Designed to Kill (Greg McKenzie Mysteries)

by Chester D. Campbell

  Circling up the elevated ramp to I-110, we drove north past commercial and industrial areas to the Brent Lane exit, which took us to Pensacola’s largest shopping center, Cordova Mall. Jill and I had found the mall handy for use as a walking track once during a period of bad weather, but today we were hoping for something a bit grander, like a small miracle, or at least a lucky break.

  As it was still a good half-hour before noon and the lunchtime rush, the place was only modestly busy, though the corridors hummed with both stylishly dressed shoppers and others who appeared in various stages of undress. It’s a Florida thing.

  I had no idea where The Bodde Shoppe was located, but Jill possessed an unerring instinct for fashionable dress shops. She homed in on it like a bloodhound sniffing out a fleeing felon.

  Jill carried the red velvet jacket in a white plastic bag. I had offered her a blue one from Wal-Mart, but she let me know she wouldn’t dare come in here with something like that. Looking around at the price tags, I could understand why. A young woman in a short green dress stood near the cash register talking with an older colleague in a conservative gray suit.

  “Can I help you?” the younger one asked.

  Jill smiled and pulled the jacket from the bag. “I hope so. We had a party for a niece who went to school in Pensacola. We invited friends, and friends of friends. A lot of people came we didn’t know. Somebody left this jacket, and we have no idea who.” She opened the jacket to show the tag. “It has ‘SH’ written inside. I hoped you might know of a customer with those initials.”

  The older woman shook her head with a look of exasperation. “Sherry Hoffman. Count on her to do something like that.”

  “Sherry Hoffman?” Jill repeated.

  “I sold her the jacket. That girl is bright as a new penny. And ambitious, you wouldn’t believe. But she can be a trifle flighty at times, and...well, unorthodox. I’ll bet she wore something outrageous with that jacket.”

  “There were some outrageous outfits there,” Jill said with a laugh. She was playing the part to the hilt. “The name doesn’t ring a bell with me, though.”

  “She runs Coastal Realty. Has an office on Gulf Beach Highway. You may have seen where she wants to run for the State Senate. I’ll bet she doesn’t remember where she left that jacket. I’ll get on her case the next time she’s in here.”

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” Jill said. She stuffed the jacket back into the bag and we turned toward the door. “Thanks for the help.”

  I looked around at Jill as we headed up the corridor toward the entrance at the center of the mall. “You wouldn’t think a sales person would be so ready to gossip about a customer,” I said.

  “She’s probably the owner. And they sound like very good friends.”

  “Maybe so. Anyway, congratulations. You did a great job in there, babe. I may nominate you for an Oscar in best supporting role.”

  She feigned a pout. “I should get best actress at the very least.”

  “Sorry. You weren’t on stage long enough to qualify.” I gave her a consoling pat on the shoulder. The good shoulder. “So what do you think of Sherry Hoffman?”

  “She sounds like a gutsy lady, wants to be a state senator. Maybe a little flaky, though.”

  “I found her occupation interesting. Real estate. I wonder if she deals in beachfront condos?”

  “Do you suppose—?”

  “I don’t suppose anything at the moment,” I said. “I just know we need to learn a bit more about Miss Hoffman, then pay her a visit.”

  Out in the parking lot, Jill glanced at her watch. “My tummy as well as my timepiece is signaling we should pause for lunch.”

  I looked around and spotted a Red Lobster next to the Ninth Avenue exit. “This is our first shot at fresh seafood. How about it?”

  “You’re the driver,” she said.

  A short drive, to be sure. We went inside and were ushered to a booth near the back beneath a wooden sign painted with a shrimp boat. After a brief look at the menu, we both ordered stuffed flounder. It seems we invariably eat the same thing when we go out, but since that’s also what we do at home, I guess it figures. Anyway, we have similar tastes in most things.

  “I’m sure you noticed what’s across the street,” Jill said as we waited for our food.

  “The Sacred Heart Hospital.”

  “Right. I suppose I should go over and see if they have a rehab center.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I need to go, too.”

  “To a rehab center?”

  I grinned. “Yeah. My libido needs rehabilitation.”

  “Like Elizabeth Taylor needs another husband.”

  “Just kidding. That’s where the Medical Examiner’s office is located. Remember? I asked the ranger.”

  ———

  A short time later, feeling as stuffed as the flounder, we got back in the Jeep and crossed over to the hospital parking area. Inside, the lobby had a high ceiling and a fancy chandelier. It looked almost a mini-version of one of those marble-floored political mausoleums in Washington. We stopped at the information booth and asked how to find the rehab center and the ME’s office. I suggested we save time by going our separate ways and meeting back in the lobby in thirty minutes.

  My trek took me to the depths of the building, where I followed a lengthy passageway that looked like a storage area for beds, gurneys and wheel chairs. The corridor ended at ground level in the rear of the building. Following the directions I’d been given, I stepped out the exit and found an adjacent door with a sign that said FIRST DISTRICT MEDICAL EXAMINER.

  The door was locked, so I pressed the button, heard a click and opened the door. Inside was a small waiting room with a couple of chairs on each side, a potted green plant and the inevitable flamingo paintings. Not a soul in sight. On the left, a counter with a window opened onto a small office, unoccupied. An open doorway led into a room that appeared jammed with files. After I had stood there for a moment, a thin young man about my height, wearing squarish glasses like Ben Franklin, walked out of an office off the file room.

  “Anybody helping you?” he asked as he strolled out to the waiting area. He appeared to be around thirty, dressed in dark pants and a blue dress shirt, hair brown and shaggy.

  “No,” I said. “You’re the first live body I’ve seen around here.”

  He grinned. “A little morgue humor there? What can I do for you?”

  I explained who I was and what I was doing here.

  “I haven’t run into anything like this before.” He studied me for a moment as though I were some sort of oddity. “Please have a seat, Mr. McKenzie. I’m Dexter Longley, forensics technician. And I just happen to be your man. I was on call Saturday morning. I’m the one who went to the scene, and I also helped the pathologist with the autopsy.”

  I took one of the chairs and smiled up at him. “I appreciate your willingness to help. Tell me about the condition of the body when you got there.”

  Longley sat in the chair across from me and tugged an ear thoughtfully. “He was lying on his left side, across the console, with his head against the driver’s seat. There was a near contact entry wound on the right temple, with searing around it. I knew it was almost certainly fatal.”

  “Near contact meaning the barrel was not pressed against his head?”

  He nodded. “But it would have been held less than ten millimeters away. The bullet left a small hole with a wide band of blackened tissue around the edges. It’s caused by a combination of flame from the muzzle and soot from burnt powder.”

  “Did you find any blood or powder burns on his hand or sleeve?”

  “No. You don’t always get high velocity back spatter from a wound like this.” He smiled, then leaned forward. “Dr. Crandall has a thing about the term ‘powder burn.’ Powder does not burn the skin per se. He says we should refer to it as powder tattooing, stippling or blackening caused by flame and soot.”

  “Okay, no powder burns. Did you do anything like
a paraffin test on Tim’s hand?”

  “We did a Gunshot Residue Kit using SEM—scanning electron microscopy.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Traces of elements you would expect after someone fired a gun. Barium, antimony and lead.”

  I frowned. “Traces. Doesn’t that test sometimes produce false positives?”

  “It can, if the person has been handling certain chemicals. But it was just one more indication that we were looking at a suicide.”

  “What about the bullet’s trajectory?”

  “Angled slightly downward.”

  “And that’s consistent with suicide?”

  “It varies. He had long arms. With shorter arms, it might have been slightly upward. But the temple is the favorite site.”

  “I understand the gun was found on the floor.”

  “Right. Statistically, I think only in about a quarter of the cases is the gun found still in the victim’s hand. The bullet was recovered also. It was a .38 caliber semi-jacketed hollow point.”

  “All right,” I said, “it sounds pretty cut and dried. All very scientific. But tell me this—would anything you found rule out the possibility of someone else firing the gun?”

  He crossed his arms and thought a minute. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “I guess not. But consider the circumstances. The victim was obviously under a lot of stress, anguished over the accident that had killed two people at The Sand Castle. It appeared to have been his fault. Sergeant Payne of the sheriff’s office was a witness to his appearance and behavior. Videotapes from the ranger station showed only Mr. Gannon’s car going into the Seashore. All the findings were consistent with suicide. And absent any evidence that someone else had been on the scene at the time of the shooting, Dr. Crandall could reach no other conclusion than a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

  Thanks to Sergeant Payne, I thought, no real search had been made for evidence of anyone else at the scene. “You do a pretty good job with the doctor talk yourself,” I said.

  “Actually, that was my first choice. But in my second year of med school, I ran out of money. So I took paramedic training and worked with the Emergency Medical Service a couple of years. I’ve been here the past five. Did you say you have a condo on Perdido Key?”

  “At Gulf Sands.”

  “I live near Perdido Bay, not far from the key. We bought a little house there after our second son was born.”

  “Tim Gannon had three boys,” I said.

  He rubbed his chin. “That’s bad.”

  “Very bad. What did Dr. Crandall come up with regarding the time of death?”

  “He put it somewhere between one and three a.m.”

  “If I turn up evidence that somebody besides Tim Gannon was likely there at that time, would he be open to a change in his ruling?”

  “You’d have to ask him, and he isn’t in now. But I’d say he would be happy to consider any evidence you can develop. I’m sure the district attorney would, too.” He grinned. “I don’t know about the sheriff.”

  Neither did I. And I was a long way from putting anyone else on that road at the National Seashore early Saturday morning.

  17

  When I met Jill back in the lobby, she had an appointment slip for Friday at one P.M. “Any chance you’ll have Tim’s death figured out by then?” she asked.

  I mimicked her eye-rolling routine. “I’ll be lucky if I can figure out all the players by then.”

  “Where do you plan to start looking?”

  “Our best lead at the moment is Sherry Hoffman. But it would help to know a little more about her before we turn up on her doorstep.”

  “Any ideas there?”

  “Who do we know who keeps up with everything that goes on in the vicinity of Perdido Key?”

  “Marilou?”

  “She’s not bad. But I’m thinking about somebody else—our friend Charlie Brown.”

  She nodded. “Charlie knows all.”

  ———

  The Rev. Charles Brown was pastor of Lost Bay United Methodist Church, located on the mainland almost in sight of the key. Lost Bay was smaller than our church in Hermitage, with a few hundred members who met in an attractive one-story building with a high-pitched roof over the sanctuary. This was topped by a soaring steeple with a simple cross. I don’t know how the steeple managed to escape the wrath of hurricanes like the one that pummeled the area back in the summer, but it did.

  Jill insisted we attend Sunday services at Lost Bay whenever we were in residence at the condo. By chance we happened to be there for Charlie’s first sermon in July. At the reception that followed, he got interested in my background—his son was an Air Force navigator—and we wound up visiting in the Brown home a couple of times before being chased out of town by the hurricane.

  When we reached the church around two, the sun was doing its shirt-soaking best to let us know that summer was still intent on making a last stand along the coast. A line of cumulus clouds drifted overhead like fat sheep marching in lock step. After blowing through the pines, the breeze carried the odor of turpentine. I parked the Jeep near the entrance to the white stucco building and we went inside. The secretary told us to go on into his office. Charlie was just getting off the phone.

  The room was small, containing a cluttered wooden desk, a few padded metal chairs, a table that looked old enough to have come off the ark stacked with magazines and papers, several shelves packed with books. A few pictures adorned the walls, including two portraits with collars I assumed meant early bishops of the church. Hanging above his desk was a large drawing of the other Charlie Brown, signed by Charles Schulz.

  “Jill, Greg...great to see you again.” The good reverend jumped up from his chair and hurried around the desk to greet us. He was a master at making everyone feel welcome. You’d almost swear he had been sitting around all day waiting for the chance to speak to you.

  “We just got in last night,” I said.

  He started to give Jill a hug, but she raised a cautioning hand. “Watch the shoulder,” she said. “Remember, I’m a recovering surgery patient.”

  He nodded. “I remember. Greg e-mailed me about it. Are you doing okay?”

  “Doing fine, thanks.”

  Charlie was a little shorter than me, about the same height as Jill, with a build that was more oval than rectangular. He had lively blue eyes that made his broad smile glow and a thick mane of white hair he groomed in something of a Robert Redford look. A tan jacket hung on the back of his chair. At sixty-three, he was winding down toward retirement, but you’d never know it by the pace he kept.

  “You ought to come down more often,” he said. “Enjoy the sunshine. Please have a seat. Is it getting cold back in Tennessee?”

  “Cool, but not really cold,” I said, scooting onto one of the chairs.

  “We got out ahead of a cold front that was swinging our way,” Jill said. As a pilot, she always described the weather like an airman.

  Charlie moved behind his desk. “Gee, I haven’t been back to Tennessee in I-don’t-know-when. I think I told you I graduated from UT. Journalism.”

  “If I remember correctly, you worked as a newspaper reporter in Pensacola.”

  “For eight years. Then I got the call and went back to school, to seminary at Candler in Atlanta. What’s going on in Nashville? I see the Titans are still winning.”

  Jill gave him a serious look. “Right now, Charlie, we’re more concerned about what has been going on down here.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That balcony collapse at The Sand Castle,” I said.

  He raised both hands and rubbed them downward across his chubby face, letting them meet in a prayerful gesture. “A horrible tragedy. I knew two of the people who were injured. And then the young architect committing suicide. Did you know he had been to church here?”

  “Tim Gannon?” Jill arched a questioning brow.

  Charlie’s blue eyes widened as if a light had suddenly flashed on. �
�Of course. I remember now. He told me he was staying at your condo. He was a friend of yours.”

  “His mother and dad are our closest friends,” I said. “The whole family goes to our church.”

  “He was just a young man. Such a terrible waste.” Charlie glanced across at a newspaper on the table. “I believe I read where the funeral was to be in Nashville yesterday.”

  “We left right after the burial,” I said. “I need some help, Charlie. Tim’s father asked me to find out who killed his son.”

  Seeing the puzzled look on his face, Jill spoke up. “We don’t think he killed himself.”

  He sat still for a moment, staring. Then his eyes resumed their normal glow. “Well, I know exactly the man you need to talk to.”

  That perked me up in a hurry. “Who?”

  “A sergeant with the sheriff’s office. He’s one of my parishioners. He did the investigation.”

  My hopes took a sudden dive. “Sergeant Payne?”

  “You know him?”

  “We met at the sheriff’s impound yard where they had Tim’s Blazer. I’m afraid the sergeant is one hundred percent certain it was suicide. And he’s not about to change his mind.”

  “He’s about as stubborn a man as I’ve encountered lately,” Jill said.

  “Sorry to hear that.” Charlie frowned. “I’ll admit, he has definite ideas about most things, but he’s really a good man. His wife runs a beauty shop near here. He’s a devoted husband. They have no children, but he’s great with the young ones. Helps teach Sunday School for sixth graders.”

  I nodded. “No doubt he looks like a giant to them.”

  “I’ll grant you, he doesn’t have discipline problems. Not on the job, either. He was in the Army—Rangers, I think—before working for a private security firm. He’s been a deputy the past fifteen years. I’ve heard him say he’s never fired his gun except for practice.”