Micro - Michael Crichton [101]
At Kaena Point, a car rested upside down in shallow water. The police department’s heaviest winch truck was parked on the road. A cable ran from the truck down through hau tangle to the car; it had been a nasty job getting the cable down through the brush. The car tipped as the cable yanked on it, and it flipped over, landing right side up. A dark blue Bentley convertible. Its soft top torn and crushed. Sand and water streamed out of the car, and a dead woman sat in the driver’s seat, creepily upright.
Watanabe made his way down the slope. He tore his slacks, and slipped and skidded, regretting that he wore street shoes.
By the time he reached the car, the cable had winched it out on the rocks. The dead woman wore a dark business suit. Her hair swirled around her face and clogged her mouth. Her eyes were gone: reef fish had eaten them.
He leaned into the car, past the corpse, and looked around. He saw articles of clothing plastered all over the wet compartment, clinging to the seats and caught in the twisted metal of the convertible’s top. Board shorts. A belt made of snakeskin, chewed by fish. A woman’s underpants, lime-green. Another pair of board shorts, with a tag still on them, just purchased. A Hilo Hattie shirt. A pair of bootcut jeans with a hole in the right knee.
“Was the lady going to do laundry?” he remarked to an officer. The clothing was the sort that younger people wear. He noticed a plastic jug wedged under the dashboard and took it out and studied the label. “Ethanol. Hmm.” He found a wallet in the backseat. It held a Massachusetts driver’s license belonging to one Jenny H. Linn. One of the missing students. But there were no bodies in the car other than the woman’s—which might or might not be Alyson Bender. That would have to wait for the medical examiner.
He climbed back up to the road. There, Nanci Harfield and another officer had photographed and measured the tire tracks in the grit leading over the shoulder of the road.
Watanabe looked at Harfield. “So what do you think?”
“Looks like the car stopped here before it went over. Then it rolled straight off.” Harfield had searched carefully around the tire tracks for any shoeprints in the gravel. The gravel was scuffed but there were no clear shoeprints. She went on, “It looks like the driver stopped right here. Then the car goes off the edge, no use of the brakes. If she’d braked, you’d see the skidmarks in the dirt. No skidmarks means no attempt to stop. She could have sat here for a while making up her mind, then touched the gas and went over.”
“Suicide?” Watanabe asked her.
“That’s a possibility. It’s consistent with these marks.”
The evidence squad took photographs and video. They bagged the body and loaded it into an ambulance, which drove off silently, lights flashing. The totaled Bentley followed, riding on the deck of the police tow truck, still dripping seawater.
Watanabe ended up back at his desk at headquarters, looking at the scratched metal wall he would stare at sometimes to clarify his thoughts. He couldn’t get over the feeling that somebody had put the clothing in the car. Especially that wallet. People who are planning to go off don’t leave their wallets behind. If Jenny Linn had gone off voluntarily, she would have taken her wallet with her. What if she hadn’t gone voluntarily? Maybe kidnapped? Had this been a boating accident? A lost boat would explain so many people missing at the same time.
He called the Property Crimes Unit and asked if there were any reports of missing boats. Not lately. He stared at the wall some more. It might be time to eat an emergency Spam sushi.
But then his phone rang. It was an officer in the Missing Persons Unit. “I’ve got another one for you.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“A Joanna Kinsky called to report her husband didn’t