Mermaid

by Tom Lowe

  Director Miles Venuti and four senior members of the production team, including Sebastian Gunter and Jonathan Lloyd, were in the room, all seated. Allen said, “I speak for everyone present and for our corporate offices when I say we feel horrible about the deaths of the two young women. Although neither of the murders occurred on our film sets, we will cooperate fully and in every way possible, should you need anything else.”

  Detective Hamilton nodded. “We appreciate that. We’ll be questioning people on your set, and we need direct access to all of them. And, we do need something else.” Hamilton glanced at Dan Grant before opening one of two large manila envelopes on the table in front of them. Hamilton removed a half-dozen, eight-by-ten color pictures of a mermaid costume. “We need to know how this costume—a mermaid tail, got from your movie set to the body of a dead girl on Key Biscayne.”

  Grant opened the second folder, removing the same number and size of color pictures. He said, “And we need know how and why this mermaid tail, which both costumes have been identified as property of your wardrobe department, was on the dead body of a girl found less than a half hour from here.” He stared at the attorney. “Yes, Mr. Allen … you are correct, neither body was found on your film sets. However, both of these young women had auditioned for parts in your movie. Both of them had been here and met with your casting people. We know that your casting director, Sebastian Gunter, seated here at this table, allowed four women who had auditioned for roles as mermaids, to borrow the costumes to take home to practice. Is that standard procedure for your company?”

  Gunter made a dry swallow, started to speak before the vice president of PR, Ann Davenport, interjected with a warm smile. “Sebastian didn’t break some sacred tenet in lending the girls the costumes. We’ve loaned out costumes for other films before cameras rolled. In this case, the actresses auditioning had pretty much made the cut for lead parts as mermaids. At least two, or maybe three, of the leads would have speaking roles. They were to have more time in the water and on camera. Sebastian made a judgement call, with the authority sanctioned in advance by the film’s director and executive producer, to allow the girls time to practice so they would be even safer, more comfortable, and secure in the water when it came time to shoot their scenes.”

  Grant shook his head. “And just the opposite happened.”

  Attorney Allen said, “It’s indeed tragic. However, this production was not complicit in any way, shape, or form, in terms of the deaths of the women.”

  “Be that as it may,” Grant said, turning to Gunter. “Have you been in the Miami area in the last week?”

  Gunter shook his head, attempting to smile. “I barely have time to go to the bathroom. I’ve been here, on our sets, since we arrived in Florida.”

  Grant said nothing for a few seconds. Someone’s stomach growled. A phone made a buzzing sound. Venuti stared out one of the conference room windows—anxious, his patience being tried. Grant nodded. “Okay. Has anyone here been to South Florida since you all arrived from California?”

  No one responded. Grant said, “Has anyone here authorized travel to South Florida for any member of your production team?”

  Director Venuti shook his head. “Come on, detectives. We’ve crisscrossed the state from time to time, doing location scouting. I was in the Keys two months ago finalizing locations and logistics.”

  Hamilton said, “How about in the last five days, Mr. Venuti … were you South Florida?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been to Key Biscayne?”

  “No.”

  “How about Ponce Inlet Beach?” asked Grant.

  “No.” Venuti leaned forward in the chair, his jawline tight.

  “I guess the schedule here keeps you pretty busy. In that case, we’ll need your phone numbers, please.” Grant slid a legal pad to the middle of the table. “You can write them down beside your names.”

  Attorney Allen cleared his throat. “As I said, we’ll cooperate fully. However, you’re talking about personal privacy when it comes to phone calls made and received and the tracking of people here who are more than willing to answer your questions.”

  Hamilton leaned forward. “What we’re taking about is murder. Two murders. If you prefer not to give us your phone numbers, we can get a court order. And, in the meantime, we can take you into the station individually for questioning.”

  Allen said, “We’ll comply with the spirit of mutual cooperation, but I want the record here today to indicate we’re doing so under objection and dispute due to individual privacy concerns.”

  Grant said, “You told us that you’d allowed four girls to have the mermaid costumes for practice. We know the names of two, unfortunately, because they’re dead. Who are the other two?”

  Sebastian Gunter fidgeted in his chair. “I have them here,” he said, looking at digital notes on his iPad. “They are Nicole Banard and Savannah Nelson.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The news media had dubbed them the “mermaid murders.” I thought about that as I worked in Dragonfly’s bilge area, replacing two rubber hoses and four metal clamps. Earlier, Wynona had left with Max to go shopping, going to an open-air farmer’s market to buy fruit and vegetables directly from the farmers who grow them. I stood up from the bilge pump, replacing the cover. I washed my hands and decided to take a walk around the marina.

  Nick’s boat, St. Michael, was gone from its slip. I knew that Nick was on an overnight fishing trip. Dave was helping a mutual friend with his income tax returns. I walked down L dock and entered the Tiki Bar. From the bartender, I ordered a cup of black coffee to go.

  “I’ll make you a fresh pot,” Flo said, coming around the bar from the dining area. She put on the coffee and turned back to me. The bartender made a Bloody Mary cocktail for a customer. There was less than a dozen people in the restaurant, one man on a barstool, the rest scattered around the tables. From the jukebox, Sting sang Fields of Gold. Flo watched one of her servers greet a family of sun-toasted tourists at the door. She looked at me, her gray eyes appraising. “I see no signs of little Max or Wynona. I’m assuming the ladies are elsewhere.”

  “They went to a farmers’ market to get some veggies and fruit. Max likes blueberries the best.”

  “No, Max likes my hushpuppies the best. But they aren’t a fruit. I’m not sure how you’d classify them.”

  “Let’s call them delicious and skip any classification.”

  Flo smiled, the color in her eyes now move vivid. “Sean O’Brien, you’ve got good taste.” The coffee pot made a hiss. She turned and poured coffee into a sturdy paper cup. “You want something to go with this? We have some fresh-baked blueberry muffins.”

  “No thanks. You might want to save one for Max, though.” I headed for the door leading to the marina.

  “If you get hungry, come on back, sweetie,” Flo said, putting the coffee pot on the burner.

  I walked past the dock master’s office and down the long boardwalk toward A and B docks, the areas where most of the commercial fishing boats could be found. The breeze carried the smell of grilled meat and diesel fumes as a Grady-White cranked to life in its slip. A little further down, smoke curled up the metal lips of a barbecue grill on the deck of 42-foot Viking. A bare-chested man in flip-flops, yellow shorts with images of wide-mouth sharks on them, opened the grill and turned two thick steaks, yellow flames playing tag.

  I walked another hundred feet or so and sat on a wooden bench on the dock under the shade of a tall canary date palm tree. Rain clouds moved in, the temperature dropping. I sipped my coffee, watching three tanned deck hands prep a 75-foot drift-boat, Mojo, for an afternoon of fishing. On the bare back of one crew member was a tattoo of a flying eagle with a fish in its talons. The image covered the man’s back from shoulder to shoulder. The blue and white sign on the railing leading to the boarding dock read: Deep Sea Fishin’ on Mojo – Full and Half Days.

  On the other side of B dock, I could see Rex Nelson’s boat, Wind Dance
r, a Bertram. I watched Rex load bags of cracked ice into one of his large coolers in the cockpit. Then he began cutting bait fish into smaller pieces. Even from the distance, I could tell that Rex’s mind didn’t appear to be in the same boat with him. His shoulders were more rounded, his movements languid. He’d look up, gazing toward the Halifax River leading to Ponce Inlet and the Atlantic Ocean. His face seemed muddled, as if he had a hard time remembering the way to the sea—a watery path he’d taken hundreds of times as a fishing guide.

  A brown pelican flew in and alighted on a wooden dock railing no more than ten feet away from where Rex stood. He looked at the bird and began speaking with him as if he was talking to a person. The pelican cocked its head, shuffling its feet in a quick, two-step dance. Rex followed up by tossing a piece of fish to the pelican, the savvy bird catching the handout in mid-air.

  I thought about something he’d said to his daughter Savannah that day when Wynona and I joined them for coffee. The ocean’s been in your blood since you were in diapers. Follow the call. You want to be a marine biologist … just do it.

  He tossed the pelican another piece of fish, turned and vanished inside his boat like he’d entered a dark cave. A soft rain began to fall. I watched it dimple the surface of the marina water, tapping against the palm fronds next to the bench where I sat. I thought about the young girl I’d managed to save from the pedophile, hoping the emotional damage she suffered would fade in time.

  And then I thought about Timothy Spencer, a wealthy but vengeful man, serving a twenty-year prison sentence, regardless of hiring some of the best lawyers in the country to defend him. And, now, according to Ron Hamilton, Spencer wanted to hire a hitman. Because, despite hiring some of the best lawyers in the nation, I came with solid physical evidence against him that I’d brought to his trial. I was counting down the days until I could take Wynona away from the depravity to an idyllic and blissful island in the ocean—so isolated that, with a bit of luck, the influence of corruption would be minimized. Then I thought of the story behind the demise of Atlantis. I stood from the bench, turned my collar up, and walked in the gentle rain back to the promising sanctity of a voyage on Dragonfly.

  • • •

  Five hours after Dan Grant and Ron Hamilton had questioned more than a dozen additional members of the Atlantis production team, they drank coffee at a back table in a nearby Starbucks, discussing the case. Grant said, “Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the perp had an accomplice … maybe two. The director, Miles Venuti, is so tightly wired it seems like his scalp is about to come off his skull. Sebastian Gunter has a hard time looking us in the eye. And the art director, Jonathan Lloyd, seems to have difficulty separating the fantasy world from the real world. The whole bunch of them smell like something’s rotten, the odor of deceit.”

  Hamilton shook his head in agreement. “And they aren’t even the actors.”

  “Now we have the names of the two other girls cast as mermaids, both given the costumes and both with speaking roles. Nicole Banard lives near Tampa. I’ll have my partner reach out to her. Not that this will happen again, but Nicole needs to be alerted. The other girl, Savannah Nelson, lives nearby. As you know, she was the first to find Michelle Martin’s body on the beach. I’ll speak with Savannah again … get a feel for her thoughts with all this. Maybe she’s decided not to continue with her role in Atlantis. But, according to the assistant director, both girls are supposed to have their scenes shot very soon. The Nelson girl and her father are friends of a guy you may have worked with on the Miami-PD force.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Name’s Sean O’Brien.”

  Hamilton looked up from his coffee cup, a smile working. “Sean, yeah. He left Miami and moved up here some years back, after his wife’s death. Before he left, O’Brien had the highest closure and conviction record in the homicide bureau. To watch him question a suspect was something else … sort of a sixth sense kind of thing, like he could read their perverse minds. However, had he not quit his job … rumor had it that the chief was supposedly going to ask for his resignation.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because, according to some, he crossed the line too often.”

  “You mean a little too much Dirty Harry tactics?”

  “All I’ll say is that he was fair. Never abusive to subjects, but he knew when and how to lay the hammer down if he had to. He was an enigma to the news media, knowing how to work the press when he needed to, ignoring them when he didn’t. But he never sought the limelight. He just got the job done, and quickly … sometimes to the chagrin of the top brass when crooked lawyers filed frivolous lawsuits for criminal clients.”

  Grant blew out a deep breath. “Some of this sounds like he stepped on a few departmental toes when bringing down the bad guys rather than stepping over the line.”

  Hamilton looked at the black coffee in his cup. “It wasn’t just the bad guys, it was the patently evil killers. Sort of like what we’re dealing with in these mermaid murders. O’Brien used to tell me to catch evil you had to go where it existed, and that was to go inside the criminal mind. He’d always volunteer for the cases involving the child killers—the pedophiles. And sometimes he took prisoners. But, I need to add—that isn’t to say he killed unnecessarily. When you deal with society’s most evil, they’re likely to fight to their death rather than be taken in. So, if your death toll is higher than the norm, rumors start and grow on their own. As O’Brien’s partner in his later years on the force, I can attest that there were no unnecessary killings.” Hamilton sipped his coffee.

  “Just last week, O’Brien was in the right place at the right time when he saw an Amber Alert come across his phone. He spotted the perp’s car, called it in, and then followed the guy. He did it well enough that the creep didn’t see O’Brien tracking him down a one-way, isolated backroad to the St. Johns River. O’Brien didn’t wait for backup to arrive. The girl wasn’t hurt. Can’t say the same for the pervert.”

  “But he’s alive, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “O’Brien, I understand, is still working as a PI.”

  “As far as I know, he’s still picking up his cases selectively. O’Brien’s the type who doesn’t interfere with a case, usually, unless it becomes personal or if someone drops it into his lap. Like I say, he’s tight with the Nelson family. We gotta flesh this thing out, make an arrest, before O’Brien feels compelled to work behind the scenes.”

  “Do you think the Nelson family has hired him?”

  “They don’t need to. He’d help them as a favor, if they asked.” Grant finished his coffee. “O’Brien may already be working on the very periphery.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He visited the general area near the crime scene on the beach a few days after all of our CSI people had left, after we’d combed the grains of sand looking for physical evidence.”

  “Did he manage to find something that your guys didn’t?”

  “He didn’t go exactly to where the body was found. He went to the area where Savannah Nelson had told us she’d seen the lone guy early that morning before she saw the body. We’d looked in the area, too. But O’Brien spent more time amongst the sea grapes, finding an abandoned turtle’s nest with a human handprint in the center of the sand, like the guy had fallen, knee prints in the sand, a scuff on the bark of a sea grape tree. There were some boot tracks, too. But we found no matching boot tracks down the beach where the body was left.”

  Grant picked up his phone, thumbing through pictures. “Here … take a look. You can see boot tracks and the handprint. It looks like the impression, from the left hand, may have been missing most of the ring finger.”

  Hamilton studied the image. “But with no matching boot or handprints next to the body, this really means nothing, especially photographed on a beach where lots of people can come and go.”

  “Not exactly so. The ME found a bruise, a handprint, in the blood lividity just
under the skin of Michelle Martin, on her back. And the print appeared to have part of a missing finger.”

  Hamilton nodded. “Why’d O’Brien send these to you?”

  “He saw a TV interview I did and knew I was working the case. I met O’Brien a second time a couple of years ago when a carny traveling with a carnival was murdered in our county. O’Brien’s niece was my initial suspect. It didn’t pan out, though. He was involved with another case I was working a few years before that. I supposed O’Brien sent me these pictures as a FYI courtesy.”

  “Maybe it’ll eventually help us, but right now, my focus is on an unknown subject who I believe is somehow, and in some capacity, working on the movie, Atlantis.”

  Grant sipped his coffee. “I keep thinking about the water samples we found in the lungs of the victims … the matching diatoms found in the water from the lungs of each girl. Who would drown these girls, play dress up, and stage their bodies in a marine-like setting?”

  “As eccentric as these Hollywood people are, I don’t see how they could pull it off. Especially the murder in South Florida … then be back on set, meeting the early production start times and ending the day again late in the evening.”

  Grant’s phone buzzed on the table. He squinted, looking at the caller ID. “It’s the office. I need to take it.” He answered the call and listened for half a minute. “Good, thanks.” He looked up at Hamilton. “We found out that Michelle Martin’s ex-boyfriend, Craig Blake, was in the Miami area right before the body of the second vic was found.”

  “That’s interesting. Just when I was thinking the perp had to be someone in the casting department of the movie, we get this information.”