Dead Wake (The Forgotten Coast Florida #5)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Just for that, you can go clean up the ninety-seven splats Stoopid left for you in front of the door,” Maggie told her.

  Sky rolled her eyes, but walked into the kitchen to grab some paper towels. Maggie headed down the hall and walked through Kyle’s open bedroom door.

  While Sky was nearly Maggie’s doppelganger, Kyle was the image of his father. His hair was the same silky black. His big green eyes were almond-shaped like his dad’s, and covered with the same ridiculously thick lashes. Three months after her ex-husband’s death, the sight of her son could still take the breath from her.

  Kyle was propped up on his pillows, watching something on his tablet. He looked up as Maggie walked in.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey, buddy.” Maggie sat on the side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “Kinda crappy,” he answered. “Sorry about your dinner with Wyatt.”

  “No big deal. I ended up having to work anyway.” Maggie leaned over and placed a hand on Kyle’s cheek. He didn’t feel warm. “What are you watching?”

  “Just some Minecraft mod videos.”

  “Do you want something to drink?”

  “Nah, I’m okay.” He looked up at her. “It was probably just Sky’s Mexican ramen noodles.”

  “That sounds like a good bet,” Maggie said.

  After taking a hot shower and throwing on some yoga pants and an old Boss Oyster tee shirt, Maggie poured a glass of Muscadine wine and let Coco outside for a bedtime pee. She leaned against the rail and waited as Coco diligently divided her urine between seventeen different key locations.

  Boudreaux. Maggie would appreciate it if he turned out to be uninvolved in this case. Until this past summer, Maggie had barely known Bennett Boudreaux. Then she’d been called to the scene when Boudreaux’s nephew Gregory had shot himself on the beach on St. George Island. Unwilling to share the secret that Gregory had raped her when she was just fifteen, Maggie had worked the case, and gotten to know and reluctantly like Boudreaux.

  She’d suspected Boudreaux knew about her connection to Gregory, and her suspicion was confirmed when the leg of Gregory’s best friend Sport Wilmette had turned up in a shrimp net a few weeks later. Boudreaux had, in his oblique way, let Maggie know that he’d killed Sport because Sport had stood by and watched Gregory rape her and dishonor the Boudreaux family.

  At that point, Maggie had had to confess to Wyatt her connection to both Gregory and Sport. For a time, it had seemed like her silence, and her working of both cases, would finish her budding romance with Wyatt before it had really gotten started. Wyatt had taken over the case, but been at a disadvantage, unable to investigate effectively while keeping Maggie’s secret. The fact that he had chosen to keep it spoke volumes

  The situation was further confused, for both Maggie and Wyatt, when Boudreaux had saved her life, and probably the lives of her kids, when he’d shown up during the hurricane to find a man in the process of choking Maggie to death. Boudreaux had cut the man’s throat, an act that no one in local law enforcement considered worth prosecuting.

  Maggie took a long swallow of her wine and listened to the wind moving through the live oaks and pines on her property. There was just a hint of brine in the air from the creek on one side of her house and the river half a mile behind it. She closed her eyes, breathed it in deeply, and willed it to clear her head.

  It was extremely unlikely, and would be painfully ironic, if Boudreaux turned out to be involved in this particular case. Maggie didn’t remember when Boudreaux had moved from Louisiana to Apalachicola to take over his father’s oyster business, but she knew it had been in the eighties.

  She hadn’t seen much of Boudreaux since the hurricane. Their shared experience during the storm had solidified something that had been building between them; some kind of mutual liking and respect, despite their conflicting positions. However, Maggie had seen very little of him since then, and had begun to think perhaps their friendship had been a temporary thing, brought on by their mutual connection to Gregory Boudreaux, and washed back out to the bay with the floodwaters from the storm.

  As Coco ran up the deck stairs, accompanied by the percussion of collar, tags, and toenails, Maggie swallowed the last of her nightly wine and turned to go back inside. Regardless of whether or not Boudreaux was involved, there was nothing she could do about it tonight, except squelch the urge to call him up and ask him.

  Five minutes after she’d hit the snooze button, Maggie was jarred within an inch of her life by Stoopid, who stood on the sill outside her bedroom window, screaming through the screen. She considered grabbing her Glock from the nightstand and shooting him, but the window screen was new.

  Instead, she rolled over and pulled her grandmother’s quilt over her head. This wouldn’t have helped much anyway, but her cell phone went off a few seconds later. She groaned as she picked it up and looked at it. It was Wyatt.

  “What,” she said, by way of answering.

  “Aren’t you up yet?”

  “I’m awake, but not up.”

  “Well, you should hurry up and come in,” he said. “It was my turn to pick up the café con leche, and I’m tempted to drink yours.”

  “Don’t. And what are you doing there so early?”

  “Reading the Crawford file.”

  “Without me?” she asked.

  “Yes, I was taught to read at an early age—”

  “Please shut up.”

  “In any event—”

  Just then, Stoopid let loose with another of his alerts that the day had permission to begin.

  “Is there an elderly man throwing up in your bedroom?” Wyatt asked after a moment.

  “Stoopid is crowing.”

  “No, he actually isn’t,” Wyatt said. “In any event, you need to come on in and see what we have here.”

  Maggie swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. “Judging by your forced cheerfulness, I’m guessing that I won’t like it.”

  “I’m guessing you won’t, either.”

  “Great.” Maggie tossed a slipper at the window screen and Stoopid shut up mid-vomit. “Give me thirty minutes.”

  “Bring more coffee,” Wyatt said before she hung up.

  He wasn’t at his desk when Maggie passed his office door. This turned out to be because he was at hers. She put the tray of coffees down on the desk, dropped her purse in a drawer, and sat down in the metal chair she used for company. Wyatt took off his reading glasses and set them atop a thick open file folder.

  “So Holden Crawford went missing on August 14th, 1977,” he said, reaching for his coffee.

  Well, that explained why she’d never heard of the man; she hadn’t even been born until the following year. Even in a town like Apalachicola, news went cold faster than that.

  “Subsequently, some guy named Roland Fitch reported that he’d seen a man he thought was Crawford that night, in front of his oyster processing business.”

  “This is in front of what is now the flower shop?”

  “No, but that’s an interesting thing that we’ll come back to,” Wyatt answered. “Crawford’s place was in that empty building just before you get to Boss Oyster.”

  Maggie took a sip of her café con leche. “Next door to Boudreaux’s business?”

  Wyatt gave her a halfhearted grin. “As it happens.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so this guy Fitch lived across the street and down the block a little ways, and he said it was dark, but that he was pretty sure it was Crawford, and he was talking to another man, a man he described as short and slightly built.”

  “That fits Boudreaux, but it fits a lot of guys.”

  “It does,” Wyatt said with a nod. “However, the reason Boudreaux, and it was your Boudreaux—”

  “I don’t have my own personal Boudreaux.”

  “Oh, but you do. Anyway, the reason Boudreaux was a suspect is that he got into a pretty public altercation with Crawford earlier that evening over at Papa
Joe’s.”

  “Wait,” she said. “What was he doing here in Apalach?”

  “Visiting his father, Alban.”

  Maggie looked up at the ceiling for a moment, thinking.

  “Stop trying to do math in your head,” Wyatt said. “He was twenty-two.”

  “Somehow, I can’t imagine him being that young.”

  “You don’t have to,” Wyatt answered, rifling through the papers in front of him. “The sheriff at the time requested his record from Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. They faxed this over.”

  He handed a piece of paper across the desk and Maggie took it. She’d always thought Boudreaux a handsome man, but the young man staring up at her looked like a darker-haired James Dean.

  “What was in his record?”

  “Not much. He got into a fight at a football game when he was in high school, broke some rich kid’s nose.”

  “Huh.” Maggie couldn’t help staring at the picture. Even though it was a mug shot, and the murky, black-and-white fax did nothing to enhance it, Boudreaux was extremely magnetic.

  “Can we get off of Boudreaux for a minute?” Wyatt asked. “Because I’m trying to tell you what Fitch said he saw.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, he said Crawford, or at least he was pretty sure it was Crawford, was outside his place talking to this shorter guy. He said Crawford’s voice was raised, like they were arguing, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then this smaller guy punches him—”

  “Crawford.”

  “—punches Crawford in the stomach.” Wyatt continued. “Fitch briefly considered running down there to help him out, but then this other guy comes out Crawford’s front door and rushes over to them, yelling. So Fitch scurries back inside. Said it wasn’t his business, but what he meant was he didn’t want to get his ass kicked.”

  “Did he know the other man, the taller one that came out afterwards?”

  “No, too dark, too far away.” Wyatt flipped a sheet of paper over. “Anyway, a couple of minutes later, Fitch heard a car and looked out his window, and Crawford’s car was headed down the street, going the other way, and the men were gone.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “Where was Crawford’s car after he went missing?”

  “Nowhere. They never found it,” Wyatt answered. “They did, however, find some blood out in front of Crawford’s place. Same blood type as Crawford’s. The days before DNA, bless our hearts.”

  “How much blood?” Maggie asked.

  “Not a lot.”

  Maggie took a drink of her coffee and stared at the edge of her desk for a moment. “So, either Crawford and these other guys took off in his car, or Crawford drove off and the other guys left on foot, or these guys took off in Crawford’s car with him in it.”

  “These are our options,” Wyatt said.

  “And this was all on August 14th, the night Crawford was last seen.” The date rang a bell with Maggie, niggled at her. She pushed the thought back for later.

  “Yeah,” Wyatt answered, then flipped a few more pages. “So, there’s plenty left here for you to go through, but let me give you some other highlights. There’s a notation on the log that the sheriff himself was scheduled to question Boudreaux, but there’s no statement in here. However, there is a note that he was questioned, and that he had an alibi for the time Fitch thinks he saw Crawford and the other guy. Only, there’s no mention of what said alibi was.”

  Maggie chewed at her lower lip. “Okay. Who was the sheriff back then?”

  “Guy named Bradford Wilson.”

  “I knew Wilson. Sort of. He was friends with my grandparents.”

  “Well, he sucked at documentation.” Wyatt flipped a few pages. “Anyway, he resigned in 1990 and was succeeded by my predecessor, Martin Vanick.”

  “He moved somewhere a long time ago, but he might be dead by now.”

  “No, but he probably wishes he was. Carol says he moved to Panama City Beach.”

  “Ew.”

  “Yeah. So, he’s old, but he’s still there. Got his number.”

  “Does our dead man have family? I don’t know any Crawfords.”

  “No kids, but he had a wife who never remarried. She’s in a nursing home over in Port St. Joe.”

  “Well, we can’t talk to her until we know for sure that our body is Crawford.” Maggie’s chin lifted just slightly. “The whole thing about Boudreaux could be irrelevant.”

  “It could, but it won’t be, because that’s the kind of luck you have.”

  Maggie opted out of a retort, took a sip of her coffee instead. “So tell me the interesting thing we’re going back to, about the flower shop,” she said after a moment.

  “Yeah, the flower shop,” Wyatt said. “Crawford owned it, but it wasn’t part of the seafood business. He owned two or three of those spaces. They’d been empty for years. He was having them remodeled so he could put a raw bar and some shops in there.”

  “They were being remodeled when he went gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh.”

  “That’s what I said.” Wyatt took a hearty swallow of his coffee. “So the building wasn’t open. It was a construction site.”

  “Why was that even in the file?”

  “When Crawford first went missing, they checked the site out to make sure he hadn’t gone over there and gotten injured. But the theory was whatever happened, happened to him that night at his oyster business.”

  “What about this altercation between Crawford and Boudreaux?”

  “In the file. Have fun.” Wyatt checked the time on his cell phone. “I have to go talk to James about some robbery over in Eastpoint last night.”

  He stood, and Maggie followed suit. As she squeezed past Wyatt to get to her desk chair, she caught a faint whiff of his cologne and just a hint of laundry detergent. He looked down at her as they passed each other, and he was so close, Maggie couldn’t help but glance through her open office door to make sure no one could see them so comfortable in each other’s space.

  Wyatt reflexively glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at Maggie as she sat down in her chair. “Paranoia. Nature’s aphrodisiac.”

  Maggie opened the file back up as Wyatt headed for the door. “You remember when I was in the hospital and you said you weren’t speaking to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I resent that you haven’t made good on that yet.”

  “You’re precious,” Wyatt said as he walked out.

  Maggie took a long swallow of her coffee and flipped the thick file to the beginning.

  Two hours, one and a half coffees, and three restroom breaks later, Maggie closed the file and leaned back in her chair, the fax image of Bennett Boudreaux in her hand. She’d referred to it several times as she’d read the contents of the case file. Boudreaux was probably the most quietly charismatic man she’d ever meant, and she thought so in a strictly platonic way, but the image of him as a man only five years older than her daughter was almost hypnotic. The fact that she couldn’t see the brilliant aquamarine of his eyes made no difference in how piercing those eyes were.

  She didn’t want Boudreaux to be involved in this case. Over the summer, she had gone from a surprising and grudging respect for the man to a genuine though reluctant liking of him. However, what they’d gone through together during Hurricane Faye had borne in her a certain sense of gratitude and responsibility. Those were bad things for a law enforcement officer to feel toward a known criminal. She knew that, and while she wasn’t helpless to change it, she was unwilling. The man had been seriously injured while saving the lives of herself and her kids.

  Maggie felt that itching at the edges of her frontal lobe again, and she sat up, leaned on her desk, and started tapping a pen on the dented metal. After a moment, it came to her, and she almost wished it hadn’t.

  August 14th. The day Bennett Boudreaux had saved her life.

  Bennett Boudreaux lived in the heart of Apalach’s historic district, a neighborhood that
surprised many visitors with its combination of cracker cottages and gingerbread Victorians, brick colonials and Greek Revivals. Apalach was a lot more northern than most tourists expected it to be, a result of the southern migration of entrepreneurs eager to succeed in the cotton trade.

  Boudreaux’s home was a white, plantation-style home with a wraparound porch, set on an unusually large corner lot. It would have commanded more than a million dollars if it was on the market, but the house was a lot like Boudreaux; modest roots dressed in understated elegance.

  Boudreaux sat at the table in the kitchen, bathed in the early morning sunlight that streamed through the original twelve-pane windows. He stirred pure cane sugar into his four-dollar per can chicory coffee, which had been served in a forty-dollar Wedgewood cup, then took his first sip of the day.

  At the cypress island in the middle of the kitchen, his cook and housekeeper, Amelia, stood over a cast iron skillet in which gently sizzled one perfectly round over-medium egg. One slice of maple bacon sat on a small plate next to the stove. Amelia was tall and large-boned, and her tea-colored Creole skin made it difficult to judge her age, though Boudreaux knew her to be sixty-three; just one year older than he was himself.

  Amelia had worked for Boudreaux for decades. Her mother, Miss Evangeline, had been his father’s housekeeper and nanny, and the only mother-figure Boudreaux had known. Boudreaux’s father had moved to Apalach in the late sixties, when Boudreaux was still an adolescent. He’d left Boudreaux with Miss Evangeline, then fired her when Boudreaux had gone off to Tulane.

  As soon as Boudreaux had started becoming successful at his own seafood business, he’d hired them both back, and when his father died in 1982, he’d taken over his father’s business and brought the two women with him. He’d suggested many times over the last few years that Amelia might want to join her mother in retiring, but Amelia had refused rather indignantly. It was unspoken, but understood, that she and her mother would always have their cottage in the back yard, but Amelia thought there should only be ‘one useless color woman to the house.’