The Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Series Boxset

by David F. Berens

  The man looked to be in his late fifties with sandy-brown thinning hair and was marathon-runner rail lean. He wore almost distastefully small blue running shorts and a faded brown Life is Good t-shirt with a picture of a jogger on the front. Chesney noted that the man’s socks were pulled up high on his calves and wondered if he was aware that style had gone out with the seventies.

  The woman appeared to be around the same age, but more appropriately dressed in a blue road-race t-shirt emblazoned with the bright orange words: Knoxville Track Club Expo. Chesney couldn’t help notice that while the man’s hair looked windblown and unkempt, as if he’d been on a long beach run, the woman’s blonde hair appeared to look the same way it might have when she first stepped out the door to go jogging. She was wringing her hands in worry and looked to be on the verge of tears.

  As he approached them, the man put out his hand and opened his mouth to speak, but the woman spoke before he could say anything.

  “You must be the officer we were told to wait for,” she said quickly, and rubbed her arms as if she were cold. “We’ve been waiting for over an hour and it’s really starting to get windy. Well, at least it feels like it’s windier than when we got here, don’t you think so, Jack?”

  “I—”

  Jack had hardly opened his mouth when she interrupted and spoke—or rather tittered—rapidly and turned to back to Chesney. “But it could just be my imagination, what with all this excitement over the… well, over the…”

  “The body, ma’am?” Chesney helped her.

  Once again Jack opened his mouth, and once again she butted in. “It really took us by surprise—” she thumbed toward Jack— “and he didn’t even see it. I’m the one who spotted it out here, which is really odd, considering I didn’t have my glasses and my eyes, ugh, they really are getting worse. I don’t know what I’ll do about it… just keep buying stronger reading glasses I suppose.”

  “I’m sure the nice officer doesn’t want to hear about your reading glasses, Dianne” Jack said with a grunt.

  “Jack and Dianne…?” Chesney pointed his pen back and forth from the man to the woman.

  “Oh yes, Jack and Dianne Smith,” the woman said, “from Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve been coming to Pawleys for over twenty years now.”

  She considered this for a moment and launched into it again. “Gosh, almost thirty years, I guess. We used to stay at the Dolphin House on the North end of the Island, but then we moved further south to a new place. It was okay, but I didn’t like the layout of that one. This year, we’re staying in a beautiful place…”

  Chesney scribbled a new note on his yellow pad as she continued to ramble on:

  7) Joggers are Jack and Dianne Smith

  It was all but inevitable that the song lyrics entered his mind… somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ bout Jack and Diane, somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ doin’ best they can.

  When Chesney looked up, he realized she was still talking about their various rental homes on Pawleys Island. Jack rolled his eyes and put his hand on her arm.

  “I don’t think this is what the officer wants to know.”

  “Well, of course it isn’t, but I was just being polite.”

  “It’s okay, really,” Chesney said and looked around them. “I’d actually like to have you show me the body.”

  Jack opened his mouth again, and of course she started speaking before he could get a word out.

  “Oh yes, oh yes,” she said excitedly, as if about a new baby in the family or an exciting new restaurant she’d discovered, and laughed uncomfortably. “It’s really incredible to find such a thing. I mean, we are medical professionals, well, he’s in the NICU and I’m… well, we have seen bodies, but… it’s not a normal thing for us to… And naturally, that’s why you drove all the way out here.”

  “Yes ma’am, it is.” Chesney snuck a glance at Dianne’s husband who said nothing but rolled his eyes yet again. He had the feeling that he’d have to wade through the woman’s never-ending details for at least an hour, when he might’ve gotten the same information (sans asides) from the man in two or three minutes.

  She pointed to the other side of the road and walked toward the cruiser. As she passed by, she noticed the scrap of metal hanging beneath the front bumper and raised her eyebrows.

  “Did you have an accident on the way?”

  “Something like that, ma’am.” Chesney tried to brush off the story casually. “A bit of a tangle with an ice cream truck.”

  As soon as he’d said the words, he wished he could take them back.

  “Oh gosh, that reminds me of the ice cream truck we used to have in Louisville when I was a little girl,” she said, off again. “It was round and had a tent on top and the man would stand in the middle. I used to sit out by the end of the driveway with a nickel… can you believe it was only a nickel back then?… and wait on the ice cream man for hours!”

  She laughed and kept telling her story, but Chesney’s attention had shifted to the two bare feet sticking out of the scruffy brush.

  He couldn’t help hearing more lyrics in his head:

  Somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ life goes on,

  long after the somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ of living is gone.

  4

  Another Hat Trick

  Karah Campobello, whose mother couldn’t decide between the names Kelly and Sarah for her firstborn daughter and simply combined the two, had just finished reading page one of her new beach novel—Ocean Blue Murder by Carrie R. Hughes—when she heard the commotion a few docks north of her. Her head was a little fuzzy from a Drunken Jack’s hangover, but she was suddenly alert with the prospect of something exciting happening today.

  She was alone in a hammock and guessed the man she spotted hadn’t noticed her lying there. It was something she was used to—not being noticed—but her sophomore year of college was going to change all of that, she was sure of it.

  Her dad had just bought her a glittering silver Land Rover that perfectly matched her Ray Ban Wayfarers. Surely the guys at Auburn would notice her cruising the campus in her sexy new ride… if she went back.

  She had come to Pawleys claiming to be in for the week on Spring Break visiting her cousin, Laura-Kate. But back in Auburn, her grades had been slipping and her performance on the volleyball team had been less than stellar. The partying life of a sorority debutante was taking its toll on her and as a result, both her academic and athletic scholarships were in danger of slipping away.

  With school having been paid for (or so he thought), her dad had taken the money out of her college fund and bought the new Land Rover; a wonderful and terrible surprise. Karah was now in what she’d call a pickle! Without that money, her dad wouldn’t be able to send her back… but God that Land Rover was a nice ride. Oh, well, I’ll figure that out before next semester, she thought.

  She laid the open paperback book on her stomach and watched the man a few docks away.

  He was a good-looking guy, maybe forty, a little lanky but in decent shape. His ruddy tan was the kind she’d seen on fisherman and construction workers. Jet-black almost shoulder length hair crept out from underneath what looked like an LSU baseball cap. His hair matched his jet-black, exquisitely manicured beard. He had sunglasses on, but she thought he must surely have blue eyes… piercing, navy blue eyes, like the last scream of the ocean before a storm, as her beach novel might call them. She grabbed her phone to snap a pic for Instagram: #springbreak #vaca #bestever.

  Karah watched intently as the scene with the boat played out. Man picks up cowboy hat out of boat, exchanges it for his own cap. Eww, bugs, she thinks but continues to watch. Man pushes boat away from dock, but then leaps into water for no apparent reason (she hadn’t seen his rod and reel fall in) and proceeds to splash and gargle his way downstream doing… a butterfly stroke? The noise—and the man—continued to move closer, splashing crazily down the creek.

  Goosebumps formed on her sun-warmed skin as she watched. Thi
s was way more exhilarating than her novel. She bit her lip as the man finally stopped swimming and stood up. He rubbed his knee and peered down into the water… looking for something, she guessed. His gaze was disappointed and never moved in her direction, though now they were only ten or fifteen feet apart from each other.

  He eased back down in the water and she straightened to snap a photo with her phone. At exactly that moment a streak of silver flew toward him from behind.

  She gasped, but soon realized the boat had caught up with him. Thankfully, it hadn’t appeared to hit him hard enough to do much real damage. Even sprawled out in the creek she could see he was more handsome at this distance than she’d realized. This vaca is going to be amazing, she thought. She added the #hottie #headboat and #ouch hashtags to her Instagram photo.

  She almost giggled out loud when he sent the loose boat downstream, waving it off like a… well, kinda like a stray dog. He was muttering to himself as he limped out of the water and hiked back toward his own dock. The cowboy hat did suit him much better, she thought.

  Sitting up she watched as the boat he’d been wrestling with drifted past. She considered swimming out after it and hauling it back up to the man. I found your boat, she would say while batting her eyelashes furiously. But no, she had just washed her hair and didn’t want to get it wet. Besides, he hadn’t seemed too concerned about the drifting boat anyway.

  Putting her book aside, the first page now splotched and smeared with the sweat and suntan oil from her stomach, she rose from the hammock and stretched. She thought about pulling on her gorgeous new Trina Turk cover-up pants over her bikini; it was early yet, but the summer heat was starting to creep up in the rusty, red Coca-Cola thermometer hanging on one of the gazebo posts nearby, so she left the pants folded on the hammock.

  She looked back upstream and watched as the mysterious—and crazy hot—stranger limped into a beach house a few homes up from her rental. She sat down on the edge of her dock and dipped her feet into the cool water. She pulled her hair out of its ponytail and ran her fingers through it.

  She would eventually have to knock on his door, of course, but she needed some excuse, a ruse to explain why she’d come calling.

  “Come on, Karah,” she said, and kicked her legs slowly in the water and spoke to her reflection. “What’s it gonna be?” Can I borrow a cup of sugar? No… that was too obvious. She needed a hook, something he’d remember. So, I see you’re a fisherman. Can you teach me to fish? Ugh, that was awful.

  As she pondered this something brushed against her leg. She jerked her feet out of the water, expecting to see a fish or a snake… maybe even a jellyfish. But no, it was a small lump-shaped thing, dark and purple in color. She leaned over to study it and when she was sure it wasn’t alive, she reached down and picked it out of the water with two fingers.

  The object quickly shed the water and she flipped it over. A smile crept onto her face.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she said recognizing the LSU logo,” but I found your hat.”

  She grabbed her book and her pants and rushed inside grinning with excitement. She felt like she was in a beach novel!

  Shower… gonna need a shower.

  5

  Hairre Today, Gone Tomorrow

  Deputy Chesney Biggins recognized the bloated face of Rick Hairre immediately. The vice-chairman—ex-vice-chairman, to be exact—was puffed up and slightly blue. His hairpiece was missing, but that wasn’t a surprise. Everyone that had known Rick when he was younger knew he’d been wearing a hideous chocolate brown toupee for the last fifteen years or so.

  What did take Chesney a few minutes to deal with was the fact that the man’s eyelids and lips were half gone, eaten by various marine creatures. It gave him an odd look of surprise.

  “Hey Sarah, I’m gonna need a wagon out here,” he said into his walkie-talkie. “We’re gonna need to call Winchester in on this one too.”

  “Winchester?” came the crackled reply at the other end. “What’s up?”

  Winchester Boonesborough was the local District Attorney and would surely want to be in on this… since Rick was an elected official, however trivial his office might be.

  “It’s Rick Hairre,” Chesney said.

  “Oh.” Sarah seemed at a loss for words. “I’ll make the call.”

  “Thanks.”

  Rick was wearing a light blue seersucker suit that made him look like Mayor Larry Vaughn from the movie Jaws.

  Very Martha’s Vineyard, Chesney thought.

  Around the collar of the suit were black-maroon stains that were probably blood. Even in his bloated, chewed-up state, he had the marks from what looked like a severe beating on his head, face and neck. Chesney was no crime scene tech, but he knew Rick had been tortured, and torture requires motivation… usually motivation to get information.

  “Oh my God!” came a shocked voice from behind him. “That poor, poor man!”

  Chesney jumped and suddenly felt like a twitchy audience member who had screamed in a horror movie when a black cat jumped onto the screen. He had visions of a Zombiefied Rick Hairre sitting up and strangling him.

  The sudden outburst had come from Dianne Smith, the woman who’d discovered Rick’s body with her husband. Chesney stood and quickly regained his composure.

  “Ma’am, sir, I have everything I need from both of you.” He ushered them away from the body. “If you will, I’m gonna need you to go down to the station and fill out a statement. Just a formality, of course.”

  He handed a business card to Jack Smith and watched as the couple walked back to the beach. Within a few minutes the ambulance pulled up. By then, Chesney had done a full circuit around the body, careful to give it a wide berth but looking for anything unusual that might give him some clue as to the nature of the councilman’s demise. So far, he’d found nothing.

  Paul D’Antaglia, the township’s paramedic and who who also served as the Medical Examiner, nodded as he stepped out of the ambulance. “Yo, Chesney. Got somethin’ big, eh?”

  Chesney pointed toward Rick’s prone figure. Paul snapped on his gloves and carefully knelt beside the body as his assistant (and wife) Carol stepped out of the ambulance carrying a medical kit. Paul was a native of Maine who’d married Bostonian Carol during med school, and after successful careers up north they’d semi-retired to Pawleys Island. Both were in their late fifties and had seen hundreds of crime scenes. Chesney had worked with Paul on several cases and thought the man made a great investigator. Not only was he obviously more medically savvy than a cop, but also more legally savvy than most paramedics, and more street-savvy than the actual Coroner. His insight was invaluable.

  “Alas, poor Rick. Guess we can forgo checking for a pulse,” Paul said to Carol. “Thermometer.”

  She handed him what Chesney thought looked like a meat thermometer with a dial on the top and a long skewer on the end. Without much ceremony, Paul plunged it into Rick’s side. After a minute or so, he looked up at Chesney. “Given his state of rigor and liver temp, I’d say we’re looking at forty-eight hours.”

  Chesney scribbled a few notes on his yellow pad. “Ideas on cause of death?”

  “Well, he’s got some obvious signs of animal gnawing, but I don’t see any tracks to or from his body. With the bloating, I’m inclined to think he was nibbled on in the water.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be able to see more when he’s on the table, but it’s obvious he was beat up pretty badly.” Paul pointed toward Rick’s head. “This one here looks like it could be our culprit.”

  At the top of the man’s wispy-haired head was a deep gash. The wound was semi-circular and looked to be severe enough to crush the skull, though there was no blood. Probably washed off in the water, Chesney thought.

  “Looks like a pistol-whip,” Chesney mumbled. “Somebody beat the crap out of him, maybe beat him to death.”

  “Oh Jeezus, Ches. Who the hell would treat old Ricky like that?” Carol asked in a Kennedy-esque Bostonian twang.r />
  “I have no idea.” Chesney paused upon seeing a van of crime scene techs pull up and start unloading cameras and number cards and q-tips. “Hey, make sure they get everything, clothes, shoes, pocket contents, all that… might be something there to help us find out who did this.”

  “We’ll get you everything you need to get this bastard,” Paul said and slapped Chesney on the shoulder.

  For the next hour, more than two hundred HD photographs were taken of Rick’s body and the surrounding area.

  As the techs were snapping their last photos and cleaning up their number cards, Winchester Boonesborough pulled up in his black ‘89 Lincoln Towncar. He didn’t get out of his vehicle, but waved Chesney over impatiently. Oh, shit, he thought, not now.

  “Deputy Biggins, what have we got here?” Winchester demanded from his partially rolled down window. “Have you got this thing under control?”

  He sighed heavily. He knew the D.A. wouldn’t get out of the car, effectively staying as far away from the scene as he could and still be at the scene.

  Winchester Boonesborough, the son of a billionaire lawyer from Dallas, Texas, had a reputation for taking all the credit for successful cases and denying responsibility for unsuccessful ones He was well known for pointing fingers at the shoddy work of those at the crime scene for failures. In short, nobody liked him.

  Chesney started toward the Towncar and opened his mouth, but was interrupted before he could speak.

  “Hey, Ches,” Paul called, saving him from a run-in with the D.A., “I found something you might want to see.”

  Chesney held up a finger indicating wait just a second to Winchester and headed back to where Paul and Carol were finally loading Rick’s body for delivery to the coroner.

  Paul reached into the ambulance and held up two Ziploc evidence bags.

  “When we picked him up, we found his wallet beneath him. Contents seem intact but spilling out a bit… and this thing.” He held up a bag with what appeared to be a small black USB drive.