Dead Reckoning

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Officer,” Evan said, “I have no reason to believe you had anything to do with Hutchins’ death. But I have a feeling that him selling the boat did have something to do with it. Do you follow? I am wondering why he sold that boat. You were surprised when he said he’d sell.”

  “Well, sure. Yeah, I was surprised. But I wasn’t about to turn him down, either, not at that price.”

  “Did he say why he was selling it?” Evan asked.

  “I asked him. Not sure whether he actually answered me or not, now that I think about it. He gave me the impression that he needed money for some family business. You know, personal stuff he didn’t want to talk about,” Rochester said. “I didn’t pry.”

  Evan asked Rochester to fax him a copy of the sales receipt for the boat and Rochester said the fax would be there within the hour. Evan thanked him and ended the call.

  He sat back in his chair, puzzling over the day’s developments. Outside his window, a hint of yellow now tinted the blue haze as the afternoon crept toward evening. Evan flipped his legal pad to a blank sheet. He stared at it for a moment, then started writing.

  Glock, shell casings found at Nickells. Match? Mac McMillian, CI? Tallahassee Ten? Cell tower. $8500. He circled the money two or three times.

  He was about to add Domestic to his list, but again hesitated. The domestic angle was a hunch, and hunches didn’t need to be written down; they tended to hang around as long as they remained relevant. He looked at his notes again. The $8500 looked like a metaphoric exclamation point. Missing money added a new dimension to the investigation. Hutchins had apparently arranged, or at least attended, a clandestine meeting with an unknown subject in a secluded area in the middle of the night. And $8500 was missing, or at least unaccounted for. It looked a lot like a blackmail, maybe over the abuse. But if the killer had got $8500 from Hutchins, why had he then killed the man?

  He needed to know what happened to the money. Evan would ask Marlene when he saw her tomorrow if Hutchins had hidden cash anywhere around the house, but he was already pretty certain she didn’t know anything about the money. He was also certain that the cash was an integral part of this case.

  He grabbed the phone and punched the intercom button, ringing Vi’s desk

  “This is Vi,” she answered, just in case.

  Of course it is, Evan thought, but didn’t say. “Yes, Vi,” he said instead, “I need to look at the Sheriff’s Confidential Informant files. Do you have those?”

  “They are in the Sheriff’s office, in the file marked Confidential Informants, in the A through F drawer. Would you like to get them yourself or shall I bring them to you?”

  “No, don’t trouble yourself, Vi, I can get them, thank you.”

  “You’ll need the key. That file cabinet is locked.”

  “Okay,” Evan said, “Do you have the key?”

  “Evan, the confidential informants are confidential. Only the sheriff had access to those files. And only the sheriff had a key.”

  “I see,” Evan said. “I guess we’ll need to call a locksmith, then. I need those files.”

  “It’s almost five, Evan. You’ll have to pay afterhours rates if you call a locksmith now,” Vi said in a tone that made Evan feel like standing in the corner. “Why don’t you just use the sheriff’s key?”

  “Yes. That’s an excellent idea,” Evan said. “Let’s do that. Where might I find the sheriff’s key?”

  “It’s in the African Violet on his bookcase.”

  “Thank you,” Evan said, again wanting to say, of course it is, and again refraining. A brief flash of ridiculous comedic irony struck him – he was suddenly certain that Vi had already figured out who had killed Hutchins, through her sheer, indomitable omniscience, and she was just waiting for him to figure it out. He assumed when he did finally piece it together and announce the name of the killer, Vi would tell him, of course it is.

  “Is there anything else?” she asked.

  Evan refocused his thoughts. “Um, yes, Vi. If Goff and Trigg are still in, would you ask them to come see me? I’ll be in the sheriff’s office.”

  “I suppose you should be,” Vi said, then hung up.

  “Let’s step out back,” Evan said when Paula Trigg and Ruben Goff appeared in his doorway. “I need a smoke.”

  The three assembled around a concrete picnic table in the courtyard behind the building. Most of the other dayshift deputies were gathering their things or had already left for the day. Somewhere nearby a barbeque grill had just been lit. Evan smelled burning lighter fluid on the late afternoon air. Soon it would be replaced by the fragrance of charcoal and sizzling beef. Evan hoped to be back on his boat before it got to that point.

  “I’ll make this quick,” he said, laying the note pad on the table. “Hutch had $8500 cash in his hand Thursday afternoon. He sold his boat. The following night, he met with someone, and now that money seems to be missing.”

  “Blackmail,” Trigg said.

  Goff looked to the side and spit.

  “Goff,” Evan said, “You said you went over the financials with Marlene ? Did you get any indication from her, or from the numbers, that there might be that much extra money stashed anywhere?”

  “Nah,” Goff said. “She doesn’t have that money. Not unless Hutch stuffed the mattress with it, but he wasn’t that type.”

  Trigg was shaking her head. “There’s no way in hell he’d sell that boat, not unless he was desperate.” She looked at Goff for confirmation.

  “Sooner sell his house I reckon,” Goff nodded. “Somebody have him over a barrel, you think?”

  “But why kill him?” Trigg asked. “If someone had blackmail material worth that much money, why kill the goose that laid the golden egg?”

  “Hutch was more dangerous than any old goose,” Goff said. “If I’d been responsible for Hutch losing his boat, I wouldn’t want that guy around to come after me later. That’s for damn sure.”

  “Problem is,” Evan said, “if blackmail was the motive, the only way to trace that back to the killer is either find the money, which is a long shot, or figure out what the killer had to blackmail Hutchins. If we go that route, it means we’re going to be trying to dig up dirt on him, and that isn’t going to go over around here. Not at all.”

  The corner of Paula’s mouth had turned up in a cynical grin and she was shaking her head again.

  “Just yesterday you were going around asking folks if Hutch beat on his wife. That sure didn’t win you any friends.” Goff had crossed his arms and was frowning. “You keep pissing on his grave around here and you’re liable to end up in one next to him.”

  Evan looked up at him sharply. “That got around pretty quickly.”

  “Why you think everybody’s been giving you the dead eye all day?”

  Evan shook his head. He didn’t bother telling Goff that these were the looks he’d been getting for days.

  Goff met his gaze. “You gotta chase this lead, no doubt, but you better tread lightly when you do.”

  “I hear you,” Evan nodded. “It’s something you two need to be aware of, that’s all. I’ll take the lead on that, but if you pick up on anything that feels like it fits a blackmail scenario, I need to know about it, right?”

  Trigg and Goff nodded.

  “We have a couple other things going,” Evan said, gesturing to his note pad. “Paula, I need you to send those .45 shells we found out at the Nickell place up to Tallahassee, see if they match the weapon we recovered today.”

  “I already did that,” she said. “They’re rushing everything I send, high profile case and all. We should have results tomorrow.”

  Evan smiled. To Goff he said, “Tomorrow, you and I are going to do a couple more interviews. We’ll be talking to Marlene again, then we’ll check out a charter captain named Mac McMillian, see what he knows about the Tallahassee Ten.”

  Goff made his pfft sound through his mustache, “There’s been a lot of folks wagging their chins about the Tallahassee Ten, lately
, but I’d be surprised if they did this. Those boys ain’t brilliant, but few dopers are dumb enough to kill a county sheriff.”

  “McMillian was a CI, working for Hutchins,” Evan said. “I got a tip that he was running Tens around on his boat, scouting missions, I guess, then reporting back about everywhere they went. You guys hear anything about this?”

  Trigg and Goff both replied in the negative.

  “Yeah,” Evan said, “me neither. Vi confirmed that McMillian was a CI, and that Hutchins had a file on him, but that file isn’t where it was supposed to be. I just looked for it and came up empty-handed.”

  “You think it was McMillian that Hutch went out there to meet?” Trigg asked. “I mean, I agree with you, Goff, most drug smuggling organizations won’t intentionally pick a fight with the police, but,” she touched her damaged ear, “every once in a while, they do.”

  “Bottom line,” Evan said, “we’ve got missing money and a missing file. The file is on a guy who was playing both sides, taking money from Hutchins for information. Taking money from the Tens for scouting smuggling routes. So, we’re going to go talk to that guy and see if we can find out what was in that missing file, and why the file went missing.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Goff said.

  Trigg was nodding her head.

  Evan said to her, “Paula, when you come in tomorrow, I need you to go over the cell records again. I requested a list of all activity recorded on the tower that covers Dead Lakes between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. on the night of the murder.”

  Paula was grinning again, a predatory twinkle in her eye. “I’m going to see both of Hutches phones show up there at the time he arrives. I’m going to see what time the phones go dead, when they go in the lake, and I’m going to see the killer’s phone as well.”

  “Exactly,” Evan said. “Also, you’ll see at least one phone on those two locals who called it in. Check their number to eliminate them.” Evan paused, then added, “This isn’t a home run. We recovered those two burner phones. If the killer thought this out as well as he seems to have, he didn’t bring his regular cell out there with him. But it is possible. Definitely worth looking at.”

  “Definitely,” Paula said. “Worst case, we’ll be able to lock down some of the timing.”

  EIGHTEEN

  EVAN HADN’T REALIZED he was exhausted until he got home to the marina. Once he stepped onto the sun deck and slipped off his shoes, he suddenly felt the need for a shower, food, and sleep, all at once if possible. He knew some of it was due to the hours he’d been pulling and the stress he felt over doing this case right, but some of it was also just coming down off of the adrenalin of finding the gun. Adrenalin only took you so far.

  He was relieved to find that Plutes had chosen to favor Evan with only minor insurgency during his absence. There seemed to be extra cat litter kicked out onto the sun deck, which Evan unwittingly trod on and had to dig out of his socks. He had to wonder how cats even managed to step in to a litter box; the stuff was like walking on somebody’s broken molars.

  Evan had some pasta and shrimp for dinner. Plutes had pureed gerbils or whatever it was that slid out of the expensive little can. Then Evan did the dishes, took a shower, made some of his golden milk with the turmeric, and carried it into the V-berth a few steps down and aft of the salon.

  He’d taken the mattresses out of the berth, and replaced them with several plastic totes, each one carefully labeled. He switched on the light, set his cup down on the shelf next to it, and opened the next box in the rotation.

  When he’d decided to sell his house in Cocoa Beach, he’d finally gone through all of Hannah’s things and packed them up. Each tote full of her possessions had been carefully organized and labeled, and most of them had gone into the storage unit he’d rented in Port St. Joe once he’d actually moved.

  The totes containing her paperwork, bills, checkbooks and other personal things from the last year had come onto the boat with him. There were five, and this one was the third in line.

  The irony wasn’t lost on him. He was a cop who investigated other people, evidently when he should have been spending more time with his wife. Now he was investigating her. Over the last several months, he had slowly made his way through the last year of his wife’s conscious life, trying to see what he hadn’t seen at the time.

  The fact that his wife had fallen off of her boyfriend’s boat had completely blindsided him. The fact that they’d been seeing each other for over six months had been more than he could take in right away. He’d had no idea that his wife was unhappy, other than her occasional, or probably frequent complaints that he separated his life from their life, as she put it. He certainly hadn’t suspected that she was unhappy enough to have an affair.

  At first, he’d wondered how she’d found the time, but he quickly realized that the sixty or so hours he worked every week happened at all hours of the day and night. She could have had a boyfriend and a second job without him noticing any absences.

  Evan pinched the bridge of his nose, where a sharp ache threatened to become a major headache. Then he reached into the tote and pulled out a Victoria’s Secret box that he knew had contained the yellow bathing suit she’d ordered online. He could only remember seeing it once; the time they’d taken the cheesy sunset gambling cruise on a whim.

  Inside the box were all of the bank statements he’d found from the previous year. Hannah hadn’t been as uptight about organization as Evan was, but she’d kept a pretty good handle on her finances.

  He pulled out the envelope containing her Capital One statement from two months before her accident. Nothing jumped out at him on the first page. Several visits to Starbucks, the physical therapist she’d been seeing to help with her lower back, a few purchases at Home Depot, probably for the paint and other things she’d gotten to redo her home office. Lots of gas.

  Halfway down the second of three pages, he saw a charge for some place called the Indian River Art Studio. A painting or some vase or another? But exactly one week later the same charge appeared. And the week after that. Forty-five dollars each time.

  He folded the statement back up and put it down, grabbed the one for the following month. It hadn’t even been opened. There he saw the same charges, exactly seven days apart. Lessons. She had to have been taking some kind of art lessons.

  Evan sat down on the edge of the wooden platform, the statement resting in his lap. His wife had been taking art lessons several weeks in a row, and he hadn’t even known. He hadn’t even known she liked art.

  The next morning, Evan left the Sheriff’s Office and headed back out to Wewa to talk to Marlene Hutchins. He’d planned on bringing Goff with him, but Goff was out on a burglary call.

  The air was so thick you could walk across it, and it wasn’t even ten yet. Evan chose between smoking with the window open or doing without in the air conditioning, and the AC won. Even so, he felt like he needed another shower already by the time he pulled into the Hutchins’ driveway.

  Marlene Hutchins opened the door and invited him in, took him back to the kitchen and offered him coffee. This time he declined in favor of a glass of water. Marlene didn’t seem at all nervous or anxious. She didn’t seem much of anything, and Evan was pretty sure she was taking some kind of sedative.

  “Mrs. Hutchins, is there anything I can do for you?” he asked once she’d sat down across the table from him.

  She looked at him and took a moment to answer, not because she was a little out of it, but because she didn’t seem to know what the answer was. Finally, she shrugged one shoulder. “You’re already doing it.”

  Evan nodded. “Ma’am, it’s come to light that your husband sold his boat a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Sold it?” She showed her first emotion of any depth, and it was surprise. If there was $8500 in this house, she didn’t know a thing about it. “He wouldn’t sell that boat,” she insisted.

  “But he did, ma’am. I have the bill of sale,” Evan said kindly. �
�He sold it to a friend of his, Officer Cal Rochester over in Panama City. Do you know him?”

  Her confusion was genuine. “Of course, I know him,” she said. “They’ve been friends…well, a long time.” She shook her head. “But he wouldn’t sell that boat. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Were you having any financial troubles?” Evan asked. “Help for your daughter, a new transmission, anything come up lately that was going to be hard to pay for?”

  She shook her head again, slowly. He could see her trying to work it out, and he felt for her. “No. We’ve always been pretty simple people. I mean, we drive used, we like to eat at home, we don’t need much. We’ve always just put away what we could for retirement. The house is paid off, we paid it four years early.”

  “So you can’t think of any reason why he’d sell a boat he didn’t seem to want to sell? And not tell you?”

  She blinked at him a few times, and he saw a hint of that sharpness he’d noticed when they’d first met. “Well, he wasn’t having an affair, if that’s what you’re getting at. I told you that already.”

  “Yes, you did, and that’s not what I meant, I’m sorry.” Evan took a drink of his water, put the glass down carefully. It hydroplaned just a hair on the ring of condensation that had already appeared. “Mrs. Hutchins, can you think of anything that someone could have found to blackmail your husband for?”

  “No, of course not,” she said. “He didn’t see other women, he didn’t do drugs. He was strictly above-board at his work…I don’t know why you would ask me that.”

  “What about allegations of abuse?” Evan asked quietly.

  “Abuse?” She tried to look like she had no idea what he meant, but he saw a flicker of fear in her eyes before she locked it down. “Of who? No, that’s just…”

  “Of you, Mrs. Hutchins. Was your husband violent with you?”