The ringing of his cell phone brought him back to the present.
“Hello.”
“Mayes?” the male voice asked.
It took Mayes a second to recognize the Callahan detective’s voice. “Yeah, Jack.”
“I got your number from dispatch. We’ve turned up something I think you’ll find interesting. I know I sure as hell did.”
Jack’s words were faint, choppy. Mayes, still holding the jar of peanut butter, left his shopping cart in the aisle, moving toward the front of the store for better phone reception.
Jack continued. “After talking to you yesterday, I pressed the coroner to make sure there was nothing underneath the clay on the face of our stiff. I really pissed him off, but I wanted to make sure after what you told me. Anyway, he re-examined the face and, lo and behold, they had missed it in the autopsy.”
“A word?” Detective Mayes asked. “Was it Seederman?”
“When they performed the autopsy and cleaned the clay from the face, the dirt granules had obscured the writing underneath, erasing most of it except for line fragments and dots here and there. The man’s dark skin tone made it appear as tiny bruises, nearly imperceptible. It was in ink. The coroner confirmed this through chemical tests. We were able to fill it in based on the letter shapes. It says ‘Lank.’ ”
“Lank? L-a-n-k?” Mayes asked.
“Yes.”
“A name?” Mayes asked, as he passed through the front doors of the grocery store, walking outside onto the sidewalk. The doors hissed closed and a shrill cadence of beeps began to go off inside.
“Could be, but it’s not the victim’s. We’re checking to see how many people with that last name live in the area. Of course lank is also a word which means lean, slender, or bony. I’ll let you know if we connect it to anything. Hey, what’s that annoying noise I hear in the background? Sounds like an alarm.”
Detective Mayes thought about the report he had received this morning regarding known criminals named Seederman. One was a man who lived in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He had been a petty thief who had died in ’84; another dead end.
“I’ll talk to you later, Jack.” Mayes hung up and turned around to see the source of the pulsing noise, which had suddenly grown louder. The store manager was several feet away motioning for the peanut butter jar still in Mayes’ hand. To add to his embarrassment, the pneumatic doors remained open and everyone standing at the counters inside—cashiers and patrons alike—were staring at him.
****
That evening, Fawn sequenced her notes. She had reviewed the FDLE website several times but had gleaned no further information about the murders in 1969 and no mention of the victims’ faces being painted half red. She was beginning to doubt Elizabeth was telling the truth about her father.
She conducted a web search regarding the grave of Osceola. She found an old black-and-white photo of the burial site near Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina. The grave was close to the fort wall, bordered by posts and chains.
As expected, there was nothing in the recorded history regarding Osceola’s relationship with Sarah Courtland or the birth of their son, Coyle.
One article described a disturbance to Osceola’s gravesite:
A disturbance of the gravesite in 1969 caused the authorities to unearth the coffin. Since Fort Moultrie is now under the authority of the National Park Service, an archeological investigation was conducted. By using hair samples from combs and brushes that belonged to the Indian warrior, they were able to confirm positively that the headless skeleton was Osceola’s.
The article mentioned that the accuracy of the story whereby Dr. Weedon was said to have removed Osceola’s head at death had not been confirmed until Osceola’s grave was exhumed in 1969 and, in fact, the skull was missing.
Fawn found further evidence from verbatim text of letters from Dr. Weedon to his son-in-law in New York, and from the son-in-law to Dr. Valentine Mott mentioning transfer of ownership of the head, which ultimately came to rest in the New York Surgical and Pathological Museum until it burned down in 1865.
Fawn reread the information about Osceola’s tampered gravesite in 1969 and realized it aligned to the year that Lawrence Courtland had discovered Sarah Courtland’s unopened letter to Coyle in the attic; the same year Lawrence had subsequently killed two people for reasons he told Elizabeth he could not explain.
Fawn sat back in her chair staring at the ceiling. Think, she prodded herself. Everything is a matter of motivation.
She looked at her notes. Okay, she thought. Let’s go back to Coyle Courtland and assume all the circumstantial evidence surrounding the history collected by Lawrence Courtland is accurate.
Fighting with Confederate forces at the end of the Civil War in North Carolina in late April 1865, Coyle stopped by to see his sick mother, Sarah, in Charleston. Although Sarah had sent Coyle a letter to his home in Amelia Island, Florida, she took the opportunity to tell him in person what she had said in the letter: he was the son of the great Seminole Indian warrior, Osceola, and it was Osceola’s dying wish to have his remains placed in Florida soil.
A spark of an idea struck Fawn. She continued her mental summation:
In 1865, post-Civil War, Coyle immediately made his way north to New York where he stole the head of Osceola from the museum, covering the theft with a fire. Then on his way home to the south, for some unknown reason, Coyle killed some innocent people in North Carolina and colored their faces half red. A posse chased him, and he was mortally wounded. He made it to Charleston where he was found dead not far from Fort Moultrie, and Osceola’s grave. The head of Osceola is never discovered.
Never discovered.
“Oh my god,” Fawn said aloud. “Mortally wounded. Coyle must have realized he would never make it to Florida, so he did the next best thing. He reunited the skull with the body of his famous father in the grave at Charleston.”
Why then, she wondered, was the skull not in the coffin when authorities exhumed the body in 1969 after they suspected the gravesite had been tampered with?
Everything suddenly crystallized for Fawn. The answer was obvious.
Elizabeth’s father, Lawrence Courtland, had dug up Osceola’s grave in 1969. He was the cause of the disturbance mentioned in the news article. He removed the skull that Coyle had placed in Osceola’s grave over a century before!
It was an invigorating epiphany that had Fawn smiling, but she could not deny the questions which loomed: What did Lawrence Courtland want with the skull and where was it now? What did it have to do, if anything, with the murders?
CHAPTER 9
That evening Mike called from his cell phone. She wanted desperately to share the information she had discovered, but her promise to Elizabeth prevented her from doing so. She sensed Mike knew she was holding something back as he continually asked if everything was okay. He expressed concern about the killing of the homeless man and repeatedly requested that Fawn secure all the doors and windows each night before she turned in.
The remainder of the conversation focused on Mike’s training classes, how these two weeks apart felt like a year, and on their upcoming October wedding.
Lying in bed that night, her thoughts still buzzed at the facts and revelations she had unearthed. Her connect-the-dot assumption that Coyle had re-interred the skull of Osceola with the Indian’s body in Charleston in 1865, and then Lawrence Courtland had removed it 104 years later, still seemed very plausible, although the motivation was unknown.
The notion that there could be some sort of curse on Osceola’s male descendents—the Courtland men—was ridiculous. But what had provoked Coyle to kill in North Carolina and then Lawrence Courtland a century later on Amelia Island? It now appeared they had both been in possession of Osceola’s skull. Did some force guide them from beyond the grave?
Absolutely not! She would not allow herself to be dra
wn down that road. She was a journalist. She would deal only in facts. Obviously there had been some motivation, some reason that influenced both Coyle and Lawrence.
Coyle’s motivation for securing Osceola’s head was known. His mother had relayed Osceola’s final wish that his bones be buried in Florida soil. Case closed.
Lawrence’s catalyst for digging up the skull in 1969 was less clear. Perhaps he felt some ancestral pull to fulfill Osceola’s centuries-old request as well. If so, why had he not taken the rest of the remains? Why the skull only?
The answer could only be found in one place: Sarah Courtland’s 1865 letter to her son Coyle, which he never opened and was discovered by Lawrence a century later. Had Elizabeth ever said what became of the letter? She glanced at the clock on her nightstand: 10:29. Too late to call her now. She was due to check on Elizabeth in the morning. She would ask then.
For 30 more minutes, she processed the facts of the story until an unwanted memory returned. She began to dwell on Juan Velarde Cortez.
Fawn thought back to her father’s death. His boat was found abandoned last May, anchored ten miles off Cedar Key. When discovered, everything on board suggested he had been scuba diving—everything except for the requisite dive buoy that was still tucked away in the bow compartment of the boat. That was typical of her father; he was paranoid someone would nose in on his treasure, so he always kept his activity secretive, even at the expense of his safety. This lack of caution had probably cost him his life.
The treasure. Her father had described it as an incalculable horde of gold and precious gems. Specifically, he had mentioned a magnificent ornate crown studded with elaborate jewels. This one item alone would make a man rich beyond his wildest imagination, her father would say.
Fawn vividly recalled receiving the phone call from the Cedar Key Police Department that day last May. The man introduced himself as Sergeant James Clark.
“Ms. Cortez, is your father Juan Velarde Cortez?”
“Yes,” she had responded tentatively.
“Does he have a boat called Onda Occidental?”
Western Wave. “Yes.”
“I have some bad news. We found your father’s boat offshore, unoccupied. He’s missing.”
“What do you mean ‘missing?’ ”
“He’s known at the Cedar Key docks by local fishermen. Your father spends quite a bit of time on the water from what people have told us.”
No kidding, Fawn had thought with a bitter tinge. Then rising anticipation had blended with sour anger.
“He was seen Thursday morning heading out early from the docks in his Sea Ray. We have several eyewitnesses. From what we can tell, it appears he was scuba diving. When we boarded his boat, we could tell it had been quite some time since the engine had been run. At this time, Ms. Cortez, while we do not suspect foul play, we do fear he may have met with an unfortunate accident.”
Fawn recalled the man bracing his words, fearful of how upset she would be at receiving the news. Her icy response caught the sergeant off guard.
“Damn him,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll be there in the morning.”
A subsequent search of the area by divers had turned up no evidence as to Juan Velarde Cortez’s fate, but a week later a segment of arm, which included half a humerus and the connecting radius and ulna, was discovered washed up on the beach.
Identification of the body part had been remarkably easy. Juan Velarde Cortez had suffered a broken arm as a teenager. It was a simple task for forensic examiners to ascertain the pattern of healing on the arm and compare it to the injury sustained by Cortez in his youth. The match was exact.
Forensics had also concluded that, if the arm had been severed while he was still alive, the blood loss would have been substantial, fatal within a short time if unattended. Obviously, Juan Cortez met with some horrific mishap—a boating accident or possibly a shark attack.
A week passed, and the corpse was still not recovered. The Gulf waters off the western coast of Florida are teeming with scavenging creatures. Carcasses are quickly eviscerated. Over the course of several days, every creature from the bottom of the food chain to the top would have taken a sample of the bloated, decaying flesh until only the fragmented pieces of skeleton were left strewn about the ocean floor.
A quote from an article had surfaced in her mind. Upon hearing of her father’s death, it harkened back: “The ocean is the single largest graveyard in the world.”
How true.
Two weeks after the boat was discovered, with overwhelming evidence, Juan Velarde Cortez was pronounced dead. A private funeral service was held a week later at a small chapel on Amelia Island, several blocks from where she would soon be living. With no body, it was a simple service.
Fawn was unable to grieve. She felt no remorse and had no tears to share for the man. Her face was hollow with indifference, such that even the minister performing the ceremony had noticed it. He mentioned privately to Mike afterward that he had never seen such a lack of emotion by a daughter over a father’s passing. For Fawn, it was hard to make others understand the sheer apathy she felt toward her father. Although she had sat listening to the minister’s words, she did so out of reverence to the church and what it stood for, not for her father, who had injected the numbness within her.
Afterward, Fawn had a marker placed in the Amelia Island Cemetery bearing the name:
Juan Velarde Cortez
Underneath, the simple inscription:
He Is Given To The Sea Where He Belongs
Its simplicity and irreverence staggered most who read it.
For Fawn, there was relief. Her father’s death represented the end of a confusing episode; one that had spanned her lifetime. That is what she had told Mike, anyway. In reality, the man’s memory continued to fester in Fawn’s mind.
One day in late June, prior to the counseling sessions Mike had recommended, Fawn spent an entire afternoon crying, finally grieving her father’s passing. She lied to Mike when he had called that day, her voice quaking. She had told him she was sick.
It was the last time Fawn had shed a tear for Juan Velarde Cortez.
CHAPTER 10
Elizabeth’s doorbell rang at 10:40 Monday morning. She wheeled to the front of the house and cracked the door open with the sliding chain still attached. Upon recognizing Fawn, she invited her in.
“Good morning, my dear,” Elizabeth said, guiding her wheelchair into the den with Fawn in tow.
Fawn took a seat on the couch, leaning forward. “Good morning.”
“How’s the fact finding going?” Elizabeth then continued without giving Fawn a chance to answer. “On Saturday, after I told you the story, I realized how bizarre it must have sounded. I have to admit, I’d never followed up on the accuracy of what my father told me, but the facts seemed very convincing. Of course, I was 16, and he was my father.”
Fawn spoke. “I was able to verify through South Carolina state records that a Sarah Courtland resided in Charleston and passed away at the end of the Civil War. I also found a Coyle Courtland from Amelia Island who enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861, but there was no record of his death.”
Elizabeth thought for a moment. She shifted in the wheelchair and held her expression, hiding the momentary pain from her affliction until she went numb again. It was something she had come to live with. “What of Father and his murders?”
“Well,” Fawn started, obviously seeking soft words. “I confirmed the story as you said: the…crimes Lawrence Courtland committed, his incarceration, his subsequent death in jail.”
“But you couldn’t find any mention that the faces of each of the victims had been colored half red,” Elizabeth concluded. Her eyes remained fixed on Fawn.
Fawn shook her head.
“As I said before, it was never released to the press. Back then, there was a give-and-take relations
hip between the police and the press; a mutual agreement as to when, where, and if information regarding violent crimes would be released to the public. It’s not like the paparazzi today.”
“Then how can I validate the half-red face signature of the killings?” Fawn asked.
“I thought you might be able to access police files, maybe autopsy information. Surely, the half-red faces would have been documented somewhere in police records.” Elizabeth realized her tone had come across a bit surly. “Sorry, my dear, I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I’m not feeling well today.”
Genuine concern crossed Fawn’s features. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’ll be fine. I just need rest. I think I’ll go relax with a good book for awhile.”
Fawn stood, preparing to leave. “Is there anything I can bring you when I return Wednesday?”
“As a matter of fact, I have been craving strawberry ice cream. If you could pick up a half gallon, I’ll reimburse you for it.” Elizabeth forced a smile as another jolt of pain struck her lower back and slowly passed.
“I could drop it by this afternoon, if you like,” Fawn offered.
“No, Wednesday is fine. Although my stomach’s clamoring for a taste, it’s been a little unsettled lately. Hopefully by then I’ll be back to normal.”
“Will do,” Fawn grinned. “Oh, one question before I go. Do you have Sarah Courtland’s 1865 letter to Coyle; the letter your father discovered in the attic? It would go a long way toward verifying the authenticity of the story.”
Three Keys to Murder Page 7
