Damaged

by Alex Kava

  Liz was accustomed to being out in winds like this. She wondered just how used to it Lieutenant Commander Wilson was. He tight-fisted the controls and fought against each gust. It felt like being in a car with the driver constantly accelerating, braking, and accelerating again, combined with an occasional roller-coaster plunge.

  Kesnick looked at her. With his back safely to Wilson and Ellis, he rolled his eyes. She held back a smile.

  From above they watched boaters coming in early, heeding the weather advisories. All the marinas were full, with lines of crafts waiting to tie up. There was no surefire protection outside of pulling your boat out of the water and hauling it as far north as possible. Some people were trying to do that by motoring up rivers and paying to dock their boats in places out of the storm’s path.

  They were seeing an early surge. Waves already pounded seawalls and crashed up the beach, reaching the sand dunes. Surfers dotted in between the waves, bright spots of color bobbing up and down, disappearing and springing back into sight.

  In the helicopter, Liz kept reminding herself to take it all in and remember how everything looked before Isaac hit. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan had decimated the area, ripping apart and chewing up everything in its path. The Florida Panhandle was where pine trees met palm trees, and the national forests that covered acres of land became shredded sticks, many snapped in two. Four-lane highways looked like a monster had taken a bite out of the asphalt, chewed it up, and spit it out. The massive live oaks, hundreds of years old, that lined Santa Rosa Sound were blown over, their tangled roots two stories high.

  Pensacola Beach is about eight miles long and only a quarter mile at its widest, a peninsula with Santa Rosa Sound on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. During Ivan the two bodies of water looked like one, meeting in the middle.

  Liz remembered that it had taken years to sift and separate the debris from the sand. Huge machines had occupied the coastline. Cranes became a part of the skyline. Blue-tarped rooftops were seen in every neighborhood. Hurricanes never discriminated.

  The three-mile I-10 bridge between Escambia County and Santa Rosa County had taken three years to repair. It had been crippling for a community connected by bridges to have all four major ones compromised in some way by the storm’s massive surge.

  Liz hadn’t been here for Ivan, only for the aftermath. She had just finished training in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. For some reason she always regretted missing the actual storm. Silly. Not like she could have made a difference. It was probably some form of survivor’s guilt. Perhaps she would be able to make a difference this time.

  CHAPTER 39

  Walter Bailey decided to close up for the day despite the steady stream of customers. He didn’t like the way the wind had started to rock the canteen back and forth. He’d bought the mobile unit at the navy commissary three years ago, not looking for a business but rather for something to do. He and his wife, Emilie, had looked forward to his early retirement. After all those years of six-month cruises and being apart, the two of them had a long list of plans, things they’d never been able to do between assignments. Emilie died before they’d even gotten started.

  Within the first year of her absence, Walter realized that all his new hobbies seemed to be things other people called addictions. He had to come to terms with the simple fact that nothing would stop the ache. There were certain losses, certain voids that could never be filled with anything other than that which left the void in the first place.

  These days he just wanted to stay busy. That’s where the Coney Island Canteen came in. The mobile canteen had been in sad shape when Walter bought it, weathered and rusted but still in good working condition. He’d scraped and cleaned and polished the stainless-steel inside, painted the outside red, white, and blue, hung curtains with stars and stripes, and named it after one of his favorite boyhood places. It had never been about making money. Instead it was something to occupy his time and keep him company so he wouldn’t think about the void, about that empty hole that was left in his heart.

  “You packing up, Walter?”

  He poked his head out the side door to find Charlotte Mills in her signature floppy hat and cat-eye sunglasses, the hat too big and the glasses too bright for her small, meek features. Her pants legs were rolled up and she wore a long-tailed white cotton shirt over a formfitting tank top. Yellow flip-flops accentuated bright-red toenails. Her pockets bulged with seashells. Before he had gotten to know her, he’d called her the beachcombing widow—but only in his mind.

  “I have a couple of dogs still warm if you’re interested.”

  “Only if you have time. Everyone seems in a hurry today.”

  “Aren’t you packing up?”

  “Humph.” She waved a birdlike hand at him. “I’ve gone through worse than what’s coming. Last time I left, they wouldn’t let us back on the beach for weeks.”

  “If I remember correctly, the bridge was out.”

  “Or so they said.”

  Years ago Charlotte’s husband was killed in a plane crash, just days before he was to testify in a federal investigation against a state senator. There was never any evidence that the crash had been anything more than an unfortunate accident, but Charlotte believed otherwise. Walter wondered if she had always been prone to conspiracy theories because she saw them everywhere now.

  “This storm’s gonna be bad.” Walter had slid the window back open and started pulling out condiments to prepare her hot dog. He decided to fix himself one and join her. “If you need a place to stay, you’re welcome to come to my house. I’m well above the floodplain and about a quarter mile from Escambia Bay. It’ll just be me, my daughter, and maybe my son-in-law.”

  “That’s so sweet, Walter. But no, I’m staying. Already got the plywood up. Plenty of batteries and the generator’s ready to go in the garage.”

  “Now, Charlotte, remember how Ivan shoved water and sand right through most of these beach houses?”

  “Mine’s cinder block. It made it through Ivan, I’m sure it’ll make it through this.”

  “Hey, Mr. B.”

  “Well, if it isn’t Phillip Norris’s son.”

  Walter almost regretted remembering the name of the young man’s father. The look on Norris’s face was a combination of shock and embarrassment. It was obvious he hadn’t wanted Walter to remember.

  He introduced Charlotte, giving the young man the opportunity to introduce himself only if he chose to. Walter was pleased, but surprised, when Norris held out his hand and told her, “I’m Joe Black.”

  “I was just trying to convince Charlotte that she needed to leave the beach during the storm.”

  “I have a nice, solid, two-story cinder-block house, one lot back from the water. I’ll be fine.”

  “People disappear during hurricanes,” Joe said, and both Walter and Charlotte stared at him, startled at his bluntness. “There were more than three hundred people who went missing after Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, Texas. I’m just saying it happens. You really might want to reconsider.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Maggie spent the rest of the afternoon back in her hotel room. Outside, the parking lots were filled with people packing up their belongings and getting ready to evacuate the beach. Most of the businesses were closed, the owners starting to board up windows and doors. However, surfers were still riding the waves. Some of the restaurants remained open. The Tiki Bar had a huge sign out front offering free drinks till they ran out.

  The hotel manager had told Maggie he’d stay until the authorities closed the bridge. Maggie and Wurth were welcome to stay until then. Almost all of the other guests had checked out. Maggie suspected, from the absolute quiet, that she was the only one on her entire floor.

  Sheriff Clayton had been gracious enough to drive her back to Pensacola Beach after the autopsy.

  “Sorry, I can’t be of much help,” the sheriff had told her. “I’ll contact Vince Coffland’s next of kin. But anything else will have to wait un
til after the storm.”

  Maggie asked him to give her cell-phone number to Coffland’s widow. If she wanted to talk about the details of her husband’s disappearance, Maggie would be interested in listening. Clayton agreed.

  Now, as she sipped a Diet Pepsi and waited for her laptop to boot up, she kept glancing at her cell phone. No calls. No messages … from anyone. She had the TV turned on to the Weather Channel but muted. Every once in a while she glanced at the onscreen graphics of Isaac’s progression. She noticed one of the weather reporters, handsome, shaved head, nice legs, standing in front of the Gulf with its emerald-green rolling waves. She read the crawl: JIM CANTORE REPORTING FROM PENSACOLA.

  “Oh Charlie, he’s here.” She smiled as she started jotting down things she wanted to remember.

  Clayton had been correct about the severed hands and the fingerprints. None on file. They would need to wait for DNA to see if any of the hands belonged to Vince Coffland. A simple blood test had already found the foot to be someone else’s. Vince Coffland was type B. The foot’s blood was type O.

  On the hotel notepad she wrote:

  Coffland disappeared July 10

  Port St. Lucie over 600 miles (land miles) away

  Foot: metal debris; belonged to a 2nd victim

  Plastic: heavy ply (commercial use?)

  Fishing cooler: Why?

  Tie-down: man-made synthetic rope, blue and yellow fibers

  Had the foot belonged to Vince Coffland, Maggie was ready with an explanation. She’d heard of storm victims—victims exposed out in the open—sometimes ending up with an odd assortment of items like pieces of insulation, asbestos, vinyl siding, and glass embedded in their skin.

  She’d asked Dr. Tomich if she could borrow one of the pieces of metal. Now she fingered it, still encased inside its plastic bag. She set it on the desktop in front of her. It was definitely metal, bent and distorted. But where did it come from?

  Perhaps the metal was something that had gotten ripped apart during the hurricane-force winds. If the foot didn’t belong to Coffland, was it possible it belonged to another person who had gone missing during Hurricane Gaston?

  She added to her list:

  Check other victims missing after HG

  Maggie had handed over to Sheriff Clayton the label—or what she suspected was a label—that she found inside the cooler. However, she had memorized the faded printing and written it down exactly as it had appeared. She pulled out her copy and laid it on the desk beside the metal fragment.

  AMET

  DESTIN: 082409

  #8509000029

  She believed the second line was “destination” and a date, 082409, which translated to August 24, 2009. She had no idea what AMET was. Probably an acronym but for what? The last line might be a serial number. It didn’t, however, match the defibrillator.

  Maggie glanced at the television and the map that Jim Cantore was showing of the Florida Panhandle. Then she did a double take. Off to the right side of Pensacola was Destin, Florida. Was it possible the second line of the label wasn’t meant to be an abbreviation for destination, but rather Destin, Florida?

  She twisted the hotel phone so she could see the instructions on its face as well as the hotel’s phone number. Sure enough, 850 was the area code. The third line wasn’t a serial number but a phone number.

  What would it hurt to try? She tapped the number into her smartphone, pressed Call, and waited. It was ringing on the other end. Her mind kicked over to interrogation mode. She slowed her breathing, wiped her sweaty palm, and transferred the phone to her other hand. Three rings. Was the person on the other end expecting one of the packages from the cooler?

  A woman’s voice answered. “Advanced Medical Educational Technology, how may I direct your call?”

  Maggie’s eyes darted to the piece of paper. AMET.

  “Yes, I’d like to speak with someone about a delivery.”

  “You have a delivery for us? Is it for one of our conferences?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “That would be Lawrence Piper. He’s off-site today. Can I have him return your call?”

  Maggie gave the woman her name and phone number. Before she could hang up, her phone was already beeping with an incoming call.

  “This is Maggie O’Dell.”

  “Hey, it’s Tully. I think I finally found your rope.”

  “What is it?”

  “High-tenacity rope, UV resistant, anti–chemical erosion, modified resin coating.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re able to tell all that from my photos?”

  “The weave is unique. I scanned in a couple of your close-ups and got a hit.”

  Maggie had hoped the rope would lead them to the killer.

  “So you found the manufacturer?”

  “Ningbosa Material Company. They specialize in bulletproof plate, cut-resistant fabric, all kinds of good stuff.”

  “Are they somewhere close by?”

  “Zhejiang, China.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not sure I pronounced that correctly. My Chinese needs work.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Everything’s made in China these days, right?”

  “There’s more. This color combination is a special order.”

  “Excellent. So who’s the customer?”

  “The United States Navy.”

  Before Maggie could respond her phone was beeping again. Could it be Lawrence Piper already returning her call? “I’ve got another call coming in,” she told Tully. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “Thanks.” She clicked over. “Maggie O’Dell.”

  “Now that’s music to my ears.”

  “Colonel Benjamin Platt.” She tried to keep the smile from her voice. She hadn’t talked to him for several days and whether she wanted to admit it to him or to herself, she missed him. “How goes your secret mission?”

  “I’m being sent home. Can I buy you dinner tomorrow night?”

  “I’m not home and I won’t be for several days.”

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed. Disappointed and tired.

  “Long story. I ended up on a road trip to Pensacola, Florida, with Charlie Wurth. Now I’m stuck here because of the hurricane.”

  “You’re kidding? Where are you right now?”

  “The Hilton on the beach. I’m looking out at the emerald-green waters of the Gulf as we speak. It’s absolutely beautiful. Hard to imagine a hurricane is on its way.”

  “Go out on your balcony.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What floor are you on?”

  “Platt, I swear if you ask me what I’m wearing, I’m hanging up.”

  “Just go out on your balcony.”

  Maggie hesitated. The balcony door was open. She had wanted to listen to the sound of the waves. She walked out onto the small balcony.

  “Now look down on the beach,” Platt told her.

  There he was waving up at her.

  “Buy you a drink at the Tiki Bar,” he said.

  CHAPTER 41

  “Did I tell you how good it is to see you?” Platt asked Maggie.

  “Three times.”

  But she smiled when she said it, so he figured he must not sound as high-school annoying as he thought he did. She wore a yellow knit top that brought out the gold flecks in her brown eyes. And she was wearing shorts—real shorts, not the baggy athletic ones she wore on game day. And flip-flops. She never wore open-toed shoes. The whole package was distracting as hell.

  They’d snagged a table looking out at the Gulf. Platt had been told that most of the tourists had left Pensacola Beach, but the restaurants and bars—the ones that were still open—were crowded with residents, tired from packing all day.

  The Tiki Bar offered free drinks. Their waitress told them they could still order appetizers if they didn’t mind an assortment chosen by the cook. In other words, whatever was left. When she delivered the platter, Maggie and Platt loo
ked at each other like they had hit the jackpot: wild-mushroom spring rolls, grilled prawns with salsa, pineapple-glazed pork ribs. His mouth started watering from the aromas alone.

  “You still can’t tell me about your secret mission, can you?” Maggie asked him after devouring a spring roll.

  “Probably not. It doesn’t matter.” He wiped the glaze from his chin, sat back, and sipped a mai tai. It was his second and the rum had begun to relax him, except that he couldn’t shake Ganz’s abrupt shift in attitude. His finger tapped at the yellow paper umbrella and bobbed the slice of lime poked at the end. “I gave them my opinion. They didn’t like it and they sent me home.”

  “Hmmm.” Maggie picked up one of the prawns. “Sounds like a government assignment. Was it one of the military bases here?”

  “How do you do that?” he said before he realized that he had just admitted she was correct.

  “Look, you really don’t need to tell me. I’m okay with that.”

  “What about your case?”

  “Coast Guard found a fishing cooler in the Gulf.”

  “With a body inside?”

  She nodded with a mouthful. They were across the table from each other but close enough that Platt reached over and dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

  “Sorry,” she said, grabbing her own napkin and wiping both corners now. He immediately regretted what had been an instinctive gesture. “Pieces of at least one victim. A man who disappeared after Hurricane Gaston.”

  “Gaston? I thought that one hit on the Atlantic side.”

  “It did.”

  “You think you might have a killer who preys on hurricane victims?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. People go missing.”

  “There is a lot of chaos and now you’re stuck here to experience it.”

  She shrugged. “You must know by now that you are, too.”

  “I was offered a ride to Jacksonville on a C-130.”