the air. I hated using my rank, but at times it felt great. He was right about one thing though, with the breeze blowing across the lake it was a rather cold day for the beginning of June.
Which meant the water would be freezing. That was the only downside of the water around Tobermory. Crystal clear, beautiful water that, when the weather and currents were in your favour, you could see almost eighty feet down. Today was a decent day, but the wreck was too deep to see. Problem was it was cold, damn cold, and June was never a great month to be there.
I’d been diving in every month from May to November, and the water in November was sometimes warmer than in June. The summer’s heat on the water took some time to dissipate, it just took a hell of a long time to heat up.
It would never be warm, but by August it would be alright as long as no man decided to skinny-dip.
“Alright, let’s suit up and get down there before it gets too late.”
It was a little more difficult for me to get suited since I needed to first take off a three-piece-suit before putting on a bathing suit and wetsuit. I could’ve changed in town but that would have been intelligent.
After some awkwardness, which involved holding a towel around myself while dropping my boxers and raising my bathing suit I was ready to soap up and get the wetsuit on.
“That was a nice dance you did there, Lincoln.”
“Thanks, Kara. I blame you and Deana for making me change like that.”
“You didn’t have to do that for us. We’re mature enough to have handled seeing… it.” My eyes moved first to Deana’s left hand, the lack of a ring confirmed my expectations.
“I’m good, but thanks. I’ll keep your maturity in mind for next time.”
I ran my left hand through my hair, making sure that my wedding band was painfully obvious. Police aren’t exactly the brightest when it comes to sexual relationships and I’d seen far too many marriages fall apart thanks to indiscretions.
I can’t say I’m anything special, a thirty-three year old with a little extra weight. Maybe it was a curiosity thing—she wouldn’t have been the first white woman to make an advance on me, one of the few African-Americans in the department. I didn’t know and I didn’t care, all I knew was I’d need to find some way to rebuff her.
“So, is it just me or do you guys pee in your wetsuits, too?” My voice was loud, loud enough to drown out the sounds of the wind and the water lapping against the boats.
Every diver on the other boat looked at me, blank yet embarrassed faces. Five men and two women all sharing the same look—the one you wore when you didn’t want to reveal the truth.
“Oh come on. Everyone does it, especially when the water’s this cold. Have to warm up somehow.” Kara snickered and Deana looked disgusted. “There are only two kinds of divers, those who pee in their wetsuits and those who lie about it. Guess you two are in the second group.”
Mission accomplished. Deana wasn’t even looking at me, instead she was focusing on some distant point in the water.
My wetsuit was a two-piece hooded design and needed a lot of soap inside to lubricate it enough to slip it on. It wasn’t an easy or attractive process but after a fair bit of grunting, and a few words that would have made my mother put the soap in my mouth, I was ready to go. All that was exposed was my feet, hands and face. I slipped my knife into the leg pocket on the suit then crossed over to the dive boat on a wooden plank someone had put across the gap. I felt like a pirate boarding a ship, preparing to plunder. It was one of those things I kept to myself.
“You ever used one of these before?” It was the man who would be my dive partner, Travis Farnham, a constable out of the Owen Sound area. Conservative estimates put him at about twenty-seven, six-foot-three and two-hundred-forty pounds—solid. He handed me a full face mask complete with a communicator.
“There’s no mouthpiece,” he said, showing me how it worked. I was familiar with them, but had never used one. “The regulator is built in, exhaust port’s here, use these pressure buttons so you can equalize. Comms button is here, press to talk, release to receive. You’ve got One-Alpha, I’m Two-Alpha, then there’s Bravo, Charlie and Delta teams.”
I nodded in understanding as I fiddled with the buttons and ports on the mask. Talking to each other underwater… I was giddy as a geek in a video game store. This sure beat chalk and slates.
“We’ve designated this boat as One-Echo, yours as Two-Echo.” Simple enough—A, B, C, D and E, one and two. I felt like I was back in preschool.
I looked over at the jackass who called me hotshot, not bothering to learn his name. “You, you have a wetsuit in there?”
He nodded.
“Good, take this.” I tossed a large cooler into the water. It was tied to the stern of our boat by a thick rope. “Suit up, hop in and fill that with water. We’re going to drop two lines—one for us to pull on in case of emergency, and another for evidence. If we find anything too big to bring up easily we’ll hook it to the rope and give a tug. Reel it in and keep it in the cooler in water or you could compromise it.”
“Ummm, okay. You want me in there now?”
Was that the sound of regret I heard in his voice? Oh, well. “It’ll take us about five minutes to descend—be in the water in no more than ten.”
I turned around to the confused faces of the other divers, but all it took was a sly wink for them to realize what I was doing.
The wreck was just as I remembered: deep, dangerous and dark. It didn’t take us long to get down to the bottom and find the body. He was floating inside the bow, the most intact part of the wreck, his back against the wooden planks of the deck, his hands and feet hanging limp.
Travis and I went to the body while the other teams spread out down the length of the ship—two for the bow, two for the stern and two in between. They were checking for any other evidence, both on or in the wreck and around it as well.
There wasn’t much to see on the body, nothing out of the ordinary on first inspection. His gauge still showed 1000psi in his tank, more than enough to surface safely. My underwater camera was snapping picture after picture as I swam beneath him to take a look at his other side. His sheath was empty. For some reason he’d seen fit to take his dive knife out. I looked around but couldn’t see it lying anywhere nearby.
“One-Alpha to all teams. His dive knife is missing, keep an eye out.” It was weird being able to speak under water and equally as weird to hear the simple responses: three voices all saying “Roger”. But finding the button to activate the comm unit was a lot easier than trying to press down on the mask above my nose in order to equalize. It was a necessity when diving—plug your nose, close your mouth and exhale forcefully—otherwise the pressure difference between the inside and outside of your ear drums could cause a rupture. It was something I’d never been good at doing, and with a mask in the way, it was even worse.
But I was there, at the wreck of the Arabia once more. It was hard to believe the ship had gone down in 1884, considering how relatively intact it still was. It was a piece of history and well worth preserving. I swam further around the bow, feeling the claustrophobia of being a hundred feet underwater and inside a shipwreck.
There were chains between the top and bottom of the inside, strong solid chains showing signs of rust, algae and, of course, zebra mussels—the scourge of the Great Lakes and many other places around the world. Not only are they an invasive species that can cause severe damage to an ecosystem, they’re sharp little buggers that have sliced my feet on more than one occasion.
I was looking at the mussels with the same loathsome glare I give mosquitoes when I saw a small patch of chain devoid of mussels, algae and even some of its coating of rust. I looked closer at it, noticed the fine lines that could have only been caused by a sharp object—like a dive knife. I took some more pictures then looked around, but still couldn’t find the missing blade.
If it was murder though, there didn’t seem to be any sign
s that the knife had been used on the victim. Just being missing, though, was suspicious enough. I dropped to the bottom and scoured the area for the cast off mussels, eventually finding the ones that had been unceremoniously removed from the chain. There wasn’t much I could do with them but two of the shells showed the cut mark, and if we could find the knife, we might be able to make a match.
A lot of ifs, but I scooped them up and put them into one of the Ziploc bags I’d shoved in my dive belt. The mussels could survive up to a week out of water, but the algae I wasn’t sure about.
The chain I couldn’t bring up. It would be in violation of a number of laws against removing anything from a shipwreck within a protected area. I’m sure a warrant would supersede those laws, but the damage that could be caused by removing the chain wasn’t worth the tiny bit of evidence on it.
I’d just have to solve the crime without that piece of the puzzle.
“You guys almost done? It’s getting cold up here.”
“One-Alpha to Two-Echo, I believe that falls under inappropriate use of police radio. And if you think you’re cold, come down here,” I said. “Talk about freezing the balls off a brass monkey.”
Kara came back quickly, “And what I said was inappropriate?”
I wanted to ask how Constable Hotshot was doing in the water, probably freezing cold and exhausted from treading. He didn’t seem smart