Apparent Wind (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 7)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “I wasn’t,” he answered. “A little buzzed, yeah, but you know me. I have a high tolerance. Plus, I only made it through two beers, then we, uh, moved on.”

  Maggie looked away, her eyes passing quickly over the bed and settling on the cheap landscape above the TV. She wasn’t especially comfortable talking about the sexual activity of someone she knew so well.

  “Okay, so you guys have some reunion sex or whatever you guys called it. Then what?”

  “I fell asleep,” he answered.

  “What time was that?” Maggie asked, looking back at him.

  He shook his head. “Maybe twelve or twelve-thirty. I’ve got the kids this weekend, so I stayed up night before last. You know, so I can sleep nights for the next few days.”

  Axel was a night shrimper, going out around five or six at this time of year and coming back after sunrise.

  “Did you argue? Fight?”

  Axel waved that off. “Nah. We only fight when we’re married.” He sighed, took the cigarette back out of his mouth and threw it on the table. “Damn it.”

  Maggie stared at the top of his bowed head. Axel was sarcastic and irresponsible, and not one to show much emotion. But he’d been devastated by her husband David’s death, he was a good father to his kids even though it was part time, and he’d been a good friend to her through some very tough times. They didn’t spend much time together these days, but if she needed him, truly needed his help, he would be there for her. She wasn’t sure how to be there for him now.

  “Axel, this is really bad,” she said quietly.

  “I’ve never raised my hand to a woman, Maggie. You know that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re here.”

  Maggie’s cell phone rang. It was Dwight. She tapped the answer icon. “Hey, Dwight,” she said.

  “Hey, Maggie,” Dwight said. “We got everybody pretty much cleared out. You know, the civilians and whatnot. I’m coming over with a key to room 15. It’s unoccupied.”

  “Are Mike and Pete with you?” Maggie asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered, as Maggie heard his knock at the door.

  She hung up and opened the door. Standing behind Dwight were the two guys from the crime scene unit. Maggie didn’t expect much as far as forensics went. Hotels were the worst crime scenes. They were nothing but DNA and bodily excretions. Maggie hadn’t stayed in a hotel in years.

  However, despite the fact that Axel readily admitted that he’d had sex with Marisol in that room, they would need to collect evidence of it, and anything else they could find, should Axel ever be on trial. Maggie was more interested in evidence of what Marisol was doing in Apalach, and who else might have wanted to hurt her. She knew in her bones it wasn’t Axel.

  She let the men in, and they all bunched up near the open door.

  “Hellfire, Axel,” Dwight said. “I’m really sorry.”

  The men in Dwight’s family had been shrimping with the men in Axel’s family for generations. There were no six degrees of separation in Apalach; they were lucky if they could stretch it to two.

  Axel nodded at Dwight as he stood, but he didn’t answer.

  “Dwight, take Axel next door and take his preliminary statement while we do our thing in here,” Maggie said.

  “Sure thing,” Dwight replied. “Uh, Wyatt’s still downstairs. He’s talkin’ to the new boss man. The new boss man got himself on TV again.”

  Curtis Bledsoe, appointed by the governor to be their new sheriff, had managed to insert himself into coverage of a small pot bust just last week. This made two TV appearances in the two weeks he’d been in office.

  “Is the news still here?” Maggie asked.

  “No, they left.”

  “Then what’s he still doing here?”

  “Trying to talk to Wyatt without standing too close to him,” Dwight answered. “On account of it makes him look ridiculous.”

  Pete, a tech straight out of college, tried to hide his laugh by coughing. Curtis Bledsoe was five foot six on his best day. He made Wyatt look like Big Bird.

  Maggie sighed. “Maybe he’ll be gone by the time I get done here.”

  “Maybe he’ll come up here and give you a hand,” Pete said, trying not to smile.

  Nobody liked Bledsoe. This was partly because, thus far, he seemed to be more politician than law enforcement officer. But it was mostly because everybody liked Wyatt so much.

  Once Dwight and Axel had gone next door, Maggie and the guys did their separate things. While they looked for trace evidence of anything at all pertinent, Maggie started going through Marisol’s things, looking for evidence that someone had a reason to kill her.

  Marisol’s cell phone, a Galaxy of some kind with a completely useless rhinestone case, was halfway under the bed. It was dead. Maggie bagged it and set it on the table.

  There were two short dresses hanging in the shuttered wardrobe that served as a closet, but the rest of Marisol’s clean clothes were still in the small suitcase that was sitting open on a luggage stand. Maggie went through it carefully.

  There were several pairs of panties that Maggie had a hard time understanding, as they looked more like headbands than underwear. The fact that Marisol had a matching bra for each one made Maggie feel like less of a woman somehow. There were a couple of pairs of shorts and a few flowy tops, a pair of pink sandals, and some red heels. The small pile of dirty laundry near the bathroom door had been similar. If she was here on business, that business was very casual.

  A large makeup bag on the bathroom sink contained nothing of note, except clear evidence that Marisol had packed more makeup than Maggie had ever owned at one time. No prescription bottles, no illegal drugs, no condoms or condom wrappers. Nothing but high end makeup and hair products.

  Maggie moved on to Marisol’s purse, which she found hanging up on the back of the bathroom door. A set of keys with a Kia remote and an Epcot key ring. More makeup. A wallet with her ID and one credit card. Maggie recognized the brand as one of those secured cards for people with bad credit. There were store cards from Macy’s and Belk. No cash, no pictures. A few gas receipts and an appointment card for a Tampa waxing salon. It was for the following Friday. Whatever business had brought Marisol here, she hadn’t been planning to stay for long.

  In the bottom of the purse, Maggie found a few loose papers. One was a receipt from the local BP, showing a purchase the night before of a pack of Camels, not Axel’s brand, a pack of Seagram’s Coolers, and a pack of Coors. Maggie bagged it and set it aside.

  One of the other papers was the torn corner of a restaurant menu. Maggie didn’t recognize it. On the back was a phone number written in pretty blue cursive. It was a local number. Maggie made note of it on her phone, then bagged the scrap of paper.

  A perusal of the rest of the room garnered Maggie nothing further. She picked up the labelled evidence bags containing the cell phone and car keys and walked over to Mike, the senior of the two crime scene techs.

  “Hey, Mike, can you sign off on these for me?”

  “Sure,” Mike said, as he pulled a receipt from a binder on the bed.

  “You guys are being awfully quiet,” Maggie said as he filled it out. “Nothing special?”

  “Not really,” Mike answered. “Of course, something like a hundred different people have been in this room in the last few months. This place is crawling with skin cells, blood, semen, hair, you name it.”

  Maggie sighed. “You ever stay in hotels?”

  “Sure,” he answered. “But I bring a kit with me.”

  Maggie thanked him and told him to give her a call, then she headed out the door.

  WYATT WAS STILL OUT front, talking to one of the guys from PD and drinking a gigantic bottle of Mountain Dew. He’d removed his tie. When he saw Maggie approaching, he patted the officer on the shoulder and fell into step with her.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey. How’d the TV thing go?”

  “Not as much fun as you would think,” Wyatt an
swered drily. “She kept calling me ‘Sheriff’ and we had to start over.”

  “Where’s the new sheriff?”

  “Little Curtis Bedsore? He lost interest once the press moved on,” Wyatt said. “Probably late for a photo op somewhere.”

  “I thought you said we had to be nice to him,” Maggie said.

  “I was being insincere.”

  Maggie stopped at Marisol’s little red Kia.

  “This your victim’s car?” Wyatt asked.

  “Yeah.” Maggie pulled the key fob from the bag and unlocked the door. “I want to take a look before they tow it over to the office.”

  “Dwight told me about Axel. Where is he?” Wyatt asked, as Maggie slipped into the driver’s seat. It was pushed much farther back than Maggie would have needed it.

  “Upstairs in the room next to hers,” she answered. “Dwight’s taking his statement.”

  “How is he?”

  “I don’t know. He’s not really a heart on the sleeve kind of guy,” Maggie answered. She spotted the car charger plugged into a USB port and pulled the phone out of the bag. “I had no idea he was still in contact with Marisol.”

  Wyatt watched her plug in the phone. “So tell me about her,” he said.

  Maggie started the car, waited for the little charging icon to come on, then set the phone down on the center console. “I really didn’t know her. She was Axel’s second wife. He was only twenty-two. His first wife was Caro, a girl we went to high school with. They only lasted seven months. Then he met Marisol. He met her at some festival in Tampa and married her a few weeks later. I didn’t like her.”

  “Why not?”

  Maggie started rummaging through the center console. “I don’t know. She was too sure of herself. Too confidant, in that flirty, overtly sexy way that some women are. David didn’t like her either, which tells you something, since most men try to like beautiful women.”

  “I like you,” Wyatt said. “But it’s an ongoing effort.”

  Maggie tossed him a look as she replaced a handful of receipts and business cards that didn’t immediately interest her. “I appreciate that,” she said.

  “So what’s the deal?” Wyatt asked. “He married her twice?”

  “Yeah. The first time, they made it a little over a month.” Maggie opened the glove compartment and started looking through it. “They fought all the time. After they split, he married Marci, a girl from Carrabelle. We liked her. She’s the mother of his two kids. But they got divorced after seven years, and a few weeks afterwards, he comes home from a trip with Marisol in tow. They’d gotten married again. This marriage lasted twice as long as the first one.”

  “So…what? Two months?”

  “Something like that.” Maggie stuck the car manuals, insurance binder and an extra car charger back into the glove compartment and snapped it shut. “A few years later, he married Angela, and they got divorced two years ago.”

  “Does he know he doesn’t have to marry every woman he dates?”

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “Believe me, he doesn’t,” she said. “All of the local women know he’s trouble, but he’s a great guy otherwise. He doesn’t lack for company.”

  “So what were he and his ex-wife doing here together?”

  Maggie shook her head. “Apparently, they had a habit of hooking up now and then. It sounds like it was a purely sexual thing. Or maybe he still loves her a little.”

  Wyatt sighed and frowned down at her. “What do you think happened here?”

  Maggie leaned back in the seat and blew out a breath. “I don’t know. But Axel didn’t do this.”

  Wyatt took a moment to choose his words. “Look, I like Axel. And I know you’re close. But if he’s got some kind of emotional connection to her after all these years, after what sounds like a pretty volatile relationship, maybe something went wrong.”

  “No,” Maggie said, shaking her head again. “Axel’s too easygoing. The reason he got married so often is that the women wanted it. And the reason he got divorced so often is because the women wanted it. He just goes along.”

  Maggie picked up the phone. The welcome screen wasn’t up yet. She set it back down.

  “Besides, he’s way too smart. If he’d done this, he wouldn’t still be here,” she said. “I doubt we’d even have a body.” She looked up at Wyatt. “Did you know that he got into MIT?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. He only applied because his guidance counselor and his mom made him. But he was a math and science geek. Our junior year, he had to start taking classes at Gulf Coast State because he’d already taken everything at our school.”

  “So what the hell happened?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Nothing. He never intended to go to college. He wanted to be a shrimper. His mom tried to talk him into being a marine biologist, but it just wasn’t what he wanted. When it’s in your blood, it just is. It’s simple and quiet and hard. It’s total dependence on the Gulf and total independence at the same time.” She looked up at Wyatt. “I’d work the oyster beds if I could.”

  “I’d be in favor of that,” he said quietly. He and Maggie had each become less enthused about the other being in harm’s way.

  “We’d be poor,” she said.

  “Whatever.”

  Marisol’s phone buzzed and Maggie picked it up. The welcome screen was up. “I love Androids,” she said. “If this was an iPhone, we’d be screwed.”

  She tapped open the recent calls list. Marisol had made two calls to Axel and gotten two back, both yesterday afternoon. There were several calls to females in the few days prior to her murder, and a few to numbers without names. The one call to a local landline, with an Apalach area code, got Maggie’s attention. It was the same number that had been written on the scrap of paper in Marisol’s room. She tapped it and put the phone to her ear.

  After three rings, a pleasant, if not cheerful, woman’s voice came on the line. “Sea-Fair Wholesale Distributors. May I help you?”

  Maggie was stuck for a moment.

  “Hello? Sea-Fair, may I help you?”

  “Uh, no. Sorry,” Maggie managed, then disconnected the call.

  “Who was it?” Wyatt asked.

  Maggie picked at one of the rhinestones on the phone case for a moment as she stared out the windshield at an azalea bush that was rustling in the morning breeze.

  “Sea-Fair,” she said finally.

  “Oh, hell,” Wyatt said, his voice tight with frustration.

  “Axel said she was here on some kind of marketing trip for her boyfriend,” Maggie said. “Maybe he’s in the seafood business, or boats or something.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll have to go talk to Boudreaux and find out,” he said.

  Bennett Boudreaux was the owner of Sea-Fair Seafood, friend and debtor to various political leaders, and Franklin County’s most acknowledged criminal. Though his crimes were mostly suspected in the widest and vaguest terms.

  After thirty-eight years of living in the same small town, Maggie and Boudreaux had only met the previous year, during an investigation. Against her better judgement, they had gradually developed an odd sort of friendship. That friendship had become very important to her right before it ended just a couple of weeks ago. For reasons she chose not to analyze at that moment, Maggie did not want to see him, professionally or otherwise.

  Maggie drummed her fingers on the console for a moment, then grabbed the phone and charger and turned off the car. Wyatt stepped back as she got out.

  “I’ll have Dwight go over there,” she said without looking at Wyatt.

  He frowned down at her, but she pretended not to notice, closed the door, and locked the car.

  “No, you will not,” he said quietly. “Dwight couldn’t get a straight answer out of Boudreaux if he asked him what time it was.”

  Maggie leaned back against the car, jingling Marisol’s keys in her hand. Wyatt waited. “I’d really rather not go over there,” she said finally.

  She could f
eel Wyatt watching her, as she stared at nothing in particular in the parking lot.

  “I hate it when you don’t want to look at me,” Wyatt said. Maggie looked up at him and blew out a breath. “You’ve been acting wonky for weeks. You need to talk to me.”

  “Yes. I’ve been working my way up to that,” she said.

  “Does it have anything to do with us?”

  “No. I mean, in a way, I suppose it does. But it’s not about us, no.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, I just needed to get my head a little straighter before we talked about it.”

  “Am I going to be upset?”

  Maggie shrugged, and something that tried to sound like a laugh came from her mouth. “This is one of those sit-down things,” she said. “Do you still want to have dinner?”

  “Yes, I do. I bought steaks.”

  “Okay. Well, Kyle’s riding home with Doug on the bus and Sky’s still on her campus visit at FSU, so I’ll be over right after work,” she said. “I just need to run home and feed the animals.”

  Wyatt moved to stand in front of her, put a hand on either side of her on the car roof, and leaned closer. “Try not to look so stricken,” he said. “Whatever it is, I can pretty much guarantee we’ve had worse conversations.”

  Maggie tried to smile. “Yeah.” She could just pick up the familiar smell of Nautilus, and when she craned her neck to look up at Wyatt, his brown eyes were close enough to crawl into.

  He bent his head and gave her a gentle kiss on the mouth. “I’ll see you at the office,” he said, then pushed off and started toward his car.

  “Why do you tease me like that?” she said to his back.

  “Because it keeps you on your toes,” he said as he walked away.

  MAGGIE HAD DRIVEN AXEL to his truck at the marina, with Dwight following, and then Axel had driven himself to the Sheriff’s Office across the bridge in Eastpoint to file a formal statement. Maggie knew, almost without question, that Axel hadn’t done anything more wrong than meet up with a woman he probably had no business seeing. But if it came down to a legal issue, it needed to be clear that she’d followed procedure, despite their lifelong friendship.