“Sounds like a bad actor.”

  Musgrove nodded. “But Wall alibied out. Two cousins and a brother swore he was on a fishing boat with them the whole week Palke disappeared.”

  Again, silence filled the car.

  I noticed a small stucco church. Read the sign identifying it as the New Birth Agape Fellowship.

  I thought about that. Pictured a saint from the holy cards of my childhood, halo looping his head, mouth wide in surprise. Figured the word must have an alternate meaning unknown to me.

  Miles ticked by. Then Musgrove spoke again. “We’re skirting the community of Wheeland Settlement.” She pronounced it Veeland. “Before that it was Blue Hills. Nothing much left between here and Northwest Point. Some small farm fields.”

  “Growing what?” I didn’t much care, but Musgrove now seemed to want conversation. Or maybe she felt she should entertain me.

  “Okra, maize, pigeon peas, squash. There are a couple of resorts over on the water, but there’s very little up this way.”

  She went still again. I returned to my window gazing.

  Grants Wheeland Gas Station. TCI Best Deal Pawn Shop. Tropical Aquariums pet store.

  One last development, then, as Musgrove predicted, the homes and businesses yielded to open scrub interspersed with farm fields and small stretches of mangrove wetland.

  Gardiner hooked a left, then made a right at Davie Bight Road. It was then I understood why we were in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  Shortly, the pavement ended at a dirt road. Then the dirt gave way to sand, a trail so narrow two cars could never have passed.

  The Jeep rocked gently. The sand shushed under our tires. Suddenly, we were at the ocean.

  The beach was bone white and scattered with boulders of varying sizes and shades of gray. The ocean was vividly turquoise, the surreal blue broken only by froth geysering skyward where waves collided with rocks.

  The sweeping grandeur was so unexpected it took my breath away.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Musgrove agreed. “It never gets old.”

  After several more minutes of lurching and rolling, Gardiner braked to a stop and nodded to Rigby. Rigby rotated to face Musgrove. I figured the handoff between the two must involve rank.

  “We in the park, ma’am. The boat be just yonder, over that ridge.” Thumb-jabbing the window by her right shoulder. “It’s best we walk from here.”

  The four of us got out and snaked along single file. Gardiner took the lead, then me, then Musgrove. Rigby brought up the rear. No one spoke.

  Gulls circled and screeched overhead, reminding me of the day I’d pulled Deniz Been from Bickerdike Basin, and of my unresolved vacation plans with Ryan. I could easily imagine us in this place, me enjoying the sand and surf, him coated with Hawaiian Tropic SPF 2000.

  The sun was hot and still high in the sky. Halfway to the ridge, I stopped to remove my sandals. To wipe sweat from my face. To take in the view.

  I wanted to forget my reason for being here. To savor the natural beauty surrounding me. The bluer than blue sky with its billowy white clouds. The coconut palms throwing razor straight shadows across the beach. The sunlight sparking the ocean and foamy spray.

  But frolicking and beachcombing were for another day.

  Gardiner climbed the small knoll first, sending a cascade of sand trickling down toward me. I followed.

  Seconds later, Musgrove joined us.

  “Binos?” she asked, reaching a hand toward Gardiner.

  Gardiner produced a pair of binoculars. Musgrove raised them to her eyes and adjusted focus.

  “Well, bugger me.”

  Musgrove’s mouth went agape, mimicking my imagined vision of the holy card saint.

  11

  Musgrove was peering up the shoreline toward a narrow tongue of land jutting into the sea. Thirty yards off the tongue, two vessels bobbed side by side, anchored and going nowhere.

  Wordlessly, she handed me the binoculars. I pointed them at the boats.

  The first was clearly marked as belonging to the marine branch of the RTCIPF. The second was a sleek high-velocity number powered by inboard motors. Vinyl cushions spanned its rail-enclosed stern. Similar seating wrapped its mongo, kick-ass bow, which angled high above the water. At midship, an enormous boom awning shaded the helm and its controls. Gray tarps haphazardly covered the cockpit, their appearance jarringly at odds with the boat’s swanky, hellcat style.

  “Not what you were expecting?” I asked.

  “Not at all.”

  I cocked a brow. Lost on Musgrove, as she wasn’t looking at me.

  “That, however”—she pointed up the beach—“I was expecting.”

  Musgrove was indicating a CSU truck, a coroner’s van, and a Jeep—this one much larger than the Wrangler that had brought us. Its broad flatbed and roomy crew cab suggested a model name like, say, the Shazam or the Godzilla. I later learned it was a Gladiator Sport.

  A rubber Zodiac lay beached on the sand directly opposite the two boats. A black-and-white pop-up tent had been erected at the same spot.

  Three men and one woman stood beside the tent. The men smoked. The woman just stood.

  “What surprises you?” I asked, handing back the binoculars.

  “I was anticipating migrants.”

  “Illegals?”

  She nodded. “Human trafficking is a problem throughout the Caribbean. And things often go awry. A few years back, fourteen bodies were found on a sloop adrift off Tobago, another seven on a vessel off Grenada.”

  I didn’t interrupt.

  “In 2021, twenty corpses turned up in an open boat a mile off Grand Turk Island.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “The Turks and Caicos are a magnet for Haitians desperate to flee the gangs and the poverty in their homeland. The day following the recovery of the twenty dead, marine branch agents intercepted another vessel carrying forty-three Haitians.” Her eyes met mine. “A forty-foot open boat driven by a single engine. Think about that.”

  We both fell silent, imagining the horror of such journeys.

  “But TCI isn’t usually the intended destination,” Musgrove continued. “Human traffickers from everywhere use this region as a transshipment point. For example, the Tobago authorities determined that the vessel they towed ashore had been stolen in Mauritania.”

  “In northwest Africa.”

  She nodded.

  I thought of the many articles I’d read about bodies discovered locked in the backs of vans and trucks. Men, women, and children dead of heat stroke, dehydration, and starvation, abandoned by the coyotes they’d paid to smuggle them north.

  “And these bastards get away with it.” I struggled to keep the loathing from my voice.

  “Not always.”

  Musgrove raised the binoculars and returned her gaze to the boats. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s a twenty-seven-foot Sea Ray SDX 270, probably a 2019 model.” She could have told me it was The Oracle and I would have believed her. “Inboard Mercs, fiberglass hull, retractable swim platform. That baby cost at least a hundred grand.”

  “Not your typical human trafficker rig.”

  “Definitely not. I expected an open craft of some kind, a dinghy, maybe a small sloop.” When I said nothing, she added, “A sloop is a single-masted boat, usually with a fore and aft mainsail and jib. Never mind.”

  “So why the dead bodies?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Returning the binoculars to Gardiner, Musgrove headed down the dune, cut toward the ocean, and strode up the beach, keeping to the hard-packed crescent left beside the water at low tide. I rolled the cuffs of my jeans, tucked my sandals into my shoulder bag, and followed. Rigby chugged along at my back, Gardiner behind her, breathing hard.

  Musgrove introduced the man and woman by the tent as Constables Stubbs and Kemp, the CSU team. Both wore navy polos tucked into cargo pants. The polos had the now familiar RTCIPF patch.

  Stubbs was the shorter and darker of the two, her long black hair secured by a coral barrette almost as large as her head. Fleetingly, I considered the logistics of wearing a hat.

  With his butterscotch complexion and sunny, eager-to-please demeaner—lots of smiling and nodding—Kemp brought to mind a golden retriever. All but the panting and dangling tongue.

  The other member of the trio was the coroner’s investigator, Iggie Bernadin. Bernadin had very dark skin and very bad teeth.

  “Brief me.” Musgrove directed her command to no one in particular.

  Eager to comply, Kemp explained what we already knew. Fishermen stumbled across a boat drifting a mile offshore, pulled alongside, saw corpses, called the cops. Members of the marine branch boarded the vessel and covered the bodies. Finding the engine dead and the fuel gauge on empty, they ordered a tow.

  “How many individuals?” I asked.

  Kemp didn’t know.

  “Men? Women? Kids?” Musgrove asked.

  Kemp didn’t know.

  “Other than placing the tarps, has anything out there been touched?”

  “Not since Stubbs and I took over watch. But we haven’t left the beach.”

  “And before the hand-off?”

  Kemp didn’t know.

  Musgrove turned to me. “Ready?”

  I nodded.

  “Gear is in the truck.” Kemp displayed more teeth than keys on a piano. “You can suit up in the tent. Shall I show you?”

  “We can manage. Be ready to ferry us over.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Kemp nodded so hard I feared a vertebral dislocation.

  We skipped the tent, choosing instead to slip into our Tyvek coveralls alfresco. The rest of the PPE—personal protective equipment—we secured in plastic sacks and carried with us.

  When we returned to the shoreline, Kemp and Bernadin were similarly garbed. Stubbs had not suited up.

  Bernadin was seated in the Zodiac’s bow. Kemp was thigh deep in the surf, steadying the small inflatable with both hands. Stubbs, obviously the skipper, was in the stern, ready to start the outboard and work the tiller.

  Musgrove and I waded out, holding our bagged gloves, masks, and shoe covers at shoulder height, boots looping our necks by their tied laces. Musgrove sloshed to port, I to starboard. We tossed our bags onto a pile made up of the men’s boots and two similar bags and, at a signal from Stubbs, climbed over the pontoons running along each side. Stubbs cranked the engine, Kemp hopped in, and we were off.

  The crossing took less than ten minutes. As we drew close, I could see that the Sea Ray had been Christened the Cod Bless Us.

  Stubbs maneuvered to the stern where a stainless-steel ladder ran from the swim platform into the water. Kemp grabbed hold of the lowest rung and clambered up. Bernadin went next, looking a bit like a spider stick-walking its web.

  After tossing my boots and bagged PPE to Kemp, I followed. Musgrove came close on my heels. Stubbs remained at the tiller.

  Even outdoors with a salty breeze caressing our faces and heavy laminated polyethylene covering the source, the odor was unambiguous. I knew whatever lay beneath the tarps had been dead for a while.

  We all raised our hoods, booted, added shoe covers, gloves, and masks. As Kemp shot videos and stills, Musgrove and I captured our own images and recorded notes on our phones. The usual opening act, but this time performed on a rolling deck offshore.

  Prelims finished, Musgrove said, “Let’s see what we have.”

  Our foursome stepped down onto the wrap-around seating, down again onto the cockpit floor. Positioning ourselves in the narrow space between the bench and the tarp, we each grasped an edge of the polyethylene sheeting.

  “Ready?” Musgrove asked.

  Three nods.

  “Lift.”

  We did.

  The stench roared up like heat from a blast furnace, rank and foul as rotten meat. I sensed a waver in Kemp’s smile, hidden by his mask.

  Below the uppermost was another tarp of equal size and weight. Unlike its counterpart, this one lay off-kilter and rumpled, as though hurriedly tossed by those tasked with its placement.

  Poking from one edge, extending almost to Kemp’s right foot, was a putrefying forearm. The hand lay palm up with fingers splayed, as though reaching for help, even in death.

  Kemp flinched and took an involuntary step backward. A small one, since little room remained between the bench at our backs and the grim cargo at our feet.

  No reaction from Bernadin.

  “Record this before proceeding,” Musgrove said to Kemp.

  As Musgrove and Bernadin held the tarp in its raised position, the CSU tech shot videos and stills. I let go long enough to snap a few photos with my phone, feet braced to counterbalance the boat’s gentle rocking, hands sweaty inside my latex gloves.

  Enough flesh had slithered free or been scavenged by seabirds to expose the bones of the lower arm and hand. While zooming in and framing, my brain logged details.

  A few maggots were present on the rotting flesh. Not many. Recently hatched, I presumed they were the offspring of pilgrim females who’d ventured seaward once the boat was towed closer to shore. Or the ladies may have been stowaways on the marine agents who’d delivered the tarps. Perhaps passengers on the tarps themselves.

  Despite the day’s warmth, one observation sent an icy pang into my heart.

  The human hand is a complex affair, composed of twenty-seven bones of differing forms and functions. The eight carpals, arranged in two rows of four, articulate with the lower arm bones—the radius and ulna—at the wrist. They are a very mixed lot, one shaped like a boat, others like a crescent, a pyramid, a pea.

  The five metacarpals run across the back of the palm. Their round, bulging heads form the knuckles.

  The fourteen phalanges are the slender, sometimes arrow-shaped bones that form the fingers. Three for each digit, two for the thumb.

  As elsewhere in the skeleton, each hand bone develops following a predictable schedule. The carpals aren’t present at birth, and there are multiple growth caps that fuse onto the metacarpals and phalanges.

  I’d need X-rays for absolute medical certainty, the phrase a lawyer would use in court. But the pattern I saw was enough.

  The distal epiphyses of the radius and ulna remained separate, held in place only by threads of ligamentous tissue. Though many of the epiphyses had been lost from the hand, the wavy joint surfaces left behind indicated that they, too, had not yet fused.

  The outflung arm belonged to a kid of no more than sixteen years old.

  “Ready?”

  Musgrove’s voice snapped me back to the present.

  Pocketing my mobile, I regripped my edge. Careful not to disturb what lay below, we maneuvered the sheeting up and aft onto the swim platform.

  Deep breath.

  A meeting of eyes above surgical masks.

  Musgrove nodded.

  We lifted the lower tarp.

  12

  The ghastly sight was in stark contrast to the surreal beauty surrounding us.

  “Bloody freakin’ hell,” Musgrove said on an indrawn breath.

  I couldn’t disagree.

  The dead lay in a muddle of withered limbs and rotting apparel. A head count showed the muddle contained five people.

  The teen lay closest to the starboard side. He or she had died wearing a neon green Under Armour tee and matching shorts. Thick carroty curls still clung to the child’s skull. Neither the hair nor the outfit was informative as to sex.

  Based on clothing, two of the other four victims appeared to be male. Like the teen, each wore shorts and a tee. Though the fabric was badly degraded, the messages on their chests were still legible. One said: I Love My Wife, I Worship My Car; the other said: Real Men Don’t Need Instructions. The irony of the latter was lost on no one.

  The pair lay supine, one between the helm and the captain’s chair, the other parallel to the cockpit seating bordering the stern. The flesh was largely gone from their faces, the exposed teeth and facial bones bleached white as the sand at our backs.

  Both men had been tall and, I suspected, fully adult. Both were emaciated, their limbs ropey and thin, making their clothing appear too large for their frames.

  An off-kilter visor held some of the helm corpse’s hair tight to his skull. The strands were long and gray. A faded elastic binder suggested they’d once formed a scraggly ponytail.

  The remaining two victims lay facedown, the legs of one overlapping the shoulders of the other. Abundant body hair suggested they, too, were adult males.

  The upper member of the pair had on Champion shorts and a UV sun protection shirt. The lower member had chosen to go bare chested his last day on earth. His board shorts were lavender and blue, his head bandanna striped yellow and black.

  I turned to Musgrove. Her expression was a mix of surprise and dismay. I guessed she’d been anticipating skeletons, not fleshed corpses. Another dashed expectation.

  “Think we can collect the remains undamaged?” Musgrove asked Bernadin.

  “I surely try my best, ma’am. I unzip the bags and, wit’ some help, together we tease one underneat’ each body.” His words rode melodious but melancholic on the soft sea air. “And we pray dese poor souls keeps demselves in one piece.”

  That’s what we did.

  The poor souls did their part.

  * * *

  The Zodiac made three round trips. Two hours later, the five corpses were strapped into the coroner’s van and Musgrove and I were back on shore. Hungry, tired, and desperate to shower.

  As its ill-fated passengers took their final journey, Kemp and Stubbs began processing the Cod Bless Us. Despite the boat’s apparently long time adrift, they would attempt to collect biologicals—blood, body fluids, hair, and tissue. As well, they’d search for trace evidence—fibers, soil, vegetation, glass fragments—especially at logical entry points. They’d dust for latent prints from fingers, palms, or feet. They’d record footwear patterns or tool mark impressions. They’d confiscate any drugs, firearms, or cell phones found on board. Using every trick in their CSU arsenal, they’d do their best to help answer the myriad questions on everyone’s mind.