“Still on your Willis kick, Shag-man?”
“Yep, he’s my man.” Shag set down the aluminum case he carried and looked around. “Man, did you get a load of the babe on the bottom out there? Somebody’s really got his wires jerked loose to do something like that to a hottie like her.” He shook his head, dreadlocks wriggling like anxious, hairy worms. “Oh yeah, Buckeye says for you to come on out. Vicky’s done with the stills, and the divers are bringin’ the lady up.”
“Okay. No mistakes, okay, Shag? The media’s going to eat this one up. Peter Hastings’s already been out here snooping around.”
“Yeah, they filmed us all the way in. No sweat. I’m the best, you know? Not to worry.”
4
The water was clear now, and we all moved down to the lower dock to watch retrieval. It was like looking through a glass-bottomed boat at a scene from a horror movie. Three divers hung suspended under the surface around Sylvie Border, taking underwater pictures from every angle, while Vicky and Shag photographed from the deck. I couldn’t take looking at the woman’s waist-length hair floating eerily in the currents, so I watched for approaching boats instead.
“They’re ready,” Bud said.
I gave the signal to bring her up.
Nobody said much now, which was unusual at a crime scene. We all knew each other well, and sometimes it helped to make small talk, if only to alleviate the tension. The chair was sunk into the mud halfway up the victim’s calves, and the divers pulled it loose with some effort, one man holding the back and one on each side.
The body broke the surface a minute later, and water streamed down the nude torso, straggling hair like bleached seaweed over her face and breasts. Bud and Buckeye grabbed the arms of the chair with gloved hands and pulled it up onto the decking. Discarded like a sack of garbage, Sylvie’s remains now would be examined, prodded, cut open, invaded by me and my friends. Though necessary, it seemed obscene.
I squatted down beside the chair. Both the victim’s arms were taped to the chair, at the wrists and the elbows, the skin wrinkled and bluish from hours underwater. The fingernails were painted scarlet. A perfect manicure. Three nails on her right hand were split or broken. The left thumbnail was nearly torn off. “She didn’t go down easy,” I said.
Bud leaned down and studied the hanging thumbnail. “Maybe she got a coupla gouges in him before he finished her off.”
“Jeez, this guy’s the psychopath of the century.” Shag’s video camera whirred softly as he spoke. He edged around the body slowly, methodically recording everything we said and did. O.J. residual. Do everything by the book.
Buckeye went down on his haunches in front of the chair. “No visible cause of death. Probably means either drowning or strangulation. Get a close-up on those bruises,” he said over his shoulder to Vicky. “Especially the big ones on the upper arms. And there’s the tattoo of Tinkerbell I was tellin’ you about. God, she just got that put on. I watched ’em do it.”
I stared at the two-inch lime green and yellow fairy tattoo on her left breast and frowned. “Her thighs are marked up pretty bad, too. Look at those wounds on her torso that look like little half-circles. What’d you think made those, Buckeye?”
“Looks like he either hit her with something or gouged her, and some of them ain’t from no perp.” Buckeye pointed out a line of purple marks on the waxy flesh of one arm. “She was fish food all night long. Turtles probably fed on her some, too, but not as bad as they would’ve if she’d been in the water longer.”
“This is god-awful,” Buckeye said.
I said, “Vicky, get your still shots of her whole body; then we’ll pull back her hair and let you shoot her face.” Vicky stepped forward, a quiet, thick-figured woman of forty with three teenagers at home and a husband who owned a boat dock. Quick and efficient and quiet, Vicky did the job solemnly, finished, and backed away. I got out my ballpoint pen and lifted a strand of wet hair. The face had been brutally beaten; so swollen and grotesque, it was beyond recognition. A five-inch swath of silver duct tape was wrapped around her neck and the decorative iron bars on the back of the chair, holding her head tightly in place.
“The skin on the face looks a little strange, Buckeye. What’s with that?”
“Hell, nothin’s gonna look right after a night underwater.”
“Some of it’s already sloughing off.”
Buckeye said, “I suspect the fish went for the head first, so the face is more damaged than the rest of the body.”
“God, they must’ve had a real feeding frenzy. We gotta get this psycho,” Bud said, leaning back against the deck railing. He sounded as disgusted as I felt. He turned to Buckeye, all kidding aside. “What’d ya think, Buckeye? Why would he set her up at a table like this?”
“God only knows,” Buckeye said, watching Shag film while I snagged back the rest of the hair behind her ears. “She’s still got on diamond ear studs. Wasn’t no robbery.”
“It couldn’t’ve been easy to choreograph that little scene at the bottom.” I rose and frowned down at the victim. “He couldn’t have done it in one dive. That means lots of coming up for air. Or full scuba gear.”
“God, and she was so beautiful,” Buckeye said.
“Think you can get anything off her?” I asked him.
“Most trace evidence’s gonna be degraded.” Buckeye grimaced and kept shaking his head. “Guess this’ll put my fishing trip on hold for a good long time. I’ll get what I can, but don’t expect much. When Shag’s done, let’s take her in like this, and I’ll remove the tape at the autopsy. Looks like he wrapped the goddamn tape around her neck at least a dozen times. We could get lucky with a partial print, but I doubt it.”
“Guard that film with your life,” I said to Shag and Vicky. “Develop it yourself. I don’t want any ghoulish pictures showing up in the newspapers.” I snapped off the gloves, eager to get the body out of sight. “Let’s go, Bud. What’d you say the lady’s name was who found her?”
“Cohen, Madeline Jane Cohen. I got a uniform over there with her. She’s pretty shook up. She’s been waiting on us since dawn.”
Madeline Jane Cohen was sitting on her sofa in a circa-1932 black tank bathing suit, with a .22-caliber pistol atop her bare, varicose thighs. She wasn’t pointing the gun at us yet, but she looked scared enough to shoot a hole through anybody that made a wrong move.
“Ma’am, you ain’t gonna need that gun.” Bud glanced at me and then approached the old woman with a certain degree of caution. Nothing like a frightened old lady with a loaded pistol to get your attention. A trail of wet spots led across the white carpet, where the woman had probably dripped water when she’d run to the phone. “Give the gun to me, Mrs. Cohen. You don’t have to be afraid; we’re gonna leave an officer here with you till your husband shows up. Remember, I told you that. Everything’s gonna be fine and dandy.”
“He’s on his way,” Mrs. Cohen said. Her voice was quick, nervous, hoarse—so were her movements when she obediently picked up the gun and handed it to Bud. “He’ll be here by noon. He got the first flight out of LaGuardia. He couldn’t believe it, either. Why, we’ve lived in New York over forty years, and never once has anything like this happened. Mort and I’ve been married forty-seven years in December, and never have I gone off by myself on vacation. And look what happened when I did. I swear I’ll never step foot out of the city again. It’s a lot safer up there with all those people around. Oh, God, that poor little girl. She was such a nice little thing. I asked for her autograph, and she gave it to me, and another one for my granddaughter, Katerina, too.”
I said, “So you and Sylvie Border were pretty good friends?”
“Oh,