“Coons?” Marino says with a smirk.

“Coon oysters are stuck together in clusters, so you break them apart and knock loose any dead shells. Coons is mostly what you get, hard to find select ones.” He pauses, says, “Don’t seem you folks know much about oystering. So let me explain. A select oyster is a single one like you get on the half-shell in a restaurant. That’s the kind you want but are hard to find. Anyhow, I started picking about noon. The tide was fairly low. And that’s when I caught me a glance of something in the grass that looked like muddy hair, got closer, and there he was.”

“Did you touch him or move him?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am.” Shaking his head. “Once I saw what it was, I got right back in my boat and called nine-one- one.”

“Low tide started around one in the morning,” she says.

“That’s so. And by seven it was high again—as high as it was going to get. And by the time I was out there, it was pretty low again.”

“If it was you,” Marino says, “and you wanted to get rid of a body using your boat, would you do it at low tide or high tide?”

“Whoever done it probably put him there when the tide was fairly low, put him in the mud and grass on the side of that little creek. Otherwise, the body would have been carried on out by the current if the tide was real high. But you put him in a place like the one I found him in, he’s most likely gonna stay right there unless it’s a spring tide at a full moon when the water can get up to ten feet. In that case, he might have been carried out, could have ended up anywhere.”

Scarpetta has looked it up. The night before the body was found, the moon was no more than a third full, the skies partly cloudy.

“A smart place to dump a body. In a week, he wouldn’t have been much more than scattered bones,” Marino says. “It’s a miracle he was found, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t take long out there to be nothing but bones, and it was a good chance no one would ever find him, that’s true,” Bull says.

“Thing is, when I mentioned high versus low tide, I didn’t ask you to speculate about what someone else would have done. I asked what you would have done,” Marino says.

“Low tide in a small boat that doesn’t have much draw, so you could get into places no more’an a foot deep. That’s what I would’ve done. But I didn’t.” He stares Marino in the eye again. “I didn’t do nothing to that little boy except find him.”

Scarpetta gives Marino another pointed glance, has had enough of his interrogating and intimidating. She says to Bull, “Is there anything else you can remember? Anybody you saw in the area? Anybody you may have seen in the area who got your attention?”