Jason came in and stared at me. “You all right?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“Owen called Captain Burke and asked about you. He said take care of you and your work. I moved your specimens over to the aquarium. They’re okay, I think.”
Unspoken, Jason was saying that what Montoya asked for, he got, even in the face of a police investigation. But Jason did not have to approve. “Owen knows about us, about the ship,” he continued. “It’s on TV. You sure you’re all right?”
“Thanks for moving them,” I said, nodding like a fuzzy dog in a car’s rear window. I could have hugged him just for bringing good news.
“What’d you find?” he asked, and bit his lip, nodding along with me. We wobbled our heads, matching rhythm, and that was too weird. I stopped.
“Xenos,” I said.
“Right. You were diving for xenos. Look like cnidarians to me, though. You sure you got what you were after? Dave grab them, or you?”
“I used the suck tube,” I said.
“Do you know Dr. Mauritz, off the ship?” Jason asked.
“No,” I said.
“Why did Dave go overboard?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You didn’t hurt him and push him over, just to hide it? You didn’t fight, I mean, and hurt him. Self-defense?”
“No. He did it all.”
“Did he say he wanted to kill you?”
“No, he just started . . .” I sucked in my breath. “Trying to curse and not doing a very good job. Kind of funny, but scary, too. I better wait for the police. Don’t want this to seem rehearsed.”
“Right,” Jason said. He got up and stuck his hands in his pockets. “We found Max. He’s dead, too. Nadia’s severely shook.”
I just stared at him. “I’m really sorry,” I said, as if it were all my fault.
“Yeah.”
Jason left, and a tall man in a blue parka came in. He was forty or forty-five, dressed, beneath the unzipped parka, in a wool sweater and khaki cargo pants, damp with sea spray. He was an FBI agent out of the Seattle Bureau, he said. His name was Bakker and he asked a lot of questions, some of which did not make sense until I realized he didn’t know I had been on Mary’s Triumph when Mauritz flipped. As well, Agent Bakker had not been informed Dave Press was missing and presumed drowned.
The news seemed to confuse him, so he turned back his pages of notes and started over.
“What in hell is a DSV?” he asked.
By the end of the interview, I was ready to collapse. Bakker folded his notebook. None of the pieces fit for him, either. In his experience, scientists didn’t just go around killing each other.
After he left, I stretched out on the long, padded bench behind the main dining table and blacked out. I should have dreamed of falling through ink, this time without the bubble, drowning in endless, stinking night. Instead, I dreamed of being out in the desert, walking beside a guy with bushy white hair, wearing a long gray shirt.
12
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
The ship returned to the Port of Seattle the next morning and agents and Coast Guard investigators swarmed over her. Diligent men and women marched aboard and began stringing yellow tape and ribbon. A dozen agents with digital cameras and crime-lab kits took samples. We were instructed not to move anything, certainly not to remove anything.
Jason intervened with the agent in charge, and he allowed Nadia and me to go down to the lab and check the specimens taken during the dive. We were accompanied by a young female agent, built a lot like Dave, I thought, her pant suit a size too small and stretched tight. She watched suspiciously from beneath a knit cap perched jauntily forward on neat cornrows, and asked a lot of questions.
She would not miss a trick, I judged.
Nadia did most of the talking. She had more color today, but her manner was cold and efficient, as if her emotions were running on a very low charge.
I was trying to figure out how to get my prizes off the Sea Messenger. The ship was likely to be impounded for days, and I had no idea what would happen to them over so much time. I just wanted to haul the containers off the Sea Messenger and get them over to the lab I was renting on southeast Lake Union. I was eager to get my critters stabilized in the proper inoculants, supplied with fresh seawater, and under reliable pressure.
Maybe it was a personal disconnect, like an emotional circuit breaker blowing, maybe it was shock. All I needed on this Earth, right now, was to document and describe the Vendobionts, if that’s what they were. Perform a few tests. Count their little fingers and toes.
It was not that I didn’t care about the rest. I just did not have a clue how I could help Nadia feel better, or do anything for Jason. I certainly did not feel responsible for what had happened, however strange the circumstances.
Maybe it was the Sea Messenger that was hexed.
I peered into my cabin. The plump agent in the too-tight suit stood there with two men in plain clothes—and I do mean plain, black suits and London Fogs.
My clothes, books, and computer were spread out on the bed, being violated.
“Hello,” I said.
The young agent had removed her cap and her cornrows were indeed perfect. She had the most intense and unreadable eyes, and the skin of her round face was an unblemished work of art.
“We’re through with these,” she said, and indicated the clothes on the bed. “But we’d like to keep these.” She swung her hand—her whole upper body, as well—to indicate my computer and three textbooks.
