by Moulton, CD
“Yeah. That smells – and I haven’t even been out there yet. Where was it?”
“About a quarter of the way from the mainland to Dolfin Point. We brought the body in. There’s nothing to see there.”
“I’ll come to the station in the morning.”
Small Clues
“Anything new since you called?” Clint asked Sergio in the morning.
“Except that there were no signs of violence on the body more than would be natural for that kind of thing, no.”
Clint didn’t know where to go with no more information. “Who was she?”
“We don’t know yet. I’m having her prints identified. They’ll have that from her passport, I hope. Nobody’s been asking about a misper or anything.”
“No ID of any type on the body?”
“A small tattoo on her left ankle. A four-leafed clover.”
“Irish.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I’ll talk with Doc, then check around. Judi can find information faster than we can a lot of the time so I’ll get her on it.”
They discussed fishing a moment, then Clint headed for the Golden Grill. None of the regulars had heard anything about anyone going out and not coming back. That group would know fairly quickly if anything such was being talked about. They didn’t miss much, and that would be something the couple of gossips wouldn’t miss. A woman who went out and didn’t come back. They would have decided she was a tramp who crossed the wrong woman over a husband, or she would have been a naive trusting sweet innocent who was probably brutally raped, then murdered – and the police would try to cover it up so they wouldn’t have to bother with investigating anything.
This wasn’t getting anywhere. Clint went home and asked Judi to ask around when she was in Bocas Town and elsewhere.
“I’m going to Changuinola with Ana and Yveth. Maybe they’ll know something there. She might not have been from here. Almirante or Changuinola are the other main places she could have stayed.”
There wasn’t much to do. Clint decided to paint his fence. He would have to know more to decide if he even wanted to bother with it. It did intrigue him because it was an obvious murder. He would be called into it because of that. He helped the police with any murder cases that came up, though they were now getting very good at investigation on their own.
“... that there was a woman there with two men, sort of reddish auburn hair and green eyes, very good figure, maybe five six or so. They went somewhere and none of them came back. Nilsa, at the hotel, said they were from Canada and had Canadian passports. She gave me the numbers and names, James Besford, Charles Dennis and Shannon O’Brien. I gave Serg the passport information. He said the woman fit the description. They were all staying in San Juan, Costa Rica, for a short while, O’Brien for several months. There may have been some kind of trouble there that they were involved in, but that’s just gossip, so probably doesn’t mean much.
“That’s about it for what I could find,” Judi finished.
“Which was a heck of a lot more than Sergio or I could find in the time. It gives us a starting place, other than a body in the bay.”
They chatted awhile about the people she ran across in Changuinola, then she went home to clean up for a dinner date. Clint cleaned up and walked into town to stop at the Toro Loco before going to El Ultimo Refugio for a good meal. He met a girl from Canada, they hit it off, she was on vacation to learn about life and she was not a virgin, but not very experienced either.
Besford and Dennis were from Canada. She had stopped for two days in San Jose’ Costa Rica. Clint managed to mention them in the way Judi taught him. She had met them once in a bar and had talked with them about Canada. They were there with some strange people by the name of Boucher, from France. There was some hood who came in and they left with him. That was all she knew.
It was a very good night. In the morning, after Eileen had gone to meet her traveling mates, Clint went to the police station to see what Sergio had learned. There was an alert out for the two men. They hadn’t left the country, according to immigration. Their passports had not been used or stamped at exit. They were being checked in Canada, information from which would come in about eleven. If they weren’t staying in a hotel and didn’t go past any of the checkpoints, they were probably still in Bocas del Toro Province. Possibly Chiriqui Grande or Punta Peña.
Clint said he would ask around about it. He had a lot of friends in that part of the archipelago who might have seen something. He went back, got his boat and headed for Tierra Oscura, Isla Popa, Isla Pastore, Shark Hole and the Crawl Cay end of Bastimentos. One Indio family who were out between Dolfin Point and Isla Pastore saw who might have been them. They had a white and green fiberglass boat, 16', with a 50 horse four stroke Yamaha. There was one woman with dark reddish hair with two men, one blond and one dark-haired. The dark man’s hair was a little long and the blond might have had a pony tail. The men were in their early twenties or so and were tall and strong. The dark-haired one had a tattoo on his left shoulder of a tiger and on the right just a pattern in red, green and blue.
The Indios can give excellent descriptions if you know just what – and how – to ask. This was a combination of the father, who noticed the woman particularly, the mother, who noticed much about the men and the three children in their early teens who noticed little points here and there. The oldest son was gay and noticed everything about the men. They were built like bodybuilders, but maybe a little bit slimmer. They were attractive, in a way. (The Indios take that as a matter of course, also.)
They passed about six meters just at the point. The boat was headed into the bay. The Indios were headed out around the point. The whole family worked the finca there. The mother said she thought she’d seen the boat before on the mainland-facing side of Isla San Cristobal.
Clint went to the little marina on the mainland facing side of San Cristobal and found that a woman named Shannon O’Brien had rented the boat for the day two days ago. He had her passport number and so forth. It was the same as Sergio had. An Indio brought the boat back just before dark and said the people in it paid him to bring it back because they had to hurry to get to the Panamá City bus that took on passengers in Almirante. The Indio was Daniel Santana, who Clint knew.
Clint went to Almirante and found Daniel, who said there were two surfer-type men in the boat. They said they had to get their bags and so forth from the Hotel San Francisco and back to the station to get the bus and couldn’t depend on getting back in time so they gave him ten dollars to take the boat back. They seemed in a hurry.
“What did they have in the boat? Surfboards or fishing tackle or what?”
“Just some snorkeling stuff and two box ice chests. The chests were heavy and the men were strong, but it took both of them to take the boxes from the boat. They put them in the back of one of the small truck taxis and went toward the hotel. I took the boat back. I usually only get six dollars so it was a good day!”
“Did you notice which taxi it was?”
“I think from Changuinola. It wasn’t from here. I only saw it once or twice before. They had a lot of money. Hundred dollar bills. I told them I couldn’t change a twenty, much less a hundred. They had a ten and gave it to me to take the boat back for them.”
He didn’t know anything else.
Now Clint was curious. A woman was dead and her two companions had gone off with two large boxes. What was in those boxes could be damned important.
Clint went to the bus terminal. The two didn’t take a bus from there to anywhere local. They didn’t take the David bus, either. The passenger manager would have definitely noticed them. The boxes would have cost extra if they were that heavy.
So. They had a taxi from Changuinola waiting – or did they call one? Did they take a taxi to David or elsewhere?
That would be between eighty and a hundred dollars. They had a lot of hundred dollar bills. Clint was suspicious about those boxes. He had a sneaky suspicion that th
ey were packed with hundred dollar bills. There was a lot of drug money in cash around the area that was in transit for laundering. Had they found a couple of boxes with millions in cash and one of them ended up dead while the other two escaped with the money in Styrofoam boxes?
Whatever, this was definitely the kind of thing he liked to investigate.
He headed back to Bocas Town to report on what he’d found and what he suspected to Sergio. Sergio said they were watching four people who they suspected were involved in drugs right there in town. Vincento Salares, Georgio Mendez, Samuel D’Alesandro and Noko Itumi. Itumi was, of course, Japanese. Clint had seen them around.
Clint went back to his house to work with the computer to check on all the names he had so far. Very little came up, except Itumi. He was in and out of trouble in Colombia and Mexico a lot before he moved to Venezuela, where he managed to stay reasonably clean. His contacts and suspected crimes were mostly petite. Vincente Salares had only one conviction of carrying an illegal weapon, a switchblade with a twelve centimeter blade. He was fined and spent three days in jail in Santa Marta, Colombia. It was looking like a drug money case, more and more. That would make it pretty hard to ever prove anything he did find. He would certainly give it the old college try, if it was that.
Clint went into town, but the four were out in a boat for the day. Enrique had taken them out. They were scuba diving the inner reefs. They went out two or three times a week to the same area. They said they were studying the fish on that kind of reef to write a book about them to sell to tourists who wanted to know about the different blah, blah, blah. Put that together with the rest. They had stashed some boxes of cash under a little reef in an area that almost nobody visited. The Canadians visited. They found the money and took it. The reason the boxes were so heavy was because they were weighted.
That fit, but why not dump the weights when they moved it? That didn’t fit what he was thinking.
Maybe it did! Maybe the weights were worth more than the money! Gold or silver bars.
So? Why was Shannon dead? If it had been the foursome they would have made it obvious she was “executed” for screwing around with their money. The two Canadians would be acting very differently than they were. They wouldn’t be leaving a trail. They would have made some kind of a move to get protection for themselves.
Clint went back to Almirante to ask about the taxi. No one knew much. It wasn’t a local. Maybe he could find about it in Changuinola.
Clint took a bus to Changuinola. A couple of people had noted the truck. One said he saw the woman in it two times and one of the men, the blond one, once. It wasn’t a local taxi.
Clint had an idea and went to the police station. They knew him and would cooperate.
The taxi had been noted and checked on because the driver made local pick-ups and was overcharging. The locals knew the legal fares, but the tourists, particularly gringos, didn’t. Two locals made complaints and the driver was forced to return their money and was warned that he was breaking national law and would end his crooked ass in jail for thirty days the next complaint they received. They didn’t receive any more.
Clint had the taxi number and checked it on the computer. Veraguas? That was a long way and on the Pacific side. Now there was a very good reason for suspicion!
Bigshots sometimes rented a taxi to take them anywhere. The taxi would take the fare where they wanted to go for un-regulated prices. They charged a lot for such trips because they too often didn’t find a return fare and had to take short-hop fares all the way back. They didn’t hang around a town hundreds of kilometers from their base. They got back as fast as they could.
That was one big question. It might give him a starting point for an investigation. It was more than a little strange.
Follow That Cab!
Clint decided to have Sergio put out a quiet information request about the movements of that taxi. It would be noted at any checkpoints along the way. They’d had plenty of time to go to Veraguas or anywhere else, but he could hope they were being careful not to be noticed – which generally meant they were noted everywhere. He then went to his house to check his e-mail and such, then took his boat out to the area where the body was found. It wasn’t the kind of place where people often went diving. The water was deep there, but it was in a sort of cove that didn’t flush well so the bottom was mud, if deep, and there were just too many jellyfish in that kind of place. Some of them could give a painful and dangerous sting. There were no reefs in there. The reefs were outside of the cove and around the end of the peninsula. The mangroves there had plenty of roots hanging in the water, but they were generally not attached to anything below because of the steep drop of the bank. If a person were to get tangled in them he or she could easily get to the surface by simply pushing them aside.
Clint went out to the area of the coral reefs. The woman’s body was found with her snorkeling paraphernalia in place. She wouldn’t be in there unless she was looking for something specific. That could well mean the body was brought into the bay after she was killed. Doc said she died of drowning, which could have occurred anywhere. Lividity was disturbed by the water currents moving the body about to where they couldn’t say whether she was moved after death or not.
He could use the working assumption that she and her friends were snorkeling around one of the small coral heads or along the reef around the end of the peninsula, found the money or whatever, were taking it out and were discovered.
Crap! She wouldn’t be the one killed and she would show some signs of resistance. A stranger couldn’t have done it that way. That meant her two friends. The fact they were at that spot had to mean something.
Okay. Hook on that unexplained taxi. They were here to find that money. It was probably put there by them some time ago. When the heat died down they came after it – which didn’t work, either. They wouldn’t have brought her along, in that case. This was the kind of puzzle Clint claimed to hate, but he actually liked the challenge. He liked to answer unanswerable questions for his own satisfaction.
He went back to Bocas Town. Judi had nosed around a bit and had found that Shannon O’Brien had come to Changuinola in the taxi to meet Besford and Dennis. Marta, whose sister worked at the Estranjero Hotel in Changuinola, said the two men booked a room for her the day before she arrived. They had the taxi driver staying in the Pension Grande Vista. Marta had Susana check on that.
There was nobody like Judi Lum for getting information! What she learned in a couple of hours would take him a week!
An interesting side note: the taxi driver, a large black man they called Gordo, seemed to be far more in charge at times than the others, though Shannon O’Brien was also sometimes in charge, it seemed. They didn’t actually argue, but they didn’t actually not argue, either. There seemed to be some tension at times.
Gordo, in a small-truck taxi from Santiago. That should make him easy enough to find! Clint thought about it for a few minutes, then packed a few things in a backpack and told Judi he was headed for Santiago. There were answers there – something he had damned few of at the moment. Nothing made sense in this one. He took his boat to Chiriqui Grande and caught the bus to David, stayed the night at the Pensión Costa Rica in David and caught an early bus for Santiago.
Santiago is a rather sleepy town in an area that specializes in cattle ranching. It’s hot much of the year and reminded Clint of south central Texas, though it tended to more greenery. He always stayed at the Bocas del Toro Hotel there and frequented the small bar and restaurant across the carretera. He knew a number of people in the area so was soon able to find that Gordo was David (Gordo) Silverano. He had gone somewhere a week or so before and hadn’t returned. He lived part of the time in Veraguas where he had a house. Yes, he was often taking the Irish lady places and she was even staying at his apartment for several days before they left. The two surfer type men weren’t known there at all. Shannon used the internet café by The Pyramid, where the bus station was. She spent a lot
of time there. She seemed to communicate with someone on Skype. They heard her talking, but it wasn’t in English or Spanish sometimes. Sometimes it was, but no one listened to anyone else’s private conversations.
Clint found where the apartment was and spoke with the landlady. She said Gordo was usually quiet and wasn’t ever any trouble except he had women there. That wasn’t at issue if it was just one or two for long periods, but he had different ones every week, it seemed. He was sometimes too bossy around his women and they sometimes got loud. She had to threaten to have the police move him if he didn’t stop that kind of thing.
Clint got the taxi registration number from her and went to the registro to make a computer check on it. Gordo had a few minor tickets, one only days ago at the Rambala checkpoint for not having the left turn signal light working.
Big deal! Taxis almost never used anything but the horn, anyhow!
Clint checked with the police checkpoint at La Mina, in the mountains. The taxis are noted when they pass, though they are seldom stopped. Gordo had come in the direction of David two days before. He had two passengers, but they weren’t checked because there was no alert out for any gringos.
Clint called Jose’, a friend who drove a taxi in David, and asked if he knew Gordo. He had met him a couple of times, but didn’t think he was in David now. He hadn’t been there in a month or so.
Clint called the more important checkpoint near Tolé. Everybody got checked there who didn’t have a cedula, and some who did..
Gordo and friends had not passed there. They had an alert to note if he came through and to get ID from any passengers, but not to delay him unless new orders came through. They had come through La Mina, but didn’t come through Tolé. That meant somewhere between.
Clint caught a bus to David. He got off in Chiriqui. Gordo and company hadn’t stopped there and hadn’t been seen there.
