And Rylee’s brain stuttered as she stared at it.
White and swollen by the water, the fingers were about eight inches under the surface.
Dead. Obviously dead.
She should reach in and grasp that hand.
Someone loved the person beneath the water, and they were tormented because they didn’t know what had happened to their family member.
In all the disasters where WorldCares was present, the rescue teams knew there would be no peace for the survivors until they found their loved ones.
Reach for it, Rylee told herself, but she didn’t move.
On land, Rylee was very used to handling something like this. She’d given artificial breath so many times, pressed her hand into gaping wounds so many times. She’d seen people with their limbs melted away, the stumps burned black. And one woman with her eyeball dangling from the connective tissues, resting in her hand.
Rylee had dampened a cloth and draped it over the eye. Dampened another and lightly pressed it into the socket just to keep things moist, but careful not to stop the flow of whateverwas flowing in her veins. Hopefully flowing. That woman was triaged as walking wounded, not one of the ones in the worst shape. So she had held her eyeball and waited for more medical help.
That one still gave Rylee nightmares.
And yes, Rylee had been around dead bodies. More than her share.
But bodies in the water?
Rylee only knew what Ed had told her when they dated last year.
Ed worked for the D.C.P.D. and trained with their swift water search-and-rescue team, so he could dive into the Potomac looking for evidence that had been tossed in.
And of course, that meant bodies too.
Ed had described the terrible conditions of those dives. The deeper he went, the colder it got. With zero visibility, he inched forward, feeling around with his hands, learning to identify items by touch through his dive gloves.
There were all kinds of dangers on the bottom: sharp objects, trees, rocks, and debris that could entangle and entrap him.
He said that bodies don’t behave the way they’re portrayed in movies. They didn’t lie flat on the floor of the waterway. The upper half suspends at an angle buoyed by air trapped in the body. So if he was looking for a newly deceased body, he was feeling around in the water quite a bit above the floor, and he usually found the corpse when his fingers pushed into an eye socket.
After about seven days, depending on the temperature of the water, the body fills with decomp gases and floats to the surface.
Once it reached the surface, fish and birds looking for food punctured the skin, released the gas, and the body sank back down.
A floating hand, that could be on the way up or the way down, Rylee reasoned.
The water was cold but not that cold. The thermometer Jesus put in the water to warn people about how long they could safely stay out said the river was fifty degrees that day.
But still, if she was right about the float and descent, this was someone who had been in the water for ten to twenty days.
And her second guess was that the corpse would lead with the gaseous pocket, so abdomen first on the way up and lightest last on the way down.
If she was right, this body was on its way back to the bottom.
She should call the police.
If she lost sight of the hand and the team came out, Ed would be there for sure.
Rylee remembered asking him how he coped with reaching around in pitch black,hopingto put his hand into decaying flesh. He said he sang opera the whole time he was under. It took up a lot of the air in his tank, but singing at the top of his lungs kept him sane.
That, and the extra bubbles, meant his team would notice if he became entangled and needed an assist.
Rylee pulled out her phone and, through the protective plastic case, tapped the Maps app, got her exact location, and took a screenshot.
