Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,26

said, “Good,” and he turned to one of the senior agents and asked, “What do we have on the diver?”

The task force had contacted twenty-one female professional and semipro divers in the three-county South Florida area. Sixteen of them had provided superficially convincing alibis for the day of the shootings, which still had to be checked, but none of them looked really good for the diver being sought. Given Barney Hall’s description, many of them were simply too heavy, and that included three of the five who couldn’t provide solid alibis.

“We’re not seeing a lot of really, mmm, lithe female divers,” the lead agent said.

“That’s not what you see on YouTube,” the Lauderdale cop said.

“You spend a lot of time watching women divers on YouTube?” asked Taylor, the female Coastie.

“I do it some,” the cop admitted with a grin.

“YouTube divers are a whole different reality,” another agent said. “Anyway, we’re not feeling real good about the prospects with the ones we’ve checked. One of them told us something I guess we knew, which I’m not sure helps at all—the water out there where the dope is, runs anywhere from a hundred to two hundred and fifty feet deep. You can get training to dive down to a hundred and thirty feet in two weeks, starting from nothing. Going deeper than that, especially for novice divers, gets risky, but for the kind of money we’re talking about . . .”

“How long would it take to train to go down deeper?” Lucas asked. “Go down to a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet?”

“A lot of places wouldn’t do it for liability reasons. What you’d do is get some experience. Take the training to get down to a hundred and thirty, which is routine, learn something about nitrogen narcosis and really how to manage your decompression problems, then start dipping deeper. Take technical courses. Learn to really use your dive computer and your lights and whatever kind of direction finder you have.”

“Are you a diver?” Bob asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s a decompression problem?”

The agent explained that nitrogen in air, under high pressure, as found in deeper scuba diving, is forced into the bloodstream. When the diver surfaces, the nitrogen can come out of the bloodstream as bubbles that lodge in the joints and internal organs, and cause painful, sometimes crippling, and sometimes deadly effects.

“It’s called the bends,” the diving agent said. “You don’t want the bends. You prevent them by stopping on the way back to the surface, when you’re still under pressure, to let the nitrogen work its way out of your body through the lungs . . . you exhale it as a gas.”

“I’ve heard of the bends,” Bob said. “Note to self: don’t get them.”

Lucas asked him, “How deep would you dive? On air, like the diver on the boat?”

The agent said, “A hundred and fifty feet wouldn’t bother me too much, but two hundred would be a problem. I wouldn’t do two hundred unless it was an emergency, and I sure as hell wouldn’t stay long. I wouldn’t be picking up any heroin cans.”

Another agent suggested, “Maybe . . . Trimix?” He looked at Lucas and Bob and added, “I’m a diver, too.”

“What’s Trimix?” Bob asked.

“A mixture of gases that’ll help you go deeper . . . but we checked that,” said the first diving agent. “The gas in the scuba tanks on the boat was straight air.”

The agent with all the certifications said, “The Coast Guardsman who shot the guy off the dock. Didn’t he say six cans were off-loaded from that Mako?”

Lucas said, “Yeah, six, but he’s not absolutely sure of that.”

“If the diver brought up six cans, we think that’d be a hundred and thirty pounds of dope, plus the weight of the cans—maybe a hundred and fifty pounds altogether. She probably had to manage at least three small lift bags or two bigger ones, which means she was probably down there for quite a while, finding the cans, loading them, managing the bags, then resurfacing. I doubt she’d be down two hundred feet. She’d have too much decompression time, hanging out halfway to surface and trying to manage those bags and the cargo bags, all at the same time. I’d bet she wasn’t down much more than a hundred and thirty or so.”

“That’s all wonderful, but is it relevant?” Weaver asked.

“Kind of suggests where you don’t need to look,” the diving agent said. “If we’re really going to look.”

“Okay.” Weaver dipped into his briefcase and came up