“Let’s make sure Toby’s waiting for us with the van,” I say to Marino, as I unzip the drysuit and stretch the gaskets over my head and wrists. “We need to get her to the office as quickly as we can, because she’s going to begin decomposing really fast now that she’s out of the water. I don’t know if she’s been frozen, but she might have been.”

“Frozen?” Labella frowns.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “Frozen or almost frozen. This lady’s been dead for quite some time, and I suspect we were supposed to recover her just long enough to lose her. I suspect the goal was to really frustrate us. Rigged up like that and pushed overboard, and then she’s decapitated, drawn and quartered, so to speak, as we try to get her into the basket. A dismembered body that slips away and is gone. Well, too bad, whoever you are,” I say, and I’m not talking to the dead woman but to the person who did this. “We have her, and hopefully a lot more than someone anticipated.”

Unzipping the body pouches, I leave them open just long enough for me to attach labeled tags to the severed end of each rope that binds her. I return to the cabin, grateful to be out of the wind and dropping temperature, and I don’t bother putting my wet clothes back on but stay in the liner. It fits me like an oversized gray union suit.

I put on my jacket and buckle myself back into my seat, and I let Labella know I’m pinching their liner and promise to return it after I’ve cleaned it. Kletty pulls in the anchor, and Labella starts the engines, and Marino sits across the aisle from me, trying to figure out his five-point harness as I try to figure out the order of things.

I envision someone on a boat tying a large fender around the dead woman’s neck, then tying a second line around her ankles and attaching the other end of it to a dog crate filled with bags of cat litter. I imagine all this being pushed overboard as a two-thousand-pound reptile appears, dragging fishing gear, bamboo, and monofilament lines that might have been little more than an irritant until he whacked into the crate, impaling it with the pole. Now he has hundreds of pounds dragging him down and tightening the fishing lines around his left flipper.

“What a strange world,” I decide. “The one thing he for sure didn’t anticipate.”

I’m talking about the killer. I believe whoever dumped this woman’s body is also responsible for her death. I will work this case as a homicide unless the facts prove me wrong.

“In my opinion?” Marino raises his voice above the thundering engines. “I think she was dumped overboard pretty close to where she was found.”