by Al Rennie
Finally, I slipped my legal pad and the manila folder holding the newspaper reprints out of my backpack. I looked over to where Mia was sitting. Her eyes were closed and her face was turned to the sun. I wasn’t certain that presenting the graphic details of Victoria’s murder would serve any useful purpose. I slid the folder and its contents back into the bag. I could get by using the scratched notes that I had made on my yellow newsprint legal pad.
“Beautiful evening, eh Joe?” Mia sighed whimsically. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”
Mai had shifted so that her arms were wrapped around her legs. We watched as the excursion boat, Little Toot, returned to the inland waterway from its last dolphin viewing excursion. My legs were stretched out in front of me. I rested the legal pad and my pen on my lap. I sat leaning slightly back supporting myself with my arms extended behind me. I had burrowed my hands into the still warm sand. I turned my face to catch the warmth of the sun’s last fading rays. I didn’t want to break the spell with the ugliness of a murder. I waited. After a few quiet moments, Mia slowly turned her face to look at me. I became aware of her attention. I turned to look her. My heart went to jelly. I couldn’t help it, and she didn’t want me to. We kissed. Her lips were soft and yielding. She reclined slowly onto the warm sand beside me. We kissed again—this time more deeply.
“Okay Bub, enough already,” Mia said pushing me away suddenly. “We’ll have time for that later—without an audience.”
I rolled away from Mia. Four feet away, gawking at us, were two little red headed, sunburned, four and five-year old sisters with blue plastic pails and yellow shovels. They were giggling like we were the funniest things they had seen since SpongeBob Squarepants tried to get Gary the Snail to take a bath. Both kids were wearing floppy white sun hats, about three sizes too big for them, and matching pink and blue polka dot bikinis. The girls’ parents were calling out to them to hurry and catch up. Mom and dad were fifteen feet farther along the beach and had just realized that their daughters had lagged behind.
“Sorry,” their father called back to us—far more embarrassed than his kids.
“You should be,” I thought uncharitably. I just waved at him—the universal signal that all is okay. His two little kids turned and scampered away. They were still giggling. Maybe we did look kind of funny if you’re only five years old.
Mia and I exchanged glances and laughed as we watched the family dynamic play out along the surf line. Mom had run back to retrieve her kids. She swept up the younger one and grabbed the hand of the other. We watched her trying to explain to the two little girls that it wasn’t nice to point and giggle at people kissing on the beach.
I thought about picking up where we’d left off, but that was wishful thinking. The spell was broken for Mia.
“Okay, so what are your ideas about how we can do something to find out who killed my sister?” Right down to business.
“Well, I’m not certain it serves much purpose, but I guess we should try to visit the crime scene at least twice. We should get to it once around the time of the crime and another time during the daylight hours. I don’t really mean crime scene. I mean where Vickie’s body was found. From what I read in the reports, the police believe that she was dumped at this location late at night. Honestly, I don’t expect to find anything, but at least there will be a context to the crime. Ideally, we should try to get there before the estimated time of death and stay for a while. If you don’t want to go with me, that’s okay, but you’ll have to give me pretty specific directions on how to get to the exact location. Once I’m away from the Clearwater Beach and Sand Key area, and even with the GPS, I don’t think I can locate—dirt path leading to make-out area—somewhere in Tampa.”
“No, I’m okay with that. I’ll go with you. Sergeant Langdon was absolutely certain that Vickie was killed somewhere else and then left there. If I recall right, he said they were thinking she had been killed an hour or so before she was actually dumped where they found her. I don’t remember him telling me how they figured that out.”
“I’m not positive about how they might have done that either—the forensic guys have a whole bag of tricks and charts—lividity, decomposition—that sort of thing. Doesn’t matter, where her body was found is still important. You have to ask yourself—why was it found? And then, why was it found there? With all the swamps and accesses to water, there’s lots of ways to make a body just disappear. Did the killer want it found for some reason? If so, what reason? Or did the killer panic and just went for what was expedient? We may never really figure that out. But I guess we have to start somewhere—and that’s as good a place as any.”
“I understand,” Mia said, and I believed that she did. She was totally focused.
“Also, it would be a good thing if I could chat with Langdon. He has no reason to want to talk with me, but if we could get anything from him, it wouldn’t be time wasted. We should try to find out if there were any other similar crimes before or after Vickie was killed. Then, I should talk with her friends from school. Find out if she had a regular boyfriend. I need to meet with your mom and stepdad and anybody else who might be able to help us get an idea of what happened during that last day. If she went to a church or youth club or dance club, I should talk with the people there. If her doctor will see me, I should visit him or her. If I could, I’d love to review the police reports, because most of that stuff I just mentioned would be in the notes made by the investigating officer. And it would have been recorded when recollections were fresh. If I could review those reports, we would save days and days. That’s another good reason to talk with this Langdon guy if we can. Realistically, that probably isn’t going to happen in this lifetime. And maybe it’s good to go back to ground zero—sort of the fresh perspective approach.”
We Make a Connection
