LC 04 - Skeleton Crew (14 page)

It was another world, a fantasy. This was the payoff for the long
descent. Lindsay was a strong swimmer, and during her diving
lessons she had discovered a talent for maneuvering underwater
with fins. Here, balanced with the weights on her belt and the vestlike buoyancy compensator, she was suspended, free of gravity,
free of drifting upward. Must be like flying, she thought.

Lindsay swam through a school of fish that looked like shiny
silver coins. An angelfish darted behind a vase sponge. Ahead,
Trey pointed to a loggerhead sea turtle. Lindsay dived to take a
closer look, wondering how old the huge reptile was. She and John
hovered over its back. She touched the shell with the tips of her
fingers, awed that any of its kind survived the ordeal of hatching
in the sandy beach, running a gauntlet of birds to the water, and
avoiding predator fish for the years it took to grow big enough to
stop being prey.

They investigated nooks and crannies, pointing out anything
beautiful or interesting. Harper was startled by an eel languishing
in a deep recess. A tiger fish brushed Lindsay's arm. She would
have liked to see a whale, but they came to these waters only in the
winter.

She checked her watch. They had been down fifteen minutes
already. The time went so fast. They came upon an expanse of
sand, like a valley carved in the limestone. Lindsay signaled to
John that she was going to look inside an overhang. He nodded and motioned that he was going to swim overhead and look at the
top of the overhang. Lindsay examined the sandy floor, brushed it
with her fingers, letting loose a fog of sediment. She swam to the
other side, resolving to look and not muddy the waters.

Ahead of her, she thought she saw something-a curve in the
pattern of rocky sediment. She swam to it, brushed away the sand,
clouding the water again. She reached and found the object but
was unable to see it in the sediment-filled water. She slipped it into
a zippered pocket, then glanced up and realized she couldn't see
in any direction through the clouded water that had enveloped
her, and didn't know which way to swim. She panicked and
grabbed at her belt for her flashlight. Unable to see or to think
clearly what she was doing, she mistakenly tugged at the buckle,
loosening the belt, and her weights slipped from her waist, into the
murky water. Suddenly and quickly, as if having pushed a button
in an elevator, she was moving upward.

Don't panic. She let out her breath slowly and stretched out her
arms and legs-flaring to slow her ascent. Then she felt an arm
around her waist. John was pulling her down. Harper met them
with Lindsay's weight belt and helped reattach it around her. Trey
watched her closely, motioning, asking if she was all right. She
nodded and indicated that she wanted him to take a global positioning reading at the place where she had been.

Lindsay's heart was still pounding and she had to concentrate
on breathing normally as they swam down the channel. Out of the
corner of her eye she saw John watching her, and she signaled to
him that she was fine. Trey led them upward to the top of the limestone rocks. Looking back down at the trough they had been in,
Lindsay wondered if it had been a riverbed. What would a
riverbed look like after being submerged for several thousand
years? Trey pointed to his watch. Time to head back to the place
where they had descended.

Halfway back, off to the side, Lindsay saw two other divers
swimming just above the bottom, looking only at the sea floor.
With the carpet of color and abundance of aquatic life, she wondered at their being so focused. They must be surveying, she
thought. For what? She looked at Trey and saw that he had noticed
them, too.

"Have a good time?" asked Bobbie when they were in the boat
stripping off their gear.

"It's really beautiful down there," said Lindsay and Harper
together.

"It's a different experience every time I go," Trey said.

Then the question that Lindsay dreaded. He asked if she was all
right. She hoped the redness that she felt creeping into her cheeks
didn't show.

"I'm fine. Sorry I scared everybody."

Trey shook his head. "Probably scared you worse than it did us.
You didn't ascend that far."

"How'd you lose your weights?" asked Harper.

"I was, uh, grabbing for a flashlight."

"A flashlight?" asked Harper.

Trey looked puzzled. Even in the overhangs the visibility had
been exceptionally good.

"Lindsay was lost in a cave once," John offered. "I expect she
had a flashback when the water got murky."

Lindsay nodded. "Really, I'm fine. Sometimes I just have this
absurd need to know that I have a light."

"Well, you did right to control your ascent," said Trey.

Ever the teacher, he explained what she would have had to do
next had a partner not been there.

Harper grinned. "You aren't used to being out of control, are
you?"

Lindsay looked at her ruefully. "No," she said.

"What was it you found?" asked Trey.

Lindsay fished the two-inch mineralized object out of her
pocket and examined it before handing it to Trey.

"I can't believe it," he said. "Do you know how few fossils have
been found here? I haven't found any, and this is your first trip."

"I have an eye for bones, what can I say?"

Bobbie reached for the bone. "What is it, can you tell?"

"It's mammal. I believe a rib fragment. The tightness of the
curve makes me suspect it might be human."

As soon as she said it, she thought of John. The phrase "bone of
contention" entered her mind, and she changed the subject.

"Did you see those other divers?"

They all had. "Lots of people dive at Gray's Reef," Trey said,
but Lindsay knew that he, like she, thought they might be Eva
Jones's divers.

Lindsay's long hair was still damp when she settled in the lab to finish analyzing the bones of HSkR1. She yawned and rubbed
her ears to get the pressure back into balance. Carolyn had cleaned
the bones of fabric and placed a wet cloth over them. Lindsay laid
out the long bones and measured them one by one on an osteo-
metric board. She gave each bone a thorough examination, first by
gently running her fingers over its surface. It probably looked to
others as if she were caressing them, but Lindsay believed in using
her tactile senses as well as her eyes.

Once when she was taking a human osteology course, she had
been blindfolded and required to lay out a box of skeletal remains
in anatomical position, then write an analysis of the individual
without ever having seen the bones. She got so good at it that it
became a challenge to the other archaeology students to find something that she couldn't identify. Sometimes they would try without
success to fool her with animal bones. Though her skills impressed
the archaeology students, Lindsay knew that any halfway good
osteologist could do the same thing. Her friends swore that if she
ever lost her eyesight, she could do her job just as well. She learned
some valuable lessons from that experience that she now tried to
pass on to her own students, and she made the blindfold test a part
of the final examination in her osteology courses.

Lindsay completed examination of each bone of HSkR1 with a
detailed visual inspection of every centimeter of its surface, using
both her naked eye and magnification. It was a time-consuming
process, but its payoff was the story the bones could paint for the
discerning eye.

HSkR1 was about five feet, ten inches tall, above average for the
men of his time. His muscle attachments were no bigger than average, indicating he was not of muscular build and therefore probably was not one of the sailors, whose hard work showed markedly
in their bones. The right lateral attachments were slightly larger
than their left counterparts, indicating right-handedness. She
found no healed breaks, pits, unevenness, or swelling in the bones
that would be evidence of disease. Nor did she find any malformation of the long bones. The individual appeared to have had
good nutrition from the time he was a child until he died.

She returned the long bones to Carolyn and took the scapulas.
Compared with the left, the beveling on the margin of the glenoid
cavity of the right shoulder blade, the cup where the head of the
humerus rests, also indicated that he was right-handed.

Lindsay took the skull, set it on the donut ring, and went to the
trays of soaking artifacts, looking for one thing in particular.

"Can I borrow this a minute?" she asked Carolyn, pointing to a
wooden caulker's mallet.

"Why?"

"I'd like to take some measurements."

Carolyn took the artifact and wrapped it in a damp cotton cloth,
warning Lindsay that it was very fragile. She and Korey watched
as Lindsay measured and examined the head of the mallet. They
came closer, hovering over her shoulder as she placed the head of
the hammer against the indentations of the skull and measured the
angle of the mallet to the skull.

"Is that it?" asked Korey. "Is that the murder weapon?"

"It was something like this. I'm sure they had many of these on
board."

The crew from the cofferdam were arriving, and the noise level
in the lab increased. Lewis came over carrying a carton.

"She's found the murder weapon," whispered Carolyn.

Lewis looked dumbfounded for a moment. "You're kidding!"

"I've found a possibility," Lindsay mumbled as she fit the head
of the mallet into the indentations at several angles.

"What are you doing now?" asked Lewis.

"The wound isn't even-the side of the weapon where the most
force was focused left a deeper impression. By measuring the
angle of the depression and the angle of the hammer in the wound,
I can figure out the handedness and the height of the perp. Add
this information to the hierarchy of the skull fractures, and I can
determine the sequence of blows during the attack."

The three of them stood staring at her a moment, and Lindsay
realized that she was accustomed to working with people like
medical examiners, or her students, who were familiar with the
forensic part of her work. She suppressed a smile.

"Well, damn," said Korey at last. "We'll be able to make an
arrest by the end of the day."

"This is great," Lewis said, his eyes glistening with ideas. "This
is the kind of personal drama we need to get everyone's interest in
the project." He set the box he was holding down on the table.
"Here's another skeleton. When can you finish with it?"

"Another one already? Is this the one you discovered?"

He nodded, and Lindsay bit her tongue to keep from saying anything about the excavation being done way too fast.

Lewis apparently was a mind reader. "I put several people on
it. Unfortunately, a dig like this one has to be done as quickly as
possible. We can't hold back the ocean forever."

"So?" asked Carolyn.

"So what?" Lindsay asked her.

"How tall was the perp and which hand wielded the weapon?"

"Right now, I can tell you that he was shorter than HSkR1 and
he was left-handed."

"Couldn't he just have used his left hand?" Korey asked.

"When someone is committing an act as serious and consequential as bludgeoning a person to death, they typically use the
hand they have the most facility with."

"You said something about the sequence of blows?" said Lewis.

"Whoever it was came up from behind and struck him on the
left side of the head with great force. When the victim fell forward,
he hit him twice more."

"Wow," said Carolyn. "You do this all the time?"

"Not all the time, but I've seen wounds like these before."

"What? With a caulker's mallet?" asked Korey.

"With a hammer, a tire iron, a baseball bat. Different wounds,
but there are similarities."

"You certainly have a nice life," said Carolyn.

Lindsay smiled at her. "I usually don't get any bodies that are
fleshed out. That makes it easier."

That evening, Trey turned the debriefing over to Steven Nemo.
Steven had created a giant cross-section schematic of the ship with
each deck labeled. The hold was easy to identify with its piles of
stone ballast. Above the hold were the orlop deck, main gun deck,
weather deck, and the forecastle and sterncastle decks. He had
mapped the location inside the ship of the artifacts discovered so
far.

HSkR1 had been found in what was described as the sailmaker's cabin because a cache of sailcloth and a leather palm thimble were found there. That made sense. HSkR1 would have been
taken there to be sewn into the sailcloth. The mallet, she noted,
came from the carpenter's cabin, where they had also discovered
part of a saw and a cache of chisels.

Lindsay wondered where the body had been discovered at the
time of the murder. Would the journal tell what happened? Surely, something as dramatic as a murder would be worth mentioning.
Lindsay bet that Lewis was pressuring Harper to hurry with the
translation, just as he was pressing her to finish the skeletons.

HSkR2, Lewis's skeleton, was in a section that Steven said was
probably an officer's or an important passenger's cabin. The huge
trunk with the bird crest was the first artifact uncovered there; the
chess pieces and the skeleton were found next. All appeared to
have been jumbled on top of one another.

"I think HSkR2 is a passenger rather than an officer," Steven
said. "An officer probably would have been somewhere else in the
ship during a storm of such severity that it eventually sank the
ship. If the chess set did belong to the passenger Valerian, there's a
good chance this was Valerian's cabin. It would be interesting if
the skeleton were Valerian, but we have no way at this time of
knowing if they are his remains."

"No," said Gina, "I don't want it to be Valerian."

Steven looked at her a moment before setting aside the cross
section and displaying a map of the sea floor.