Collateral Damage Page 2

  “What the hell happened, Matt?”

  I told him what I’d seen and that I’d picked up the three passengers from the water.

  “I’ve been listening on the radio,” he said. “I’ve got ambulances coming to Moore’s. We can offload any injured at the docks there.”

  “You’ve got some people in the water up by the bow,” I said. “They’re going to start getting cold.”

  “I’ll go get them. Why don’t you get these folks names and take them to Moore’s so the paramedics can take a look.”

  He went around me and moved slowly into the shallows to pick up the people on the sandbar. I crossed the channel running almost due west, past the southern tip of Jewfish Key and across the lagoon to Moore’s Stone Crab Restaurant. I saw a sea of flashing blue lights in the parking lot. I maneuvered into the dock and cut the engines. Logan and I helped our passengers off the boat and turned them over to the paramedics.

  “You ready for a drink?” I asked Logan.

  “Damn right.”

  I picked up the microphone. “Coast Guard Cortez, this is Recess.”

  “This is United States Coast Guard Cortez.”

  “This is Recess. I’ve dropped my three passengers off at Moore’s with the paramedics. I’ll be inside in case your people need to talk to me.”

  “Recess, did you get their names?

  I gave them to her, told her my cell phone number, signed off, and headed for the bar.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was late by the time the Coast Guard accident investigator called me. He’d had to drive down from St. Petersburg. He told me that they’d inspected Dulcimer and didn’t think there was any structural damage. Just a bit of bottom paint scraped off the bow where it ran up on the sandbar. They’d kept the passengers aboard and were going to tow the boat back to its dock at the restaurant. Other than a few scrapes and bruises, there did not seem to be any casualties, except for the captain. He’d apparently had a heart attack or a stroke and died at the helm. The investigator said he’d call me the next day and come by and get a statement.

  It was midnight and my friend Debbie the bartender was trying to kick us out. Logan and I had been joined by a few other villagers who were interested in all the commotion out on the waterway. We filled them in on what we knew, and after I talked to the investigator, they all knew as much as I did.

  Logan paid our tab and we walked down to the dock and boarded Recess. I pulled away from the dock and threaded my way around the sand-bars and idled toward my cottage. We could see the activity over on the Intracoastal where two small towboats were hooking up to the bow of Dulcimer. They’d see her home.

  “I wonder why they don’t just take her home under her own power,” I said.

  “Gotta pay the towboat captains anyway. Might as well make them work for their money.”

  “Probably makes it easier to justify calling them out in the first place.”

  “The bureaucratic mind,” said Logan, “never fails to amaze me.”

  I slid Recess into her home berth, tied her off, and told Logan I’d wait until morning to wash her down and flush the engines. “I need sleep.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”

  Logan went to his car, and I opened the back patio sliding glass door and went in to bed.

  My cell phone rang, waking me from a troubling dream of soldiers falling off boats into subtropical waters. Daylight was creeping through my windows overlooking the bay. I looked at my watch. A few minutes after six. I rolled over and picked up the phone.

  “Matt,” a soft voice said “this is J.D. May I come by with the Coast Guard investigator and talk to you?”

  “Sure. When?” I was puzzled as to why she was calling me so early.

  “Now. There’s been a bad turn on the Dulcimer grounding.”

  I sat up in bed, a little surprised. It had seemed pretty routine last night.

  “Give me ten minutes to jump in the shower and put some coffee on.”

  “We’ll be there in fifteen,” she said, and hung up.

  J. D. Duncan was my friend and Longboat Key’s only detective. She’d spent fifteen years on the Miami-Dade police force, ten as a detective, and the last few as assistant homicide commander. When her mom died and left her a condo unit on the key, she’d decided to leave the stress of Miami and join us in paradise. She’d gotten the job with the Longboat Key Police Department a few months before and had quickly become part of our island community.

  I took a quick shower, put on a clean T-shirt and cargo shorts, and set the coffee dripping. My doorbell rang. I opened the front door to find J.D. standing next to a tall man in civilian clothes whom she introduced as Chief Warrant Officer Jacobi. The Coast Guard accident investigator.

  The dectective was in her late thirties, stood five feet seven inches tall, and wore her dark hair just short of shoulder length. Her green eyes could stare down a criminal or crinkle in happiness. She had a smile that made you just want to get up and dance, a straight nose, laugh wrinkles bordering her eyes, and a complexion that could only have been the result of good genes and skin care products. She was slender, small waisted and long legged with full breasts that could not quite hide beneath her clothes.

  I invited them in and poured coffee for each. We sat in the living room. Jacobi was a couple inches taller than I and weighed thirty pounds less. He wore civilian clothes, was about forty years old, had a head full of brown hair with some gray starting to show at the temples. His nose was a bit small for his angular face and his chin had that tucked in look that you get with a large overbite. A chipped left upper incisor would have given him an odd smile. He seemed to be a serious man and I doubt that he smiled much.

  “We’ve got two murder victims on Dulcimer,” J.D. said.

  That brought me upright. “Murder victims?”

  “Yes,” said Jacobi, his voice rumbling in the deep register I’d heard on the phone. “They were both knifed and thrown overboard.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to get my head around this new piece of information.

  “Did you see anything that looked out of the ordinary?” he asked.

  “You mean other than a hundred-ten-foot boat running hard aground and throwing passengers into the water?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  “If you’re asking if I saw any bodies, the answer is no.”

  Jacobi looked hard at me for a moment. I suspected he had practiced that stare in the mirror, the better to intimidate witnesses. I wasn’t impressed. I looked back passively, waiting for another question. He broke eye contact, looked over at J.D., shrugged.

  “One of the victims was the husband of the woman you fished out of the water,” J.D. said.

  “What do you know about them?” I asked.

  “The husband was a fifty-two-year-old lawyer from Jacksonville named Peter Garrison,” said J.D. “The other victim was a twenty-five-year-old woman from Charlotte, North Carolina.”

  “When did you find them?”

  J.D. took a sip of her coffee. “A few hours ago. When the Coast Guard got Dulcimer back to the dock, we let the passengers off. No reason to hold them. The paramedics brought the woman you picked up,” she paused, looked at her notes, “Mrs. Betty Garrison, from Moore’s over to Dulcimer’s berth. She couldn’t find her husband. It seems she’d gone to the upper deck to have a cigarette and left her husband in the dining area on the second deck. She was leaning on the rail and when the boat hit the sandbar, she was tossed into the water.”

  “Where were the bodies?” I asked.

  “Washed up on Sister Keys, right near where Dulcimer went aground.”

  “Who’s the young woman?” I asked.

  Jacobi broke in. “According to her driver’s license, she is Katherine Brewster, single, lived with her parents. I had to break the news to them about thirty minutes ago.”

  “Any connection between the girl and Mr. Garrison?” I asked.
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  J.D. leaned forward in her chair, reaching again for the cup sitting on the coffee table. “We haven’t had time to establish anything except that Mrs. Garrison never heard of her. Katherine had come to the area by herself and was staying at a small bed and breakfast on Anna Maria. We found the key in her pocket. We’ll check all that out.”

  “How did you know she was missing?”

  “We didn’t,” said Jacobi. “We found her body while we were looking for Garrison.”

  “Any evidence on the boat?” I asked.

  “The crime-scene unit from Manatee County is going over it as we speak,” said J.D. “I doubt they’ll find much with all those people tramping through it.”

  “You said the bodies washed up on Sister Keys. Do you think they were in the water when I was picking up those three people?”

  “I doubt it,” said Jacobi. “It actually looks as if they were thrown overboard and may have been washed up on shore by the movement of the boats trying to get Dulcimer off the bar and underway to her berth. They weren’t in the water very long.”

  I sat for a beat, thinking. “Do you see this as a crime of opportunity, random, or what? It seems awfully coincidental that the grounding gave the murderer the opportunity to strike in the confusion.”

  “We agree with you,” said J.D. “The medical examiner will do an autopsy on the captain today. He may not have died of natural causes.

  “Look,” she continued, “I know you didn’t see the bodies, but give me a minute-by-minute description of what you did see. There may be something there that’ll give us a lead.”

  I took her through the minutes from the time I saw Dulcimer making her way up the channel until I pulled into the dock at Moore’s.

  J.D. was quiet for a moment. “You said the pilothouse was dark before the other lights went out. Isn’t that unusual?”

  Jacobi and I both shook our heads. “No,” he said. “The captain would have kept the pilothouse dark so that he could see better outside. His instrument lights glow red, so even they wouldn’t have been visible from Mr. Royal’s vantage.”

  J.D. nodded her head, accepting the explanation. “How long after the lights went out did the boat run aground?”

  “Seconds,” I said. “No more than a minute. I was still running alongside at idle speed. She was moving at maybe ten knots. She would have gotten by me quickly if she hadn’t hit the bar. When she stopped, I was still beside her, back near the fake paddle wheel.”

  “Was she still moving at the same speed?”

  That stopped me. I sat upright in my chair. I was thinking about the exact second when Dulcimer grounded. It had been quiet except for the nervous chatter of the passengers. When the music died, so did the engine sounds. That was the reason I thought of her as a ghost ship as she was sliding by me. The big diesels were quiet.

  “The engines had been shut down,” I said.

  “When?” asked Jacobi.

  “I don’t know. Let me think.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to get back to the very moment that I became subliminally aware that the engines had shut down. “Just as I crossed her bow, I heard the engines race, as if someone was pouring the fuel to them. Then, just as suddenly, they stopped. Somebody shut them down. She’d gotten a little burst of speed, and then drifted onto the bar. She hit pretty hard, though, so she had some speed on.”

  “How much time elapsed between the time the engines were shut down and the boat went dark?” asked Jacobi.

  “Immediately. Or almost immediately. I think whoever shut the engines down did so by turning off the ignition and probably reached over and turned off the generator. It was that fast.”

  “And how long before the Coast Guard boarded and fired the generator back up?” asked Jacobi.

  “Let me think. I radioed Cortez as soon as the lights went out. In the few seconds it took to get a response, Dulcimer grounded and the screaming started. I’m not sure I even got the transmission off before she hit the sandbar. I think it was probably ten minutes before the Coasties arrived on scene and boarded. Somebody apparently went to the pilothouse and kicked over the generator. I’d say fifteen minutes tops, but the Coast Guard log will probably give you a better time line.”

  “I’ve already ordered that,” said Jacobi. “We’ll match the log to your recollection.”

  “You might want to talk to Logan Hamilton,” I said. “He was there the whole time.”

  “We will,” said J.D. “Anything else, Mr. Jacobi?”

  He shook his head. “I think we’re through for now. Thank you, Mr. Royal.”

  They stood, shook hands, and left.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I took my paper and coffee onto the patio. It was getting warmer as the sun rose higher. I was starting to feel a sheen of sweat brought on by the high humidity. Soon it would be too uncomfortable to sit outside. It was time for my morning jog on the beach.

  I was just tying my running shoes when my cell phone rang. The caller I.D. told me it was J. D. Duncan.

  “Good morning, again,” I said.

  “You had breakfast yet?”

  “No. I was just going out for a run.”

  “If you’ll join me at the Dolphin, I’ll buy.”

  “Does this include Chief Warrant Officer Jacobi?”

  “No. He’s gone back to Cortez to finish a preliminary report or something.”

  “You’re on. What time?”

  “Right now. I’m just pulling into the parking lot.”

  “See you in five.”

  I put on a ball cap and drove out to Broadway, took a left on Gulf of Mexico Drive, and rode south. The royal poinciana trees that lined the road were in bloom, providing a canopy of red blossoms that brightened the island, a neat juxtaposition to the foreboding cloud that had encapsulated my paradise.

  I turned into the Centre Shops, a small plaza set among seagrape trees, bougainvilleas, banyans, and other local flora. The Blue Dolphin Café was housed there and during the summer served mostly the local population. In the winter, during what is known as “The Season,” snow-birds flocked there for breakfast and lunch giving the place a buzz that was absent in the doldrums of summer.

  J.D. was in a booth near the front door. She stood as I approached. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse, blue slacks, and low-heeled navy pumps, what she called her detective uniform. Her hair was pinned back from her ears and she was smiling. Her belt held a holstered Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol, a small case for her cell phone, and the gold detective’s badge. A handheld police radio sat on the table.

  She gave me a perfunctory hug, the kind that our islanders almost always give, a token of friendship, no more. J.D., whose real name was Jennifer Diane Duncan, and I had become good friends in the months since she had come to our key. We’d share drinks with friends at Tiny’s on the edge of the Village or Mar Vista or the Hilton or Pattigeorge’s, the occasional lunch or breakfast, and sometimes we’d go off by ourselves to one of the local restaurants or take my boat to Egmont Key for a day at the beach. Our relationship never progressed beyond that, even though there were moments, like now, when my heart skipped a beat at the sight of her.

  She’d been very professional that morning at my house, and I had expected nothing less. She was working a case and had a colleague from another agency with her. It would not have been seemly for her to hug the witness. She was seeking information, but she also knew that I would be more forthcoming over a leisurely breakfast than in a staring contest with the Coast Guard.

  We took our seats and the waitress brought me a cup of coffee and a glass of water. One thing about the Dolphin, they knew their regulars and what the regulars liked. J.D. was already half finished with her first cup. I knew she had a large capacity for coffee, perhaps a legacy of all those years in the cop business.

  “Sorry about Jacobi,” she said. “I just met him this morning when they called us out about the bodies they found.”

  “Not a problem, cupcake.”

 
“Cupcake?”

  “Um, Detective?”

  “There. Isn’t that better?”

  “Sounds kind of formal.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, but it won’t get you shot. ‘Cupcake’ just might.”

  “Point taken, Detective.”

  “I wanted to make sure you haven’t thought of anything else about last night before I go talk to Logan.”

  “No. I gave you and Jacobi everything I remember.”

  “Okay. Just checking, Studmuffin.”

  “Studmuffin?” I asked.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No. It fits.”

  She smiled and my heart jumped up and did a little jig. “Right,” she said and gave her attention to the server who’d come to take our breakfast order.

  “Is Jacobi going to be investigating the murders?” I asked.

  “No. That’ll fall to me. Jacobi is an accident investigator. His job is to find out what caused the boat to go aground. Since the Sister Keys are part of the Town of Longboat Key, the murders are my jurisdiction.”

  “Do you see any connection between the shooting on the beach and the knifings on Dulcimer?”

  “No. Well, at least not yet. There may be. I am curious about one thing you said this morning.”

  “Yes?”

  She took a bite of her scrambled eggs, chewed for a moment, sipped her coffee. “You’re pretty sure Dulcimer was making the dogleg when she went dark.”

  “Yes. She made the turn to the east, but never came back westerly.” “Okay. It was about that time that she headed toward you and the bar and just seconds later the engines died. Right so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Almost immediately after that, the generator shut off.”

  “Right.”

  “Somebody had to kill both Garrison and the girl and dump their bodies overboard in the time between when the lights went out and the Coast Guard got the generator running.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  “Assuming these weren’t just random attacks, the killer would have had to stick close to the victims so that he’d know where they were when the lights went out.”