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

by Wayne Stinnett

  “How do you know it was a man?” Ben asked. “A strong woman could have done the same thing.”

  “Ah, yes. You’re absolutely right, of course. There are a couple more things.” Doc stepped to the foot of the table and took both the victim’s ankles in his hands. “Please don’t be embarrassed,” he said to Devon, and then moved the legs apart, exposing the woman’s genitalia.

  “See these abrasions on the inside of her upper thigh?” Doc asked.

  Devon leaned over the body. She’d been closer to another woman’s vagina in college, though she’d never tell either of these men.

  “Her bathing suit was forcibly ripped away,” Devon said.

  Ben glanced quickly where Doc was pointing. “Still doesn’t mean it was a man.”

  “That’s where we get to the troubling part, Detective.”

  Ben knew the ME was about to tell them something important. He always used a person’s title when he became dramatically serious.

  “The vaginal swab came back positive for acid phosphatase.”

  “Semen?” Devon asked.

  “Very good,” Doc replied.

  Ben’s brow furrowed. A murder was one thing, but a rape and murder was something else altogether. “You’re saying she was raped and then murdered by drowning, by someone who yanked out her reg and held her under?”

  “No, he’s not saying that,” Devon said, looking closer at the bikini abrasions. “The skin here is broken, but she didn’t bleed, or bled very little.” Slowly, Devon stood erect and shuddered.

  Doc looked at her and solemnly nodded.

  “Oh my God,” she muttered. “You’re saying this woman was murdered by drowning and then raped.”

  “You’re looking for a large man,” Doc said, moving methodically around the table, covering the body. “About six feet tall. He’ll be powerfully built, with great upper body strength. If you find him, and he has a computer, I’d be surprised if you don’t find pornographic material on it depicting acts of necrophilia.”

  The flight to LaBelle took a little over an hour. I’d left just after dawn, having first called Carl to let them know what was going on. He’d said not to worry; he’d take care of things there. Gray clouds had been building to the east when I left, blotting out the sunrise, but at least it hadn’t been raining. I’d left Finn with Rusty; I wasn’t sure how Billy would react to a dog in his car. Landing at the small airport, the sky was clear and sunny, though it was only a hundred and forty miles north of Marathon.

  Billy strode out of the little terminal building as a small motorized cart approached from a row of hangars. “A buddy has room in his hangar,” Billy said, pointing at the approaching cart with his chin and extending his right hand.

  Putting my flight bag down, I gripped Billy’s forearm in the Indian way he’d taught me when we were kids. He was dressed in his usual jeans, western shirt, and boots, his long black hair tied back under a well-worn cowboy hat.

  “I appreciate this, Billy.”

  “Ain’t nothing, Kemosabe.”

  Billy Rainwater and I had grown up together, hunting and fishing all around the Fort Myers and LaBelle areas. His mother was half Seminole and half Calusa, and his father was one of the few remaining full-blooded Calusa Indians. This meant nothing back in the sixties and seventies, but Billy’s Calusa heritage gave him special recognition today. A year younger than me, he’d followed me into the Marine Corps, when he’d graduated high school.

  Billy introduced me to Steve Carter, as the man climbed off the little cart and walked toward us.

  “That is one beautiful ole Beaver,” Steve said, after we shook hands. “Fifty-four?”

  “Close,” I replied. “It’s a fifty-three.”

  “I got plenty of room in my hangar, but she’s gonna make my old crop duster look even uglier.”

  “I’ll be back after the storm,” I said reaching for my wallet. “How much for four day’s storage?”

  “Nothing,” Steve replied. Then to Billy he said, “We’re square now?”

  “On the first thing,” Billy said.

  The man nodded and went back to his cart, where he attached a long vee-shaped boom to the lower cross member between the Hopper’s pontoons, then hitched it to the cart.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Billy, as the man started pulling Island Hopper toward his hangar.

  “He owes me a few favors,” Billy replied. “You ready?”

  A few minutes later, we climbed into one of Billy’s big off-road trucks, a Chevy Blazer. He owned a shop on the outskirts of town, where he worked on other people’s off-roaders, a very popular activity in South Florida. I noticed a pair of surfboards strapped to the roof of the big truck. Turning out of the airport parking lot onto Cowboy Way, we drove a short distance and then turned south on US-29. As the big truck gathered speed, the oversized tires began to hum on the pavement.

  “You still driving that thirteen-letter shit-spreader?” Billy asked, referring to my 1973 International Travelall, aptly dubbed The Beast.

  “Got no reason to buy anything newer,” I replied. “What’s with the surfboards?”

  “I feel like going surfing in a hurricane.”

  “You surf? Since when?”

  “Not all Indians ride only horses,” Billy replied.

  “You know there aren’t very many beaches in the Keys, right?”

  He shrugged. “I’m sure you know where all of them are. Just take me to one and I’ll teach you how to ride, too.”

  I laughed. “Me? Surf?”

  “Never too old to learn new tricks, Kemosabe. When you stop learning new ways to have fun is when you start dying.”

  “Pretty deep for a red man,” I said, paraphrasing a line from Gunsmoke, a TV show the two of us used to watch all the time, in which Marshall Matt Dillon was talking to the red-headed saloon owner, Miss Kitty Russell.

  Billy grinned, remembering also. “I’m a pretty deep red man.”

  The drive took a lot longer than the flight, but soon we turned off Alligator Alley onto the Sawgrass Expressway, going around Miami. Traffic in our direction was pretty light, but there was a steady stream of cars headed north. The stream got heavier when we merged onto US-1 off the Reagan Turnpike.

  “Looks like they might have issued an evac order,” Billy said.

  Ahead, on our side of the highway, there wasn’t a car in sight as we approached Card Sound Road just south of Homestead. The northbound side, though, was nearly at a standstill.

  “Turn left,” I said. “Let’s get some lunch at Alabama Jack’s.”

  Billy slowed the big truck and got in the turn lane. “Never been there, but I heard about it.”

  “Good food, but don’t eat too much. When we get to Rusty’s the food’s a lot better.”

  As Billy turned onto Card Sound Road, it started raining. “This from the hurricane, you think?”

  “Maybe an outer band,” I replied. “The storm’s probably still several hundred miles away. I’ll call Rusty and find out.”

  Fishing my phone from the cargo pocket of my shorts, I turned it on. It had been in a drawer in my stateroom aboard the Revenge. I’d let it charge overnight, without turning it on. Now I saw that I had half a dozen missed calls, the most recent from my daughter, Eve, who lived in Coconut Grove. There was also a text message from Kim and another from Rusty, both sent at about the same time, two days before.

  Ignoring the messages, but making a mental note to call both my daughters, I punched the icon to call Rusty. Jimmy answered and I asked what the latest was on the storm.

  “Downgraded to a Cat 3, man. But still headed west-southwest. The Weather Channel predicts landfall on one of the islands in the Bahamas sometime late Monday night. Rusty still says it’ll cross Cuba into El Caribe after that. They ordered tourists out of the Keys this morning. You on your way back?”

  Something in Jimmy’s voice told me he was asking for a specific reason. “Yeah. We’re stopping for lunch at Alabama Jack’s. Shou
ld be back there in about two hours. What’s up?”

  “That crusty old dude, Vince O’Hare? He was here looking for you a little earlier.”

  O’Hare? I thought. “He say what he wanted?”

  “Grunted something about coming back later was all, man.”

  “All right, if he shows back up, tell him I’ll be there by fourteen hundred.”

  “Later, dude.”

  I ended the call, wondering what Vince wanted. He was an old shrimper and lobsterman, who lived alone in a rundown old house on Grassy Key and kept pretty much to himself. Except for when he felt like tying one on—then he usually ended up in a fight or in jail.

  “What’d Rusty say about the storm?” Billy asked, slowing to turn into the parking lot.

  “His bartender answered,” I replied. “Storm’s still way out in the Atlantic, at least six or seven hundred miles from here, so this rain probably isn’t from Ike. They did order all the tourists to leave the Keys, though.”

  We ate a quick lunch and got back on the road, stopping for gas in Key Largo. By the time we arrived at the Anchor, the rain had stopped and the sky was a deep azure, as if there were no threat of bad weather on the horizon.

  The bar was dimly lit and the interior was dingy, even by Stock Island standards. The lack of windows made it perpetually nighttime inside. The ambiance, if one could call it that, seemed to be a mixture of a 1950s roadside dive and a 1970s strip club, with a little bit of biker influence. The wooden floor was uneven, making patrons that were unaccustomed to the place—even the sober ones—stagger as if they’d been on a weekend bender. In short, it wasn’t the kind of place tourists flocked to, unless they were looking for trouble.

  Rafferty’s Pub had once been owned by William “Wild Bill” Rafferty, who’d bought the place in 1963. It had a very seedy reputation then, but Wild Bill introduced a whole new level of debauchery. Back then, Key West had in many ways still been a pirate town, lying on the outskirts of civilization. Wild Bill had been a well-known character in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the fifties. His arrival in the Keys was shrouded under dubious circumstances and his connections with the syndicate were common knowledge. He’d operated a similar establishment on the Boardwalk with impunity.

  Today, Wild Bill wasn’t so wild. His current residence was a convalescent home in Florida City, the last town on the mainland before the Keys. He spent his days and nights much the same as the other people who lived there: sitting in a wheelchair, drooling into a cup. But Wild Bill had a secret, one that only a small handful of others had any idea about—and most of them were now dead. He’d shared part of that secret with his oldest son.

  That son was the current owner of Rafferty’s Pub, located a block off US Highway 1 just before the bridge to Key West. At fifty, Harley Davidson Rafferty was the oldest of Wild Bill’s two sons. He was also the brightest, which really wasn’t saying a whole lot. His little brother, Marion Morrison Rafferty, named after the legendary John Wayne, was ten years his junior.

  Harley was the only one that ever dared called him Marion, though. The younger man preferred the name Duke, like his namesake. He’d pummeled many men, and more than one woman, to near death just for calling him by his given name. Duke wasn’t a tall man, but he was unusually large, the product of steroid abuse in his late teens and early twenties.

  “How’d it go?” Harley asked his little brother, as the freakish-looking man joined him at a table in the back.

  A waitress wearing only a G-string quickly placed a beer and another shot glass on the table, before hurrying back to the paying customers sparsely scattered around the thirty tables strewn around the interior of the bar. In the middle of the large room, against one wall, was a small stage where a girl with long, dark hair gyrated naked around a pole, not even attempting to keep time with the techno music blaring from the speakers. Next to the stage, behind an elevated podium, sat a balding overweight man, who controlled the sound equipment and introduced the dancers.

  “Went okay,” Duke grunted, pouring a shot of whiskey from the half-empty bottle at his brother’s elbow. “Why cain’t we just go on out and find it?”

  Harley’s eyes rolled back in his head. “I told you a million times—not until the old man and his cronies are all dead. There’s only him and the boss left, and the boss is in prison.”

  “Both of ’em are all dried up in da head, man.”

  “Don’t matter, Marion. Others know what happened way back then. They just don’t know where to look.”

  If Duke had had two eyebrows, they’d have been knitted together as he glared at his older brother. Instead, the single bushy brow just sort of dropped in the middle, as if two giant caterpillars had collided at high speed. “Why you gotta call me that?”

  “Sorry, little brother.” Harley poured more whiskey into his own shot glass and raised it in salute. “It won’t be much longer. Here’s to keeping secrets.”

  Duke lifted his glass and clinked it against Harley’s. “Secrets.”

  “Did you take care of everything like I told ya?”

  “Did just like ya said,” Duke replied. “Cleaned everything up real good with a hose-pipe they had. Then I left an O-Z in the wheelhouse and set it adrift.”

  “One ounce?” Harley asked, slamming his shot glass on the table. “I gave you two ounces. What happened to the other one?”

  Duke stammered for a moment, unable to put words together in his addled brain and get them to come out of his mouth. Finally, he just shrugged his massive shoulders. “I guess I partied with the other one.”

  “You tooted a whole ounce of coke?”

  “Well, not just me, Harley.”

  The elder brother folded his fingers together and rested his chin on them, waiting. Sometimes, it was easier with Duke to just let him have some time to organize his thoughts. Any time his brother tried to lie, it was so obvious that a deaf, dumb, and blind man could tell.

  The big man looked down at his empty glass sheepishly. “Me and Brandy and Jasmine, I guess.”

  “They weren’t with you on the boat, were they?”

  Duke looked up at his brother. “Course not. I ain’t dumb.”

  “Calling you dumb would be an insult to dumb people.”

  “I did everything ya said, Harley. It’s just, well, I had the two O-Zs and the girls wanted to party, ya know.”

  “These girls always want to party, Duke. It’s why they work here.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So, you cleaned everything up, left the ounce of blow on the boat and set it adrift. Did you at least make sure the problem was taken care of? And what about the nigger you said was financing their dive? You leave his cash box, too?”

  “Sure, Harley. There won’t be no trouble there. Them two won’t ever be seen again and the box’ll be found just like ya wanted.”

  “Good,” the older Rafferty said, motioning the waitress to bring him another beer. “I can’t believe the three of you snorted up a whole ounce, though.”

  As the nearly-nude waitress delivered Harley’s beer, Duke dug into his pocket and took out a small plastic bag half-full of white powder. “We didn’t do all of it,” Duke said, laying the cocaine on the table between them. “There’s plenty left.”

  The waitress, a bleached-blonde from Oklahoma, eyed the bag of cocaine on the table hungrily, smiling at her bosses.

  Ben was nearly home. It had been another very long day, and now there was a possible hurricane to deal with. As he approached the entrance to the parking area for Key West Bight’s houseboat community, his cellphone began to ring on the passenger seat. He had it set up to use a distinctive ringtone whenever dispatch called, and that was what he was hearing now: the “Bad Boys” theme song from the TV show Cops.

  He considered ignoring it, but picked it up and hit the Accept button as he turned into the parking lot. “Lieutenant Morgan.”

  “Sorry, Detective,” the woman’s voice said. “I know it’s late and you’ve been on duty all d
ay, but we just got a call that might be connected to your homicide.”

  “Might be?”

  “Well, it’s a dive boat,” the dispatcher explained. “Adrift and grounded on Knockemdown Key in Kemp Channel. The marine unit on scene suggested it might be related to your case.”

  “Who’s the marine unit on scene?”

  There was a pause before the dispatcher said, “Deputy Martin Phillips.”

  “Jeez, does that kid ever sleep?” Ben muttered as he backed out of the parking spot in front of his little blue houseboat. “Never mind. Tell the deputy I’m on my way, but it’ll be half an hour before I get there.”

  Forty-five minutes later, delayed by an overturned RV at the entrance to the KOA campground on Sugarloaf, Ben pulled into the back of the Sheriff’s Department sub-station on Cudjoe Key. Getting out of the Crown Vic, he looked toward the building first, debating going inside to get a cup of coffee. Behind him, someone called his name.

  He turned and saw Deputy Phillips standing on the dock by his patrol boat, holding a thermos in the air. “Got your coffee, Lieutenant,” he shouted across the grass and crushed shell parking lot.

  Ben walked over and accepted a plastic mug as he stepped aboard the deputy’s boat for the second time in as many days. He was beginning to feel like he was back on marine patrol duty—except for the extra fifty pounds the desk job had put on him.

  “Thanks, Marty. What ya got?”

  “It’s not really a dive boat,” Marty began, as he tossed off the lines and started to idle the boat through the canal. “But it does have an air compressor and tanks aboard. It’s more like a salvage boat or research vessel.”

  “Know who it’s registered to?”

  “Dispatch just called to confirm, not a minute before you got here. But I know the boat. It’s registered to James Isaksson, a salvage diver out of Ramrod. I used to work for his dad, Dwight.”

  “Did you call Mister Isaksson?” Ben asked, as Marty turned a sharp left following the canal.