Only Rage (A Sadie Price FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 2)

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

Sadie stepped onto the boat, holding her breath against the smell and clenching her stomach against the nauseous roiling of the waters. Even in the harbor, the waters were choppy after the storm had been raging over Anchorage and the surrounding areas for the last few days. Seawater lapped up the side of the dock and the air tasted of salt.

She looked around for the fisherman that had found the body, noticing the state of the boat. It was one of the smaller ships, and its machinery was old and looked in need of repair. A lot of the crab fishermen, she knew, needed to keep expenses down and so there were too many boats in the water that were frankly dangerous. If a ship went down completely once it was out at sea, the Coast Guard frequently couldn’t get to it on time to prevent fatalities.

Crab fishing was a dangerous game, and so the fishermen themselves tended to be resilient folk, not easily spooked.

The man who crouched near the hold in front of her, however, looked like a broken man. He looked up as Sadie and the Coopers approached, and Sadie saw the recent horror in his eyes. Whatever he had seen down in the hold, Sadie knew, was going to give him nightmares for the rest of his life.

“I’ve been doing this since I was a kid,” he said as the Sheriff introduced them. The fisherman’s name was Raul. “I’ve been around the crabs all my life. Seen some right big ’uns. I know some people find them frightening, but me, I love ‘em. Tasty critters they are. People will pay for good Alaskan crab meat.” His expression twisted and Sadie thought he was about to cry. “Never knew they could do that to a body though. Like something out of a horror film.”

Sadie crouched down next to him, trying not to think too hard about what he had just said. “You must have had an awful shock,” she said softly. “But you have done the right thing by calling us straight in. Is the body still in the hold?”

The fisherman nodded, staring at Sadie with haunted eyes. “I threw a sheet over it. You will have to go in there and see for yourselves. I’m not going near it again.”

“That’s okay,” Sadie reassured him. She stood up and glanced at Jane who was hovering over them. No one was in a rush to go into that hold and see what had terrified Raul so badly.

“Deputy, do you want to take this man’s details while the Sheriff and I go and check out the body?”

Sadie half expected Jane Cooper to look annoyed at Sadie taking charge, but instead the other woman looked relieved and nodded.

“Sure,” the other woman said, giving her a grateful smile. Sadie took a deep breath and followed the Sheriff down into the hold.

“I don’t think this going to be pretty, Cooper,” Sadie said in a low voice as they approached the figure in the corner, haphazardly covered by the sheet. A lock of long dark hair showed at one end and, at the other, a lump of flesh that might once have been a foot.

The Sheriff didn’t say anything, but even in the dim glow of his flashlight Sadie could see that he already looked nauseous. As the local Sheriff, dealing with both Anchorage and the surrounding hinterlands, he wouldn’t have seen too many bodies. Accidents, mostly, a few domestics and suicides, but nothing like the things that Sadie had seen, and even she was wishing that she didn’t have to look at what awaited them under that sheet.

Cooper lifted the sheet carefully, mindful not to disturb anything. The ME had already been called out and forensics were on their way, although the snow would slow them down. Resources were scarce out here, and Anchorage often had to share with neighboring cities.

Sadie held her breath, against both the mingled smell of shellfish and death, and to steady herself against whatever she was about to see.

It was only a quick glimpse, partly obscured in the gloom of the hold, before Cooper dropped the sheet and spun around, retching, but it was enough. Sadie closed her eyes against the nausea that filled her. She could taste the bile in her throat, but she held it down.

“Okay,” she said, breathing slowly. “That was pretty bad. We are going to have trouble identifying her – assuming it is a her.”

“It was a her,” Cooper said, sounding wretched as he wiped his mouth. “I saw...I saw...it was all eaten away.”

He retched again and this time he threw up, but thankfully far enough away from the body not to contaminate it. Sadie averted her eyes. Sometimes, it happened. Cops were only human, and Sadie had seen hardened homicide detectives suddenly throw their guts after years on the job. She would never mention it to Cooper; she would pretend that she had never seen it.

Even so, the Sheriff straightened up and glared at her accusatorily, as though it was her fault he had vomited. He was just embarrassed, she knew, but she felt a little stung. After a hostile start, they had begun to work well together on their last case, and it pained Sadie that he thought that she would react to his momentary weakness in any other way than with compassion.

Mind you, he had recently seen her break a grown man’s nose.

She turned around and made her way back to the ladder. “Let’s go and see what the fisherman has to say,” she said neutrally.

As she came back up onto deck she took large breaths of the harbor air, which tasted of crab and salt and snow. The Deputy looked over at them, took one look at her brother’s face and grimaced.

“That bad?” she said sympathetically.

“It might be hard to identify the body,” Sadie said, still carefully not looking at the Sheriff.

“This is Raul,” Jane told her, nodding at the fisherman. “He found the body just before he called it in, while he was clearing out the hold. Says it has no idea how it got there.”

Sadie noticed that Raul’s hands were trembling. “Of course. Were you the only one on board, Raul?”

He nodded, opened his mouth to speak and then shut it again. He was in shock, Sadie thought, and no wonder.

The Deputy answered for him.

“He told me there are usually three of them, but the other two had gone home because of the storm. They didn’t want to get stuck aboard the ship for Christmas. But Raul wanted to check out the rest of the catch, because it was a good one. That’s about right isn’t it, Raul?”

Raul nodded again, although Sadie wondered if he had really heard anything that the Deputy had said. He looked dazed. He pulled a packet of cigarettes from out of his pocket and lit one with shaking fingers. The wind and wet air meant that it took a few tries to get it to stay lit. They stepped away from him, giving him some privacy. The Sheriff was standing at the side of the boat, looking out across the harbor, scanning the other ships.

“I took the names of the other men on board,” Jane said, “But there are people all over the harbor, all times of day and night. Anyone could have taken an opportunity to put the victim in the hold. We will need to interview anyone who has been here over the past few days.”

As Sadie agreed, Cooper turned around, frowning.

“We don’t know yet that anyone did put her there,” he cautioned. “Let’s not jump to conclusions yet. We need to establish that this is even a murder before we start talking about victims.”

The Deputy shrugged, unfazed. “Just thinking ahead,” she said. “It’s a bit of a weird place for a body to turn up, right? Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of it before.”

Sadie agreed with Jane. It was possible, of course, that the body had been picked up with the catch rather than been placed directly in the hold, but even if that was the case, there was the question of how the body had gotten into the sea in the first place.

She shook her head, hardly able to believe that this was happening right off the back of solving a serious murder case. They had been on their way to the Coopers for shelter from the storm and a well-deserved rest, and now it looked like they would be getting neither.

Sadie had expected Alaska to be quiet, at least compared to her previous posts. Instead, the action hadn’t stopped since she had arrived.

It was almost as though she had brought trouble with her.

“I agree,” she said, looking out over the harbor. It looked almost pretty under the moonlight. “We should do a search. Check the rest of the holds.”

Cooper’s eyes swiveled around to her in horror, and Sadie guessed that his thoughts hadn’t gone straight to the possibility of having to see any more bodies that were in the state of the one below.

“On the evidence of just one body,” he said impatiently. “We don’t even know how it got there. You can’t order a full search of the harbor because of one body in one hold. It would take hours and cause uproar among the guys. This is the height of crab season, and these men need to be out on the water doing their jobs. A search could take all day or even longer. And likely turn up nothing.”

“We don’t know anything yet; I’m with you on that,” Sadie agreed. “But then wouldn’t it be better to err on the side of caution? If this is a murder, then there could be others. And better the bodies are found by professionals than any other fishermen. That isn’t going to do them much good either, is it? I’m pretty sure he’s going to need a few days off after this.”

She glanced over at Raul who was now leaning over the side of the boat at the opposite end, still looking shell-shocked. A few days off was probably an understatement.

“Why would there be any others?” Cooper snapped. Sadie raised her eyebrows at his tone, surprised and annoyed by it. “Even if this is a murder that we are looking at here, not every murder is a serial,” he said, softening his tone as he continued. “You’ve done a great job on this last case, and we couldn’t have solved it without you, but don’t you think that you might be letting it cloud your judgment? It was you who was warning me not to jump to conclusions, before all this.”

Sadie eyed him, saw the strain on his face and the shadows under his eyes, and shrugged. He was making a valid point and maybe she could be overreacting. Neither of them – nor Jane, who had ended up in the hospital too – had had time to process recent events. Part of her wanted to chew him out for the way that he had just spoken to her, but she exhaled slowly and let it go.

“Okay,” she said, “we’ll play it your way, Sheriff. Let’s wait to see what the ME has to say about the cause of death, and we’ll go from there.”

She decided not to add that if there was even a hint of a suspicion of foul play, then she was giving the order to search the holds. As local Sheriff, this was Logan Cooper’s jurisdiction, but as a Fed, she could override him on this, a fact of which she knew he was aware and no doubt resented.

Sadie had no wish to play pissing contests; it wasn’t her style. But back in D.C. she had a reputation for her instincts always being on the nose, and right now they were screaming at her.

Screaming that this body was only going to be the first.