Ruby went to the window. As the Dolphin lifted off, she looked down and saw a diver in a wet suit talking to a seaman along the main-deck starboard rail.
“Hey, guys. I’m Lieutenant Everett from Naval Safety investigating the crash,” she said as she arrived in front of them. “Did you go down and see the wreckage?”
The diver nodded. He was a cute kid, lean and blond and green-eyed with a fresh green tattoo of a shamrock on the webbing of his right hand. He was short, about five foot five or six. Sitting gracefully in his Body Glove suit, he could have been a teen surfer resting between waves.
“How far down was it?” Ruby said.
“About a hundred and twenty feet,” the blond diver said.
“Can you go deeper?”
“You’d be amazed,” said the older deckhand with a wink as the kid blushed.
Ruby glared at the joker, a thick-featured, dark-haired thirtysomething with a goatee. She looked at his deckhand’s green hard hat. What was the navy term for green hats? Oh, yeah. Deck apes.
“We’re trained to go up to two hundred or so or even more, but you need special tanks with added helium,” the young diver said.
“Were the deceased in uniform? Air force personnel or navy? Could you tell?” she said.
“Lieutenant?” called a voice from above.
Ruby turned around to see Lieutenant Martin at the pilothouse rail above, waving.
“Excuse me,” she said to the diver. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
“I’ll be here,” the diver said.
“Me, too,” said the deck ape with a wink.
She went back up the stairs and followed Lieutenant Martin inside. He led her across the bridge through a short corridor into his wood-paneled office.
“Coffee?” he said, closing the door.
“Please. Black.”
She stood silently waiting as he poured. The mug he handed her had a picture of a cute little blond boy in a funny puffy Hulk costume on it.
“Please, sit back and get comfy, Lieutenant,” Martin said, gesturing at a bench-like padded couch bolted to the wall. “There’s been a change in plans apparently.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“We’ve been advised to completely stay away from the wreckage. We’re actually leaving now. We’re supposed to babysit at a distance of a quarter mile. We’re not supposed to touch any debris. Just keep people away. Starting now. No personnel are to go near the wreckage until the navy salvage ship arrives. Including you.”
Ruby’s brow wrinkled.
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“But how does that make sense?”
Lieutenant Martin leaned forward in his bolted-down office chair and thumbed back his hat as he thought about that. He took it off and began spinning it off a finger.
“I have absolutely no clue,” he finally said. “But as it turns out, I shouldn’t even have called you. My boss is pissed that I jumped the chain. I should have called him first, he said, even though he’s on leave with his family on vacation out in California. You ever see something like this with a crash before?”
Ruby looked down into her coffee and then back at him before she slowly shook her head.
“Not even close,” she said.