But the crocodile video calmed him down.
Killibrew sat through the first screening, answering Frank’s questions, but adding nothing. Clearly put out to be wasting her time on something she’d already filed away.
She was a big woman. Fifty pounds overweight. Heavy makeup, lots of lipstick, either angry she had to explain herself to a federal agent, or else born angry. But Sheffield, still coasting on his night in the sack, didn’t let her crabby impatience rile him. He had his pace, his own way of working, polite but taking his sweet time no matter whom it annoyed.
After the initial viewing, he said, “First thing I’d like to know, why are these two biologists making a video at all? Is this routine? They do it every time they go out, or is this a special occasion?”
She didn’t know.
“You didn’t ask Cameron Prince?”
“Didn’t think it was relevant.”
“You ask his supervisor?”
“I didn’t think it was relevant, I still don’t.”
“Seems odd.”
“Not to me.” Arms crossed below her breasts, staring over his head. Enduring this.
“What happened to Levine’s severed arm?”
Killibrew’s eyes refocused on Frank.
“The arm Prince carried back to the boat. Levine’s arm.”
“The arm was lost in transit.”
“Lost?”
It was all in the file if he cared to read it. Every last detail, so he could save them both some time if he just read the file.
“How the hell did the arm get lost?”
“On the airboat ride back to the biology lab, Prince set the arm down on the deck, and in his haste to return, it bounced overboard. The water was choppy, the airboat was traveling at a high rate of speed.”
“Why’d he go back to the base? How come he didn’t try to find her? He had a radio, or a phone, right? He could’ve called for help, stayed out there. She could’ve still been alive.”
“He said he panicked and wasn’t thinking straight.”
Sheffield asked if her techs examined the deck for traces of blood from the severed arm.
“By the time we got out to Turkey Point there’d been a downpour. If there’d been blood, it was washed away.”
“You double-check with the Weather Service about this rain?”
“I did not.”
“So Prince tells you there’s a downpour, and you don’t have any other verification of that? You ask anyone else on the scene?”
“Why would he lie about rain?”
“You’re a homicide detective. Why do people lie to you?”
Her frown deepened. “There was no blood.”
“They luminoled it and found no trace of blood?”
“It rained.”
“The question I’m asking, did you or the technicians check?”
She shut her mouth, twisted her wedding ring around and around on her finger. Sheffield pitied the man who’d picked out that ring.
“So you didn’t check?”
“The ID techs saw no sign of blood. It rained. And the airboat was splashed with seawater from the ride back to the docks. Prince ran the video for us, walked us through the event. We questioned him for an hour. He was distraught, found it hard to focus, he was shivering. We returned to the scene, Prince guided us, and we searched for the body, spent all night, all morning, and into the afternoon searching that canal and the ones adjoining it, and we found nothing. There are carnivores in those canals, lots of them. It’s in the report.”
He and the detective watched the video a second time. When it was done, Killibrew went to powder her nose and Sheffield read the file. Minimal. Three pages long. A dashed-off, half-assed account.
Clearly she’d made up her mind early on, probably pissed she had to spend so much time on an airboat out in the sun, blowing up her hairdo, mosquitoes biting, Sheffield could only guess. But Killibrew’s first impression was that the death was an accident, and she wrote it up that way, start to finish. Croc versus human. Croc won. Video verification, trustworthy first-person eyewitness report.
The half dozen photos were of the airboat and the berms alongside the canal where the incident took place. Some broken brush close to the waterline where Prince claimed the croc dragged Levine into the cooling canal. Footprints in the mud, drag marks. Case closed. Twelve hours after the croc attack occurred, Killibrew pulled up stakes and released the scene. Once you release a scene, you never get it back.
When Killibrew returned, Sheffield was halfway through the video for the third time, at the point where Prince was slogging through the water and lifted up the arm. His face was strained. Maybe he was terrified or in shock. Maybe he had acting skills.