Dangerous Depths (24 page)

“Well?” Dunn asked when we climbed
aboard.

“It’s Billings. No one else was in the boat.
It looks like he was clobbered from behind.” I pulled the top
portion of my wetsuit off and let it hang around my waist. I took a
deep breath of fresh sea air, closed my eyes, and lifted my face to
the sun. Carr went to the front of the boat and stretched out on
the bow. We needed the light, the warmth and time to recharge.

Dunn unzipped the bag and took a quick look.
“Damn,” he muttered. I knew he’d been hoping for some better news,
like maybe that Billings had just drowned.

Finally, we suited back up, got fresh tanks
and gathered our evidence containers for the last dive. We’d spent
almost an hour down there already. This dive would be short. We
knew what we needed to collect and divided the tasks. Each of us
carried a couple of water-tight containers in mesh bags so the
evidence could be preserved in sea water to prevent corrosion.

When we got to the bottom, Carr headed to the
wheelhouse to remove the knobs from the cabin door. Maybe we’d get
lucky and find prints. I swam back to the hull. There I pulled out
my dive knife and chipped some charred pieces into an evidence bag.
From these, the lab should be able to determine whether an
accelerant had been used.

When I got back to the cabin door, Carr and I
swam inside looking for a murder weapon and a motive. All the
electronics seemed intact—no dangling wires where instruments might
have been pulled out. Whoever had killed Billings hadn’t been
interested in his GPS, radio, or radar equipment. Theft was
obviously not the motive here.

A huge toolbox was bolted down alongside one
wall. I was about to open it when I was confronted by a threatening
set of teeth—a moray eel. It snaked out from behind the box and
wriggled off to find a better place to curl. I collected anything
that could have been used to crush Billings’s skull—a hammer, a big
pair of cutting pliers, a level. I gathered the tools into a
PVC-type tube long enough to contain the items, careful not to
smear any prints that might be on them, and then snapped a lid in
place on each end of the tube.

Carr was opening lockers and cupboards for
any indication of contraband, especially drugs. We collected a few
bags of stuff that were probably just flour and sugar. Each piece
of evidence was captured in a jar, the lid screwed tightly in
place, and dropped into our mesh bags. I collected a cigarette
butt, a couple of coffee mugs, and anything else that might contain
prints and wasn’t bolted down. That was the trouble with an
underwater crime scene. You couldn’t just dust every surface at the
scene as could be done in a dry environment.

We’d pretty much scoured the wheelhouse. I
took a final swim around. Under the chart table I found a heavy
wrench. Carr swam over with a container and we placed it inside.
This could very well be the murder weapon. I shone my light back
into the recesses under the chart table, the beam illuminating what
at first looked like a piece of rubber matting. Then I realized it
was a flipper. I grabbed and pulled. Damned if it wasn’t a dead
hawksbill turtle. Had Billings been poaching?

I decided to bag it and take it to the
surface. It was possible that it related to Billings’s death
somehow. Maybe Billings had been interfering in some other
poacher’s territory or gotten crossways with a colleague. Seemed a
stretch—murder over a turtle. But I’d ask Liam and Tom to take a
look at it.

Carr swam up behind me. I pointed to the
turtle and indicated that I wanted to collect it. I could tell he
thought I was nuts. He shrugged and signaled that he was going to
head back up with the containers of evidence that we’d filled. He
was pretty well weighted down with stuff. I gave him the okay
signal and indicated I’d be right behind him.

It was a struggle getting the turtle into the
bag, as it kept getting caught in the mesh fabric. Finally I
managed to get the thing contained. I looped the ties of the bag
over my arm and snugged it up over my shoulder, my camera strap
over the other. I shone my light ahead and started out of the
wheelhouse cabin. I was three feet from the doorway when the boat
rocked slightly, then began a slow tip.

I kicked my fins hard, but before I made it
to the door, the boat was tumbling sideways. It flipped on its side
and then onto the roof and started to slide. A sickening dread
twisted in my belly.

The boat picked up momentum as it slid down
the embankment on its roof. I’d lost my flashlight when the boat
had flipped over; now I was surrounded by utter blackness and
completely disoriented. I was pretty sure I was upside down on the
ceiling of the wheelhouse. When I tried to right myself I couldn’t
move. I was tangled in a mass of loose lines. God knows how far it
was to the sea floor—too far to make it to the bottom alive.

I could feel the mounting pressure as the
boat went deeper. I kept pinching my nose, struggling to keep my
ears clear. I could hear joists creaking as the boat bumped the
side of the precipice and kept going down. I had to get out, but
every time I tried to move, I was pulled up short from behind. I
knew my tank valve was caught on something. I twisted in the
blackness, trying to get loose.

My fingers grabbed only empty water. I had to
get out of my vest. It was the only way to free myself. I unsnapped
the clip that held it around my chest and tried to slip my arm out
of the shoulder strap. No go. I finally realized that my arm was
wrapped up in my camera strap. I fumbled in the dark, working my
fingers from the case to the release clip. I pushed the release and
felt the camera fall away. I slipped out of the vest and brought my
tank around in front of me, one arm still in the vest, my regulator
clasped tight between my teeth. I found a coil of rope tangled
around the valve and pulled on it until it fell away.

Just at the edge of my vision, I could see
blue lights dancing through the darkness. Then they turned into
golden fairies, with the most beautiful translucent wings. I heard
myself laughing into my regulator and knew I was hallucinating.
Nitrogen narcosis was setting in big-time. If I didn’t get out of
the boat soon, I’d be thinking it was a good idea to ride it all
the way to the bottom.

I groped though the darkness, my arms
outstretched, sweeping nothing but black watery emptiness. Finally,
my fingers found the wheel. I grasped one of the spokes, and
crashed my tank hard against the windows I knew were right in front
of the wheel. I felt one give. One more hard blow and my tank broke
through. I pulled the tank back to me, wrapped one arm around it,
grabbed the edge of the window frame, unconcerned about the shards
that tore through my gloves. I kicked hard and pulled myself out of
the boat. Water swirled around me. I was being sucked down,
tumbling helplessly out of control, in the grasp of the powerful
eddies created by the sinking boat.

Finally the boat fell away and I was left
hovering in the vast empty ocean. That’s all I could comprehend. My
mind would not function. I was disoriented and on the verge of
losing consciousness. Darkness was building around the edges of my
brain. I wondered how deep I’d been pulled. I knew I should check
my gauges for depth and air supply, but it all seemed like way too
much effort.

My body instinctively did what was natural:
It headed up. As I rose from the depths, the water turned indigo;
basic thinking skills returned and I kicked toward the growing
circle of light above me. Finally, I checked my gauges. I was at
two hundred feet. My air supply registered pretty close to zero.
The maximum depth on my gauge showed I’d been at almost three
hundred feet. I was stunned and scared. I knew what being that deep
could mean.

How long had I been down there? It felt like
hours but it had probably only been minutes. Still, it was long
enough and deep enough that I’d be consumed by the bends when I
surfaced. I had no choice though but to keep going up. At fifty
feet, I felt the first stab of pain shoot through my back and under
my rib cage, a sure sign that nitrogen was moving out of my tissues
and forming bubbles in my bloodstream. I needed to stay at that
depth to allow them to dissipate, but without air that was
impossible.

Where the hell were the others? Carr should
have seen the boat going over the edge. I scanned the water above
me, hoping to see someone, anyone, coming for me. That’s when I saw
the light, coming close. At first, I thought I was still
hallucinating. Then two divers took shape in the indigo water.

Carmichael reached me first with an extra
tank. O’Brien was right behind. He grabbed me and took a long hard
look into my eyes. I nodded, indicating I was coherent, and let
them take over. They got the other tank attached and took me
deeper. I felt the pain subside. Carmichael checked my gauge to see
how deep I had been, then wrote
dive tables
on his slate. I
knew what he meant. He was going to the surface to calculate
decompression time. O’Brien stayed down with me, his arm wrapped
around my waist. We drifted there, waiting for Carmichael to
return.

I was amazed to find that the mesh bag with
the turtle still draped over my shoulder. O’Brien gave me this look
like,
what the hell are you doing with a dead turtle on your
back?
I could hardly remember myself. If I hadn’t taken the
time to bag it, I’d have been out of the boat before it had started
its trip to the deep.

Finally Carmichael returned with a bunch of
numbers written on his slate. He’d had to do a lot of estimating. I
could see by the numbers on the slate that Carmichael was playing
it safe. He wanted me to decompress at sixty feet for ten minutes,
then do successive decompression stops at continuing shallower
depths for a total of more than two hours, a long, water logging
procedure. O’Brien and Carmichael took shifts along with some of
the other rescue divers who had been alerted and come out, bringing
extra tanks. Hours later, I broke the surface into the
sunlight.

Stark had stayed. He was reclining under the
bimini on Carmichael’s boat when I surfaced.

“It’s about time you got back up here.” He
lifted his head and smiled, then walked to the transom and waited
while I unbuckled my weights and BC and handed them up. He offered
me his hand and pulled me into the boat. He still had his dammed
life vest on.

I dropped onto a seat in the boat, exhausted
and thirsty.

“Are you okay, Hannah?” O’Brien asked,
concern etching his face. He handed me a bottle of water and an
orange.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” I said, taking a long
swig of water. My throat was raw, my chest sore, and I had a
headache. The water was performing its magic though; some of the
fatigue was slowly vanishing, the pounding in my temples subsiding
to a throb.

“What happened down there?” O’Brien asked.
“When Carr surfaced, he said he looked back and saw the boat
sliding down the embankment.”

“I tried to swim back fast enough to get to
you,” Carr interjected. “But I saw it was hopeless. I headed for
the surface for help.”

“It’s okay, Ed. There wasn’t anything else
for you to do,” I said, pulling the orange apart. “I was bagging
that stupid turtle when I felt the boat rock and then start to
slide. I just couldn’t get to the door fast enough. It rolled onto
its roof and started down. I was finally able to break out a
window.” I chewed on the orange and replayed the scene in the boat.
The ocean air never smelled so sweet, an orange taste so
delicious.

“As soon as Carr told us what had happened,
Carmichael and I threw our gear on, grabbed extra tanks, and went
down. We didn’t know what to expect but we were fully prepared for
a long, deep dive to get you out of that boat. When we got to the
edge of the embankment, we could see your bubbles and then you
appeared. Best thing I ever saw.” O’Brien sat down beside me and
handed me more water. I could see how scared he’d been.

“Thanks for coming after me,” I said,
squeezing O’Brien’s hand and smiling at James Carmichael.

“Hey, no problem.” James turned and gave me a
thumbs-up. “Shoulda known you’d find your way outta dat boat. All
we did was bring you a little air.”

“As soon as we knew you were okay down there,
Dunn went back into town with the body,” Stark said. “You up to a
visit to the coroner’s?”

“Sure. I’ll meet you there,” I said.

Carr and Stark headed back in the rescue boat
and I rode back with O’Brien and Carmichael. On the way, I thought
about Elyse and how similar the sinking of the
Lila B
was to
the explosion and fire on the
Caribbe
. And two unrelated
murders, two boats sunk within a week in these islands, seemed
pretty unlikely. I was anxious to meet up with Stark and find out
what the hell had happened.

By the time we pulled into Road Town Harbor,
I’d consumed a gallon of water, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,
and another orange. I was feeling amazingly well. Nothing like
surviving.

O’Brien and I wrapped the turtle in ice and
loaded it in the Rambler. After nearly dying getting the thing out
of the wreck, I wasn’t about the let it rot. I’d have Liam and Tom
take a look at it.

The coroner had already removed Billings’s
clothes and was just beginning to examine the body, when we got
there. He showed us the shirt. It had a hole in it, along with what
was probably blood in the fibers—which wasn’t too surprising,
because there was a matching tear in Billings’s flesh, on the right
side of his abdomen.

“It’s a good-sized wound,” the coroner said,
probing it with his scalpel. “Don’t think it’s a knife wound. Too
big, too jagged. Lots of trauma around the edges. See this?” He was
pointing to the bruises that encircled the wound.