Cause of Death Read online

  "Look, I can't be here all day waiting for Stu," he said to a man in coveralls and a filthy ski jacket.

  "We could haul Bo's butt in here, Cap'n," was the reply.

  "No way Jose," Green said, and he seemed quite familiar with these shipyard men. "No point in calling that boy."

  Hell," said another man with a long tangled beard.

  We all know he ain't gonna be sober this late in the morning."

  "Well, now if that isn't the pot calling the kettle black," Green said, and all of them laughed.

  The bearded man had a complexion like raw hamburger.

  He slyly eyed me as he lit a cigarette, shielding it from the wind in rough bare hands.

  "I hadn't had a drink since yesterday. Not even water," he swore as his mates laughed some more. "Damn, it's cold as a witch's titty." He hugged himself. "I should'a wore a better coat."

  "I tell you what's cold is that one over yonder." Another worker spoke, dentures clicking as he talked about what I realized was the dead diver. "Now that boy's cold."

  "He don't feel it now."

  I controlled my mounting irritation as I said to Green, "I know you're eager to get started, and so am I. But I don't see any rescuers or police. I haven't seen the johnboat or the area of the river where the body is located."

  I felt half a dozen pairs of eyes on me, and I scanned the eroded faces of what easily could have been a small band of pirates dressed for modern times. I was not invited into their secret club and was reminded of those early years when rudeness and isolation could still make me cry.

  Green finally answered, "The police are inside using the phones. In the main building there, the one with the big anchor in front. The divers are probably in there too staying warm. The rescue squad is at a landing on the other side of the river where they've been waiting for you to get here.

  And you might be interested in knowing that this same landing is where the police just found a truck and trailer they believe belonged to the deceased. If you follow me."

  He began walking. "I'll show you the location you're interested in. I understand you plan on going in with the other divers."

  "That's right." I walked with him along the pier.

  "I sure as hell don't know what you expect to see."

  "I learned long ago to have no expectations, Captain Green."

  As we passed old, tired ships, I noticed many fine metal lines leading from them into the water. "What are those?" I asked.

  "CPs-cathodic protectors," he answered. "They're electrically charged to reduce corrosion."

  "I certainly hope someone has turned them off."

  "An electrician's on the way. He'll turn off the whole pier."

  "So the diver could have run into CPs. I doubt it would have been easy to see them."

  "It wouldn't matter. The charge is very mild," he said as if anyone should know that. "It's like getting zapped with a nine-volt battery. CPs didn't kill him. You can already mark that one off your list."

  We had stopped at the end of the pier where the rear of the partially submerged submarine was in plain view. Anchored no more than twenty feet from it was the dark green aluminum johnboat with its long black hose leading from the compressor, which was nestled in an inner tube on the passenger's side. The floor of the boat was scattered with tools, scuba equipment and other objects that I suspected had been rather carelessly gone through by someone. My chest tightened, for I was angrier than I would show.

  "He probably just drowned," Green was saying. "Almost every diving death I've seen was a drowning. You die in water as shallow as this, that's what it's going to be."

  "I certainly find his equipment unusual." I ignored his medical pontifications.

  He stared at the johnboat barely stirred by the current.

  "A hookah. Yeah, it's unusual for around here."

  "Was it running when the boat was found?"

  "Out of gas."

  "What can you tell me about it? Homemade?"

  "Commercial," he said. "A five-horsepower gasoline driven compressor that draws in surface air through a lowpressure hose connected to a second-stage regulator. He could have stayed down four, five hours. As long as his fuel lasted." He continued to stare off.

  "Four or five hours? For what?" I looked at him. "I can understand that if you're collecting lobsters or abalone.

  He was silent.

  "What is down there?" I said. "And don't tell me Civil War artifacts because we both know you're not going to find those here."

  "In truth, not a damn thing's down there."

  "Well," I said, "he thought something was."

  "Unfortunately for him, he thought wrong. Look at those clouds moving in. We're definitely going to get it." He flipped his coat collar up around his ears. "I assume you're a certified diver."

  "For many years."

  "I'm going to need to see your dive card."

  I looked out at the johnboat and the submarine nearby as I wondered just how uncooperative these people intended to be.

  "You've got to have that with you if you're going in," he said. "I thought you would have known that."

  "And I thought the military did not run this shipyard."

  "I know the rules here. It doesn't matter who runs it."

  He stared at me.

  "I see." I stared back. "And I suppose I'm going to need a permit if I want to park my car on this pier so I don't have to carry my gear half a mile."

  "You do need a permit to park on the pier."

  "Well, I don't have one of those. I don't have my PADI advanced and rescue dive cards or my dive log. I don't have my licenses to practice medicine in Virginia, Maryland or Florida."

  I spoke very smoothly and quietly, and because he could not rattle me, he became more determined. He blinked several times, and I could feel his hate.

  "This is the last time I'm going to ask you to allow me to do my job," I went on. "We have an unnatural death here that is in my jurisdiction. If you would rather not cooperate, I will be happy to call the state police, the U.S. Marshal, FBI. Your choice. I can probably get somebody here in twenty minutes. I've got my portable phone right here in my pocket." I patted it.

  "You want to dive--he shrugged--then go right ahead. But you'll have to sign a waiver relieving the shipyard of any responsibility, should something unfortunate happen. And I seriously doubt there are any forms like that here."

  "I see. Now I need to sign something you don't have."

  "That's correct."

  "Fine," I said. "Then I'll just draft a waiver for you."

  "A lawyer would have to do that, and it's a holiday."

  "I am a lawyer and I work on holidays."

  His jaw muscles knotted, and I knew he wasn't going to bother with any forms now that it was possible to have one.

  We started walking back, and my stomach tightened with dread. I did not want to make this dive and I did not like the people I had encountered this day. Certainly, I had gotten entangled in bureaucratic barbed wire before when cases involved government or big business. But this was different.

  "Tell me something," Green spoke again in his scornful tone, "do chief medical examiners always personally go in after bodies?"

  "Rarely."

  "Explain why you think it is necessary this time."

  "The scene of death will be gone the moment the body is moved. I think the circumstances are unusual enough to merit my taking a look while I can, and I'm temporarily covering my Tidewater District, so I happened to be here when the call came in."

  He paused, then unnerved me by saying, "I certainly was sorry to hear about Dr. Mant's mother. When will he be back to work?"

  I tried to remember this morning's phone call and the man called Young with his exaggerated Southern accent.

  Green did not sound native to the South, but then neither did I, and that didn't mean either of us couldn't imitate a drawl.

  "I'm not certain when he'll return," I warily replied.

  "But I'm wonde
ring how you know him."

  "Sometimes cases overlap, whether they should or not."

  I was not sure what he was implying.

  "Dr. Mant understands the importance of not interfering," Green went on. "People like that are good to work with."

  "The importance of not interfering with what, Captain Green?"

  "If a case is the Navy's, for example, or this jurisdiction or that. There are many different ways that people can interfere. All are a problem and can be harmful. That diver, for example. He went where he didn't belong and look what happened."

  I had stopped walking and was staring at him in disbelief.

  "It must be my imagination," I said, "but I think you're threatening me."

  "Go get your gear, you can park closer in, by the fence over there," he said, walking off.

  CHAPTER 2

  LONG AFTER HE HAD DISAPPEARED INSIDE THE BUILDING with the anchor in front, I was sitting on the pier, struggling to pull a thick wet suit over my dive skin.

  Not far from me, several rescuers prepared a flat-bottomed boat they had moored to a piling. Shipyard workers wandered about curiously, and on the dive platform, two men in royal blue neoprene tested buddy phones and seemed very thorough in their inspection of scuba gear, which included mine.

  I watched the divers talk to each other, but I could not make out a word they said as they unscrewed hoses and fitted belts with weights. Occasionally, they glanced my way, and I was surprised when one of them decided to climb the ladder that led up to my pier. He walked over to where I was and sat beside me on my little patch of cold pavement.

  "This seat taken?" He was a handsome young man, black and built like an Olympic athlete.

  "There are a lot of people who want it, but I don't know where they are." I fought with the wet suit some more.

  "Damn. I hate these things."

  "Just think of it as putting on an inner tube."

  "Yes, that's an enormous help."

  "I need to talk to you about underwater comm equipment. You ever used it before?" he said.

  I glanced up at his serious face and asked, "Are you with a squad?"

  "Nope. I'm just plain ole Navy. And I don't know about you, but this sure isn't the way I planned to spend my New Year's Eve. Don't know why anybody'd want to dive in this river unless they got some sort of fantasy about being a blind tadpole in a mud puddle. Or maybe if you got ironpoor blood and think all the rust in there will help."

  "All the rust in there will do is give you tetanus." I looked around. "Who else here is Navy versus squad?"

  "The two with the rescue boat are squad. Ki Soo down there on the dive platform is the only other Navy except our intrepid investigator with NIS. Ki's good. He's my buddy."

  He gave an okay sign to Ki Soo, who gave it back, and I found all of this rather interesting and very different from what I had experienced so far.

  "Now listen up." My new acquaintance spoke as if he had worked with me for years. "Comm equipment's tricky if you've never used it. It can be real dangerous." His face was earnest.

  "I'm familiar with it," I assured him with more ease than I felt.

  "Well, you gotta be more than familiar. You gotta be buddies with it, because like your dive buddy, it can save your life." He paused. "It can also kill you."

  I had used underwater communication equipment on only one other dive, and was still nervous about having my regulator replaced by a tightly sealed mask fitted with a mouthpiece and no purge valve. I worried about the mask flooding, about having to tear it off as I frantically groped for my alternate air source, or octopus. But I was not going to mention this, not here.

  "I'll be fine," I assured him again.

  "Great. I heard you were a pro," he said. "By the way, my name's Jerod, and I already know who you are." Sitting Indian-style, he was tossing gravel into the water and seemed fascinated by the slowly spreading ripples. "I've heard a lot of nice things about you. In fact, when my wife finds out I met you, she's going to be jealous."

  I was not certain why a diver in the Navy would have heard anything about me beyond what was in the news, which wasn't always nice. But his words were a welcome salve to my raw mood, and I was about to let him know this when he glanced at his watch, then stared down at the platform and met Ki Soo's eyes.

  "Dr. Scarpetta," Jerod said as he got up. "I think we're ready to rock and roll. How about you?"

  "I'm as ready as I'm going to be." I got up, too.

  "What's going to be the best approach?"

  "The best way-in fact, the only way-is to follow his hose down."

  We stepped closer to the edge of the pier and he pointed to the johnboat.

  "I've already been down once, and if you don't follow the hose you'll never find him. You ever had to wade through a sewer with no lights on?"

  "That one hasn't happened to me yet."

  "Well, you can't see shit. And that's the same thing here."

  "To your knowledge, no one has disturbed the body," I said.

  "No one's been near it but me."

  He watched as I picked up my buoyancy control vest, or BC, and tucked a flashlight in a pocket.

  "I wouldn't even bother. In these conditions, all a flashlight's going to do is get in your way."

  But I was going to bring it because I wanted any advantage I could possibly have. Jerod and I climbed down the ladder to the dive platform so we could finish preparations, and I ignored overt stares from shipyard men as I massaged cream rinse into my hair and pulled on the neoprene hood.

  I strapped a knife to my inner right calf, and then grabbed each end of a fifteen-pound weight belt and quickly hoisted it around my waist. I checked safety releases, and pulled on gloves.

  "I'm ready," I said to Ki Soo.

  He carried over communication equipment and my regulator.

  "I will attach your air hose to the face mask." He spoke with no accent. "I understand you've used comm equipment like this before."

  "That's correct," I said.

  He squatted beside me and lowered his voice as if we were about to conspire. "You, Jerod and I will be in constant contact with each other over the buddy phones."

  They looked like bright red gas masks with a five-strap harness in back. Jerod moved behind me and helped me into my BC and air tank while his buddy talked on'

  . "As you know," Ki Soo was saying, "you breathe normally and use the push-to-talk button on the mouthpiece when you want to communicate." He demonstrated. "Now we need to get this nice and secure over your hood and tuck it in. There, you get the rest of your hair tucked in and let me make sure this is nice and tight in back."

  I hated buddy phones the most when I wasn't in the water because it was difficult to breathe. I sucked in air as best I could as I peered out through plastic at these two divers I had just entrusted with my life.

  "There will be two rescuers in a boat and they will be monitoring us with a transducer that will be lowered into the water. Whatever we say will be heard by whoever is listening on the surface. Do you understand?" Ki Soo looked at me and I knew I had just been given a warning.

  I nodded, my breathing loud and labored in my ears.

  "You want your fins on now?"

  I shook my head and pointed at the water.

  "Then you go first and I will toss them to you."

  Weighing at least eighty pounds more than when I had arrived, I cautiously made my way to the edge of the dive platform and checked again to make certain my mask was tucked into my hood. Cathodic protectors were like catfish whiskers trailing from the huge dormant ships, the water ruffled by wind. I steeled myself for the most unnerving giant stride I had ever made.

  The cold at first was a shock, and my body took its time warming the water leaking into my rubber sheath as I pulled on my fins. Worse, I could not see my computer console or its compass. I could not see my hand in front of my face, and I now understood why it was useless to bring a flashlight. The suspended sediment absorbed light like a blotter, for
cing me to surface at frequent intervals to get my bearings as I swam toward the spot where the hose led from the johnboat and disappeared beneath the surface of the river.

  "Everybody ten-four?" Ki Soo's voice sounded in the receiver pressed against the bone of my skull.

  "Ten-four," I spoke into the mouthpiece and tried to relax as I slowly kicked barely below the surface.