The Bone Bed

  The leatherback slowly lifts his watermelon-sized head and looks directly at me as if to emphasize his caretaker’s point. Nares flare as he exhales loudly, his protruding eyes dark pools on either side of a beaklike mouth that reminds me of a crooked jack-o’-lantern smile.

  “I understand the way you feel better than you’ll ever imagine, and I’m eager to get out of your way,” I say to Pamela Quick. “But I have to know about his injuries before I can finish up here.”

  “Moderate abrasions circumferentially around the skin-carapace line of left distal shoulder extending about three centimeters on distal posterior margin of the left-front flipper,” she describes with steely affect. “Associated with an abraded area of the distal leading edge.” She reads the blood test results on the digital display.

  “And his values?” I ask.

  “Typical for entangled leatherbacks. Mild hypernatremia, but he should be fine. Until he encounters some other human detritus or a boat that kills him.”

  “I can understand how you feel about it. . . .”

  “You really can’t,” she says.

  “I need to ask if you saved the fishing gear.”

  “You can have it.” She reaches inside a ski bag.

  “Based on your expertise, can you reconstruct what happened?”

  “Same thing that always does to these animals,” she replies. “They run into a vertical line, freak out and start spinning around, and get wrapped up in it. The more they struggle, the worse it gets, and in his case, he was dragging a heavy pot and a body for God knows how far.”

  “And dragging the buoy.”

  “Yes. Dragging that, too.” She hands me a transparent plastic bag that contains tangled monofilament, several leads, and rusty hooks.

  “What makes you assume the body and pot were dragged? It seems you’re assuming they weren’t originally where they are now. Any reason to suppose he might have gotten entangled here, where he was found?” I label the bag with a permanent marker.

  “Leatherbacks are in perpetual motion,” she answers. “The monofilament probably was entangled with the buoy line. What we do know for a fact is he hit the fishing lines, and his left flipper got wound up, but he’s programmed to keep swimming. The more he swam, the tighter the lines wrapped around him, it would seem. By the time we got to him, he could barely move his left flipper, and he was going under.”

  “Any estimate of distance based on how fast leatherbacks can swim?” I ask.

  “We could have this conversation later.” She barely looks up at me.

  “Any information I can get now is really important,” I say firmly. “It could help us determine where the body might have entered the water.”

  “That person is gone. He’s not.”

  “This could be a homicide investigation. I don’t think anyone wants to interfere with that.”

  “All I can tell you is the top speed for a leatherback is about twenty miles per hour,” she replies flatly, “but no way he was going anything close to that dragging what was attached to him. It’s not possible to say where he might have run into the line except that I’m thinking he didn’t get very far after he did. Maybe a few miles at most, until he was running out of steam and getting pulled down by his load, barely able to keep his head above water.”

  “It’s not likely he got entangled in the open ocean.” I scan the horizon, the outer harbor separated from the open Atlantic Ocean by some sixty-five miles of bays, peninsulas, and islands. “It’s too far from here.”

  “Absolutely no way,” she agrees. “I’m estimating hours, not even a day, based on his injuries and what good shape he’s in. There’s nothing wrong with him that saltwater won’t heal. Just moderate abrasions to this one flipper, a mild abrasion to the dorsal head, as you can see. Don’t confuse the pink spot.”

  Her latex-gloved hand pats a pinkish splotch on the top of his dark mottled head, and she seems to have relaxed a little, to find me not quite as objectionable.

  “Each leatherback has a unique fingerprint,” she explains. “We actually can ID one of these by the spot on its head; not sure what it’s for, but maybe a sensor of sorts that detects light or helps the animal determine its location in the ocean.”

  “Let me look at his injuries. And then I promise I’ll get out of your way.”

  She pulls back the wet sheet from his neck, and I can smell his clean fishy smell as I get close to him, just inches from his restrained left flipper, which is at least six feet long. Then I smell the strong ammonia of urine.

  “That’s a good thing.” She obviously smells it, too. “The more alert and active, the better. We want all-systems-go. Like I said, nothing all that serious. The worst offender is this. Part of a barnacle that’s embedded in this ridge right here. I was about to extract it.”

  She shows me a fragment of what looks like white shell or white glass that she assumes was driven into the carapace close to his neck, where the leathery skin is inflamed and abraded.

  “You’re thinking he struck something that had barnacles on it,” I infer.

  “I’m thinking something with barnacles on it struck him,” she replies, and already I’m not sure I agree with her, as I notice a scattering of clamlike barnacles that have colonized on the rubbery outer skin of the turtle’s exposed carapace. “While he was entangled in the line and dragging all that weight, maybe a boat grazed him or he knocked into a channel buoy, a piling, a rock, who knows what. Something, at any rate, that has barnacles attached. Normally I would collect this and preserve it in formalin.”

  “It’s better if I do it.”

  She seems reluctant and starts to protest.

  “Really,” I insist.

  She falls silent, and I motion for Marino to bring a scene case to me, the Pelican 1620, I let him know, and I assure Pamela Quick I will collect the necessary evidence in a manner that does no harm to the turtle and do so as expeditiously as possible. I tear open a packet of disposable forceps and am surprised by the smooth, cool surface of the carapace, what feels like polished stone or an oily hard cured leather.

  The dense texture of the flipper is unlike anything I’ve ever touched, maybe similar to ballistic gelatin, and I bend close, wearing a binocular magnifier, dual 3.5X acrylic lenses in a lightweight eyeglass frame so my hands are free. I feel the tension of life and struggle and hear the blasts of his breaths and am aware of his power, were he to break his restraints, his flippers as dangerous as whale flukes. His scissorlike jaws look capable of crushing or amputating a limb, were he to clamp hold of it.

  In the magnification of the lenses, the protruding white shell is pearlescent and clam-shaped, with a dark muscular stalk that I gently clamp into the tips of the plastic forceps while I gently rest my right hand on top of the turtle’s huge head. It is as cool and smooth as petrified bone, and I feel him slowly, heavily stir. I’m constantly aware of where his jaws are in relation to me, and I hear the blasts of his respiration and feel the softness of his pink-tinted neck against my leg as he puffs up and emits a loud groan followed by a low growl.

  “Now, don’t be such a grumpy old man,” I say to him. “No one’s hurting you, and you’re going to be fine.”

  I’m careful not to break or damage the barnacle as I work it out of the leathery skin, and then it is free and I move out of the way so Pamela Quick can attend to the wound, which isn’t what I’d expect if the turtle was struck by something covered with barnacles and stabbed or punctured by a glasslike shell. She swabs the shallow wound with Betadine, and I place the barnacle in my gloved palm. I can see a trace amount of a substance on it, what looks like a hint of bright yellowish green paint on the plate farthest from the stalk, just a faint swipe on an edge of shell that is broken.

  I imagine an object covered with barnacles coming into contact with the leatherback, the force of the impact sufficient to drive the tip of the shell into the hard leathery ridge and unseat or pry the barnacle from whatever it was cemented to. But the transfer of paint or
what might be paint doesn’t fit with such a scenario, and I envision the natural-gas tanker that passed us less than an hour ago. A number of them I’ve seen are painted garish colors, chartreuse and teal green, neon blue or orange.

  “Something painted yellowish green,” I ponder out loud, as I place the barnacle into a small plastic evidence container. “Not likely a rock or a piling. More likely he struck a boat, a Jet Ski, or something like that struck him.”

  “A rather insignificant glancing blow, if that’s the case,” she puzzles. “Certainly not the usual thing we see in a boat strike. When these animals surface for air and get hit by a speeding boat or a tanker, usually the damage is profound. He must have been barely bumped by something, or he barely bumped into something.”

  “With bright green paint?”

  “I got no idea,” she says.

  I label the evidence container and feel the boat heave from side to side, the surf getting heavier. The temperature is dropping, and I’m chilled by cold saltwater flowing around my feet, my pants soaked up to my knees underneath white Tyvek.

  “Well, if whatever he ran into or ran into him is a boat, for example, that’s a little curious,” I continue, “since most are protected with an antifouling paint, some type of coating to prevent barnacles or other organisms from attaching to the hull.”

  “Ones that are properly maintained. Yes.” She is terse again and wants me gone.

  “I suspect the barnacle was attached to the turtle and not to whatever struck him,” I conclude. “And paint or something greenish yellow was transferred to part of the shell.”

  “Maybe,” she says distractedly, and I can tell she doesn’t think it matters and is eager for me to leave her alone.

  “We’ll get this analyzed in the labs and see what it is,” I add.

  Marino takes photographs while I look over the leatherback a final time, placing a gloved hand under his head to keep his bony jaws from opening when I’m close to them. I peel the soaked sheet back from his massive body, which unlike other turtles has no lower flat bony shell, the leatherback barrel-shaped and disproportionately wide around the shoulders and tapering off to short rear flippers and a long tail. I see nothing else that might be of forensic interest, and I let Pamela Quick know I don’t intend to interfere with her patient a moment longer.

  “Just tell me how you want to go about things, because I’ve got to go into the water,” I say to her. “What I don’t want is to go in at the same time he does, and I certainly don’t want him running right back into the same line and getting tangled up again.”

  “You’re doing your recovery from here? Or over there?” She indicates the Coast Guard boat.

  I stand up and steady myself as the fireboat rocks harder. The wind is biting, and saltwater has soaked through my shoe covers and is seeping inside my boots. Of course I have no intention of recovering a dead body from a boat crowded with marine animal rescuers.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I decide. “Marino and I will get back on board the Coast Guard boat and pull the buoy line in close to it so we can take care of what we need to do. And the minute we’re off this boat I suggest you get Lieutenant Klemens to move some distance from here so you can release our leatherback friend out of harm’s way.”

  I climb back up the transom steps and retrieve my coat from the upper deck while Marino collects the scene cases. Then we return to the bow.

  “Nice to look at, but she sure as hell doesn’t win any personality awards,” he says.

  “She’s just trying to do her job and wants no interference,” I reply. “You can’t blame her.”

  “Yeah, except she doesn’t give a shit someone’s dead. Not even interested.”

  Marino looks back in Pamela Quick’s direction as we remove gloves, shoe covers, and Tyvek, stuffing them into a red biohazard bag.

  “Some of these animal lovers are like that, though,” he says. “Fanatics. Certified whackos who will throw red paint on you or beat you up for wearing a fur collar or snakeskin boots. I got me a pair of rattlesnake-skin boots, and you think I don’t get a lot of shit when I wear them?”

  He hands the cases over the rail to Labella as the two boats plunge together and apart like an accordion.

  “Tanned rattlesnake skins bought off eBay and custom-made,” Marino continues to gripe.

  “Sounds disgusting.” I swing one leg over the first rail, and Labella reaches for me.

  “Well, don’t wear them in fucking Concord or Lincoln, in Thoreauville”—Marino is right behind me—“where you go to jail for cutting down a damn tree,” he adds at the top of his lungs.

  ten

  AN AIR HORN BLARES THREE TIMES, AND THE FIREBOAT backs away from where it was anchored, pivoting on its stern, nosing toward a lighthouse jutting up whitely on the horizon. Jet engines gush and churn foamy water that dissipates into a lacy wake as firefighters move the leatherback and its rescuers toward the open sea, leaving us to take care of the rest of it.

  The task I face is one I hope the media and the curious don’t know about, and I survey the water heaving in the sunlight, looking for any sign that spectators and TV crews will move on to witness the turtle’s release. I want everyone gone. I want whoever is dead recovered discreetly, respectfully, and at the same time I feel very protective of the huge old turtle and furious at human selfishness and ignorance.

  Leave him alone, for God’s sake, I think, and I could easily worry myself sick about it, imagining any number of awful fates that might befall an almost extinct creature that lives simply to eat and swim and breed. I know the stories of people who motor too close to great whales and other magnificent animals, taking pictures, trying to touch or feed them, and inadvertently maim or kill them. I’m dismayed, then outraged, as I watch boaters pull up anchor and start their engines, the news helicopter already pursuing in a high hover.

  “At least they’re not going to hang around here,” Labella says.

  He’s crouched next to the Stokes basket, checking the restraint straps and the harness, making sure everything is functioning properly. What we don’t need is to have the body tumble out back into the water while we’re trying to hoist it in on board the boat.

  “Which tells me they don’t know the reason we’re here,” he adds.

  “Maybe they don’t, but what do you make of that?” I look up at the white twin-engine helicopter a thousand feet above us, I estimate. “It seems to be hanging around.”

  “Not a news chopper.” He stares up, shielding his eyes. “Not MedFlight. Not Boston or state police or Homeland Security. Maybe a Sikorsky, something big, but for sure not one of ours, so I’m guessing it’s private. Someone who’s out flying and maybe wonders what’s going on down here.”

  “It’s got a camera mounted on it.” I get an uneasy feeling as I watch the gleaming white machine hover steady as a rock, the nose pointed at us, the sun glaring on the windscreen.

  “Maybe a TV camera. But it could also be a FLIR,” Labella says. “I can’t tell from here.”

  The only private pilot I know who might have a Forward Looking Infrared Radar system thermal imager mounted on his or her helicopter is my niece, Lucy. But I don’t mention such a possibility, and it bothers me that I haven’t seen her new ship, a twin-engine Bell that was delivered to her barely a month ago. Lucy wouldn’t have a white helicopter, I reassure myself. Black or shark gray, but not white with red and blue stripes festooning the tail boom, and I don’t recognize the tail number on this one, either. I wonder if Marino has seen her new helicopter, but he seems oblivious, is busy with Sullivan and not paying any attention to what’s thudding overhead.

  “Well, it’s disgusting and shouldn’t be permitted.” I’m back to being upset about the turtle, about the ugliness of human nature, as I watch rubberneckers motoring after the fireboat. “People have no respect or common sense. If some goddamn idiot runs over that leatherback after all he’s been through . . .”

  “It’s illegal to hunt, harass, or injure s
ea turtles.” Labella gets up, a drysuit folded under his arm. “How about a hundred-thousand-dollar fine.”

  “How about jail.”

  “I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of you.”

  “Not today.”

  “What we’re going to do is start up the engines so we can get within reach of the buoy line,” he tells me, while Kletty attaches an aluminum dive ladder to the transom and Marino opens the scene cases again, talking loudly with Sullivan about motorcycles and how bad the roads are up here in the Northeast. “But obviously we can’t be running while you’re in the water.”

  “Thank you. I’m not fond of close encounters with props,” I reply.

  “Yes, ma’am. Roger that.” Labella smiles, and I try to forget what he looks like and how it makes me feel.

  Orange-and-black nylon rustles as he unfolds the drysuit and hands it to me, asking if I need help getting into it. I tell him no, thank you, and sit down on a bench to take off my wet boots and socks, tempted to remove my wet cargo pants and long-sleeved shirt. What would make the most sense is to strip to my underwear and put on a liner, but no way I’m going to do that on a boat that has no head and is full of men, and I’m aware of how self-conscious I suddenly am. Modesty is a luxury in a profession where one works in the worst conditions imaginable, including outdoor scenes with no toilet and encounters with putrid body fluids and maggots. I’ve cleaned up in gas-station sinks before and dressed in the back of a car or van, not caring who was around.

  I’m conditioned to be stoical. I know how to be indifferent and impervious. I’m damned accustomed to male colleagues looking at me and thinking tits and ass, and it doesn’t bother me or it didn’t used to because I was able to be oblivious, to be single-minded about my mission.

  It’s not like me to be so damned focused on myself, and I don’t like it one damn bit as I think of things that have nothing to do with my responsibility or legal jurisdiction or what unpleasantness might await me underwater. I’m aware of the recent comments Benton made, aware of Marino’s irritating bluster as he talks loudly with Kletty and Sullivan, about boats now, and what a good idea it would be for the CFC to have one, and what an experienced captain he is.