“You’re probably right.”
We came to the mid-rise condo building that marked the two-mile turnaround point for our four-mile run. I looked at my watch. Almost seven o’clock. We started back north, our breath getting a little shorter now. The conversation stopped, and we plodded on, making good time.
We cooled down on our walk from the beach to my cottage, took a quick shower, put on clean clothes, and walked back to the Longbeach Café, a tidy little diner in the same small shopping center that housed Tiny’s Bar. Bob and Shannon Gault were sitting in a booth. They waved us over and asked us to join them.
“You guys look pretty chipper for this early in the morning,” Bob said.
“She dragged me out for a run,” I said. “Kind of gets the blood flowing. How have y’all been?”
“Fine,” Bob said. “We just got back from San Diego and heard you’re coming out of retirement.”
“Sort of. I think I’ve got one more case in me.”
“We knew Nate Bannister,” Shannon said. “Terrible little man.”
Colleen, the owner and cook, came and took our order and left.
“How did you know Bannister?” I asked.
“We talked to him a couple of years ago about building our house,” Shannon said. “He didn’t get along with the architect, he didn’t like the plans, and he called me sugarplum and told me I had no business making suggestions to him about what kind of house I wanted.”
“Sugarplum?” J.D. asked, laughing.
“Yeah. I thought Bob was going to hit him.”
“I guess you decided to go with another builder,” I said.
“Yes. I think Bannister got the message when Bob kicked him off the property.”
Colleen brought our breakfast, and we ate as we talked.
“Did you ever meet his wife Maggie?” I asked.
“Once,” said Bob. “Bannister took us to dinner when we first contacted him about the house. We got rid of him about three weeks later.”
“What was your impression of the wife?” I asked.
“She seemed nice,” Shannon said. “Kind of quiet; reserved, I guess.”
“How did they seem as a couple?” J.D. asked.
“Fine,” Shannon said.
“Did you ever meet anybody else who worked with Bannister?” I asked.
“Just his assistant,” Bob said.
“Tori?”
“Yes. I think that was her name.”
“What was she like?”
“She seemed pretty much in charge,” Bob said. “At least when we were talking money. But one time he almost bit her head off.”
“Tell me about that.”
“I think she was talking about allowances for different rooms,” Bob said. “You know. Things like how much we could spend on crown moldings, flooring, that sort of thing. Suddenly, out of the blue, Bannister called her a stupid bitch and said he’d explain it all to us.”
“What did Tori do?”
“Nothing,” said Shannon. “She just sat there and didn’t say another word. I’d have slapped some of that arrogance out of him if he’d talked to me that way.”
Bob grinned. “I thought Shannon was going to take him out when he called her sugarplum.”
“There was something else,” Shannon said. “I think Bannister and Tori were having an affair.”
“What made you think that?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. There was just something between them. She was quite a bit younger than he, and he was certainly in charge of whatever relationship they had. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’d bet good money they were an item. She looked genuinely hurt when he called her stupid.”
“She also looked mad as hell,” Bob said.
“That too,” Shannon said.
“Did you ever see them again?” I asked.
“I saw him a couple of times on the island, once at the post office and another time in Publix,” Bob said. “I just nodded at him. Never had another conversation.”
“What about you, sugarplum?” I asked.
Shannon burst out laughing. “That’s not funny, Matt. But no, I never saw him again. I did see Tori once.”
“Here on the island?”
“No. I was downtown with some friends having lunch and I saw Tori in a restaurant. She was sitting in a corner with a man about her age. Not much to him. He was wearing one of those tight t-shirts that showed off his biceps, only he didn’t have any. I couldn’t see them as a couple, but they were holding hands and talking quietly. Kind of looking into each other’s eyes. That kind of stuff. I don’t think she even noticed me.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago? Maybe three. I can look at my calendar and pinpoint it exactly if you need the date.”
“Don’t worry about it now. Can you describe the guy?”
“He was skinny as a rail, but tall. It was hard to tell with him sitting down, but I’d guess maybe six-two. He had blond hair that he wore long. I don’t think he washed it regularly. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“How about eye color, facial hair? Any distinguishing marks?”
“I didn’t get a good enough look at his face to tell you about his eye color, but I don’t think he had a beard or mustache. No scars that I saw.”
“Are you thinking they might have had something to do with Bannister’s murder?” Bob asked.
“Not really, but you never know what’s going to turn up. I am sure that Abby Lester didn’t kill him. But somebody did.”
Bob looked at his watch. “We’ve got to go. We’re going to take the boat on a run down to Venice with Woody and Sue Wolverton and grab some lunch at the Crow’s Nest.”
We said our good-byes, and Bob insisted on picking up the check.
Our day was just as J.D. planned it. She sat on the patio reading a book, and I read up on case law to make sure I wasn’t missing something I’d need for Abby’s case. We walked to Moore’s for lunch, back to my cottage, more reading, more sunning on the patio, more conversation about things of no importance, then to Mar Vista for a light dinner and home to bed. Not a bad way to spend a beautiful Sunday in paradise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Monday mornings are busy times at the Longboat Key police station. The cops who were off for the weekend are catching up on what had happened since their last shift ended, paperwork is flowing to the deputy chief’s office and on to the chief’s. The Sunday night shift is getting ready to check out for the day and the calls of snakes in pools and dogs loose on the beach start coming in. There is little crime on Longboat Key, but the island never sleeps. Dogs bark, neighbors quarrel, snowbirds drive slow on Gulf of Mexico Drive, raccoons raid trash cans, car keys get lost, lovers walk the beach after midnight, landscapers start working before eight; a never-ending litany of calls presenting problems that the officers respond to and sort out.
J.D. had closed her office door, muting the cacophonous din echoing down the corridor. She was contemplating the email she’d received early that morning from Detective Brad Corbin in New Orleans. It contained a DNA analysis on Connie Pelletier and a note explaining that the ballistics people at the Orleans Parish crime lab had determined that the gun used to kill Connie was the same one that had killed Officer Tatum. The connection to the murder of a police officer spurred the lab to a frenzy of overtime, resulting in a quick turnaround on the DNA.
J.D. emailed a copy of the report to Bert Hawkins with a note asking him to compare Connie’s DNA to Linda Favereaux’s, and imploring him to let her know something as soon as possible.
Corbin’s email also told her that he had found regular cash deposits into Tatum’s bank account beginning two years before— at about the same time that he became one of the records clerks. Corbin had also checked the bank account of Tatum’s predecessor, a civilian who had held the job for twenty years. He’d received monthly cash deposits for most of that time.
J.D. looked at her watch. Almost nine. Corbin wo
uld be at work. She dialed his cell phone, identified herself, and told him she appreciated his email and the rush on the DNA. “What more can you tell me about the money going into the records clerks’ accounts?”
“Not much,” Corbin said. “They were cash deposits, probably made by the account holder. But they were regular as clockwork. During the first week of every month, Tatum’s predecessor made a five-hundred-dollar deposit. Apparently, Tatum got a raise. He was depositing a thousand bucks a month.”
“The other guy was a civilian. Why did they replace him with a cop?”
“I asked the chief about that. It seems that internal affairs had some indication that when Tatum was a patrol officer, he was on the take from some pretty bad people down in the Quarter. Apparently, just penny-ante stuff for the most part. Look the other way on small crimes like prostitution being run out of some of the bars, that sort of thing. They never could get the goods on him. The chief didn’t have the grounds to fire him, so he brought him in-house to take care of the records. He figured Tatum couldn’t get into trouble in the records room.”
“Looks like the chief was wrong,” J.D. said. “Did you follow up with the civilian to find out where the money was coming from?”
“Unfortunately, no. He died about six months ago. Heart attack.”
“Did the money going to him ever stop?”
“There were no more cash deposits after he retired.”
“Were you able to check to see if any of your other records are missing?”
“I’ve got our information technology people on that, but they may never find anything. We’ve got thousands upon thousands of files, and a few could have been taken out and not returned, and we’d never know, unless we were looking for a specific file.”
“What about the computer files? Wouldn’t the IT people be able to find out if any of those were erased?”
“They’re trying to reconstruct that now. We’ll know more in a couple of days.”
“Thanks, Brad. I’ve sent your DNA results on Connie to our ME for comparison with my victim’s. I’ll let you know what turns up.”
J.D. hung up and went to her computer. There were still no reports of any activity on James Favereaux’s credit cards. She dug through her inbox. Junk mail, memos about nothing important, and a report from the Sarasota County crime lab on Favereaux’s car that had been found at the Tampa airport.
J.D. groaned out loud. The report was dated the Wednesday before. It’d probably shown up in her inbox on Thursday morning while she and Matt were en route to New Orleans. She had forgotten about it.
The report was detailed, giving a description of the meticulous search of every part of the vehicle. Nothing out of the ordinary was found. Just the typical detritus found in most cars after they’d been driven awhile. There was a McDonald’s bag on the floorboard of the back seat. It contained, among other things, the remains of a meal and a receipt for a Big Mac, fries, and a Diet Coke, bought at an all-night McDonald’s on Cortez Road at twenty-five minutes past midnight on Monday morning, the night of his wife’s murder. Was this before or after she died?
J.D. remembered that the ME’s assistant could only give an approximation of the time of death. She pulled the autopsy report from the file and found the estimated time of death. Midnight, Sunday, give or take an hour. She thought about it. If Linda had been killed early in that two-hour window, James would have had time to kill her and get to the McDonald’s shortly after midnight. If she had died late in the window, James would have had time to get his burger and drive home and kill his wife. Was he that devoid of humanity, that big a monster? It didn’t fit with the fact of his philanthropy to USF, the endowed chair in African-American studies.
She went back to the forensics report and found the mileage that showed on the car’s odometer at the Tampa airport parking garage. She toyed with that, but since she had no way of knowing what the mileage was when he pulled into McDonald’s, there was no way to determine if James had driven straight from the restaurant to the airport or had made a detour to the key to kill his wife.
It hit her like a lightning bolt. Cameras. The town had recently installed cameras near the bridges at either end of the island, part of a system known as Automatic License Recognition System. The cameras took pictures of the license plates of any vehicle that entered the island or left it. The plate numbers were instantaneously fed to a computer that checked the plates against those listed for stolen cars or ones owned by people who had suspended or revoked licenses, or a myriad of other things. A number of islanders had complained about Big Brother, but the cameras had been installed and were being tested. Maybe they caught James Favereaux’s plates.
She called Sharkey and asked how to find out the information she needed. He said he’d run it for her if she could give him a plate number. She gave it to him and in a few seconds, he said, “Here it is. He left the island on the Longboat Pass Bridge at eleven-fifty on Sunday night and returned at twelve-forty-five in the morning. He left again via the Longboat Pass Bridge at twenty minutes after one.”
“Okay. So he has a Big Mac attack and goes to McDonald’s. He crosses the bridge at eleven-fifty, takes about thirty-five minutes to get to the restaurant, order his meal, and start home. He comes back across the bridge twenty minutes after he pays for the meal. Not much traffic that time of night, and it would be about a fifteen to twenty-minute drive either way.”
“Sounds about right,” Sharkey said.
“So what about the fifteen-minute gap? There was thirty-five minutes between the time he left the island and the time he paid for the meal, but it took him only twenty minutes to get home.”
“Maybe he stopped for gas. Maybe the Cortez Bridge was up on his way to McDonald’s and he had to wait for a boat to pass. Any number of things could have delayed him.”
“You’re right. Thanks, Martin.” She hung up and thought some more. It didn’t make sense that James killed Linda, went to McDonald’s, and then returned to the island. When he came back from McDonald’s, he crossed the bridge at twelve forty-five, and would have driven the ten minutes farther to his house. That would have put him at home within the kill window. She knew those windows were not very precise. They could be off by an hour or more depending on a lot of variables.
Still, Favereaux could have murdered Linda, left his house at ten minutes after one, and crossed the bridge at one-twenty. The time frame fit. Did something happen, a violent argument perhaps, within the fifteen minutes or so between the time he arrived at the house and the time he left?
What happened in that fifteen minutes? What was the murder weapon and where was it now? Probably in the Gulf of Mexico. Something didn’t fit. A man leaves his house, drives a half-hour to McDonald’s at midnight, eats his sandwich in the car on the way home, kills his wife, and leaves again. She shook her head. Could she assume that he ate the sandwich? Did it make any difference? The remains of the sandwich wrapping were in the car. The sandwich was gone. Maybe he threw it out the window, but why would he do that? Suppose he wanted to establish a time line by leaving the time stamped receipt in the car. Did he know about the cameras on the bridge? A lot of islanders weren’t paying attention to them yet, so maybe it wasn’t something he thought about. If he’d thought about it, he would have known that the cameras would have established his time line.
If he knew about the cameras and planned to kill his wife, why take the chance that somebody could figure out the time line that put him in the house during the period when the murder took place? And if he were just trying to establish a time line with the McDonald’s receipt, why not stop for gas at the 7-Eleven store at Cortez Road and Palma Sola Boulevard? It would have been closer, and the gas receipt would have served the same purpose.
She had no answers, but her growling stomach was telling her that it was lunchtime. Her phone rang. Bert Hawkins. “I don’t know what you’re working on, J.D.,” he said, “but the DNA report from New Orleans makes things interesting.”
&nb
sp; “How so?”
“The dead woman in New Orleans was, without a doubt, the mother of Linda Favereaux.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was time for me to have a conversation with Robert Shorter, the man with anger issues who had left his fingerprints in Bannister’s condo. I drove twenty miles south to a Siesta Key condo that sat on the bayshore near the southern end of the island. I knew from my search of the Sarasota County property appraiser’s website that the building in which Shorter lived was only about five years old, but it was not wearing well. Stucco was peeling from the underlying concrete block, leaving bare patches in the walls. The wooden trim appeared to be rotting away, the landscaping was minimal, and neighboring condo buildings nearing completion were encroaching too closely on Shorter’s building and severely limiting the view of the bay. It made me wonder if someone had greased the palms of a building official to get the necessary permits to build.
The man who answered the door was squat, about five feet six and two hundred pounds. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties. His belly, not quite covered by a thin t-shirt, overflowed the waistband of his shorts. He was wearing flip-flops and a scowl. “Whadda you want?” he asked.
I stuck out my hand. “I’m Matt Royal, Mr. Shorter. I’m a lawyer—” I got no further.
“Get the fuck outta here.” He started to close the door.
I put my hand out to stop the door. He pulled it quickly, opening it all the way. “I’ll kick your slimy ass,” he said.
I smiled. “I guess the anger management classes didn’t take.”
He threw a punch. I saw it coming. There was a split second there when his eyes squinted and his right shoulder twitched and the fist started upward. I reacted instantly, old army training kicking in. I stepped back and his fist whizzed past my chin, missing completely. His body followed his hand, the momentum twisting his torso to his left, opening up his right rib cage. I reacted reflexively, no thought, no debate about the wisdom of my response, or the consequences. Just action. I jabbed him with a left, hard, just below his right ribs. I’d learned long ago that when you punch somebody, you don’t aim for the place you’re planning to hit. You aim several inches beyond, so that when you connect, it’s with all the power you can generate. That stopped his forward movement and turned him toward me. I followed up with a right to his solar plexus. He went down, gasping for breath, falling into his apartment.
Chasing Justice Page 12
