Six John Jordan Mysteries
Page 90
“Which is why everybody scratchin’ they heads over her puttin’ in for a transfer back to PCI. “
He laughed as my face lit up.
“It’s illogical, but most babes’ motives got more to do with they hearts than they heads.”
“Thank God for that,” I said, and tried to stop grinning. “Thank you, God, for that.”
Blood Sacrifice
a John Jordan Mystery Book 5
by Michael Lister
1
I was walking along the bay, searching for serenity, when the first body was discovered.
It was a cold December day, especially for North Florida, and the breeze blowing in off St. Ann’s Bay stung my face and brought tears to my eyes. The sun was out, and though it was bright enough to make me squint, the day was dull and had a grayish quality I associated with the muted colorlessness of winter.
Taking a break from the demanding duties of prison chaplaincy at a maximum security facility, I had come to the small coastal town of Bridgeport following the second breakup of my marriage, which had come on the heels of two homicide investigations that had taken more out of me than I had realized.
Raised in a law-enforcement household and working as a cop to pay for seminary, I found myself continually getting involved in investigations. Though chaplaincy was draining enough, it was dealing with crime day after day as an investigator that had left me depleted and depressed, unable to deal with the second death of my marriage.
I had been fighting a losing battle against a powerful undertow, but rather than drown I had washed up on the shores of St. Ann’s Abbey, a secluded retreat center among the ubiquitous slash pines of the Florida Panhandle. Now, it was no longer just my pride or career or even my marriage, but my very soul I was trying to save.
A crime scene was the last place I needed to go, but from the moment I saw the flashing lights near the marina, I found myself moving toward them—irresistibly drawn, like an addict, to that which threatened to destroy me.
I glanced behind me. The shoreline was nearly empty, only a few early morning walkers in the distance—senior citizens in pastel warm-up suits from the look of them. Without thinking about it, I picked up my pace and moved deliberately toward the emergency lights and the crime scene beyond them, the damp sand clinging to my tennis shoes as I did.
The first person I encountered near the entrance of the marina was a pale young police officer with a sparse beard, a round face, and an extra fifty pounds.
“Hi,” he said. “Can I help you?”
Far too friendly and eager to help, he was one of the few cops I had ever encountered who erred on the side of serving.
“First crime scene?” I asked.
He glanced back beyond the emergency vehicles to the other officers, detectives, fishermen, and EMTs swarming the body.
“Not really at this one,” he said.
“You’ll be at more than you want to before you retire or resign,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t get too many ‘round here. You a cop?”
“Not anymore,” I said.
He nodded.
Beyond him, the massive metal skeleton of Bridgeport’s abandoned paper mill stood still and quiet, rising out of the fog like the rusting remnants of a former, less sophisticated civilization. Scheduled for demolition in a few days, soon the largest symbol of dying old North Florida would be no more.
“Looks like they could use some help,” I said. “I better get on up there.”
“I can’t let you go—”
“Is Steve Taylor still the chief here?” I asked.
“You know him?”
“He was a deputy for my dad over in Potter County a lifetime or two ago.”
“Your dad Jack Jordan?”
I nodded. “I’m John.”
“Well, I guess it’d be all right for you to—”
“Thanks,” I said, pushing past him before he realized what he was doing.
“Hey,” he said.
I turned around to face him, my eyebrows shooting up.
“If your dad ever has any openings...”
“I’ll put in a good word for you,” I said. Dad likes hiring guys who can’t even keep a crime scene secure.
“I’m datin’ a girl from over there.”
“Lucky her,” I said, and continued walking.
“No. I mean that’s why I want to move. Hey. Don’t you need my name?”
“I got it from your name tag.”
“Oh,” he said, and looked down at his shirt.
While he studied his shirt, I hurried down the dock, its weathered and splintered planks creaking beneath me as I did, the early morning fog adding to the perpetual dampness provided by the water, and I could feel the sticky moisture on my skin and in my hair.
Past the police cars and ambulance, the small body of a young man was splayed in a spreading pool of water, his wet clothes and hair clinging to his body and the dock, the small group of officers and EMTs gathered around him. I couldn’t tell for sure from this distance, but he resembled one of the troubled teens I’d seen at St. Ann’s.
“The hell you think you’re doin’?”
I looked up to see one of the officers walking toward me. He had the muscle-turned-fat build of an aging jock, but he carried himself as if he were unaware of the metamorphosis that had taken place in his unsuspecting body.
I stuck out my hand. “I’m—”
“I don’t care who the fuck you are. This is a crime scene. Get outta here ‘fore I arrest your ass.”
“I think I know him,” I said.
“The floater?” he asked.
I looked at the body again. No way he was a floater. Not only were there no signs of fixed lividity, but the body had yet to begin to decompose.
“Floater?” I asked.
Ordinarily when a person drowns, his or her body sinks to the bottom, head, hands, and feet hanging down, and stays there until decomposition causes gas to form in the tissue, making the body rise to the surface.
“The dude we found in the water,” he said slowly, shaking his head. “You know him?”
“I think so,” I said. “But he’s not a floater.”
“The fuck you talkin’ about?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at the others, who returned his look of incredulity and his laughter. “We fished his ass out of the water.”
“You may have, but he wasn’t floating at the time.”
He turned to the others again. “Believe this guy?” Turning back to me, he said, “The hell else do you do in the water?”
“Sink.”
“Sinking, floating, all I know is he sure as hell wasn’t swimming,” he said. “You know him or not?”
“I need a closer look?”
“Of course you do,” he said. “You a reporter?”
“Prison chaplain,” I said. “I’m staying at St. Ann’s and I think I saw him a couple of times in chapel.”
“Well, you won’t be seeing him there anymore—except maybe at his funeral. Take a closer look so you can get out of here.”
As I approached the body, the small group backed away from him slightly. When I reached him, I knelt down and said a prayer.
“Is it him?” Muscle-fat said.
I nodded.
“What’s his name?”
“Thomas I think. They called him Tommy Boy.”
“Thanks,” he said, his tone dismissive. “‘Preciate it.”
“Where’d you find him?”
“In the water.”
“But not floating,” I said.
“Look, I’m sorry I called him a floater. I didn’t know you knew him.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s—”
“You really need to go so we can get to work.”
“Where’d you find the body?” I asked.
“It was caught in the net of a shrimp boat,” a thick-bodied female EMT with short, wiry hair and a large, not unattractive face said.
She shook her head. “We just got here and were told to wait for Chief Taylor.”
“You need to go ahead and take them. They’re crucial in establishing time of death in a drowning.”
“Listen,” Muscle-fat said, “we’ve been patient with you, but you’ve got to go before the chief gets here. We’ve got the floater situation under control.”
I’m not sure exactly why I did what I did next, but I suspect it had something to do with the deteriorated, self-destructive state I was in. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I scooped up the body and tossed it back into the bay.
“What the fuck are you doin’?” Muscle-fat said, as the others gathered around me.
The body made a splash when it went into the water, ripples moving out from the entry point, but long after the water was smooth again, the body had yet to resurface.
I took in some air through my nose, and the briny smell of the bay filled my nostrils.
We all stood there for a long moment, watching the spot where the body had entered the water.
“Guess you weren’t dealing with a floater after all,” I said.
“And didn’t have it under control either,” the female EMT said to him.
Kicking off my shoes, I dove into the cold water and retrieved Tommy Boy’s body. Lifting him up as far as I could, the others took hold of him and had him lying on the dock again by the time I was out of the water.
“Arrest his ass,” Muscle-fat said to the middle-aged officer standing closest to me. “And radio the chief.”
I turned and held my arms behind me and Middle-aged snapped on the cuffs, led me to his car, shoved me into the backseat, and slammed the door.
2
“The hell you thinkin’?” Steve Taylor asked.
He was leaning over, looking down at me through the partially opened window of the patrol car, his spotless, wrinkle-free uniform fitting as if it were made for him. All his clothes looked that way, and it wasn’t just that he was trim and muscular. It was the way he wore them—the way he carried himself, the razor-thin line he walked between confidence and cockiness.
“That your officer’s too much of an idiot to know he wasn’t dealing with a floater,” I said.
His pale blue eyes widened under arched brows. “And you couldn’t’ve just told him?”
“I did,” I said. “Several times.”
Steve and I hadn’t gotten along when we both worked as deputies for my dad. It started out as a personality conflict with an unhealthy dose of competition, but eventually escalated into dislike because of disagreements we had over cases we worked together.
“Heard you became a chaplain,” he said.
I nodded.
“I’d hoped that meant you’d changed, but you haven’t. Always gotta be right. Never were a team player—even when it was your dad’s team. One look and I would’ve known that body hadn’t been in the water long enough to be a floater.”
He was right. I was wrong. It was obvious, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it, to apologize to him for potentially destroying evidence or giving a defense attorney reasonable doubt on physical evidence alone. What I had done was yet another sign of just how badly I needed to be at St. Ann’s. It didn’t happen too often, but occasionally I would do something so unexpected—especially to me—act out in some erratic way, that it let me know I had far more to deal with than I wanted to believe.
Opening the door, he said, “Come on.”
Without uncuffing me, he led me back over to the body. Like Tommy Boy, I was still dripping, my soaking clothes clinging to my body, but unlike him, I was feeling the bite of the breeze. He wasn’t feeling much of anything at all.
The others gathered around us.
“Listen up,” Steve said. “I know most of you are new and haven’t had much experience, which is why I told you to wait for me to get here. We’re not gonna have a lot of homicides or suicides or even accidents around here. Hell, we don’t have a lot of anything—which is why we live here, right?”
“And why we’ll be moving if Gulf Paper gets its way,” Muscle-fat said.
The others laughed, but like the shrieks of the gliding gulls all around us, the sound was quickly carried away by the wind.
Since the paper market had softened and the paper mill had closed, Gulf Coast Paper Company, now the Gulf Coast Company, the largest landholder in the state of Florida, was in the process of developing some of its 900,000 acres of Panhandle land into resorts, golf courses, gated communities, condominiums, and other sins against the unspoiled beauty of the one part of Florida we had always naively believed was Disney and Spring Break proof.
For almost six decades, the Gulf Coast Paper Company had supervised its Panhandle acres in an unsurprising fashion, growing and harvesting pines and turning them into pulp at its mill in Bridgeport. It had quietly ruled a barely visible backwater empire of fast-growing slash pines, loggers, and paper mill workers, but times had changed, and in the new economy, the land itself and not the trees or pulp or paper had become the commodity.
Soon the Forgotten Coast of Florida would be anything but, and a way of life would become as extinct as the endangered species sacrificed in the temple of tourism to the American god of greed.
“Every time we have a suspicious death,” Steve continued, “it’s an opportunity for you to learn more about investigative techniques.”
Each of them nodded, fully concentrating on Steve’s sage-like words.
With sun-bleached blond hair and deeply tanned skin, Steve looked more like a waterlogged surfer than a respected chief of police, and I could tell by the way the women responded to him that most of them found him intensely appealing.
“Now,” he continued, “someone tell me why this victim is not a floater.”
“Because he didn’t float,” the female EMT said.
“Uh huh,” Steve said, “but why didn’t he?”
Standing there, shivering in the cold breeze, hands cuffed behind my back, I felt embarrassed, foolish, and frustrated, all of which were quickly turning to anger.
“He didn’t float,” Steve said, when no one was able to answer his question, “because he hasn’t been in the water long enough for decomposition to begin and gas to form in his tissue causing him to float up to the surface. So, as our friend from Potter County pointed out, a body in water is not necessarily a floater.”
“If he hadn’t gotten caught in Eli’s nets...” Muscle-fat said.
“It would have been a while before we found him,” Steve said. “Gas forms faster in warm water and more slowly in cold water. Ours aren’t as warm as they usually are, but they’re not freezing either, so it would have taken days. All of this helps us establish time and ultimately cause of death. Speaking of which, are we dealing with a homicide, suicide, or accident?”
When no one in the group gave more than a shrug, he turned to me.
I shrugged too.
“You mean you don’t know everything?” Muscle-fat said.
“I figured you were about ready to reveal the killer’s identity to us by now,” Steve said.
“With drownings—if that’s what we’re dealing with—it is extremely difficult to determine the cause,” I said. “That’s why it’s so important to do things the right way from the very beginning.”
“Like tossing the body back into the water?” Muscle-fat asked. “That’s something they never taught us.”
I didn’t say anything. I deserved that and a lot more, and I would just have to take it.
“You guys see any signs of lividity on his face or hands?”
They all strained to look, but there was none to see, so they shook their heads.
“Why would we expect to see some?” Steve asked me.
“Because, Professor Taylor,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster with chattering teeth, “when a body is in the water, its extr
emities hang down toward the bottom.”
“So the fact that there aren’t any signs of lividity means what?” Steve asked the others.
“He hasn’t been in the water long,” the female EMT said.
“Which is what we would expect to see in light of the fact that he wasn’t found floating,” Steve said. “There’s also no signs of violence on the body, and since suicides by drowning are very rare, we’re probably dealing with an accident, but let’s keep an open mind while we investigate and wait for the autopsy report.”
They all nodded.
“That okay with you?” Steve asked me.
I gave him a small smile and nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“I think his mouth’s frozen shut,” Muscle-fat said.
“That’s too much to hope for,” Steve said, “but he does look a little blue. Better get him back in the car.”
This time Muscle-fat himself escorted me to the car and shoved me into it. After slamming the door, he rejoined the others around the body, where they stayed for a long time, talking and laughing and waiting for the medical examiner to arrive.
Since I had been at St. Ann’s, I had been undergoing counseling with Sister Abigail, and as I sat alone in the backseat of the patrol car, all I could think about was what she would make of all this.
3
“You did what?” Sister Abigail asked.
I told her again.
“And you were arrested?”
I shook my head. “Steve said something about the embarrassment and humility doing more for me than a night in a jail cell could.”
I had run into Sister Abigail on the way to my room to change into some warm, dry clothes, and she had insisted I tell her all about it first.
“Let’s hope he’s right,” she said with a glint in her eye.
In her midfifties, Sister Abigail’s pale skin, extra weight, and wispy reddish-blond hair made her look older than she was, but her wit and the wicked twinkle she often got in her eyes made her seem much younger.
“Let’s,” I said.
“You scaring yourself yet?” she asked.