“Homeless guy camping on the bank under the bridge,” Leo said. “He saw the floater, went berserkers, alerting the bridge operator who works way up in that box there.” He pointed. “Operator’s in charge of raising the bridge for marine traffic. We got his statement and one from the homeless wingnut. Got him in a vehicle up in the lot.”
“Jumper, you think?”
“Not a chance in hell. She’s trussed up like a sausage in plastic—wait till you see this one.”
“Yo!” A sharp whistle issued from one of the officers on the vessels. “We got her! Diver’s bringing her up!”
They all swung around to watch the boat with the dive team maneuver around the logs, the tender carefully reading his buddy’s line. A soft wet mist shrouded the water. The sleet doubled down as rain. Yet another vessel chugged along the marine channel under the bridge, sending a bigger surge and more waves slapping and chuckling under the dock. The logs rolled and bumped together.
“Fucking idiots!” yelled Leo. “Where’s that backup harbor unit? Can’t they stop these damn things? Going to kill our diver down here.”
The diver’s neoprene-covered head suddenly emerged outside of the boom in a smooth, mercurial swell of gray water, his goggles glistening. He brought a plastic-shrouded shape up beside him, and he started to swim it toward the dock. Maddocks, O’Hagan, and Leo went to the edge. Silence befell them. Their floater was still facedown. She surged and rolled in the swells, hair undulating with seaweed around her head. As the diver brought her closer, they could see two parallel striations—deep gashes—across the back of the victim’s skull, as if her head had been hacked open with an axe. From the neck down she was bound in what looked like a thick polyethylene tarp, opaque. Wound tight with rope. Another long piece of rope attached to her neck floated several meters out into the water.
“You weren’t kidding when you said she’s been trussed up like a sausage,” Maddocks said quietly as he snapped on latex gloves. He crouched down at the edge of the dock as the diver brought her near. O’Hagan put on her own gloves, squatting down beside him. Leo stood slightly to the side, watching, his hands firmly in his pockets. A chill washed through Maddocks as he got a closer look at their floater.
Under that plastic sheeting she was naked, her skin fish-belly white, like something alien. A grub.
“Get that photographer down here,” Maddocks said to Leo, who in turn bellowed for the guy. The photographer, who’d been sheltering under cover of the bridge, came running along the dock, almost slipped, regained his balance.
“Bloody rookies,” Leo mumbled, hands still tucked deep in his pockets. The photographer began to shoot images of the floater in the water. Two morgue guys came along the dock, carrying a metal litter basket and body bag.
“Take a close-up of the back of her head here,” Maddocks said to the photographer, pointing to the bloodless gashes in the victim’s skull.
The flash went off. A foghorn sounded as mist thickened.
“She could have been slashed by a boat propeller,” O’Hagan said, leaning in for a better look herself. “Not uncommon in drownings, especially if she went over the side of a boat and caught the props at the rear. Wasn’t a very big vessel if that was the case, or she’d have been dismembered, chopped into tiny pieces. Propellers from craft like tugboats tend to space the lacerations farther apart.” More photos were snapped—a close-up of the rope around the victim’s neck and the ropes binding the tarp.
“Or she didn’t go overboard but resurfaced after a period of submergence due to gas production,” O’Hagan said. “And then she was chopped by the prop of a passing boat. When that kind of refloat occurs, in most instances, the body comes up in a facedown attitude, like this one, and the damage will nearly always be to the back of the head, shoulders, neck, buttocks. Okay, let’s get her out.”
“Some more hands on deck here, please,” Maddocks said. The coroner’s guys laid the body bag out on the dock and helped heft the floater out. They placed her gently on the body bag. Water pooled around her. The rope around her neck stretched about three meters long and was frayed at the end, blackened by what looked like engine grease.
More photos were taken. They rolled her over.
“Holyfuck,” Leo said, taking a sharp step backward.
They stared.
A skull that was barely covered with a layer of raw, ragged flesh grimaced up at them. Eyeballs, opaque, protruded from hollow sockets. All the tissue around them was gone. Eaten. Nose gone. Holes in the cheeks. No lips at all softened the bare grin of her jaw.
“Jeezus fuck, I hate floaters,” Leo whispered.
“Anthropophagy,” O’Hagan said quietly, still on her haunches, studying the face closely. “The ingesting of a human body by any multicelled organism—fish, reptiles, crustaceans, animals, invertebrates—is a natural phenomenon, but it can be truly shocking to a novice diver to recover something like this.”
A small creature slithered out of the mouth.
“Fuck,” said Leo.
“How long to do that kind of damage?” Maddocks said. “Any idea how long she’s been down there?”
“Depends on several factors—like where she went in, from where she drifted, temperatures, currents, and what kind of sea life got at her. Sea lice are voracious feeders, for example. They’ll enter the body through any orifice—anus, mouth, ears, nose, open wounds—like those on her skull—or they’ll go for the soft tissue, force their way in around an eyeball, eat eyelids, lips, ears, nose. Once inside the body they continue to feed until the source of nourishment is consumed, or until they’re disturbed. Shrimp could have done this within sixteen hours, can reduce a body to a near skeleton within a week. I’ll need to get her onto my table for a better idea. And more context would help.”
From the ravaged face, there was no immediate way to tell if this DB was male or female, but through the plastic Maddocks could make out the swell of a bare breast, dark nipple. He swiped rain from his wet brow with the back of his sleeve.
“Doesn’t look like too much damage under the tarp yet,” he said.
“Clothing usually serves as a barrier for at least the first twenty-four hours,” O’Hagan replied. “Her torso appears to have been pretty well insulated by that polyethylene. It’s tightly secured around the neck. I’m guessing she hasn’t been in the water that long.”
“Why wrap her body up like that but leave the head exposed?” Maddocks said, more to himself than anyone else as he touched the plastic with his gloved fingertips, trying to better see what was under it.
