Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  “Miguel blew up…stuff? When?”

  “Nearly twenty years ago. He was young, with no prior record, and that shortened his sentence.”

  “So, okay, exactly how easy is it to make a fertilizer bomb?” I asked, thinking all of this put the home-and-garden center on the corner block in a new light.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  Well, thank goodness for that, I thought.

  “It’s the ammonium nitrate in the fertilizer that makes the bomb,” Philip said. “But bomb-grade ammonium nitrate is regulated by the government and you cannot just walk into a store and buy it like you can fertilizer. Ordinary fertilizer is much denser than bomb-grade ammonium nitrate, so the would-be bomber must first add aluminum, zinc, or potassium sulfate to lower the temperature threshold above which the fertilizer will explode.”

  In that entire illustrative lesson, one phrase danced in bright red before my eyes: potassium sulfate. Uh-oh. Didn’t I have a receipt for that too, taken from Miguel’s own truck?

  By now, Philip had entered his college-professor zone, and continued with the introductory bomb-building 101 lecture. “Fortunately, not just anybody can get the mixture correct; there’s some expertise involved. Add, say, too much zinc or potassium sulfate, and the material is apt to blow up while the would-be bomber is moving it around.”

  “So, it could be…an accident? I mean, Angus. Maybe he…just accidentally knocked some over?”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it because the sailboat moves with the waves, so it couldn’t have been too sensitive. And even if it was an accident, it had to be there on the boat and it had to be treated—your ordinary, untreated fertilizer will not explode, you understand? So regardless, Miguel was up to something, having ammonium nitrate–based fertilizer treated to explode aboard his sailboard. The experts are still trying to reconstruct exactly how it happened. There wasn’t much left of the boat.”

  Or, apparently, of Angus, I thought, feeling sick again.

  “Well, what in the world do they think is Miguel’s motive? I mean, Angus was his friend and his shipmate. Besides, if you’re going to kill somebody, wouldn’t you do it without destroying your own place of abode and transportation? I mean, that sailboat didn’t come cheap.”

  Two seconds too late I realized I was being a tad shrill in my sudden defense of Miguel and that Philip was studying me very closely.

  “I do not know yet what the suspected motive might be. Why does it matter so much to you that the police consider Miguel the prime suspect?” Philip sounded suspicious.

  “He’s a client.”

  A client who had had me half naked on my own couch.

  We went back and forth a bit more without actually putting anything new in play until finally Philip said he would come over tonight, and he’d bring a nice wine and some deli food from the Granary. “That is,” he added, “if your yardman is not joining you for dinner.”

  “Actually, Jimmie is staying with me, and so is Delvon, on a temporary basis. It’s just until I find them a place of their own.”

  Philip gave me half of a smile, which I read as some version of “I told you so.” After all, this was the man who had accused me of being sweet.

  “Then, for the sake of our peace and privacy, I’ll pick you up at seven and we will retire to my house,” Philip said, so chivalrously out-of-date he forgot I was perfectly capable of driving myself to his house. If I had wanted to go there. But since I did not, I made the excuse of too much work to be romantic, and shoved Philip out of my office.

  Once Philip was truly gone, I stood and stared out the window, as if some rhyme or reason might be found by studying the back parking lot of my law building.

  But all I came up with was that it certainly was convenient for Angus’s killer that Miguel had purchased the raw materials for the bomb. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe Miguel was a killer. But that was primarily based upon the fact that he was awfully cute and I had the hots for him. And he seemed to be the poster child for love and peace and changing the world via letter writing.

  Oh, well, there was that conviction with Uncle Bomb Guy for blowing up Bush-hogs in the Glades. That was definitely a little left of letter writing.

  And, I had to remember Miguel handing Angus the sack of groceries and then stepping away from the ship and leading me from the explosion. Awfully, awfully convenient for Miguel.

  And that was way too much convenience for coincidence.

  Chapter 13

  The number one suspect in the murder of Angus John lobbed the ball so firmly into my court that I suspected karmic forces were at play, destined to rob me of any sense of peace and quiet.

  That is, Miguel was lurking in the bougainvillea near my car when I left my office in the cool Florida evening. Before I could properly express my surprise, Miguel pulled me into the lush bushes where he was hidden and, grabbing me in earnest, kissed me like we had made love the evening before.

  “How are you?” he asked, his voice all lovey-dovey tender.

  “We need to talk. I’ve got a lot of questions.”

  Instead of answering, Miguel kissed me again, slipping his hands inside my blouse. Prime suspect or not, Miguel’s fingers made reason leave my head wholly as I pressed into his touch.

  Just as I felt like I might rip our clothes off, right there in the shrubbery of my own law office—I mean, how wild would that be?—Miguel pulled away from me, leaving me with tiny trickles of sweat gathering between my legs and a hint of a pant in my breath.

  “Meet me at the Peace River Canoe Outpost tomorrow and I’ll take you canoeing,” he said, as if he’d picked up the wrong page of the script.

  Canoeing? In this conflict and chaos? What was he, a Boy Scout on an escape-reality trip?

  “That’s totally crazy,” I said, giving voice to the obvous.

  Miguel grinned a toe-curling grin. “I’m an unpredictable type of guy. Come on, let’s go canoeing.”

  But the power of reason had returned to my brain. I didn’t lean into him, instead, I snapped, “This isn’t summer camp. The police are looking for you. They think you made a fertilizer bomb and killed Angus. We definitely need to have a long chat.”

  “On the river. Tomorrow.”

  “No, right now. And, hey, in case you didn’t notice, I work for a living. See, that’s my office. What I need from you is an explanation. Not canoe lessons.”

  “Lilly, I want to show you that river, up close and personal. If Antheus puts that mine in, all kinds of toxic crap will drain into Horse Creek and the Peace. That river is a bull’s-eye for phosphate waste. I want us to enjoy it, now, so you’ll understand what I’m fighting for—that’s why I want to take you canoeing.”

  Suddenly an alternative Miguel motive popped into my brain, trained as it was toward paranoia by too many trials in the free-for-all world of Florida tort litigation.

  Maybe Miguel wanted to take me canoeing to kill me and dump me in the river. After all, not only was he the prime suspect in Angus’s murder, but I could testify that he had conveniently turned away from the boat just as Angus went aboard.

  But more important, I had the receipts showing Miguel had purchased the raw materials for the bomb that probably killed Angus. I’d been smart enough—or distracted enough—not to have mentioned this to him before. But by now, he’d surely have looked for those receipts to destroy them, and once he noticed they were missing from his glove compartment, he had to figure I was the most logical thief. I mean, I’d had temporary custody of his truck Saturday night.

  So, yeah, I might be a kink in Miguel’s plans to avoid the death penalty.

  “No, I can’t get away,” I said, hoping I sounded coy and not suspicious. But even as I said that, I knew Bonita could reschedule my paltry little appointments, and that the greatest test of Miguel the Suspect would be to go with him.

  I mean, if he tried to kill me, obviously he was a killer.

  And if he didn’t try to kill me, then maybe he’d give me some a
nswers, and we could figure this out and get him out of trouble.

  While I weighed just how much I wanted to know this man’s true character versus just how much I did not want to be the cheese in the trap, Miguel kissed me again. But I could tell his mind was already elsewhere. Mine certainly was. Instead of the kiss, my mind was curling more thickly around the notion that if Miguel got me out on the river without any witnesses who could identify him, killing me and dumping me overboard left a lot fewer suspicions directed at him than if he’d choked me in my own house yesterday, where my neighbors routinely watch me like I’m reality TV.

  The kicker was, I just had to test this new theory, and in the only way I could think of. So I let him think the kiss convinced me. But what won out was my need to know if he was really a killer. “Okay, let’s canoe and talk.”

  “See you at the Peace, at eight. We should get an early start,” he said.

  After Miguel left—fled would be a good word, actually—I stood in the bushes for a moment and wondered at the inherent lack of wisdom in becoming bait in my quest to learn if Miguel wanted to kill me to cover up his other murder. Or murders. I mean, M. David was still out there as an unsolved murder.

  Clearly, I needed backup.

  Chapter 14

  If I had my childhood to do over, I’d make my brothers teach me more about the fine art of warfare, gang or military. I mean, yeah, bless their wild country-boy hearts, those guys had taught me to kick and punch and throw a knife and shoot a gun, and run like hell, plus all the other rudimentary basics of a red-dirt childhood. I mean, we could do things with a slingshot and chinaberries that to this day I don’t know why we aren’t blind in at least one eye. But I didn’t learn much about the tactics of war. Troop movements, strategy, keeping a unit in reserve, backup safety plans, and all that sneaky stuff of the cover-your-ass variety.

  That is, I was clueless as to the potential stratagems of this backup thing.

  It was tricky, this balance between how to provide for my own personal safety but not tip my hand. Okay, I mean I couldn’t cradle a .12 gauge or bring a bodyguard and still expect Miguel to either spill his guts or physically confess by shoving me underwater. Nor, given the logistics, could I just have someone hide in the bushes.

  So, yeah, backup was a problem.

  My first thought was Jackson, I mean, he was the reincarnation of Stonewall Jackson, and he stood tall and wide and knew his weapons. But quickly I realized Jackson would be a tad too obvious. And hard to hide.

  Finally, I came to the reluctant conclusion that I had to be my own backup. That is, I’d take my gun. I mean, I had that perfectly usable Glock I’d bought off-the-record when I was in danger from that hippie-woman vintner who’d broken Farmer Dave’s heart and driven him to hitchhiking with a burro from the Grand Canyon. Having paid good money, and cash at that, for the gun, I figured I might as well tote it along. Not only did I know how to use it, but Miguel would not expect me to be armed.

  But just in case I was miscalculating this whole thing, I wanted somebody to know what I was up to, and so I called Olivia.

  After all, if Olivia hadn’t brought Angus John into my office as a client, I would never have become involved in any of this. As I spilled my plan to Olivia, I did a bit of heavy editing on my motive. That is, I didn’t say my primary goal was to determine if Miguel was a killer by seeing if he tried to kill me. Rather, I emphasized to Olivia that I hoped to convince Miguel to tell me everything he knew about Angus and the explosion.

  “I don’t think you should go with him, canoeing, I mean,” Olivia said.

  “What? Why?”

  “He’s got a temper.”

  Yeah, but, hey, so what? I had a temper and I didn’t blow up my friends or dump people in the Peace River. And I said as much, suddenly eager to defend not only Miguel but the wisdom of my plan.

  “Do you remember what happened to the first panther out at the Antheus site?” Olivia asked, in the weary tone of someone starting a long, unhappy story.

  “Sure, some son of a bitch shot it.”

  “Yes. What the newspapers didn’t tell, you know how they never follow up on stories, was that it was a female. With kittens.”

  My stomach did a nosedive at the sudden images leaping up in my imagination. “No. Please don’t tell me those kittens were shot too.”

  “Worse,” Olivia said. “They were left to starve.”

  “Don’t tell me any more.”

  “But you need to know this. It tells you something about Miguel. He found the dead panther, and saw she had been nursing before she was killed. After that, Miguel went about half mad and scaled the wall at M. David’s house to raise holy hell with him, accused him of killing it. He did a pretty good job of beating the tar out of him before M. David’s bodyguard heard the noise and came in the room and pulled Miguel off him.”

  “They call the police?”

  “Yes, but then after the police hauled Miguel off, M. David declined to press charges. PR problems, probably. Miguel went back into the wilderness and didn’t leave until he found the two kittens. He was out there for three days. One kitten was already dead, but he kept the second one alive, and he and Lenora nursed it back to health.”

  “Where is it now?” I asked, not remembering any baby panthers at Lenora’s.

  “At Big Cat Rescue in Tampa. Lenora already had a panther, one she and Adam rescued a few years back. There’s a lot of government red tape in having a Florida panther, plus the cost and time, and, what with her being sick, she couldn’t keep the kitten.”

  “Adam? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife guy?”

  “Oh, yeah. You met him?”

  “Barely. He was out at Lenora’s when I took Jimmie out there to help her.”

  “Cool guy. Does a lot of work with Lenora. He takes the panther around to schools, and stuff like that, trying to educate people about them.”

  While Olivia talked, I realized that I’d never told her about meeting Lenora, or going out there. I didn’t even know Olivia knew Lenora, and, yet, Olivia’s conversation, like our last one, assumed that we both knew her and we both knew we both knew her. But she didn’t learn it from me that I’d met Lenora. That made me wonder if Miguel had told her about me and Lenora. Plus, Olivia clearly knew an awful lot more about Miguel than I did. All of this conspired to make me a tad curious, if not suspicious.

  “When was the last time you talked to Miguel?” I asked.

  Olivia breathed over the phone for a few minutes. Then she said, “You know, that day in your office.”

  Somehow, that didn’t seem likely. But I let it slide. For now.

  “Well, just because he beat up M. David doesn’t mean he’ll hurt me,” I said, paradoxically, I suppose, given that I envisioned the canoe ride as a test of that very theory. “So I’m going to go with him, but, in case I’m wrong, if you don’t hear from me by noon, call the sheriff ’s department,” I said, moving my agenda along.

  “I’ll bring my kayak, paddle nearby, keeping you in my line of vision at all times,” she said.

  Nice of her to offer, but, see, that was the problem with the backup thing again. If she was there, then Miguel wouldn’t have the chance to try and kill me, and I wouldn’t gain any insight into his true character. But I had to wordsmith my objections.

  “But paddling in tandem would seem too obvious,” I said. “I don’t want him to know I’m suspicious about him. If you’re there, he probably won’t open up and talk to me, and I need to know what is going on.”

  After a modicum of weakening protests, Olivia finally agreed that she would do no more than alert the law if I didn’t give her a call by noon. But I knew she wasn’t happy about it.

  Next, I made a quick call to Bonita to tell her I was taking the day off to go canoeing with Miguel, and that she needed to clear my schedule. After processing her loud sigh as disapproval, I hung up. I mean, I didn’t need Bonita to mother me. I was a grown-up professional woman with a closetful of gray and blue business
suits and I could skip work and play hooky with a suspected murderer if I wanted to.

  Having thus planned my canoe trip, a half hour later I was gleefully washing food in the kitchen when Jimmie bounded in, dangling my spare key in his hand. “I done found that fake-injury plaintiff, that one who is suing me, and I got him on video, jes’ sitting on his patio drinking beer. I got me some good film of it.”

  “That doesn’t help,” I said. “A man with spinal damage can still drink beer.”

  Jimmie recited a line of poetry that sounded like something I remembered from high school, about those who sit and wait also serve, and then he assured me he would spend tomorrow and the next days tracking the beer-drinking, faker plaintiff until the man did get something on film showing he didn’t have any real injury.

  “That would be nice,” I said. “Now where’s Delvon? Were you at Lenora’s preserve today? How’s Lenora?”

  “Oh, I done forgot,” he said, and pulled out a scrap of paper. “This here’s a note Lenora done wrote you. She’s thanking you, and giving you her home number and telling you where she lives.”

  “So, I guess you read the note.”

  “Sure did, that’s how come I know what it says. You think I done took up mind reading?”

  No, not mind reading, why bother to mind-read when you snooped as well as Jimmie did? I took the note, read it, and pocketed it. Lenora had been profuse in her praise of Delvon and Jimmie. “Seems like you and Delvon are getting a lot of work done out at the bird place.”

  “Oh, she got more’n birds. And it ain’t just work. We done had some fun out there with her and all them critters. She’s a great lady. Why, I tell you what, Delvon done fallen in love with that sick woman. I might’ve falled in love with her myself if ’n I hadn’t met up with Dolly first.”

  “You’re in love with Dolly?”

  “I might be.”

  “And Delvon’s in love with Lenora?”

  “He sure is.”

  “In one day?”

  “Sometimes it’ll sure hit you like that. Didn’t you tell me yourself when you done met Philip the first time, you couldn’t say nothing. And I ain’t never knowed you not to have something to say. Philip is a real fine man.”