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

by Dawn Lee McKenna

“Just ask him if he needs housekeeping or towels or something,” Maggie answered. “I just need to know if he’s actually still there.”

  “Okay,” Peggy said, sounding fairly reluctant. “Hold on a sec.”

  Maggie glanced up at Dwight as Peggy put her on hold. She listened to a recording about the hotel’s winter rates as she chewed the corner of her lip. Peggy came back on about a minute later.

  “Maggie? He’s there. He was kind of mad.”

  “Okay, Peggy,” Maggie said. “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

  She hung up the phone, then sat forward and drummed the fingers of both hands against her desk as she stared at the fake wood grain. Dwight waited.

  “So, he just magically appears in town on Friday. Why didn’t he just drive his own car up here?” Maggie asked the desk. “And why didn’t he check into Water Street until Saturday?”

  “It’s a perplexment for sure,” Dwight said. “I was thinking maybe somebody dropped him off up here. What do you think?”

  Maggie frowned at the air for a moment. “Possibility, but it doesn’t make much sense,” she said. “Of course, this guy’s like a garter snake; he’s sneaking around doing all kinds of crap that I don’t get. I was thinking before you came in. We’ve been thinking Mari used this other phone of hers because she didn’t want Mann tracking her here, but the phone wasn’t a secret. We got his phone number from her recent calls.”

  “Huh. Yeah,” Dwight said.

  “Maybe she had the second phone for business they didn’t want traced to their iPhone accounts.”

  “Sounds logical.”

  She rapped on her desk a few times. “Do me a favor; run over to Water Street and just sit on the place. If he goes anywhere, you go with him. Take your car, though. No cruiser. I’m going to take another look at her phone.”

  “Got it,” Dwight said, and hustled out of the office.

  The last call from this phone had been on Tuesday night. It was to Axel, which meant little to Maggie, and nothing else she found in the contacts did, either. They’d traced every call on the list, though there weren’t many.

  She tapped the screen to go back to the home screen, and was about to shut it off when one of the icons caught her eye. The icon meant little, a blue and silver-striped sphere. But when she tapped it, it turned out to be an app for Barclay bank. Mann had never said which credit card he’d gotten for Mari, but Maggie knew her secured card was from Credit One.

  She stared at the app’s open page, which was asking her to log in. The user name was filled in. It was Mari80. Marisol had been born in 1980, Maggie knew. She stared at the space for the password a moment, then tried Mari80. She wasn’t surprised when it came back invalid. She considered for a moment, then typed in Axel78. Invalid. She sucked in a breath. She knew that the app would probably lock her out after one or two more tries.

  She stared at it for a moment, then picked up her own cell phone.

  “Hey, Maggie,” Axel answered after the first ring.

  “Hey, Axel,” Maggie said. “What year did you and Marisol get married?”

  “The first or second time?”

  “Both.”

  “The first time was 1991,” he answered. “The second time was…’99. Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.” He didn’t even sound like he was trying to convince himself.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Having coffee at the house with Wyatt,” he answered.

  “With—Wyatt doesn’t drink Maxwell House,” she said stupidly.

  “He brought his own,” Axel said.

  “Ok, well, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “Okay, see you later.”

  Maggie hung up, then picked up Marisol’s phone, stared at the app as she sent up a silent prayer, then typed in Axel91. When the app opened up, she let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

  The last day the card showed transactions was two days before. Tamara’s. Maggie hadn’t realized that charges from both Mari’s and Mann’s cards would be on the same account, but she guessed that made sense, since Mari was only an authorized user. Over the previous few days, there were miscellaneous, uninteresting charges from local restaurants and gas stations. Friday was more interesting, with a charge from Enterprise of Panama City, made that morning. Nothing for Thursday, the day they’d found Marisol’s body.

  But Wednesday afternoon, there was a charge for almost $400 in Tampa. It was from Bayside Marine Fueling Center.

  Wyatt watched as Axel hung up the phone, then took another sip of coffee from a chipped mug. He’d come over to Axel’s small house on 4th Street to check up on him, see how he was holding up. He’d been expecting the man to be drunk or asleep, but he was neither. Axel was on his second pot of coffee, and Wyatt had joined him on his covered back patio, where the ceiling full of old buoys and the homemade hammock, made out of shrimp netting, achieved an authenticity that nautical-minded decorators would never manage.

  “What’s up with Maggie?” Wyatt asked him.

  “I don’t know man,” Axel answered. “She wanted to know when Mari and I got married.”

  Wyatt nodded, stared out at the back yard, where a small fountain was encircled by antique glass buoys in various colors.

  “Let me ask you something, Axel,” Wyatt said finally.

  “No, we never dated,” Axel said.

  “What?”

  Axel looked over at him. “Maggie and I never went out,” he said simply.

  “I know that,” Wyatt said, irritation tinting his voice.

  “Oh. Well, then what?”

  “Why the heck did you get yourself a shrimp boat instead of going to MIT?”

  Axel stretched out his legs and propped his bare feet on an old gear box. “I didn’t. My dad left me the boat,” he said.

  “Don’t be an asspain,” Wyatt said. “Why didn’t you go?”

  Axel shrugged. “I can understand and prove Fermat’s last theorem, but that doesn’t mean I give a gnat’s ass about it.”

  “Fermat,” Wyatt said. “Is he a local?”

  Axel was going to say something snarky, but Wyatt’s grin told him he knew Fermat didn’t live in Apalach. “I guess we won’t go into the applications of elliptic curves and crap,” he said instead.

  “I appreciate that,” Wyatt said. He took a long drink of his coffee, then shrugged after he’d swallowed. “Hey, at least you’re pretty good at totaling up the night’s catch, huh?”

  “Not without sticking my tongue out, man,” Axel answered.

  Wyatt touched his ball cap in appreciation, then unfurled himself from the too-low for his height Adirondack chair. “I gotta get going.”

  Axel got up, too, and stretched his legs. “Me, too. I’ve got some work to do on the boat.”

  “Lucky you. My new fearless leader has me talking to the Chamber of Commerce today about some kind of tourist safety crap.”

  “I give it two months before you shoot him and take your job back, man,” he said.

  “That’s way too optimistic,” Wyatt replied.

  MAGGIE HAD LEFT TWO MESSAGES, on what she was pretty sure was an actual answering machine, for the dockmaster at Bayside Marina in Tampa. So far, she hadn’t heard back, and her admittedly low patience had spun out already.

  She killed time checking on Dwight’s surveillance of Water Street, which was uneventful thus far, and by reading up on gravel, or flakka. South Florida was having a heck of a time with it, particularly with the gruesome side effects the drug had on many people.

  One man had tried to eat the face of another in a Publix parking lot in Dania. A teenaged girl had accidentally impaled herself on a fence in Hollywood, while she was running away from demons. A man in Fort Lauderdale had been caught trying to have sex with a tree at Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale. Maggie wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work, but she was sure of one thing: she didn’t want this crap anywhere
near Franklin County. The more she read, the less sorry she felt for the sad, dead woman who had once eaten dinner in her home.

  Maggie told Google to leave her alone, then drummed her fingers on her desk for a moment before grabbing the case file, rifling through the pages from Tampa PD, and then picking up her cell phone to make a call.

  “Sgt. Freeman,” a deep voice answered. It had a touch of the northeast to it.

  “Sergeant, this is Lt. Maggie Redmond from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office,” Maggie said. “You sent us some info a few days ago on a man named Toby Mann.”

  “Tobias Mann, yeah, he’s a popular guy this week,” the man said. “He’s a real winner.”

  “I’ve been trying to get in touch with the dockmaster at Bayside Marina down there,” Maggie said. “Do you know if Mann has a boat?”

  “Yeah, he’s got a boat,” Freeman answered. “Makes a big deal about it, thinks he’s Scarface or somebody, you know, not the run of the mill dumbass that he is.”

  “Do you know what kind of boat?”

  “No, not a clue. I’m from Pennsylvania, you know? But it’s a nice one.” Maggie heard him fumble with the phone, maybe switching ears. “You know who you need to talk to, though, is Det. Bruce. We were just talking about Mann this morning.”

  “What about?” Maggie asked.

  “Hold on, let me let you talk to him, right?”

  Maggie sat through an eternity of seconds on hold until someone else picked up the line.

  “Lt. Redmond?”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said, sitting up.

  “Ryan Bruce, narcotics. Larry said you’re asking about Toby Mann?”

  “Yeah, I am. I was calling to find out if he has a boat.”

  “Yeah, I saw where you people requested his file a few days ago,” Bruce said. “I was planning on giving you folks a call later.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Well, to answer your first question, yeah he has a boat,” Bruce said. “He does a lot of partying on it, entertaining clients and so forth, acting like a big man. But he also likes to meet with people out on the water. Either he thinks it’s more private, or he thinks it’s more impressive.”

  “Do you know what kind of boat it is?” Maggie asked.

  “No, not offhand, but I can find out,” Bruce answered. “But the reason I was going to give you a call is that we got a heads up from an informant this morning. Said Mann’s supposed to be meeting up with some guys from up around Panama City.”

  “What kind of guys?” Maggie asked.

  “Guys we don’t like,” Bruce answered. “Our informant says they were originally supposed to be meeting with someone else, out on the water, like Mann likes to do, back on Thursday night, but that got cancelled. Now we hear it’s back on, per Toby Mann.”

  “Where?”

  “We don’t have a time or coordinates yet. We’ve been in touch with the Coast Guard up your way, so we can try to get some names for these people from their boat registration, but we can’t really do anything other than gather information,” Bruce explained. “This is just a meet and greet, a first date. No product, no money.”

  “Your informant works for Mann?”

  “No, he works for a guy Mann used to work for.”

  “Gavin Betancourt?”

  “Yeah, you know him?”

  “We’ve met, “Maggie answered. “So how would Gavin’s guy know about this meeting?”

  “Apparently, Betancourt’s the one that told Mann about the original meeting,” Bruce answered. “But Mann’s the one that cancelled it, and he’s the one rescheduled it.”

  Maggie stared at the old Café Bustelo can she used to hold her pens. Betancourt had set Mari up. He’d either set her up, or sold her out, by telling Toby about the meeting. He might as well have had his hands around her neck, too.

  “Anyhow, I can update you if anything comes of this thing tonight, but that’s what I got,” Bruce said. “You want me to get a car to run by the marina and see what kind of boat Mann’s got?”

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind,” Maggie said distractedly. “I’m on my way to go talk to him.”

  “You’re working the thing with his girlfriend, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, tell him we said ‘Hi’, would you?”

  “Sure thing,” Maggie answered as she got up from her desk, automatically touching the .45 in her holster.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  He hung up and Maggie grabbed her purse and phone and hurried out of her office.

  Maggie’s phone rang as she pulled out of the Sheriff’s Office parking lot. She thought of a few bad words when she saw that she only had about three-percent left on her battery. She’d loaned Sky her car charger the night before and forgotten to get it back. She thumbed open the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Lieutenant Redmond?” asked an older male voice she didn’t recognize.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “This is Paul Hammer, from Bayside Marine? I just got your message, ma’am.”

  “Yes, thank you for getting back to me,” Maggie said as she turned left onto 65.

  “You were wanting to know about Mr. Mann’s boat?”

  “Yes, sir,” Maggie answered.

  “Well, it’s a nice ‘un. ’85 Bertram, the Mark 3,” he said. “But we’ve never had no trouble here with him.”

  Maggie headed him off at the pass. “There’s nothing for you to worry about, Mr. Hammer,” she said. “I just need to know about the boat. Is it there?”

  “Well, no,” he said, sounding relieved that it wasn’t. “He pulled out…oh, it was Wednesday. I don’t recall what time exactly, but it was after lunch and before I left for the dentist at four.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “Nope, but he filled her up earlier in the day,” he said. “She’s got the twin Cats, you know. 375s. He had ’em put in last year. She’ll move for ya, but she’ll guzzle some diesel while she’s doing it.”

  “Mr. Hammer, do you have the name and registration number for her?” Maggie asked, pulling over to the side of the road.

  “Yes, ma’am, I pulled ’em for ya.”

  Maggie grabbed a pen from the console and wrote the information down on the back of some mail. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate you getting back to me.”

  She heard him start to say something, but she disconnected anyway. She thumbed open her contacts list and tapped the most logical name there before she pulled back out onto the road.

  Her father answered on the first ring. “Hey, Sunshine,” he said in his gentle voice.

  “Hey, Daddy,” she said hurriedly. “Listen, I just have a second, my phone’s about to die. I have a question.”

  “Okay.”

  “A Bertram Mark 3. How fast could it get here from Tampa?”

  “Well, let’s see. If she’s got the single screw, she’s not going to be a speed demon—”

  “It’s got twin Cats,” Maggie interrupted. “375s.”

  “Well now,” Gray said, sounding impressed. “That’s different. I’d say she’ll do 25-30 knots if you’re pushing her, but you’re gonna have to stop for fuel along the way at those speeds. I don’t recall for sure, but I’d say that boat’ll hold 300 gallons or so. If you’re pushing it, you got maybe six hours of fuel for a seven, eight hour trip. So I’d say maybe eight, nine hours, with refueling.”

  Maggie tried to do math in her head. Toby was at his restaurant opening at least until three, but no one swore they saw him after that. If he left the marina as late as four, that meant he’d get to Apalach around midnight or one.

  “She’s a nice vessel, Sunshine, but she’s got no style,” her father was saying. “She’s no Grand Banks.”

  “I’m not shopping, Daddy, I’m working,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Anyti—”

  Maggie’s phone went dead, and she dropped it onto her seat, then turned left onto 98 and headed for the bridge to
Apalach. Outside her windows, the bay gleamed like a newly-polished mirror, tinted a rich yellow from the late afternoon sun.

  She pulled up in front of the hotel about ten minutes later, just in time to see Dwight hurry out of the office with a young blond woman in tow. Maggie didn’t know her, but she was wearing a maid’s smock. She looked a little upset. Dwight looked significantly more upset.

  “What are you doing?” Maggie asked, as she got out of the Cherokee.

  “Well, I was sitting over there in the parking lot when Carrie here came out to her car, getting ready to leave for the day,” Dwight said. “Carrie’s my Mom’s next door neighbor.”

  Maggie glanced at her just long enough to acknowledge her, then looked back at Dwight. “Okay,” she prompted.

  “Well, she knew I was doing somethin’ cause she saw me sitting out here earlier,” Dwight said. “So I told her I was waiting on our guy. Only she says he left this morning, before I even got here. Must have been right after you had Linda check on him.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been sitting here all day surveilling nothing,” he said. “Linda just let me in, and he’s gone.”

  “Crap, crap,” Maggie said again. “He’s got a boat. I think it’s here.”

  “A boat? You think—”

  “Can I go on home?” the blond girl asked.

  “Yeah, go ahead,” Maggie said, waving her off. As the girl walked toward the parking lot, Maggie looked back at Dwight. “It’s a Bertram Mark 3. A cruiser named Rapture. Clearly, it’s not here. You check over at Scipio Creek, since it’s closest. I’m going to try Ten Foot Hole. I’ll call it in on the way.”

  “He’s had all damn day to get gone,” Dwight said.

  Maggie shook her head. “He’s got a meeting set up for sometime today or tonight, out on the water.”

  “Reckon that’s why he’s stuck around?”

  “I’m sure it’s one reason,” she answered as she climbed back into the Jeep.

  She had just started the engine and put it into reverse when Dwight ran up to her window, holding out his cell phone. “It’s Mike. Says he’s been trying to call you.”

  Maggie put the Jeep back in park and took the phone from him. “Hey, Mike.”