Collateral Damage Read online

  “Ouch. I know you don’t like to think too much about those days.”

  “Yeah. Have you had any luck on the murders?”

  The waitress came for our orders. The menu was long and complicated. A lot of dishes were named for movie stars of the ’30s and ’40s. I knew it was all good, and I ordered potato pancakes and a brisket of beef. J.D. had a salad and a Diet Coke.

  “Which murders?” she asked.

  I noticed a little crinkle around her eyes. I looked at her, waiting for the smile. She favored me with it and I melted a little.

  “Why don’t you bring me up to date on all murders on the island in the last three months.”

  “Does this have something to do with your visitor this morning?”

  “Yeah. My pal’s name is Charles Desmond. Ring any bells?”

  She sat back in her seat. “The dead guy on the beach is your buddy’s son?”

  “Was.”

  “Well, yes. Was.”

  “I didn’t make the connection until he came by this morning.”

  J.D. blew out a breath. “He’s a nice guy. I wish I could help him, but we’ve run into a blank wall on the investigation. He calls now and then, but I never have anything to tell him.”

  “He wants me to file a civil suit.”

  “Against the department?”

  “No. He thinks you walk on water. He wants to use the suit as a vehicle to help you find evidence.”

  “I knew he was rich, but I’d think he’d have to have more money than God to get you out of retirement. Who’s he going to sue?”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know where to start. I was hoping you’d share your file with me.”

  “I’d have to run that by the chief.”

  “If you’re willing to help, I’ll call the chief myself and ask him about it. I didn’t want to step on your toes.”

  She grinned. “You were afraid I might react negatively and kick your butt or something.”

  “There’s that. Plus, I want you on board with me.”

  “If the chief says it’s okay, I’m all for it. I’ll do whatever I can.”

  “I’m not getting paid, by the way. Just in case you’re interested.”

  “I didn’t think you were. Mr. Desmond must have been a good friend for you to come out of retirement for him.”

  “A long time ago he put his life on the line to save mine. No matter what you do after that, you cannot repay the debt in full. It’s one thing to save a life, like a nurse or doctor, but it’s so much more when somebody puts saving your life in front of saving his own.”

  “That’s some motivation you’ve got there, friend. Be careful that you don’t get too close to the fire. You could get burned.”

  We ate a leisurely lunch, talked of things of little seriousness, laughed a bit, exchanged a couple of jokes. Her cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID. “Dispatch. I’ve got to take this one. Sorry.”

  She left the booth and walked outside. She was back in a couple of minutes, put a ten dollar bill on the table and said, “Duty calls. I’ve got to interview a lady who lost her watch at the airport in Detroit last March. Says she needs a police report for the insurance company.”

  I laughted and handed her the ten. “This one’s on me.”

  “Wouldn’t that fall under bribing a cop?”

  “It might, but you can trust me. I’m a lawyer.”

  She laughed, snapped the bill out of my hand, and left.

  I went from the restaurant to the police station. I stood inside the waiting room and watched the dispatcher finish a telephone call. She rolled her chair over and opened the sliding glass window that separated her from the public.

  “Hey, Matt,” she said. “Who’re you here to see today?”

  “Hey, Iva. Is the chief in?”

  “Sure. Let me tell him you’re here.”

  She shut the little window and picked up the phone. She said a few words, hesitated, hung up, and motioned me through the door that led to the offices in the back of the building. I walked down a short hall and knocked on the open door of Chief Bill Lester’s office. His head was down reading a memo, one of dozens strewn across his desk top.

  He looked up. “Come on in, Matt. Damn paperwork gets bigger and bigger. How’re you doing?”

  Bill Lester was my fishing and drinking buddy and the guy with whom I regularly shared a grouper sandwich at the Sports Page Bar and Grille in downtown Sarasota.

  “You gotta come out from under that mess sometime. You want to meet me for a beer at Tiny’s this afternoon after work?”

  “It’s a date. But you didn’t just stop by to offer me a beer.”

  I told him about Doc Desmond and that I wanted his permission for J.D. to show me the police investigative file. I also told him what I wanted to do with any information I turned up.

  “Might as well, Matt. We’re at a dead end here. Who knows? You might turn up something that we can hang our hat on. Tell J.D. to give you the file and any help she can. I worry that I’m not keeping her busy enough. I know several agencies around here that would jump at the chance to hire her.”

  “I don’t think she’s going anywhere, Bill, but I’ll put her to work.”

  “Go for it. Keep me in the loop.”

  The chief went back to his paperwork and I headed home. I called J.D. and told her what Lester had said and asked if she’d like to drop by my cottage later that afternoon. She said she’d make a complete copy of the file and bring it with her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The file was not large, not for a murder investigation. J.D. explained there just wasn’t much to go on. Very little evidence. There were statements from witnesses, but none of them were even sure where the shot came from. They had been on the beach and saw young Desmond fall backward when the slug tore into his chest.

  J.D. and I were sitting in my living room, the file spread out on the coffee table. I was sipping from a can of Miller Lite and the detective was easing into a bottle of Chardonnay, one glass at a time. It was a little after five in the afternoon. The sun was moving toward the west, toward the sea into which it would soon sink. I looked at my watch. We had about three hours until sunset. The day was clear with a smattering of clouds hanging low over the Gulf. It would be a spectacular sunset, and I wanted to be sitting on the deck of the Hilton watching it.

  “You got time for dinner at the Hilton tonight?” I asked. “We could sit on the deck and watch the sunset.”

  “Sure. Just us and all the other tourists.”

  I smiled. I loved our sunsets and she always kidded me about it. Said it was something for the tourists to enjoy. I took the position that sunsets were tonics for beach bums and since I was a beach bum we had to watch the sun set.

  I pulled some photographs from one of the folders. They were grainy, black-and-white, some kind of security photos probably.

  “From the elevator at the Grand Beach condos,” J.D. said.

  “You’re pretty sure that’s where the shot came from?”

  “Yes. It’s the tallest building in that area and we found a filtered cigarette butt and some scuff marks on the flat roof at about where the shot had to come from.”

  “Did you find the slug that killed him?”

  “Yes. It went right through him and hit the sand. We found it with a metal detector.”

  “Did the bullet tell you anything?”

  “Only that it was a thirty caliber.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. And we couldn’t pull any DNA from the butt. We don’t even know if it belonged to the shooter. We’re thinking it didn’t, because it’d been on the roof long enough that the weather had degraded any DNA that might have been there.”

  “You’re sure you’ve got the right building?”

  “Pretty sure. The crime-scene techs were able to figure a pretty good trajectory of the bullet. It fits with the Grand Beach and the scuff marks we found on the roof.”

  “I’m not sure I u
nderstand the significance of the scuff marks.”

  “We’d had a gully washer the night before. Lots of rain. It would have washed off any marks that had been on the roof. The new ones had to have been made that morning and the maintenance guys were the only ones with keys to the roof. Neither of them had been up there that morning.”

  I held up the photographs. “Elevator surveillance?”

  “Yes. Not much help.”

  I looked closely at the pictures. Each one had a time stamp in the bottom right corner. Several were taken about an hour before the second group. I separated them out according to the time stamp. I saw a man wearing a light windbreaker jacket made of some dark material, jeans, running shoes, and a ball cap pulled low on his forehead. He never looked at the camera. In all the pictures, he had his head down.

  “He knew about the camera,” I said.

  “Yes. We never got a shot of his face.”

  “He’s carrying a briefcase in all of them.”

  “We’re assuming that was a container for his rifle. He could break it down and it would fit perfectly in the case.”

  I looked more closely at the pictures. “Are you sure this is a man?”

  “Because he’s small?”

  “Yes. It could be a woman.”

  “I thought of that, but it doesn’t seem too plausible. Women usually aren’t professional killers. They have to have some other motive. Jealously, sometimes money, something that rattles their system and makes them angry enough to kill. Besides, most women wouldn’t be trained snipers, and we think this guy had to have been well trained in order to hit the target at that range.”

  I sat quietly for a moment, staring at the pictures. “How did the killer know that Jim Desmond would be jogging on the beach that morning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that the murder was random? That the killer just went up on that rooftop with the idea of killing somebody, anybody, and Jim came trotting up?”

  “We considered that. But there have been no other killings in the past three years in Florida that match the pattern here. I think if it was just random, we’d have had more murders just like this one. A serial killer can’t stop with just one.”

  “What about the killings on Dulcimer?” I asked.

  “No connection that we can see.”

  “What if the sheer randomness of all the killings is the connection?”

  J.D. shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. One was a long-range shooting and the others were knifings. The captain was killed by someone skilled in martial arts. Either that, or the killer was very strong. Up close and brutal. And we’re pretty sure there had to be a team of at least two people working the boat. One to take care of the captain and another to kill the passengers.”

  “And you never found any connections between any of the four dead people.”

  “None.”

  “If Jim’s killing wasn’t random, then the killer must have known that Jim would be on the beach that morning. Any thoughts?”

  J.D. nodded. “Desmond had been at the Hilton for three days before his wedding. He jogged the beach every morning at about the same time. We think the killer was betting on his being at the same place at pretty much the same time on the day of the murder.”

  “Do you think there was anything significant about the fact that he was murdered on the day after his wedding?”

  “I thought about that, but decided that it was probably a coincidence. If the new wife had been part of it, it would have made sense for her to wait until she was married to have him killed. Then she would inherit.”

  “Jim came from a wealthy family. Maybe that was a motive.”

  “Meredith, the wife, has more money than the whole Desmond family. Her grandfather was richer than I can imagine and set up a trust fund for Meredith. She came into control of it on her twenty-first birthday. Even if she inherited the entire Desmond fortune, it would only be a drop in the bucket of the money she already has. As they say, that dog won’t hunt.”

  “I guess not. Didn’t you tell me that the couple was leaving that afternoon for a honeymoon in Europe?”

  “They were.”

  “Then if the shooter missed Jim that day, if Jim had not jogged, or gone on the street or the other way on the beach, the killer would have missed him.”

  “I guess so,” she said.

  “But if the killing wasn’t random, then there must have been a contingency plan.”

  She was quiet for a moment, sipping her wine. I heard a dog bark in the distance, the screech of one of the peacocks that run wild in the Village, an outboard engine chugging at idle speed up the lagoon where I lived. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Maybe?”

  “The Grand Beach condo building takes up the whole area between the beach and Gulf of Mexico Drive. There are no obstructions on the roof that would have kept the shooter from moving across it. There are a bunch of air-conditioning units up there, but nothing that would stop him from moving from the front of the building to the back. If Desmond had come up the sidewalk on Gulf of Mexico Drive, all the killer had to do was move to that side of the building.”

  “What if Jim had jogged north on the beach?”

  “I see your point. How would the killer have gotten to him? And if he hadn’t gotten him that day, then Desmond would presumably have been out of reach in Europe. That’s an argument for randomness.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe there was another shooter on the roof of another building to the north of the Hilton.”

  She sat quietly for a beat. “Damn. We never thought about that. There’re some buildings to the north that could have hidden a sniper.”

  “If you’re going north from the Hilton,” I said, “there are several low-rise buildings, no more than three or four stories high, until you get to the Tropical Condos. That building is eight stories. There are no others that tall all the way up the island.”

  She pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll get a crime-scene unit up there now. It’s probably too late, but we’ve got to check it out.”

  She made arrangements to meet the crime-scene people at the Tropical in thirty minutes. “If your theory is correct,” she said, “there had to be at leasttwo shooters.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll meet you later at the Hilton,” she said, and was outthe door.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  July on our key is a time when there are few tourists and we islanders meet for drinks and jokes and stories of other lives, those we lived before we found our paradise on Longboat Key. Some of the stories were probably even true, although we didn’t much care and never tried to sort out the truth from the fantasy. Everybody is entitled to start over, and our little island was as good a place as any for that.

  I was sitting at the outside bar at the Hilton talking to Billy Brugger who had been slinging drinks in the place for a quarter of a century. He knew everybody, those still with us and those who had departed for other venues, those who had died and those who had simply moved away, perhaps tired of the essential sameness of our lives, bored with the little stimulus that island living provided, needful of the stress they’d left behind in the cities of the Midwest, or simply craving the daily contact of family and the familiar friends of their youths. He knew their secrets, the ones whispered to him over the bar late at night, when the whisperers had drunk too much and were a little maudlin, perhaps thinking of the homes they’d left to chase the sun to Florida. And Billy kept those secrets. He was as closed-mouthed as a sphynx, judicious in his friendships and in many ways a repository of all the island’s ills.

  I’d stopped by Tiny’s after J.D. left. The chief was already into his second drink, chatting with one of the regulars, a commercial fisherman from Cortez. A couple of other locals sat at a table in the corner, intent on the golf game playing on the big flat-screen TV. Bill Lester never had more than two drinks when he was driving. We talked while he sipped on the last one and then heade
d home. I paid my tab and drove three miles south to the Hilton.

  Billy looked at his watch. “She’ll be hitting the water in about five minutes.”

  He was talking about the sun. He enjoyed the sunsets as much as I did, but would never admit it lest the locals think him as crazy as I. The people who lived on our key figured that when you’ve seen thousands of sunsets, the beauty pales into insignificance. But not for me. Each one was different from the others, the colors splaying across the water in ever changing patterns, the birds, a new flock each day, flying across the face of the sun on their way home for the night, the small formations of clouds hanging at the edge of the horizon, reflecting the last rays of the day. I was mindful of the fact that perhaps my fascination with the sunsets was that it was the last vestige of Old Florida, the land I’d known growing up, that part of my youth now buried under the condominium towers, parking lots, and thousands of new homes that fed the beast called progress.

  “I know,” I said. “I can always depend on the sun.”

  J.D. came up the ramp from the parking lot. “Hey, Billy,” she asked, “is he still sober?” She was pointing at me.

  “Yeah. You can always tell. He’s not nearly as interesting when he’s not drinking much.”

  J.D. took the stool next to mine. Billy poured her a glass of wine. “It’s time,” he said.

  I turned my stool toward the Gulf, my back to the bar. The sun was just beginning to dip into the horizon. I watched as it sank, moving quickly as if glad to be done with this day, seeking a little rest before it started its rise over the mainland in a few hours.

  I turned back to J.D. “Find anything at the Tropical?”

  “Nothing. But I didn’t expect to. Their surveillance cameras are working and they save about six months worth of images on a computer. One of the techs is going through the pictures now, trying to narrow it down to the day of the shooting. See what we get. I’m not expecting much. He’ll let me know in the morning.”

  “You hungry?”

  “I could eat a cow.”

  “How about a hamburger?”

  “That’s a start. Can I have fries with that?”