“Again?” Donovan asked.
They were all crowding around GJ. She had to be uncomfortable with three other FBI agents clearly invading her personal space, but she didn't comment. No one really did. Donovan was still processing what he'd seen.
Though Noah kept his eyes trained on the screen, over the other agent’s head, Donovan caught Eleri’s gaze. Her return expression told him she had seen it, too.
“Maybe we play it back from the beginning,” Eleri stated for him.
He couldn't disagree. They needed to watch everything. They needed to see if this other diver—the third person—appeared in frame at any time prior.
It was clear that the film caught the death of the diver they thought was Allison. Whether or not it was her, the diver began bleeding openly into the water after jerking around. The next thing the camera caught was three sharks attacking and leaving almost no trace of the diver on screen.
Because her body had been found several days later, Donovan surmised that maybe the sharks had pulled her off-screen. But the video was rolling on without him and he parked that question. The other diver appeared only as arms and legs at the edge of the picture, as if he had hung back to watch.
“Wait!” Donovan blurted before GJ hit the button again. “Talk me through this. Noah, Eleri? I don’t know enough about diving. What am I watching? Because it looks as though the person filming, supposedly Neriah, has no idea that her fellow diver has been attacked by sharks and killed right behind her. Is that possible? Or is she responsible? Did she ignore this as it happened?”
He couldn’t tell. He didn't swim in swimming pools any more than he had been forced to do as a child. That had occurred all of twice, and he’d never gone back in. He knew at the least that swimming pools were dramatically different from the ocean. “Is there no noise down there?”
He'd studied physics to get into med school. For just a moment, he was grateful that it was a required course. He calculated now that noise traveled faster and more clearly in liquids than in air. So how would it be possible that the diver with the camera had not heard the commotion?
Noah looked to Eleri as though to ask who should go first. When she nodded, he jumped in. “It's entirely possible.” He pointed to the screen. “The camera isn't aimed. I don't know whether the camera-holding diver was looking at this scene or was looking away. But if the diver was. . . maybe. . . looking down at the ocean floor, collecting coral scrapings or trying to pick up or catch small fish specimens, this could happen behind them without their knowledge.”
“There's no noise?” Donovan pressed. GJ lifted her head and watched the conversation taking place above her but didn't enter it.
“I'm sure there is noise, but when you're down there, you've got a mask on your face, pressure in your ears, and a regulator in your mouth. All your senses are distorted. And the regulator makes a. . .” he searched for words and gave up. “I don't know! A compressed air noise every time you take a breath. It hisses and wheezes and it’s reasonably loud. That’s most of what you hear under water—your own breathing.”
Eleri chimed in. “Something going on thirty or more feet behind you could absolutely go by unnoticed.”
Donovan tried to absorb the information. At least this other diver didn't watch their dive buddy get murdered and just ignore it. Or, they didn’t know that. “So that means,” he added, speaking as his brain worked when maybe he should wait, but he didn't, that Neriah might not have known she was filming this. “She would return to the boat, knowing that Allison was gone, and simply wait for her to surface somewhere else? Is that reasonable? She wouldn’t search for her friend?”
This time it was Eleri who replied. “Yes, according to the original reports, she did search for Allison. But she didn’t worry when she didn’t find her. So yes, that report still holds water, even given this video.”
“What about the blood?” Donovan asked. “Wouldn’t she have seen it when she searched? Wouldn't at least the people on the boat see it? Does it not show up?”
It hit him then. Everything he knew about diving was from fiction—novels, TV, movies. “That's just in the movies. Right?” He admitted his own inadequacies when he found them.
“Yes,” Eleri said. “Though I haven't ever witnessed anything like this underwater. Noah?”
“I saw a shark catch a tuna once. . . and it was petrifying,” he said. “And the fish did bleed into the water. It wasn't human sized, but it was a big fish. Honestly, I'm not up on my ratio of fish blood to human blood in pints, but there was much less blood in the water than I would have expected.”
GJ sat still, like Donovan, absorbing all the unexpected diving information. But Eleri pushed on. “It looks like this diver—probably Allison—was far enough below the surface that there's no way any kind of blood pool or anything would have been visible from up top.”
“What about the camera person?” Donovan asked again. “Wouldn't she see it? Or he?” He had to acknowledge they really didn't know who had been holding the camera. “Wouldn’t they turn around and see it?”
“No,” Eleri shook her head at him. “The water currents carry blood away relatively quickly. So, if you didn't turn around pretty much as it was happening, you wouldn't know.”
Donovan took a moment to put all those new pieces of information together. It wasn't like TV. Underwater, apparently, they didn't hear you scream, especially if they were in full scuba regulation dive gear. He threw out another question as it formed in his brain. “So if there were sharks in the area, wouldn’t they come after a person who was bleeding? That’s normal, right? So if they know the sharks are there, why aren't they taking better care of each other? Isn't this the whole point of dive buddies—to keep this from happening?”
He kept pushing forward, not understanding how one woman was murdered—that’s what it was—while another just looked away and scraped coral or such. “I mean, she interacted with another diver who looks like he stabbed her?”
Donovan said it with a question mark. They hadn't even addressed that aspect of the video yet. “And she dies with several sharks attacking her, and the other diver possibly doesn't see it. Why isn't this something they have planned for?”
It was Eleri who sighed and tipped her head back and forth. She was thinking about her answer and Donovan liked that. She never devalued him for the things he didn’t know. “Yes, there are clearly sharks in the water. But for the most part, they leave you alone.”
Donovan felt his eyebrows climb. Clearly, they didn’t. But he let her continue.
“I've seen videos where sharks have come up behind divers and bumped them, but they don't bite. Even if they do bite, people often shake them off. So yes, this can happen.” She waved a hand at the video. “And, obviously, it did. But it's really the exception rather than the rule.”
“So this isn't her dive buddy’s fault?” Donovan asked.
Again, Eleri tipped her head side to side, as though to say yes-and-no and this time Noah jumped in. “Neriah stated that she and Allison often got somewhat separated, but that they were very good at hooking back up, and that they would both simply surface if they didn’t find each other underwater. You’re right, it is a really bad practice, for exactly this reason. But while there are guidelines, there aren't really any laws stating you have to stay with your dive buddy. And, at least according to Neriah, this is what she and Allison usually did.”
Eleri added, “It’s the same thing Hannah said. They have grant money, but it only lasts so long. So, they have to get the work done in a certain amount of time. That often means splitting up to get samples. If they stayed together, they would need twice as many dive crews or twice as much time.”
Donovan was getting it—standard practice, slightly cutting corners. It was usually fine until it didn’t work out. Then it created a huge problem.
Eleri's next tip of the head indicated she had thought of something. “Donovan, you might have touched on Neriah Jones’ disappearance with that idea. I hadn't thought of it before, but if she feels responsible for missing this, she might have run off to find the killer. It does look like she at least eventually found the video, so she might be playing sleuth.”
Donovan was thinking that through. Citizen sleuths were a terrible idea. It never worked out like in cozy mystery books. People really died. He pushed that thought aside and tried to process Neriah’s motive. He thought there was a disconnect between what Neriah might have done when she first fled versus what she might think now. “So you think it's plausible that Miranda Industries didn't get to her, threaten her in some way, and make her flee?”
“It's plausible,” Eleri said. “But my personal guess is that it’s both. I think she left because they threatened her. It all happened too fast, and the texts to her friends indicate she believes someone is after her. She’s not just hunting, she’s hiding. But at some point, she watched this whole video, and she might think she can solve Allison’s murder.”
Donovan was nodding along when GJ at last jumped back into the conversation. “We still need to watch this again. And none of us has addressed the issue about when she gets stabbed. . . or the fact that the other diver doesn’t look like he’s touching her when it happens.”