The Bone Bed

forceps while I gently rest my right hand on top of the turtle’s huge head. It is as cool and smooth as petrified bone, and I feel him slowly, heavily stir. I’m constantly aware of where his jaws are in relation to me, and I hear the blasts of his respiration and feel the softness of his pink-tinted neck against my leg as he puffs up and emits a loud groan followed by a low growl.
    “Now, don’t be such a grumpy old man,” I say to him. “No one’s hurting you, and you’re going to be fine.”
    I’m careful not to break or damage the barnacle as I work it out of the leathery skin, and then it is free and I move out of the way so Pamela Quick can attend to the wound, which isn’t what I’d expect if the turtle was struck by something covered with barnacles and stabbed or punctured by a glasslike shell. She swabs the shallow wound with Betadine, and I place the barnacle in my gloved palm. I can see a trace amount of a substance on it, what looks like a hint of bright yellowish green paint on the plate farthest from the stalk, just a faint swipe on an edge of shell that is broken.
    I imagine an object covered with barnacles coming into contact with the leatherback, the force of the impact sufficient to drive the tip of the shell into the hard leathery ridge and unseat or pry the barnacle from whatever it was cemented to. But the transfer of paint or what might be paint doesn’t fit with such a scenario, and I envision the natural-gas tanker that passed us less than an hour ago. A number of them I’ve seen are painted garish colors, chartreuse and teal green, neon blue or orange.
    “Something painted yellowish green,” I ponder out loud, as I place the barnacle into a small plastic evidence container. “Not likely a rock or a piling. More likely he struck a boat, a Jet Ski, or something like that struck him.”
    “A rather insignificant glancing blow, if that’s the case,” she puzzles. “Certainly not the usual thing we see in a boat strike. When these animals surface for air and get hit by a speeding boat or a tanker, usually the damage is profound. He must have been barely bumped by something, or he barely bumped into something.”
    “With bright green paint?”
    “I got no idea,” she says.
    I label the evidence container and feel the boat heave from side to side, the surf getting heavier. The temperature is dropping, and I’m chilled by cold saltwater flowing around my feet, my pants soaked up to my knees underneath white Tyvek.
    “Well, if whatever he ran into or ran into him is a boat, for example, that’s a little curious,” I continue, “since most are protected with an antifouling paint, some type of coating to prevent barnacles or other organisms from attaching to the hull.”
    “Ones that are properly maintained. Yes.” She is terse again and wants me gone.
    “I suspect the barnacle was attached to the turtle and not to whatever struck him,” I conclude. “And paint or something greenish yellow was transferred to part of the shell.”
    “Maybe,” she says distractedly, and I can tell she doesn’t think it matters and is eager for me to leave her alone.
    “We’ll get this analyzed in the labs and see what it is,” I add.
    Marino takes photographs while I look over the leatherback a final time, placing a gloved hand under his head to keep his bony jaws from opening when I’m close to them. I peel the soaked sheet back from his massive body, which unlike other turtles has no lower flat bony shell, the leatherback barrel-shaped and disproportionately wide around the shoulders and tapering off to short rear flippers and a long tail. I see nothing else that might be of forensic interest, and I let Pamela Quick know I don’t intend to interfere with her patient a moment longer.
    “Just tell me how you want to go about things, because I’ve got to go into the water,” I say to her. “What I don’t want is to go in at the same time he does, and I certainly don’t want him running right back into the same line and getting tangled up again.”
    “You’re doing your recovery from here? Or over there?” She indicates the Coast Guard boat.
    I stand up and steady myself as the fireboat rocks harder. The wind is biting, and saltwater has soaked through my shoe covers and is seeping inside my boots. Of course I have no intention of recovering a dead body from a boat crowded with marine animal rescuers.
    “I’ll tell you what,” I decide. “Marino and I will get back on