that and pushed overboard, and then she’s decapitated, drawn and quartered, so to speak, as we try to get her into the basket. A dismembered body that slips away and is gone. Well, too bad, whoever you are,” I say, and I’m not talking to the dead woman but to the person who did this. “We