“Moderate abrasions circumferentially around the skin-carapace line of left distal shoulder extending about three centimeters on distal posterior margin of the left-front flipper,” she describes with steely affect. “Associated with an abraded area of the distal leading edge.” She reads the blood test results on the digital display.

“And his values?” I ask.

“Typical for entangled leatherbacks. Mild hypernatremia, but he should be fine. Until he encounters some other human detritus or a boat that kills him.”

“I can understand how you feel about it. . . .”

“You really can’t,” she says.

“I need to ask if you saved the fishing gear.”

“You can have it.” She reaches inside a ski bag.

“Based on your expertise, can you reconstruct what happened?”

“Same thing that always does to these animals,” she replies. “They run into a vertical line, freak out and start spinning around, and get wrapped up in it. The more they struggle, the worse it gets, and in his case, he was dragging a heavy pot and a body for God knows how far.”

“And dragging the buoy.”

“Yes. Dragging that, too.” She hands me a transparent plastic bag that contains tangled monofilament, several leads, and rusty hooks.

“What makes you assume the body and pot were dragged? It seems you’re assuming they weren’t originally where they are now. Any reason to suppose he might have gotten entangled here, where he was found?” I label the bag with a permanent marker.

“Leatherbacks are in perpetual motion,” she answers. “The monofilament probably was entangled with the buoy line. What we do know for a fact is he hit the fishing lines, and his left flipper got wound up, but he’s programmed to keep swimming. The more he swam, the tighter the lines wrapped around him, it would seem. By the time we got to him, he could barely move his left flipper, and he was going under.”

“Any estimate of distance based on how fast leatherbacks can swim?” I ask.

“We could have this conversation later.” She barely looks up at me.

“Any information I can get now is really important,” I say firmly. “It could help us determine where the body might have entered the water.”

“That person is gone. He’s not.”

“This could be a homicide investigation. I don’t think anyone wants to interfere with that.”

“All I can tell you is the top speed for a leatherback is about twenty miles per hour,” she replies flatly, “but no way he was going anything close to that dragging what was attached to him. It’s not possible to say where he might have run into the line except that I’m thinking he didn’t get very far after he did. Maybe a few miles at most, until he was running out of steam and getting pulled down by his load, barely able to keep his head above water.”

“It’s not likely he got entangled in the open ocean.” I scan the horizon, the outer harbor separated from the open Atlantic Ocean by some sixty-five miles of bays, peninsulas, and islands. “It’s too far from here.”