by Tom Lowe
“It’s about water samples found in Michelle Martin’s lungs.”
“What about them?” Baird stood next to a dead body lying on a stainless-steel gurney that slides like a file drawer into the bank of the lab’s refrigeration units. A tag was attached to one big toe, the man’s body covered in a sheet. Baird closed the drawer and walked across the county morgue to his office. “I assume you’re referring to the diatoms found in the sample.”
“Yes, I am. I just want you to preserve whatever amount of what you have left after taking the initial sample from her lungs.”
“As I mentioned earlier, we have about three ounces remaining.”
“Please keep it refrigerated or frozen if you have to. I want to have a remaining water sample if we need it after we make an arrest and this murder case moves into the trial stages.”
“Of course. I understand. Let me check and make sure the sample is still there.”
“I can’t image anyone tossing it out, not this early in the investigation.” Grant walked back to the image on the screen, staring at one of the lakes.
“We are very careful about evidence and the preservation of evidence in cases of homicide. And now that we know the water from the lungs of both victims matches, it’s an even greater significance. Hold a minute, Detective. I’m going to check.”
Doctor Baird walked across the autopsy room to a large storage room, more stainless-steel doors near a far wall. He opened one of the refrigerators, quickly finding a sealed glass vial marked with Michelle Martin’s name, date of death, and a county serial number assigned to the open case. He lifted his phone back to his ear. “It’s here, as expected.”
“Excellent. I have a feeling we’ll need it again. Thanks.” Grant disconnected. He stared at the picture of the lake closest to the Blake home. “Could there be something in the water right here?” He touched the screen with one finger. Something that will help us close this case. There’s only one way to find out. We have to go there.”
• • •
Doctor Baird picked up the vial of water he had removed from both of Michelle Martin’s lungs, walked back to the autopsy area and over to a lab assistant sitting at her desk, fingers working a computer keyboard. “Claire … do me a favor.”
“Of course, Doctor Baird. What is it?”
“I’m not sure about the shelf life of microbes in lake water. Do a little research on preserving this sample under refrigeration or freezing. We want to keep the content as best preserved as possible. I’d recommend we freeze this sample that we removed from Michelle Martin’s lungs to safeguard what’s in here. It has something in it that the state crime lab’s forensic techs discovered.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, you haven’t heard?” He handed her the glass vial. “Diatoms. And Detective Grant said that the water samples found in the lungs of the other mermaid victim matched this one. It suggests both girls drowned in the same body of water.”
“That could mean by the hands of the same killer.”
“Most likely, yes.”
The lab assistant held the glass vial up to one of the ceiling lights, studying it for a moment as if it contained one of the secrets to life itself.
FORTY-FOUR
Wynona stared at Dragonfly, imagining it under sail at sea. She got up from her chair in Gibraltar’s salon, holding Max in both of her arms like she might hold an infant. Wynona walked into Gibraltar’s cockpit, lifting her eyes up toward a white pelican that alighted at the top of Dragonfly’s mast. Dave watched her for a moment, then glanced at the framed picture of his daughter on the end table. He looked across at me. “How’s Wynona doing? How’s she really doing?”
“Better. Much better, thanks.”
“She reminds me a lot of my daughter, Linda. And Wynona has the same depth that I saw in my daughter since she was a little girl. Wynona is staring at Dragonfly like her ship has arrived at port. I think she’s anxious to sail.”
“She’s looking forward to the trip. Dragonfly will be hauled out soon. We’ll hoist the sails a few days later.”
Nick sat at one of the barstools and said, “Should be clear sailing the next few weeks. No sign of tropical disturbances forming deep down in the Caribbean. No storms spinning off the western coast of Africa either. Y’all should be good to go.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way. We’ve had enough storms in our lives the last few months.”
Dave nodded, looked at the melting ice in the bottom of his glass, then raised his eyes to me. “Sean, it’s traumatic enough when a woman loses a child in a miscarriage, especially three or more months into a pregnancy. By then the woman and her husband already have told family and friends, and maybe even started to design a bedroom for the pending arrival. That happened to Linda when she tried to become pregnant with her second baby. After the miscarriage, she was depressed for months. For Wynona, the strong woman that she is, to lose a child not by miscarrying but rather by an assassin’s bullet—to what is essentially murder, that has to inject enormous despair into the heart of a mother to be. The result can be prolonged sorrow, depression, and maybe feelings of guilt and hopelessness. And for you, my friend, you bleed inside, too. Outside of that, I’ve never seen you happier, and I’ve never seen you more worried.”
I watched Wynona in the cockpit and looked back at Dave. “Often, I’ve found that you can’t have one without the other. It’s a two-sided coin. With the flip of a coin, I just want to believe that it lands on the smiling side the most.”
“Nick and I both hope that Wynona will heal completely … physically and emotionally. Perhaps you both will be blessed with another pregnancy down the road.”
Wynona walked back into the salon. She looked at me. “What day and time will Dragonfly get hauled out?”
“The marina will lift her out Tuesday at nine a.m. A few days later and all tweaked, Dragonfly will be back in the water, and we can start loading her with provisions. Nick tells me we should have smooth sailing.”
Nick grinned. “You got it. As long as you stick to the Caribbean and not the world. My thirty-day weather forecast is only good for the islands.”
Wynona smiled. “That’s more than good enough for me.”
Dave crossed his legs, adjusting the sandal on his right foot. “After you guys are down there a few months, maybe Nick and I will catch a seaplane and make a landing near Dragonfly in whatever island cove you’ve found.”
“You’d better,” Wynona said. “I’m not sure I can last a few months without some of Nick’s special seafood dishes.”
Nick set his beer bottle on a coaster. “Down there, in a cove, I’ll go spear fishin’ and come up with some fat yellowtail. We’ll grill ‘em on Dragonfly.”
Dave said, “Let’s hope by the time you two return to Ponce Marina, the perp in the case of the mermaid tails is caught, tried, and doing two life sentences in the state penitentiary.”
He looked at Wynona. “Before you two untie the lines and set sail, using your background with the FBI, any parting thoughts on the person who likes to stalk young woman and leave them dead on the beach, dressed as mermaids?”
Wynona set Max down and shook her head. “I’d like to see what cards detectives in Miami and Volusia County are putting on the table and sharing with each other. The obvious place to start is with the most apparent suspect … Michelle Martin’s former boyfriend, Craig Blake. In my experience investigating homicides, more than ninety percent are connected to someone in the victim’s immediate circle of family and friends. That’s where the motivation begins, and it often has something to do with money—usually greed or jealously. Not unlike the reasons Plato said had caused Atlantis to sink to the bottom of the sea. My spidey sense on this one is that it’s probably the same perp.”
Dave nodded. “Sean, what do you think?”
“I don’t have a spidey sense. But, what I do have is the feeling I sometimes got when doing ground searches, looking for the enemy in Afghanistan, or as a detecti
ve—hunting for murder suspects in abandoned buildings, homes … the woods. It’s a heightened sense of awareness. I know it’s not the same, watching two murder investigations unfold on television news. But there’s something about these killings that hits close to home.”
Wynona nodded. “Do you think it’s because you know Detective Grant? Or at least you’ve met him through your work on a few cases, and you certainly know Detective Ron Hamilton. Maybe, in a vicarious way, do you feel what you think they’re feeling?”
“Maybe. Both are trying hard to right wrongs and catch criminals. In the Middle East, I saw horrors that went way beyond the boundaries of war. It was even greater than genocide, if you can imagine. Burning people to death. A dozen men urinating on charred corpses. Isis teaching boys how to mock a prisoner before shooting him in the head. Beheadings were like a party for these people.”
“That’s not warfare,” Nick said. “It’s some kind of crazy vengeance.”
“In Afghanistan, before I managed to escape the mud hut where I was being held for execution, one of the reasons I escaped was because of what I saw, smelled, and heard. It was a strength—a determination I somehow got from the anger that rose out of my pores when one of the Taliban warlords placed a wicker basket in front of me. It was where I was kneeling in the dirt because they had me chained to an oxen yoke.”
Wynona’s voice was just above a whisper, “Sean … I didn’t know. You never talked about …” Her voice trailed off.
Nick cleared his throat. “Oh shit … what was in that basket?”
“The severed head of one of my men. Kevin had a wife and two little girls back in Waco, Texas. The Afghan leader looked me in the eye, smiled, and said, they’d been using the head as a soccer ball until it fell apart. The rest of my men, six more … their severed heads were put on stakes and displayed at the entrance to the encampment.”
Nick made the sign of the cross, his face twisted. He stood and went behind the bar to get a beer.
Wynona took a deep breath, picking Max up and caressing her. Dave looked out the port-side window at a 45-foot Hatteras entering the marina from the Halifax River. Nick popped the cap off a bottle of Heineken and took a pull. He used the back of his hand to wipe the beer foam from his mustache. “Sean, you never told me about that stuff.”
“I don’t talk about it. The only reason that I’m mentioning it now is because of the morbid display of the girl’s bodies. It takes a deeply deviant criminal mind to do that. Someone who is acting out a couple of things … a vengeance of some sort against women and a sexual fantasy that is up there with necrophilia, maybe worse.”
“How do you mean?” Wynona asked.
“Psychopaths, like Ted Bundy, fit the profile … a sicko who has sex with a dead body. But the criminal mind orchestrating the deaths of the young women in mermaid costumes is creating a hybrid woman … half human and half fish. Since mermaids don’t exist, except somewhere in the dark fantasies of his vile brain, this Dr. Frankenstein—the real monster that he is … he’s making his own sinister creation.”
Dave said, “So detectives are looking for someone with a vendetta and a fantasy rolled into one. Maybe a contemporary Jack the Ripper.”
Wynona said, “But Jack the Ripper was never caught. However, that’s where forensic profiling got its baby steps, way before the FBI put together its Behavioral Science Unit during the late seventies. In the case of the Ripper, he had sex with his five victims. Police thought he was a surgeon because of the way he cut into the bodies. I remember reading about an early pathologist … a Dr. Thomas Bond who disagreed with Scotland Yard detectives. He said all five victims did die by the hands of the same man, but the cuttings on the bodies were far too rudimentary to have been that of a surgeon.”
Dave nodded. “But, because they didn’t catch Jack the Ripper, we’ll never know if the good doctor was right or wrong.”
I said, “Jack the Ripper was a serial killer, usually the hardest to catch because they often kill at random and with no real connection to the victims.” I glanced at Wynona. “Although there have been two girls in mermaid costumes killed, the FBI won’t classify those as serial killings until there’s a third body.”
Wynona nodded. “And you think there will be a third, right?”
“If he’s not caught, yes. In thinking through what we know about the two murders, I don’t think it’s the first girl’s boyfriend. It’s most unlikely he’d have reason to kill a second girl at random after killing his girlfriend—someone who was in his close inner circle.” I watched a 40-foot Sea Ray enter the marina.
Dave used a cocktail napkin, damp from condensation, to clean his bifocals. “Sean, do you still believe that these two murders are linked to the movie, Atlantis?”
“Yes. It may not be directly attached to anyone on the movie set, but it’s certainly related to part of the theme … mermaids. It might not be associated with the narrative in the screenplay but, in one way or the other, I believe there’s a hidden connection in the script’s storyline. If I were a detective working the case, I’d read closely between the lines to find the elusive and obscure link.”
FORTY-FIVE
Hollywood studios are some of the best in the world when it comes to garnering publicity for their movies and television shows. From multi-city press junkets to sending A-list actors and directors out to meet the entertainment news media and appear on TV talk shows, the studios work the system because they know how the system works.
Bad publicity is a different animal.
Negative publicity can cause a major movie to be dead on arrival at the box office.
Director Miles Venuti thought about that as he paced inside his production trailer, a marked-up draft of a screenplay in one hand, a phone in the other. He was on hold, waiting for the Pisces Productions CEO, Saul Steinberg, to pick up the line after his executive assistant had placed the call. Venuti stopped and looked out one of the windows, members of the film crew moving like an army with expensive cameras and equipment. “I don’t have time for this shit,” he mumbled.
“Miles, we have to talk” said Steinberg in a rapid-fire voice. “Where are you now?”
“In one of the trailers. I’m about to go out to start rehearsals.”
Saul Steinberg, late sixties, a thick silver mane of hair, sat in his lavish studio office behind his large teakwood desk. On one the walls were framed pictures of celebrity actors, and on an adjacent shelf were two Oscars and three Golden Globe statues. “We sent our lead corporate attorney, Ben Allen, and our vice president of PR, Ann Davenport, on the company jet. They’ll be on set for a while. I want you to give them office space and your full cooperation. We need to nip this thing in the bud before it blows out of control, and we lose a hundred-million dollars.”
“I understand. I’ll work with the lawyer and PR people. But you have to remember, I’m here with almost two-hundred other members of the crew, actors, and hundreds of extras. We have a movie to shoot. I don’t need this fucking problem—either.”
“Listen to me! I understand and appreciate your concerns. I know we’ve hired additional security, and that your team continues with the internal investigations. But, the fact is, two of your female extras were found dead and dressed in costumes that came from our wardrobe department. It doesn’t mean anyone on staff, or our freelancers, had a damn thing to do with this. The props, mermaid tails, could easily have been stolen. The important thing right now is public perception for Atlantis. This movie took eight years to finally green light. The public must see us—the studio and the production teams, as bending over backwards to cooperate with police. The cable news and talk shows are eating this thing up. Social media has gone ballistic with rumors and speculation. Our LA and New York offices are inundated with news media phone calls. I want to spin the negative publicity into positive, and I want that to transfer it into ticket sales when we release Atlantis. Understood?”
“Of course, it’s understood, just as long as you and the board
understand that this impacts our production schedule and will create delays, cause us to run behind schedule, and affect the bottom line.”
“Remember this … we originally wanted the film shot on soundstages. It gives us more control—better security than when shooting in a dozen locations. You fought hard to shoot it in Florida, Greece, and off the coast of Africa. So, right now, we have no choice. It’s the unfortunate cost of doing business when shit hits the fan.”
Venuti said nothing for a few seconds. He looked out the window, one of his assistants walking quickly toward the trailer. Behind her, standing next to some of the portable outdoor dining tables, were two men dressed in dark sports coats, white shirts, and ties. They were speaking with a middle-aged woman. Venuti knew the men were not actors or plainclothes security. They had the central casting look of police detectives, right down to the way their coats hung over the pistols strapped to their belts. One of them he recognized. “Saul, where is the lawyer and the PR person now?”
“I’m told their jet touched down a little while ago. They could be on the set soon. Why?”
“Because I’m watching two men who appear to be police detectives. They’re talking with the head of our wardrobe department. And I have no idea what she’s telling them.”
“You need to get out of the damn trailer and intercept. Politely, tell them that we’ll be happy to answer any and all of their questions, but we have to do it in the presence of our legal counsel.” Steinberg slammed down his phone. He looked across his office at a movie poster for Atlantis depicting the silhouette of a large, mountainous island in the ocean, the dark water deep red from a sunset. The poster included the images of a muscular Greek god—Zeus, two younger men—his sons, and a beautiful woman, her mermaid’s tail just visible above the surface of the blood red sea.
FORTY-SIX
“Detectives, we’re operating a closed set as we shoot Atlantis; however, we’ll make cast and crew available anytime you may want to speak with them,” said Ben Allen, a balding man in a dark gray suit. His vivid green eyes had an embracing light to them, making people feel that everything they said was of value to him. Allen was the senior corporate attorney for Pisces Productions. He sat at a conference table directly across from detectives Ron Hamilton and Dan Grant. To his right was the VP of public relations, Ann Davenport. Late-forties, engaging smile, dark hair worn up.