“I suppose I doubted myself. That first shooting. I’m not sure now that I was justified.”
“Yet you were cleared on that one. Why don’t you have nightmares about the second, where you were not cleared but instead fired?”
“I suppose I thought I was correct in that decision, no matter what the review decided.”
“Ah. So you not only set yourself up as the one who decides to kill or let live, but you then decide if a review board of your superiors is right or wrong. What godlike entity gave you this awesome authority?”
Troy stared at Groves. That had no effect. Troy hardened his look to CopStare, which would have intimidated the average criminal suspect. Groves sat there looking back blankly, totally without emotion. After a minute Troy decided he was not going to outstare the psychologist. Maybe if he tried it with those silvered sunglasses.
“The second shooting was not even a conscious decision,” he said. “You can’t wait for a conscious decision in those circumstances. I fired without even thinking about it. When I saw the gun. As for my opinion of the review board, let’s put that down to free will.”
“Facile,” Groves said. “First, you didn’t shoot by instinct. Nobody has that instinct. You shot because you had planned, long before, what to do in that situation. And then you had practiced that action until it came to you as an automatic reaction when the right stimulus presented. Trained reaction is not instinct.”
“All right. I can buy that,” Troy said. “So what?”
“So you trained and trained and when that training resulted in an action that saved a woman’s life, you ended up being bothered by it, perhaps regretting it.”
“I ended up feeling guilty.”
Groves shook his head. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. ‘Guilt’ is a meaningless term until we know what’s at the root. And we’re not there yet.”
“Will we ever get there?”
Groves stared at Troy, deadpan. “Possibly,” he said.
Chapter 47
Tuesday, August 6
The bicycle had been sold to John Barrymore some eight months earlier and the rear tire on the bike matched the mud imprints on the road that Corporal Rivers had collected. The blood type on the small woman’s tee-shirt and jeans that Milo and Angel had found beside the road matched that of Jarvess Michaels. A DNA test result was coming later. The DNA was back for the cigarette Rivers had found in Michaels’ truck and all they needed was someone to match it to. It was all circumstantial but it was enough for a judge to issue an arrest warrant for Kathleen Barrymore, and search warrants for her house, cars and property grounds.
By the time Troy had all the paperwork it was after two in the afternoon. Bubba Johns and Milo Binder were finishing their day shifts at three and four, and Troy asked them to stick around. When Angel Watson and Jeremiah Brown, who were both pulling the evening shift, showed up he told them to skip the exercise hour and for Jeremiah to take the patrol alone for a few hours.
Bubba drove and Troy sat up front, with Angel and Milo in back behind the cage. Bubba drove them to the Barrymore house and on up the driveway to park blocking the garage. Bubba went around back while Troy, Milo and Angel went to the door.
Kathleen Barrymore answered the ring. She glared at them. “What now? Do I have to complain to the town council about you again?”
“Milo, why don’t you do the honors,” Troy said. “I can never remember all the words.”
“Kathleen Barrymore, you’re under arrest,” Milo said. He pulled out his handcuffs and slapped one on Kathleen’s right wrist. Before she could do more than squawk, he had turned her and grabbed the left wrist. Milo read off the Miranda warning perfectly.
“Angel, if you would be so kind,” Troy said. Angel stepped in and ran her hands over Kathleen from head to toe. “She’s clean. Externally anyway.”
“Let’s check the house, for anyone else,” Troy said, as Milo dragged the complaining Kathleen out and over to the truck.
“Stay with her,” Troy said.
“The rear doors don’t have buttons on the inside,” Milo said. “She can’t get out.”
“I know that. Stay with her.”
There was no one else in the house. Troy opened the French doors that faced the river and Bubba came in to help search.
Chapter 48
Saturday, August 17
Troy locked the tiller of the Sea Pearl in place and stepped forward past Lee to roll up the mainsail around the rotating mast. Back in the rear cockpit he sat and rolled up the mizzen too. He had already started the small outboard but now he put it in gear and motored the twenty-one-foot open boat out of the Gulf of Mexico and into a narrow channel through the mangrove forest that made up the Ten Thousand Islands. Lee Bell sat up in the main cockpit, wearing a large floppy straw hat and her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. She had on a pale blue one-piece bathing suit and dark blue shorts over that. Troy wore some off-duty cargo shorts and a vented fishing shirt. He still wore the safari hat from his uniform, with the MBP crest on the front. Polarized sunglasses let him see the shallow spots.
They had brought the boat out early, to be in the Gulf by the time the sea breeze kicked up. Troy watched the passing trees and island shapes, comparing them to the chart he had open on the seat beside him. Mostly he didn’t need the chart. He had long ago memorized the passageways through these islands.
“How can you know where you’re going?” Lee asked. “It all looks the same. Everything is mangrove, same height, not a straight line in sight. You can’t see ahead more than a few dozen yards at a time.
“Ever hear the joke about Carnegie Hall?”
“Of course I have. Why don’t you just use a compass and a GPS?”
“Compass is useless in here anyway. Too many twists and turns. I have a GPS. But eyeballs and a chart, comparing what you see on paper to what you are looking at, that’s a lot more challenging.”
“Old-fashioned, you mean.”
“I like my chart. And remember, while the GPS can tell me where I am on the surface of the planet, it is displaying this on a manmade chart. Same chart as this one.” He held up the chart he had spread open on the seat beside him. “And this is an area where the islands and channels change every time there’s a big storm. People who slavishly follow GPS maps are called automobile drivers. Out here it’s just one tool among many.”
He found Faka Key and skirted the island until he reached the tiny landing on the east side. It was barely fifteen feet wide, with red mangroves growing out into the water on either side, and the small sandy beach only visible at the last moment. He nosed the boat in, careful of the two masts and the trees, pulled up the leeboards at the last moment, shut off the small outboard and ran the bow aground.
“We’re here,” he said.
“Where?”
“Lunch stop. Bathroom break. And a great view.” He climbed out over the bow. Lee followed. They pulled the boat up a little higher. Troy took the claw anchor off the bow, pulled out ten feet of chain through the hawse-pipe, and half-buried the anchor in the ground. He wrapped a few feet of chain around the big cleat on the foredeck. They got out a cooler and several folding chairs.
Just inside the landing there was a camping area, kept clear by occasional visitors, and one lone picnic table someone had donated years back. Troy led the way past that, carrying the cooler. Lee followed with the folding chairs slung over her shoulder. The path he was on started to slope upwards. It soon got to be fairly steep and he had to struggle a bit with both hands on the cooler. They reached the top of the mound. Here there was an open space, kept clear of bushes by the feet of occasional visitors. Lee gasped at the view. “It’s beautiful,” she said. He set the cooler down and Lee opened the chairs.
Below them, extending for ten miles all around, was a wonderland of twisting narrow channels, oyster bars, larger bays, small islands. It was like looking down at an emerald-and-blue map spread out before them.
“Why couldn’t I see this hill from down
there?” Lee asked.
“It’s a Calusa Indian mound, same as the one on the east end of Airfield Key, only this one has gotten overgrown. Top of the mound happens to be at the same height as the tops of the trees down there. So you don’t see it, looking up. But up here, you’re just slightly above the trees yourself, so you can look out.”
They got out the food and water and ate, chewing silently and looking at the mangrove forest below them.
“This is where Bubba and some other people rode out the hurricane,” Troy said. He told Lee the story. “They didn’t sit up here, of course. They hugged the slope farther down. But that’s why the Calusa built these mounds in the first place.”
“What do you mean? I thought they just ate a lot of oysters and dumped the shells in a convenient pile.”
“Sure they did. But they had a plan and built the mounds up intentionally. When a storm came—and they came without warning—the natives simply rode it out, sitting up on their high mound. In a way they were a lot smarter than we are. We bulldozed most of the mounds around Florida to make roadbed. The highest point in Mangrove Bayou proper is maybe five feet above sea level. Well, actually, the highest point is the top of the shell mound on Airfield Key. Ironic. The Calusa would have scoffed at our stupidity.
“The town emergency plan has a mention of sending the residents to sit out a bad storm surge on top of the Airfield Key mound. Hope not too many people are left in town if that happens. Might be some pushing and shoving for a spot.”
“I bet,” Lee said. “Speaking of Airfield Key, what’s the latest on Kathleen Barrymore, one of my neighbors?”
“Ah. She’s likely to spend a long time in durance vile…”
“Southern redneck police chiefs don’t say, ‘in durance vile,’” Lee said.
“I’m a director of pubic safety, remember. Says so on my door. And Kathleen is in durance vile for the moment, probably for some time to come, perhaps for life. We matched both Tats Michaels’ blood—he was her longtime boyfriend—and her own DNA, mixed together on the clothing and the shoes she had buried. We tracked down, by the serial number, the store that sold her husband the bicycle and also matched the bicycle tire tread with the cast the Collier County Sheriff’s deputy made. The concrete block and PVC pipe and the electric drill she swiped from the construction guys working on her house were not so conclusive. Never got useful prints off any of those. We have the motel records for when they stayed together and your flight logs for when John Barrymore was out of town.”
“Poor guy,” Lee said. “He was foolish, but you shouldn’t have to die for being foolish.”
“I agree. Anyway, it’s enough, barely, to convict her for the murder of her boyfriend. We might be able to link her to the murder of her husband, though we assume that Tats did that, using an electric drill she provided for him. She probably got him onto the boat too, using the swim ladder so nobody at the yacht club would see him walking in the side gate or around the docks.”
“Why kill her boyfriend?” Lee asked. “If she had not done that, you wouldn’t have had that truck, and Michaels’ body, and the hole full of bloody clothes, and the bicycle. All you would have had would have been a dead body on a boat that the medical examiner said was an accident.”
“Well, who knows,” Troy said. “There would have been two people knowing one secret and no secret is safe that way. He was a loose end so far as Kathleen was concerned. My guess? He was the one who killed John Barrymore. She didn’t know enough about boats and tools. He did.”
“She got too greedy,” Lee said.
“That she did. Greed is the whole framework for this. Greed to get her hands on her husband’s money. Then greed to keep it all to herself. With her husband dead she inherited four million dollars. Why split any of that with a boatyard mechanic boyfriend nicknamed Tats? She had moved up the social ladder by then. She was already trolling for her next fish at the Osprey Yacht Club. I saw her doing it.”
“I hear a lot of mights and maybes.”
Troy shrugged. “What can I say? It’s not a perfect world. I suppose, if it were, nobody would need me. Lucky for me most criminals are stupid.”
Lee looked sideways at Troy, sitting next to her. “You do tend to rate people by their intelligence, don’t you?”
“Do I?”
“You do. It’s a character flaw.”
“Don’t complain. It’s why I like you.”
“You like me because I’m the sexy redhead who grabbed onto you at the yacht club Hail and Farewell.”
“That too. But sexy women are common…”
“Well, excuuuse me!”
“…but truly intelligent women—and men—are rare.”
“Well, all right then. But it’s still a mistake to judge people only in terms of their IQs.”
“I’ll try to do better. You sexy thing.”
“Speaking of doing better. Has the Mangrove Bayou town council decided to keep you on permanently?”
“I’m still a probie. The mayor likes me. Howard Duell seems to have had a mad-on about me from the get-go. The swing vote is Max Reed. I would say he’s 60-40 for me.”
“What about the shooting? You had to kill that man. That must have been awful.”
“It was awful for Billy Poteet. And in some regards it was almost the exact repeat of the time in Tampa when I killed that man with the knife to his ex-wife’s throat.”
“The one in your nightmares.”
“The one in my nightmares.”
“And you also got investigated. For this latest one, I mean.”
“Standard procedure after a police-involved shooting. The state attorney’s office cleared me. ‘Following the completion of this investigation it appears that Director of Public Safety Troy Adam was in the legal performance of his official law enforcement duties and acted within the scope of his legal assignment,’” Troy quoted.
“So that’s good. And if they make you the permanent chief…”
“Director of pubic safety.”
“…director of pubic safety, do you get a real police car to replace your nunmobile?”
“I don’t think so.”
About the Author
Stephen Morrill was born into the Army, served there himself, and wandered the world for thirty years, living in twenty-one cities in six countries. He attended various universities for seven years without ever amassing enough credits in any one subject to get a degree. Finally he settled, like a barnacle holding fast to a piling, in Florida.
“When it came time for me to pick a place to settle down I wanted water activities and beaches,” Morrill says. “I also decided to live and work in a place everyone else dreams of retiring to. It’s a decision I’ve never regretted.”
Since then he has canoed and sailed almost every Florida waterway and SCUBA dived on almost every reef and wreck. He has been a reporter for a wire service, written for magazines, edited several magazines, and written books, including several Florida travel works.
“I suppose I’m a native now. As they say, I have ‘sand in my shoes.’”
Mangrove Bayou Page 22
