Free A Superior Death by Nevada Barr Page B

said.
    “There’s just the five,” Anna said. “Total.”
    “No,” Bobo returned, sounding pleased to correct her.
    “There are six.”
    “Did you manage to open the stern room?” Anna asked.
    She couldn’t imagine they had. The entrance was blocked with tons of debris. But the NPS Submerged Cultural Resources Unit out of Santa Fe speculated that there could be as many as a dozen more corpses there—men trapped when the ship foundered.
    “This was the engine room,” Bobo said, his tone daring her to challenge his knowledge of anything underwater.
    “Six?” Anna said. “Well, stranger things have happened . . .” She was too tired to stand and argue. Nitrogen narcosis, shadows, imagination—at a hundred and seventy-five feet who knew what they thought they saw? Anna didn’t really care.
    Her agreeing without believing stung Bobo. “You wait,” he commanded and trotted out the door. Jon shrugged his heavy shoulders in a gesture that was so French as to be a parody.
    Anna waited, thinking of the wine on the counter, of her flannel sheets. The hands on the desk clock found one another at midnight. Jon hummed a little song to himself and poked through the rack of brochures.
    Bobo came back with an underwater videocamera. He pushed the machine at Anna. “Look,” he demanded. Anna pressed her eye to the viewfinder. “Body number one,” he announced and she saw a pale headless apparition lit by the unforgiving glare of an underwater lamp. Bobo took the camera back and pushed fast forward, his attention fixed on a digital readout window. “Body number two.” He thrust the camera into Anna’s hands once again. A drift of amorphous remains clad in what looked to be overalls floated on the tape. “Number three,” Bobo said after repeating the fast-forwarding process. Another dead Pills-bury doughboy in dark clothes. Anna smiled. The fingers of the left hand had been folded down, all but the middle finger. She’d heard divers sometimes flipped a macabre and ghostly bird to the next guy down. “Four and five,” Bobo said, working his video magic again. Two more remnants, faceless, one with no arms. “And six.” Bobo handed Anna the camera a final time.
    She pressed her eye to the viewfinder until black clouds troubled her vision. Then she set the camera carefully on the desk. “I’m going to need this tape,” she said. She reached over the desk and lifted the permit from Jon’s fingers. “And I’m going to have to ask that you do not dive the Emperor tomorrow morning, that you remain here. I’m sure the Chief Ranger will have some questions to ask you.”
    Again she lifted the camera and pressed her eye to the viewfinder. Number six was indeed well preserved. Though the clothing was right for a sea captain of the early part of the twentieth century, it looked new. Shadows hid most of the face but the lips and chin were sharply defined and a cloud of light-colored hair floated out from beneath the cap the figure wore.
    Number six had not gone down in the storm of 1927.

CHAPTER 5

    “ L ike I said, I couldn’t tell who it was—or supposed to be,” Anna told Lucas Vega. “Caucasian from the color of the hair. Male attire, if that means anything. It was impossible to tell size from the video. It was just a dark body floating against a darker background. There was nothing close enough—and in focus—to compare it with.”
    Lucas didn’t say anything. He and Anna stood on the deck of the Lorelei watching the white vee-shaped wake plowing a furrow in the lake. Diving gear was stacked against the cabin behind them. Pilcher piloted the boat and Jim Tattinger, ISRO’s Submerged Cultural Resources Specialist, rode inside as was his custom whenever possible. A light drizzle fell from an iron-gray sky hanging low over the lake. There was no wind and the water was flat and dark.
    Anna pulled herself deeper inside her Gore-Tex jacket, keeping her back to the wash of air around the cabin. Vega, bareheaded