Black Coral Read online

  Maybe that’s what George intended by hiring him. Perhaps Hughes is really here to be my babysitter and keep me from doing stupid things like free diving among giant gators. Or maybe Hughes is the expendable one who’ll take those risks . . . I need to find out if George has a secret grudge against the man.

  “Check,” I say to Hughes, then call over to my dad. “Go ahead, Robert!”

  Dad calls to the crane operator, who lowers the cable with the weighted straps into the water over the van. After he gives Hughes and me a thumbs-up, we start wading into the water. George is already in a flat-bottom Fish and Wildlife boat, along with Chris Kaur. While Kaur wields a rifle loaded with tranquilizer darts, George has his hunting rifle across his lap.

  Just because Big Bill is tied up like Houdini on the shore doesn’t mean that his friends we couldn’t catch aren’t still lurking about. Everyone’s on edge. Even Dad’s expression has changed now that I’m in the water . . . despite all we’ve been through. Or maybe because of it.

  I downplayed the retrieval operation to my mother, like I do with everything else. After their divorce, she lost her enthusiasm for all things maritime, so I try not to get her too worried about my misadventures.

  “Ready?” I ask Hughes as we reach the drop-off.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Just an FYI. We’re on an outcropping. If there’s a gator den in this pond, right below us is the likely location.”

  “Noted.”

  When you think of burrowing animals, alligators don’t come to mind, but they’re probably the largest animal—next to bears—that alters their environment to create a habitat.

  Alligators will dig into the dirt below the waterline and tunnel as far back as fifteen feet, creating a chamber large enough for them to turn around inside. With a gator the size of Big Bill, that’s a serious lair.

  When we pass by the lakes and waterways where alligators live, we tend not to think about what’s really down there. There could be an entire network of underwater caverns beneath our feet. Some days you go out with a tracker and don’t spot a single alligator. It’s not because they’re somewhere else—it’s because they’re sitting on the bottom or resting in their burrow, digesting their latest meal or watching over their brood.

  We dive in and start swimming toward the floats over the van. Nothing grabs us from behind . . . not that I really expected that to happen. The den is a place to retreat to, not generally a hiding spot to attack from.

  Visibility is still garbage, but it’s much better in daylight than when I first dived into the lake.

  Hughes is to my left and keeping pace with me. Periodically he rotates and checks behind us. This is a sign of a diver who has swum in shark-infested waters. Big ones like great whites or bulls like to ambush when you’re not looking. When I tell people that a shark knows if you’re looking at them, they tend not to take me seriously. I’ve seen it firsthand. Some divers even paint eyes on the back of their masks. I’m not sure if that gives the sharks pause or makes them laugh so hard they give up.

  While we don’t have to worry about sharks this far inland, there are other threats, like unaccounted-for alligators, large constrictor snakes, small venomous snakes, and the occasional American crocodile. Even the much-rarer Nile crocodile. Of all reptiles, venomous snakes excluded, I’d least like to encounter the Nile crocodile. They kill more people every year than just about any other animal that’s not a snake. Fortunately, we’ve found only a handful of them in South Florida. Most likely they were escapees from a private zoo—of which Florida has more than its share.

  Hughes holds his hands out and glides to a stop. The bright-yellow material of one of the lifting straps is floating before us. Beyond it, the brown hulk of the van has become visible.

  I point to my right, and Hughes follows as we swim around the van to get a look at the whole vehicle. Its surface is covered by algae, making it impossible to see through the windows. The doors all remain tightly shut, and the van’s stuck in the muck past its hubcaps. We make our way to the back of the vehicle, and I start to dig in the mud above where its trailer hitch would be located.

  The plan is to use the crane to lift the rear of the van high enough to get the straps around the vehicle’s body, then pull the whole thing ashore, where the FDLE forensic team can open it and examine the interior.

  While I pull handfuls of mud away, I wonder how the van sank so deeply with all the windows and doors shut tight.

  Hughes taps me on the shoulder and takes over the digging. As he burrows, I grab the rails of the ladder on the back of the van and peek over the top.

  There’s my answer. The van has a small bubble dome on top that’s been cranked open a few inches. That’s all it would take. As the water rushed in through the pressure-relief valves designed to keep your ears from popping every time you slam your door shut, the air was pushed out through the top of the van, causing it to sink quickly instead of float.

  When I look back, Hughes has the trailer hitch exposed. I hand him a yellow strap, and he attaches it to the frame. We swim back a few yards and surface.

  “Tell Robert to lift it,” I say to George after pulling the regulator from my mouth.

  The crane’s motor shifts into gear, and the cable grows taut. The operator, an old friend of my dad’s named Mel Bracket, who has a mustache like a walrus, is a pro at this kind of thing and doesn’t force it.

  After moving it a few inches, Mel lets the cable go slack for a moment, then revs the crane again. The marker on the cable rises a few inches as the lake bottom starts to lose its grip on the van and whatever secrets lie inside.

  After the cable has risen another half meter, Hughes and I dive back down. I grab one end of a strap, and he grabs the other. We slide it under the back and to the front of the van in unison instead of one of us swimming underneath. That would be stupid—the kind of thing a McPherson does when nobody’s watching.

  We get the strap into place, and Hughes cinches it tight while I get the next one ready. Two minutes later the van is wrapped like . . . well, like Big Bill.

  Hughes and I surface and swim away from the van. Dad gives the signal, and the crane slowly begins to lift the entire vehicle. I catch a glimpse of the parting water out of the corner of my eye. It reminds me of a submarine surfacing.

  Once we get to shore, Hughes and I have our fins and tanks off before anyone can reach us to lend a hand. We turn back around in time to see the van emerge from the water.

  Mel lets it hover over the lake for a few minutes. Muddy water gushes out from the undercarriage as the van begins to drain. Suddenly Big Bill is no longer the most interesting photo op. Camera operators and reporters line up against the barrier to watch the old vehicle as it floats over the lake, ready to reveal its mysteries.

  I tell myself that the best outcome is an empty van, because that means nobody died. But the cruel reality is that, from a professional standpoint, there’d better be a body in there to justify this massive expenditure of state resources.

  We finally get the van over land, and Mel sets it down gently on a large blue tarp. Two technicians in white hazmat suits go to the back doors with crowbars and start to pry them open.

  Strategically, the van was placed so that its back faced away from the news crews and cameras. Hughes and I walk around to get a better look. A crowd of law enforcement officials gathers around us at the edge of the tarp.

  The doors swing open. There’s not a body inside. There are four.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SALVAGE

  Although I’m the one who found the van, pushed for it to be investigated, and helped pull it from the water, I’m simply another bystander now as FDLE’s forensic unit swarms over it, taking photos, looking for the VIN, and cleaning the muck from the license plate. While UIU is an independent agency, we don’t have a forensic unit. We have to rely on Marquez’s good graces to give us the help we need.

  Thankfully, despite our contentious meeting, she’s made a sincere
effort to supply us with the needed personnel. And right now it looks like it was a good bet on her part.

  The moment the techs opened the van, the four sets of skeletal remains on the floor were unmistakable for what they were. Despite having spent years underwater, clothing, hair, and even shoes remained visible on some of them.

  Sealed inside the van with only the small vent open at the top, they weren’t predated upon by larger animals or shifted by currents. Instead, they were left to slowly decompose over the years in their metallic tomb.

  You normally make such discoveries only in sunken submarines or ships with sealed compartments. Even so, those almost always occur in salt water, in which entirely different ecosystems govern decomposition.

  To be clear, these bodies have decomposed, but not in the way a body normally does when submerged in a Florida canal.

  Our state’s history is replete with stories of bodies being found underwater in odd circumstances. For more than a century, human remains have been found in Lake Okeechobee, sometimes several dozen at a time. The bodies appear to have been buried when parts of the lake were above water, suggesting that they came from a much older civilization. Which, considering that there are Florida artifacts dating back over ten thousand years, means they could have died at any point over a ridiculously long period of time.

  Unfortunately, the heyday for finding skeletal remains in Lake Okeechobee came long before modern forensic methods of dating existed, let alone DNA technology. Sooner or later a body will turn up and someone like my PhD adviser, Nadine Baltimore, will give us a fuller picture.

  “What’s going on?” asks George as he appears next to me.

  I point to the techs in their white suits. “They’re not saying anything.”

  A kneeling technician is using a brush and water bottle to clean the mud off the rear license plate. We all lean in as the letters and numbers are revealed.

  George already has his phone to his ear. “Sierra Quebec Tango four one three,” he recites into the phone.

  Leave it to George to already have someone from the DMV on the phone. Or is it? I look over at the pool of reporters for his girlfriend, Cynthia Trenton. She’s not with them. Instead, I find her on the side of the crane that’s away from the crowd, typing on her laptop with her earbuds in. She glances over in our direction and gives George a thumbs-up.

  “Leaking to the press already?” I ask George.

  “Asking Florida’s best crime reporter for background,” he corrects me. “FDLE will use the new database system, and it’ll take them an hour to realize they need to use the older system. Meanwhile, I can already tell you the names of the victims.” He pauses for a moment, then speaks into the phone. “You know, honey, you can’t run their names until we talk to the families . . .”

  I can hear her blistering response and see the look on her face from a distance as she explains to George that she doesn’t need a lecture in journalistic integrity from him. Watching an award-winning journalist chastise George is one of the perks of the job.

  George puts down the phone and mutters, “That woman.”

  Scott Hughes tries to pretend he didn’t overhear the whole exchange. The poor guy has no idea what he’s gotten himself into with the two of us. God knows what George told him to lure him from Fort Lauderdale PD to our unit.

  “Well,” I ask George, “what did she say about the van?”

  George points to the bodies being photographed by the techs and says in a low voice, “Four teenagers went missing in February 1989, in a van with these plates, after going to a rock concert. It was in the news for a few weeks, but eventually investigators decided the kids ran away. They’d had a couple of drug-possession charges and came from dysfunctional homes. Except for one. Straight-A student, but rumors of depression.”

  “Just like that?” I ask. “Case closed?”

  “They’d executed Ted Bundy a month prior, and I guess people were sick of those kinds of stories. It was easier for the parents to believe the kids would come home than that something bad happened. Although something like this wasn’t ruled out. Hold on.” George checks his phone. “She sent some more stuff. Police searched the canals between the concert and their homes and found nothing. Hmm. I think I remember that.”

  Pond 65 is between here and nowhere. “What venue?”

  “Black Coral Amphitheater. They shut it down years ago. It’s probably a Walmart now.” He takes another look at the bodies in the van as a tech starts to cover the back opening with clear plastic. “Anyway, assuming that’s them. Oh, look who decided to show up.” George nods to the road, where Janet Marquez is climbing out of an SUV.

  “How much you wanna bet she was waiting at the nearest Starbucks to find out if there was a body?”

  “You’re learning. Oh crap! Follow me. She knows too.” George grabs me by the arm and starts pulling.

  I’m about to ask why, then realize that Marquez is making a beeline straight for the reporters. Damn it. She’s about to put the FDLE stamp all over this.

  I’m still in my dive suit and booties, which aren’t meant for jogging, but I do my best to keep up with George. Scott Hughes is somewhere behind us, probably trying to figure out what kind of mental cases he’s working for.

  Heading off Marquez isn’t about claiming credit. Well, it’s not only about that. Now that bodies have been found, FDLE will want to take the credit and the investigation away from us, which would be okay in theory . . . but in reality, it’ll pretty much mean closing the case and moving on. Which is probably what we’d do anyway, but UIU needs the credit for this one.

  When George has to go before the state senate and explain who the hell we are, we need some wins on our record—especially because we put some of their major donors behind bars.

  Marquez is nearing the press. We’re not going to be able to intercept her in time without it being awkward. I briefly consider yelling to Mel to use the crane to knock the woman into the lake—better yet, drop her next to Big Bill, who only has the attention of two Fish and Wildlife trackers.

  Just as Marquez is rounding the base of the crane and stepping onto the grass in front of the press, a miracle happens: Cynthia Trenton materializes out of nowhere and stands in front of her with a recorder.

  Marquez stops cold. Trenton’s a recognized journalistic figure, after all. Before Marquez can tell her that she’ll be making her statement to the whole crowd, Cynthia is throwing a barrage of questions her way. I can’t hear them from here, but from the look on Marquez’s face, I can assume that Cynthia asked her point-blank about the missing kids—something Marquez probably doesn’t even know about yet.

  George pulls a pair of reading glasses from his pocket and hands them to me. “Put these on.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Just shut up and put them on.”

  I oblige, and he takes a brief second to assess the look. Through blurry lenses, I see him nod his head. “Good enough. Your hair is wet, and you still got a red mark where the mask was . . . but I think it’ll work.”

  “For what?”

  “If I’m going to put you on TV, I still need to use you for undercover work.”

  “Wait, what?”

  George is ten yards away from the press and already has his hands up in the air, calling attention to himself while Cynthia runs interference with Marquez. His gravelly voice booms, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Florida Underwater Investigation Unit will have a fuller statement later today, so I can only give you a brief comment about Inspector McPherson’s case. First off, the UIU would like to thank the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for their forensic assistance. The facts are that we have recovered bodies in the van. We believe we know their identities but are awaiting more forensic testing. If that’s confirmed, we won’t be releasing that information until we’ve had a chance to talk to the families. I hope you understand. We can’t risk any leaks, given the sensitivity of the matter. I think you can all relate. The last thing anyone wants to hear is s
ome bureaucrat on TV telling them their family member is deceased.”

  Marquez’s eyes widen as she realizes what George just did. If she’d planned on announcing that she and the FDLE found the 1989 runaways, he just killed that. George also managed to get the UIU’s name in there twice, along with my own, which clearly has her seething.

  George pushes me toward the lights and microphones. “Inspector McPherson will answer any questions she can.”

  I turn back to him and whisper, “What can I tell them?”

  “Use your judgment,” he says under his breath.

  I’d ask for clarity on that, but he’s already walking toward the furious Marquez. Words are about to be exchanged, and I’m not sure I want to be around for those.

  Okay, Sloan, now what?

  Um . . . what does Dad do in these situations? I could ask him, since he’s leaning on the crane tread, watching me.

  “First off, I’d like to thank the FDLE and Fish and Wildlife for their help, along with the Highway Patrol. I’d especially like to apologize to Big Bill for the disruption.” I point to the alligator on the other side of the lake.

  Oops, was that too flippant?

  “As Director Solar said, the Underwater Investigative Unit doesn’t have a full statement yet.” Wait, are we the Underwater Investigative Unit or Investigation Unit? “What I can tell you is that we became aware of the van when responding to a Highway Patrol request for assistance when a separate motor vehicle crashed into Pond 65.”

  The rest of my moment in the limelight becomes a blur as I do my best to not mention what I’m not supposed to mention. I get a few shouted questions and stumble through answers. Thankfully, George returns to my side.

  “If you have any questions, please contact us through our website,” George concludes. “In the meantime, we’d again like to thank the FDLE for their forensic assistance to the UIU. Here to talk about that part of the investigation is Janet Marquez.”

  “We have a website?” I ask in a whisper.