Backwater Cove

by Steven Becker

  “Holy crap, Hunter,” he said. “Get your ass out of there and let Miami-Dade handle it.”

  For once I agreed with him. Normally, I would fight him tooth and nail to remain active in an investigation. There was only one page of the rulebook that I knew. Section 9 Article 2 of the park service manual gave me authority to pursue cases outside of official park boundaries. I had used it more than once, but now the trail back to the park was thin. I promised to leave it to Miami-Dade and that I would be back on patrol in the morning and disconnected.

  The officer working the entrance to the club gave me the once over when I approached the door and it took Grace to get me admitted back into the scene. I took this for a good sign that I would be dismissed. My only regret was leaving things like this with Justine, but as I looked over at the body, she was totally engrossed in helping Sid.

  “I gotta go,” I said to Grace and started for the door, figuring it would be better to call Justine later.

  “Just don’t leave town,” Grace’s attempt at comedy fell flat.

  Fortunately for her, but not so much for me, I heard my name called. We both turned toward the duo working around the dead man. “Hunter, you’d better see this.”

  9

  Suddenly the music and light show stopped and I looked around to see who was calling me. Grace’s partner had arrived. I thought I had dodged that bullet, but he must have caught a ride with another unit.

  “Got the bartender. Thought you cleared the building, Ranger Rick,” her partner said.

  I cringed when I heard him, but let the nickname go. After all, I had taken to calling him Dick Tracy. “I took a quick look around, saw the body, and got Grace.”

  “Not the way we do it. He was out back in the beer cooler.” He said, walking him over to a table, he started questioning him.

  It turned out he was the only employee here this early. There were two girls assigned to work the small private party before opening, who had disappeared. It was just champagne, so he had set up the room and left them to prepare for the regular opening.

  “You got any info on who booked the party? How many, where they were from, who paid— that kind of thing?” Tracy asked.

  “There should be something in the office.”

  We walked together towards a partially concealed door next to a hallway which looked like it led to the dressing rooms. The office was too small for all of us, so we waited outside while the bartender retrieved the information. He came back a minute later with a clipboard. “Name’s Alex. Paid up front. Seductress Charters is the name on the credit card.”

  “Contact information?” Grace asked.

  He wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “What was the name of the boat the girl said they were aboard?” Grace asked.

  “Yeah, she said they lived aboard Spindrift, but the party was aboard Temptress.” I leaned over the small rectangular piece of paper. “

  It had an address at the Miami Beach Marina, a place I was unfortunately too familiar with. I walked over to the VIP room to see how Sid and Justine were doing. What had once appeared to be a strictly Miami-Dade affair had circled back to me.

  “Give us a few more minutes,” Sid said, shooing me out of his way. “Almost done here.”

  He moved around the body, doing whatever Medical Examiners do. Right now he was searching the dead man’s pockets. He fished a wallet out of the front and handed it to Justine. She laid it on the counter next to the receipt and carefully extracted a driver’s license.

  “Jensen Stillhouse,” she said.

  The name didn’t make the man on the floor any less dead.

  “He’s the manager,” the bartender said. He stood in the doorway.

  “We can deal with the rest at the morgue. Let’s get him out of here,” Sid called over to two deputies standing by the door. He must have seen the question on our faces. “He was strangled.”

  “Why all the blood then?”

  His look told me I would have to wait for that answer.

  It took four of us to get the dead man into the body bag and load him onto the gurney. Finally, the deputies wheeled him out and Sid started packing up his equipment. I thought about the last few bodies I had found, glad that this one was not in the park and I wouldn’t have to sit in on the autopsy.

  Once the body was removed, Justine started her real work. She had already chalked the outline of the dead man on the floor. Now she started to move around, taking pictures, and picking up anything that could remotely be considered evidence. With the mess lying around, there was a lot of it. I had to admire her as she worked; besides her efficiency, she moved with a cat-like grace, her body toned by hours of paddleboarding.

  “There’s another one of those VIP rooms back there,” Dick Tracy said. “Really? You want to cuddle at a crime scene, it’s probably open.”

  I ignored him and whispered a quick joke that only Justine could hear at his expense. Whatever tension had been between us earlier was gone. Maybe because Grace had disappeared into the back, but more likely because few things got my girl excited like a dead body.

  “What about security footage?”

  Grace gave me a stone-cold stare. I had received the same from Justine on other occasions when I overstepped my bounds and wondered if they taught it at the Miami-Dade police academy. I stepped back to acknowledge her authority. I had to remember that we were in Miami Beach and not Biscayne National Park, where our roles would have been reversed. This wasn’t our first rodeo and I knew better.

  “You can’t be putting security cameras in a club like this. Clientele sees them, they won’t be back,” the bartender said.

  “You saw the group. Who were they?”

  “Young players would be my guess. This guy Alex books them in here pretty regularly. I think he’s a big shot with the boosters at the U.”

  “Sounds like they were underage,” I said. He dropped his head to the floor.

  “We’re not ABC,” Grace said, glaring at me again.

  “Y’all need to move on,” Justine said. I need to start collecting fingerprints.” She pulled double gloves on before starting. “Can’t be too careful in here.”

  We left her to her work, and went to the bar to plan out next step. We knew where the boat was now, but that became secondary when Grace’s radio went off. The helicopter had found the van.

  10

  With her headphones on, Justine was in her own world, processing the crime scene. I took one more longing look and left with Grace. “I’ll follow you,” I said, before realizing that I had no transportation.

  “Maybe better if you rode along. This is my jurisdiction and I don’t want you going rogue on me,” she said.

  For a second, I was about to look behind me and see if Susan McLeash had somehow slipped in and that was who she was addressing. I had to accept that I had gone slightly beyond my authority before, and as long as I was still involved, it shouldn’t hurt my ego if she was in charge. I went around the car and opened the passenger door. Martinez would certainly approve.

  “Thanks, Ranger Rick,” Grace’s partner said, sliding by me and taking the shotgun seat.

  I took a deep breath and tried not to react to him. To add insult to injury, I pulled the lever for the back door and found it locked. I had to tap on the passenger window to get Dick’s attention before the electronic lock disengaged and I could open it. As Grace pulled away from the curb, I sat behind the steel screen thinking I was being treated like a criminal. Dick was listening to the radio, giving Grace directions from the helicopter pilot’s report. I leaned forward trying to see the screen of the phone. The steel mesh blocked my view and finally, I sat back. Grace had the lights on, but no siren and with traffic pulling over, we easily navigated through the streets of South Beach.

  “It’s moving again,” the pilot’s voice came through the radio.

  I couldn’t help myself and peered through the grill. I knew where the van had stopped. “He just left the marina.�
��

  “Duh.”

  “We need to split up. I can take the marina and you guys follow the van,” I said.

  “Not on your life, Ranger boy. This is our territory.”

  “At least check the marina. We know the boat names. We can check with the dockmaster. Maybe he dropped some of the guys off.”

  “He’s making sense,” Grace said.

  “Yeah well, I’m calling in backup.”

  Dick Tracy got on the radio and called for both boat and vehicle backup. I had to admit serious LEO envy, watching him summon the full power of Miami-Dade. I wasn’t really sure if the park service was asset poor or if it was Martinez juggling the books to make himself look good, but I had to beg for everything and that more often than not involved Miami-Dade.

  Although, the view through the front windshield was obscured, the side windows were clear and I was able to track our progress. Dick Tracy sat in the passenger seat, calling out the turns as we passed the on-ramp for the causeway. When he called out a right turn, I had a moment of deja vu as we entered the Miami Beach Marina. Home port of the Big Bang, the facility and adjacent bar had been the scene of a previous case. Before I could relive the moment when Susan McLeash had shot my primary suspect, the front doors opened and Grace and her partner started toward the dock. I had a moment of panic when I thought the doors were still locked, but the handle opened and I took off after them.

  I knew my way around the marina and cast a glance at the bar, half expecting to see Gordy, the owner of Bottoms Up Boat Cleaning, as we ran toward the docks. Fortunately, the happy-hour crowd was two-deep at the bar and I passed without incident. I followed the Miami-Dade detectives down the seawall and stopped at a small building.

  “I know the dockmaster,” I said, moving to the door.

  “Whatever, Ranger Rick,” Dick Tracey said, removing his badge from his pocket and pushing past me. Justine had given me the nickname out of affection and I cringed again when he used it. We reached the small office and I decided to wait outside and let the detective pull his macho cop act by himself. A minute later, he flashed me a grin as we followed the dockmaster toward the locked gate.

  “The Temptress docks down there,” the teenage boy said, punching a code into the controller to the side of the gate marked Pier 4 in bold letters. “Slip forty-seven.”

  We left him standing there and took off down the dock. As we moved toward the end, the boats became bigger and more expensive. I could only wonder what the party boat looked like. We reached the slip number and stood staring at water. The Temptress was gone.

  Glancing down at the dock, I saw something red and wet. “Over here,” I called to Grace. Seconds later, the three of us were hovering over a trail of blood.

  “Whoever this was, they were moving in the direction of the boat,” Dick Tracy said.

  I looked at the blood and, recalling my training from binge watching CSI, recognized the teardrop shaped droplets and knew he was right. Again, I tried my plea, “We need to split up.” It wasn’t Grace so much as her partner, but I knew I’d be better off on my own. They were homicide detectives; that’s what they did—solve murders. I was more interested in saving the two live girls. The blood was surely evidence, if not a clue, and I texted Justine to come down when she was finished at the club. realizing as soon as I hit send that I should have had Grace request her presence.

  I walked away from the scene just as a Miami-Dade police boat pulled into the marina. Grace flagged them down and a few minutes later, the two detectives were aboard and the boat took off. I wasn’t sure if they were chasing the van or the Temptress; they could be chasing unicorns for all I knew. Glad to be rid of them, I waited until they had rounded the southern point and were out of sight before walking casually down the dock, not realizing when I had passed through the gate, that it had a self-closer. I heard it lock behind me. Before I could think of a story to tell the dockmaster, a woman approached, pushing a wheelbarrow full of provisions.

  I stepped back as she punched a code into the keypad. When she struggled to get the wheelbarrow through the gate, I seized the opportunity. Reaching in front of her, I grabbed the gate, and held it open. She smiled and continued down the dock. I took a quick look around and followed. She stopped next to the vacant slip the Temptress had occupied. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Sure,” she said, boarding a sleek sailboat. “If you help me load.”

  I jumped at the opportunity, assuring myself it was not because of her translucent blue eyes shaded by a white visor, which showed off her blond hair, or her slender body, barely concealed in a tight-fitting tennis outfit. It was because this kind of interaction was much more productive than an interview. She introduced herself as Donna and I grabbed the top box and handed it down to her. It was a slow process, as I could only ask a question every time she came back out for another box. By the time we had finished unloading the provisions, I had a few answers.

  The boat she was provisioning was an eighty-foot luxury sailboat. When I asked about the Temptress, she turned away. I was about to follow up on the questions when I saw Justine coming down the dock. I handed Donna a card and went to the gate to let her in. Together we walked back to the empty slip.

  “What’d you do with Miami-Dade’s finest?” she asked, looking around the empty dock.

  “They’re off chasing the van or the boat. I’m not sure.”

  She laughed. “I heard something on the scanner that it was reported heading toward Key Biscayne. What about their cruiser? It’s still in the parking lot.”

  “They hopped a ride on a police boat.” I said.

  “Probably makes sense. Be faster than driving.”

  The Rickenbacker Causeway connected Key Biscayne with the mainland but, in order to reach it, they would have had to backtrack through downtown, making a large U-turn. While I was figuring drive times, Justine had spotted the blood and placed her case down next to it. She removed some yellow numbers and snapped a few pictures before touching any evidence. “You guys didn’t track through here, did you?”

  Before I could answer her, I saw trouble coming.

  “What happened? You didn’t tell me you were a cop,” the woman from the sailboat said, walking right through the path of blood.

  Justine’s claws came out. She looked up at the woman, but turned to me with a roll of crime scene tape in her hand. I knew what to do, and ushered Donna away from Justine. “Please, ma’am, this is an active crime scene.”

  “What’s this ‘ma’am stuff’? I told you my name was Donna.”

  Justine looked up from the blood and glared at both of us.

  “Okay, Donna. Let’s move over here and let her work.” We moved toward the power pedestal.

  “Crime scene…” Justine scolded. “There’re likely prints there from when they disconnected from the shore services.

  I scolded myself for not thinking about that and started walking Donna back to her boat. “Do you know the people that own the Temptress?” I asked, figuring if I was already in trouble, I might as well get some info out of it.

  “Reese Rosen,” she said bitterly. “Seductress Charters. He owns everything docked on this pier.”

  It added up. “Charters?”

  “Luxury at its finest. All the bells and whistles. My husband and I run them.”

  “So you know where the Temptress is?”

  “Alex is in charge of that group.”

  “Do you have an itinerary and manifest?”

  “You could probably ask my husband. I just stock ‘em and make sure the entertainment’s right.”

  Before I could comment on the “entertainment”, I followed her glance to the gate where a man was struggling to get a hand truck through the narrow opening. He was the size of an offensive lineman and when I held the gate for him, I saw what looked like a championship ring. Seeing him as able to fill the A-gap and screen me from his flirtatious wife and Justine, I followed him to the boat.

  “About time you s
howed. The ranger here has been helping me,” Donna said.

  “Howdy howdy,” he said, easily lifting two cases of beer from the wheelbarrow and crossing nimbly to the boat. “What’s up next door?” he asked, glancing at Justine. “Hey, girl,” he called over.

  I followed his gaze and had a minute of jealousy when I saw him smile. Justine was bent over by the pedestal, dusting for prints. If it wasn’t an awkward situation, I would have smiled, too. “Can you tell me anything about the Temptress?”

  There was a flicker of something in his eyes. “If she got out on time, she’d be clearing International waters about now,” he said, turning back to the boat. “Right, Donna?”

  She turned, grabbed a case of the beer Alex had just brought aboard, and disappeared down the companionway. Alex continued to unload the half dozen cases. There was some urgency in the way they were working and I expected they would be pulling out soon.

  “Got a charter?”

  “Always, dude. Some sail, some motor, whatever works.”

  “Is the Temptress one of yours?”

  “Everything this side of the dock belongs to Mr. Rosen.” He turned back to Donna with the last box and disappeared into the cabin.

  It didn’t seem like I was going to get anything else out of him so I walked back to Justine and watched her work. Asking was probably not going to get me any answers and I thought about the timing.

  “How much longer?”

  Justine looked up at me. “You can’t rush these things.”

  I wasn’t going to push her if she was working. “I’m going to check with the dockmaster about something.”

  “Cool,” she said without looking up.

  I knew she liked to work alone—one of the reasons she worked the night shift. With Justine occupied, and Alex and Donna out of sight, I was happy to walk away. I reached the gate and ran into a girl pushing a cart of dive gear. She wore a full wetsuit, with the top part peeled off revealing a bikini top. My first thought was Abbey, a woman who’s body I had found back in the bay. She had been killed several piers away for uncovering an insurance scam to blow the Big Bang. But this woman had blond hair and was very much alive. We smiled at each other and I continued to the dockmaster’s building, but instead of going in, I walked past it, heading to the bar. The diver had given me an idea.