Fallen Hero: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 10)

by Wayne Stinnett

  Draining my own beer, I rose with him and we started down to the dock area to clean the fish. “I don’t know. Lawrence is a good friend and I guess I just don’t want to work for him. Does that make sense?”

  “We’re good friends,” he said, descending the stairs. “I got no trouble taking your money.”

  “That’s different. At the end of the day, you always have something to show for the work you do. A treasure hunt doesn’t have any guarantee of success.”

  “True dat,” Carl said, picking up a cooler from under the cleaning station and stepping aboard Pescador. “I guess I can see your reasoning behind it. Think he found someone else?”

  Carl opened the live well under the forward seat of the boat, then using a little catch net, began to dip the small grunts out and dump them into the cooler.

  “Yeah.” I picked up the first fish and quickly filleted it, then dumped the carcass in the water. “I heard on the coconut telegraph that he hired a guy out of Ramrod Key—a young fella named James Isaksson. Ever hear of him?”

  Dipping the last of the fish into the cooler, Carl joined me at the cleaning table. “I know a Dwight Isaksson in Ramrod. He’s a little older than us, maybe mid-fifties. Used to run a salvage boat, but had to give it up when he lost an arm to a boat prop. Might be related—don’t know if he had any sons or not. Didn’t know him that well.”

  We continued cleaning the fish, making quick work of it, and filled a small metal tray with the tasty little fillets.

  “Ya know,” Carl said, looking down in the water below the dock, “we could just drop a trap right here. Them lobster have gotten pretty used to getting fed here every day.” I frowned at him and he said, “I know, I know, it ain’t sporting.”

  “It’s also illegal,” I reminded him, though the thought had crossed my mind a few times on stormy days. We kept a line of lobster and stone crab traps along the deeper part of Harbor Channel and when a gale blew in from the east, pulling the traps became a real chore.

  “Yeah, well, it’s only illegal if you get caught.” Carl picked up the tray of fillets, and we went back up the steps. “You got any room in your freezer?” he asked.

  “Maybe for half of them. Charlie say what she was planning for dinner?”

  Carl grinned. “Yeah, she did. Grunts and grits. Let’s put half of these in your freezer and the rest I’ll put in our fridge.”

  “How the heck does she know?” I wondered out loud.

  “I keep tellin’ ya. She’s part fish and part witch.”

  “We got a floater,” Detective Ben Morgan said, leaning through Captain Pete Simpson’s open door.

  “A floater?” the captain asked. Though Key West had the reputation of being a wild and lawless town, there were surprisingly few murders in the southernmost city, and a body floating in the water wouldn’t be good for tourism. “Where?”

  “A boater found the body of a diver about half a mile north of Snipe Key.”

  Relieved that it was a possible diving accident and not a homicide, Captain Simpson said, “We’re shorthanded, Ben. You’re gonna have to take lead. Grab Evans out of the bullpen.”

  Morgan frowned. “She gets seasick.”

  Simpson opened his drawer and tossed a small pill bottle, which Morgan deftly caught in his left hand. “Tell her to take two Dramamine. By the time you get down to the dock, they’ll kick in. Jefferson’s already out on a domestic disturbance with shots fired, and Clark won’t be back from vacation till tomorrow.”

  Morgan turned to go back to the squad room. He’d been a Monroe County Sheriff’s deputy for nearly twenty years, moving up from water patrol to the detective squad ten years before. Five years ago, he’d been promoted to lieutenant. As Captain Simpson’s second-in-command of the small investigative unit, he oversaw the work of the other detectives, but rarely went out into the field anymore.

  In his early forties, Ben was one of only a handful of lieutenants in the department. Unlike the others, he wasn’t looking forward to his next promotion. In a town known for rum drinking, a Captain Morgan would become the brunt of many jokes.

  “Evans,” Ben shouted as he entered the squad room and found her at her desk. She looked up from her computer, her light-brown eyes sparkling with excitement. The woman always seemed to be upbeat and smiling. Ben walked across the small squad room she shared with three other detectives. Evans’s partner was out on sick leave for at least two more weeks.

  Ben placed the pill bottle in front of her. “Take two of these. You’re with me.”

  “What do we have?” Devon Evans asked, standing and picking up the pill bottle, looking at it. “Dramamine? We’re going out on the water?”

  Ben rolled his eyes at the young blond detective. “You live and work on an island. How can you not be a boater? Never mind, take two of those and let’s go. A fisherman found a floater up near Snipe Key.”

  “Ugh,” she replied, twisting off the top and shaking out two of the little orange pills. Obediently, she popped them in her mouth and swallowed them down with a gulp of water from an Evian bottle. She’d been prone to motion sickness since she was a little girl. Not just on a boat, but planes, cars, even amusement park rides.

  The drive from the administration building on Stock Island to the nearby marina where the department kept their two patrol boats only took a few minutes. They could have walked it nearly as fast, but given the increasing girth of his waistline, Ben preferred the air-conditioned comfort of his county-issued Crown Vic.

  At the marina, the two detectives walked out to where a patrol deputy waited on a brand new twenty-three-foot Mako center console. Drug arrests were common in the Keys, and many times the dealers had their financial assets seized, as well as their boats, cars, and drugs. The boats and cars were auctioned, and the money kept the department’s equipment updated on a regular basis.

  The deputy wore gray shorts, along with his gray uniform shirt and black utility belt and holster—typical of water patrol deputies, but in sharp contrast to the light gray suit and black tie Ben wore and the black skirt and dark gray jacket of the junior detective.

  “Welcome aboard,” the deputy said. “I’m Deputy Martin Phillips.”

  “Detective Ben Morgan,” Ben said, shaking hands with the young deputy. “This is my partner, Detective Evans.”

  Ben stepped down into the cockpit and pointed forward. “Take the forward seat, Evans.”

  Devon stepped down and went forward as the deputy started the big Yamaha outboard, then tossed off the lines.

  “I used to be on the marine patrol squad,” Ben said. “I thought I knew everyone. You’re new?”

  “Filling in for Quail,” the deputy said, as he put the boat in gear and idled away from the dock. “His wife’s having a baby any day and he’s taking some comp time. I usually patrol out of the Middle Keys.”

  “Ah, you’re Ben Phillips’s boy. Heard you’d joined the department. How’s your dad?”

  “Doing well, sir. The other patrol boat is anchored on-station where the body was found. He has a line on it, but hasn’t pulled it out of the water yet. Waiting for the ME.”

  “Doc Fredric on his way?”

  “He’s finishing up an autopsy in Marathon,” Phillips replied. “Said he’d be out there in under an hour. That was about twenty minutes ago.”

  “It’ll be close to dark when he gets there.”

  “I don’t think Doc sleeps much,” the deputy replied, bringing the boat up on plane and accelerating across the shallow flats to the north.

  Twenty minutes later, the deputy slowed as they approached another sheriff’s patrol boat, identical to his own. The other deputy motioned them to tie up on his port side. As they neared, Ben could see why. In the water on the starboard side, a scuba tank was in the water, tied off to the boat. Attached to the tank was a body, floating face down.

  Once the two deputies made the boats fast, Ben stepped over and asked, “Whatcha got, Deputy Cantrell?”

  John Cantrell po
inted a long arm toward another boat, anchored a hundred yards away. “Fishermen found her about an hour ago, sir.” Then stepping over to the other side, he nodded down at the body. “She’s naked, except for the BC and fins.”

  “Naked?” Devon said, stepping over to the other boat and leaning over the rail. “I know it’s the Keys, but isn’t that kind of odd? Scuba diving in the nude?”

  “Not as strange as you’d think,” Deputy Phillips said, joining the others at the rail.

  “Have you moved the body at all?” Ben asked, pulling a pair of blue latex gloves from his pocket and snapping them on. Evans, following his lead, did the same thing.

  “No, sir,” Cantrell replied. “Dropped a noose around the first stage and tied it off.”

  “Well,” Ben said, leaning over and reaching a hand down, “let’s see what she looks like.” Grabbing the woman’s dark-blond hair, he pulled her head up for a closer look at her face. “Good God!” he exclaimed, releasing his grip and letting the woman’s cracked and torn face drop back into the water. He’d seen his fair share of victims involved in scuba diving accidents, car accidents, beatings, and nearly a dozen murders. But, he’d never seen anything like he’d just witnessed.

  Devon went to the back of the boat and leaned over the transom, vomiting into the water. Phillips quickly grabbed a bottle of water and took it to her, offering her a towel that was draped across the back of the seat.

  “Thanks,” Devon said, wiping her mouth and taking a long pull from the bottle. “It wasn’t the body. I get seasick pretty easy.” She returned to the side of the boat, all three men staring at her. Ben rolled his eyes.

  To prove her point, she leaned over the gunwale and peered down at the body. “Something’s not right here.”

  “You mean about a woman who lives on an island and gets seasick?” Ben asked.

  “No.” She glared at him. “Look at her right arm.”

  All three men looked over the side. The body moved in the light chop and, just as Devon had indicated, the right arm moved strangely.

  “Her arm’s broken,” Phillips said. “The upper arm.”

  Just then, the sound of another boat could be heard. Ben looked to the east and saw a patrol boat, with blue lights flashing, coming out of Cudjoe Channel, just beyond Sawyer Key. As it approached, he recognized Doc Fredric standing in the bow, one hand holding the bow line, his white hair pulled straight back by the wind. There were three others on board with Doc Fredric, Ben noted.

  “ME’s here,” he said to nobody in particular.

  Cantrell went forward and motioned the other boat to the port side as well. The deputy at the helm expertly guided the boat alongside, making a threesome of twenty-three-foot Makos, all lashed together, with their collective bows pointing north into the current.

  When it was secured, the doctor stepped lightly over onto Phillips’s boat, belying his age, then again onto Cantrell’s. “Nice to see you again, Marty,” he said, shaking Phillips’s hand. He nodded to the other deputy, shook his hand and greeted him by his first name, also.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” the old doctor said to Devon, extending his hand. “I’m Leo Fredric, Monroe County Medical Examiner. But please, just call me Doc.”

  “Detective Devon Evans,” she replied.

  “You’re a breath of fresh air in the department,” Doc said, extending his hand to Ben. “Too many of these ugly, old detectives in the department to suit me. What do we have, Ben?”

  Ben grinned at the old-timer. He’d been the ME for Monroe County since before Ben had joined the department in 1991, and everyone liked him. “Doing about as well as an ugly, old detective can, Doc.” Nodding over the side, he continued. “Female Caucasian, completely nude except her fins and buoyancy compensator. Multiple cuts and abrasions on her face, and what appears to be a broken upper right arm.”

  “A broken humerus?” Doc asked, a quizzical expression on his face, as he leaned over the gunwale for a closer look. “Some lividity around her outside bicep, as well. She must have been hit pretty hard. A boat perhaps. But, I’ll know more when I get her to the lab.”

  Unlike the detectives, Doc always talked of the dead, as if they were still alive, using the pronouns she, he, him, or her, instead of “the body,” as the detectives were accustomed to. If he knew who it was, he’d refer to the victim’s body by name.

  “May we borrow your— Doc began, turning to Cantrell, who already had his backboard out, a line attached to the top of it. “Oh, I see you anticipated me, John. Very good.” He turned and nodded to the two men in the back of the boat, who were both wearing department issue scuba gear.

  The two men rolled off the gunwale, disappearing with a splash. A moment later, their air bubbles announced their arrival next to the body and Cantrell lowered the backboard to them.

  “Face down, gentlemen,” Doc said. “Leave her equipment on her. There may be trace evidence on it.”

  The two men worked quickly, strapping the body onto the backboard as they were instructed.

  When they had it secured, Doc nodded to Marty and John. “Haul her up, boys. Let’s see what we can see.”

  Marty and John pulled up on the line attached to the backboard. As the top of it reached the gunwale, Marty held on firmly as John grabbed the handhold on the top of the board. When John nodded, Marty joined him at the gunwale and they both reached down to grab other handholds on the sides. The divers in the water pushed the foot of the board away from the boat and the two deputies hauled it up, and then maneuvered it around so that the woman’s upper body was on the casting deck and her feet on the center console’s front seat.

  “The BC is fully inflated,” Doc noted, walking around the body. He squatted down to examine the woman’s face. “Oh my, what happened to you, dear?”

  “Looks like her face was hit by a prop,” Ben offered.

  Doc looked up, a wry smile on his face. “Oh no, not a propeller, I’m afraid. Come closer, Ben. You too, Devon.”

  The two detectives moved around to either side of the ME and knelt next to the platform. Marty and John leaned in behind the two detectives for a closer look, as well. Taking a pair of tweezers from his pocket, Doc carefully removed something from the side of the woman’s face. At first, Ben thought it was a bone fragment.

  “Coral, I do believe,” Doc said. Then he extended it to Marty, who he knew to be an avid sport diver and aquarist. “Would you agree?”

  “Absolutely, Doc.” Marty pointed. “What’s that in her mouth?”

  From another pocket, Doc pulled out a small magnifying glass. “Good eye, Marty,” he said, opening the woman’s mouth and looking inside. “Coral sand and sea grass, I believe. All the way back into her esophagus. Note also the foam back in there. This poor girl probably drowned.”

  John whipped off his sunglasses and did his best Richard Dreyfuss impression. “Well, this is not a boat accident!” His impression of the line from the movie Jaws was less than stellar, and he received a stern look from Ben.

  Doc and Devon both chuckled and she whispered softly, “I loved that movie.”

  Doc grinned at her and said in a low voice, “That picture ruined tourism here for two years. I’d just been made assistant ME at the time and it was the most boring two years of my life.”

  She giggled softly, getting her a stern look from Ben as well. “Can we get on with this?” he said.

  Marty handed Doc two heavy plastic bags. The ME glanced up at the young deputy and winked. “Better watch out, Ben. I think these young deputies are bucking for your job.”

  Doc did a quick inspection of the victim’s right hand then, putting the bag over it, he secured it with a rubber band. “What’s this?” Doc said, peering closely at the left hand, before bagging it, as well.

  “What is it, Doc?” Ben asked.

  “Probable COD is drowning,” Doc replied. “I won’t know for sure until I get her to the lab, but there’s something under the fingernails of her left hand. My first guess
is skin tissue. Possibly from someone else.”

  “Homicide?” Devon asked, her eyes sparkling just a little.

  “I can give you more information in the morning,” Doc said. “But my guess is yes, a homicide. Do we know where the dive boat is?”

  Ben glanced at Marty, who spoke up. “Dispatch is checking, but no dive boats reported a missing diver today.”

  Doc Fredric looked toward the bow, and beyond it to the northern horizon. Like most people in the Keys, he instinctually knew the rise and fall of the daily tides. “It will be low tide in less than an hour,” he said, still staring off to the north. “This poor girl may have drifted on the current for miles.”

  The following afternoon found Finn and me slowly idling the Revenge along the canal at the Rusty Anchor. Reaching the turning basin at the end, I used the throttles to slowly spin her around as I scanned the tiny marina. There wasn’t anyone on the dock, nor in the yard. Unusual at the Rusty Anchor on a Friday evening.

  Gaspar’s Revenge is my forty-five-foot beast of a fishing boat. I’m a horsepower junkie, and the Revenge has it in spades. It’s powered by twin eighteen-liter diesel engines, each producing just over a thousand horses when they’re new. But they’d been highly modified and supercharged by the previous owner, who was also a power nut. Now, each engine put out a whopping one-thousand-three-hundred ponies.

  Letting the boat drift slowly toward Rusty’s big barge, tied off at the end of the turning basin, I quickly scrambled down from the fly bridge and tied the Revenge off to the barge’s big deck cleats.

  Leaping the gunwale, I crossed the barge to the gangplank, Finn trotting ahead of me. I recognized most of the boats docked here—live-aboards, for the most part, plus a few boats whose owners lived in normal accommodations but didn’t have their own dock.

  For the weekend, this would be home for Finn and me. Rusty and I had gone through boot camp together at Parris Island, and had been close ever since. Next year, we planned to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of our graduating and becoming Marines.

  I paused at the top of the gangplank and took a slow look around the yard and parking lot, while Finn relieved himself on a banyan tree. Looking at my surroundings was an old habit born of necessity. Seeing no threats—not that I expected any—I strode toward the door of the bar.