Backwater Key

by Steven Becker

  Before I had reached the helm of the center console, the boat was thrown hard to port by the wake of the go-fast boat as it sped away. Justine and I watched it climb up on plane and head back to Miami. The rest of the boats, their occupants bored now that the show was over, started to disperse as well.

  “Well, cowboy, them cowgirls sure took a likin’ to you,” Justine said, punching me in the arm.

  I was relieved that was over. “We should head back to your lab.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” she said, sliding away from the wheel.

  I moved in to take her place and glanced back. She was pecking out a message on her phone and I wondered what I was in for now. A minute later she was back beside me.

  “Where to?”

  “Dodge Island. Sid will pick us up,” she said.

  I wondered what she had in mind and hoped it wasn’t payback for missing the autopsy. I couldn’t help but notice the strip club boat ahead. The women looked fully recovered now, and I couldn’t help but watch until they turned into the Miami Beach Marina. Dodge island was to the left and I turned away. We passed the eastern tip, where the pilot’s station was located, and followed the seawall until I spotted the Miami-Dade Coroner’s van. Sid was standing beside it and stepped forward to help with the lines.

  Justine and Sid were close in a father and daughter kind of way. She thrived on his mentoring and he loved the attention. There was a mutual respect that I wished I had with Martinez. I still had to break the news about Susan working undercover to him and had been composing an email in my head on the ride over.

  We left the boat and I got into the back seat and braced myself for the ride. Sid climbed into the driver seat and assumed his position. Hunched over with the steering wheel almost touching his chest and his nose to the windshield, he started the van. I had seen this show before and reached for my seatbelt, pulling it tight around me. Thankfully he didn’t have to back up and the van lunged forward when he jammed the transmission into drive and accelerated. There are not many times I am thankful for traffic, but this was one of them, and when I saw the cars lined up on the MacArthur Causeway, I relaxed. I could see Justine had also eased her grip on the handle mounted to the dashboard. It turned out we were both premature as he spun the wheel and accelerated onto the shoulder.

  “Sid, what are you doing?” Justine yelled at him.

  He pretended not to hear.

  “Sid!”

  “What are they gonna do, put me out to pasture? Might as well have some fun before I go.”

  I stayed quiet and kept my death grip on the door handle. Finally the traffic eased and gravel flew from the rear tires as he accelerated, cutting off two cars before we reentered the legal lane. When we reached the mainland, traffic resumed to normal, as did his driving. I was close to used to it by now. Tentatively I released the door handle and pulled out my phone. It had been several hours since I had checked it, and the screen was full of notifications.

  Scrolling through it I saw two from Allie. The rest of the world could wait. The first was just a smiling face good morning. The second was an “OMG what are you doing?” Below the text was a picture of me on the boat with the strippers. Whenever there were scantily dressed women around, there were generally cameras, but after studying the picture for a minute, I realized it had been taken from the beach. From the angle the picture was taken from, it appeared to have come from curiously close to where I had last seen Susan McLeash.

  To confirm my suspicions my phone vibrated and when I looked down at the screen, I saw it was Martinez. Hoping Sid would run off the road now, I answered.

  “What the hell, Hunter?” he yelled.

  I guess that was the new hello. I knew better than to interrupt him.

  “I just got a full report from Susan. That picture’ll make the freakin’ news in a hot second. It’s already all over social media.”

  I could tell he was running out of steam. “Did she tell you the whole story? If we didn’t get that boat out of there you’d be looking at a shark attack from all the blood in the water.”

  “It’s all appearances, don’t you get that?” He paused. “Never mind. Just get me a report so I have some ammunition when the press starts asking questions.”

  Now that Susan was feeding him information, I gathered that my decision would go unquestioned. I’d put her in a bad position, but now she was my only source on the island. Putting my anger about the picture aside, I texted her for an update—I needed to keep her close.

  I texted Allie back with a quick synopsis of the rescue, making sure to include Justine prominently. Just as I responded to the last message, my head slammed forward and hit the seat in front of me as the van came to an abrupt stop when we hit the concrete bumper in front of the Medical Examiner’s office. My legs were shaky when I got out and I noticed Justine’s were the same. We shared a look common to all survivors and followed Sid’s hunched-over form as he swiped his card in the reader next to the door.

  The sense of urgency from the ride over disappeared the minute we entered his office. He went to the coffee maker and started fussing with the controls of the imported machine that Vance had brought in. There were several mutters of “I just want a black coffee”, and finally the machine complied and he came over to the table where Justine had laid out the piece of concrete.

  I wondered why she had brought it here instead of to the lab until he hunched over and sniffed it.

  “Ah, the sweet smell of death.”

  19

  When things go well they tend to go slowly; when they fall apart it’s like dominos cascading into each other. That’s what I was feeling when Sid gave us his analysis. After a short lecture on the chemicals emitted by the body during the process of decomposition, he finally got to the point. The chemical that had etched the concrete was one of the death smells, and often present on a recently deceased corpse. Having it drip from the body on an obvious path to where the body had been found was a red flag.

  Vance had done the right thing and taken the liver temperature at the scene. Time of death could be determined by a temperature probe stuck into the deceased’s liver; it usually just took some simple math to figure out how long the victim had been dead. Subtract the probe’s reading from 98.6 and do a simple calculation. It was the standard, but didn’t seem to work with my cases. The first several bodies I’d had to work with had been in the eighty-plus degree water long enough for it to buffer the reading.

  “A corpse is like a fish,” Sid said, raising his eyes over his thick readers.

  I knew better than to respond. Class was in session.

  “You’re not going to find a bonefish in cold water. They like it warm.”

  I nodded, wondering where he was going with this.

  “Fish are cold blooded. They will assume the temperature of their environment. Fishing 101, right?”

  “Right,” I said. I had learned from pursuing trout out west that water temperature was everything. My impatience overcame me and I took a stab at it. “So the internal temperature of a dead body will be affected by its surroundings.” I was sure I had it now. “The man was left hanging over the railing in the direct sun. With the concrete deck below and the iron rail, the heat coming off them would artificially raise the liver temperature.”

  “College boy, too,” Sid said to Justine. “And he can fish.”

  “Thinks he can, anyway,” she said, smiling at me.

  He then embarked on another lecture, ending with his assumption that based on the formation of this, that, and several other things, the time of death was close to twenty-four hours prior to what we had thought. That was a huge window.

  They were having a grand old time at my expense, but I was without a theory and that bothered me. I moved to the side to think while they chatted about one of their current cases. What I had originally thought was a gang-related retribution killing over a drug deal gone bad was now looking like it had been staged.

  If the goal of the murderer
was to set someone up, it had what retribution killings didn’t. My four puzzle corners were back in play: means, motive, opportunity, and the trigger. At least I wasn’t starting from zero. There was a real motive now and I had an assortment of unsavory characters and a suspicious FBI agent to look into.

  “Can we identify the substance being dried on the concrete?” Justine and Sid gave each other a conspiratorial look and then both turned to me. I would have taken a phone call from Martinez right now. I looked down at my watch and saw it was after five. The day shift at the crime lab would be gone soon.

  “Let’s go, lover boy,” Justine said, reading my mind.

  “Curious to know when you identify it. It’s a slow day, maybe I’ll dive into the corpse and see if Vance missed anything,” Sid said.

  “Would you have seen anything out of place without having this evidence?” I looked over at Justine, who was bagging the piece of concrete. I knew Sid enjoyed mentoring Vance. The old man had spent decades picking apart dead bodies. He gave me the of course I would have look.

  “Thanks.” I started to leave. “Can you tell Vance the water is about eighty degrees—perfect for bonefish.”

  I knew, as twisted as it was, that he had a sense of humor. I wouldn’t have prodded him otherwise, but to my relief, he laughed at the barb.

  “One of these days, I’ll take both you boys out and show you how to fish.”

  I thanked him and said good-bye, thinking that excursion might actually be fun. Justine gave him a hug and pecked him on the cheek before following me out of the exam room. We left the building and stood in the covered entry looking at the parking lot. We both laughed when we realized we had no vehicle.

  “I’m not going back and asking him for a ride,” I said, pulling out my phone and pressing the icon for the Uber app. “Where to?” She still had not said it was okay to go to the lab.

  “I gotta eat. Can we go grab a bite and let the day shift clear out? Then we can see what we have.”

  “Works for me.” The sun was heading down now and I realized I hadn’t eaten since I left the house early this morning. Not knowing when we would return, she had hitched a ride with a cruiser to Dodge Island where I had picked her up earlier. We decided to get her car from the lab. While we waited for the Uber, I wondered how Susan was faring out on the island. Checking in could endanger her. I’d have to wait for her to call. Seeing her hammer the two beers earlier, I doubted that was going to happen. In the back of my mind I started working on a contingency plan to get her out of there.

  A car rattled to a stop just ahead of us and I looked to the entrance to see if someone was waiting for a ride. When the driver lowered the passenger window and called my name with a heavy accent, I almost didn’t answer. Justine smacked me. Her hunger was turning to “hanger”. The ride would have to be fine. The easily identifiable scent of Febreze hit us hard when we climbed in and I could only wonder what the driver was trying to cover up.

  He said something close enough to the lab for me to confirm that as our destination, and took off. The car rattled badly as we left the parking lot and I wondered if it would make it over the causeway. I placed odds at fifty-fifty and would have asked Justine for her wager if I didn’t suspect the driver knew more English than he was letting on.

  All in all, it was an uneventful trip, especially compared to the ride over with Sid. When the Uber pulled up next to Justine’s car, I was out the door before he came to a complete stop. I wanted out of here. We hopped in and beat the Uber rust bucket out of the parking lot.

  Fifteen minutes later, we sat at a corner table in a Cuban joint eating some kind of pork dish that I couldn’t pronounce. I liked it, though. Cuba actually had a cuisine, something I missed after living with California Tex Mex for most of my years. We were quiet as we shoveled the food in our mouths.

  The overhead fans brought the smell of café con leche to me and I looked over at a couple a few tables over. They seemed to be winding down their evening like normal people. I turned to Justine and smiled. Their lives might look good on the outside, but ours was good on the inside and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. She kicked my shin under the table and gave me a sideways glance at the couple—she had seen it, too.

  “To the lab, Bat Girl?”

  “Roger that, Kimo sabe.”

  We paid and left the couple to their normal lives. Traffic should have been light leaving the beach this time of night, unless there was a Marlins, Heat, or Panthers game, in other words about every third night plus playoffs. Tonight was one of those nights, and the causeway was lit up with red lights in front of us. My anxiety started to build as I became impatient with the slow-moving traffic. I felt close to a breakthrough, but the lab seemed so elusive.

  Finally, we passed the stadium and the traffic pattern flipped. Cars were backed up coming toward us and we had a clear path onto the Palmetto. Pulling up at the lab, I looked at Justine and awkwardly asked permission to come in. Back in the day—a month ago—she’d had the old lab to herself. Things had been easier before the techs had to swipe their card to log hours onto the equipment they used.

  Before she answered, I started pecking at my phone.

  “What are you so busy with?”

  “Sending a work order for the lab work.” The hammer had come down from somewhere in the county bureaucracy about her not working on evidence without a case number or authorization. Grace Herrera had helped me out before when our cases overlapped, but this was a park matter.

  “Right on.” She laughed and punched me. “You can come in then and supervise your work order.”

  That was her signal that everything was good. I hit send and heard the swoosh that it was gone. Martinez was CC’d. I had to do it and was counting on him not seeing it until the morning. I got out of the car before she changed her mind and followed her into the building. We had to pause at the door while she swiped her card and, after a few seconds of anxiety, the buzzer sounded and we were inside.

  It was almost seven and the lab was a dull glow of LED indicator lights. A brighter light was on by a workstation off to the side, but otherwise it looked like we had the place to ourselves. Justine went right to a machine, then went to the vault to get the evidence. I had no idea what it was and thought it would have been nice if they put ID cards with descriptions in front of each piece like in a museum. I stayed quiet; asking questions would only distract her.

  After donning gloves and a mask, she took the piece of concrete out of the baggie with a pair of tweezers and gently set the sample down on a piece of glass in the center of the instrument. She closed the lid and pressed a button.

  “Should just take a minute.”

  Before I could ask what the thing was and how it worked, the display on an adjacent computer monitor lit up. We moved to the workstation and read it. She was quiet for a minute, as if digesting the answer to our question and before she said anything, she changed programs and started typing. I assumed she was entering the results until a worried look came over her face. She was about to say something when my phone vibrated.

  A text came through from Allie to call, which I did.

  “Dad, that woman you work with is on the news.”

  20

  I pulled up the local channel on my phone and thought about how it wasn’t right for a fifteen-year-old to have seen and experienced what she had at such an early age.

  “Can we go see them? Maybe this weekend?” she asked.

  Her request was denied. Saying no to your kids is hard. They are often unrelenting and you have to hold the line. The first time a no turns into a yes, they will never forget. I remembered when it felt like that was the only word that came out of my mouth for days. We said good night and disconnected.

  I sat quietly, thinking about the boats hanging around the island, while Justine ran another test. With the weekend coming up, if the shutdown continued, something would need to be done before this party turned into a spectator sport. The lab had several monitors, constantly s
treaming the news, and I turned to the closest. They were showing footage of the island shot from a helicopter. It was from earlier today when we’d been out there. I saw the camera zoom in on Susan, dancing on the table. I breathed in relief that I had already seen what Allie was referring to.

  “I think I have it pinned down,” Justine said, waiting until she had my attention. “Propyl propionate.”

  I gave her the this means nothing to me look.

  “It’s a chemical released by the body when it decomposes. I had a feeling from the pineapple smell.”

  “So, it could have come from the body when it was moved to the lighthouse?”

  “Yes and no.”

  I was too tired for another puzzle.

  “There should just have been traces. Not enough to leave a trail. Curious, though, it’s also a paint solvent used for automotive paints. Do those guys have a garage or shop?”

  I wasn’t sure about them, but Ron Pierce did, and I recalled the paint equipment on the workbench. “Is it something we can compare to another sample if we find it?”

  “If it was bought commercially there would be slight differences in the chemical composition. Companies will do that to obtain patents. It’s a lot of work though and could take a while.”

  I got the hint. Unless the result of those man-hours was going to solve the case, the request would likely be denied. “We need to get into Pierce’s garage.” It sounded so simple when I said it, but getting a search warrant for a property probably leased by an undercover federal agent was easier said than done. Miami-Dade bore a grudge against him, but they were bulls in a china shop. I would have to go this alone.

  I happened to glance over at the TV again. With the Capitol building as a backdrop, a drop-dead gorgeous reporter was interviewing what I guessed was a congressman. The closed caption stream running across the bottom of the screen confirmed I was right. It also said there was nothing on the table amicable to both parties. The shutdown would continue, leaving me two problems: the murder and the bikers out at the island.