Chapter 1

Monday, October 22, 10:00 a.m. Near Hampton Junction in the
southern Adirondack Mountains

Mark Roper followed sheriff Dan Evans down, staying so close to the
man's flippers that they occasionally brushed his face mask. But he
didn't want to get too far behind the tunnel of light from Dan's
headlamp, which led them ever deeper into the darkness. Unable to
see anything but black outside its range, Mark couldn't tell up,
down, or sideways unless he focused on the illuminated streams of
algae streaking at them. Like snow against a windshield, they
heightened his sense of speed.

The cold penetrated his hood, giving him a doozy of an ice-cream
headache; it burrowed through the vulcanized rubber of his dry suit
and a double layer of thermal underwear, then through skin, muscle,
and bone to settle directly into his marrow. Despite diving gloves,
even his fingers threatened to freeze up, but he kept his grip on
the safety line, kicking and propelling himself ever lower, moving
hand over hand. God, when would they get there? he wondered,
repeatedly having to pinch his nose through his mask, then blow to
relieve the painful pressure in his ears.

He'd been down this deep before, but in the warm blue ocean off
Hawaii. Here he might as well have been swimming in ink. Though the
water was clear, the mountain lake, nestled in a steep gorge, was
so narrow and deep that it swallowed most of the sunshine from the
surface. Other dives they'd made in the district were shallow, but
with this one claustrophobia pressed in with smothering force. He
couldn't let himself get far from Dan, who carried the big handheld
spotlight. If he ended up alone, his own headlamp would be too
feeble at this depth, and Mark wasn't at all sure that he'd be able
to hold panic at bay. A dangerous situation, because down here cold
and disorientation were killers. Already he was breathing too hard,
the sound rushing loudly through his ears, and he made a conscious
effort to slow it down.

A white cord trailed out in front of them to nothingness. If it
hadn't been there, the end abruptly marking where the bottom lay,
they might have hit the thick layer of silt and muck that covered
the lake's floor and thrown up such a cloud of debris they'd be in
a virtual blackout that not even a lamp could penetrate. As it was,
their arrival kicked up plumes of dirt that hung suspended around
them like giant gray fronds.

Dan looked at the dive computer on his sleeve. Mark did the same,
barely able to read the screen. According to the
numbers—measurements of the cold, the pressure, the depth,
the altitude of the lake—the calculation told him they could
only stay about fifteen minutes before having to head back. Their
ascent would be no faster than a half foot per second, and they
would have to make a three-minute safety stop fifteen feet from the
surface to allow the release of excess nitrogen from their
bloodstreams. The clinical consequences if he got it
wrong—multiple emboli, pneumothoraces, mediastinal emphysema,
subcutaneous emphysema, all of them air bubbles where they
shouldn't be—were nasty enough that he'd die screaming. As
county coroner, in the last four years Mark had seen three dive
victims with just such injuries, and he sure as hell was going to
be careful.

With so little time, he wanted to get going. But the silt
remained—in fact, seemed to grow worse—making it
impossible to see at all, cutting him off from Dan. Waiting for it
to settle felt like an eternity, and he began to doubt his senses,
unable to make out even his own bubbles or tell if the rope in his
hand led to the surface or the bottom.

Stop! Think! Act! he said to himself. It was the diver's credo to
stay out of trouble. He breathed deeply, slowly, to gain control.
Then he adjusted the pressure in his suit with a small squirt of
compressed air to maintain neutral buoyancy.

Dan came into view, floating just below. Mark suspected that he,
too, was trying to conquer a sense of panic and probably regretting
the day they'd flown off to Hawaii together for the week of scuba
training that would qualify them for these forensic dives. But Mark
had pushed the idea so they'd no longer have to wait around for an
outside team every time someone drowned.

Finally, the particles in the water cleared.

The area around them hadn't so much as a strand of seaweed on it.
But it wouldn't be easy to spot what they were after, he decided,
surveying the little he could see of the barren landscape. The
hooks from the search-and-rescue boat must have snagged their catch
deep within this soft mush because anything of any weight would
have buried itself under its surface.

Unless the pulling had rooted up the rest of the remains before the
limb tore off, he knew they'd never find them.

Dan slowly turned and swept the surrounding area with the probe of
his lamp. It barely penetrated ten feet before the thick, absolute
darkness sucked it up.

Hopeless, Mark thought.

Indeed, after a complete rotation, they had seen nothing.

Mark took a reading from his compass. The draggers had told him the
target should lie approximately north to northeast from the anchor
line. He oriented himself so that what they were looking for should
be in front of him, if the men above had been right in their
guesstimates. He handed Dan his headlamp, took the powerful
handheld light, and started forward.

He'd gone only twenty feet when it loomed up before him.

A headless thorax, rib cage included, protruded out of the soft
mud, resting at a slight angle. The left humerus and a more or less
intact right arm trailed into the black sediment, making it seem as
if the skeleton were trying to push itself up out of its grave. The
bottom half, the pelvis and legs, remained out of sight. There was
no sign of the skull.

Earlier that morning Dan's volunteers had been dragging the lake
for the body of a seventy-nine-year-old man with Alzheimer's
disease who'd wandered off the previous weekend. Retrieval should
have meant a simple transfer to the undertakers in Saratoga
Springs, the paperwork to follow. Instead they hauled up the bones
of a left forearm barely attached to the remnants of a fingerless
hand. They called Dan and Mark, but not before dropping an anchor
with a line attached.

Up top Dan had shown Mark the limb as they prepared for the dive.
It was pretty well stripped of flesh, but enough cartilage and
connective tissue held it together that one of the grapple prongs
had caught the space between the ulna and radius, the long bones
running from the elbow to the wrist.

To Mark's amazement, the bones' owner appeared equally intact.
Except down here the strands of remaining tissue waved in the water
like tattered clothing. Using the beam, he signaled Dan to swim
over.

Everything had been colored brownish green by a heavy overgrowth of
algae. That the flesh and organs were otherwise mostly gone
certainly meant many years had passed since this person went in the
water. That some of the bones were still connected at all, he
thought, had to be from the preservative effects of cold and mud on
gristle. Certainly the absence of a head was no surprise. The bony
portion that joined a skull atop a spine was a small peg no bigger
than the end phalanx of the little finger. In life it took a
neckful of muscle, sinew, and cartilage to hold everything
together, more than for any other joint in the body. No amount of
cold mud could preserve that much connective tissue and keep
everything in one piece. The skull would have detached from the
spine and stayed in the sludge at the first yank of the grappling
hooks. Better not go rummaging about for it either. There'd be
other much smaller bones scattered about in the sediment, such as
the fingers. One of them might have a ring on it that would help
with identification. They'd have to get a forensic dive team with
specially insulated suits to sift through the gunk and, using a
modified scopes basket, do a proper retrieval. And they'd have to
do it pronto—or wait until next spring to finish. Freeze-up
could occur by late October, early November around here, and no one
in his right mind would go diving for a skeleton once it meant
cutting through ice with a chain saw.

Mark got down to basics.

After returning the lamp to Dan, he took an underwater slate from
his belt and made a primitive sketch of the find, indicating its
distance from the marker. He then used his favorite tool for
gathering underwater evidence, an Olympus camera in a
light-and-motion housing with a built-in strobe. The blast of light
firing once every second animated the skeleton, making it appear to
move and shift position as if it were posing for him while he
drifted around taking shots at different angles.

He looked at the spot where the pelvis disappeared into the dirt.
He'd better confirm that the lower half was all there, not wanting
to miss the outside chance he was dealing with a cut-up body.

He drifted gently over the top of the hipbones and dipped a hand
down either side to where the legs should be.

The sand beneath him exploded to life, and a six-foot ribbon of
black undulated out of the murk. He screamed into his mouthpiece
and jerked backward, crashing into Evans, who'd been floating a
foot above him. The shape writhed between his arms and shot into
the darkness.

An eel.

Normal in the lakes around here. Even known to wrap around the legs
of swimmers at night. But harmless.

Tell my pounding heart that, he thought, peering into the thick
silt the creature had stirred up.

He could make out his watch only by holding it up to his faceplate.
Less than five minutes left before they'd have to head up. No time
to wait for this latest disturbance to clear. But unable to see his
nearest surroundings, he'd lost all sense of direction again, and
felt a nauseating swirl of vertigo.

Stop! Think! Act! he once more reminded himself, slowing his
breathing, then expelling a few bubbles from the side of his
mouthpiece. Be- fore they disappeared in the gloom he glimpsed
enough of their passage toward the surface to orient himself, and,
trying not to think of the eel circling somewhere out there,
reached toward the bottom.

Once more passing his hands through the silt, he found the long
shafts of both femurs and palpated along them. The tibiae and
fibulae of the lower legs came next. He slid his hands farther down
to confirm the presence of feet—and his finger caught on
something that felt like thick chains.

What the hell?

They were looped around the ankles.

Oh, shit!

Running his fingers along them he came to what must be a padlock. A
few links more led to a smooth hard surface that felt like a metal
shaft about six inches in diameter. Following its shape deeper,
both his arms up to the shoulder in muck, he made out the
double-pointed flanges of an anchor.

He reached up to grab Dan, who hovered just above and, drawing him
closer so they floated faceplate to faceplate, guided the sheriff's
hand into the ooze. Dan's eyes grew wide behind his mask, and he
immediately signaled for them to start up.

Mark agreed. This was now a crime scene, which they must not
further disturb. The forensic team would have to sift through the
muck not just for parts of the body, but also for evidence that
might help them determine who had sent it to the bottom.

They rose slowly, no faster than the proscribed one-half foot per
second. Mark felt they weren't even moving. Any quicker, however,
and the nitrogen bubbles would appear in their bloodstreams,
blocking every tiny artery in their bodies. So they hung there, two
specks suspended in a horizonless, charcoal world, the surface
still invisible beyond an infinity of gray twilight.

Mark's thoughts slid to the scene below, and thinking about their
find unnerved him more than when he'd actually seen and touched it.
The idea that they were swimming in water steeped with the remains
of human rot didn't bother him. His head knew that that part of the
process had mostly ended long ago. It was the possibility the
person went into the lake alive and conscious that made his skin
crawl. The image of someone plummeting through this nether world,
struggling round-mouthed to scream, nothing but bubbles streaming
out, filled his head. From the way Dan kept staring down, pupils
magnified big as dimes behind the Plexiglas, he, too, appeared to
have trouble keeping his imagination in check.

Who could it be? Mark wondered. No one had been reported missing
from the Hampton Junction area since he'd started general practice
seven years ago. The ten years before that, while in New York at
the university, med school, and during his residency, he'd gotten
home often enough he would have heard about anyone who'd
disappeared. It was possible, of course, that someone had brought
the corpse here to dump it. Might be Jimmy Hoffa down there for all
he knew. Everybody from the Northeast came here to party and play.
Why wouldn't they import their murders as well?

Excerpted from MORTAL REMAINS © Copyright 2003 by Peter
Clement. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books, a division
of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.