by Tom Lowe
Savannah felt awkward, smiling. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just stand there and look the way you look, which is quite beautiful. I suppose guys tell you that often.”
Savannah moistened her lips. “Not really. I’m working my way through college, not a lot of time for a boyfriend. I have a few guy friends, though. Like three of them. We hang out and surf together.”
“Oh, really? Hence you’re a natural born mermaid.”
“I don’t know about that. But, after I finish my work on Atlantis, I want to apply to Weeki Watchee to work as a mermaid. It’s close to my university.”
“You sound like a smart young lady, a girl with her feet on the ground.” He took two more pictures and then sat in a chair behind the desk, hands on the computer keyboard. “Okay, we’ll need your name, address, and a way to contact you. That includes phone and email, if you do email.”
“I do … just not a lot. Texting is easier.”
He paused and scratched his elfin nose, the tip almost cherry red. “What do you girls like to wear when you’re out in the ocean surfing with the guys?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, a bikini I’d suppose, right?”
Savannah took a deep breath. “I don’t know what other girls wear, but for me it’s usually a wet suit on the top half.”
He stared at her for a moment, licked his lips with the tip of his tongue. “The only reason I ask is because you’ll be wearing a mermaid’s tail. And it sounds to me like you’d do well in the costume … like you were born to play the part.”
TWENTY-SIX
As we worked on prepping Dragonfly for sailing, Wynona and I took a break and walked the beach in shorts and T-shirts near Ponce Inlet, the red brick lighthouse visible beyond dunes sprouting sea oats and clumps of green interspersed with yellow petals of wild sunflowers. Max trotted a few feet in front of us, dodging the roll of the breakers. She spotted a sandpiper, gave chase for a quick burst until the bird flew farther down the beach. Max, satisfied with her partial victory, held her head up, now more of a prance to her gait.
Wynona smiled and used both hands to fix her hair in a ponytail, the wind picking up somewhat. “I wonder what Max would do if, God forbid, she somehow managed to catch a sandpiper.”
I said, “It’ll never happen. The sandpiper has longer legs. Max is content enough to instill the fear of her dachshund breed into all wildlife that dares to be in her path. Didn’t you know that she thinks she owns this beach?”
“I can tell. Let’s see what happens if she stumbles on a crab half her size.”
“She’s learned her lesson with crabs. She sniffed one a little too close when she was just out of the puppy stage.”
“Did the crab pinch her nose?”
“Almost. Max did a quick backstep, looked up at me for reassurance, and walked around the crab.”
Wynona laughed. Her laugh sounded good in concert with the splash of the surf and the snicker of gulls in the sky. I reached for her hand, and we walked barefoot in the gentle breakers, following Max. We strolled the beach in silence for a few minutes, the sky a pale blue, cumulus clouds billowing over the horizon, some with the gray tint of unpolished silver.
“The sand’s so soft,” she said, stepping out of the surf and onto the white sand.
We walked past people sitting under umbrellas, children running toward the waves, the smell of sunblock lotion and burgers in the air. I could hear snatches of conversations and someone’s radio playing Cruisin’ sung by Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow. Wynona watched a young mother holding a baby in the ankle-deep surf, the child’s feet just touching the lap of the water, the baby giggling in delight.
Wynona held my hand tighter, her eyes looking back out across the vista. A white sailboat was less than a half mile off the shore, the boat appeared to be heading toward Ponce Inlet. Wynona said, “That’s going to be us soon, sailing off into the horizon. I’m so ready. I promise not to look back until we can no longer see land.”
“I’ll man the helm and keep sporadic watch to let you know when you can look in a 360-degree radius and see nothing but blue sea and blue sky in all directions.”
“Now, that sounds like a plan, Captain.” She smiled, and we continued walking, past a sandcastle half washed away in the rising tide, beyond the music, and now away from all of the beachgoers, the shoreline pristine, the wind picking up. “Do you think it’s going to storm?” Wynona asked.
“Those clouds are definitely getting grayer as the day wears on, and the wind is blowing stronger.” I looked at the rolling swells in the distance. “We’ll be getting some larger waves in a little while, and they’ll be big enough to surf as long as you wrap before the storm hits because you certainly don’t want to risk the ride through lightning.”
“That’s what Savannah Nelson said she was doing the morning she found the body.”
“Yes—she likes to take advantage of the pre-storm waves for practicing her competitive skills. Luckily, for the crime scene investigators, the storm stayed just offshore that morning, preserving how the body was staged. Hopefully, they picked up some footprints and physical evidence.”
“How far are we from where Savannah was that day?”
“Less than three blocks. It’s close to a county beachfront park. No houses, hotels, or condos in the immediate vicinity. The perfect place to surf before a storm.”
“And, evidently, a good place to off-load a body.”
“Unfortunately, it was.”
“As horrific as it is, let’s hope the poor girl’s death was a freakish anomaly. Maybe the perp will get arrested very soon and there will be no similar murders. And, hopefully, Savannah Nelson can live her life as best she can until some of the revulsion fades.”
I said nothing, watching Max stop to sniff a sand dollar that had washed ashore. Wynona said, “What’s on your mind, Sean. You seem distant, preoccupied.”
“Sorry, just thinking about what we need to do before the trip. Thinking about Rex and Savannah … and the girl whose body was found near here.”
“I can tell that you don’t believe it will be a single murder, right?”
“I’ve been wrong about these type of heinous things before, maybe I’m wrong now.”
“Yes, but I believe that you’ve been right about them more often than wrong. You believe Savannah is in jeopardy, don’t you?”
“What I keep thinking about is the person she briefly spotted on the beach right before she saw Michelle Martin’s body. He simply could have been a guy out for an early morning stroll on the beach, but Savannah said he was standing by the path leading to the park and the lot.”
Wynona cut her eyes from the in-coming tide to the sand dunes, the sea oats swaying in the wind. “Maybe he just got out of his car, walked to the fringe of the beach, saw the storm in the distance, watched Savannah ride a wave, and then left.”
“Of course, that’s a possibility, maybe it’s a probability. And maybe it’s not.”
“Let’s walk down there. See it from that perspective. Who knows, we might see something that’s been overlooked. If nothing else, we’ll have an idea of the vista Savannah had that morning. And, from where the beachgoer stood, we can see if the view to where Michelle’s body was lying might have been obscured by sea oats or a sand dune. Or maybe there was a clear view.”
I nodded and looked toward the horizon where the clouds were building, and the white caps on the deep blue sea were churning in a faster rhythm. “No one can stop a storm approaching, but we can stop a killer from returning like the tide. It had better happen fast, though.”
“You think he’s going to kill again and very soon, don’t you?”
“Let’s go take a look at the area where the body was found. That might help with my answer.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tricia Hill was looking for something in the water. She peered into the powerful electron microscope searching for an aquatic fingerprint.
In a corner of the state crime lab in downtown Orlando, Hill used an eye dropper to smear a sample of murky water between two glass slides and placed the sample under the lens of the microscope. The water had been removed from the lungs of Michelle Martin. The pathologist found traces of human blood in the water.
But that wasn’t what Tricia Hill was searching for.
She was looking for something that might help police zone in on where the victim was killed. It certainly wasn’t in the ocean; however, it might be one of the lakes near where Michelle Martin lived … or a lake where the killer lives. If they could find the suspected murderer, something in the water might connect the dots and solve the crime. Hill, a forensic chemist, focused the powerful lens. She would look through microscopic algae, microbes and one-cell life, hunting for the only organism on the planet with cells made of transparent, opaline silica.
Hill was searching for clues shrouded in the microscopic world of diatoms.
She didn’t have to look too far in a water sample filled with deadly bacteria and a host of microorganisms. “There you are,” Hill said, her voice just above a whisper. “I’ve found you. Now, all detectives have to do is find the water where your twin brothers and sisters live. And, maybe, that will be the place where the victim was killed.”
• • •
I didn’t know if something I had learned from an old man—a Bedouin shepherd I met in the desert of Saudi Arabia, would work on the Florida beach sand. But it was worth a try. As Wynona, Max, and I walked down the beach, I looked at the sand dunes above the mean high tide areas, the damp irregular line in the sand left behind as the breakers receded. We’d been walking for more than a half hour, and I could see where the high tide had left the bone white sand damp, the shadow of a temporary stain would soon evaporate in the sun.
It was on my second tour of duty in the Middle East when I met the elder sheep and goat herder. His name was Rahman Bashar, late sixties, dark skin tough as leather, black eyes that looked the world straight in the eye. He mostly wore his lavender kahanja on his head, a pale white tunic robe, and camel skin sandals. He and his wife raised two sons and a daughter in the desert, all of the children were born under a goat skin tent in the rolling sand dunes of the Arabian Peninsula.
The U.S. Army—specifically Delta Force, had hired Bashar to teach desert survival techniques and how to track in the barren, arid regions of endless sand. At first Bashar was reluctant to work with members of my team. “I’m a simple shepherd, a goat herder,” he said with a twinkle in his dark eyes. After a few hours of thinking about it, he said he would take my squad of ten men into the desert for no more than three days to teach survival and hunting techniques. Bashar brought along his prized camel, which he had named Omar.
He showed us how, in the early morning, to look for water drops of condensation often found beneath flat rock in the desert. He taught us how to hunt for people or animals as the tracks become less and less visible in the shifting desert winds. “It is a handed down tradition,” he said, his impassive eyes scanning the vast arid land. “Bedouin men had to become good trackers to find lost sheep or goats that wandered off in the desert or the mountains, too.”
He had two of my men, one tall and one shorter, walk fifty yards through the sands of a remote region. He pointed to the tracks. “I will show you how to tell the weight of the men, if one had a limp, when tracks were made. And I will tell you how and why one man will last longer in the desert, should they become separated in a sandstorm or even decide to go their separate paths.”
Bashar taught us how to spot recently buried landmines and IEDs. In the desert mountains or along the coastal regions, he showed us how to find drinkable water. He pulled a wide, curved knife from a sheath he wore on his belt and dug a hole above the mean high tide area of a Saudi beach. Within five minutes, clear water began seeping into the bottom of the hole. He used one of his brown hands to scoop water, taking a sip. “Look for the cedar tree near the beach. When you dig here, the water can be used for drinking.”
As Wynona, Max, and I got closer to the place where Michelle Martin’s body had been found, I thought about what that keen-minded desert nomad had taught me, hoping some of it might now help in a land and a lifetime away from where I had first learned it.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Forensic chemist Tricia Hill was never on the scene when the criminals were finally caught, but often her work helped open the doors to the dark places where the criminal mind hides. She thought about that as she looked at the immediate contacts on the police investigative paperwork in the case of the homicide death of Michelle Martin.
The first name and number Hill found was that of Detective Dan Grant. She printed out a high-resolution colorful image of what she’d seen under the microscope, picked up the image from the printer and made the phone call. “Detective, this is Tricia Hill with the state crime lab in Orlando. I wanted to give you a call to share something that I found in the water sample that the medical examiner removed from the body of Michelle Martin.”
Grant, walking to his unmarked car in the sheriff department’s enclosed lot, stopped at his car door. “Thanks for the call. What do you have?”
“Maybe something you can use. Maybe not. It depends on whether or not you can find the body of water where the victim drowned. Because, if you think you’ve found it, we can go out to test the water to confirm the location of death, or disqualify it, based on a water sample removed from one of the victim’s lungs. The scenario of her being found on the beach but with freshwater in her lungs really bothered me. So, I’ve been looking for microbes that might match water samples from the place she drowned, if that area can be located.”
“What kind of microbes are you talking about?”
“They’re called diatoms. Like your fingerprints are unique to you, certain diatoms are unique to specific bodies of water. I know Florida has thousands of lakes. All we have to do is find which one you think is the right one. And then we can confirm it.”
“Thank you. That’s one piece of the puzzle. If we find that specific body of water, we have to find a way to connect a suspect to it.”
• • •
As Wynona and I got closer to the sand dunes and sea oats, I shared some of Rahman Bashar’s knowledge with her. She said, “He sounds like Joe Billie, a man who can see and find things in the wilderness that most people will overlook.”
“That’s a good comparison. They both are masters of situational awareness. It goes far beyond simply being observant.” I stopped and studied the beach from near the county parking lot to the surf. I looked north. “Savannah told us that the morning she spotted the body, she’d seen the man standing to the right of the path that cuts through the sea grapes, palms, and sea oats, heading back to the parking lot. So, that probably would be in this direction.” I pointed, Max leading the way as we followed her.
Max stopped in her tracks, barking once as a ghost crab darted into its burrow in the shadow of a sea grape bush. I studied the terrain, moving my vision in a steady horizontal scan. I motioned to an area up the beach where I saw a wooden cross partially covered in flowers. It was erected in the sand at an approximate location where the body of Michelle Martin was found. I looked over at Wynona. “From here it appears that the guy Savannah saw just briefly could have seen the body of Michelle Martin in a colorful mermaid costume just up the beach a little way.”
Wynona used her right hand, touching above her eyebrows to shield the sun from her eyes. “No doubt. There’s a direct line of sight. No shrubs or palms to block the view.”
I looked at the difference in the sand above and below the mean high tide areas on the beach. As I walked around the sea grape shrubs, in the shadow of a tall palm, I spotted what appeared to be blemishes on the sand in a near full circle, the circle no larger than the round top to a standard-sized trash can. “That’s where a sea turtle, probably a loggerhead, dug a nest and laid her eggs a couple of months ago.”
“How do you know when
she did it?”
“Because there are tiny eruptions in the sand where the baby turtles crawled up and out, scurrying into the surf. It takes a couple of months for them to hatch.”
From a distance of ten feet, Wynona looked at the imperfections in the sand. “One of the tribal elders told us that male sea turtles do one thing only once in their lives, but not so for the females.”
“What did he share with you?”
“That the male turtles leave tracks in the sand only one time in their entire lives … lives that can be up to one hundred years long. They never come on shore again after leaving a place like this. But the females, the mother turtles, will return to their birth beach for as long as they can become pregnant.” She blinked her eyes rapidly, turning away, looking toward the sea.
I stepped closer to the abandoned turtle nest, kneeling down, studying it for a moment. “The baby turtles weren’t the only ones leaving tracks.”
Wynona turned back around to face me. “What do you mean?”
“There’s a human handprint. It must have happened right after the turtles hatched and left the nest.” I walked carefully around the pockmarks in the sand, looking directly behind the vacant nest. I could make out what appeared to be an imprint left in the sand as if it had come from a human knee. I knelt back down, looking at the base of a sea grape tree. The bark on the trunk, in an area about the size of a quarter, looked scratched. I spotted what appeared to be tracks left from boots, like the kind commercial fishermen wear.
“What do you see?” Wynona asked, coming closer.
“You might want to pick up Max. This isn’t a designated crime scene, but it could be where the perp came through after he left Michelle’s body on the beach.”
She picked Max up, staring at the center of the turtle’s nest. “Looks like you spotted hand and footprints. What makes you think the perp may have left them here?”