Apparent Wind (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 7)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  She asked Dwight to get Axel settled in one of the two interview rooms, then went to the vending machines to get the three of them something cold to drink. She was waiting for the second Dr. Pepper to drop when her new boss, Sheriff Curtis Bledsoe, came into the break room and put a hand on his hip.

  Bledsoe was in his forties, with carefully groomed strawberry-blond hair. He wasn’t overweight, but he had that soft look a man gets when he thinks golf is exercise. He was in full-on Sheriff’s uniform, his shoes shined to mirror quality, but it did little for him.

  “What is this I hear about this guy Blackwell following you here in his own vehicle?’ he asked her.

  Maggie glanced at him as she picked up the Dr. Pepper, then started dropping in some more quarters. “He did,” she said. “Dwight said you wanted us to bring him here for his official statement.”

  “Bring him being the operative word here,” he answered.

  Maggie wanted to point out that those were actually two words, but she refrained. “He’s here,” she said.

  “He could have just taken off,” Bledsoe replied.

  “He didn’t,” she answered.

  “Look, Lieutenant, if you can’t follow standard procedures in this case, I’ll turn it over to Lt. Coyle,” he said. “I’m not especially excited about you working a case where the chief suspect is your friend.”

  Maggie leaned down and pulled her RC from the bin. Then she stood and tried not to look combative when she looked her boss in the eye. “With all due respect,” she said without meaning it, “this isn’t Orlando. Pretty much every suspect that comes through this building is related to or friends with one of us.”

  “Be that as it may, I require professionalism and due diligence,” he replied. “T’s crossed and I’s dotted, am I clear?”

  Maggie was torn between reciting her fifteen-year record with the Sheriff’s Office or just taking out one of the man’s kneecaps.

  “Transparent,” she said instead.

  “Very good,” he said. “I understand that we’re all going through a transition.” He gave her a small smile. “Perhaps you in particular. But the sooner we’re all on the same page, the better we’ll function.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “I take my position, and the confidence the governor has placed in me, very seriously,” he said, sounding like he was on TV again. “I intend to be the best sheriff this county has ever had.”

  There was absolutely no chance of that ever being true. Maggie nodded, hoping it looked polite enough, then headed for the door.

  An hour later, Maggie tapped the end of her pen against the edge of the interview table and watched Axel. He’d grown more tired-looking by the minute, and was slouched against the back of his chair. His Crimson Tide ball cap was pulled down low and he was staring at the floor, but the lines on either side of his mouth had deepened, and he was very still. Maggie knew it was starting to hit him. She glanced over at Dwight, who was typing into his department tablet as he leaned against the wall.

  “Axel, I think you need to get a lawyer,” she said quietly.

  He looked up at her. “Why? I mean, other than the fact that I was there, there’s no evidence I did anything to hurt Mari. I had no reason to hurt her.”

  “You might not think so, but you guys had an unusual relationship. Emotional,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, Maggie,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t emotional, it was chemical.”

  “Chemicals have a way of getting out of balance,” she said.

  He looked up finally, looked her in the eye. “Maggie.”

  “I’m not saying that I think you had anything to do with her death, Axel,” Maggie said. “I’m saying, that from the outside, it looks bad.”

  Axel sighed and looked at the table. “Howard Fairchild is my lawyer.”

  “You don’t need another divorce, Axel. You need a criminal lawyer.”

  “I trust Howard. Plus I can afford him,” Axel said. “And he’s got to be better than some overworked public defender.”

  Something caught Maggie’s eye, and she saw Bledsoe peeking through the small glass window in the door. She sighed and pushed back her chair.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She closed the door behind her, and Dwight looked over at Axel. “Axel, I’m sorrier’n hell, man.”

  Axel nodded, but kept his eyes on the floor. “Thanks, Dwight.”

  Dwight wanted to say something else, but couldn’t think of anything. He turned his attention back to the tablet.

  Axel quickly swiped at the moisture on his left cheek, then pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Am I going to get arrested if I light this?” he asked.

  “Uh, you know, I think it’s still legal in government buildings,” Dwight said to the tablet.

  “Excellent,” Axel said, and fished out his lighter.

  Bledsoe waited in the hall for Maggie, then crooked his finger at her. The gesture infuriated her when it came from anyone other than Wyatt or her father, but she swallowed it and followed him to the break room doorway.

  “Charge him,” Bledsoe said without ceremony.

  “With what?” Maggie asked, a panicky feeling touching her stomach.

  “Suspicion of murder,” he answered, his expression telling her he was dealing with an idiot.

  “I don’t suspect him of murder,” she said.

  “The county suspects him of murder, Lieutenant, and you will charge him accordingly,” he said. “Did you advise him of his rights?”

  “Well, I didn’t Mirandize him, but he did waive his right to have his lawyer here during questioning.”

  “Well, now you can Mirandize him,” he said.

  “We have no real evidence that he did anything,” Maggie said.

  “He was there. He was the only one there who knew her,” Bledsoe said, his lips stretched tightly across perfect teeth. “It would appear that maybe he’s the only one in town that even knew her.”

  “I knew her,” Maggie said flatly.

  “Did you choke her to death?” Maggie didn’t bother answering. “Charge him. Let him make bail in the morning if he can, but this county will see that this office does not play favorites or turn a blind eye.”

  Maggie didn’t even know what that was supposed to mean. It was more soundbite than logic. She folded her arms across her chest.

  “That’s all, Lieutenant. Redmond,” Bledsoe said, then walked past her toward his office at the end of the hall. Wyatt’s old office.

  Maggie took a few calming breaths, then nodded in answer to Myles Godfrey’s smile as he walked past her into the break room and opened the fridge. Myles was one of her favorite deputies, a thirtyish man with dark hair and black hipster glasses.

  “Hey, Maggie?” he asked, leaning against the open fridge door. “You got anything in here?”

  “I never pack a lunch,” Maggie said. “You need some money for the vending machine?”

  “No,” he said, taking a brown paper bag out of the fridge. “John picked this couple up out on 98. They’re in Room 2 while we wait for the shelter to call us back. They’re legal, but they’re just kids, and they haven’t eaten in a couple days, you know?”

  Maggie watched him pull a couple of plastic containers out of the fridge. He opened one and sniffed it, then closed it up again. “Mike doesn’t need this tuna salad. He’s got ten pounds of deer jerky in his desk drawer.”

  Maggie fished three crumpled singles out of the front pocket of her jeans. “Here, get them some juice out of the machine.”

  “Thanks.” Myles took the bills and nodded at her. “I heard Bledsoe giving you a hard time,” he said more quietly. “How long you give it before somebody clocks him?”

  “Too long,” Maggie answered. She headed back across the hall, opened the door, and gently closed it behind her. She pulled her phone out and set it down in front of Axel.

  “You need to call Howard Fairchild,” she said.

  Twen
ty minutes later, Maggie walked Axel down the tiled hallway between two rows of holding cells. The deputy walked a few steps ahead of them. He stopped at an empty cell and swung the door open. Axel walked in, turned around to face the door as the deputy shut and locked it. Maggie put a hand on the bars and leaned in.

  “I’m sorry, Axel,” she said. “It’s kind of late to get a bail hearing set for tomorrow morning, but maybe Howard will get lucky. If not, he can get you one for Monday.”

  “Do they let you out for smoke breaks around here?” Axel asked her.

  The deputy, a veteran of twenty-some years with closely-cropped salt and pepper hair, piped up. “Every four hours, you go out to the yard,” he said kindly. “Next one’s at four. Last one at eight.”

  Axel nodded, and the deputy glanced at Maggie. She jerked her head just a little, and he headed toward the door. Maggie looked at Axel and sighed. He tried to smile at her.

  “David would be pissed at me for this,” he said quietly.

  “He’d be pissed for you,” she said.

  Axel dropped his eyes to the floor “I still talk to him sometimes, out on the bay.”

  “Me, too,” Maggie said around a lump in her throat.

  “I was supposed to take Mari out on the bay tonight,” he said quietly. “All the time I knew her, she would never come out with me, not even for a simple ride.”

  Maggie remembered. Mari’s dislike of the water was one of the things that had kept her from liking the woman. “But she was going to go tonight?”

  “Yeah,” Axel answered. “She was the one who suggested it. I don’t know. Maybe she was trying to get another chance, maybe not. Who knows with her.”

  “Maybe.” Maggie didn’t say that another chance probably wouldn’t have been a better idea than the first two.

  He looked up at her. “Hey, do me a favor. Call the kids and let ’em know I’m okay, okay?”

  Maggie nodded. “Yeah.”

  He looked back down at the floor, but wrapped one calloused finger around one of hers. “We’re having some kind of crappy day.”

  “We are,” she agreed quietly.

  MAGGIE’S PROPERTY WAS ALMOST five acres at the end of Bluff Road, about five miles outside of town. It had belonged to her grandfather on her daddy’s side, and he had built the cypress stilt house in the center of the property before Gray Redmond had been born. Now it belonged to her, and one day it would belong to one of her kids.

  She stopped at the mailbox at the head of her dirt road, grabbed the handful of mail, then drove almost a quarter-mile through the tall pines, Live Oaks, and fossilized cypress. Her dog Coco, half-Lab and half-Catahoula, was sitting in the gravel parking area before Maggie even pulled in. As soon as Maggie turned off the Jeep, Coco barreled over to the vehicle, smiling widely. When Maggie stepped down, Coco collapsed at her feet and turned belly up in an expression of relief and affection.

  Maggie bent and rubbed her belly. “Hey, sugar,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Coco followed Maggie to the deck stairs, stairs that Axel had helped her father replace after the last hurricane. Seeing them made her sadder than she already was. She distracted herself by looking up at the deck for Stoopid, her rooster, who should have already been coughing at her from the railing or tumbling down the stairs to admonish her for something.

  He was nowhere in sight, and she unlocked the door and let herself and Coco in, then left the front door open to allow some air through the screen door. Maggie couldn’t stand to be shut up, and the windows would stay open until they got a hard frost.

  She dropped her purse and the mail onto the dining room table, removed her back holster and set it beside her things, then headed for the kitchen. She was halfway there when she heard Stoopid’s idea of crowing from down the hall.

  She walked down the hall, Coco in tow, and opened the bathroom door. Stoopid was in the sink. So was the toothpaste, which had about eighteen holes in it. There was Stoopid poop all over the hardwood floor.

  He commenced to warble out some paragraph on his day, the health benefits of toothpaste or his thoughts on Maggie’s astrological sign.

  “No,” she said, and picked him up, then dropped him over the side. He half-flapped, half fell to the floor, then preceded her out of the bathroom. She followed him as he ran down the hall, wings at partial deployment, looking like a model plane that hadn’t finished drying.

  When she got to the kitchen, he was chanting at the refrigerator door. Maggie opened the door, which prompted his vocal and incessant encouragement, grabbed his scrap bowl, and then led him to the front door. The screen door scraped open, and she set the bowl down on the deck. It was immediately set upon by Stoopid, who barely looked up when Maggie slapped the door shut again.

  Her cell phone rang as she passed the dining room table. It was Kyle.

  “Hey,” she said shortly when she answered.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Did you lock Stoopid in the bathroom?”

  “No. Is he locked in?”

  “No, but the door was shut,” she said.

  “He must have pushed it shut,” Kyle said. “He forgets which way it swings.”

  “He shouldn’t be thinking about which way the door swings, Kyle!” Maggie said. “He needs to start staying back outside like a real chicken.”

  “Mom, he keeps getting in,” Kyle answered. He sounded a lot less concerned than Maggie wanted him to.

  “Buddy, there’s poop all over the bathroom,” Maggie said. She wanted to be mad, but that was hard with Kyle. It was easier with Sky, but not nearly easy enough.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Kyle said. “I was the last one out this morning. I’ll clean it up when I get home. But you really should check out those chicken diapers.”

  “Kyle, I’m not putting diapers on my rooster,” Maggie said. “He’s already idiotic.”

  “They have ones with Christmas ornaments on them, just in time for the holiday season,” Kyle said, and she heard him smiling.

  “Kyle.”

  “Okay, Mom. Well, I checked in,” he said. “I gotta go. Doug’s mom wants us to walk the dog.”

  “Okay, buddy. I love you,” Maggie said as she walked into her bedroom.

  “I love you more,” he said, and hung up before she could come back with a retort. It was an old routine, but it never got old. The day Kyle got too mature for it, as Sky had, Maggie would park herself in sackcloth and ashes.

  Meanwhile, she needed to change and get over to Wyatt’s. As she undressed, Maggie thought about the conversation they were about to have. She hadn’t been putting it off because of Wyatt, she’d just needed some time to figure out what she thought about it all before she tried to explain it to him. She needed time for the anger and the hurt and the feeling of being lost to dampen down a bit.

  They hadn’t, really, but she knew that she’d been quiet and distant and sometimes testy the last couple of weeks, and Wyatt had been patient.

  She threw on a pair of jeans and a baggy, thin sweater, brushed out her hair, and headed out of the room. She stopped in the bathroom long enough to spray some perfume, a scent made with gardenia essential oil that she bought at the farmer’s market, and that was all of her preparation. She wasn’t much of a beauty girl; she lacked the necessary girl skills.

  She stopped at the dining room table, tucked her holster into her purse, and grabbed her keys.

  Next to the front door hung a picture of her and Daddy, sitting on the side of his dock and laughing into the camera. It had been taken last spring. Before she’d met Bennett Boudreaux. Local kingpin. Collector of politicians and IOUs. The man who saved her life. Tears sprang to her eyes and she blinked them away angrily.

  She wanted to go back to last spring. Instead, she just went out to her car.

  Wyatt lived in the historic district, in a small green bungalow just a couple of blocks from Lafayette Park in one direction and the bay in the other. Maggie tapped on the screen door, and Wyatt came to the door a moment later, wearing
cargo shorts and one of his many Hawaiian shirts. This one was light blue, and despite the fact that she teased him about the shirts, this one was her favorite. She knew he knew that.

  “Hey,” he said as he opened the door for her.

  “Hey,” she answered.

  She stepped inside, and he bent nearly in half while she stood on tiptoe and they thus managed a kiss.

  “Something smells good,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Charcoal,” he answered.

  “Oh good, I was craving some yesterday,” she said.

  Wyatt followed her into the breakfast area at the back of the small house. The sliding doors out to the back patio were open, and the white curtains slipped back and forth along the floor in the gentle evening breeze.

  “You want a glass of wine?” Wyatt asked her as he walked around the breakfast bar and into the kitchen.

  “Sure,” she answered. She put her purse down on the tiled bar and watched him grab a Moscato out of the fridge.

  “I’m glad you want the wine, because I forgot to pick up some RC,” he said as he poured two glasses.

  “I don’t suppose you have any sweet tea?”

  “No, because I keep forgetting to get tea bags at The Pig.”

  “You’re from Virginia,” Maggie said. “How can you not have some Luzienne in the cupboard?”

  “Very easily. I don’t drink tea, as you well know.”

  “What does your mom think about that?”

  “She thinks I never should have moved to Florida,” he said, and held out her wine.

  They both took a long drink. Wyatt watched her over his glass, and she saw him watching. He took his glass with him as he opened the fridge and pulled out a Ziploc bag of steaks in a marinade.

  “I fired up the grill so the neighbors will think we cook our meat,” he said.

  She knew that he knew they were biding their time, and he was helping her do it. She loved him for that. She followed him out to the back patio.

  “I even opened you a salad,” he said. “What do you think about that?”

  Maggie smiled as she looked at the bowl of salad on the table. Next to it were half a dozen bottles of salad dressing. “You have a lot of dressing for somebody that doesn’t eat vegetables.”