Death By Sunken Treasure (A Hayden Kent Mystery Book 2) (22 page)

Grant’s face contorted behind his mask.

He swam for me. His dive knife, the same one he used to slit open Mike’s remains, extended in front of him.

I froze. Then spun in the water column and finned away as quickly as I could.

My heart felt like someone was squeezing it too hard. My breaths came in quick short gasps. If I weren’t careful, I would run out of air at one hundred feet.

This was the dream all over again. The faceless divers, laughing as I struggled. Laughing.

Drunk. Martini’s Law. Grant wasn’t crazy. He was narced—suffering from nitrogen narcosis. It was far more common diving air at depths of one hundred feet. I had to take control, not run.

Turning back to meet him, we danced a macabre water ballet. My goal was to get behind him. Grab his tank valve. Get out of danger and in control.

He swung the knife at me again. This time the sharp serrated edge slashed through the arm of my wetsuit.

Grant used my momentary pause to grab me in a bear hug. He turned off my air. His arms locked around me like a vise.

I couldn’t breathe. I had no air. I sucked deeply on the regulator. Nothing.

I struggled and managed to grab Grant’s mask. I yanked it away from his face. He panicked and released me.

Stretching my arm behind me, I turned on my air and gulped a greedy breath. Then I swam behind him and grabbed his tank valve.

While he struggled with his mask, I got a firm grip on his tank.

Every move I made left a trail of blood in the water. The wound stung, but didn’t hurt. I hoped the tight wetsuit would serve as a pressure bandage.

We swam in a circle spiraling ever higher. No anchor line. I gazed down and spied the sandy bottom of the sea floor. We swam up a little more. My depth gauge said sixty feet. I dared to let go of the valve and swim to face Grant. If he had narcosis, it would have dissipated by this time. His mask was more than half-filled with water. I read fear in his eyes.

I put my hand on the top of my mask, tipped my head back, and let the pressure on my forehead lift the bottom mask seal slightly. Then I blew hard. Grant watched. He imitated my movements and managed to clear most of the water from his mask.

I indicated we needed to do a safety stop. I glanced at his air gauge. He was down low. I judged he had enough to ascend. I removed my second regulator from the keeper and offered it. He refused. At this depth, I couldn’t see the bottom. I looked up, but the water clouded as we rose; we couldn’t see the surface either, or any boats. Something caught the corner of my eye. About one hundred yards to my right I saw a shape sitting on the water. It looked like a boat. I breathed out a large sigh of relief.

We must have overshot our mark while we were fighting. I pointed the boat out to him and when we finished our three minutes at depth we swam slowly upward in that direction. As we drew closer, I thought it looked like twinned hulls above us. At about thirty feet below the surface, I looked up again. This time I was certain. Two boats. I figured Janice or Mallory came and waited for us to surface. I checked Grant’s air again. He would have enough, barely. Again I offered him my regulator. This time he took the mouthpiece and sucked in the air. He stayed on my air while we did a two-minute stop. Holding at fifteen feet is hard, no matter what your experience level, so I added a short stop at thirty feet. I wanted to be sure if we couldn’t hold the fifteen-foot depth later, we didn’t add getting the bends to our worries. I could tell from the surge that the wave action topside had increased. Grant gave me back my regulator. We turned to swim in the direction of the boat when the sea erupted. Both boats started their engines and peeled away in opposite directions.

Thirty-Six

Fear I couldn’t show tingled in my veins. Two boats. Neither one ours. What happened to our boat? What happened to Grant? Had the attack been a result of narcosis? A trickle of sweat made its way down my back inside my wetsuit. Had we missed our boat? Accidentally headed to open sea? My arm throbbed now. I didn’t know how much of a surface swim I could handle.

I made a conscious effort to stay calm. The last thing I wanted was for Grant to recognize the fear in my eyes.

We still had a safety stop ahead of us. We would find the boat when we surfaced, I assured myself. Sure, we’d be in for a swim, but we would locate the boat. Safe and secure. I smiled around my regulator. I stank as a navigator. In fact, the only navigational promise I ever made students was that the boat would be on the surface. I winced.

Lost in my own thoughts, I almost failed to glance at my depth gauge. Fifteen feet. We needed to stop here for at least three minutes; five was better. I turned to signal to Grant, and he jerked the regulator out of my mouth. He must be out of air. He sucked deeply on my air supply. I unhooked my second and put the mouthpiece in my mouth. Then I picked up Grant’s air gauge. It read below empty. He ran flat out of air. I motioned to him to calm down and showed him my air gauge. The dial read just between one half and one quarter. Plenty for the two of us for the stop and the assent. But only if he stopped sucking the gas like a drunk giving up sobriety.

His breathing calmed. Because of our out-of-air predicament, we were forced to be close and face to face. Some emotion I couldn’t read flashed in his eyes. He wedged his hands together, palms up and open. The symbol for boat. Then he moved a hand through the water like a fish swimming. The symbol for gone. I regretted not having a slate with me. I tried to sign that his boat would be someplace in the world called the surface. I didn’t have enough signs to get the concept across. Truthfully, my heart pounded like a drum. More than anything I wanted to be on the surface breathing air from the sky, looking at our boat.

The three minutes of the safety stop seemed like an eternity. Finally, I gave the symbol to ascend. We went up together, tethered by our mutual survival pack. I told Grant to use his snorkel as soon as we broke the surface. The rollers increased to the four- to six-foot range now. The waves made seeing anything difficult. Grant surrendered my regulator and I clipped it to my BC along with my second. Then I did a quick flipper kick to gain some speed and altitude and did a spinning turn in the air hoping to locate the boat.

Nothing.

I leaped again, opting to start from a different quadrant.

Nothing.

All the boats I saw were far away.

All going someplace else.

I struggled to fight the panic that rose in my chest. I slipped back into instructor mode. My training wouldn’t let me down. Not now. “Well, the old scuba joke is a bad day underwater is when the boat you dove off of passes you on the way down.” I smiled and tried to appear encouraging as I grabbed Grant’s weight belt and pulled the catch. The weights fell to the bottom. Our survival depended on our buoyancy. 

I should have known better than to try to fool Grant.

“Yeah. I’d say a bad day diving is when you come up and don’t find the boat.” He rose on a roller and swallowed water on the way down.

“Keep that snorkel in your mouth.” I hoped my voice held more authority than I felt.

I was grateful Grant thought our lack of a boat to be our biggest problem.

In reality, our biggest problem was our lack of a dive flag. We could easily be run over. In these seas, the boat that hit us might never realize it.

I gazed toward shore.

The white column of Bonefish Towers stood out like a beacon. It looked to be six or seven miles away from where we were treading water. At least we hadn’t drifted north in the Gulf Stream.

I stripped my tank from my BC. To save ourselves, we needed to swim for shore. The incoming tide was in our favor. We could use the larger rollers too. They would push us closer as they rolled toward land.

Grant struggled to stay afloat and breathe. Like many beginning scuba divers, he didn’t deal well with the surface. The good news, once I got him out of his gear, Grant was a great swimmer. I knew he could cover the miles too. Provided some boater didn’t take us out.

I kept a firm grip on my unstrapped tank. Grant’s tank sported one Velcro strap. In order to free his tank, I had to undo it and I needed him to hold my tank to manipulate it. He wasn’t offering me any assistance, so I figured he didn’t notice my struggle. I turned to face him. His mask hung around his neck. The snorkel gripped so tightly in his teeth I worried he would cut through the plastic mouthpiece. His fingers fumbled with unusual clumsiness. Then he grabbed the tank in both hands and tried to smash me in the head. Shocked and afraid, I dove down to avoid the blow. He had my tank. I had to come up.

He kicked in a circle, always facing me. My lungs burned. I needed to breathe. My next breath would be water-filled unless I thought of something fast. Spots blinked on and off in my vision. Grant’s symptoms definitely weren’t narcosis.

With my last ounce of strength, I did a porpoise move in the water. Making the biggest kick I could, I turned myself into a human torpedo and propelled myself into his groin. I surfaced at the same time the tank fell from his hands. The aluminum tank was buoyant, especially when empty. I hoped it wouldn’t catch a wave and knock me out. The weights in my BC tugged me downward. I had to jettison them or face drowning. I released one and was about to release the second when Grant came charging back towards me, his knife shining in the sun. I pulled out the weight and bashed him in the head. I tried to hold on to it but between the momentum and the waves, it fell from my hand.

Grant’s eyes rolled back in his head and his body went limp. I felt both vindicated and condemned. Where the hell was the boat? What had happened to Grant? No diver ever had narcosis at the surface. Was he having some bizarre reaction to the depth? I didn’t know. I stuffed a hand into his BC pocket, planning to jettison anything I found to help lighten him. My hand closed on a small rectangular box. Curious, I pulled it out to look at it before dropping it to the sea floor.

Through the clear dry bag I saw a shadowbox, with five doubloons forming a frown. I turned it in the other direction and the frown turned into a smile. This was what he stuffed in his BC pocket on the boat. Had he intended to leave it on the wreck site? A tribute to Mike? Why the secrecy? A folded paper was wedged behind the shadowbox, its edge barely visible. I flipped the dry bag over. It was from the DNA laboratory that performed the tests for Dana. Grant Huffman was the father of Lisa’s child. My mind rebelled at the words. Did this mean Grant killed Mike? I couldn’t get my head around the thought. Then I remembered Grant’s arms wrapped around me underwater. With cold certainty, I knew how Mike died. Grant killed him. Turned off his air, just like he’d tried to do to me. He wasn’t narced. He was a killer. I shoved the dry bag in my own BC pocket.

I pulled his face out of the water by his hair. His lips were blue. Although I wore my heavy five-millimeter wetsuit, he wore only a basic dive skin.

Cold would kill a swimmer.

The body temperature cools to a point where the major organs shut down. I tried to remember the order. This was important.

Grant was suffering from hypothermia.

He was dying of the cold. That was too easy a death, as far as I was concerned.

Thirty-Seven

Water entered my mouth as my lips dropped open. I choked and spat out saltwater. Nothing in my training prepared me for this.

Grant needed to be warm and dry. Then the state could kill him for what he did to Mike. I wanted him to live long enough to hear me testify at his trial. It took all my strength not to let myself think of how much I had cared for him. I could relive our relationship later, looking for clues I might have missed. Right now, I needed my anger. My double anger, I corrected. When I thought of how much pain he caused Dana.

I flipped over on my back and drew Grant in lifeguard-style. Then I proceeded to stroke with my free arm and kick with my legs. The cut in my arm moved beyond throbbing to outright pain. Every stroke brought waves of agony. Grant’s deadweight nearly drowned me even after I manually inflated my BC with a few puffs of air.

After swimming about two years, I ventured a glance over my shoulder.

Bonefish seemed a bit closer. Not close enough to be encouraging.

I glanced at my dive gauge. The surface interval feature read twenty minutes. I calculated we swam about ten of those minutes.

We heard a lot of boats. No one ventured near. I struggled to decide if that was a curse or a blessing. Without a dive flag or some signaling device, anyone close could run us over. My blood ran cold at the thought.

I lifted Grant’s head and looked at him. He was still out. My arms stroked into the lifesaving swim again. While I swam, I pieced together the clues. Grant left the office for the day immediately after Mike signed his will. Now I believed he went to The Petard. Grant, not Buddy, was the handsome man who served as witness. My stroke faltered for a moment as I wondered how I could have missed these clues. They stood out like beacon lights now.

Grant knew all about the corporate structure of The Petard and the salvage permit. He’d given me plausible reasons, but it didn’t change the facts. Officer Barton saw a twenty-seven-foot Mako anchored at the treasure site. Grant’s boat. Grant knew Devon in high school. That meant he knew Jake. Janice saw a twenty-seven-foot Mako on the treasure site the night she was looking for a lost diver. Grant’s boat. Grant was plundering the site. That explained the look on his face when I told him I was diving it. He didn’t want to dive it with me. He didn’t want me to dive it at all. He knew I would find it disturbed.

The sound of a boat coming at us from the shore broke into my thoughts.

The engine whined louder as the boat neared. I rolled Grant off me, keeping his head above water, and turned and gazed toward the sound. The bow of a boat headed directly for us.

Panic welled up in my throat. I was stuck. With Grant unconscious, I couldn’t force a free dive to a safe depth. If I let go of Grant, the wave action could pull him away and under. That would be too good for him. I wrapped an arm around him so he couldn’t slip away and feather-kicked trying to get above the waves. No luck. Not holding dead weight.

The vessel cut to our left. We were lifted on a wave high enough for me to see the writing on the side. Fish and Wildlife.

“It’s a grouper trooper,” I shouted.

As quickly as the elation came, desperation followed. I needed to signal somehow. Shock and the cold must be affecting me too, causing me to forget a basic dive safety staple. I pulled a safety sausage from my pocket and pulled the cord to inflate it. The plastic tube filled in a few seconds that felt much longer. A bright neon yellow column rising from the blue sea. Whoever drove the boat couldn’t miss it.

The boat slowed and turned towards us. The safety sausage chose that moment to split. The deflated plastic sack fell to the water like a useless appendage.

I was in worse trouble than before. Now I had a boat heading toward us. Slowly, but right at us.

My cold and wrinkled hand plunged back in my BC pocket. My fingers touched something else. I pulled it out. The bag that held Mike’s ashes. I offered up a quick prayer that he would forgive me and blew into the bag to inflate it, and knotted the end. The bag wasn’t big, but I draped a part of the brightly colored sausage over it and thrust it into the air over my head.

The motor throttled back. The boat idled toward us. Janice’s face loomed over us.

She brought the boat to a halt and tossed a life ring overboard. By this time I’d inflated both my and Grant’s BC. Something I didn’t want to do while actively swimming. Too much drag.

I grabbed the doughnut and threaded an arm through it. Then I flipped on my back and swam, pulling Grant to the stern of the boat. Janice reached over and hauled him up to the swim platform by the shoulder straps of his BC. I helped her wrestle Grant over the gunnels to safety, pushing as she pulled.

“I knocked him out with a weight. He killed Mike. He tried to kill me.” I held my cut arm out of the water. Blood dripped down and hit me in the face. Janice checked to see that Grant was still unconscious. Then she walked to the center console and spoke into her microphone.

She stripped Grant of his gear and wetsuit, wrapped him in towels, and cuffed his hands behind his back. I swam around to the outboard, used it for a swim step, and managed to pull myself out of the water.

While I half-walked, half-fell over the transom to the floor of the patrol boat, Grant came back to life.

“Stop, Janice. You’ll rub my skin off.” Grant actually sounded distressed. “What the…” He tried to pivot himself into an upright position. Janice controlled him by putting a knee on his back and keeping him pressed to the floor of the boat.

“I can’t breathe.”

“You can talk just fine. That means you are breathing. Stay down or I’ll Taser you. Do not move. Do not get up.”

She shot a glance over her shoulder at me. “He’s complaining. I think he’s going to be all right.” She pivoted and pointed toward shore. “The cavalry.”

I strapped my BC in a tank holder on the side of the boat. Then I reached into the pocket and pulled out the dry bag I had taken from Grant. Before I handed it to Janice, I opened the bag, pulled out the paper, and read the contents. Twice.

Grant fathered Lisa’s child. Grant was Lisa’s lover.
I felt sick when I handed the package to Janice. The revelation almost overshadowed my joy at the sight of the blue rotating lights of two patrol boats heading in our direction.

The patrol boats appeared about three miles away. Janice wanted to wait for them rather than try to transport Grant and me to the hospital herself. The oncoming boats were built for speed. That would free her to search for Grant’s boat.

While she studied the contents of the dry bag, I brought her up to date in more detail than I wanted to volunteer for an official report. Janice listened without taking notes. She opened her mouth to speak when she glanced over the bow and froze. A boat headed for us at full speed.

From the angle, the boater would never see us. We were in open ocean. If he hit us, he could cut us in half. Suddenly he cut a hard starboard turn. His wake nearly swamped us. I recognized Grant’s boat instantly. Devon Rutherford was at the wheel.

Janice jumped behind the center console in a heartbeat. She throttled up and had her boat on a plane before I could brace myself. I crashed backwards against the gunnels. Janice shot a questioning glance over her shoulder. I mouthed, “I’m fine.” Grant appeared stunned, but unhurt.

It took a few moments for the other two patrols to catch and overtake us. They left us bouncing in their wakes as they drove on to try to head off the Mako.

The Mako made another tight turn, trying to swamp the two patrol boats.

Something happened. The Mako went dead in the water.

From our vantage point, well away from the action, we watched an officer board the boat. Janice’s radio crackled with details of the stop.

Devon broke away and dove into the water.

One of the officers dove in after him.

He came up empty-handed.

Three times.

I glanced at Janice, my emotions on overload. “Did we just watch a man die? A man who saved my life?”

She reached a hand out to my shoulder.

“He, Jake, and your boss drowned Mike. If he drowns, there’s a strange kind of justice in that.”

“How could I miss the obvious?”

Janice’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “There’s a lot more you don’t know than what was in the dry bag. Barton and I were having lunch together when I got your text. She told me I better find you fast. Jake had been talking. Grant followed Mike to The Petard the day he died. He convinced Mike that he wasn’t being fair to his partners, his mother, or Lisa. Then he told Mike if he signed the draft with two witnesses, it would revoke the will he signed in your office. Mike complied. He might as well have signed his own death warrant. It was too risky to let him live. He could change his will again. I took off before they had the warrants final.”

My thoughts whirled at top speed. I shook my mental bag of puzzle pieces and let them fall together in a new pattern. I couldn’t understand Grant’s involvement. Why would he blow his career? In all the years I worked for him, I never once questioned his ethics.

The other two made sense. Devon and Jake had to secure their interest in the salvage and the bar by trickery. They could lose that if Mike made another will. One that Grant might not have a hand in. Devon in Miami? Sure, it was the perfect alibi. Since he got the interest in the treasure site, it was better if he wasn’t around when the second will was signed or when Mike died.

I huddled in the gunnel. The towels Janice gave me were not sufficient to fight off the cold. Janice added a few more details, but couldn’t help me with why Grant was involved. It had to be more than an affair with Lisa. People got together and broke up all the time. No one had to die.

As she spoke, an officer surfaced with a limp body in his arms. Devon came to life when he hit the air, kicking and fighting. The officers subdued him. From our vantage point, we saw one of the men pull the handcuffs tight.

They handled him carefully. I wanted them to beat him to within an inch of his life.

We were so involved in the action in front of us we failed to see another boat approach us. A soft bump alerted us to the presence of Officer Barton. She tossed Janice a line and twinned the two boats together. Then she squatted at Grant’s side.

“I have orders to bring you to Fisherman’s Hospital as fast as I can.” She cocked her head to the side and looked at Janice. “By the way, we finalized the arrest warrant for Devon Rutherford this morning. Seems like we won’t need to serve it.”

Grant struggled to his feet, dropping grey towels as he stood. “I’m fine. I’m going to refuse treatment. I have to get to my boat.” His eyes hungrily devoured the vessel with an officer onboard.

My throat ached with emotion. I looked at the man I thought I knew and hoped to know better and felt my world crumble.

“You were the baby’s father,” I finally managed to croak out. “You and Lisa, I never saw it.”

An expression of contempt covered his face as he looked at me. “You couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You, little miss investigator, making cow eyes at me all day long while you played pin the tail on the killer. You saw Lisa plenty of times at the marina. You were just too self-involved to notice.” He snorted.

“But you cared about me. I know you did. You cared for me after the fire. You were always there for me…” My voice clogged with tears, I couldn’t go on.

“You were supposed to teach me to dive. There wasn’t anything else, Hayden. Not on my part. I’m sorry.” He cocked his head in Officer Barton’s direction. “Now get me uncuffed.”

Officer Barton slowly looked him up and down. “We cut a warrant for you too. Jake has been occupying his time chatting with us.” She curled her lip, but remained calm and professional as she placed him under arrest and read him his rights.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to transport, Daphne?” Janice asked.

Daphne. Officer Barton had a first name. Daphne. Such a delicate name. I cocked my head and stared at her. No. It fit, I decided. Her demeanor was delicate. Like a flower.

“What about Jake?” Janice asked.

“Bail revoked. He’s been cooperative, but he’ll have the other two musketeers’ company to enjoy.”

My gaze lingered on my former boss. I bit my tongue to keep from asking the only other question I wanted answered. If I didn’t ask it, then maybe it wouldn’t be real. Instead I said, “Why did the bar burn?”

Barton glanced from Janice to Grant, and then at me. “Nobody wanted it.” Barton stopped short and then continued, “Collecting and splitting a lump sum insurance payout would be better than selling it.”

I nodded. There was something more, but I’d think about that later. The last piece fell into place.

“Buddy had to die. He knew the corporate secrets and the real plan. Somebody had to present the second will.” Officer Barton spoke as she steadied Grant in the boat. “Your boss brought him the second will.”

My eyes felt huge in my head as I stared at Grant. He refused to meet my look. “Who killed Buddy?” I asked.

Barton jerked her chin in the direction of the patrol boat.

“Devon saved you to cover his tracks and find out what you saw. You were getting too close to the truth. Jake was supposed to kill you. He didn’t expect the fire to flash so fast when the liquor exploded. He got trapped. Fortunately for him, the fire jumped the area where he hid. He was lucky he didn’t die trying to get the doubloons off the wall. He was clutching them when the fire rescue personnel found him.”

“The doubloons? The set on the wall?” I pointed to the dry box fitted into the niche on Janice’s console. “Grant had a set with him today. It’s in there.”

“They broke the whole thing open. Each of the partners had a set. Buddy’s had names written on the back of his shadowbox. His files indicate his job was to get the permits through, keep the State investigators off the group’s back. When Mike insisted Buddy make him sole owner of the permit and the bar, Buddy never made the change, but he let Mike think he had,” Officer Barton said.

The rocking of the boat made bile rise to my throat. Buddy knew too many secrets, and he took sides. When Mike died, Buddy should have known he was next. “I guess Devon and Jake’s involvement is pretty obvious. But Grant?”