Damaged

by Alex Kava

  “No, I’m on my way out. I thought you’d be still sleeping.”

  “Here they are,” he said as he pulled out a box. He stood and wiped at his knees while he handed her the box of power bars. “These are supposed to be really good. Lots of protein. They aren’t the cheap ones. Throw a few in your bag. Take the box if you have room.”

  She took the box and watched him stuff the other packages back into the cabinet.

  “You dug through the cabinet just for these?”

  “I know they’ll probably have MREs for you but they get old fast. I bought these last week thinking you’d like them.”

  Liz wondered if he was simply avoiding the subject of last night. Maybe he didn’t remember. She wouldn’t embarrass him.

  “When did you get your car?”

  So he did remember.

  “Last night. Scott took me back to the beach.”

  “Scott?”

  “He was here picking up the generator you loaned him.”

  Walter stared at her. “I know I had a bit to drink yesterday, but I haven’t talked to Scott in over a week.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe he talked to you while you were at the Tiki Bar.”

  “Nope. Had a few drinks with a friend of his from out of town.” He closed the cabinet and started pulling items from the refrigerator. “Nice enough but a strange young fellow. Told me his daddy’s name is Phillip Norris but he calls himself Joe Black. Now why would a boy not use his daddy’s name?”

  “Maybe his mom and dad weren’t married. He told you he’s a friend of Scott’s?”

  “No, not exactly.” He started searching through another cabinet, this time pulling out a small blender. “He said it was nice to be drinking with someone he liked. Said that he’d spent the last two evenings on the beach with a business associate who was a—okay, now this is his word, not mine—he said he was a dickhead funeral director. Doesn’t that sound like Scott? You saw Scott drunk the other night on the beach. It has to be Scott.”

  Liz wondered if Joe Black was the friend of Scott’s who owned the fishing cooler. Didn’t he say it belonged to his friend Joe?

  Her dad was gathering and arranging an array of items on the countertop: a banana, a bottle of honey, a jug of orange juice, and a carton of milk.

  “What are you making here, Dad?”

  “Oh, just something. I’ve got a little bit of a headache.”

  “Like a hangover?”

  He frowned and she let it go.

  “You’re not taking the canteen to the beach today, are you?”

  “Just for an hour or two.”

  “Dad, they’re closing the Bob Sykes Bridge at one.”

  “I’ll be gone by then. Right now there’ll be some hungry people on the beach. And I need to check on some friends.”

  “Promise me you’ll be back here by noon.”

  He nodded. “So I won’t see you until after the storm?”

  “I’ll call and let you know when we get to Jacksonville. We’ll be doing search and rescue until they tell us to get to safety. I’m thinking that’ll be sometime this afternoon.”

  “You be careful. No hotdogging.”

  “You be careful, too, hot-dog man.”

  He smiled and shrugged.

  “I’ll talk to you later.” Liz kissed him on the cheek as he splashed milk and orange juice together into the blender. She thought the concoction actually looked too good to cure a hangover.

  “I can’t believe Scott helped himself to one of my generators without asking.”

  “Sorry, Dad. He made it sound like he’d talked to you.”

  She grabbed the box of power bars, and as she headed out the door she heard her dad say, “He really is a dickhead.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Maggie thought Charlie Wurth was being a bit overprotective. She knew he felt responsible for bringing her to Florida in the middle of the storm, so she wasn’t surprised that all the way out her hotel door and down the hall he ranted about her staying on the beach. In fact, she could hear him still mumbling as he got on the elevator.

  What she wasn’t prepared for was Platt’s reaction.

  “You really can’t stay on the beach,” he told her almost as soon as she closed the door.

  “I’ll be with the United States Coast Guard.”

  He didn’t smile.

  “Really, I’ll be okay,” she said.

  “When the outer bands start, there’ll be torrential downpours, thunderstorms, possibly tornadoes. Have you ever been in a hurricane before?”

  “No, but I’ve been in a tunnel dug under a graveyard with a serial killer.”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “I wasn’t being funny.” She stood back and looked at him. She’d seen his serious side, the concerned doctor watching over his patient. This was something different. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know you can.”

  He let out a deep breath and rubbed at his jaw, an exhausted mannerism Maggie recognized. It only occurred to her now that he may not have gotten as much sleep as she did last night. She’d been surprised, maybe disappointed, to wake up and not find him beside her.

  “I worry about you,” he said.

  She started to smile until she saw the look on his face. This wasn’t an easy admission for him. They teased each other a lot, but this was serious.

  “I really can take care of myself,” she tried again.

  “But somehow you manage to get in the way of suitcase bombs and the Ebola virus. Not to mention serial killers.”

  “You’re the one going off on secret missions to undisclosed locations.” Maggie’s sudden switch in tone surprised her as much as it did Platt.

  This time, however, he smiled and said, “So you worry about me, too?”

  She shrugged then nodded.

  “It’s annoying, isn’t it?” He was back to teasing. A more comfortable place for both of them.

  His phone rang twice and stopped. He glanced down at the number.

  “My ride’s here.” But he didn’t move. “Call me. Or text me. Let me know you’re safe.”

  “Absolutely. You do the same.”

  He picked up his duffel bag and slung it over his shoulder. He started for the door, then without warning he turned back.

  “What the hell,” he mumbled and in three steps he was kissing her, one hand cupping the back of her neck, the other keeping his duffel bag from banging her shoulder. “Make sure you take care of yourself, Maggie O’Dell.”

  She was glad he sounded a little out of breath. As he headed for the door another damned phone started ringing. It was Maggie’s. She wanted to ignore it.

  Platt smiled at her as he closed the door. “You better get that.”

  She was shaking her head then realized she was smiling, too.

  “Maggie O’Dell,” she answered.

  “Yes, Ms. O’Dell, this is Lawrence Piper returning your call.”

  Platt had made her forget her case. It took her a second to remember who Lawrence Piper was and why she had called him.

  “You wanted to know about a delivery,” he prompted.

  How could she play this? She couldn’t very well tell him she’d found his phone number on a label stuck to a cooler full of body parts. Or could she?

  “Concerning Destin on August twenty-fourth,” she said, just as she realized the twenty-fourth was yesterday.

  “I don’t understand. I told Joe we had to cancel Destin because of the hurricane.”

  He sounded like a businessman. She hadn’t had the chance to research Advanced Medical Educational Technology. But there was nothing clandestine or sinister in his tone. The best interrogators Maggie had worked with had taught her that the less the interrogator said, the more the interrogated filled in. She waited.

  “Are you working with Joe?” Piper asked.

  “I’m trying to.” She kept her remarks innocuous.

  Piper laughed and added, “I told him he needed an assistant. Look, Magg
ie—you don’t mind if I call you Maggie.”

  A businessman but also a salesman, Maggie decided.

  “Not at all.”

  “I already told Joe I’d make this cancellation up to him. I’ve got a couple dozen surgeons coming to a conference in Tampa over Labor Day. I’m going to need at least twenty-two cervical spines. I’d prefer brain with skull base intact, if that’s possible.”

  Maggie thought about the body parts found in the cooler, individually wrapped in plastic. Could it be that simple? A body broker making a delivery? From what little she knew, there was nothing illegal about it. Most federal regulations applied only to organs. Few states regulated anything beyond that.

  “I don’t want to lose Joe,” he said when she didn’t respond. Evidently Maggie’s silence was disconcerting to Piper. “Can you tell him that? He hasn’t called and the number I have for him has already been changed. That’s an annoying habit your new boss has.”

  “Yes, I know. He likes to be the one calling.” She wasn’t surprised.

  “It’s tough to find someone with his skill and consistency. Especially someone who delivers and sets up. Can you tell him that?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said.

  As she pressed End, she noticed she had missed a call: Dr. Tomich.

  Brokered body parts. It made sense. And it probably explained the identical cooler Liz Bailey saw outside a funeral home. It didn’t, however, explain Vince Coffland’s disappearance.

  Maggie pressed Return Call.

  “Tomich,” he snapped. His clipped manner made his name sound as if it were a swear word.

  “Dr. Tomich, it’s Maggie O’Dell returning your call.”

  “Ah yes. Agent O’Dell.”

  Before she could tell him that the parts might be brokered, Tomich surprised her by saying, “It appears you were correct.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “After examining the X-rays I discovered a bullet in Mr. Vince Coffland.”

  “Are you certain it wasn’t shrapnel? I think that’s what the metal is in the severed foot.”

  “No, no, no. This is a bullet. I went back and extracted it. Looks like a .22 caliber handgun. The trajectory path would suggest that it entered somewhere below the occipital bone and above the cervical vertebrae.”

  “In other words he was shot in the back of the head.”

  “That would be within the broad range, yes. You understand I am speculating. Without the head and neck I do not have the entrance wound. But from where the bullet was lodged and from the downward path it left in the tissue, I would estimate that the victim may have been bending over when shot.”

  Execution style? Maggie kept the thought to herself as she thanked Dr. Tomich and ended the call.

  The body parts may have actually been meant for one of AMET’s surgical conferences. However, it looked like Piper’s connection, Joe the body broker, might also be a killer.

  CHAPTER 52

  Charlotte Mills packed up the last plastic container and hauled it upstairs. She had secured all her important documents, jewelry, and memorabilia, including photo albums, scrapbooks, and her collection of autographed novels. One container alone held all the newspaper and magazine articles about her husband’s “untimely death,” or as Charlotte called it, his Mafia-style murder.

  The federal government had ruled the plane crash an accident, an unfortunate engine failure on the Lear jet that was supposed to deliver him to Tallahassee so he could testify in front of a grand jury. She had warned George months before that turning state’s evidence could mean his death. But he insisted it was the right thing to do, his penance for helping “the son-of-a-bitch” corrupt politician get elected. As a result, the son of a bitch kept his job.

  That was fifteen years ago and Charlotte Mills had gotten nowhere in her diligent pursuit of the truth. Five years ago she gave up—or at least, that’s what it felt like, when, in fact, she had depleted all of her options. She didn’t want to also deplete her financial resources. George would have been furious with her if she had done that. So finally she accepted the life-insurance money, the policy that George had invested in just months before the grand jury convened.

  She had already quit her job to work full-time investigating George’s murder. It turned out to be way too many wasted hours. When she finally stopped she bought this place on the beach, and now she spent her days walking along the shore collecting shells. And she spent her nights reading all the wonderful novels she hadn’t had time for. It wasn’t a bad life and she wasn’t going to let some hurricane dismantle it.

  Charlotte took a long, hot shower, knowing it might be her last for a week. She put on comfy clothes, tied her short gray hair into a stubby ponytail. She checked her list as she placed new batteries in a variety of flashlights. She filled the bathtub, all the sinks, and the washing machine with water. She stuffed extra bottled water into the freezer. The latter was a small trick she’d learned during the last hurricane threat. It meant having ice to keep things cool and water to drink later.

  With the windows and patio door boarded up the house was dark, reminding her that she’d need to put the candles and matches in a plastic bag and have them somewhere she could grab when the electricity went off. Same for the extra batteries.

  Her master bathroom was the only true inside room and she had set it up as her refuge. The counter was arranged with the necessities: a battery-operated radio, several flashlights, a telephone already plugged into a landline, a cooler filled with sandwiches, her prescription meds, and even a pickax almost too large for her small frame to lift. Everything she would need for a ten- to twelve-hour stay.

  She was on her way back upstairs when a knock at the front door stopped her. The sheriff’s department had come by earlier. Her neighbors had already left. She checked the peephole. Saw the patch on the man’s sleeve and she let out a groan. Was this the county or the federal government’s last-ditch effort?

  “I already told the sheriff’s deputy that I was staying,” she insisted as she opened the door only to the security chain’s length.

  “Hi, Mrs. Mills,” the young man said with a smile. “I met you at Mr. B’s yesterday. Joe. Joe Black.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Walter parked the canteen as close to the marina as possible. That’s where all the action was this morning. They warned him at the tollbooth that the bridge would be closing at one o’clock. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper in the opposite direction. He realized he probably should have stayed home, found something to occupy his time, but he had everything ready and there was only so much you could prepare. He didn’t want to sit at home and wait. There’d be enough waiting while the storm raged on for hours.

  The marina was crowded with last-minute boaters trying to tether their boats—big and small—as best as possible. Some were loading their crafts onto trailers. A few brave souls—or stupid, Walter decided—were venturing out into the swell in an attempt to get their boats out of the storm’s path.

  Tension filled the air along with diesel fumes. Arguments edged close to fistfights. The waiting and watching of the last several days ended with the inevitable realization that Isaac was, indeed, heading directly for them. There was no more predicting. No more hope for a last-minute turn. There was no more escaping. Now it was only a matter of battening down the hatches as best as possible.

  Walter parked in a corner of the marina lot where the boaters could see him and he could chat with them. Howard Johnson, the owner of the marina and a deep-sea fishing shop, had invited Walter to set up here anytime he wanted. In exchange Walter kept a special bottle of cognac so at the end of a hard day he and Howard could sip and share stories.

  Walter decided that today he’d only stay an hour. He’d serve up whatever he had on board for free until the food or the hour ran out.

  At first he didn’t pay attention to the panel van that pulled up next to the sidewalk leading to the docks. He noticed the owner struggling with a huge bag, yanking it out of the van then drag
ging it. Not an unusual scene down here. Walter had seen this type of bag before. Someone had pointed one out, calling it a “tuna bag.” Fishermen used them for the big catches that didn’t fit in a cooler. The bags were tough, huge, waterproof, and insulated. About six feet by three feet it looked like a giant-size tote bag with a washable lining that could be removed.

  Walter thought it was a bit odd that someone would be hauling a fish to his boat. Usually it was the other way around. The guy wore a blue baseball cap, shorts, deck shoes, and a khaki button-down shirt with the tails untucked. Walter caught a glimpse of the chevron patch on the shirt sleeve. What the hell was some navy petty officer doing here in his service uniform, dragging a tuna bag? Then Walter recognized the guy.

  “Hey, Joe.”

  Too much noise. Joe didn’t hear him.

  That bag looked awful heavy.

  Walter glanced around inside the canteen. He hadn’t turned on any appliances yet. He left a tray with hot dogs and condiments out. He’d be right back. Then he locked all the doors and headed over to the sidewalk to help.

  “Hey, Noms.”

  This time Joe looked over his shoulder and did a double take. His face was red and dripping sweat. His eyes darted around the marina like he hadn’t expected to be recognized.

  “Let me give you a hand with that,” Walter said, grabbing one end of the bag.

  “No, that’s okay, Mr. B. I’ve got it.”

  Joe tried to pull away but Walter didn’t surrender his end. Instead, he asked, “You got a boat out here?” He really wanted to ask why Joe was wearing what was probably one of his father’s old shirts. Even his ball cap had the U.S. Navy insignia embroidered on the front. Walter waited till Joe gave up and let him help.

  “Cabin cruiser.” Joe nodded at the boat in the second slip to their right.

  Walter whistled. “She’s a beauty.” He smiled at the name, bold and black, written across the stern: Restless Sole.

  “My dad left it to me. Thought I’d take it over to Biloxi.”