Backwater Bay

by Steven Becker

  With nothing to show for my efforts, I backtracked to the port-side stairway and descended to the lower deck. I found two smaller staterooms, both empty. A closed door at the end of the hall beckoned. Opening it, I found myself in a richly appointed master bedroom suite. Brenda appeared to have taken ownership. Clothes were all over the floor, looking like they had been brushed off the bed. An unmade bed tells a story, and from looking at this one, it was clear that two people had occupied it recently. There were indentations in both pillows and I could tell by the way the sheets lay that it had been exited from both sides. Brenda had had company recently.

  A quick search of the drawers showed little, only confirming her taste in skimpy clothing. You could have laid out what looked like a dozen of her bathing suits to form a quilt that wouldn’t have covered a small child. The suite had its own head, which had too much makeup on the counter and two towels on the tile floor.

  The closet door was slightly ajar, and I pulled it open. It looked like the dumping ground for everything the previous occupant—a man, judging by the clothing—had left behind. I kicked the pile and my foot struck something. Leaning over, I delicately moved aside a pile of clothes that may have been clean or dirty; I couldn’t tell. A heavy-duty case sat on the floor.

  It looked like it was made to protect something, and from the orange color and scuff marks, not something you would expect to find in the master stateroom closet. I pulled it out and set it on the bed. Staring at the heavy-duty clasps, I paused, and after hearing no movement from Brenda, I opened it. Inside were a dozen different-size pieces that looked similar to the one I had found in the pocket of Abbey’s BC. I picked one up and rubbed my hand against the smooth surface, remembering the stone-like texture of the one Abbey had.

  One thing I had learned about boats was that they telegraphed even the smallest movement. When the deck shifted twice I suspected I had company. I closed the case and placed it back in the closet. The movement settled, and I heard voices now. The legality of my invitation aboard might be in question if anyone found Brenda passed out on the couch and a uniformed agent in her bedroom.

  Trying to figure out a graceful exit, I closed the case and set it back in the closet. After quickly tossing clothes over it, I turned and realized I still had the piece in my hand. I stood motionless for a minute, staring into the closet and trying to figure out what to do. I may have been there legally, but that didn’t give me the right to take evidence. It was quiet now. Whoever had been moving around had stopped. When I turned around, Brenda stood in the doorway.

  “Anything I can help you with?”

  There was nothing I could say to justify my being there. I slipped the piece into my pocket, knowing the next move was hers. I suspected I knew what it might be. Being caught in the lair of a wealthy lush was not on my bucket list and I quickly searched for a way out. She moved closer and her hand reached for the top button on her blouse. It was so low-cut there were only five. She was through the third already and within inches of my face when the boat moved.

  It caught her off guard too, and when the boat shifted again, she lost her balance and fell into me. At least this time I knew it wasn’t an act, and I caught her, guiding her to the bed. She reached for me, trying to pull me onto her, but the boat moved again. Using the movement to my advantage, I rolled off her and gained my feet.

  “I better see what’s going on,” I said, sliding through the doorway.

  15

  I had gained the deck and saw the cause of the movement. A boat sped past an adjacent dock, kicking up a large wake behind it. Other boaters were on their decks now, yelling at the driver to slow down. Relieved both that it had saved me from the temptress and that there was no one else aboard, I paused by the gunwale. The light behind me shifted and I saw a shadow.

  Brenda was standing in the doorway. Something about her had changed. I had seen this look before and it was never good. Her eyes, only minutes ago had looked soft and seductive, now they were like orbs of stone. She was mad and coming straight for me. I had no idea where the anger was coming from, if she had seen me searching her cabin or if it was because I’d rebuffed her advances. Fortunately, she was slight. Maybe five-two and a little over a hundred and ten pounds, soaking wet.

  She took a swing at me, but I caught her fist with my hand and gently turned her away, easing her toward the transom. The fire quickly died and I wondered what was going on.

  “Men don’t say no to me,” she sobbed.

  At least now I knew what it was. Before I could respond the yacht bumped against the dock again and I saw my chance for escape. Brenda sat on the deck and offered no resistance as I jumped onto the transom and hopped across the two feet of water to the dock. I glanced back and saw Brenda peering over the gunwale.

  I felt sorry for her and realized that since I’d turned her away so easily, there was no way she could have subdued Abbey, who was four or five inches taller and outweighed her by twenty pounds. Abbey was also experienced in the water. It was someone stronger who had killed her.

  I waited until I was well down the dock before taking my phone out and dialing Justine’s number. She answered on the second ring. “I got something I need you to look at.”

  “Hey to you too.”

  “Hey, sorry.” I caught her up on the last few hours.

  “Send me a picture and I’ll see what I can do. Right now, I have those two dicks hanging around waiting for me to process their case.”

  “I will.” I didn’t want the conversation to end this way. “I gotta keep Martinez happy and do some patrol tomorrow. How about we catch up tomorrow night?”

  “That’d be good.”

  I disconnected, wondering how long I could keep doing double duty before it caught up to me. I was more confused now than I had been that morning, and with Justine tied up and nowhere else to turn right now I looked forward to some sleep. The bar was on my way to the parking lot and I glanced over. Gordy was there holding court between two new women. I’d had enough of this crew for the day and moved to the shadows to avoid being seen.

  Back at the truck, I pulled the plate I had found from my pocket, set it on the seat, and took a picture. I sent that with a text message to Justine and headed back to Homestead. Half an hour later, I reached the headquarters building with nothing solved. After leaving the truck in the back parking area, I walked to my boat, and realized just how tired I was.

  It had been an easy ride across the bay and I managed to dock against a flood tide without waking Zero—a sure measure of success. Despite how tired I felt, my mind churned away and I had a hard time sleeping. Finally I fell asleep only to find myself feeling groggy and sluggish. The sun was just up and I doubted I’d had more than three or four hours of good sleep. Two cups of coffee solved that problem and I headed out to the dock. Zero found me this time and, with his body firmly between me and the boat, rubbed against my leg while I scratched his ears.

  “Gotta go, my friend,” I told him, pushing him aside with my leg and grabbing the bowline. I hopped down to the center-console and started the engine. There was no wind and little current, allowing the boat to sit in place as I released the stern line and pushed away from the dock. Proud of my last two docking maneuvers, I put the boat in gear and set a course for the pair of towers that marked the Turkey Point power plant, where the schedule I had given Martinez said I would be. The two chimneys were one of those unique things about Biscayne Park, and I found it ironic that in the middle of an iconic wilderness preserve stood a nuclear power plant.

  Today was one of those rare days where the water looked more like a lake than an ocean. Running at twenty knots with the wind rushing through my hair cleared the last of the cobwebs from my head and things started to fall into place.

  I thought I knew how Abbey had been killed, but the motive eluded me. I suspected it was money, and that it likely had something to do with the fight between Brenda and Gabe. Brenda came off as a victim, and unless she was much stronger and craftier
than I gave her credit for, she was not the killer. Gabe was protecting what was his baby and probably the only asset Brenda’s lawyer hadn’t taken from him. I doubted he would have anything to do with a crime aboard. That could tie the boat up as a crime scene or it could even be confiscated. If he had done it, I guessed it would have been elsewhere. For the rest of them, I didn’t like Gordy, but that didn’t make him guilty of anything besides being an ass. He was arrogant and crafty, a deadly combination, but Abbey had worked for him and people don’t often kill off their revenue streams. Herb and Holly were involved somehow. There was every indication that they were in financial trouble, but I couldn’t figure their angle for killing Abbey. Alibis were another problem. They were useful in solving many crimes, but Abbey’s death had a window of almost two weeks.

  I was caught in a bad spot and my confidence started to wane. If Abbey was killed while cleaning the bottom of the Big Bang in the marina it was really Miami-Dade’s case and I would have to give it up. If the body had been run over by a boat, it was an accidental death and I had no reason to investigate it.

  It was then that the missing link came to me. How did the body get from the marina in South Beach to the mangroves in the backwaters of Biscayne Bay? There were only two ways I knew for the body to travel that distance. One was by boat and the other by water, and I wondered if a strong outgoing tide was powerful enough to relocate the body.

  I had learned to read moving water; the eddies and currents in the streams out west were generally easy to see. The tidal currents here and the effect of the wind on them were different. Slowing down to an idle, I coasted to the shoreline, pulled my phone out, and opened one of the apps I had loaded that showed the wind and tides. I had learned to read the graph over the last month and understood some tides were more powerful than others, especially around the full and new moons. I would have to check the date range later, but for now, there was a fairly strong outgoing tide. The tidal range gave an indication of the speed of the current. The larger the swing, the more water had to move between low and high tide. With the current phase of the moon, the five-foot swing meant the water would be moving fast.

  Lacking a body, I looked through the holds on the boat, finally settling on a fender. After tying a line to it, I tossed it overboard and watched. Wearing a wetsuit, Abbey was probably buoyant enough to float at or near the surface, something the propeller tearing through her would back up. I watched the buoy drift toward the barrier islands at a surprising rate. It took less than a minute to take out the entire hundred feet of line. When it came taut, a visible wake continued to pull at it.

  The math was fuzzy, but I had nothing better to do with Martinez probably glued to his computer screen watching my movements. To support this theory, the VHF radio went off, startling me to the point that I almost dropped my phone overboard. I gave him my position and told him I had found an abandoned trapline—something that wouldn’t require an incident report but was a hazard to navigation and would need to be removed from the water. Even over the crackle of static on the radio, the disappointment in his voice that I was actually doing my job according to the schedule I had submitted was evident.

  Back to work now, I pulled in the line and opened the stopwatch app on my phone. Just behind the transom, I dropped the buoy in the water and tossed over the coiled line behind it. Seconds started to tick off and I waited patiently for the line to reach its limit. When it did, I stopped the timer and saw it had taken just thirty seconds for the buoy to reach the extent of the hundred-foot line. Taking the two numbers together, the hundred feet of distance and time equated to over two miles an hour. If the tides were about the same at the time she was killed, even with no wind, it would have taken about three or four hours for the body to float across the bay before it was trapped in the mangroves.

  Sitting on the gunwale, I scrolled back to July’s tide chart and found the range of days I suspected she was killed. The tides corroborated my theory. It wasn’t much, but it was progress. The problem now was that it looked like she died in Miami and not in the park boundaries. I’d have to think about how to deal with this. For the time being, I decided to keep this to myself.

  The wind had picked up, giving me a wet ride back, and in my frustration I didn’t heed my training. The boat crashed into the dock, gouging the spot that was still waiting on the final coat of paint. The five-mile ride in these seas aboard the small open boat had rattled my already tired nerves. Zero’s barking was annoying and I tried to ignore him as he bear-rushed me at the dock. My evasive maneuvers failed and I found myself squatting down and petting him. The simple effort made me feel a little better and I rose when Becky approached with Jamie glued to her hip.

  “Ray’s gonna have a piece of you for that one,” she said, moving down the seawall to look at the fresh damage.

  “I’ll give it a go myself this time. He taught me how to repair it.”

  She gave me a knowing glance that told me it wasn’t as easy as it looked. “We’ll see. Where’s your new lady friend?”

  “She’s working,” I said, thinking it had been too much business and little pleasure between us in the last few days.

  “She’s a keeper if you ask me.” Thunder boomed and she looked toward the west. “They come up fast this time of year.”

  I realized I had been so caught up in thinking about the case and cursing the building seas that I had neglected what they foretold. I followed her gaze to the large anvil-shaped cloud that had just formed. Its black bottom was distinct and a wall of gray rain connected it to the water. If I had come in a few minutes later I could easily have been caught in open water. A sudden gust of wind made me stagger sideways and I found myself with Jamie in my arms. Becky leaned over to retie the lines. The wind was pushing the stern of the boat away from the dock. She grabbed the bitter end of the line and took a turn around the cleat, using the added leverage to muscle the boat back to the dock. Once it was close she took a complete turn and then crisscrossed the lines before making the final turn, which bound the line.

  “You got to watch it around here,” she said, rising and taking Jamie back.

  I had just seen something that bothered me. A fat drop of rain fell, a harbinger of what was to come, and we started down the path together, going our separate ways where it split toward our respective houses. Zero paused at the fork, trying to decide which way to go. Becky gave him a firm command and he sped off toward their house. I was a half-dozen steps late getting to my front door and paid the price of getting caught in a Florida downpour. Dripping wet, I entered the house and stripped off my clothes. After changing and grabbing a beer, I sat out on the covered porch watching the storm. There was a picture in my head that was slow in forming.

  16

  The rain continued until dusk, thwarting my plans to see Justine. It wasn’t the rain so much as the visibility that worried me. Wet was wet and I could bring a change of clothes, but running a boat without radar through blinding squalls was dangerous. Even with my decision made, I couldn’t help but check the weather radar app on my phone in case a window presented itself.

  Just before Justine was due in at work, I called her and apologized. We made plans for her next day off, but I hoped to contrive an excuse to see her sooner.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about the picture?”

  The conversation had turned work related, but at least she was the instigator. I had thought about how to handle this after seeing her persona change at the office. “I didn’t want to push.”

  “I got rid of those dicks last night, so I had a chance to have a look at it.”

  “No worries. So, fill me in.”

  “It’s a zinc anode. They’re used to stop the galvanic corrosion on boats.”

  I had the choice of either eating my ego and asking her what that was or Googling it myself. She made the decision easy.

  “Different metals in a saltwater environment create a chemical reaction called galvanic corrosion. The weaker metal will give up
its electrodes and essentially decay. The zinc plates are made to take the brunt of the corrosion. They’re attached to the bottom of the boat and need to be replaced every so often, so it would make sense that Bottoms Up would do that as part of their service.”

  I didn’t get into other parts of their service. Pulling the plate I had taken from the case in Brenda’s closet, I fingered it. “This doesn’t feel like metal. More like plastic.”

  “They make them out of aluminum and magnesium as well.”

  I didn’t think it was metal at all. “Any chance you can have a look at this one and tell me what it’s made of?”

  “We might be able to work something out,” she said.

  We disconnected, leaving me nothing to do but ponder the case. My stomach grumbled and I set the zinc plate down on the table.

  I cut up the leftover lobster in small chunks and added some pepper, onions, and a few eggs. The omelet turned out to be a good one. After grabbing a fresh beer, I took a notebook and sat at the counter staring at my laptop wondering where to start. I did Google zinc anodes and got a quick education on the science and what was available. I saw what looked like the six-by-three-inch plate I had and enlarged the image. Pulling the one I had closer, I knew something was wrong. There was no manufacturer’s name or model number embossed in the plate like in the pictures—it looked homemade. Without a way to analyze the material, I set it back down and tried a different angle.

  First I listed the names across a piece of paper: Abbey, Brenda, Gordy, Herb, Holly, and Gabe. I started drawing lines and circles connecting the players and in a few minutes had a Venn diagram nightmare. It made sense that most of the characters knew each other. My next step was to look at the relationships and try to find a motive.