Collateral Damage

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “Can we get a look at that account?” I asked.

  “My agency has a mole in the bank that holds the account. But, the director doesn’t want to use him unless we have something that touches on national security. If we can tie the Desmond murder into a security issue, we can get the information.”

  “Fat chance,” said J.D.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It was late when we finished our meal, but I wasn’t sleepy. Jock and J.D. were ready to call it a day and headed home. I stopped by Tiny’s for a beer and a little conversation with friends. The place was nearly empty. Susie, the proprietor, was leaning over the bar talking to Cracker Dix. Two men sat at the end of the bar deep in conversation. The TV above the bar was muted, a baseball game in progress. Somehow the games always seem a little better without the incessant chatter of the announcers.

  Susie looked up as I came in. “Hey, Matt.”

  “Hey, Susie. Cracker.”

  I took the stool next to Cracker. Susie moved to the cooler to retrieve a Miller Lite for me, brought it back, and set it on a cardboard coaster on the bar. “I heard that Jock was in town.”

  “Yeah, but the weenie wanted to go home to bed.”

  “Where’s Logan?”

  “With Marie. They’re having dinner on the mainland. How’re you doing, Cracker?”

  “No complaints. I heard you’ve been looking into the murders on Dulcimer.”

  I chuckled. Everybody knows everything on a small island. Cracker was an expatriate Englishman who’d lived on Longboat Key for thirty years. He’d come with his bride to visit his new in-laws when he was in his mid-twenties and stayed. The marriage didn’t last, but his love for our key was as deeply ingrained in his persona as the accent he’d never lost. He stood about five feet eight and his wardrobe seemed to be limited to Hawaiian shirts, beige cargo shorts, and flip-flops, and on cooler days, boat shoes. He wore a thin strand of gold around his neck and a small gold stud in his right ear. He was as bald as an onion and much loved by the islanders.

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m trying to help an old friend find out who killed his son on the beach the same day as the Dulcimer murders. I don’t think there’s any connection, but I’m checking it out.”

  “Did you know that Dora was aboard Dulcimer that night?”

  “No. What was she doing on a tourist dinner boat in June? She’s usually in the mountains by then.”

  “She was late leaving this year and the Observer asked her to do a piece on the boat.”

  “I’d like to talk to her. Do you know how to reach her in Blue Ridge?”

  “Don’t have to. She’s here.”

  “What’s she doing on the key in August?”

  “She had to come back for a doctor’s appointment or something. She’s only here for a couple of days.”

  “Thanks, Cracker.”

  The evening wore on. The two men at the end of the bar left, and a few minutes later Tracy Tharp and three other servers from Pattigeorge’s came in. Tracy gave me a hug and chatted a few minutes before joining her friends at one of the high-top tables near the bar. A group of workers from Mar Vista arrived for what Susie called the second shift, a time when the restaurants on the north end of the key closed and the workers stopped at Tiny’s for a nightcap before heading home.

  Cracker was in a storytelling mood, and I enjoyed hearing about his hilarious escapades in Wales, India, Pakistan, and other places that his hippie culture had taken him before he settled down on Longboat. I’d heard some of the stories before, but when Cracker was on a roll, new tales appeared, each one funnier that the last. I often wondered which were true and which were the result of the hyper imagination that rolled around in Cracker’s enormous brain. I left Tiny’s in a better mood than when I’d arrived, and headed home.

  The house was quiet except for the snoring coming from Jock’s room. I locked up and went to bed and dreamed of soldiers who had died in a strange land. My soldiers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jock and I were sitting on the patio drinking coffee under whirring ceiling fans. The sun was up, the sky cloudless, the bay green and clear. I heard the clatter of a low-flying helicopter and soon spotted it, a Coast Guar-chopper heading north over the bay. An osprey flew low above us, a fish in its talons, gliding toward its nest on Jewfish Key. I was telling Jock about my conversation the night before with Cracker Dix.

  “I’ve met Dora,” he said. “She’s the small gray-haired lady who comes into Tiny’s sometimes.”

  “Yes. I didn’t remember anything being printed in the paper about the killings, so I called J.D. She said there was nothing.”

  “That seems a little strange. You’ve got a reporter on the scene of two murders and she doesn’t even do a human-interest-type story.”

  “Yeah. Dora spent a lot of years with major news organizations covering some of the world’s hotspots. She’d surely know how to write a story about two people knifed to death on a boat. Why didn’t she?”

  Jock smiled. “I guess you’ve got to ask her that.”

  I looked at my watch. Nine o’clock. I opened my cell phone and dialed her number. She answered on the second ring.

  “Good morning, Dora. This is Matt Royal.”

  “Good morning, Matt. How are you?”

  “A bit perplexed.”

  “Well, that won’t do. How can I help unperplex you?”

  “I was talking to Cracker Dix last night. He said you were aboard Dulcimer the night of the murders.”

  “I was.”

  “But you didn’t write a story.”

  “No.”

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “Not if you’ll buy me lunch today.”

  “Isn’t there some law against bribing journalists?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, you never eat much anyway. I guess a small bribe won’t hurt.”

  “I don’t think so. Mar Vista at noon?”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  Dora Walters was a petite woman with a cap of gray hair, a ready smile, and eyes that sparkled with the vestige of the beautiful girl she’d been fifty years before. She was in her seventies now, and spent her winters on our key and her summers in the North Georgia mountain town of Blue Ridge. She’d been an internationally known reporter who had semiretired to her job on our local paper. She had traded the reporting of international incidents for taking pictures of self-satisfied partygoers holding drinks and smiling vacuously for her ever-present camera. She always seemed amused by her job and the people she covered. It wasn’t the same as reporting on heads of state, but it suited her and she was content to spend her winters slipping into parties and taking pictures and writing stories of this or that charity fund-raiser.

  I walked the short distance from my house to the restaurant and was sweating in the August heat by the time I arrived. Dora was just pulling into the parking lot, so I waited at the door for her.

  “Matt, you must be nuts, walking in this heat.”

  “Well, it was only a couple blocks.”

  “Yeah. In this heat.” She walked through the door shaking her head. We took a seat by the windows overlooking the bay. A waiter came and took our order, a salad for Dora and a burger for me. He brought our drinks a minute or two later and disappeared into the dark reaches of the kitchen.

  “Why are you here this time of the year?” I asked. “Aren’t you usually still in the mountains?”

  “Yes, but I had to come home for a few days to take care of some business matters. I’m headed back tomorrow.”

  “So,” I said, “why no story about the murders on Dulcimer?”

  “By the time I could write it, it wasn’t a story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Observer is a weekly. Our absolute drop-dead deadline is Tuesday evening. I was on the boat on a Monday evening. The story would have to be set up on Tuesday to be in that week’s paper. It wasn’t supposed to be much of a story. And it wouldn’t ha
ve been without the murders. Just something to fill space during the summer dearth of news on the key.”

  “Why were you even here? Don’t you usually go to Blue Ridge in May?”

  “Usually. But I was having some work done on my house and it was taking longer than expected. So I stayed put for an extra couple of weeks.”

  “So, why didn’t you write the story on Tuesday?”

  “I was in the hospital.”

  “What?” I was surprised. I hadn’t heard that Dora had been hurt.

  “It was nothing. When Dulcimer ran aground, I was knocked off my feet. Pete Collandra was one of the medics on the scene and he sent me to the hospital to be sure I hadn’t hurt something important. I got out the next day, but it was too late to write the story. By the following week it was old news. Thus, no story.”

  “What can you tell me about that night on the boat?”

  “Matt, you know I’m always happy to talk to you, but why are you so interested?”

  “Do you remember that a young man was killed on the beach the same day?”

  “Duh. I’m not senile.”

  “Sorry. The dead man was the son of a friend of mine from my army days. He asked me to look into his son’s death. The police are at a dead end.”

  “I thought that pretty Detective Duncan was in charge of that investigation.”

  “She is, and she’s helping me. We’re thinking there might be something that was missed on the first go-around.”

  “Are you interested in the murder or the detective?”

  “Both, I guess, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got a better chance of solving the murder than wooing the detective.”

  Dora laughed. “Okay. But what does the murder on the beach have to do with the Dulcimer killings?”

  “At first, I didn’t think there was a connection. But now I’m not so sure. I’m just grasping at straws at this point.”

  “There’s not much I can tell you. It was a pretty normal evening. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just people having fun.”

  “Did you see any Asian people on the boat that night?”

  “Not that I recall. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I’m beginning to think that some Asians were involved in the killing on the beach. I’m just working back, trying to find a connection.”

  “Absolutely nothing stood out about the evening until the lights went out and we hit the sandbar.”

  I thought for a minute, trying to think of anything else to ask her. Then an image jogged my brain. A camera. I’m an idiot, I thought. “Dora, did you have your camera?”

  She smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Did you get any pictures?”

  “A lot.”

  “What happened to them?”

  She reached into her purse and came out with a compact disc. “They’re all here. Yours for the price of a small salad.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Jock, J.D., and I were seated around my desk. I was scrolling slowly through all the pictures on Dora’s CD, looking for something that might be of use to us. There were close to a hundred photos of smiling people staring into the camera, engaged in their meals, looking out the large windows of the dining deck.

  “There,” said J.D. “Isn’t that Katherine Brewster?”

  I looked more closely. The photo showed a pretty blonde woman seated at a table by herself. Over her shoulder I saw the back of a man wearing a flowered tropical shirt and across the table from him was Betty Garrison. “That’s Katherine,” I said. “That’s the Garrisons sitting behind her.”

  “Let’s see if we have any more of that area of the deck,” said J.D.

  I scrolled through more pictures. I didn’t see Katherine or the Garrisons. But I did see an Asian man, sitting at a table with another man and a woman. “There’re our Asians,” I said. “Let me see if I can home in on their faces.”

  I manipulated the photo program, bringing the face of the first man into sharper focus. “I’m pretty sure that’s the one who tried to knife me,” I said. “Let me get a look at the woman.” I played with the mouse, bringing the woman’s face into view, blowing it up some, playing with the resolution. “That’s her,” I said. “She’s the one who was with the guy on the boardwalk.”

  “What about the other guy?” asked Jock. “Do you recognize him?”

  I looked closer, manipulating the program some more. “No. I’ve never seen this one.”

  “Can you make some prints of their faces?” asked J.D.

  “Sure.” I fiddled with the program some more, cropping it so that I finally had reasonably good pictures of each of the Asians. I printed three copies of each one.

  “Who do you think the third guy is?” asked J.D.

  “I don’t know. But there had to have been two men involved. One of them broke the neck of Captain Prather, and I don’t think the woman would have been able to do that. She could have stabbed Katherine or Garrison, but I don’t think she could have gotten both of them.”

  “You’re probably right,” said J.D. “From the time the boat veered off course until the lights went out was just a few seconds. I think the murders would have had to have taken place during the first few minutes when the confusion was at its maximum. The one on the bridge wouldn’t have had time to get to the dinner deck.”

  “Let’s see what else we can find,” Jock said.

  I scrolled some more. Nothing. I was at the end of the photographs.

  “Do it again,” said Jock. “We might have missed something. Let’s look for anything out of the ordinary, not just Asian killers.”

  I started the process again, slowly scrolling through the pictures, stopping at each one, three pairs of eyes scrutinizing each photo, looking for something, anything that would give us a hint of what had happened and who was involved. We found nothing.

  “I think,” said J.D., “that we need to take a break and then go through them again. There has to be something in all those pictures that we’re not seeing. What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch. “Three o’clock.”

  “I need to get some paperwork finished at my office,” she said. “Why don’t we meet back here at five and take another look.”

  Logan stopped by at four. Jock and I were still looking at photos on the computer, trying to catch a glimpse of something out of the ordinary; anything that would move us a step closer to understanding any connection between the murders on Dulcimer and the death of Jim Desmond.

  “Is that porn?” asked Logan as he came through the door.

  I laughed and explained what we were doing. “I found the Asians who tried to kill me the other day. They were on the boat that night.”

  “You want a drink?” Jock asked.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got to get home and pack. We’re leaving in the morning.”

  Logan and Marie were driving to Tampa to start a weeklong Caribbean cruise.

  “Be careful, Logan. Too much sun and sex might do you in,” I said. “

  I’m willing to take that chance. Do you think the Asians are the same people who killed Desmond?”

  “No way to tell. Besides, we’re not even sure Asians were involved in Jim’s death. We’ve got the connection to Laos and there was an Asian guy at the Hilton the night of the wedding, but that might not mean anything.”

  “But these guys tried to kill you,” said Logan. “If they weren’t tied to Jim’s murder, why would they be after you?”

  “I can’t see any other connection,” I said. “We hadn’t even begun to look into the Dulcimer murders at the time they tried to take me out.”

  “Maybe,” said Jock, “they killed Jim that morning and decided to reward themselves with a dinner cruise.”

  I stared at him, a smile playing at the corner of my lips.

  “Nah,” he said. “I don’t believe it either. They’ve got to be connected somehow to both Jim and Dulcimer.”

  “Let me see the pictures,” Logan said. “Maybe a fresh pair of eyes w
ill see something you’re missing.”

  “Have at it,” I said.

  I went back to the first photo and started the slow scrolling. I stopped at the one that showed Katherine sitting behind the Garrisons and told Logan who they were. I stopped again at the picture showing the Asians. I scrolled some more.

  “Wait,” said Logan. “Go back one.”

  I backed up one picture and held it on the screen.

  “Isn’t that the Garrisons and Katherine?” asked Logan.

  I peered at the photo. It showed the back of a woman sitting across from a man with blond hair, wearing a tropical shirt. Behind the man sat a woman with long blonde hair, her back to us. A young man sat across from her facing the camera.

  “You’re right,” I said. “This one was taken from behind Betty Garrison. We completely missed it.”

  “Can you enlarge it so that we can get a better view of the guy across from Katherine?”

  I used the mouse to crop the face of the man and then enlarged it. I sat back in my chair, surprised beyond words at the image I saw. I’d seen the young man before. In a photograph on the top of a console television set in the Brewster’s home. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “That’s Doug Peterson. Katherine’s boyfriend.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  By the time J.D. arrived back at my house, Logan had left. He told us he’d be back in a week or so. I showed J.D. the photo Logan had spotted and explained who the young man was.

  “How did we miss that?” she asked.

  “We weren’t looking for anything specific,” I said. “And we’d never seen Peter Garrison’s face, so we didn’t recognize him. I think Logan came in with fresh eyes and picked up on something we’d passed over at least twice.”

  “We also weren’t expecting Katherine to be sitting with her boyfriend,” said Jock.

  “I thought he was having dinner with Katherine’s parents the night of the murders,” said J.D.

  “That’s what the Brewsters told me,” I said. “They obviously lied.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “That’s what I want to ask them. I didn’t want to call them until you got back.”