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

by Charles Dougherty

  He went below and rummaged in his liquor locker for his bottle of Chairman's Reserve, his favorite rum from Saint Lucia. He reached into the freezer compartment of his refrigerator for a couple of ice cubes, and poured himself a generous tot, squeezing half of a fresh lime into the glass, and adding just a little water. He got his cell phone out of the drawer under the chart table, and took his drink and the phone back up to the cockpit, thinking he would call Sharktooth. He leaned back against a cushion with his feet up, took a sip of his drink, and thumbed his way to Sharktooth's cell phone number.

  "Hey, Phillip! How the sail, mon?" Sharktooth answered.

  Phillip smiled, thinking that caller i.d. had radically changed the way people answered incoming phone calls. No more mystery, no aura of suspense. "That's too bad. I miss that," he said, not realizing he had given voice to his thoughts until Sharktooth responded, puzzled.

  "Huh? What you say, Phillip? That you, mon?"

  "Sorry, Sharktooth. Guess I was still at sea. I had a great sail. Sorry you weren't along. I caught a nice tuna, about seven pounds. Steaks will be on the grill as soon as I get a chance to cut it up. Did you find anything aboard Sea Serpent?"

  "Yeah, mon, I send email, 'bout 2 o'clock. Send pictures of all the boat paper. Phillip, I find Dani' watch. Gold Rolex, her name on the back. In a bag wit' all her lady t'ings, diamond earrings, pearls, lipstick, stuff. It tuck way back in the little locker in the head. Send picture of all that stuff, too. I t'ink that mon, he don' know it on the boat, so I take it. Okay, you t'ink?"

  "Yeah, Sharktooth, I think it's okay. You're probably right about him not knowing. Maybe Dani stuck it there and forgot it, or she didn't get a chance to grab it when she left." Phillip was thinking aloud, trying to work out a benign reason why Dani would leave her valuables behind. All of a sudden, he wished he didn't have to call J.-P. tonight. "Even if Reilly knows about it, he's not going to pull that out while he's got Michelle aboard, so I think you did right."

  "Thanks, Phillip. I worry some 'bout I take, but I t'ink you mebbe want to give to J.-P., yes?"

  "Yeah. I think I'd rather give it to Dani, though."

  "That the troof. Okay, mon, I call you if they clear wit' the custom, okay?"

  "Okay, Sharktooth. Thank you, my friend."

  "Blessing, Phillip," Sharktooth said, disconnecting.

  As much as he wanted to postpone it, Phillip knew he had to share his news with J.-P. before it got any later. He placed the call and took a sip of his drink as he waited for the connection. As Phillip had known he would be, J.-P. was distressed by the news.

  "I gave her that watch for her birthday, the year she quit working for Marie's father. I don't know about the other jewelry Sharktooth found, but she always did like diamond earrings."

  "He said he sent me pictures in an email. As soon as I get ashore to an Internet café, I'll forward the whole lot to you. Any news from Mario?" Phillip hoped to change the subject.

  "No. Nothing. You are in Bequia tonight?"

  "Yes, just got in. It's getting late here, so I won't get ashore until tomorrow. You can expect that email in the afternoon, your time. I'm going to be ashore all day tomorrow, so don’t forget you can reach me on the cell phone any time you think of something."

  "Okay. I will call when I get the email. Maybe we will both have more ideas by then. Have a good evening, and thank you for helping me."

  "You're welcome, J.-P. You know that. Keep your spirits up. Talk to you tomorrow. Good night." Phillip disconnected.

  Chapter 22

  Michelle had mentioned that she was hungry a couple of hours into their snorkel trip. Robert had beached the boat not far from where they had been swimming. He rummaged in his ice chest, passing Mike and her each a frosty bottle of beer. Then he took the ice chest ashore, set it down on the dry, hard-packed black sand, and began gathering driftwood. Soon, he had a fire going, and by the time she and Mike had started a second beer, he had served them each a heaping plate of fresh, cold salad with fruit, and steaming, hot from the fire, barbecued lobster. She couldn't remember a better meal or a bigger surprise. After they had eaten their fill, they all rested in the shade of the coconut palms until they were ready to go back into the water and cool off.

  Back aboard Sea Serpent, she was relaxing in a cool shower after the day's exercise. She was pleasantly tired as she rinsed the shampoo from her hair and reached into one of the little lockers for her conditioner. She tipped the bottle up and squeezed it over her open palm, annoyed when it spluttered. Empty! Fortunately, she had another bottle, but it was in her make-up kit. She rinsed her hands and dried them, opening the locker where she had stashed the bag. She ran her hand into the back corner, but she didn't find the soft leather case. She patted around in the locker, increasingly alarmed. It had been there last night, when she found the watch and put it in with her jewelry. Where could it be, she wondered. She picked up the little flashlight that stayed above the sink, and got to her knees, peering into the locker with the aid of the light. The bag was not there. Thinking that maybe she had put it back in a different locker, she went through them all, but the bag was not in the head compartment, anywhere. Forgetting the conditioner in her anxiety, she quickly toweled herself dry and put on a pair of running shorts and a lightweight cotton T-shirt. She wiped down the teak surfaces in the head, and took her towel up on deck, where she clipped it to the lifelines to dry. Mike was stretched out in the cockpit, sound asleep. She went back below and made a quick but thorough search for the missing bag. When she didn't find it, her initial alarm began to turn into a deeper fear. She forced herself to think through what this could mean.

  She knew very well that she had put the Rolex watch in that bag and put the bag back into that locker yesterday afternoon. She had kept the bag hidden in that dark, hard to reach corner since the first night she had been aboard Sea Serpent, conditioned by her life's experience to hide her valuables. Her passport and wallet, she kept with her in her purse, always to hand. There was a bankcard in the wallet, and usually between 50 and 100 euros. She always separated the make-up kit with its jewelry pouch from the rest of her belongings, and put it in a place where she thought it was least likely to be found by anyone looking for loot.

  She knew that Mike had locked the boat when they left this morning, even though Robert had said that locking up was unnecessary. He had explained that at least one of the Indian River guides, whoever wasn't doing a tour that day, always kept an eye on the anchored yachts. He told them it was a matter of pride, as well as a necessity, for them to keep their customers' boats safe. They made a living by making people feel comfortable here, and they didn't want any petty thievery to discourage their trade, as it had done for years along the west coast of Saint Vincent. She had watched Mike unlock the boat when they got back from their outing, and there were no signs of intrusion that she could see. Everything about the boat looked the same as it had before they left. She was confident that no one had been aboard in their absence.

  That only left one option to explain her missing bag. Mike must have found it. This idea was profoundly disturbing to her. Why would he have been looking for it, even, she wondered. He was wealthier than any man she had known before. Her few jewels, while worth a good bit of money to her, if she needed quick cash without access to a bank, wouldn't mean much to a man who owned a yacht like this one. Not by her reckoning, anyway. This, to her, was further evidence that the man was deranged. He not only talked to himself and drifted off into some trance-like state, but he secretly went through her belongings. That was creepy enough, but why had he taken the bag? It wasn't as if she could go anywhere with it. While she wasn't a prisoner on the boat, she couldn't go ashore without him knowing about it. She knew he didn’t want her to stay in Saint Martin. He had made no secret of his wish that she should accompany him on his travels into the indefinite future. That was another strange thing about him. Was this part of his campaign to keep her from leaving when they reached her destination?

&n
bsp; He wanted her to be his, on some level. He projected an aura of possessiveness, but there was something off about it. The desire of a man to number her among his possessions was nothing new to her. She had encountered that innumerable times since she had reached the age of puberty. In fact, in her somewhat jaded view, the only reason any man would spend time with her was because he wanted to own her on some level. She understood that men wanted her. They wanted her sexually, and they wanted her as a trophy, to show off to the world, to demonstrate that they were worthy of the attention of a beautiful woman. This aspect of male behavior was something that she accepted as part of reality, and it was one more weapon in the arsenal that she maintained, one of the things that she depended on and could use to her advantage. Mike's early advances hadn't put her off. Quite the contrary; he was well groomed, and better behaved than most of the men she had been around, and he represented a timely way for her to escape from Martinique, before anybody found out about Frankie.

  When she had gone to Sea Serpent with him that first night, they had made love, as she had known they would. She had found Mike a gentle and considerate lover, although not a passionate one, nor an imaginative one. It was almost like he was doing what he thought was expected of him. That was all right with Michelle. She had a clear understanding of what she wanted out of the relationship. It was better for her purposes if Mike didn’t become attached to her. She just wanted to work her way to Saint Martin. After that first night, he had made no further overtures, although she had made it clear frequently that she was amenable to an encore. He seemed less interested in bedding her than he did in getting her to agree that she would stay with him. He didn't ever say that he loved her, nor did he ask her to marry him. These things she expected. Most men that she had been with had done both, although she knew that few of them had been sincere. No. This man wanted some strange commitment from her, and became quite insistent when she tried to put him off. She had found this confusing, at first, but now that she knew more about him, she found it disturbing.

  When she considered that he had taken and concealed her stash of valuables, it was even more disturbing. She had already been planning what she would do with some of the money from the watch. The watch! She scolded herself. She had been so focused on the loss of her store of wealth, her financial security, that she had forgotten that there was another dimension to the gold Rolex. He now knew that she had found it. Had he hidden it beneath the cushions and forgotten it? Or had the Dani woman simply lost it there, without him knowing? Either way, it didn’t matter now. He had found her jewels, and he had found the watch. He knew that she knew about Dani, not just from the Phillip man's questions, but also from her finding Dani's watch here on Sea Serpent. Did he really not remember Dani being here, she wondered, or was he a better liar than she had ever known? That added new depth to her fear. A man who could lie like that, fooling even himself, he was a kind of crazy that Michelle didn't like to contemplate.

  She reached for her purse and opened it. Inventorying its contents by feel, she wanted the reassurance that she still had at least her identification and a little money. There was still a few hundred euros in the bank, too. She could draw on that anywhere, as long as she had the card. She would be all right, if she had to leave this man without getting the jewelry back, but she wasn't ready to give that up just yet. She worked her finger through the little slit in the lining of the purse and fingered the straight razor. Frankie's razor. It was a thing of beauty, as well as utility, with its mother of pearl handles and gleaming blade, the one thing of value that Frankie had owned. He had claimed that it had belonged to his grandfather, a merchant seaman from Portugal who had loved a woman from Fort de France and given up the sea for her. It was a nice story that Frankie used to tell, when his head was straight, but Michelle had her doubts. In her typical, pragmatic fashion, though, once Frankie had gone too far and forced her to deal with him, she had kept the razor. It had been useful, dealing with Frankie. It might be useful dealing with Mike. She would keep it close to her -- she could recover from the loss of her jewelry, but she wouldn’t allow him to take any more from her. She knew their next stop was Les Saintes, Guadeloupe. She could blend in easily there, another beautiful French girl from another French island. There would be another yacht going to Saint Martin. It was early in the season.

  ****

  Mike was still stretched out in the cockpit, but he was awake now, feeling refreshed after a day of exercise and a nice, long nap. He had not dreamed, for a change. At least, he hadn't dreamed that he knew about, and that was a relief. Lately, he had been having the vivid dreams, the ones that disturbed him, and woke him up, so that he carried their agony into consciousness. He would find himself, in the middle of the night sometimes, or sometimes after a nap like this afternoon's, lying awake, trying to resolve the impossible elements of his nightmares. He would feel an overwhelming sadness when that happened. It was sadness for which he couldn't account, rationally, and as he struggled to find its cause, he would become angry. Angry, and frustrated.

  The first time he remembered awakening like that had been after the fire. It wasn't immediately after the fire; he hadn't been upset, then. Everything had been going according to his plan in the days right after the fire. He thought it had probably been one of the first few nights that he spent in the first foster home. He couldn't remember the names of those people. Just the man who sat in the thickly upholstered recliner, yelling for his skinny, hyperactive wife to bring him another beer; "…and shut those God damn young 'uns up, for Christ's sake, Hazel," he would yell. Almost verbatim, every night, as she was trying to get the four foster children to bed, he would yell at her. Mike hadn't known until then that there were people like that. He soon learned that there were many people like that. A lot of them discovered that they could make enough money to buy more beer and bigger televisions by taking in foster children and collecting a subsidy for each child. He had decided after his third or fourth foster home that these foster parents had a more honest relationship with their foster children than he had experienced with his own parents. Each party understood what was happening, what was expected. The foster parents got the subsidy, and, in return, they allowed some children that nobody wanted to live in their house, as long as they could stand one another. The children got a roof over their heads, and sometimes food to eat. Nothing about it was complicated, unlike when he had lived with his own parents, where he had never quite known what was expected of him.

  He had thought that after the fire, he would go to live with Uncle Andy. When the social worker had asked him if he had any close relatives, he had told her about Uncle Andy, giving her the address down in Jacksonville. He had worked all of that out, memorizing the address before the fire, figuring he would need it. He told her he had another uncle, and an aunt, in Alabama, but they hadn't been in touch with his mother ever, that he could remember. That was true, too. He only knew about them because he would hear his folks talking about them, late at night, after he was supposed to be asleep. He couldn't hear much of what they said, and he didn’t understand quite why they were estranged. Over the years, he had picked up enough snippets of conversation to grasp that his mother's family had cut her off when she married his father. Except for Uncle Andy. His Uncle Andy had always gone his own way, and had been his father's friend before his parents even knew one another. Uncle Andy had always been fun to be around, too, and he had been good to Mike, bringing him presents and spending time with him when he was little. He would go to live with Uncle Andy, now that his parents were dead, he told the social worker.

  Two days later, the social worker had come to the temporary foster home again, bringing a man with her. She had introduced the man as Doctor Herpin, saying that he wanted to meet Mike, just to make sure he was all right. Mike had protested that he wasn't sick, and the social worker had said that Doctor Herpin wasn't that kind of doctor.

  "What other kind of doctor is there?" Mike had asked. The woman looked at the doctor and nodded
her head.

  "If you're worried, or upset, or you just need to talk to somebody without worrying about what you say, my job is to listen to you, Mike, and make you feel more comfortable. I'll never tell anybody what you talk about with me," Doctor Herpin said.

  Mike had immediately dismissed the doctor's presence from his mind, not realizing that he would be spending more time with him over the next few years than he would spend with anyone else. "Not that it was worthwhile," he said aloud, looking around the cockpit, realizing it was dark and that he was on a boat. He closed his eyes and went back to that fateful encounter with the social worker and Doctor Herpin.

  He couldn’t remember the social worker's name. "Doesn’t matter," he said to the empty cockpit. He vividly recalled how he had felt when she told him that he couldn't live with Uncle Andy, because his Uncle Andy wasn't well.

  "I can take care of him while he's sick," Mike had said.

  The woman had looked at Doctor Herpin, strain showing in the lines on her forehead. Doctor Herpin had looked at Mike, catching his eye, and then looked back at the woman. He nodded his head.

  That was when the woman told him that his Uncle Andy was in a state-run mental hospital in north Florida. He would probably never get out. "Even if he gets well enough to leave the hospital," she had said, "he can't ever go home. He'll have to go to prison. Your Uncle Andy killed his wife and child, Michael. I'm sorry."

  Chapter 23

  Phillip finally admitted to himself that he was awake. He knew it was very early; it was still too dark to see any details of the space around him. He consoled himself with the thought that he had gone to bed just after dark last night, and rolled out of the berth, turning on a light in the main cabin. 4 a.m. He had four hours before he could clear in with customs. He started a pot of coffee and sat down at the chart table to think while the coffee perked. He turned on his cell phone, and in a few seconds, it chimed to let him know he had a voice mail message. Amazing, he thought. When he had first started working in the islands, the only effective means of communicating had been via radio. Things have changed down here in the last few years, he thought, as he pushed the buttons to retrieve his message, curious about who would have called during the night. Sandrine, maybe?