He cleared his throat and tried again. “Lex has been part of my daughter’s life…my life…for two years now. His parents are my friends. I just can’t believe he would have hurt Glennie. If he did…”
Suzanne stepped forward, as if to touch his arm, but she didn’t follow through. Her hand hung in mid-air, touching nothing.
Alan found his voice. “I’ve spoken with Lex’s family and they’re outraged that the media is treating his disappearance like a footnote to my daughter’s. So am I.”
Faye wasn’t at all convinced that Alan’s concern extended beyond his daughter’s safety to Lex’s.
And what about the possibility of random violence? Was Alan really ignoring the possibility that Glynis and Lex had been caught up in a purse snatching gone bad? Or the possibility that they had crossed paths with a serial killer who murdered for no reason at all?
Faye suspected that Alan Smithson couldn’t comprehend the notion of killing for no reason at all, because it didn’t fit with his world view. And that world view was simple: Alan Smithson and his money sat squarely at the center of the universe.
***
Detective Overstreet reached for a cigarette, but pulled his hand away from the pack without touching it. He was a nicotine addict, for sure, but he wasn’t so much of a junkie that he’d let a pregnant woman sit cooped up in his car beside him, breathing his second-hand smoke. He was having second thoughts about the wisdom of hiring a pregnant woman to help him in the first place.
The woman was interesting, he’d give her that. “The crucifix is probably very old,” she was saying, “maybe as old as St. Augustine itself. There’s a decent chance that all the artifacts you found are that old—musket balls, crucifix, beads, celt, blade, bone. The age of the crucifix alone ramps up the significance of Glynis’ note. If someone was tampering with an unreported archaeological site of that age…”
Detective Overstreet had grown up in St. Augustine, and that upbringing generally put you in one of two camps. You either had a certain reverence, even awe, for the cool old stuff you saw every day. Or you were thoroughly bored with the constant carping over how old the bricks were in the pothole-strewn street in front of your house, which did nothing but make you wish for some nice smooth asphalt. And you wholeheartedly wished the flippin’ tourists would go home and stay there.
Overstreet liked the old stuff, himself, and if there were people out there abusing it, then he wanted Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth to help him find them.
“Betsy says that this visit to the county growth management people will tell us where construction is going on in the county.” She patted one slender, short-nailed hand on her armrest. Its skin was the color of dark honey. “Nothing we see today will tell us much of anything, though. Nobody’s going to put a piece of paper in their file that says, ‘Dug up a real old crucifix today. Tossed it in the landfill to keep the damn preservationists off my back.’ Today, we’ll find out where the currently active construction projects are, and that’s all. We’re going to have to go out and look at the construction sites themselves. Even that won’t tell us much, unless somebody’s raping history at the very moment we arrive.”
“Then why did you suggest that we do this?”
The honey-colored hand rubbed a cheek made puffy and blotchy by hormones. Overstreet remembered when his wife had been this pregnant. Three times, she’d looked this tired and this uncomfortable.
“We’re going out there because people have consciences,” she said. “Somebody dug up those artifacts. What did they do with them? Throw them away someplace where Glynis found them? Give them to Glynis because they knew she cared? Somebody knows where those artifacts—museum-quality artifacts, from the looks of some of them—came from. That somebody probably knows that Glynis had them. Now that her disappearance has hit the media, that person’s conscience is going to be screaming, right about now. Anyone in that position who isn’t feeling some blame for her predicament is a sociopath.”
“So you think that if we go out to the site and just…hang around…someone might come to us privately and spill the beans?”
“It would probably be smarter if I went without you. People get very quiet when the police come around. Maybe you’ve noticed that?” She crossed her arms and grinned like a woman who knew what he was about to say.
And she did. Overstreet wasn’t about to be distracted by her smart-ass tendencies.
“That’s what Miss Smithson was trying to do, and look what happened to her.”
Damn. He was right back where he’d started. Despite the fact that they had no plans for this day beyond paperwork, there was still a danger that he might be putting his civilian consultant in harm’s way, and he didn’t want to do that.
There was no way in hell he would ever show her the photos stored in his phone’s memory. The wide shot of Glynis’ sleek expensive car sitting empty with the driver door hanging open. The close-ups of blood smeared across the pristine leather seat. The mid-range shots depicting the positions of the broken celt and the broken blade and the blood-sodden envelope. And the very graphic shot showing just how much blood had soaked into the ground in Dunkirk Manor’s employee parking lot.
“Has the lab come up with anything, based on the samples they took from the parking lot?”
Overstreet could see that she was going to keep poking into the most gruesome parts of this crime until he told her to shut up, or until he broke down and told her the whole bloody truth.
“Footprint analysis from the parking lot hasn’t been all that useful. The forensic technicians were dealing with pea gravel and patches of weedy grass and soil packed hard as iron. They did find three partial footprints—”
“Wait. Let me guess. Glynis, the gardener, and…Lex?”
“Close. Glynis and the gardener were gimmes, although the conditions were so bad that the technicians could even have missed those. But no Lex. Just Sara the housekeeper.”
“She walks through that lot twice a day, at least.”
“Exactly.” If he closed his eyes and forgot Faye was an archaeologist toting a Ph.D. and a nearly done bun in the oven, Overstreet could believe he was talking shop with another detective, a partner. “Sara was seen arriving at work at six-thirty, about the time Glynis was on film at the convenience store. So her footprints were supposed to be there. There was also plenty of scuffing that proved what we already knew—the entire staff of Dunkirk Manor comes through there every day. Beyond the expected amount of scuffing from foot traffic, I’d say there was enough evidence to suggest a struggle near Glynis’ car, but we’ve basically got nothing useable, footprint-wise.”
“Tire prints?”
“The only interesting tire print data that we have is negative. The whole parking lot is covered in a web of tire tracks, and not many of them are readable. Those that are readable seem to belong to cars that had every right to be there, the cars of Dunkirk Manor employees. Lex Tilton, however, drives a vintage Corvette with extremely expensive specialty tires. We see no sign that his car has ever been in that lot.”
Faye hadn’t even thought about Lex’s car. “Do they know where that Corvette is?”
“In the driveway of the very nice historic home where he lived with Glynis, not three blocks from Dunkirk Manor. Apparently, she hardly ever drove to work.”
“Does it mean anything that she drove yesterday?”
“Maybe she had a fight with her boyfriend and left in the car just so she could get him out of her sight. That would explain why she was out and about so early. Or maybe her car was running on empty and she just needed to get some gas. Or maybe she’s addicted to convenience store coffee. We just don’t know.”
“So we know that she got gas on her way to work, although we can’t be sure where she was coming to work from. Probably from her house, but we don’t have proof of that. Her car got as far as Dunkirk Manor, and its seats are smeared with blood that’s Glynis’ type. We don’t really know where Lex slept or where he’s been since…”
“You are the witness who saw him last,” Overstreet pointed out.
“Then we don’t know where he’s been since night before last. But we know he’s missing and that he’s not in his own car or in his girlfriend’s. Do we know his blood type?”
“B-positive. Which isn’t good news for Lex Tifton.”
The pretty doctor nodded her agreement. “So we know that it’s completely possible that he lost a heckuva lot of blood yesterday morning. So I guess you used the same magic blood-detecting fluorescent chemicals in the parking lot that you did in the gardening shed. Those two people that were bleeding have gone somewhere. Did they leave a trail?”
Overstreet liked to talk shop with a cigarette in his hand, and he was really missing it about now. “That fluorescent stuff only works well in the dark, so we had to wait hours to use it in the parking lot, and who knows what data we lost in the meantime? The bed-and-breakfast’s damn sprinkler system ran at 7:30 a.m., according to a maid who got wet trying to take out some trash. God only knows what the sprinklers washed away before we even knew Glynis was missing.”
“I remember Kirk grumbling about an inch of water standing in the test pits that morning. I asked Daniel to change the sprinkler schedule, but it never occurred to me that this water had made Glynis harder to find.”
Overstreet nodded and continued walking his consultant through the evidence, as he knew it. “The B-positive bleeder left a clear trail for the first few feet away from the car, but everything’s been washed away once the trail leaves the lot. The A-positive person, probably Glynis, also left a few drops until she got to the sprinklers. That’s all we got.”
“So we know that two bleeding people walked—”
“—or were carried—” Overstreet interjected.
“—across the parking lot. Big hairy deal. Of course, they left the parking lot. They certainly weren’t there any more by the time anybody realized there was a problem.”
The woman didn’t miss much, and she didn’t mince words.
“That’s about all the physical evidence we’ve got right now. The lab’s working on some hair and fiber evidence from the car, but every indication is that the hairs belong to Glynis and Lex, two people who had every reason to be sitting in that car and leaving hairs behind. I—”
Faye looked out the window, then interrupted him without a visible qualm. It occurred to him that she might need to learn to kiss up to her clients if she hoped to be successful as a consultant. Blithely ignorant of her client-relations faux pas she said, “You know, we’re almost at the growth management office. We really should talk about what we’re going to say to these people.”
The egg-headed archaeologist was doing a better job of concentrating on the reason for this interview than he was.
The closely trimmed fingernails were still drumming on her armrest as she talked in that singsong tone people use when they’re really just thinking out loud. “We want to talk to somebody who knows how the artifacts were found. Was the cross just lying on the ground? Or did someone dig it up?”
He nodded and just let her keep thinking aloud.
“Was that someone working on a large development that required permit approval? Or was it just someone with a shovel in his back yard? The laws distinguish between those things.”
Despite their very short acquaintance, Overstreet felt completely confident that Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth would thoroughly investigate the fine points of those laws.
This brief conversation had more than discharged her duty and earned her paycheck, but God love her, now she’d moved on to ruminating over the list of suspects, and she was doing a damn fine job of it, too.
“If you could’ve heard the argument between Glynis and Lex…” she mused. “I’d be tempted to just presume he took her and be done with it, but that would be intellectually dishonest. There are the antipreservationists to consider, with Dick Wheeler the ex-commissioner first among them. And I really don’t like her father, but maybe I’m just prejudiced against self-involved rich people.”
Overstreet allowed as how she was not alone.
“I don’t know what to think about Daniel and Suzanne. They were close to Glynis, and I can’t think of any reason for them to hurt her…”
“But you include them on the suspect list out of…let me guess…intellectual honesty?”
She smiled at his teasing. “Yes. So we have to include Levon and Kirk to maintain that honesty.” The smile dimmed. “The poor guys are beside themselves with worry. They really liked her for herself, aside from that pretty face.”
“And your husband Joe?”
She was woman enough to bristle at the suggestion. “Yeah, but then we’d have to include Magda and me. We are each other’s alibi, and we could be in cahoots, you know.”
His cell phone chose that moment to ring, and in that moment Overstreet and Faye lost their leisurely afternoon surrounded by boring files.
The voice of Overstreet’s boss boomed out of his cell phone. The boss never had much to say when he was pissed off. Like now. He just got straight to the point. “We’ve got a body, and that’s all I know. Some old fart called in, damn near hysterical because he found a rotting corpse in his usual fishing spot.”
Overstreet wondered if Faye could hear the grisly information moving out of the phone and into his ear.
“You know the boat ramp at Lighthouse Park? The medical examiner’s office has somebody there already, talking to the guy that pulled the body out of the river. Get over there now.”
No wonder the boss was so thoroughly pissed off. The poor guy that found the body was probably just a nice retired man out for a day of fishing. He’d done what he considered to be the right thing by hauling the body out of the water and getting it to shore…and it couldn’t have been an easy or fun job.
The guy was probably a pretty fine boatman, come to think of it, if he managed this without capsizing his craft. But his good deed meant that every abrasion on the body would come with a question. Did it happen when the body was salvaged from the water? Did it happen during the past day-and-a-half, while the body was presumably floating free in the river? Or did it happen as part of an assault or murder?
Overstreet was almost as pissed off by his own awkward situation. What precisely was he supposed to do with the highly paid and well-qualified consultant sitting to his right? It wasn’t fair to shut Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth out of the investigation, not when she was truthfully a real asset to the team, and he had no time to drop her off on his way to the boat dock, anyway.
He looked her over. She looked about as emotionally stable as a person can look, which was quite some accomplishment in her condition. And the woman’s air of quiet security said she was convinced that she could take care of herself, no matter what. But she was wrong.
Faye Longchamp-Mantooth sat in the car next to him, barely big enough to carry the child in her belly. Even when she wasn’t pregnant, an average-sized man with no scruples could flatten her without half-trying. There was a reason that some policemen kept their own women on a short string, constricting their social circle and limiting their freedom to move around the world until there was really nothing in their lives but their husbands. It was sick and it was wrong, but Detective Overstreet could understand it.
In a law enforcement career, a person saw up-close what havoc an evil person could wreak on a woman. Or on a man.
Still, there was no help for it. He was going to have to take a pregnant lady to see something awful.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The condition of the body was…well, no corpse that had been in the Matanzas River for that long was going to look good. Faye would have thought she’d be nauseated by such a sight but adrenaline seemed to be keeping her lunch in her stomach.
The body, still dressed, was wrapped loosely in a blue tarpaulin. The skin was white and flabby. The throat wound seemed to have monopolized the attention of the fish and crabs attracted by this big tasty morsel of dead human being,
which might have been a good thing and it might not. The medical examiner and the CSI people and Detective Overstreet had all commented on the corpse’s exceptionally good condition.
“That brackish water in the Matanzas keeps a floater looking good for an extra day or so,” the medical examiner, Butch Benedict, had said.
Sometimes, when Faye got all dolled up for an evening on the town, Joe whistled and said, “Mmmm, looking good…” She devoutly hoped that his definition of “looking good,” was night-and-day different from Butch Benedict’s.
Not wanting to seem like a prissy girl, Faye leaned over the side of the boat one more time and took a good long look at something mind-bendingly terrible. Squinting at the body’s destroyed throat, three words came out of Faye’s mouth without conscious thought.
“Call my husband.”
Overstreet lurched in her direction. “Are you sick? Do you need to sit down?”
Bewildered, Faye blurted, “What? Oh, that. You know, you should really just try to forget that I’m pregnant.”
He looked at her as if she were speaking Sanskrit. He also looked like he expected her to faint and hit the ground at any moment.
“Okay, so maybe you can’t help but notice that I’m as big as a barn. But try.” She waved a hand in front of his mild blue eyes, with their incongruously long gray lashes. “And try to focus on what I’m saying. Let’s call Joe. It may be that this throat wound was made with that stone blade that Glynis found. The other half of it, anyway. I don’t see anything about that wound that says it wasn’t.”
Faye thought that maybe talking about mortal wounds and how they were made might start him to thinking more about their job and less about her condition, which would be a nice change. Most detectives spent a fair amount of time obsessing over the murder weapons that generated their caseload.
Faye plowed ahead. “Joe knows more about primitive tools and weapons than most anybody. He makes them. He uses them. He digs up old ones. High-falutin’ archaeologists pay him outrageous sums for his opinions on flintknapped tools. Let him look at that wound and tell us what he thinks about how it was made.”
Strangers Page 12
