Hell by Hilary Norman Page B

morning, two miles east of Baker’s Haulover Cut, soon after Ron Emett had taken a dive off his pontoon boat to try and find out what was amiss with the Danforth anchor, he surfaced gasping and ashen-faced.
    â€˜Call the cops!’ he yelled up to his wife, Rachel.
    â€˜What happened?’ She leaned over the side, stretched out her hand to try to help him as he began scrambling wildly back on board. ‘What’s wrong with the anchor?’
    â€˜What’s wrong with it,’ he told her, ‘is there’s a body attached to it.’
    Goddamned flesh and bone snared right around one of the flukes.
    Ron Emett had never felt so sick.
    â€˜You just call the cops and stay on this boat,’ he told Rachel. ‘You don’t ever want to see what I just saw, honey. Not ever.’
    Not ever.
    They came in droves.
    Not just the cops and Sam and Martinez and Crime Scene and Doc Sanders, and more members of the media circus than any of them had seen in a long time, but any number of small private boats, plus a horde of rubberneckers with binoculars on the beaches, no one put off by the storm warnings forecast for the day. And who the hell had gotten word out so fast, Sam didn’t know, but none of it really mattered, because there was and would be nothing much for them to see, because the remains of that poor human being would be kept under wraps until the ME was ready to commence his exam back on dry land.
    And so far as the detectives were concerned, they, too, were going to be pretty much treading water until Elliot Sanders had something to tell them.
    Could be days or weeks.
    And maybe it was some kind of perverse wishful thinking, or maybe it was one of Sam Becket’s well-known hunches, which made no sense, given that this could be anyone: a lone sailor gone overboard or a drunk or a swimmer who’d gotten in a jam with no one to help him. Anyone.
    But Sam knew it was another victim.
    He just knew it.

FOURTEEN
    April 28
    H e was right.
    And this time it was bad news for Gail Tewkesbury, among others, because they had a match.
    The body that had come to rest beneath Ron and Rachel Emett’s pontoon was that of Andrew Victor, Ms Tewkesbury’s housemate and friend.
    Like the first body – still a John Doe – this poor guy was minus his heart, not to mention various fingers, toes and other parts of his anatomy, courtesy of nature and the ocean’s scavengers.
    He still had his teeth, though, a perfect match for Victor’s dental records.
    Which meant that Sam and Martinez and the rest of the squad were now in business with a full-blown homicide investigation.
    â€˜No clear evidence of skin raking,’ Lieutenant Alvarez pointed out at a squad meeting. ‘The heart not Cooper’s MO, so far as we know.’
    â€˜But Andrew Victor was African-American, gay, was known to go looking for sex in South Beach, was probably strangled with a ligature from behind, all of which makes him a candidate for Cooper,’ Sam responded. ‘And no, his heart wasn’t the one stuck in a dinghy and tied to my house, but that message was as personal as Cooper’s note to me last March.’
    â€˜Any idea why he’d graduate to cutting out hearts?’ Joe Sheldon asked.
    â€˜Because he’s the sickest fuck we’ve ever had to deal with,’ Martinez said.
    â€˜Maybe it’ll turn out to be just black hearts,’ Sam said, then shrugged. ‘Cal was always an exhibitionist.’
    â€˜And he may not be raking his victims’ chests these days,’ Martinez said, ‘but I’m betting the fruitcake still beats himself up.’
    â€˜Only one way to prove that,’ Sergeant Riley said. ‘Find him.’
    The squad’s number one task.
    No one wanting that to happen more than Sam Becket.
    He had woken up that morning with something else on his mind.
    Their home was not secure enough, his wife was still jittery, even if she