Mermaid

by Tom Lowe

  “Just a few minutes more.” She glanced up at the ME and shook her head. “Doctor White, I’m hoping you can tell us how she died. A young woman packed into this mermaid costume and propped up here like a broken toy is a morbid display of absolute evil.”

  The ME nodded, wind blowing her hair. “A friend of mine, from my college days, works in the ME office in Volusia, and she said that the girl found in a mermaid costume near Daytona Beach, died from drowning. I suspect we might find the same thing here. We’ll know soon.”

  Detective Ramirez stood and looked toward the horizon at the people in the boats, some holding up phones and taking pictures or video from the distance. “And I suspect we’ll find other things in common with the murders of these girls.”

  She glanced back at the beach, the crowd of onlookers growing larger. She saw TV news trucks pulling up in the county parking lot. Reporters and camera operators unloading TV equipment and coming over the sand dunes like hired mercenaries sensing death in the humid air.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I watched my two ladies with a sense of pride. Wynona and Max, returning from a walk, both coming down L dock. Max in a slight lead, as always. Both smiling. Max seemed to have more of a lopsided grin rather than a smile. I stood in Dragonfly’s cockpit coiling and placing an extra anchor rope in a storage bin. Wynona and Max paused near the empty slip where Nick’s boat, St. Michael, is usually moored. He was coming back from a two-day fishing trip, standing in the wheelhouse, slowing St. Michael to less than two knots as he came through the marina. Sea gulls followed the boat’s transom, knowing they’d be fed when Nick cleaned some of his catch.

  Wynona waved to Nick. He returned the wave, his arm as brown as a roasted coffee bean, hanging out the open window next to the helm. Nick blew St. Michael’s horn once. Max turned in a half-circle, dachshund dance, barking twice, her eyes bright. I watched them for a moment before getting out of Dragonfly and walking over to Nick’s slip as he backed his boat in with the ease of a New York City taxi driver parking in a tight spot.

  He shut off the diesels, left the wheelhouse, and tossed a line to me. I secured it around a dock cleat, the moving water slapping the dock pilings. Nick slipped a white rope around a post and quickly tied if off. He did the same with two more lines, lowering four rubber marine bumpers, two on either side of the boat. He looked up at us and grinned. “It’s good to have a welcoming party. That’s the old Greek way, you know. When fishermen returned from the sea, folks gathered around to see the catch or to buy some fish.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Did you catch some fish?”

  “Sean, you don’t need to ever ask that question of Nick the Greek.” He grinned and walked over to a large, white ice chest built into St. Michael. The heavy cover was secured with three wide hinges. He lifted the lid, used one hand to scrape ice off a fish, and picked up a red snapper by the tail. “Lots of these fellas. Most in here are bigger than Hot Dawg.”

  Max angled her head, staring at the fish, tail wagging. Nick laughed. “I tossed some of the babies back, told ‘em to hang out with mama in the reefs. Stay away from grinning sharks, and I would come back to see ‘em some other day. Never take more than you need or can sell at the fish market for a fair price.”

  Wynona smiled. “Nick, you’re a responsible and conscientious fisherman.”

  He set the fish back on ice and lowered the cover. “That’s ‘cause I got a conscience. Some dudes will fish a reef dry, stripping it and movin’ on to someplace else. Not me. I made an agreement with Mother Ocean a long time ago. You take care of me, and I take care of you.”

  Wynona watched him dry his hands on a red towel. “I like how you and Savannah Nelson call the sea Mother Ocean, adopting it from what she said her mom called it.”

  Nick nodded. “Without Mama Ocean, we’d be like Mars. Redder than ‘em red snappers and not a drop of water, the stuff of life.”

  Dave Collins stepped off Gibraltar, approaching us. Max trotted over to him, tail wagging. “Good afternoon, Miss Maxine. I see ol’ Nick has returned from the sea.” He grinned, looking over at Nick. “I trust you did well?”

  “Old, eh? Look who’s talking. I’ll make my rent at the marina this month. Pay for groceries and beer. Have some left over to take Christi to the movies. Now, what more does a man really need, huh?”

  Wynona laughed. “When can we meet Christi?”

  “Next Saturday night.”

  Dave grinned and shook his head. “I think you sum it up well, Nick.” He looked at Wynona and then at me. “I assume you have not read or heard the news in the last few hours, correct?”

  Wynona said, “Please don’t tell us there’s been another mass shooting somewhere.”

  “No, nothing of that scale. However, the latest death is certainly a tragedy. And it hits close to home.”

  Before Dave could tell us, I knew what he was about to say. And I hoped I was wrong, very wrong.

  Dave folded his arms across his thick chest, looked toward the Tiki Bar in the distance near the marina parking lot and then turned back to us. “Police found another young woman dead near the sea. This body wasn’t on a beach, but rather at the end of a large jetty, a bulkhead sea wall, on Key Biscayne. And she was found in a mermaid costume.”

  Nick lowered himself into a deck chair and said, “It’s gotta be the same guy.”

  • • •

  Detective Dan Grant took the call at his desk in the sheriff’s department. He sat at his desk at the far end of the homicide division, a half-dozen detectives at desks working the phones or staring into computer screens tracking down leads. Grant pressed a button at the base of the phone. “Detective, I hear you had a bad one on Key Biscayne. Glad you called me before I could reach out to you.”

  Detective Ron Hamilton stood next to his desk, opening a file folder, looking at the crime scene photos, the chilling images of the body found on the rocks. “I wanted to compare notes with you. Maybe we’re both after the same perp. Maybe not.”

  “What do you have?”

  Hamilton told him all that he and Detective Ramirez had come up with from the crime scene. He added, “The girl’s name is Kristen Morgan. No visible signs of trauma. We’re waiting for the results of an autopsy and toxicology reports. She was attending the University of Miami. She had one semester to go before graduating. The vic was a competitive swimmer, earning a partial scholarship to join the university swim team. And she made extra money working three days a week as a mermaid in one of the most upscale restaurants and bars in Miami Beach. Place is called the Odyssey.”

  “Who was the last person to see her alive?”

  “We think it was a friend and coworker. Her name is Diana Harmon. She works as a mermaid there, too. She said that she and Kristen left the restaurant at the same time, around ten at night. They walked to their cars together. Harmon said she drove off just before Kristen Morgan, but she watched Kristen get to her car and unlock the door.”

  “But did she see the girl get inside her car?”

  “No. Two days later, Kristen is found dead on the rocks close to the Cape Florida Lighthouse.”

  “Any surveillance cameras in the area where she was last seen?”

  “Yes, one overlooking the employee parking lot. Unfortunately, out of the seven outdoor cameras, it was the only one that wasn’t working that night. We’re not sure why the malfunction.”

  “Maybe it malfunctioned because someone did something to prevent it from recording. If that’s the case, could be that the perp works for the damn restaurant.”

  “We’ve questioned management and the building maintenance man. The cameras are connected to a closed-circuit feed that leads to a bank of monitors in the office. Apparently, no one noticed that the video feed from the employee parking lot wasn’t working the night that the vic left.”

  Grant held the phone to his left ear and took notes with his right hand. “That sounds a little too convenient to me. It’s very suspect. Maybe our perp is a South Florida creep
.”

  “Could be. He gets around the state. We’re doing background checks on every person currently working for the Odyssey, including the owners. Our forensic techs found human urine in an area of the parking lot where Kristen Morgan’s car was parked. That tells you a lot. What’d the perp say or do in the lot to scare her that much?”

  “A knife blade to the neck or a gun to the head can cause anyone to pee in their pants.”

  Hamilton nodded. “We’re running DNA test on the urine. What’s the story on the suspect you guys are questioning, the former boyfriend of your vic?”

  Grant gave him an update and added, “He’s a cocky one. The family lawyered up from the get-go. He’s an abusive SOB … but what’s bothering me is this whole damn mermaid thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Craig Blake is no choir boy. He’s got a mean streak. Entitled rich kid. But the display of his ex-girlfriend’s body on the beach … it appears, at least on the surface, out of character for him. Why would he take the time and effort to do that when a guy like Blake could have just tossed her off a bridge? To put it in blunt terms … the death is too artsy-fartsy for a guy in construction. A murder that’s almost too creative, in a shocking way, for an asshole like Blake. And, after you described how you found the body propped up on the jetty for boaters to see, seems too dramatic for Blake. But that’s just my gut feeling.”

  “Do you know if he was in the Miami area in the last forty-eight hours?”

  “No, but I can find out. I will pull phone records. Go through Google Earth and see what we see. Let’s compare notes on the mermaid tails.”

  “How so?”

  “The one found on Michelle Martin came from the set of the movie, Atlantis, which they’re shooting in Florida. The movie is about the legend of the lost continent of Atlantis and, apparently, mermaids and ancient Greek gods are all part of the script. Michelle had auditioned for a part and was about to be hired. One of the casting directors let her borrow the tail to practice in a swimming pool. The mermaid tails the movie people developed are quite sophisticated. Some of them can use prosthetics to make the tail move lifelike in the water.”

  “CSI is going over every inch of the tail. We’ll do comparisons. I have a feeling I’ll need to visit their movie set. Tell me more about the guy who let the vic borrow the mermaid tail … the casting guy. Who is he? Have you questioned him?”

  Grant looked at his notes and gave Detective Hamilton an overview. “Between Sebastian Gunter, Jonathan Lloyd, even the director and producer, they’re so focused on their damn movie that they don’t want to be questioned in a murder investigation. It’s a nuisance to them.”

  “It’d be good to know if any of them, or anyone from the movie set, was here in the Miami area the last couple of days. Same thing, of course, goes for the ex-boyfriend, Craig Blake.”

  Grant stood at his desk and rubbed his left temple. “We’ll drill down on him, get phone data and look at new mileage on his car since we first inspected it.”

  “If Blake was down here during the time when this girl was abducted and killed, I’d toss any coincidental bull crap out the window. I don’t care how many lawyers he has. If he murdered up there in Volusia County and here in Dade County, he’ll do it again somewhere else. If he’s our guy, it’s just a matter of time when the urge to kill rises in his chest, and the convenience of finding prey is in the crossroads for him. No doubt the next victim will be another poor girl in a mermaid tail.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  It was an ominous feeling I used to get in Afghanistan. As member of Delta Force, we’d trained for almost every conceivable wartime scenario, especially when it applied to boots on the ground—to sighting the enemy through the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope. Or infiltrating the Taliban’s lair in surprise, clandestine attacks before the break of dawn. The feeling was a sensation beyond the gut. It originated from somewhere in the internal compass—the human defense psyche honed from thousands of years of survival.

  I felt it at times when the potential of lethal combat was hiding around the corner of Afghan homes built from hard-packed mud. Every movement—olive tree leaves jostling in the hot wind, a goat wandering the dusty street, shadows moving. I’d get the same razor-sharp awareness as a detective, searching for a murder suspect we believed was hiding in a house or a building. Some called it a sixth sense. I believed it was absolute acute awareness of my surroundings because it often meant life or death.

  It was as if the injection of adrenaline had a chemical in it that dramatically increased my ability to perceive motion or things out of the natural order. At those threatening times, my sense of hearing was more acute. Fine-tuned. My vision—day or night, was like a radar, detecting the slightest movement, even in the peripheral areas. My sense of smell was sharper, able to detect human body odor in the breeze, or the smell of fresh urine downwind in a dirt alley. I knew that my sensation of the fragility of life was at its highest when the threat of death was at its closest. I’d heard that race car drivers, going at high speeds, sometimes feel the sensation that life around the perimeter of the track, the crowds, the people moving in the pits, it all appeared to slow down the faster the driver pushed his car.

  Today, as we sat in Gibraltar’s salon with Dave using his TV remote to select a news station, I felt the veiled churning in my gut, the perception that the threat of murder was looming. Not so much for me or those in my immediate vicinity, but for someone else. I just didn’t know who, and I didn’t know why because it never happened when I watched a tragic news story on television. I felt empathy for those hurt or killed. However, because I’m seeing the tragedy second-hand and as a spectator, watching a story that, most often, had already happened, it was like witnessing the body counts after combat, the numbness to endless casualties of war.

  “Here it is,” Dave said. “Cable and national news networks are carrying the news story because, again, it’s one of those peculiar stories coming out of Florida.”

  Wynona, sitting in a deck chair, put Max on her lap and said, “Working as a detective, I find nothing peculiar from or about Florida. Not that the status quo is strange, weird, or inexplicable … it’s just Florida and all the nuttiness that comes with the sunshine state. You got to take into account that it’s a high visitor and transient state. We get the nuts coming from everywhere else.”

  Nick laughed. “I guess a lil’ craziness is the trade-off we get from living in a place where you don’t have to shovel snow. We just have to shovel all the crazy bullshit outta the way.”

  I looked at the TV screen, recognizing locations. “This news is coming from a place I know well, Miami-Dade.”

  Dave turned up the sound. The story started with an aerial perspective shot from a TV station’s drone camera. The video began as the drone flew over the lighthouse on Key Biscayne. The reporter’s narrative, a woman, said, “This is what tourists saw when they stepped up to the banister of the Cape Florida Lighthouse. Below, and out on the rocky jetty, was the body of a college student, partially nude and wearing the dark green tail of a mermaid.”

  The image cut to an interview with a woman, British accent. “At first, I thought it was some kind of prop, you know … maybe something a chamber of commerce might do. Sort of like a mermaid who was welcoming boaters to the area. The guide at the lighthouse said it was not a prop and immediately called 9-1-1. It’s so horrible and tragic.”

  From the perspective of boaters in the water, the video cut to a shot of CSI detectives and technicians working the crime scene. The narrative continued. “This video was taken by a boater on his cell phone. It’s a grisly scene of the girl’s body appearing to be left in a sitting position on an outcropping of rock. The boater told us that at first he thought it was someone pretending to be a mermaid, but when there was no movement, he said those initial thoughts quickly went away.”

  The image cut to a man on the beach, boats in the background. “We didn’t know what it was. My wife thought we’d sp
otted a mannequin in a mermaid suit. Even the girl’s hair was moving in the breeze off the water. It was really eerie. I got goosebumps, and it’s eighty-five degrees out here.”

  The images changed to CSI technicians loading the body under a white sheet on a gurney and into a van, the words Miami-Dade Medical Examiner on the sides of the van. The reporter’s voice-over narrative continued. “Police don’t know for certain how the girl was killed. And they don’t know if this bizarre death is, in some way, linked to the murder of a girl found in a mermaid costume south of Daytona Beach near Ponce Inlet. It’s been reported that the first victim had water in her lungs at the time of death. Police aren’t sure if they have the same findings here.”

  The picture cut to an interview with Detective Ron Hamilton. “At this point in the investigation, we don’t know how she died. There were no obvious contusions or wounds on the body. The medical examiner will conduct an autopsy and let us know the cause of death … and the probable time of death, too.”

  I stared at the screen, stared into Ron Hamilton’s face. I knew what he was feeling out there on the rock jetty investigating the heinous death of the young woman. And I remembered what he recently shared with me. Word on the street is that Spencer is looking for a hitman to pay you a visit.

  Wynona looked over to me and said, “That detective, Ron Hamilton … he’s one of the guys you worked with when you were at Miami-Dade PD, right?”

  I said nothing for a few seconds, watching the news video. “Yes, that’s Ron. He looks fatigued. It’s as if this one, the senselessness of it, hit him in the gut. He has two grown daughters. And now he has to tell someone their daughter won’t be coming back home.”

  The video cut to a live shot of the reporter on the beach, the wind tossing her shoulder-length black hair, CSI techs and deputies in the background. “Although police say they know the identity of the deceased girl, they aren’t releasing it until they can reach family members. We do know that police in Volusia County, where the first body was found in a mermaid tail, are questioning a person of interest. Could that person be connected to the death of the girl found on a rock jetty in the shadow of the oldest standing structure in Miami and Dade County, the lighthouse at Key Biscayne? We’ll see where the investigation takes detectives. Now back to you in the studio.”