Donovan could practically hear the cogs clicking in Eleri's brain and he didn’t want to jump into that mess. Though this was their case, he was thinking of it as hers.
Eleri spoke to the new agent as though she did not know the victim and the wife personally. Still, her incredulity shone through. “How did the wife just take the body? Did the FBI not oppose that?”
Noah Kimball shook his head. “Not really. The wife has that right.”
Donovan's head turned, watching as Eleri’s brow pulled together, fighting the hair she’d scraped back into a semi-neat knot. She’d changed clothes and her entire look since standing on the beach, unwilling to walk into the Miami branch in a wet skirt. Now, as she began tugging at strings that she disliked, he understood why.
“The FBI should have fought harder,” Eleri demanded, though the deed was already done. “We have that legal right—”
But the agent cut her off. “We're discussing a same-sex couple. The wife was threatened with a lawsuit by the victim's family members.”
“Still,” Eleri protested, though her force was weaker this time.
“No.” Suddenly, the very young agent was standing his ground. “Florida may have removed its ban on same-sex marriage, but we didn’t get rid of all the bigotry. Understandably, the wife needed to be given control of her spouse's body—and quickly—before anything could be brought up in court. An interstate case could have questioned her rights as the spouse and held everything up.”
“But the laws—” Eleri protested. Donovan understood. Nationally, the marriage should be recognized, but Agent Kimball was pushing back.
“Honestly, I don't need to be lectured on how this system still fails LGBTQ couples.” He let the statement hang for a moment.
Eleri seemed to not be getting the hint—one that Donovan began to recognize in the vehement defense the agent offered.
Opening her mouth one more time, Eleri tried again to establish an order that would give her something to be angry about. But Kimball adequately held her back.
“No, please.” He said the words politely but firmly. “I fully understand the damage a family can do to a gay couple.”
Eleri's jaw snapped shut, and she nodded quickly. Either she realized she agreed or she’d decided this was not the hill she wished to die on—not when this agent clearly had a stake in it himself.
The silence hung between them for a moment, so Donovan jumped in figuring a change of topic would be welcome. He’d been examining the photos—instead of arguing the lost body—and he found this case landed right between their two areas of expertise.
He often dealt with fresh corpses; Eleri usually saw highly decomposed or skeletonized ones. This body—ravaged by the ocean and apparently bitten by several sharks along the way—fell somewhere in between.
“I think I found why this might be an FBI case. What might make it a murder.”
Both faces turned to look at him, one new and curious, the other familiar and trusting.
“We—Eleri and I—” He pointed between them, “were told this was a murder. So that’s our starting point. I’m looking specifically for something the preliminary investigation missed that makes this killing deliberate. I don't know what Hannah said to convince our SAC that was the case, but ‘murder’ was what we were told. Looking through these pictures, I see a few small marks that might offer an explanation.”
Eleri flipped her folder back to the pictures. As he watched, Agent Noah Kimball also picked up a folder from the desktop. He pulled out one picture and held it up to ask if this was the one, but Donovan shook his head and pointed to another.
Once all three of them were on the same image, he spoke again. “Here.” Donovan put his finger on his own photo. “I think this is a knife wound, though it’s hard to tell from the photo alone.”
Beside him, he heard Eleri mutter under her breath, “I hate pictures,” and he almost smiled. He understood, but only asked Agent Kimball, “Do you see? Nothing seemed to have taken a bite out of this portion of the body. This is a small wound, narrow and likely deep, and appears to have been made by a sharp object. I can't be more certain without better photographs.”
Pulling a third photo out, Donovan rotated it around to show the others. “There’s a similar mark here, as well. Very similar—which makes both wounds even more suspicious.”
“Fish bites aren’t this consistent?” Kimball asked as the side of his mouth curled up.
Donovan shook his head. “Sadly, no.” But he pointed again to the upper right quadrant of the victim’s chest, where the second mark that also might be a knife wound appeared.
The sea and the creatures in it had gotten to Allison's body. Any marks it might have borne beforehand would be hard to distinguish from what the fish did later. Making those distinctions was difficult, even when he had the body on a table in front of him. Marks were “consistent with” things. Marks were “consistent with” a baseball bat upside the head. But even if the bloody baseball bat was nearby, the exact cause of the injury wasn't something the medical examiner could fully determine.
From the photographs, it appeared easy to determine that the large marks on her legs and the missing pieces of flesh were consistent with bites by sharks, but Donovan couldn’t say what species.
Agent Kimball had already told them Great Whites had been indicted in the incident. But maybe it wasn't an accident.
“Hold on,” Kimball said, tapping on his keyboard. Turning his monitor toward the two visiting agents, he pulled up of more pictures, making Donovan very happy. He'd been afraid that these few photos and the short, written notes were all the Miami office had to offer regarding Allison’s body. He knew there should be more—even for a shark attack. Scant evidence would have amounted to a serious breach of protocol.
While Eleri seemed more than willing to tell this branch they weren’t doing their job, Donovan wasn’t ready to call them out within minutes of walking into the building.
The building itself was all glass and angles, reaching up into the sky. Donovan’s emotional impression—the way they'd been checked in and greeted by name—led him to believe that the Miami office had their shit together. But this folder had concerned him. Agent Kimball was now making him feel better as he showed Donovan a file with possibly thousands of photos of the body.
“Find me those two spots in close up.” Donovan motioned to the screen. He would have asked nicely, but this was important. This was the heart of whether or not they even had a case.
It took a few moments of Donovan rejecting various photos before he said, “Wait. There. Zoom.”
Kimball gladly obliged, and the three of them leaned in closer, peering at what was almost clearly a knife wound.
A knife wound.
“Why is this not in the notes from the ME’s office?” Donovan demanded. Maybe it was now his turn to be irate. They hadn’t been here thirty minutes and they’d already discovered the case was being radically mishandled.
This time it was Kimball who was frowning as he looked at the screen, tapping back and forth, pulling up the records. “I don't know. It appears someone photographed the body and filed the photos and lab work and not much more. The local ME concluded it was a shark attack and left it at that.”
Donovan found his patience this time. It seemed they would all do it in turn. Maybe if the examiners had believed this was just a shark attack, and that all they needed to do was confirm it, this evidence might be passably adequate.
Still, any body that came across his table would have been more thoroughly examined—suspicion of murder or not.
“I’ve been told they’re very busy. I don’t think they have time for cases that are already written off as accidents.” Though Kimball spoke in clear defense of the local office, he didn’t put any force behind it.
He’d stopped tapping on the keys to look up at his new partners, his green-eyed gaze hopping between Eleri and Donovan. “So you're suggesting that she was murdered via stabbing and then left to the sharks.”
“It would be underwater,” Donovan added. “Assumedly, she was in a wet suit, or a suit of some kind, when this occurred.” The wetsuit would be valuable evidence, if it hadn’t been destroyed or lost.
Kimball nodded. “The death did occur during a dive. However, the water around here is plenty warm at this time of year, and she might very well have been in just a swim suit.”
“Let’s see what we can locate,” Donovan pushed. As the local agent, Kimball would have an established relationship with the ME’s office. As Not-Eleri-or-Donovan, he was already in a better position and wasn’t pissy about the way things had been handled.
Donovan tried to put on a happier attitude. “Well, it’s not good, but we have somewhere to start.”