The Blood-Dimmed Tide (John Joran Mysteries Book 22)

by Michael Lister

  “Did a little research when I saw his name on the witness list,” she says. “Had Merrill look into him.”

  Merrill Monroe, a private security consultant and my best friend since childhood, has been serving as a sort of unofficial defense investigator for our shoestring-budget operation.

  “When we found out he works at the Oasis Iguessed at what they were calling him for,” she says. “I prepared for other possibilities also—tried to be ready for anything. Got lucky.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with what you did today. Brilliance. Skill. Poise. Intelligence. Experience. Compassion. I could go on and on—and none of it would involve luck.”

  “Well, thank you. You are as biased as you are kind. But . . . are you okay? Your words and your demeanor aren’t exactly lining up.”

  “It was hard to hear,” I say. “All of it. Takes a toll. I’m just drained.”

  “I’m sorry. I knew it would be. It’s so hard to sit there unable to say or do anything while you’re being talked about in horrible ways like you’re not even in the room.”

  As we reach the outskirts of our small town, the piles of debris on the sides of the roads change from just trees and limbs to trees and limbs and shingles and tin and siding and appliances and furniture and clothes, as if a bomb exploded in a heavily populated area.

  Beyond the piles of wet and battered trash, the hobbled houses still remaining are plywood patched and blue roofed with heavy tarps, the edges of which flap in the breeze.

  “And the truth is . . . I feel guilty. I’m physically ill with it.”

  She starts to say something but then stops, allowing me the opportunity instead to say whatever else I need to.

  “He may have been wrong about what he testified to, may not have seen me on the night he thought he did, but—”

  “I don’t think he saw you at all,” she says. “I think he got that info from Janna and said he saw it because otherwise it’d be hearsay and inadmissible.”

  “Really?”

  “Merrill found evidence he was somewhere else that night, but since we didn’t need it and it would just complicate things I didn’t use it.”

  “That makes everything you did even more impressive,” I say. “Shows such wisdom and good judgment too. It’s no wonder I’m so over the moon for you.”

  “And I, you, but get back to what you were saying before.”

  “Just that even though he didn’t see me the night he thought he did—”

  “Or at all.”

  “—or at all, he was right about what he said. I did drink the night before the shooting.”

  She nods. “I know you didn’t drink much that weekend,” she says. “It was pretty packed with nonstop kids and family activities. But I figured you did that Sunday night.”

  Somehow it’s comforting that she knows—has known all along.

  I reach over and take her hand.

  Suddenly I feel less alone and isolated than moments before.

  “Are you saying you were impaired on Monday morning when you reached the school?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t think I was, but . . . what if I’m wrong?”

  “Mind if I just ask you a few questions about it?” she says.

  “Not at all.”

  “Did you wake up hungover that Monday morning?”

  “I’m just not sure. Maybe. A little.”

  “Did you drink any that morning?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “Did you get up and drink any after we went to bed Sunday night?”

  I shake my head again. “No, I didn’t.”

  “So you drank some between, what—ten and midnight Sunday night? And you think you might have been a little hungover Monday morning or in some way impacted by the time you got to the school some nine hours after your last drink?”

  “I’m afraid I might have been.”

  “The evidence that shows Derek was firing at you is incontrovertible,” she says. “Agree?”

  I nod.

  “Would you be dead instead of Derek if you hadn’t reacted?”

  “At least injured. Possibly dead.”

  “But because you responded the way you did, you’re alive today. Is there anything—anything at all—in your response time that would indicate you were impaired in any way?”

  I can’t help but smile. It’s a smile that’s more of an inappropriate grin given the gravity of our topic of conversation. “My wife,” I say. “The brilliant defense attorney. With just a few quick questions you convinced the judge, jury, and executioner inside my head.”

  “Only because of the answers to the questions,” she says. “Only because of the truth that you weren’t impaired in any way that morning.”

  16

  Inspired by Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan in the book of Luke in the Christian Bible, Samaritan’s Purse teams have been working in crisis areas around the world for over forty years. A nondenominational evangelical Christian organization, this kind of first responder ministry team uses volunteers to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people dealing with war, poverty, natural disasters, disease, and famine.

  Since shortly after Hurricane Michael moved out of the area it left so devastated, Samaritan’s Purse has been set up in the front yard and grass and dirt parking lot of First Baptist Church on Main Street, working tirelessly to help relieve the suffering of those hit hardest by the storm.

  Parked parallel to Main Street, the black Samaritan’s Purse semi-tractor-trailer with its huge logo filling the side lets people in town know who all the orange-shirted volunteers represent. Beyond the eighteen wheeler, a fleet of rented orange and white U-Haul trucks filled with supplies and tools and tarps sit ready to carry the small volunteer teams in various directions each morning, alongside other trucks, trailers, tractors, campers, and tents—and in and among and around them all are the mostly middle-aged white men and women who seem to be in perpetual motion.

  “That’s the second one,” Rob Mills is saying. “Something’s going on. We go into some truly dangerous places all around the world and we rarely ever have anything like this happen.”

  He’s the volunteer coordinator for the operation here and is telling me how he’s had another volunteer go missing.

  We are standing at the corner of East Church and Main. Behind him the all-white church rises up into the soft late-afternoon sky. Like nearly all the churches in the area, First Baptist suffered damage from Michael. Unlike many of the churches in the area—particularly Panama City, Mexico Beach, and Port St. Joe—this one is still standing. The landscape is littered with steeples—many of them partially buried in the rainwater-softened ground they impaled when they were ripped off and flung by the 200-mile-per-hour gusts.

  The first Samaritan’s Purse volunteer to disappear was a white woman in her mid-fifties from Nashville. She went missing on the first night the initial team arrived, just two days after the storm. Her name is Betty Dorsey, and she left the camper she was staying in next to the church to grab her phone charger out of her car in the middle of the night or early morning hours and was never seen again.

  “We’re going to be here into next year,” Rob is saying. “That means a lot of volunteers rotating in and out. If it’s this unsafe we’ve got to warn them and take additional precautions and safety measures.”

  The night that Betty Dorsey disappeared, the electricity was still off, the storm-stunned town still in shock shrouded in darkness. The most recent missing person, Rick Urich, is an early forties black man from Indiana.

  “When was Rick last seen?” I ask.

  “This morning,” he says. “He left his tent to go take a shower at the crack of dawn. He’s the early riser of our group. Always gets up first. Always gets the coffee going. Always exercises, showers, and has his quiet time first. Usually by the time most of us are stumbling out of our campers and tents, he is sitting on the front steps of the church drinking his coffee and doing his m
orning devotional. And the thing is, Rick is built. He works out and does circuit training every morning. He looks more like a professional athlete than a cell phone salesman. He wouldn’t’ve gone quietly. He would’ve fought. It would’ve been loud and violent, and yet no one saw or even heard anything.”

  He looks over toward the sanctuary and I follow his gaze.

  I’m not sure how old the new section of the Baptist church is. It has been here as long as I can remember. But the truly old section behind it, the one that used to be the sanctuary and is now offices and Sunday school rooms, came all the way from Buck Horn or Blue Gator way, way back, and was rolled the several-mile trip on massive logs cut down for that purpose. Given its connection to the history of our town, I’m extremely grateful it survived Michael’s assault.

  “How do you know what time it was he disappeared this morning?”

  “The guy he shares a tent with, Derry Cerrone, stirred as Rick unzipped the tent and asked him what time it was.”

  “What time was it?”

  “Four-forty-three. We found where Rick had started making coffee in the gym’s kitchen—the coffee canister, filters, and bottles of water were on the counter next to the maker, but that was as far as he got.”

  “And y’all’ve done a full search of the facilities?” I say. “Made sure he didn’t have a heart attack in one of the bathrooms or classrooms or something?”

  “We certainly looked for him,” he says. “But I can’t be sure we searched every possible place. But . . . there are people everywhere around here. As you can see. How could someone snatch a big, strong young man like Rick in the first place—let alone not be seen or heard doing it?”

  A deputy had responded this morning and taken the initial report, but she’s one of our most lazy and sloppy officers and she wasn’t here long enough to have done a proper search.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s quietly organize a small group to search the entire area. I need a picture of Rick and I’d like to talk to Derry Cerrone.”

  While the small group of trusted volunteers headed up by Raymond Blunt and Phillip Dean, searches the obvious and larger places, Derry Cerrone and I look in the smaller, less obvious places.

  Mechanical and storage closets.

  Kitchen cabinets.

  Camper and truck and trailer storage compartments.

  “Rick would have to be chopped up into pieces to fit in some of these places,” Derry says.

  He’s a late-twenties white man with bad skin, hair that looks like he cut it himself, and anger issues. He seems nothing like the other volunteers and I wonder why he’s here.

  He adds, “We looking for Rick, or his remains?”

  “We’re looking everywhere for everything—hoping to find clues or evidence or the missing persons themselves.”

  “There’s more than one?” he asks.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask.

  “Since the beginning,”

  “And you haven’t heard about Betty Dorsey?”

  “Oh, forgot about her. Guess I figured she probably just decided to go home. This isn’t for everyone. Lot harder than it looks. Helping people is hard. Dealing with people is hard.”

  “Wonder if Samaritan’s Purse ever considered using that as a slogan instead of ‘Helping in Jesus’s Name’?”

  “It’d be more honest,” he says.

  “What made you become a Samaritan’s Purse volunteer?” I ask.

  “Honestly . . . my dad’s a big donor . . . and . . . if I want him to keep donating to me, I have to keep him happy. This is one of the ways I do it.”

  17

  “I’ll post a patrol car here,” Reggie is saying. “All night every night and as many hours during the day as I can spare—especially early mornings and late afternoons.”

  She and I are across Main Street from the church, leaning against her vehicle, looking over at all the activity.

  “Lot of people,” she says. “Need to keep a closer eye on them. And not just because of the two that have gone missing . . . but because whatever happened to them could’ve been done by another one of the volunteers.”

  “True,” I say. “Would make sense if it was someone who knew their schedules or could just blend in while waiting for one of them to stray away from the herd.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “someone from outside of the group would have to stand around for hours hoping for an opportunity.”

  “Doesn’t mean they didn’t, but it’d be far more difficult.”

  “Are you thinking their disappearances are related?” she asks. “I mean, they’re so, so different from each other. I can’t see a single thing they have in common but being a volunteer here—and all that does is puts them in the same vicinity. It doesn’t change the fact that they’d never fit the same victim profile.”

  I shrug. “I’m not sure what to think,” I say. “They are way, way too different to be part of a type and yet being taken from the same place under similar circumstances would seem to connect them. I just don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do know,” she says. “Our little area has been infiltrated by criminals. We’ve seen such a spike in crime of all kinds. Theft, rape, assault, battery, fraud. It’s certainly possible that their disappearances are unrelated.”

  “I just feel like we’ve got too many missing persons cases for some or most of them not to be connected. Especially the ones who were seen alive after the storm. I’ve started digging into them and the deaths we’ve had—suspicious or otherwise—but I’m having to work through them mostly at night, so it’s going slow. But if it’s okay with you I’d like to continue that, dig even deeper.”

  “Of course,” she says. “Hell, you’ve been doing it on your own time. What could I say? But it’s very respectful of you to ask. Just do what you can. Let me know if you need help with some of the legwork and I’ll get it for you.”

  Betty Dorsey and some of the other missing persons cases belong to other detectives, and while I don’t want to take them away from them or even appear to, I do want to look at them all for connections and patterns we may be missing.

  “You mind just letting all the other investigations proceed as they are?” I ask. “Don’t even mention that I’m looking at them? I’ll just work in the background as I have time.”

  “Perfect. Everyone is stretched so thin right now they wouldn’t care anyway, but I won’t say anything. Most of my investigators are still functioning more as deputies than anything else. And I feel bad that you’re having to do anything but deal with the trial, but . . . given the state of our world right now and the potential of a . . . of some kind of link between some of them . . . I really need your help. How’d it go today, by the way? Meant to ask earlier.”

  “Are Merrick and his kids staying with you?” I ask.

  She looks surprised and confused at the question but can’t help smiling some at the mention of his name.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “He looked extra tired in court today. I wondered if you kept him up all night.”

  “Actually, tonight is the first night they’re staying.”

  “He wasn’t the only person we know well in attendance,” I say. “Randa kept her word and showed up today.”

  “I wish I knew what she was up to,” she says.

  “She may not even know,” I say. “And it’s at least possible that she’s not up to anything . . . yet. Just observing, waiting, enjoying her freedom. It’s interesting to see the lengths Merrick goes to just to avoid having to interact with her.”

  “Can’t blame him,” she says. “Only interaction I want to have with her is my fist with her face.”

  It’s an odd comment to hear from an adult—especially one in Reggie’s position—but she means it. She’d pummel Randa given the chance. And she’d enjoy it. A seasoned barroom brawler and all around tough mujer, my money would be on Reggie regardless of who she was fighting, but against someone like Randa it’d be a massacre.

>   I’m about to tell her she might yet get that chance when Raymond Blunt and Rob Mills emerge from behind the Samaritan’s Purse semi, cross Main, and rush toward us.

  “We found him,” Rob says.

  As if not to be outdone, Ray yells, “Rick. He’s back. He’s okay. He was just . . . helping someone.”

  When the two men reach us they breathlessly trip over each other trying to be the first to tell us the news.

  Thankfully, Rick Urich joins us a few moments later.

  “Sorry for the scare,” he says. “I sure didn’t mean to put anybody out. Didn’t intend to stay as long as I did. A guy came by this morning before anybody else was up and asked for help. His elderly parents were stuck in their home because fallen trees blocked their driveway. He said he had a tractor and chains and saws and just needed a little help. I figured I’d be back before anyone else was up, but either way I was going to call Rob a little later when I knew Rob would be up—but I had no signal and then my phone died. And then we bogged down his truck and trailer and it took us all day to get them out and clear his parents’ drive. Again, I apologize.”

  “No need to,” Reggie says. “We’re just glad you’re okay. And we appreciate what you were doing.”

  “Next time just wake someone up,” Rob says. “And always go out as a team. That’s how we do things.”

  “Got caught up,” Rick says. “It won’t happen again.”

  We talk for a few more moments about Rick’s adventures and the communications challenges facing us in this new post-apocalyptic landscape, and Rick and Rob drift back across the street to join the other Good Samaritans.

  “I had a case like this once,” Ray says, “and I’ll tell you—”

  “Where is Phillip?” Reggie asks.

  He shrugs. “Probably still over talkin’ to some Samaritans.”

  “I doubt he’s talking,” I say.

  “Well, yeah,” he says with a laugh. “Listening or observing. Whatever the hell he does. He’s bad to just disappear, just sort of quietly wander off. Anyway, this case I had—”