Lemon Reef by Robin Silverman

Author:Robin Silverman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

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Our next stop was Pascale’s house. Pascale was shut away in her room with the lights off and the shades drawn. She did emerge, likely having heard us come in. She seemed frail, her complexion waxen, and she moved and spoke slowly. “Any news about Khila?” She held on to the wall for balance.

We shook our heads.

Pascale went back into her room.

Ida was standing at the picture window. She shrugged and matter-of-factly informed Nicole and me, “There’s a black car out there that’s been following us since we left this morning.”

That got Nicole’s attention. She went to the window. “Which one is it?” Ida started to point. Nicole caught her hand. “Just describe it, Ida. If someone is following us, we don’t want them to know we know that.”

“That black thing across the street.”

“The Jeep?” Nicole’s eyes narrowed. “Wasn’t there a black Jeep at bay side last night?”

“There’s a million of those cars,” I said.

“I’m just saying,” Ida was turning away from the window, “It’s out there now, and it’s been following us.”

“I’ll see if I can get the license-plate number.” Nicole left out the back door.

Ida disappeared down the hallway without saying anything. I knew she’d been upset since Beasley’s office, and I had some idea why, but I didn’t feel like talking to her about it. Instead, I turned my attention to the question of where Del had died.

Talon told the police Del went into the water with him around 10:30 that morning for a quick dive on the reef before breakfast. Her heart failed about twenty minutes in. He told the police he tried to do CPR in the water. When that didn’t work, he dumped the air from her buoy compensator, took her tank off, and then pulled her onto the swimming ramp and tried again. Then he swam to shore to get help. In response to why he’d left her, as opposed to calling in over the radio, he said, and it was confirmed, the radio was broken. His first contact with the police from shore was reported to be 11:05 a.m.

Maybe the boat had been anchored on Lemon Reef and the divers just hadn’t seen it. But why would anyone anchor a boat at a site where a drug trade was taking place if the whole point of choosing an underwater-dive exchange had been to avoid Coast Guard scrutiny? Boats were stopped and searched routinely in those waters. Talon knew that.

What Talon likely did not know: it was possible to trace the trajectory of a human body in an ocean current. In the eighties and nineties, controlling the influx of “illegals” had become a national obsession, and the navy had been given a huge amount of money to monitor the more vulnerable national coastlines, including Miami’s. The Naval Oceanographic Office, using the science of geophysical fluid dynamics, could now trace the path of a dead body in an ocean current.

And I was familiar with this brand-new science because, last year, Jake Mansfield—a scientist working

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