Rolling Thunder

by Matt Lincoln

  “Yeah. Come on.”

  I grabbed a flashlight and headed for the cave with Holm tailing right behind. The body was just to the right of the entrance, a black male not much older than twenty in a filthy tank top and cutoff jeans, no shoes. He sprawled on his stomach with his head turned to one side, hands tied behind his back with a braided gold rope and a single gunshot wound to the back of his head.

  This looked unfortunately familiar.

  “Ah, what the hell,” Holm breathed as I crouched next to the body and directed the flashlight toward his upper arm. Sure enough, the victim had a tattoo of a hooded snake wrapped around his bicep.

  “He’s a Black Mamba.” I stood up, shaking my head as I walked slowly around the body. “And this looks like a Congo Kings hit.”

  “Ya think?” Holm said bitterly. “I swear to God, if we’re getting dragged into a Bahamas gang war, I quit. Seriously, is one lousy Saturday fishing trip too much to ask?”

  “We don’t know anything yet.” I stopped at the victim’s bare feet and directed the flashlight down. There were several cuts and gashes along his soles, some of them deep. Small flecks of white grit were caught in the deeper ones. “He didn’t get these cuts on this beach. Looks like coral.”

  “Oh, good. So if he was killed somewhere else and just dumped on American soil, we can hand this off to the RBPF.”

  “Don’t think so.” I knew Holm wasn’t really interested in passing off the case, and neither was I. He was just eternally butt-hurt about his fishing trip. “Look at the saturation around his head. He was shot here.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Holm grumbled and started to inspect the upper part of the body.

  At some point soon, we’d have to deal with the Royal Bahamas Police Force. They weren’t going to like ceding the investigation to us, but at least now I knew why none of the other U.S. agencies wanted to touch this one with a ten-foot pole.

  The Black Mambas were dangerous, especially their leader, Cobra Jon. The biggest gang in the Bahamas, they had zero interest in answering to the authorities and had been responsible for more deaths of law enforcement personnel than the rest of the Bahamian gangs combined. The worst thing was that nothing ever stuck to them. An endless parade of tainted evidence, unflinching alibis, and vanishing witnesses clung to every charge brought against them. If Cobra Jon couldn’t bribe his way out of a situation, he’d slaughter his way out instead.

  And speaking of witnesses, I had to interview ours, though I doubted she’d seen anything helpful. Just then the techs filed into the cave, their blue paper scrubs rustling with every step.

  “Supervise the collection, will you, Robbie?” I said. “I need to speak with Miss Bleu, so I can get her off my crime scene.”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “Ethan… I don’t like this one.”

  I nodded. “Me, neither.”

  There was something off about the whole thing, but I’d have to worry about it once we brought everything back to the office. Time and tide waited for no man, regardless of whether he had a crime scene to process.

  Chapter 4

  Tessa Bleu watched me approach with a tired sort of wariness. She’d ditched the paramedics and the blanket, and beneath it, she wore canvas shorts, a mesh top over a t-shirt, and sensible shoes. No jewelry, no wedding ring, a light layer of makeup artfully applied that was nevertheless starting to smear a bit in the humidity. She carried a small string backpack and a camera bag strapped across her body like a shield. Her deep brown hair was wrangled into a loose French braid, and her wide green eyes regarded me with curiosity and something more.

  Pretty thing, but not from around here. She seemed fairly capable, possibly even resilient, though she obviously hadn’t been prepared to stumble across a dead guy on this remote beach.

  “Ms. Bleu,” I said as I stopped in front of her and fished out my badge. “Special Agent Ethan Marston. I know you’ve probably been through this already, but I have to ask you a few questions about what happened here today.”

  She gave a tiny, shuddering sigh and sipped at whatever was in the cup she still held. “I guessed as much. Are you also with the, er … Coast Guard police?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m from a different agency.”

  “Which one?”

  And here I’d been hoping to skip the mouthful. “MBLIS,” I told her, adding what the acronym stood for. “We’re the red-headed stepchild of coastal military investigations.”

  That got her to laugh and relax a little. “All right, Agent Marston. What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with how you found the body.”

  She nodded, closing her eyes for a moment. “I was shooting the cave,” she said and then broke off with a gasp. “Pictures,” she added quickly. “I was shooting with a camera, not a gun. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Bleu,” I said with a faint grin. “I knew what you meant. You’re not a suspect.”

  “Oh. Good.” She smiled a bit. “Call me Tessa.”

  I nodded. “Okay, Tessa. You were shooting the cave, and…?”

  “I have permission to be here,” she felt compelled to add. “From the Coast Guard.”

  “Tessa,” I said as gently as I could. Whatever she’d seen, other than the body, it had clearly rattled her more than her outward appearance let on. “I promise you’re not in trouble here. You don’t have to justify anything.”

  She glanced at me, blew out a long breath, and stared into the distance. “I’m sorry. I’ve just never seen anyone who was murdered before,” she said softly. “I suppose you have though, right? You must be used to it.”

  I gave a noncommittal shrug. We weren’t exactly here to discuss my career or how many bodies I’d seen, let alone whether it bothered me. “Are you okay to keep talking to me, Tessa?”

  “Yes. I’ll be fine.” She shuddered, squared her shoulders, and faced me fully. “So I was shooting the cave, coming up to it, and I saw something in the flash. At first, I thought…” She laughed a little. “I thought it was an alligator. I read up on them before I came to Florida and found out that sometimes they hang around salt water, even though they’re freshwater animals. So I was cautious.”

  I smirked. “Good call. Did you happen to read that the best thing to do if you run across an alligator on land is to turn and run in the opposite direction?”

  “Yes. In a straight line, not a zigzag,” she said in that way one recounts something from rote memory. “But it wasn’t moving, and I was still pretty far away. Besides, it only took a few more shots to realize it wasn’t an alligator.”

  “You saw that it was a person.”

  She nodded slowly. “And he was dead. I would’ve gone in there, tried to help, if it wasn’t very clear that he was beyond helping,” she said almost defensively as if I’d accused her of malicious lingering with intent to watch a man die. “So I stayed out here and called 911. That’s when I saw the other guy.”

  “What other guy?” I said, sharper than I intended.

  Tessa’s brow furrowed. “Didn’t Agent Parker tell you?”

  Before I could reply, the steady background noise of the surf surged loud, and a wave lurched around the rock she was sitting on to lick at my shoes before receding into the ocean.

  “Tide’s coming in fast,” I said as I watched the waters continue to encroach on us. “Can you walk and talk? I need to get back to the scene.”

  “I take it that means he didn’t tell you.” Tessa stood, brushed herself off, and stepped down next to me. “After I made the call, I saw —”

  “Ethan!” Holm cut her off as he trotted out of the cave, waving his arms over his head. “You’d better come in here. We’ve got a second body.”

  I glanced at Tessa, but she looked just as confused as me. “The other guy I saw was alive,” she said and pointed toward the top of the cliff above the cave. “He was up there, looking down.”

  Damn it. So that’s what Parker meant when he said she was a witness. But at this di
stance, it’d be impossible to make a positive identification of someone standing on that cliff. Like I figured, what she’d seen wasn’t very helpful.

  Tessa cleared her throat and patted her camera bag nervously. “And I… er, took a few pictures of him. The man on the cliff,” she clarified. “In case he had something to do with this.”

  Somehow, I managed not to curse aloud. If the guy up there had been the killer and he realized she’d taken his picture, even from this far away, whoever it was might try to retaliate.

  “Come with me,” I practically growled as I started toward the cave, where my partner had disappeared back inside. “I’m going to need your camera.”

  She crossed her hands protectively over the bag. “Well, you can’t have it.”

  “Excuse me?” I stopped to glare at her. “You’ve got photos of the body and the possible killer on there. It’s evidence. I need it.”

  “And yet I’m not going to give it to you,” she said defiantly.

  I sighed. “Are you really going to make me get a warrant, Ms. Bleu?”

  “No,” she said. “All you have to do is ask nicely.”

  I chuckled and relented, already liking her more. “Fine. Could I please borrow your camera?”

  “No, but I’ll give you copies of the pictures,” she said with a smile as we started toward the cave again. “Where should I send them?”

  I hunted through my pockets, found a business card, and handed it to her. “Email’s on there. Work and cell numbers too,” I said. “Get them to me as soon as possible when you go back to wherever you’re staying. I’d also like to have a quick look at the pictures when I’m done… but I still have more questions for you, so don’t go anywhere yet. Please.”

  She nodded and slowed, hanging back from the entrance. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not go in there,” she said almost under her breath.

  “That’s fine.”

  There was still a pair of local cops on the scene, so she’d be safe on the off chance the man from the cliff came back, even though I knew he wouldn’t. For all we knew, he could’ve been a tourist who’d wandered the wrong terrain, or even a Coast Guard grunt on patrol. And if it was the killer, he wouldn’t risk being seen here by people with badges.

  “I’ll be out soon,” I told Tessa.

  She managed a nervous smile. “I’ll be right here.”

  I headed inside to find the techs prepping the body for the stretcher and Holm further back in the cave, playing a flashlight beam across the surface of a sizeable tidal pool.

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” he said when he caught sight of me. He waved me over. “The good news is, I think this other body is way out of our jurisdiction.”

  Frowning, I skirted the pool and walked toward him. “Whose jurisdiction is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the British Royal Navy or the Caribbean colonial army?” He gestured dramatically with the flashlight, aiming it beyond the tidal pool.

  There, seated against a thick stalagmite, was a blackened, grinning skeleton half-buried in damp sand, clutching a thick, cloudy glass bottle in one bony hand and an ancient pistol in the other. The splintered and heavily eroded remains of a small wooden boat were scattered around and behind the long-dead figure, who’d almost certainly been a pirate.

  A spark of excitement rose in me, but I tamped it down. Now wasn’t the time to indulge my little personal side quest. Then again, I wasn’t going to leave a find like this for someone else to grab or for the Coast Guard to confiscate out from under me.

  “Let’s bag and tag it,” I said. “Everything we can get. Take photos, too.”

  Holm arched an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t we call, I don’t know, the museum cops or something?”

  “Museums don’t have cops, Robbie.” I suppressed a grin as I took a few steps forward. “My crime scene, my evidence. Anything I decide might be relevant, even if it doesn’t look that way.”

  My partner opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it with a knowing smile. “You really think this is related to the…”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  “Could be. This is the right area,” I said quickly, trying not to let my excitement at the possible find get away from me, “but I’ll worry about that after we deal with the fresher dead guy. For now, we take it all with us.”

  “I’ll get the bags,” Holm said.

  At least something good had come out of working on Saturday, but with the case shaping up the way it had been so far, it’d be a while until I got the chance to dig into these old relics.

  “Dead men tell no tales,” I murmured as I grabbed the small digital camera from my pack and started snapping pictures. “But I think you’re going to tell me plenty, aren’t you?”

  The skeleton’s silent grin was his only reply. Still, I thought I could make him talk.

  Chapter 5

  The MBLIS office was on the Miami coast, a few miles south of the NCIS and CGIS satellite offices. Unlike our sister agencies, whose headquarters were in D.C., the Miami location was the main branch, since most of our operations involved Mexico, Central America, and of course, the Caribbean islands. This meant that our director was onsite.

  I needed to have a word with her before we dove into this case.

  Normally I would’ve knocked on the door to Diane Ramsey’s office, a perfunctory courtesy before I walked in anyway. Today, I didn’t bother with the knock. When I walked in, Diane was seated behind her desk, looking at something on her computer.

  Damn. I’d kind of hoped I was interrupting a meeting.

  “Marston,” she said as she glanced up with frowning hazel eyes. One of the youngest directors in the history of the agency, Diane was just shy of forty but looked thirty most days. Today she seemed especially youthful in a casual, brightly colored blouse and slacks instead of her usual dark pantsuit, her hair down and loose. “You look upset.”

  “Not upset, exactly. Just curious.” I helped myself to the chair across from her desk. “Why’d you pull us off the Francke case, right in the middle of an arrest? You know I don’t like leaving things unfinished.”

  She sighed and tucked a blonde curl behind her ear before swiveling fully to face me to fold her hands on the desk. “I thought CGIS told you there was a rush on that murder scene. Because of the tide?”

  “Yeah, they did,” I confirmed. “So why didn’t you just send Birn and Griezmann out there? Would’ve been faster than scrambling a team to take over our bust.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “You know why.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “Enlighten me.”

  “Because you and Holm are better investigators,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

  The director drummed her fingers on the desk. “You know what? I’m not doing this with you today, Marston. I assigned you the case. So just work it, and shut up about it.”

  “Diane,” I pressed as I made my tone firm.

  She averted her gaze, and I knew my hunch was right. The orders were coming from someone with higher clearance than her, and there was more to this case than I was being told.

  “You know, it’d be a lot easier doing my job if I had all the facts.” I leaned forward in the chair. “So are you going to spill it, or do I have to work in the dark?”

  “Ethan… I can’t. Not this time,” she said quietly. “Please, for once, could you just not push it?”

  I took a minute to think about that, then decided to shrug it off for the moment. I liked Diane, at least better than our previous director, and I knew she could get in trouble if she shared classified information. Honestly, she probably didn’t have the whole story either.

  “All right. I won’t,” I told her, “but you know I’m going to find out what this is about anyway.”

  That got a smile from her. “I’m counting on it.”

  “Well, I’d better get to work. Got a dead body downstairs.” Two of t
hem, actually, though I hadn’t told the director about the other find in the cave. I knew damned well it didn’t have anything to do with the murder, and I wanted to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. Didn’t feel like listening to anyone complain about misappropriation of resources. I stood, walked to the door, and then turned back before I opened it. “By the way, you spoiled Robbie’s fishing plans. He’s a little peeved.”

  Diane smirked. “He’ll get over it.”

  “Probably, but you’re not the one who has to listen to him bitch.”

  Her laughter chased me as I left the director’s office and headed downstairs to the squad room on the main floor. On a Saturday, most of the stations were left deserted by the lucky agents who didn’t get shanghaied into working weekends, but Holm was at his desk across from mine, talking on the phone.

  He saw me coming and held up a finger as he turned slightly away, the phone to his ear. “I don’t give a damn about your cancellation policy,” he said into it. “I’m not paying for a boat that I don’t get to use. If I don’t have a refund by Monday, I’ll shoot you. I have a gun.” With that, he slammed the phone down, rolled his eyes, and grinned at me. “You have to be firm with customer service.”

  “Uh-huh. Threatening to shoot them was a nice touch.” I waited for him to stand and come around the desk before we headed for the elevator. “I take it that you’ve finally accepted that you’re not going fishing today.”

  Holm snorted as the elevator dinged and the doors opened. We stepped in, and he thumbed the button for the lower level without a word exchanged between us. After being partners for four years and in the same Navy SEAL unit for three years before joining the agency, our wavelengths were fairly synched on the job.

  “Yeah, I get it,” he said. “I should really just buy a damned boat.”

  “You’ve been saying that since boot camp,” I reminded him.

  “Hey, a boat is a big investment.” Holm shrugged. “I don’t want to commit until I find the perfect one.”