Collateral Damage

by H. Terrell Griffin

  He signaled for the waitress, paid his bill, and walked toward the entrance. He’d stop on his way home for a late-night burger and fries, maybe a milk shake. He hadn’t eaten since lunch and even the little booze he’d consumed was taking a toll on his stomach. A little grease would be helpful.

  As he walked toward the door, he was thinking about the next seventy years. He came from a long-lived family, so it was probable that he would live to see ninety. Maybe beyond that. He had a lot of life before him and he’d made up his mind. He’d talk to his father and then set out in the direction he wanted for himself. One that would take him happily through all the coming decades.

  When the young man stepped out into the July night, he had less than two minutes to live.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Torpor. Malaise. Lethargy. These are descriptions that fit the year-rounders when the dog days of August approach and the heat and humidity hang so heavy over our island that their weight drives us to the ground, turning us into whining creatures who scurry like spider crabs from our air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned markets or restaurants or bars and back again. The key is sparsely populated, with even some of the full-time residents fleeing to cooler climes in northern states or the mountains of the Midsouth. It is a time when few tourists visit our island and those who do are other Floridians who trade the heat of the interior for the anemic breezes that blow from the Gulf of Mexico. It is a time when listlessness stalks the island, when we fall into a kind of stupor that is interrupted only by our need for cold beer and whiskey and boozy comradeship with our fellow sun dwellers, those souls who gladly trade the blissful Florida winters for the harsh summers that drive less hardy mortals into cooler venues to the north.

  August had crept up on me with little fanfare. Another month gone, a little closer to mid-October when our weather usually turns gorgeous for its seven month run up to the heat of the summer that comes early in our latitudes.

  So, on the first day of August, I drove the Explorer north across the Longboat Pass Bridge onto Anna Maria Island, through the towns of Bradenton Beach and Holmes Beach and into the village of Anna Maria City that perches on the northern end of the seven-mile-long island. The bed and breakfast was a large and rambling Key West-style home that boasted five bedrooms, each with a private bath. It sat on the tip of the island with views over Passage Key Inlet to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and Egmont Key. A thin beach separated the water from the grass lawn behind the little inn.

  A small brass sign on the front door invited me in. I walked into a large foyer with hardwood floors and a staircase ascending to the second floor. A desk sitting near the stairs held a computer and a small bell. A sign welcomed me to the Anna Maria Inn and suggested I ring the bell for service.

  A woman came from the back in response to the bell. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Jeanette Deen. You must be Mr. Royal. Right on time. Detective Duncan said you’d be by this morning.”

  I’d read the transcript of the statement a young police officer had taken from Jeanette Deen. I knew she was in her mid-sixties and had bought the Anna Maria Inn with her husband about ten years before when she had retired as principal of an elementary school over in the middle of the state.

  The woman standing before me looked to be late forties, perhaps early fifties if you wanted to stretch it. She was trim and fit, her dark hair showing only a few strands of gray. She was smiling and I could see the reflection of the beauty she must have been in her youth. She was still beautiful, but in a more restrained and refined way. She had aged gracefully and because of good genes or good living or both had retained much of her youth far beyond the age when most of us begin to wrinkle and sag.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Deen,” I said. “I appreciate your taking the time to speak to me.”

  “Please call me Jeanette, Mr. Royal. I hope I can be of some help. It was truly tragic what happened to that young woman. Come on back to the kitchen. I’ve got fresh coffee brewing.”

  I followed her to the back of the house and sat at a table in a dining nook that was surrounded by glass, giving me the benefit of the view up Tampa Bay to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. She poured coffee for both of us and took a seat across from me. “How can I help you, Mr. Royal?”

  “Please call me Matt, Jeanette. I’m a lawyer and I represent a man whose son was killed on the beach on Longboat Key back in June, the same day as the murders on the Dulcimer. We think there may be a connection between the two events.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “There hasn’t been any press on it. We’re not even sure there is a connection, but we’re trying to find out.”

  “Who is ‘we’ if I might ask?”

  “I’m working closely with Chief Bill Lester and Detective J. D. Duncan of the Longboat Key police. Our interests are the same. We’re trying to find out who committed the murders.”

  “How can I help?”

  “What can you tell me about Katherine Brewster?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. She’d only been here for a couple of days when she died. I suggested she take the Dulcimer cruise that evening. She had a gift certificate for dinner on the boat, but I don’t know if she intended to use it. Maybe if I hadn’t suggested she go, she’d still be alive.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Oh, I don’t. I understand that things happen. If I hadn’t suggested she go on the boat that evening, she might have been killed crossing Cortez Road or on the trip back to Charlotte. There’s no way of telling, so I know intellectually that I wasn’t the cause of her death. But one does wonder at the vagaries of life, doesn’t one?”

  “One does. I’m convinced that life is a series of random events that somehow come together in some sequence that is beyond our understanding. That sequence, when it becomes a whole timeline, is what we call our lives. It may be fate or the result of a higher intelligence or God. I don’t know, but it’s there.”

  “Oh, I think God has a hand in it. I’m not sure just how, but then that’s part of the eternal mystery, isn’t it?”

  I smiled. “It is a mystery, and for some of us it works out very well and that’s what we call happiness.”

  She smiled. “You’re a philosopher, Matt.”

  “Right.” I laughed. “Do you know how she chose your place for her stay, or for that matter, how she chose Anna Maria?”

  “That’s easy. She was given a gift certificate for a week’s stay here at my inn. She said she had been asked to bartend at a function in Charlotte, some charity event, and a few days later, she got the certificate in the mail along with a thank-you note signed by the chairman of the event.”

  “Was the gift certificate one you issued?”

  “Yes.”

  “To whom?”

  “To a travel agency in Charlotte.”

  “Was this unusual?”

  “Not really. Sometimes an agency somewhere requests one. They pay me with a credit card less their commission and I send it to them. It’s blank, so they can put whatever name they want to on the certificate.”

  “Would you have a record of the one used by Katherine Brewster?”

  “I’m sure I do. It’ll be in my computer.”

  I followed her back out to the foyer. She sat at the desk and clicked at the keyboard for a few seconds. “Here it is. Each certificate is numbered and the one that Katherine used was issued by me to the EZGo Travel Agency in Charlotte on May fifteenth of this year.”

  “Have you sent them other certificates?”

  “I don’t think so.” She went back to the keyboard. “No. That’s the only one.”

  “Can you check to see how it was paid for?”

  A few more clicks. “A credit card. Would you like the number?”

  “I would.” I thanked her for the coffee and the information and left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was nearing noon as I crossed the Longboat Pass Bridge. I’d planned to meet Jock
at Moore’s Stone Crab Restaurant for lunch. Logan had a morning doctor’s appointment and then was going to meet Marie for lunch in downtown Sarasota. J.D. was lunching with the chief to bring him up to date on our evolving views of the cases.

  I was a few minutes early, so I swung by my house. I wanted to call EZGo Travel. I dialed information and asked for the Charlotte number. There was no listing. I thought that strange, but then figured it was probably in one of the suburbs. I went to my computer and Googled EZGo. Nothing. Nowhere in the entire country. I went to the North Carolina public records. No listing for a corporation or a fictitious name filing for EZGo. Some of the Charlotte suburbs are in South Carolina, so I checked those records. Nothing.

  I called Jeanette Deen. “Hi Jeanette, this is Matt Royal. Sorry to bother you again so soon.”

  “No bother, Matt.”

  “Do you have an address for EZGo? The place where you sent the gift certificate?”

  “I’m sure I do. Hold on a minute.”

  I heard the keyboard clicking and she came back on the line. “It was to a post office box in Charlotte,” she said, and gave me the box number.

  “Thanks, Jeanette. I’ll try not to bother you again.”

  “Anytime, Matt. It’s not a problem.”

  I drove down to Moore’s. I usually walked, but it was August and my Explorer had a healthy air-conditioning system. I’m no fool.

  Jock was sitting at the deserted bar talking to Debbie, who had been serving drinks there for the past twenty years. She was a good friend and I think secretly had a thing for Jock. I joined them.

  “I heard somebody was trying to kill you yesterday,” she said.

  “News travels fast.”

  “There’s never new news on this island. It’s old before it has time to germinate a little. The gossip telegraph works very well, even in August.”

  “Well, I’m okay. In case you were worried.”

  “We probably need a better class of killer on this island. You know, somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

  “Ah, Deb. You’d miss me.”

  “Well, I’d sure miss those big quarter tips you give.”

  “You’re worth it, babe.”

  She laughed, threw a dish towel at me and went to the beer cooler for my Miller Lite.

  “Did you find out anything?” Jock asked.

  I related my conversation with Jeanette Deen. “She sent the gift certificate to EZGo Travel Agency in Charlotte, but there is no such business.

  Just a post office box. I’ve got the credit card number that the certificate was charged to. Maybe that’ll give us some more information.”

  “You going to ask Deb to check it out?” he asked.

  “Yep. We’ll save your agency for the hard stuff.”

  “Check what out?” Deb asked.

  “I just need a little hacking job,” I said.

  “Geez, Royal. There’s no such thing as a little hacking job. They’re all big. What do you need?”

  “Some information on who pays the bills on a certain credit card?”

  “You got the number?”

  “Of course.”

  “Give it to me. I’ll check it out when I get home tonight.”

  Debbie was a very competent hacker. She’d taken some computer courses at the local community college just for her own edification. The further she got into it, the more she realized she had a gift. Before long, she was hacking her way into all kinds of databases. It was a hobby for her, and she never took anything of value or shared the information with any-one else. I was probably the only person other than Jock and Logan who realized what she could do. She’d helped us out before.

  Back at my house, I typed a note of my conversation with Jeanette Deen into my computer and e-mailed it to J.D. and Doc Desmond. Jock was on his cell phone, which had some sort of encryption that ensured the privacy of his conversations. He was talking to somebody at his agency headquarters in Washington.

  “They’ll get back to me on Soupy,” Jock said as he closed his phone.

  “Thanks. We may be chasing wild geese with the Dulcimer murders. If Soupy sent a team to take out Jim Desmond why would they kill two people who apparently have no relationship with each other or with Desmond? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe Soupy is the wild goose.”

  “You’re thinking that he might not have anything to do with any of this?”

  “That’s one option. Another is that Dulcimer and Jim are just coincidences.” He held up his hands. “I know, I know. You don’t like coincidences, but sometimes they happen.”

  “What would you guess the percentages of that are?”

  “Near zero, but that doesn’t make it impossible.”

  I shook my head. “You may be right, but I don’t like it.”

  “I agree,” said Jock. “Let’s keep digging. We’ll either hit a complete dead end or we’ll turn over a rock somewhere and find our answers.”

  I thought he was right. I called Mrs. Garrison in Jacksonville. “My name is Matt Royal, Mrs. Garrison. I’m a lawyer in Longboat Key and I’ve been retained to look into the deaths on the Dulcimer.”

  “I remember you, Mr. Royal. You pulled me out of the water. But who would be looking into that now? I gather that the police haven’t been able to find much of anything.”

  “My client’s son was killed on Longboat Key the same day as your husband. There may not be any connection between the murders, but I need to cover all the bases. May I come to Jacksonville to meet with you tomorrow?”

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone line, a slow exha-

  lation of breath. “I don’t see why not. I’ve talked to the police twice, so I’m not sure there’s anything else I can tell you.”

  We agreed to a time for me to be at her house and then I called the Brewsters in Charlotte. I told them the same thing I’d told Mrs. Garrison and they agreed to meet with me two days later. It would take me that much time to drive to Jacksonville and then on up to Charlotte.

  I called Chaz Desmond to tell him what we’d learned and how confused we were. “I’m going to Jacksonville to talk to Mrs. Garrison and then on up to Charlotte to see the Brewsters.”

  “When are you planning to go?”

  “I’ll drive up to Jacksonville tonight and meet with Mrs. Garrison tomorrow. I’ll go on from there to Charlotte and see the Brewsters the day after tomorrow.”

  “I’ll send my plane. You can leave in the morning, meet Mrs. Garrison and then fly on to Charlotte. You’ll be home tomorrow night.”

  “That sounds like a plan, Doc. I’ll make sure the Brewsters are free tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Be at Dolphin Aviation at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport at eight in the morning. My pilot’s name is Fred Cassidy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I drove the rental car toward the south side of Jacksonville, the quiet of a Sunday morning making me think of that old Johnny Cash song “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” The sidewalks, lined by old oak trees draped with moss, were still asleep and I felt a little out of place as if I had suddenly been transported from another dimension to this large southern city cloaked in its Sunday solitude.

  Betty Garrison lived in a Georgian-style red brick home fronting the St. Johns River. Apparently her husband Peter had been a very successful lawyer. She answered the door wearing a pair of white linen slacks, a white blouse trimmed in turquoise, and white boat shoes. Her only jewelry was a pendant necklace, a small stone that matched the color of the trim on her blouse. She was a petite brunette with a southern accent that immediately put me at ease.

  We went to a family room that had a lot of glass overlooking the river. It was ten in the morning and the sun was already high. A boat with a skier behind roared in near the shore, and the laughter of teenagers floated on the breeze. Far out in the middle of the river a towboat pushed a barge southbound.

  The St. Johns is wide as it winds its way through Jacksonville, its languid curren
t pushing toward the sea. It is one of the few rivers in the world that flow northward, and when Jock and I were teenagers we’d spent a lot of pleasant hours on the river’s upper reaches near our hometown in central Florida.

  Mrs. Garrison offered coffee, which I accepted, and we settled into high-back chairs facing each other. “I hope I can help, Mr. Royal, but as I said on the phone, I’ve told the police everything I know.”

  “I know some of my questions will be the same the police asked, but if you’ll bear with me I’ll be out of your hair real quick.”

  She smiled. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “Tell me how you came to be aboard the Dulcimer that evening?”

  “My husband and I were taking a little break and had gone to Long-boat Key. We were staying at the Colony Beach. We went to the restaurant on the property for dinner. Peter picked up a tourist brochure on the way in and one of the coupons was for the dinner cruise on the Dulcimer. We decided to try it the next evening.”

  “Do you remember seeing Katherine Brewster at all that evening?”

  “Vaguely. The police showed me a picture of her. I remember seeing her on the boat because she was so strikingly beautiful and I wondered why she was alone.”

  “How did you know she was alone?”

  “She was sitting at a table for two, but at first no other guest was there. I noticed one man who seemed to be hitting on her stop by, but he left pretty quickly. Then another young man came in and sat with her for a few minutes and left.”

  “Can you describe either of the men?”

  “The young man who sat with her didn’t stand out at all. He was in a golf shirt and jeans, brown hair, I think. He seemed a little agitated and didn’t stay long.”

  “What about the man who seemed to be hitting on her? Can you describe him?”

  “No. I couldn’t even tell you what he was wearing. I just have a vague recollection of a man. He may not have even been hitting on her. Maybe I just assumed it.”

  “Where was she sitting in relation to you and your husband?”