Murder in Mariposa Beach

by Teresa Michael

  “What was this insurance guy’s name?”

  “Lloyd Anderson.” She read him the phone number off Anderson’s business card.

  “I’ll give Jack the information, and we’ll be sure to look into this.”

  “Thanks, Detective,” Libby said clicking off her phone.

  “What did he say?” Mimi asked as Libby laid the phone on the table.

  “He said he would look into it.”

  “That would be so strange if there were a connection,” Mimi commented.

  “Too strange.”

  “Do you think that Pilar was involved in something illegal?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s beginning to look that way.” Libby looked around. “This place is a mess.” She held her head and sat down.

  “You should go back to my house and get some sleep.”

  “Thank you, but I think I’ll go home.”

  “I don’t think you should be alone.” Mimi wrinkled her brow. “The hospital discharge instructions said – ”

  “I’m fine. I’ll take some of those drugs and get some sleep.”

  “Come on. I’ll drive you home, and then I’ll check on you later, per the discharge instructions.”

  “Any other time, I’d walk the two blocks, but today, I think I’ll take the ride.”

  “After I drop you off, I’ll come back and try to get the kitchen cleaned up a little. Louisa is coming in tomorrow to help me bake the refreshments for opening night.”

  “Oh jeez. That slipped my mind. What do you need me to do?”

  “Don’t worry. Louisa and I have it all in hand. It will be simple: coffee, iced tea, cookies, cupcakes, brownies and cheesecake. All bite-sized and easy to serve. We’ll bake enough to cover the weekend, but, if not, I’ll do another batch Sunday morning.”

  “I should still be able to work the concession stand.”

  “We’ll play that by ear, okay?”

  As Detective Stacey was hanging up the phone, Jack appeared at his elbow, “Answering my phone again?”

  “Jeeeezus.” Stacey practically knocked the phone off the desk. “Don’t sneak up on people like that!”

  “Who was on the phone? Were you flirting with my sister again?”

  “It was Libby Marshall.”

  “Is she all right? She had a pretty bad bump on the head,” Jack said tossing the file folder he was carrying onto the desk and taking a seat.

  Stacey pulled his chair around and sat across from Jack. “I just had a very interesting conversation with her regarding the break-in at the café.” He filled Jack in on the three suspiciously related burglaries. “There are too many similarities for these three separate events not to be related.”

  “The three businesses are in three separate counties, but not only do they share the same computer services company, I bet Pilar Montoya is the sales rep for each one,” Jack said.

  “And the burglaries are the same. They trashed each place and took the computer hard drives, laptops and other electronic devices…anything with digital storage capabilities,” Sam added.

  “It’s like they were looking for something.”

  “But what? Obviously, they didn’t find it because they’ve kept looking.”

  “Hopefully the forensics from the café computers will be back tomorrow or Friday,” Jack said.

  “Maybe that will shed some light on what they’re looking for.”

  “We should probably look at the remaining client list to see if anyone else was hit in the last few days.”

  “Good idea,” Sam said. “I guess it was just coincidence that these three happen to have the same insurance carrier and Libby was smart enough to pick up on that.”

  “Yes, she’s a smart girl,” Jack chuckled. “Do you think there could be anything else in common with these three businesses, other than Pilar and her company?”

  “I was going to do a computer search to look into that when you scared the hell out of me,” Sam said. “You never know what you will find when you start poking around in financials.”

  “If there’s something out there, I’m sure you’ll find it,” Jack said. He was consistently amazed at what Sam could dig up poking around on the computer. “Oh, by the way, I looked into Javier Montoya, Pilar’s father.”

  “And?”

  “He’s an important man in the Cuban community. Came over to Miami as a boy. He started off with a food truck and pretty soon had a bunch of food trucks, then a restaurant and a partnership in a hotel. Now he lives in Coral Gables. No criminal record, just some juvey stuff.”

  “Wow, that’s a big rise, from an immigrant street kid to a ritzy home address.”

  “Isn’t it?” Jack asked.

  Sam stood and began to push his chair back to his desk.

  “There’s something else that’s bothering me,” Jack said.

  “What?” Sam turned and asked.

  Jack opened the file folder he had been carrying and pulled out the picture of the young girl from the morgue the day before. It was a close up of her face. Her eyes closed, hair swept back from her face. “This is the girl I asked Libby to view at the morgue yesterday.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Unknown. Prints are not in the system. The girl was pretty, no more than twenty years old. She’s someone’s daughter or sister, but there’s been no missing persons report.”

  Sam picked up the 8x10 print and said, “She looks Hispanic. Do you think she could be from one of the migrant worker camps?”

  “If she were a migrant worker, I would think her hands would be calloused. She had a manicure.”

  Jack’s partner took a closer look and then tossed the picture back onto the desk. “Are you thinking human trafficking?”

  “I’m leaning in that direction. She was found out in Myakka, but it was a body dump. There was salt water in her lungs.”

  “So, she was drowned in the Gulf but dumped in the lake.”

  “Looks that way.” Jack picked up the photo and slid it back into the folder.

  “Are you trying to link this girl with the Pilar Montoya case?” Sam asked. “That’s a stretch, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.” Jack shook his head. “We’re missing something.”

  Sam plopped into his chair, leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. After a few moments of thought, he sat up and said, “Perhaps Pilar had something that somebody wanted and, being a computer person, perhaps they think she hid it somewhere, electronically that is.”

  Jack nodded, “That would explain why they are going around stealing computers. They don’t want the equipment. They want the information stored on the equipment. All the burglaries happened after they didn’t find what they were looking for at Pilar’s house. So they took her and killed her boyfriend.”

  “What about Richard Chen?” Sam asked. “Where does he fit in?”

  “I think he was collateral damage. Wrong place. Wrong time.”

  Chapter 11

  Wednesday Afternoon

  An Old Friend

  After Mimi dropped her off at home, Libby collapsed onto her bed, crossing her forearms over her eyes. Three businesses use the same company to purchase hardware and software. Three businesses vandalized, and their computer hard drives yanked. The sales person is missing, probably kidnapped, her boyfriend murdered and her computers vandalized. I’m convinced all of these events must be connected.

  Libby pulled herself off the bed and went into the living room where she had dropped her purse. On the way home from the café, they had stopped at the pharmacy and picked up the prescription for antibiotics, pain medicine and the dry shampoo. She went into the kitchen and filled a glass with water from the tap. Popping open the lid, she dropped two pills into her hand.

  “Could these pills have been any bigger?” She swallowed them one at a time, following each with a long gulp of water.

  On the way back to the bedroom, she decided she had to make a call she’d hoped she would never have to make.

&
nbsp; She went to her closet and dragged out the step ladder she kept in the back. She carefully stood on it and retrieved the wooden lockbox pushed to the back of the shelf behind her out of season sweaters. She stepped down and placed the box on the bed.

  She went to the dresser across from the bed, pulled out her underwear drawer and turned it over on the bed. Taped on the bottom of the drawer was the key to the box. She knelt on the floor at the foot of her bed, wearily laid her aching head on top of the box and closed her eyes.

  She remembered the day she moved into this house and placed the box on the shelf without opening it. She vowed not to open it unless she was desperate.

  Today qualified as desperate.

  She raised her head and scraped her fingernail over the masking tape that held the key to the bottom of the drawer. She hesitated a moment before inserting the key and opening the box.

  The scent of cedar caught her nostrils, and she remembered the day her grandmother gave her the box. She was ten years old. “Miss Libby, this is to put your treasures in,” Grandma Elizabeth had said. She insisted on calling her Miss Libby instead of Mary Beth or Mary Elizabeth as her parents did. She wondered what her grandmother would think if she knew that instead of her treasures, Libby kept her past in that box.

  Lying on top was a 4 x 6 picture of Libby in her wedding dress. She loved how she looked in that dress, strapless, snug at the waist then cascading to the floor in a full princess skirt. The next picture included her ex-husband, Antonio Salvatore Cassinelli, the most handsome and charming man she had ever met. They were an attractive couple — he with his black wavy hair and classic Roman nose and she with her red hair and hazel eyes.

  She blinked, straightened her back and laid the pictures aside.

  She knew the item she was looking for was in the box. She rummaged through the passports, papers and pictures until she found a folded piece of paper ripped from a yellow legal pad. She opened it, looked at the number, slowly stood and reached for her phone.

  On the third ring, she heard, “Yo.”

  She smiled at the sound of his voice. “Ray-Ban?”

  His name was Raymond Bancroft, but he was always “Ray-Ban,” and to complete the package, he always wore Ray-Ban sunglasses.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Mary Elizabeth O’Brien.”

  “Mary Beth, is that you? I thought you were dead or something.”

  “I’m alive. I just moved away.”

  “I know. Remember the new IDs I got for you?”

  “And I appreciated it then, and I still appreciate it now.”

  “I heard you weren’t a lawyer anymore, and that you were working in a coffee shop.”

  “All true.”

  “Well, you’re too cool to be a lawyer anyway.”

  She laughed. “Ray, do you still do side jobs?”

  He owed her more than one favor. They met in the University of Cincinnati Library when they were both undergrads. Ray was the best researcher Libby had ever met. Sometimes his methods weren’t always above board and, in those cases, Libby went with the ‘I don’t really want to know’ policy.

  “Sometimes. If the job is right.” He paused. “Well, Red, what do you have in mind?”

  She smiled. She hadn’t been called that since the last time she spoke with Ray, and he was the only person who got away with calling her that. “A simple business search. You could probably do this in your sleep.”

  “Okay, what’s the business?”

  “South Florida Workplace Solutions, Inc. They’re out of Miami. They have a local office in Sarasota, Florida. The sales person’s name is Pilar Montoya.”

  “Mary Beth, all kidding aside, I was worried when you dropped out of sight. I thought that you were dead, but then I did a skip trace and finally tracked you down to that little beach town in Florida. That was some bad shit that went down with you and your ex-husband. I didn’t contact you because I figured you didn’t want to be found, what with the new IDs and all. Are you all right?”

  “For a while, I wasn’t, but I am now. I’m sorry. I should have let you know sooner.”

  “What’s this all about? What are you into?”

  “I did some business with this company, and I…uh…I need to check them out.”

  “Other than this Pilar Montoya, do you know the names of any of the major players involved with this company?”

  “Pilar did mention a co-worker named Jordan. I probably should tell you that Pilar is missing, and I need to locate her.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out and get back to you in a day or so.”

  She thanked him and hung up then fell back on her bed, crawled under the covers and fell asleep.

  Chapter 12

  Thursday – Mariposa Beach

  Equipment Shopping

  Libby awoke with a pounding headache. She wanted to pull the covers over her head and at least attempt to go back to sleep. Knowing that Mimi was probably already at the café cleaning up the kitchen, however, added to her guilt at lying in bed.

  The kitchen was a mess. Neither one of them felt up to tackling the flour, sugar and other assorted foodstuffs that had been littered about the floor along with upended chairs and turned over appliances. They needed to clean up the kitchen, inventory the supplies, purchase what they needed, all before starting to make the intermission refreshments for David’s Grease premiere on Friday night.

  She reluctantly kicked off the sheet and padded into the kitchen to take one of the headache pills the Emergency Room doctor had prescribed for her.

  She pulled a small glass from the cabinet next to the sink and filled it with orange juice. Popping the headache pill into her mouth, she washed it down with the juice. As she swallowed the pill, she surveyed her small backyard from the kitchen window. There was an eight-foot square concrete patio just outside the window.

  The hot August sun had practically killed her potted flowers, and she chided herself for not being more attentive to them. The walkway was still damp, making it appear that it had rained in the early morning. There was something on the edge of the sidewalk that caught her eye. She set the glass on the counter and leaned closer to the window, her gaze resting on the impression in the grass.

  Her back door opened off the small galley kitchen onto a small wooden platform with three steps down to the sidewalk that led around back to the patio. Libby went to the door, pushed aside the café curtain and examined the sidewalk.

  She unlocked the door, then slowly opened it. She carefully stepped down the stairs and squatted next to the footprint in the flowerbed by the steps. She stood and followed the walkway around to the patio and found the impression she saw from the window.

  The footprints appeared to be the same or at least from the same type of shoe. To gauge the size, she hovered her bare foot over the shoe print. Her size seven foot fit well inside the shoe print, indicating that the person who had been in her backyard was probably a big man with size eleven or twelve shoes.

  Was someone trying to look in her kitchen window?

  Her heartrate quickened, and she took a quick look around her small backyard. She saw no one but heard a lawnmower in the distance and a dog barking down the street.

  She walked the path along the side of the house checking for any additional footprints. She stopped in the driveway and looked up and down the street. She continued to the opposite side and walked the full perimeter of the house but found nothing suspicious, other than the footprints.

  Since they didn’t find what they were looking for at the café, perhaps they think whatever it is could be at my house. But what is it?

  • • •

  After a morning of cleaning and, then, baking, Libby was at her desk in the café office. Her to-do list, along with a ham sandwich, was by the phone. She took a bite of the sandwich as she began to scroll through price comparisons on her home laptop that she had brought with her to the café. The sandwich tasted good, and she was glad the vandals hadn’t done anything t
o damage the expensive refrigerator, but she was perturbed when she found they had helped themselves to her last two Coronas.

  Cookies and brownies were cooling on the prep table ready to be packaged for transport to the theater in Sarasota on Friday afternoon.

  “Libby,” Mimi called from the kitchen. “I’m going to the grocery store to pick up more supplies.”

  Libby rolled the office chair to the doorway between the office and the kitchen. The office was so small; it was hardly a full turn in the chair for her to face Mimi. “How much more do we need?”

  “I wanted to make some of those mini-cheesecakes that everyone loves, and we probably need another batch of chocolate chip.” Mimi picked up her purse and turned to leave. “I won’t be gone long,” she said before closing the back door.

  Libby rolled back to her desk and took another bite of her sandwich. While Mimi was out, she planned to begin vendor communication to replace at least some of the damaged equipment. She put down the sandwich and clicked on the page for the cappuccino machines.

  She soon discovered she had been staring at the same cappuccino machine for a long time without comprehending what was on the page. She couldn’t stop thinking about the footprints in her backyard and tried to remember when the meter was last read.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she muttered. “The meter is on the other side of the house.” She didn’t want to admit it, but she was sure the only explanation was that the men who broke into the café were expanding their search to her home.

  What are they looking for?

  She pushed that thought away and looked at the next item on her list – new computers for the internet café. She wondered about Pilar’s employer and what they were doing about her clients.

  Libby looked at her phone for Pilar’s office number and clicked the ‘call’ icon on the contact screen. She got an automated voicemail that instructed her to press two for customer service or four for technical support. She decided dead computers were included in technical support and pressed four.