In the Water
Mark Wheaton
“WOW, THAT’S BEAUTIFUL! TAKE MY picture!”
Candice handed her camera to Jenn and leaned as far back over the boat’s guardrail as gravity would allow. The resort’s sailboat sliced through the water at a good twenty knots. It had picked up the tail end of the fall’s monsoon winds blowing down the Thai coast through the Straits of Malacca.
Jenn planted her foot against a deck cleat and snapped a few pictures. The water was calmer closer to shore, and photos easier. But out in open water, the waves slapping into the hull sent up a sheet of spray and it made for a more dramatic backdrop.
“Did you get it?” Candice asked, voice lilting up as fear crept in.
“All good!” Jenn said.
Candice steadied herself as the boat bounced over a high swell. She spun around, grabbing for the jib boom, only to miss and land on her hands and knees. She slid toward the edge of the deck. The captain’s words of warning of how long it would take to slow and turn the ship, should someone tumble off, echoed in her mind.
One of the boat’s assistant cooks lunged forward to take her arm, steadying her as she regained her balance.
“Thank you,” Candice said. “Shouldn’t have had a second Mai Tai before getting on board!”
The assistant cook, Thinh, laughed amiably .
“No problem,” he said.
“Special Agents Rucker and Attenberg have arrived.”
Sub-Lieutenant Wichan Pimdee closed his eyes and tented his fingers over the bridge of his nose. There wasn’t enough Ativan on the island of Phuket to prepare his mind for what would next follow his corporal through the office door.
“Show them in, please,” Pimdee said, getting to his feet.
It was only 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside but sweat had already saturated Pimdee’s shirt. On a normal day, he wouldn’t mind. He’d go for a swim on his way home or after he picked up his kids from school. But when greeting members of foreign law enforcement, he knew how much his appearance factored into the level of condescension he’d receive.
The first American who entered was a pink-faced hulk of a man with a tight buzz cut and hair the color of wheat. His neck was so large it looked like his shirt collar might burst. He was followed by a middle-aged woman who looked exactly one-quarter his size with a wild nest of curly brown hair atop her head and thick-framed glasses.
“Agent Attenberg,” Pimdee said, extending a hand to the woman. “We spoke on the phone.”
“Sub-Lieutenant Pimdee,” she said. “This is Agent Rucker.”
Pimdee forced a smile and shook the beefy man’s hand. He’d expected some sort of iron grip in return, the sign of a true American cowboy, but the man’s palm was so sweaty it was like shaking hands with an eel.
“Welcome to Phuket,” Pimdee said. “Is it your first visit to Thailand?”
Attenberg stared at the young sub-lieutenant as if taking his measure. Her gaze flicked away and returned, betraying a hint of irritation.
“I’m sorry, but can we go straight to the crime scene?” she asked. “I have two sets of parents back in Boston, desperate for answers. Every second we waste on pleasantries compounds their frustration.”
“Of course,” Pimdee said, signaling his corporal to bring around a Jeep.
The water glowed turquoise a dozen feet off port bow. Everyone on deck went quiet. Jenn lifted her camera. The patch of light blue, a ring of white around its edge, grew larger.
“Oh my God!” Candice exclaimed as the whale surfaced and spouted. “That’s amazing!”
A second, smaller turquoise spot appeared next to the larger whale.
“That’s the baby,” the resort’s guide, who’d introduced himself as Thinh, said in English before switching to Mandarin and repeating for the other tourists aboard.
It surfaced next to its mother, sending a thin jet of white spray into the air. The handful of tourists on deck, some still finishing the lunch laid out by the crew, applauded.
“How old is it?” Jenn asked.
“Very young,” Thinh said. “Maybe a week or two. They’re born already at 2,000 pounds and about twelve feet long.”
“Wow,” Jenn said, switching to video.
As soon as the whale had been sighted, the sails were hauled down to avoid the boat striking the animal. Now, as it bobbed idly up and down in the water, the whales seemed intrigued.
“Are those birds?” Candice asked, pointing to flashes of silver splashing over the water ahead of them.
“Flying fish,” Thinh said. “Fleeing the whales.”
The whales glided forward, not sharing in their prey’s panic. Candice watched the fish go, springing from the gentle waves as if trying to escape a patch of boiling water. The sky off the boat’s starboard side was much darker, blue purpling almost to black, like an atmospheric bruise.
“Is that a storm?” Jenn asked.
But Thinh had gone back below deck.
“Is it going to rain?” Candice asked, forlorn. “There goes our beach day.”
Only the corpses had been removed. The rest of the suite was exactly as it had been thirty-six hours earlier when resort security officers had forced the door, tearing free the long strips of plastic supergluing it shut. These same strips were glued in place around each of the windows and doors, even the one leading into a closet.
Pimdee thought the smell, which had sent the security officers staggering back into the hall, had dissipated slightly.
“No guest reported an odor?” Agent Attenberg, wearing a hooded hazmat suit with shoe covers, asked as she stepped around the scene.
“Nothing,” Pimdee said. “After the fact, the guests in the room next door reported hearing noises, but no smells. ”
“The other side of that wall or that one?” Attenberg asked, first pointing to the wall of the living room and then to the bedroom.
“Bedroom side. Where we found the bodies. We think they sealed themselves in the suite first. Then the bedroom. Then the closet itself.”
Agent Rucker headed for the bedroom, slipping on the plastic sheet which covered a section of the floor. Attenberg pointed up to the constellation of pinhead-sized blood stains splattered across the ceiling and down the ocean-facing windows.
“Have you determined whose blood that is?” she asked.
“Not yet. We sent samples to our new regional forensic science center in Yala, but also to your people at Quantico, as well as the PNP crime lab in Manila.”
“Why Manila?” Rucker asked from the bedroom.
“Justo Arevalo and Tito Canoy were both Filipino nationals,” Pimdee explained. “Their families have petitioned their government to investigate as well.”
Agent Rucker scoffed. Pimdee said nothing.
“Where were the samples taken?” Attenberg asked.
“Carpet, walls, windows, bedsheets, multiple shower curtains and towels, bathroom tiling, and furniture,” Pimdee said.
“Do you have any concerns the bodies were moved postmortem?”
“Yes, it’s clear Arevalo and Canoy—”
“I mean, the victims,” Attenberg said.
“You’re referring to Candice Burton and Jenn Schlosser as the victims?” Pimdee asked.
“Of course, they’re the victims,” Rucker said, storming out of the bedroom, his face a few degrees pinker than before. “You thought we meant the guys trying to kidnap them?”
“We’re still assessing the situation,” Pimdee said, staring back at the angry American. “To your eyes, they’re victims. To mine, I’m unable to make that determination, particularly as their bodies were in such an advanced stage of decomposition.”
Rucker scoffed.
“You’re telling me you’ve got a couple of pretty young American girls here in one of the world’s number one destinations for sex tourism and traffickers—when they turn up not just dead but glued into a pair of plastic cocoons in what’s obviously a kidnapping gone bad, you’re open to the possibility they’re the perpetrators? That they killed these two men, sprayed blood everywhere, high-fived, then zipped themselves into the bags to suffocate and die? Only to be discovered when their bodies practically explode and drip fluid into the laundry room below?”
Pimdee looked from Rucker to Attenberg, then sighed.
“What I know for certain is Arevalo and Canoy died in the evening of the 15th not long after they can both be seen entering this suite in the hallway’s security footage,” the sub-lieutenant said. “Our preliminary autopsy has their times of death right around seven o’clock. Our witnesses reported hearing both Burton and Schlosser conversing at least five hours beyond this point as late as one in the morning.”
“The fluid was noticed when?” Attenberg asked.
“On the morning of the 17th .”
“The Filipinos weren’t missed?”
“They were only sent to check on the refrigerator,” Pimdee explained. “The sensors inside showed it had been emptied completely, which would spark a bill of $500. Add that housekeeping had been verbally refused for two days straight and a welfare check was proposed.”
“Doesn’t answer the question,” Attenberg pressed. “What happened when the two men didn’t show up to their next shift?”
“It is my understanding calls were made to their houses and cell phones, but there was no answer.”
“That doesn’t seem suspicious?” Rucker demanded.
“Not under the circumstances,” Pimdee admitted.
“What circumstances?” Rucker asked.
“The storm,” Pimdee replied simply.
“Of course,” Attenberg said. “The storm.”
By the time the sailboat returned to the pier jutting out from the resort’s private beach, the decision had been made for the crew to drop off the passengers then resume sailing around to the more protected, western coast of the land. A line of workers waited on the dock, umbrellas in hand to escort the guests through the light rain.
Jenn and Candice waited for the older tourists to disembark, the latter staring wistfully down the long beach as workers collapsed cabanas and hauled in chairs and umbrellas in preparation for the coming storm. Closer to the hotel, wait staff brought in tables, chairs, and heating lamps from the outside dining areas.
“I can’t believe it!” Candice moaned. “The whole place is on lockdown. What’re we supposed to do?”
“There’s a shuttle into Phuket City,” Jenn said. “It’s on the western side, right?”
“Unfortunately, they cancel shuttle service for storms,” Thinh said, helping them step from the boat. “The roads flood and power lines come down. It’s dangerous.”
“Is it best to hole up in our rooms?” Candice asked.
“Only if you want to miss the party,” Thinh said. “While some workers go to their homes to be with their families, others do stay at the resort. The grand ballroom is perfectly safe. The windows can withstand hurricane winds. This is but a storm. Generators are run. Fires lit in the fireplaces. There’s an open bar. Anything that might spoil in the kitchen refrigerators is brought out for a feast. There’s music and dancing. All inches away from this great and beautiful calamity.”
That does sound fun, Jenn thought.
They headed into the resort, crossing the sand then ascending the marble steps leading to the backdoors of the main lobby. They thanked their umbrella-wielding escorts and ducked inside. If there was a lot of activity on the beach, there was twice as much in the lobby. Desk clerks juggled phones. The wait staff set up long tables and laid out warming trays. Cases of liquor were wheeled in on dollies, prompting cheers from a handful of guests.
A cart of bullhorns and first aid kits arrived as well. Jenn noticed they were quickly hidden in a luggage storage closet.
The hotel was being prepared for disaster, but the excitement was palpable.
“Everybody’ll flip when they hear about this,” Jenn said.
Candice’s gaze fell on a tall, deeply tanned young man wearing flip-flops and board shorts, his upper torso and arms covered in colorful tattoos.
“Jenn, it’s the guy from Goa!” Candice said, leaning in. “What was his name again? Jasper-something?”
“Bacevich,” Jenn said, though she wasn’t looking at the apparently ever-shirtless Tasmanian, but instead at the young woman they’d initially mistaken for his girlfriend beside him, Tamara.
But you can call me Tama.
Tama seemed to notice Jenn at the same moment. Her face lit up and, suddenly, there was a gorgeous, green-eyed young woman in a bikini top and shorts racing straight for Jenn, arms outstretched .
“Jenny!” Tama cried. “Candy!”
Tama’s arms encircled her neck to pull her in for two kisses on the cheek, a third on the nose.
“I can’t believe it’s you!” Tama said.
When Tama kissed Jenn a fourth time, this one grazing her lips, the explosion of endorphins inside Jenn’s head somehow drowned out the screams around her as a door blew open, sending a pair of planters crashing to the floor. The electricity went out a second later and the ballroom was plunged into semi-darkness.
Jenn barely noticed.
The video footage blinked from the fourth kiss to white noise.
“That’s when the power dropped?” Agent Rucker asked.
Pimdee avoided making a snarky comment about the agent’s deductive powers and nodded.
“That’s the last time we have eyes on them?” Agent Attenberg asked.
“Cameras, yes, but we have eyewitnesses, both guests and staff, who saw them throughout the night,” Pimdee said.
Both agents went silent, confirming to Pimdee the Americans would treat these testimonies as anecdotal at best. In this case, he agreed. Not only due to the storm, but also because a third of the witnesses had misidentified the Americans when shown photos.
Attenberg rewound the footage, freezing it on Jasper and Tama.
“These two are still missing?” she asked.
“They are,” Pimdee confirmed.
“Have you notified their parents? They’re brother and sister, right?”
“While that’s what their travelogues and social media profiles claim,” Pimdee said, “they’re actually not. They’re not even from Tasmania but likely Ecuador. In our search, we’ve had them appear at other resorts under an array of aliases even checking in with EU and South African passports.”
“Have you reached out to Interpol?” Attenberg asked.
“Yes, we’re expecting a reply soon. But the reality is they could be miles from here by now.”
Attenberg scrutinized Pimdee’s face.
“You don’t believe that, do you, Sub-Lieutenant?”
“We have four bodies but enough blood for twice that many,” Pimdee said, looking back at the image of Jasper and Tama on the screen. “But I’m not one to create narratives until the facts are in.”
Jenn thought the generators would be for emergencies like lights and refrigerators. So when electronic dance music burst from several speakers set up around the ballroom, she was surprised and cheered along with the others.
“Before the radios dropped out, they said the storm made landfall with 90 mile per hour winds,” a DJ yelled into a microphone. “This isn’t a storm party anymore. It’s a hurricane party!”
There were more cheers.
The storm surge had long since flooded the beach. The dock and the patio restaurant were submerged. The ocean continued to rise, now at the second step from the top of the stairs leading up from the beach.
For Jenn, it felt like being on a ship at sea. The roiling ocean gave her a feeling of rocking back and forth though she was standing still. She expected the entire hotel to be lifted from its foundation and cast into the water at any second.
The thought made her shudder.
“Whoa!” exclaimed Tama.
She’d been coming up behind Jenn, her hands suspended in the air inches from Jenn’s shoulders.
“I was about to grab you when you shivered,” Tama said. “It was like your skin saw me coming. You think it’s scared of me?”
Jenn mentally stammered as she struggled to locate a coy response.
“It shouldn’t be,” Tama said, giving Jenn a peck on the lips before wrapping her arms around her. “How incredible is this view?”
Jenn nodded as she turned back to the storm. She’d glimpsed Tama’s pupils. They were almost as wide as her irises, making her eyes look black. She didn’t know what drugs Tama was on, but imagined that’s why she was handsy.
Not that she minded. Candice and Jasper hadn’t stopped dancing since the music began. Candice was as awkward as Jenn in her flirting, but Jasper was one of the easiest going, most disarming people they’d met. Sure, within minutes of meeting him at a beach club in Goa, they knew he was a drug dealer, but he seemed downright apologetic about it. Like they’d discovered he was selling timeshares instead of MDMA.
“Have you ever been this close to a storm?” Tama asked, swaying behind Jenn as if dancing.
“Not like this,” Jenn admitted. “You?”
“On land a couple of times but once at sea,” Tama said. “We were going between Port Hedland, Australia and Bali in some old freighter when we hit a huge squall. It felt like we were in a carnival ride, only it went on for hours and hours instead of thirty seconds. They had these bunk belts on the beds to keep us from falling out, but I still slammed into the wall every few seconds. My entire left side was a bruise the next day.”
“Ouch.”
Tama nipped Jenn’s left earlobe. With teeth.
“Ouch ,” Jenn repeated.
She stared at Tama’s grinning reflection in the window as it overlaid the storm.
“Hey, I need to grab something from my room before it gets too dark in there,” Jenn said. “Care to join?”
Tama grinned.
After dancing and drinking for hours, Candice hit a wall. She hadn’t lost track of how many drinks she’d had—three rum-heavy Dark ’n’ Stormys—but knew she hadn’t balanced it well with water. Jasper, who didn’t drink alcohol, was higher than the storm clouds. Unlike Tama, whom she’d seen getting extremely tactile with Jenn, ecstasy seemed to make Jasper disappear inward. He barely registered Candice’s presence.
“You okay?” she asked finally, yelling over the now rave-style Bollywood music blasting from the speakers. When he didn’t respond, she put her hand on his chest. He looked at her as if woken from a wonderful dream to a so-so reality.
“You okay?” he asked, clearly having not heard her question.
Candice had been on the fence about Jasper. Feeling dehydrated and tired didn’t help, but she could’ve rallied. But looking into his glassy, drug-engorged eyes changed her mind.
“Getting a little tired. May head to the room for a nap.”
“I, uh . . . think your friend went back to your room with my sister,” Jasper said. “They’ve been gone a while.”
Candice glanced over. Sure enough, Jenn and Tama were gone. They’d been on the road since summer with a month to go before having to return to Boston for the spring semester. In that time, Jenn had gotten crushes on two or three people only for them not to reciprocate. Candice didn’t feel like intruding.
“I’ll stay out here,” Candice said. “I’ll be fine.”
“You can go to our room,” Jasper suggested. “We’ve got two beds.”
Candice raised an eyebrow. Jasper smiled.
“Just offering a bed! I’ll let you into our room and scram. No problem. Cool?”
Candice opened her mouth to reply when the pungent smell of chemical cleaners hit her full in the face. She was instantly dizzy, the room spinning around her. She looked for the source of the scent even as her legs went out from under her. Jasper caught her before her head struck the floor.
“Are you all right?”
“What is that?” she asked. “That smell?”
Jasper looked around, then shook his head.
“I don’t smell anything.”
Candice closed her eyes, hoping it would pass, but the scent remained. It was strong. Overpowering. It came at her from all directions. At first, it felt like a poison. But now, something pleasant.
Even delicious.
“I think you should lie down,” Jasper said. “I’ll just open the door and go.”
“Oh, you can come in,” Candice said, trying to nod, though her head moved in a circular motion. “If you try anything, I’ll throw up on you.”
“Deal,” Jasper said, laughing. “Put your arm around my shoulder. We’re just up the stairs.”
“And that’s the last time you saw either of them?” Attenberg asked.
“Yeah, they went up the stairs and disappeared,” said Banjong Phutua, a sous chef at the resort who’d stepped in to bartend.
“Weren’t you concerned about her state of inebriation?” Attenberg asked.
“It wasn’t like that,” Phutua said. “They seemed to be old friends. They talked about a restaurant they’d visited in India. Her friend had gone off with the other one and she needed looking after.”
Sub-Lieutenant Pimdee reached for a cigarette for the fourth time, then remembered Attenberg’s three previous requests he didn’t smoke. He left the pack in his pocket. He’d already interviewed Phutua and knew his story by heart. He’d worried the chef’s statement today might be different than the transcript Pimdee had already provided the FBI, but he’d been consistent.
“You never saw any of the four of them again?” Attenberg asked. “Did you see them the next morning, for instance?”
“I didn’t see them, but I wasn’t around,” Phutua confirmed.
“Where were you?”
“The house where I and several other workers lived was swept away by a mudslide,” he said. “I was recovering whatever belongings I could.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Attenberg said.
Pimdee was about to ask the two agents if they wanted to step out to discuss whether they had any more questions when his cell phone vibrated, indicating a text. After reading it, he held it out for Agent Attenberg to read, and then escorted them out of the interrogation room.
“It’ll be another minute or two,” he assured Phutua.
The text had been from Pimdee’s office letting him know the report from Interpol on Jasper and Tama Bacevich, real names, Sergio Samaniego and Aurelia Idrovo had arrived. The email from Interpol was encrypted, requiring an IT worker to open it on their iPhone before printing off the station’s printer. It was then put in a file folder on Pimdee’s desk.
When Pimdee went to pick it up, however, Agent Rucker snatched it straight from his hands and flipped through it. Pimdee signaled the corporal waiting in the doorway.
“Corporal, please escort Agent Rucker out of my office, but not before returning that file to me.”
Rucker glared at Pimdee, holding up the file.
“It says, ‘human trafficking,’” Rucker shot back.
“Corporal?” Pimdee repeated.
“Wait outside, Jim,” Attenberg ordered.
Rucker scowled, but did as he was told. Attenberg handed the file to Pimdee.
“I—” she began.
“No need to apologize,” Pimdee replied, opening the file.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“We’re all on edge given the severity of the crime,” Pimdee continued.
Attenberg fell silent. Pimdee read the report twice, then handed it to Attenberg .
“Jesus Christ,” Attenberg said, reading quickly. “They were drug dealers, but also drug smugglers, and were even accused of manufacturing methamphetamine in Mozambique. Also, ‘tik.’ What’s tik?”
“Methamphetamine,” Pimdee said.
“They provided heroin to human traffickers and illegal brothels in at least four cities around the Indian Ocean,” Attenberg said. “Drugs used to coerce and control, but also to hamper recall in case of arrest. Why weren’t these people behind bars?”
“Excellent question,” Pimdee said.
“So, maybe a kidnapping gone bad isn’t far-fetched?”
“Possibly,” Pimdee agreed. “But there was one more thing I asked Interpol about. On the last page.”
Attenberg flipped there.
“A DNA profile of Samaniego and Idrovo?”
“Our forensics team has now identified eight unique individual blood samples taken from the room,” Pimdee said. “Two were ID’d right away as belonging to Arevalo and Canoy. A third from Burton. Two more now from Samaniego and Idrovo.”
“I’ll assume the sixth is Jenn Schlosser but that leaves two more victims to be identified?”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to say Schlosser is the sixth,” Pimdee said.
“Why?”
“Because all eight of these samples were taken from inside her mouth.”
Jasper’s room was peaceful, silent and dark. Candice stared at the off-white ceiling from the bed, no longer minding the spinning of the room or the world beyond. The pungent odor had faded but hadn’t gone away altogether. She could still smell it—taste it—in the air. It was unlike anything she’d smelled before, changing her perception like a drug. Inhaling it was like tasting something delicious every time she breathed. It was like chocolate. Fresh strawberries. Calla lilies.
Her late grandmother loved calla lilies. Even had a perfume that smelled like them. This scent took her right back to her grandmother’s kitchen. The sensory memory was almost overpowering.
Jasper moved around the room, closing curtains and drawing a glass of water for Candice. When he handed her the glass, she realized the calla lily scent came from him.
“What is that?” she asked, dreamily.
“What’s what? ”
“The cologne you’re wearing.”
“I don’t wear cologne,” he said. “Maybe you’re still smell—”
“No, it’s on you,” she said. “Come here.”
He hesitated, but finally leaned over. Her nose filled with the scent, activating memories of childhood she hadn’t remembered for years. It was like a mental time machine. There were other smells entwined with the calla lilies, taking her all through her life in vivid colors.
“This is incredible,” she whispered.
He opened his mouth to reply and the scent increased tenfold. She moved her face to his, kissing him.
“You threatened to vomit on me if we did anything,” he said, half-kissing her back.
“No. Only if you did anything.”
She drank him in, enjoying the experience with her entire body. The scents that had only hung in the air a second before now cascaded through her body. It was as if she were reliving the endorphin rush of every wonderful moment of her entire life. The drug providing this had to be ferreted out from Jasper’s body, where it hid in the recesses.
He bit her lip, barely enough to break the skin. As his saliva traveled over the exposed wound, Candice’s vision blurred and her mind went white. It was as if she were being transformed into a new version of herself, one capable of consuming experience with—
“You bit me!” Jasper shrieked, jumping away and touching his tongue.
Blood poured over his bottom lip and ran down his chin and neck. Candice wasn’t interested in the blood. She wanted what she’d tasted in his mouth. She rose. He backed away.
“Sorry,” she said.
He softened. She struck him in the head with a lamp. His head hit the corner of a table with a crack as he crumpled to the floor.
Candice flew to his mouth, but there were new smells now. They came from the base of his skull. She pulled at the flesh atop his broken spinal column, but couldn’t break it, even as her nose filled with the fragrant new scent. She bit at it with her teeth, but this was clumsy and took too long. She grew desperate.
Candice reached for the glass he’d used to bring her water. Breaking it against the table, she gripped a shard between two fingers and sliced through his skin. A thousand—no, ten thousand —flavors wafted into her nose.
It was exhilarating.
Jenn’s right arm was broken in three places. Tama had fought back against her first attack using an ice bucket, but the drugs in her system slowed her down a half-step. This was the only advantage Jenn needed. She got her hands around Tama’s neck and squeezed.
When Tama fell unconscious, Jenn thought she was dead. It was a surprise when blood spurted out of Tama’s torso as Jenn tore into it, the motion indicative of a still beating heart. By the time Jenn opened Tama’s throat, it had stopped.
She leaned back against the sofa, more in love with Tama than she’d ever been with anyone else in her life. The ecstasy the young woman had delivered to her! It was beyond words.
She wished Candice was there. At some point, she blacked out. When she awoke, Candice was beside her.
“Jenn?” Candice said, looking at the parts of Tama now strewn around the room.
“Oh,” Jenn replied. “Oh, God. This is . . . I can explain. It’s—”
“It’s okay!” Candice said. “I can’t explain it, but it’s happening to me, too. I can . . . I can smell things.”
“Me, too!” Jenn exclaimed. “It’s like I can smell these entire worlds inside other people, worlds that connect with my own in wondrous ways. There’s no past, no future—all present!”
“Exactly!” Candice agreed. “It began with smell—”
“Jasper?”
“Yeah, Jasper. But then . . . taste.”
“Yeah, taste !” Jenn said, then shrank back. “But I can smell it in you, too. From all over.”
Candice leaned toward Jenn. Inhaled. Salivated.
Jenn punched her with her shattered arm.
“No!” Jenn said, finding speech harder and harder. “We must keep one another safe. Others .”
“Yes, others,” Candice echoed.
But the scents coming from within Candice were so powerful they almost overwhelmed Jenn’s senses. She lunged for her friend. Candice batted her away.
“No!” Candice cried.
“I’m sorry!” Jenn said, tears in her eyes, though from pain or anguish at her own actions, she didn’t know. “We have to protect ourselves from each other. We have to be smart.”
“We can’t share this,” Candice said.
“No, we can’t,” Jenn agreed. “We have to be careful.”
They consumed what they could of Tama before setting aside the parts they found unenticing. They tried to clean the room, but it was a lost cause. Worse, every time they neared the door or the wall, the aroma of the people nearest them wafted in. Jenn felt silly, like a cartoon character carried aloft by the visible scent lines of a pie.
She told Candice and they laughed about this for several minutes, jumping on the sofa. Jenn considered devouring Candice twice more, but was proud when she struck her head against the wall instead.
Jenn got the idea to shove towels under the doors to keep out the stench of others, but this only did so much. They’d need tape. No, glue . They’d need plastic sheets like shower curtains.
But their hunger overwhelmed them. They attacked each other again before they could head to the housekeeping pantry to steal supplies. Jenn took a bite out of Candice’s ear. Candice bit off Jenn’s right middle finger.
They stopped before things got out of hand, Jenn shoving a last piece of Tama’s foot in her friend’s mouth.
“We must be smart about this, remember?” Jenn said.
Candice nodded, then straightened.
“Jasper,” she said, her voice a rasp.
They didn’t bother cleaning Jasper’s room. Besides, he’d conveniently fallen on a rug. They carried his body to the bathtub and rolled him in with a thunk , spending the next hour picking his bones clean. When done, they showered with their clothes on, bundled Jasper’s remains in two backpacks, and carried them, the rug, and the shower curtain back to their room.
They were halfway down the fire stairs when Jenn noticed something.
“I can’t smell you as well when you’re under plastic,” she said.
Candice set down the rug, soaked in blood and spinal fluid, to wrap the shower curtain around Jenn.
“You’re right! I can still smell you a little bit, but maybe if we wrap it tighter?”
“Yeah,” Jenn agreed. “Much tighter. We’ll need more plastic.”
“More plastic, more glue, more people,” Candice replied.
The electricity didn’t come on for another five hours. By then, Jenn and Candice were prepared. The resort’s security officers wouldn’t force their door for another ninety-two hours.
Pimdee and the agents returned to the resort a final time. They’d spent two weeks chasing thin leads and rumors about human trafficking rings, but came up dry.
When the sub-lieutenant refused to add Arevalo and Canoy to his report as possible suspects, a frustrated Agent Attenberg had her superiors contact their counterparts in Manila to open an inquiry there. The FBI’s suspicions were delivered to the Burton and Schlosser families and soon leaked to the press. For anyone following the case stateside, a salacious chronicle of two girls accidentally killed during a kidnapping gone wrong confirmed both their suspicions and worldview. They moved on.
“But you’re not satisfied, are you?” Attenberg asked Pimdee, as they walked down the sandy beach.
The sub-lieutenant looked out over the water, shaking his head.
“There are still people unaccounted for, people you’ve decided don’t matter,” Pimdee said. “But my job is to make sure a crime like that doesn’t happen again, not to provide a patched together story to grieving parents. I don’t have the luxury of ignoring inconvenient evidence that doesn’t prop up my narrative.”
Attenberg ignored this remark, casting her gaze to the waterline.
“We’ve been out here four or five times,” she said, nodding to a strange looking fish lying dead nearby. “Each time, there’s some other crazy dead fish washed up here. How come?”
“The Indian Ocean is extraordinarily rich in its sea life,” Pimdee said. “Unfortunately, some of its most fascinating species we only learn about after a tsunami or storm drags them up from the depths.”
“Any of them good eating?” Agent Rucker snarked.
“Not that we’ve tried,” Pimdee said, his annoyance with Rucker making him feel feverish. “While I can’t say our fishermen don’t occasionally prepare ones found in open water, those that wash up here are handed over to our marine biologists for study.”
“You don’t want to try one?” Rucker replied. “To see if you’ve discovered the new tuna or something?”
“No, some have been found to be filled with poisons or industrial toxins, others with rare parasitic bacteria,” Pimdee said, shaking his head. “Did you know there are some fish down there, near the bottom, that feed on bacteria and other microorganisms?”
“Isn’t that normal? ”
“Not these,” Pimdee said. “Bacteria enter the fish and it alters the way microbes in the digestive tract are balanced. The microbiome created by the bacteria tells the fish that instead of shrimp or plankton, it should eat the microorganisms the bacteria require to stay alive. So, it consumes and consumes, but only the bacteria get fed. Soon, the fish dies and the bacteria seek another host.”
“Disturbing,” Attenberg said.
“If you’re a fish, I suppose,” Pimdee replied, staring out at the water. “If you’re a fish.”