The woman casting stink-eye at the cracks spared me a glance. “I’ve been expecting you.”

That didn’t sound ominous at all.

She ignored me after that, so I got to work and knelt beside the corpse. From a distance, I hadn’t noticed the dark hair covering the head was only a finger’s length or that an Adam’s apple disturbed the line of the throat. The usual routine of searching the deceased’s face for hints of Lori screeched to a halt. “This victim is male.”

He had died trapped in that androgynous state some boys transition through on their way to manhood.

“We noticed,” the woman said.

I lifted the plastic and choked before what I was seeing fully registered. Hand covering my mouth, I flung myself away from the corpse. I braced on my palms and knees with my head hung over a deep crevice and filled it with the turkey club I’d eaten for lunch. From the waist up, the boy resembled any of the other victims. Besides the obvious difference. From the hips down, his bones had been picked clean of meat.

No wonder the marshals were on high alert. A predator hunted those waters. Charybdis? I doubted it. He was too fastidious. The compressed timeline bothered me too. Not to mention the victim was the wrong sex, and mutilation on this scale wasn’t his style. He collected arms—one limb per victim, to be precise—not legs. And he drowned his girls first. This boy… Gods, I hoped he hadn’t been alive when the creature who killed him began eating.

“Here.” A bottle of water appeared in front of me. “Rinse out your mouth with this.”

I stuck out my hand, and the Good Samaritan slapped the drink across my palm. When I stopped tasting bile, I lifted my head high enough to see Flipper standing barefoot across the fissure from me. She had stripped out of her boots and cutoffs. The purple neoprene top was back on, but she wore a lime-green bikini bottom instead of the metallic tail from yesterday. I craned my neck but didn’t spot any fins or gills.

“What are you about to do?” I wiped my wrist across my mouth.

Her toes flexed in the loose sand, and her orange-and-blue toenails sparkled. “I need to interview the locals.”

A red mask hung from her fingertips, which answered my next question. “You’re going in the water.”

She raised a candy-colored eyebrow. “Unless you’re volunteering…?”

A shudder rippled through me hard enough to squeeze my empty gut again. “No.”

Flipper twirled the rubber strap around her pointer and started walking toward the waiting marshals. “In that case, I left your fob in my right boot in case I don’t make it back.”

“Hey,” I called after her. “Be careful.”

Her answering smile dazzled. “You too.”