Matanzas Bay

by Parker Francis

  Patience had never been my strong suit. I kept telling myself a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt and I should sit tight. Acting rashly could have deadly consequences. Let the police handle it. Good advice, but someone else might be in danger if I did nothing.

  I flipped open my phone and tapped in Erin Marrano’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times.

  “Come on. You have to be home on this gawd-awful night,” I muttered to myself. After the fourth ring, I heard the hand-set fumbled as though she may have dropped it. I waited for Erin to say ‘hello’ and apologize for dropping the phone, but instead heard a muffled scream before the line abruptly went dead.

  In my mind, I pictured Erin Marrano, her scorching blue eyes now cauterized with fear. I closed the phone and dropped it on the seat between my legs so I could grab it quickly if Marrano called. I cranked up the Toyota and turned off onto King by the statue of Ponce de Leon. There I joined a procession of cars crawling along Avenida Menendez.

  I cursed the traffic and winced as a flash of lightning illuminated the Bayfront, swabbing a pair of sailboats anchored near the bridge with a ghostly light. When I saw a slight break in the traffic, I took a chance and swerved around two cars in front of me. Ignoring the angry gestures and honking horns, I fishtailed onto Myrtle Street and then Magnolia.

  The street was dark and overhead the huge oak branches seemed to flail out at each other forming a shadowy and forbidding canopy. Closing on her house, I spotted a dirty brown pick-up truck backed into Erin Marrano’s driveway, driver’s door open, lights on. Fifty feet up the street, my headlights swept across Lem Tallabois’ car parked beneath the drooping branches of a weeping willow. Dark splotches stippled the windshield making it difficult to see into the front seat, but I saw the outline of a man and wondered why Laurance’s security chief was parked in front of Erin Marrano’s house.

  Two people moved briskly from the house to the truck. I was still half a block away, but recognized one of the figures as Erin. The other person had his back to me as he dragged her toward the pick-up and pushed her into the front seat. I didn’t get a good look at his face, but there was no doubt it was Jarrod Watts—Erin’s twin brother.

  Erin kicked him and scrambled partly out of the vehicle. Screeching to a stop directly behind the truck, I saw Watts punch Erin in the face. She staggered and he pushed her back inside the pick-up and slammed the door. He ran around to the driver’s side just as I jumped out to intercept him.

  “Watts,” I yelled, grabbing at him with my right hand. My fingers grazed his rock-hard shoulder searching for something to hold onto. Leaning into the truck, already off balance, I didn’t expect his next move. Instead of pushing me away, Watts grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward as he accelerated. I lost my balance, slipping on the wet driveway and bouncing off the side of the truck.

  Watts twisted the steering wheel to the right onto Erin’s front lawn. The truck’s rear wheels swerved toward my head. I rolled away and jumped to my feet watching the pick-up lurch crazily across Erin’s front yard, tires carving twin furrows in the St. Augustine grass as he bounced over the curb and onto the street, barely missing Tallabois’ Buick.

  He turned toward me briefly as he roared away, and in the glare of my headlights I saw the finely chiseled features of Jarrod Watts smiling at me.

  FORTY-ONE

  The tires on Watt’s truck spun and squealed as he drove south on Magnolia toward the Myrtle Street intersection. I raced to my car and followed the glow of the retreating taillights. The truck’s brake lights flickered momentarily at the stop sign before fishtailing around the corner onto San Marco.

  A near-by street lamp cast a yellowish pallor over the scene, and as I passed the Buick on my left, I confirmed that Tallabois was inside the vehicle. I also recognized the spatter across his windshield as blood. The dirty red specks matched the thin trickle flowing from the neat hole in his forehead.

  It was too late to help Tallabois but not Erin. Turning the corner, I spotted the pick-up truck on San Marco. Together, we headed east over the Bridge of Lions and onto Anastasia Boulevard where the traffic thinned considerably.

  Watts increased his speed and I accelerated to keep him in sight. He cranked a hard left at State Road 312 where the road squeezed from four lanes to two. We swept through St. Augustine Beach past restaurants, motels, banks and condominiums.

  Surprised I hadn’t heard from Buck Marrano yet, I reached for my cell phone in the pocket between the seats where I normally kept it. When I couldn’t find it, I scraped my hand across the passenger seat, keeping one eye on the road. Then I remembered dropping it between my legs after I called Erin’s house. I boosted my butt off the seat, and felt beneath me. Nothing but damp fabric. My eyes raked the floor before I figured it out. When I jumped out of the car to stop Watts, I must have dropped the phone, and now it was lying in a puddle in the street.

  Shit! I’d lose Watts if I stopped to make a phone call, so I kept his taillights in sight, wondering where the hell he was headed. Minutes later he made another turn to the left, passed the Oasis Restaurant and entered a stretch with gated residential communities on both sides. A1A widened to four lanes again. The speed limit increased to forty-five, and Watts bumped it up to seventy.

  Like a somber gray curtain, the rain sucked up the headlights of the other vehicles until they broke through in garish splashes of orange and gold. I concentrated on the road and mentally kicked myself for not suspecting Watts earlier. There were clues, but I’d been so focused on the St. Johns Group’s development that I hadn’t connected the dots.

  The lights on my internal pinball game didn’t begin flashing until Jack Fuller told me about Sternwald’s adoption scam. It struck me Sternwald may have used Christopher Henderson as bait. Of course, the infant’s death report threw me off track, but now I knew it was only another of Sternwald’s lies.

  There were other clues, including the cold blue eyes Watts’ and Erin shared. And when I saw him this afternoon he said something that slipped by me at first. He said he wished he hadn’t been away visiting his cousin in Tampa when Henderson committed suicide. Later, I remembered Henderson told me Watts had gone to visit an uncle in Destin. Both of them were lies. Watts stayed in town to murder his father.

  Of course, it took Jack Fuller’s digging to put it all together for me. Keeping one eye on the pick-up’s tail lights, I recalled how Fuller, through his research and questioning, had reconstructed the sad and sordid story of Christopher Henderson’s young life.

  ***

  According to Fuller, Christopher Henderson had been one of the babies used in the lawyer’s cruel shell game. After baby Christopher became sick with what was first diagnosed as scarlet fever, Sternwald put a note in his file along with a forged death certificate. Then he gave the toddler to his girlfriend, Anita Watts, a hooker from Delmar, Alabama.

  Fuller tracked down Anita Watts and learned of her relationship with Sternwald. He learned she had posed as the unwed mother in a few of his scams. In return, Sternwald, who probably thought Christopher was going to die, had given her the baby. The baby recovered, but Anita’s crack addiction made it impossible for her to be a proper mother. After two years, she turned herself in to social services and voluntarily gave up the boy she’d renamed Jarrod Watts.

  Watts spent his childhood bouncing from one foster home to another. The small and pale child often found himself bullied by older boys sharing crowded rooms. He learned to hide from them, but he also learned to fear the adults as much as his peers.

  At age seven he landed in the home of foster parents Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Rindale. Authorities later learned the couple had never been married, and Rindale, who had changed his name, was a convicted pedophile from Texas. For nearly two years Rindale sexually abused the boy with the icy blue eyes and angelic face.

  Despite his shame and fear, the boy eventually told a teacher, and they placed him in a state shelter. But the damage had already been done, and Christopher Henderson,
now known as Jarrod Watts, became an abuser and bully before seemingly putting his life in order.

  Along with Anita Watts, Fuller interviewed officials from the state shelter. He told me Watts graduated from high school and attended a junior college where he entered a pre-nursing program. Later he completed a physical therapy internship at a Huntsville hospital, but then dropped out of sight.

  “Funny thing, though,” Fuller told me in his telephone call. “About two years ago there was a break-in at that shelter where Watts grew up. Someone made a mess of their records.”

  “Did those records have details of his connection to Anita Watts?” I’d asked.

  “You bet. Anita told me the boy visited her around that time. She wanted to unload herself of all the guilt she felt, so she told him the whole sordid story of his birth parents and how she and Sternwald had used him.”

  “So that’s how he found out about Henderson and Sternwald?”

  “Yep, and a few months later, Mr. Sternwald turned up dead.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah, and that’s not all. This Rindale character—”

  “The pedophile?”

  “Uh-huh. He was a Vietnam vet who came home without his legs.”

  FORTY-TWO

  As I followed the siblings along the rain-soaked highway, I understood Christopher Henderson’s tragic childhood must have wreaked horrible psychic damage. Through his intelligence, charm and coping skills, he nearly straightened out his life to overcome the abuse he’d suffered as a child. Everything changed after he learned the circumstances of his adoption, about his twin sister and how Clayton Ford Henderson had abandoned them.

  I could definitely see him wanting revenge against Sternwald and Henderson. But why had he snatched his sister? And what triggered him to kill William Marrano?

  The rain had eased leaving a welcome break in the dark storm clouds. We passed Butler Beach and then Crescent Beach when I remembered our conversation at the Mill Top Tavern. Less than a mile ahead on the right was the Ft. Matanzas National Monument. Watts had talked about it as a place of refuge, comparing it to a hide-away he favored as a child. Now I realized that childhood refuge must have been where he went to get away from Rindale, trying to forget the terrible things he did to him.

  The glow of the low fuel light interrupted my reverie. Shit. I should be okay for another twenty or thirty miles, which worked if Watts turned into the Ft. Matanzas National Monument. But if he kept driving south I’d be forced to stop for gas. Then what?

  I edged closer to Watts’ rear bumper, weighing my options. I had his license plate number and I could call the police once I found a phone. Maybe I should stop at the next restaurant or service station and make the call.

  Watts stared at me in his rearview mirror as though sensing my indecision. He lifted his right hand, giving me the middle finger salute. Without thinking, I stomped on the gas pedal and swung into the other lane. I pulled along side the truck and Watts rewarded me with a grin. Instead of flipping me a bird this time, he held up a pistol.

  Directly ahead I saw the sign for the Ft. Matanzas National Monument. Not waiting for him to get off a good shot at me, I surged past the pick-up, whipped the wheel to the right, tearing his bumper loose, and carrying him with me off the road. Together, we bounced along a short access lane on a path leading directly into a concrete monument sign marking the entrance to the Ft. Matanzas National Monument. Braking hard, I stopped within inches of the sign. Watts threw the truck into reverse, his dangling front bumper scraping the pavement, sending up sparks.

  A wooden barrier blocked the road leading into the park. I half expected Watts to return to A1A. Instead, he blasted through the barrier and stormed into the park. I followed his trail of sparks. Watts skidded around the island of live oaks and picnic benches, bounced up on the curb in front of the squat visitor’s center and came to a stop with his front right tire on the sidewalk. I hung back, parking thirty feet away and waited for him to exit the truck.

  It occurred to me that following him here might not be the most intelligent thing I’d ever done. I was within spitting distance of a man who’d killed at least three people, and probably was responsible for my new alligator phobia and throbbing headache.

  I watched Watts gesticulating wildly while Erin cowered against her door. Above them a slice of moon appeared through a break in the clouds, and the dim light shimmered in the wet oaks towering over the visitor’s center.

  Erin pushed open her door, but Watts grabbed her by the arm, dragging her across the seat and out on the sidewalk.

  I impulsively jumped from my car. “Watts, let her go,” I shouted.

  Still holding onto Erin’s arm, he half turned and in one motion raised the pistol and fired. It felt like a slow motion sequence in a movie, but as his arm came up I dove through the open door of the vehicle. The bullet passed through the driver’s window where I’d been standing only a moment before. Just a lucky shot, I told myself, but I knew I was the lucky one.

  With my head on the car seat, I stared directly at the dashboard panel and noted the clock. For the first time since I chased after Watts, I thought about the deadline Kurtis Laurance gave me. He said I needed to respond to his offer by 9:00 p.m. I only had ten minutes left to give him an answer. At the moment, his offer and the $200,000 per year salary sounded more tempting than ever. But in life, timing was everything, and I had more important matters to think about. Like saving my ass, and, hopefully, Erin Marrano’s.

  I slowly sat up, sneaking a look over the dash. Watts was dragging Erin up a leaf-strewn hillock to the left of the visitor’s center. She wasn’t going easily, struggling, slapping at her brother. One strap of her pink tank top slipped from her shoulder. In a panic, she turned to look in my direction.

  A rush of adrenalin coursed through my bloodstream. My heart rate jumped and I felt beads of sweat on the back of my neck. A saner person would drive away. Find the nearest telephone. Call Sergeant Marrano and let him deal with Watts. The next call should be to Laurance, telling him to save me a seat on the plane.

  Even while those thoughts thrashed through my head, I knew it wouldn’t go down like that. Not after the way Erin looked at me. Her wild blue eyes glowed with a feral fear so intense I felt it pass between us.

  “Help me,” she screamed as Watts dragged her over the top of the little hill.

  Images bombarded me. Images of William Marrano’s corpse. Of Jeffrey Poe on suicide watch. Of Henderson’s body lying at the foot of the lighthouse, broken and bleeding. I saw again the look of horror on Serena’s face when she first saw my injuries.

  There would be no call to Laurance tonight. He’d have to fly to Tallahassee without me. Sucking down a deep gulp of air, I pulled the Smith & Wesson from my belt and leaped from the car. I folowed the path to the top of the grassy hillock, careful not to slip on the slick, leaf-covered grass. As Watts and Erin disappeared over the other side, I ducked behind the trunk of a huge oak, yelling, “Jarrod, don’t do this. We can talk it out.”

  He stopped near the bottom of the hill leading to the inlet and turned to face me. He held Erin in front of him with one arm, and with his gun hand gestured at me to turn back. A slash of moonlight cut diagonally across one side of his face giving his cheek the appearance of bleached bone.

  “Get out of here while you can, Mitchell. This is no concern of yours.”

  “I know that Henderson was your father, and Erin your sister.”

  “You think you have it all figured out, don’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he raised the pistol and fired.

  The round thwacked into the tree, sending chips of bark flying. I stayed hidden behind the oak for a minute and waited while my pulse decelerated to something closer to normal. Cautiously, I peered around the tree and spotted them at the bottom of the hill. Nearby, a narrow walkway extended over the inlet to a dock where several small boats were tied up. From a previous visit, I knew these boats were used to ferry people across Matanzas Inlet t
o the barrier island housing the fort. Watts stood staring at the boats as if weighing his chances of using one of them to get away.

  “Watts, listen to me,” I shouted. “Rindale did terrible things to you, but don’t take it out on Erin. She’s your sister, for God’s sake. Let her go.”

  He whirled around, still using her as a shield. “Yes, she’s my sister, and we’re more alike than you’ll ever know.” His arm tightened around her throat.

  “Show yourself or I’ll put a bullet through her head.” He raised the pistol, which I now recognized as a Glock 22, which takes a hefty 40 caliber round. He placed the barrel to her head.

  Without a clear shot I didn’t have much choice. I tucked the .38 into my waistband in the small of my back, stepped out from behind the tree and raised my hands. “Okay, Watts, I’m coming down. Don’t hurt her.”

  With the Glock still pressed against Erin’s right temple, he watched me approach.

  “You tossed Henderson off the lighthouse, didn’t you?” I hoped to get him talking, distract him until I was close enough to disarm him.

  “That was sweet.” His frigid blue eyes gleamed unnaturally in the moonlight and he smiled at the memory. “He squealed like a little girl, begging me not to hurt him. To give him another chance. Do you believe that? Now he wanted to be my daddy. After what he did to me, he’s lucky it ended so quickly.”

  I took several more steps toward him. “A jury would take your terrible childhood into consideration, and—”

  “Don’t try to shit me, Mitchell. We both know there won’t be any jury trial for me. Not after tonight.” He twisted his hand in Erin’s hair and pulled her head back. She gasped and clawed at his hand. “I like you Quint, but if you come any closer I swear I’ll kill you along with this lying bitch.”

  I backed up a step and held out my hands to calm him down. “Okay, okay. Tell me something, Jarrod. Why’d you kill William Marrano?”

  He seemed to be working through my question. “Henderson showed me his will,” Watts finally said. “He actually told me he was fond of me and wanted to take care of me. What a laugh.”