The Bone Bed

better.”
    Both men wear summer uniforms of navy cargo shorts and T-shirts, their portable radios slung over their shoulders. On a strap around Klemens’s neck is a remote steering station, what looks like a high-tech PlayStation console, that he can use from any area of the boat to steer its four jet engines when they’re running.
    “I’m Jack.” The fireman with the bear tattoo reminds me we’ve met before. “The
Sweet Marita
, the trawler that burned up near Devils Back last year? A bad one.”
    “Yes, it was.” A liquefied petroleum gas leak caused an explosion, and three people died. “How’s it going?” I ask Klemens.
    “Too much of a carnival for my taste,” he says, and I do my best to ignore the uncanny sense of familiarity he always makes me feel.
    Tall and rawboned, with sharp features, vivid blue eyes, and a mop of sandy hair, he looks exactly the way I imagine my father would have, had he lived to see his forties. When Klemens and I work cases together, I have to resist openly staring at him as if the most dominant figure from my childhood has come back from the dead.
    “I’m afraid we’re attracting quite a crowd, Doc, and I know you don’t like that.” Klemens looks up, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Not a damn thing I can do about it, but at least this jerk’s backing off, so maybe we can hear again.”
    We watch the helicopter ascend vertically, leveling off at about a thousand feet, and I wonder if the Coast Guard radioed the television news pilot and told him to gain altitude immediately. Or do we have the fire department to thank for it?
    “Much better,” I agree. “But I wish it would buzz off.”
    “It won’t.” The fireman named Jack scans the water with field glasses. “One hell of a story. Like capturing Nessie, and the media doesn’t even know the half of it yet.”
    “What does the media know, exactly?” I ask him.
    “Well, they know we’re out here, obviously, and the sooner we get this big boy back in the water, the better.”
    “Should be releasing him in a few, which is damn good, for a lot of reasons,” Klemens says to me. “You can see how low we are.”
    The dive platform is level with the bay because of the weight of the turtle and the rescuers attending to it, water rolling around them as the boat lifts and settles on swells.
    “Rated for twenty-five hundred pounds and maxed out, never seen anything like the size of this one,” Klemens says. “We run into entanglements and strandings all the time, and it’s almost always too late, but this one’s got a real good chance. What a monster.”
    Klemens balances himself against the tender, a rigid-inflatable rescue RIB with a gray tube hull and a 60-horsepower engine. I note that on the other side and still under its red tarp is the A-frame and hydraulic winch that can be used to retrieve people or other deadweight from the water, including a monster turtle. Obviously the winch isn’t what got this creature on board, I remark to Klemens, and I’m not surprised. Whether it’s an eight-hundred-pound gray seal or a huge loggerhead or dolphin, marine rescuers won’t run the risk of causing further injury and typically refuse the help of a winch.
    “Anything that might cause the slightest transfer of trace evidence or artifacts.” I remind Klemens I need to know everything that’s been done.
    “Well, I don’t think the turtle killed anyone,” he says, with mock seriousness.
    “Probably not, but all the same.”
    “No machinery was used,” he confirms. “Of course, my feeling about it is if we can sling human beings on board without hurting them, we sure as hell can do a turtle. But they did it their usual way, pulled him in close, harnessed him, got a ramp under him, and inflated the float bag. Then it took all of them and us to pull him on the platform. That was after they got his flippers restrained, obviously. He gets going with those things, he could tear the damn boat apart and knock a few of us into last year.”
    I direct his attention to a yellow boat fender. Not far from the boat, it’s attached to a buoy line, and I ask if that was what the turtle was entangled with. I notice that nothing has been cleated off.
    “Nope,” he says. “Some kind of fishing gear, possibly snoods from a longline or a trolling line that got wrapped around his left-front flipper.”
    “He wasn’t entangled with the same line the body is attached to?” I don’t understand.
    “Not directly.