Bluewater Killer: A Serial Murder Mystery Set In Florida and the Caribbean (Bluewater Thrillers Book 1)

by Charles Dougherty

  Rosa had been a medic in the Cuban military, back in the cold war days when the Russians were still funding Castro's government. Her skills in dealing with trauma cases surpassed those of many emergency room physicians in the islands, especially if the case had to be handled in a remote location. She was neither cruel nor kind to her charges, but was best characterized as indifferent to their humanity. To Rosa, reasonable treatment was merely good business; it enhanced the value of her stock, so she provided a healthy diet, medical care, and more creature comforts than most of her captives had known in their previous lives.

  Security was not much of an issue on Baliceaux, as there was no way on or off the island except for the boats supporting El Grupo's activities. There were guards looking after the stockpiles of goods in transit, but they were kept strictly away from the concealed compound that housed Rosa's charges. This eliminated any opportunities for her inmates to corrupt members of the security force. She had two medically trained women with backgrounds similar to her own to help her with her responsibilities. Each of the captives was kept segregated from the others, in small but comfortable private cells. Showers and toilets were shared, but access was restricted to one person at a time, so none of the captives knew the others.

  ****

  The new girl had been aboard the Erzulie Freda, a small Haitian freighter that was delivering a shipment of drugs from Venezuela. Big Jim had gone aboard the decrepit little rust bucket to check out the merchandise before allowing it to be off loaded, and he had seen her, apparently in a deep sleep. She had been sprawled carelessly on the pilot berth in the wheelhouse, a blanket thrown over her wet, clammy body. There was an inflatable life vest on the cabin sole by the berth. The vest had lost pressure through a large gash down one side. Jim saw that there was a water-activated strobe light attached to the vest, still flashing. The girl was strikingly beautiful, with short, curly blond hair and even features. Trim of figure, but curved in all the right places, judging from the contour of the blanket, she would catch a man's eye, even in her bedraggled, comatose state.

  "Who is she, Julio?" Big Jim asked the dirty, unshaven captain, who was busily unpacking a carton that had a picture of a microwave oven on the side. The packaging was hollow foam plastic blocks, each containing 500 grams of pure cocaine.

  Julio paused and looked up from his task, taking advantage of the interruption to avail himself of a swig of rum from an unlabeled bottle on the table next to the carton. He gave an inarticulate shrug and went back to work. Big Jim wasn't sure if Julio was being rude, or if the shrug was an answer in itself.

  "I don't understand, Julio. Is she your lady?" Big Jim tried again.

  Julio turned from the carton and picked up the bottle again, wiping it on his filthy forearm before offering it to Big Jim, who shook his head, declining Julio's hospitality. Julio stretched his back, putting both hands on his hips and rolling his torso, his joints popping. He turned his single, bloodshot eye on Big Jim, his jaw working as he sought the words to answer. He belched loudly and shrugged again, licking his lips.

  "The lookout, he see she. Sun, she set. Light flash, flash, flash. We pick she up. Busy, put she here. You want?" He took another swig of rum, waiting for Big Jim's answer.

  "You know where she came from?" Big Jim asked.

  "Prob'ly boat," Julio belched again. "Lifejacket bust when we drag she over side."

  Jim looked again at the flaccid lifejacket, prodding it with the toe of his shoe. He noticed that it was of good quality and had a harness sewn into it. He recognized it by type as having most likely come from a sailing yacht, but there were no identifying markings other than the manufacturer's logo.

  "How long ago did you pick her up?" he asked, turning his attention back to Julio.

  "Hour. Mebbe two hour," Julio shrugged again. "You want, Big Jim?"

  Maybe 15 or 20 miles from here, at the most, Jim calculated before he responded. "Was she awake when you found her?"

  "Nah. She mash up; out cold," Julio answered.

  Big Jim flipped the blanket off the unconscious girl, noticing how the still-wet T-shirt molded to her well-formed breasts, his eyes tracing the muscles in the long legs visible below her cutoff blue jeans. She had a good tan and looked well groomed and well fed. He put a hand to her shoulder and shook her gently. There was no response. He saw no obvious wounds, and probed gently in her hair with his fingers, stopping when he found a large lump on the left side of her head. He spread the hair around the lump, looking for a cut, and found an open wound over an inch long. He could see the white bone of her skull through the swollen tissue that formed the inner edge of the cut. The flesh looked white, and it was puckered from immersion in seawater. The bleeding had stopped of its own accord, apparently, and her time in the sea had washed the blood away. He felt a strong, steady pulse in her neck, and her breathing was smooth and easy. He reasoned that she must have fallen overboard from a yacht, maybe hit by a swinging boom during an unplanned jibe. The automatically inflated lifejacket had kept her afloat until Julio found her. It was odd that no one had come back to pick her up, unless she had been sailing alone, he reflected.

  "Too bad for her she didn't use that harness in the lifejacket," Jim said. "At least then she would have stayed aboard her boat. What are you going to do with her, Julio?" Big Jim asked.

  "Take she to Haiti, if she come awake. I sell she there. Is an Arab, he buy blond white women." Julio nodded, agreeing with himself.

  "She would be a lot of trouble for me," Big Jim said.

  Julio grinned, showing an expanse of pink gum interrupted by the occasional blackened stump of a tooth. The bargaining process had begun. "She very beautiful. Valuable to Arab. Healthy; young. She wake up soon."

  "She might not wake up, Julio. Then she's worth nothing but trouble," Jim countered.

  "No trouble. I put she back in the sea, she no wake up."

  "Tell you what, Julio. You leave her here, and Rosa can take care of her. When we sell her, I'll take out Rosa's expenses, and we can split what we get for her with you. That way, you don't have to keep her alive and hidden all the way back to Haiti."

  "Nah. No like Rosa expenses, and how I know what you get for she, you?"

  "Okay, Julio. I'll send you an email and you can agree to the price before we sell her, and we split Rosa's expenses."

  "You say the expenses in the email," Julio demanded.

  "No problem. I can do that," Jim agreed.

  "If she die, no split any expense," Julio said, on a roll now.

  "Okay." Jim nodded.

  "If she die you take scalp to show me she die," Julio said, rummaging in a drawer under the table.

  Jim watched as Julio pulled out a digital camera and made two photographs of the unconscious girl. He shot a close-up of each side of her head and then brought the camera over to show Jim the pictures, her ears prominent among the damp curls. Scrolling between the two pictures as Jim looked, Julio explained, "Now, Big Jim, if she die, you and Rosa, you take she scalp, with she ear both, so I can know to believe."

  Jim nodded in agreement, and they returned their attention to removing a brick of cocaine from the plastic foam packing material on the table by the microwave carton.

  ****

  Rosa's job had become a little more challenging when Jim and Julio carried the limp girl into the two-bed infirmary. She immediately set to work, stripping off the clammy, wet clothes and drying the girl off with the help of one of her assistants. They put her into a hospital gown and got her covered with a dry blanket, once they determined that she had no injuries other than the wound to her head. Rosa deftly cleaned and stitched the cut, and her aide attached an intravenous drip, so that they could keep the girl hydrated and nourished.

  "What do you think, Rosa?" Big Jim asked.

  "It is in the hands of God, Big Jim."

  "When she wake up?" Julio asked.

  "She could wake up any minute, or never," Rosa responded. "With no scan or MRI, we have no way to know what d
amage is inside the skull. She is healthy, strong, young woman. If there is no damage to the brain, she will live a long time. With a head injury, nothing is certain. She may live a long time and not wake up. We can only care for her and wait, but I don't think the lump looks so big. She will come around, probably. She is very beautiful, no? Worth some waiting, I think."

  Chapter 17

  Phillip had stowed his groceries aboard Kayak Spirit, and he and Sandrine had enjoyed a leisurely lunch at the open-air restaurant on the dock in the marina. She kissed him goodbye as she left to go back to work, leaving him to imagine what wonderful company she would be if only she could join him on his cruise. Shaking his head with a rueful grin, he settled the check with the cashier at the bar and walked down the dock. He stepped aboard Kayak Spirit and started the diesel, letting it warm up while he cast off the stern lines and spring lines. Kayak Spirit was moored stern to the dock, nestled snugly between two white plastic boats that were part of a bareboat charter fleet. Phillip left the mooring pennant at the bow to hold her off the dock, locked the tiller straight ahead, and engaged the transmission. With the engine idling, Kayak Spirit gradually made way forward as Phillip fended off the boats on either side. When his bow was almost directly above the mooring ball, he dropped the pennant on top of the ball, stepped back to the cockpit, and shifted the transmission into neutral so that he didn't risk fouling the prop with floating mooring lines. Kayak Spirit had sufficient way on to give him some directional control, and he took the tiller in hand, guiding the boat out into the fairway between the lines of moored yachts until he was clear of all of them.

  He put the transmission back in gear and opened the throttle a bit, motoring carefully through the mooring field off the marina until he was in the channel that led past the point, out into Cul-de-Sac Marin. Once away from the confined space off Club Med, he centered the tiller and took the transmission out of gear, allowing Kayak Spirit to coast while he went forward to the mast and raised the mainsail. Once the sail was up and luffing, he returned to the cockpit and trimmed the mainsheet in, to center the mainsail. The boat rounded smoothly up into the 12-knot easterly wind and slowed down. He went forward again and raised the staysail and his Yankee jib. As the three sails flogged loudly, he scrambled back to the cockpit, pulled the tiller to the windward side, eased the main, and sheeted in both headsails. The boat heeled the least bit and surged forward on a beam reach, the bow wave like a bone in her teeth. Phillip shut down the engine and leaned back against the leeward cockpit coaming, his bare right foot providing a little pressure to the tiller to counteract the boat's slight tendency to round into the wind.

  What a glorious day, he thought, settling into the rhythm of the boat and the sea. Once out of the protection of Pointe Dunkerque, a long-period ocean swell made itself felt beneath the two-foot wind chop. Spray was flying from her bow as Kayak Spirit sliced her way through the blue-green water, and all was right in Phillip's world. It was hard to think about anything unpleasant in his current circumstances, and he fully understood why people like Dani chose to sever as many shore side ties as they could, to enjoy this feeling of freedom combined with the sense of oneness with nature. To complete this postcard-perfect Caribbean day, a school of dolphin began to play in his bow wave, crisscrossing his path and occasionally leaping out of the water right beside him, splashing him as they dropped gracefully back into the sea.

  The thought of Dani tugged at Phillip, and he forced himself to contemplate the work ahead. His plan was to backtrack along the route that he assumed Sea Serpent would have taken when Reilly was northbound from Grenada to Saint Lucia. He was hoping to find some trace of Dani along the way, or some additional information about Sea Serpent and Reilly. While there were many possible stops along the way, most yachts traveled in daylight, and they moved at roughly the same speed, so they often stopped in the same places. He already knew from the police in Saint Vincent that Mike Reilly had not cleared customs in their country this fall, and he knew that Reilly had stopped at Rodney Bay, Saint Lucia, after a trip from Saint George's, Grenada. That was a distance of approximately 130 nautical miles, or three days of easy sailing, stopping at night. The Morrises had met him and Dani in the Tobago Cays, and Dani had jumped ship from Rambling Gal in Mayreau. The Tobago Cays and Mayreau were only a few miles apart, and both were popular stops, each about 50 miles north of Saint George's.

  Most yachts would have broken the trip from Saint George's northbound at one of those two places, or at Union Island, which was only a few miles from either of the other two. It was possible to make the trip from that area to Rodney Bay in a long day, but it was around 80 miles. Most yachts would break that trip at Bequia, which was also part of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Phillip knew that many yachts would anchor for the night in a country where they had not checked in with customs. The typical routine was to hoist the yellow "Q," for quarantine, flag, indicating that they had not yet cleared customs, and move on early the next morning. While the legality of this was open for debate, the authorities generally didn't make an issue of it, as long as the yacht's crew didn't go ashore or transact business with local vendors. Phillip strongly suspected that Reilly had stopped for a night in Bequia, although he had never officially entered Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

  Kayak Spirit rounded Pigeon Island on the northwest tip of Saint Lucia, and made Rodney Bay at dusk. Phillip anchored off the Sandals Resort and stowed his sails, settling in for the evening. By the time he had squared away Kayak Spirit, it was too late to clear customs. He was pleasantly tired from the exhilarating sail across the Saint Lucia Channel, and not particularly hungry after his big farewell lunch with Sandrine. He opted for a cold beer and a sandwich in the cockpit. Sated, he took a quick shower to cool off and crawled into his berth, making an early night of it.

  ****

  Paul Russo had gathered extensive information about Michael Carroll Reilly in a short amount of time. He had started with a former co-worker at the Miami Police Department who checked the driver's license and motor vehicle registration databases, using the mailing address that Phillip Davis had unearthed. Reilly didn't own a car, and he had gotten his Florida driver's license 25 years ago, surrendering a Georgia license that he had gotten at age 18. His date of birth was May 30, 1965, and he had been born in Savannah, Georgia. Armed with that key date and a history of addresses, Paul had made use of a number of public and private databases to fill out his dossier. He was amazed at how much he was able to find using online searches. Quite a bit more information was available now that he was no longer chasing crooks for a living. He had discovered two things that were of particular interest. The first was that Reilly had been orphaned at the age of thirteen. He had a downloaded article from the Savannah Morning News from the summer of 1978, describing the house fire that had claimed his mother's life. The article referred to his father's death from a heart attack just a few months before his mother's death. Young Michael had been "camping out," in the back yard and had been awakened by the fire. He had gone to the next-door neighbor's house to call for help. Paul wanted to know what happened to Mike in the aftermath of the fire.

  He found the second piece of information in a newspaper article in an online database as well. It was more interesting and of more recent origin. The article was from the local newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the summer of 2000. It described the mysterious disappearance of Andrea Reilly, Mike's wife of 13 years. According to the article, Mike had worked in the local yachting industry, and the article implied that he was relatively well known in the community. He had been on a yacht delivery from Nassau to Fort Lauderdale with another local man, and he had returned home after several days to find that his wife was gone. She and Mike had made their home aboard a yacht named Sea Serpent, moored at a private dock in one of the many canals in Fort Lauderdale. Paul wondered if that was the same Sea Serpent. He would check that.

  Their nearest neighbor, the man from whom they rented the dock space, reported that
he had not seen Andrea around the boat since before Mike left for the Bahamas, nor had he noticed anyone on or around the boat while Mike was absent. The neighbor had assumed that Andrea was with Mike, since he knew that she often accompanied him as a cook when he took work as a delivery captain, so he thought nothing of her absence until Mike asked him if he had seen her. Mike had called the police and reported her as missing. The strange part of the story was that all of her clothing and personal belongings were missing as well. Paul thought it sounded like she had enough of the guy, picked her time, packed up, and left. There was a Fort Lauderdale detective quoted in the article, a Sergeant Donald Funk. Paul figured he could probably shed more light on the matter, if he was still around. He decided that was worth a drive up to Fort Lauderdale, if he could track down Donald Funk. He called the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, identified himself, and asked if Donald Funk was still on the force. It turned out that Sergeant Funk was now Lieutenant Funk, and Paul soon had a lunch date with him. He looked at his watch and decided to drive up a little early. There was no telling what traffic would be like on I95 North. It was always a gamble.

  ****

  Lieutenant Funk was a polished, pleasant, and well-groomed man about 10 years Paul's junior. He had suggested a sandwich joint called the New York Deli, and Paul had driven them over to the shopping center that housed the place. They were each well into hot pastrami sandwiches that were dripping grease into the waxed-paper lined baskets that served as dishes. They both ate quickly and efficiently, a habit common to many who shared their occupation. Paul might be retired, but that kind of habit persisted. In their line of work, you never knew when your meal would be interrupted. Paul had explained his interest in Reilly on the phone earlier that morning, so, as Don Funk finished his last mouthful, he started right in on his recollections of the case without waiting for Paul to ask.