March's Luck (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 5)

by A. E. Howe

  “Okay, I know about her father. Go on,” I prompted.

  “Yeah, anyway, so I was not doing well down there. Like, strung out every night, so I asked her if I could hitch a ride back home.”

  “When was this?”

  “About two weeks ago.”

  “And you didn’t bother to tell me you were back in town?” I was more than a little miffed.

  “I was lying low, man. Once I got back, I started thinking about some of the guys that might want to hurt me. You know, after all that stuff…” He let that hang in the air. I actually was amazed that he’d been able to keep that low of a profile. “I went to some NA meetings and cleaned up. I’m clean. Really,” he protested.

  “Enough of the diary of a drug addict. I’m interested in what Marcy is up to.”

  “You are a lot more hostile than when I left,” Eddie said, which almost caused me to throttle him. Maybe that proved his point. “Marcy’s found out something that’s got her all worked up. She’s been acting really weird.”

  I took a deep breath. “What did she find out?”

  “I’m not sure. She’s gotten all secret squirrel about everything. I wanted a ride yesterday, and she was all, like, can’t, you gotta walk, I’m not your personal chauffeur, blah, blah, blah. I saw her with a couple of guys a week ago, and when I asked what they were up to, she didn’t want to tell me.”

  “What did these men look like?”

  “One of them was short and pudgy. The other guy was tall, not fat, not too skinny. Middle-aged. The pudgy one looked a bit older. Not Marcy’s kind of guys at all. She goes for the young party guys.”

  He didn’t have to tell me. I’d always wondered what she’d ever seen in me. Looking back, I was probably her one attempt to have a real relationship. She wasn’t very good at it.

  “How did they act?”

  “The guys were upset, and she was angry. Marcy kept looking back at me like she was afraid I might hear what they were saying.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “We’d pulled up to her house. Her parent’s house, really. She’s staying with them. We were going to go drinking in Tallahassee and she needed money. When she got out of the car, the two guys came out of some place. I didn’t see them.”

  I thought of my ambusher. Was this their MO?

  “When she saw them, she told me to stay in the car. They went down by the street and talked.”

  “Did you get a look at their faces?”

  “No, I was sitting in the car. I had to look over my shoulder to see them at all. Besides, it was already dark.”

  “Did you see their car?”

  “No. Marcy came back to the car and said she had some money. We drove off. I didn’t see where the two guys went.” So they gave her money. Interesting.

  “But she told you she broke into my place?”

  “Said she needed to get something of hers. Not like she was stealing,” he said, and I wondered what she would have called taking the money.

  “Marcy didn’t say what she was looking for?”

  “She was just pissed that she couldn’t find it.”

  “Okay, this is important. Like life and death important for you. Do I have your attention?” He looked a bit surprised and started patting his pockets nervously, looking for his pack of cigarettes. “Did she ask any questions about me, and did you answer or tell her anything about me?” I asked, thinking about Cara.

  He squirmed and took out his cigarettes. “Maybe.”

  “Like where I live?”

  “Maybe. Yeah.” He took out his lighter. I reached out and took it away from him.

  “Think. What else did you tell her?”

  “I don’t know. Not much. But it’s a long drive up from Miami. I didn’t tell her I was working for you or anything.”

  “Did she ask about my relationships?”

  “They sort of came up. I said you had a girlfriend, but I don’t even know who she is.”

  Eddie’s attention span was wandering. I wasn’t going to get much more out of him. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.

  “This is a down payment. I want to know who Marcy is hanging with. Use your phone to take pictures. Find out what she’s doing and let me know. Got it?” I held out the twenty.

  Eddie looked at the money for just a second before taking the bill and stuffing it in his pocket. “I got it.”

  I turned and left him standing among the graves while I wondered how long he would be able to keep himself above ground. He was certainly living a high-risk lifestyle.

  My phone rang before I was halfway back home.

  “You might want to see what’s burning at the sandpit,” Darlene said. “I think we found the pickup truck.”

  Chapter Eight

  The county-owned property known as the sandpit was a hundred acres used primarily as a source of sand for various construction projects. The county even made a little money selling sand from the pit to contractors.

  The property was located at the south end of the county in the middle of pine woods that were owned by various timber companies. A chain-link fence and gate along the main road stopped any causal attempts to enter the area, but there were a dozen dirt trails and logging roads leading into it from other directions. The area was a favorite place for anyone wanting to sight-in their rifle. Both the sheriff’s office and the county attorney had warned the commission that this was a liability nightmare, but every time the issue came up the commission looked at the cost to secure the pit and decided they’d rather ignore the problem. Even when we found a body on the property a couple of years ago, once they found out that the person had died from an overdose, they continued with business as usual.

  I saw the glow of the fire as soon as I turned off the main road. I pulled through the gate and down to the edge of the pit. I could see a small tanker truck from the volunteer fire department sitting about forty feet back from the fire. A couple of firemen were standing around watching the flames while one guy held a hose and occasionally sprayed the burning truck. The truck’s cab was blazing, but the fire was well past its peak.

  A patrol car was parked near the fire truck. I saw a female deputy leaning against it with her arms crossed, watching the last of the fire. She looked over and I was a bit shocked to realize that it was Darlene. I got out of my car and she headed over to me.

  “I’ve been keeping them from just dousing the truck with water, trying to preserve any evidence from the areas of the truck that weren’t on fire. Did let them spray around where the VIN plates are.”

  “Good.” She was right. If you let the firefighters have their way, they would empty the tank on the truck, washing away any evidence that didn’t burn. “What are you doing in uniform?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “I asked Lt. Johnson if I could do some patrol time. I’ve got to pay my dues like everyone else. I know everybody, but this gives me a chance to work with them in the same uniform,” she said matter-of-factly.

  This, combined with Pete’s lecture, was making me feel guilty that I wasn’t giving our partnership a chance. “Good thing you were working,” I said, holding out an olive branch.

  “I heard the call and was on this end of the county. Of course, when the call went out I had no idea it might be our truck. We still can’t be sure. When I saw it could be ours, I asked dispatch who had called it in. According to them, a guy who does long-haul trucking and lives out on Pine Top Road saw the glow when he was on his way home. He called it in as a bonfire at the sandpit.”

  “I’ve got something I need to tell you,” I started.

  After I’d filled her in about the ambush that had taken place at my gate, she gave me a hard look, the fire reflecting in her eyes. “You should have called it in,” she said flatly.

  “You’re right. But there are a lot of white pickups in the county, and I’ve had some trouble with intruders at my place recently, so I wasn’t positive it was related.” I hated having to defend my actions, but I hated it even mor
e when I suspected that I’d made the wrong decision.

  “You said you and Pete found a spent shell casing. Probably ought to log it in with the Parrish case,” she said without judgment.

  A call came in over the radio that was strapped to Darlene’s shoulder. After a little back and forth with dispatch, she turned to me. “Accident. If you have this, I’ll head over there,” she said, already moving to her car.

  When the sun came up, I was sitting in my car staring at the burned-out hulk of the truck. The clouds were gone, but the temperature had dropped down to near freezing during the night. I got out and checked the VIN number. It was definitely the stolen truck, probably the one used to steal the backhoe and most likely the one driven by the man who shot at me. I got back in my car and turned on the heater, waiting for the crime scene techs to arrive.

  By noon, Marcus had finished processing the truck and we were watching the driver hook it up to a tow truck. As it pulled away, I had the feeling that we had reached a lull in the investigation. That vehicle had been our one tie back to the bad guy. Now that he’d ditched it, we didn’t have much to go on. Marcus had pulled a palm print from the tailgate and some other trace evidence, but we’d have to wait to see if that got any hits with the NCIC.

  I hadn’t gotten much sleep watching the smoldering truck, so I quit work at three and went home to a blessedly peaceful house—no break-ins and no shoot-outs at my gate.

  I was awakened from a long nap by Cara’s knock at the door. She came bearing the gift of food—barbecue from Deep Pit. The smell made my stomach growl. I contained my hunger long enough to give her a kiss before diving into the pulled pork sandwich. Once my inner carnivore was satisfied, we talked a bit about recent events.

  “Treasure Island. That sounds auspicious,” Cara said.

  “What it seems is a very odd thing for Marcy to have. She was never the literate type.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I got the book out of the safe and handed it to her. She turned it over in her hands, looking at the cover. It was fabric-covered cardboard featuring the image of Long John Silver with his foot on a treasure chest, a couple of fellow pirates flanking him. Only two colors, black and red, had been used to print the image on the light blue cloth.

  “This one was printed in 1930,” she said, flipping pages. “There’s a name.” Cara pointed to a juvenile-looking scrawl in pencil on the first page of the story. George Pike.

  “Marcy’s last name is Pike,” I mused. “So this is hers.”

  “I don’t see anything else except some kid’s stuff scrawled in the margins here and there,” Cara said as she thumbed through the rest of the pages. She closed the book and handed it to me. “Are you going to give it back?”

  Her question made me think. I hadn’t considered what I would do if it was Marcy’s book. I knew I ought to return it immediately, but some niggling voice deep down inside was telling me not to move too fast.

  “I will. But I may wait a day or two and think about it.”

  George Pike. There was something about that name. When it came to old news, I knew who to talk to. I made a mental note to visit Albert Griffin, the unofficial official Adams County historian.

  I put the book back in the safe, then joined Cara in the living room, turning down the lights as I went.

  “Play some of that hippy music for me,” Cara told me, and I pulled up a mix we’d recently made of folk songs and mellow classic rock.

  She snuggled close. “There’s comfort food and then there’s comfort music,” she said, reaching up for a kiss before we turned to the more advanced moves.

  My plan to visit Mr. Griffin was put on hold. I was walking from my car to the office Friday morning when Darlene came running out of the building. For a second I wondered if the building was on fire, but when she saw me she came straight to me.

  “Joe Parrish’s body has just been found in his driveway,” she said, going past me toward my car. I unlocked the doors and followed her.

  Joe Parrish lived on the Parrish property, about a mile from the main house, in a nice brick ranch-style home that looked about ten years old. Deputy Julio Ortiz, who had answered the call, had already taped off the driveway and most of the surrounding area by the time we got there.

  “No doubt he’s dead,” Julio assured us. “A big concrete alligator is sitting on top of his head. Or, I should say, where his head used to be. It’s just a pancake now.” The more gruesome the crime scene, the more irreverent the first responders and investigators tended to be. I was convinced it was a psychological defense mechanism.

  I looked up the driveway. The house was on a rise about a hundred yards away, surrounded by hay fields. A couple of old oak trees flanked the house. I could just make out something lying in the driveway next to a pickup truck. The garage door was partway down.

  Ten minutes later Shantel and Marcus pulled up in the crime scene van. They filmed as we walked up the hill to the body. Julio had not been exaggerating. Joe was lying on his stomach, and sitting where his head should have been was a forty-pound concrete statue of Albert the Alligator, the University of Florida’s mascot. A large pool of blood, brain matter and skull fragments surrounded it.

  “Looks like the statue came from over here,” Darlene said. She was pointing to an area beside the driveway and near the garage where there was a deep depression in the flowerbed.

  “We aren’t looking for a small guy.” I stated the obvious. To use something that heavy to attack a man as big as Joe would require strength and height. “And I think we can eliminate suicide as a possibility.”

  “Death by football mascot. Now I’ve seen everything,” Marcus said while filming the body.

  “If the murderer wasn’t wearing gloves, we should be able to get some good DNA off the gator,” Shantel said. “That concrete would take off some skin.”

  “Which means we have to do a damn good job coordinating with the guys from Darzi’s office when they get here,” I said.

  We were all staring at the ground, looking for any piece of evidence that might have been left behind. The scene looked depressingly clean, but then a clean scene was easier to work than a messy one. At least if we found something, it would probably be important.

  “Looks like he was dressed for work. Came out of the garage, went to get in the truck and was ambushed,” Darlene suggested.

  There was that word again—ambush. But how did that attack in my driveway tie in to the two murders?

  “Are we on the same page that the two Parrish murders are connected?” I asked. The deduction seemed obvious, but there were some arguments against that assumption.

  “Likely. But the method is radically different. Location is different. Time of day similar. Victim is a member of the same family, which suggests that the family is being targeted. We should warn the rest of them as soon as possible to take precautions. Of course, the odds that a family member is involved just went up a couple fold as well,” Darlene stated.

  I couldn’t help but think of Hank Junior. Had he been asleep in his apartment again? The maid hadn’t been able to corroborate his alibi for the time of the first murder.

  Two murders in the same family. Clearly we were missing some connection. The profit motive for the family was stronger now. What would the survivors be set to gain by this second death? It all depended on Joe’s will to dictate where his share of the farm went.

  “He’s got an ex-wife and a child. We need to know where she was,” I told Darlene.

  “I checked her address after the first murder. They live in North Carolina. I’ll make sure they were there.” As usual, Darlene was on top of it.

  “Hard to picture a woman doing that,” I said, looking at the alligator.

  “It would take an Amazon to kill with that thing. I’m not sure that I could lift it high enough to hit someone. Of course, he might have already been on the ground,” Darlene said thoughtfully.

  “The ex could have hired someone to kill him. Wouldn’t be t
he first time.” I wondered if my ex had hired someone to accost me at my gate.

  “You’re not lying,” Darlene said, lifting her eyebrows. Then she moved in and took a closer look at a spot of blood that had reached Joe’s truck. “Looking at the blood splatter, it’s possible that he might have been hit with something else and knocked to the ground.”

  “I’ll call over to FDLE. They have a blood splatter expert,” Shantel said as she photographed the blood.

  We heard a commotion at the end of the drive. Looking down to where I’d parked, I could see one of the sisters was giving Julio hell. “I’ll go help him,” I said and started back down the driveway.

  Julio had convinced Marge to sit in her car. As I came over, he handed her a bottle of water. When she saw me she brushed the water aside, jumped out of the car and ran over to me.

  “I’ve got to see him. Who is doing this to us?” Her eyes were wild. She kept reaching up and tugging at her hair, clearly on the edge.

  “We’ve got to process the scene. You can’t see him right now,” I told her, thinking: I doubt you’d want to see him. As it was, we were probably going to have to do a DNA test to be sure that the body was Joe Parrish, especially if he didn’t have fingerprints on file and if his teeth and jaw where too badly damaged to test against dental records. This was one ugly murder. The only good thing I could say about it was that the victim still had his skin on, unlike a body we’d found in a hot tub a couple of months ago.

  Marge stared into the distance and I began to worry that she was going to go into shock. Then I saw a truck come down the road and park erratically in the driveway. Hank and Jane jumped out.

  “Your brother and sister are here,” I gently told Marge. She didn’t seem to hear me. I made the mistake of stepping toward Hank and Jane, who were hurrying over to us. I had no sooner moved out from between Marge and the driveway when she made a run for it. I had to turn and race to catch up with her.