He examined the hook closely. “Good news—the angler was not fishing for sharks,” he said in his Sri Lankan English, colloquially known as Singlish. “This line and hook, it is for gamefish—sailfish or marlin. Bad news—the damage to the hook means the white tip put up a strong fight until the line broke. The escape would leave it exhausted.”
“Exhausted enough to ride a current to shore and get tangled up in the Matara safety nets?”
“Yes, I think so. Struggling for oxygen the entire way. You will probably find high levels of stress hormones in the blood sample you took from the liver.”
Elsa sighed, disappointed but not surprised. “Sharks,” she explained to the audience, setting aside the hook and tugging off her yellow latex gloves, “need water moving over their gills to breathe. If they stop swimming, they drown. This great white, it seems, exhausted itself getting off the fisherman’s line, which left it—”
“Doctor,” Mark said, holding the video camera in one hand and his nose with the other as he peered into the shark’s stomach. “I think I see a second bone…”
Elsa joined him at the necropsy table. “You’re right,” she said, snapping a glove back on. “Most likely another of the whale’s vertebrae…” She plucked the bone free from the sludge—and frowned in momentary shock.
“Oh, no,” Mark mumbled. He quickly recognized what she held in her hand and averted the video camera, but not before the human skull appeared on the outdoor television screen.
The crowd erupted in bedlam.
Chapter 2
MARTY
Dr. Martin Murdock stood on the aft deck of the RV Oannes, the smoke from his corncob pipe drifting away from him into the briny air. He was staring out at the vast expanse of the Laccadive Sea to where it kissed the vermillion evening sky. Marty had purchased the twenty-two-meter ship from a local businessman who had been in the process of retiring his ragtag fishing fleet. At the time it had reeked of fish and showed its age in every grubby plank and window. Now, after a thorough retrofitting, it was a state-of-the-art research vessel featuring scientific equipment, high-tech electronics, and both a wet and dry laboratory.
The Oannes was also his permanent home.
It had never been Marty’s intention to live aboard a boat, but his work often kept him there late into the evenings. When he found himself spending the night in the master stateroom more often than not, it became redundant renting a house in the city. And so he adopted the life of a sea nomad, waking each morning to the squawks of herons and spoonbills and seagulls, showering with spotty hot water, and bobbing around like a rubber duck in a bathtub during Sri Lanka’s frequent tropical storms. It was an unusual lifestyle, but not an uncomfortable one.
“Wishful thinking never caught anyone a mermaid, mon capitiane.”
Marty turned as his sprightly, short assistant, Pip Jobert, emerged from the companionway to the lower deck, where she had been working in the dry lab. Her typical outfit on any given day was a grungy tee-shirt, torn jeans, and an Australian slouch hat (one side of the brim pinned up with a rising sun badge) to keep the equatorial sun off her tanned face. Today she wore the slouch hat and torn jeans but with an oversized Metallica singlet that revealed her bra straps. A pair of Ray-Ban Aviators shielded her sea-green eyes. Her coffee-colored hair, which fell nearly to the small of her back, was braided into two individual ponytails. On her feet were a pair of sun-bleached flipflops so well-worn they had holes in the soles beneath each of her big toes.