All of this was said in the blink of an eye, and Evan was glad the kid finally took a breath, his bony chest caving with the effort. Evan glanced at Goff, who was looking at him.
“Feller’s dead,” Goff said, apparently thinking Evan needed translation.
“Oh yeah,” Danny said, all wide-eyed innocence. “Essentially, for sure.”
Evan nodded at Goff. “I caught that.” He looked back at Danny. “There are quite a few defensive wounds on his hands.”
“Oh, yeah. Looks like he fought pretty hard, the poor sucker,” Danny said. “He didn’t die easily.”
“Any thoughts on weapon?” Evan asked.
Danny zipped his duffel and stood. “Just that we’re looking at a thin blade. I won’t know length or any blade curvature until I get in there. One oddity, for me, is that there aren’t any slash marks to the torso. A few on the hands, right, but none to the body.”
“Why’s that weird?” Goff asked.
“Well, in my experience, okay not experience because this is my first death by stabbing, but in my studies, when you have this much violence, probably rage, right? When you have this much, and especially if the guy’s fighting back, you’ll see more slashes. You know, trying to get the job done and over with. But the guy doing the stabbing in this case, he only slashed at the hands and forearms then, we can suppose, moved in for, you know, stabbing.”
“Well, I agree with you about the anger,” Evan said. “Since the killer didn’t even check Bellamy’s runner’s belt, we can assume he was targeted for something other than robbery.”
All three of them looked at the body a moment, Danny with his hands on his hips, nodding down at the man like he’d just said something.
“You ready for the paramedics to come down here and help you bag him up?” Evan asked.
“Yeah, I’m ready to head back to the lab,” Danny said. “I also have to pee.”
Evan looked at Goff. “Can you get the paramedics?” he asked. “I’m gonna go see what’s happening with the neighborhood canvass.”
Goff nodded, and they both headed back up the embankment. Trigg was following Crenshaw back to the street.
“You done?” Evan called from behind her.
She stopped and waited a second for him to catch up. “Yeah, I’ve got everything we’re gonna get.”
“Anything besides the blood?”
They started walking again. “Not really. I pulled a couple of fibers from his jacket and a hair from the zipper pull. Brown, but not his. Not helpful unless the DNA belongs to someone in the system, but we’ll see. Goofier things have happened.”
“That’s true,” Evan said.
“I also got a few partial shoe prints where the grass was sparse by the trees, but who knows. Some are certainly the victim’s. How’d the notification go?”
Evan stopped by Trigg’s Jeep Liberty, watched as she opened the door and started putting her kit away. Crenshaw had already loaded most of the gear and evidence into the cargo area.
“It sucked,” Evan answered. “Young wife, two little girls.” He sighed. “They just moved here for a better, safer place to raise their kids.”
“That does suck,” Trigg said quietly, closing her door.
Cops had a tendency to crack jokes or see the dark humor in a violent death or a crime scene. It was almost necessary, as it created distance between them and the victims; a distance that helped them do their jobs. But, once a cop met the victim’s dog, once they smelled the pot roast that the victim wouldn’t make it home to eat or saw the family pictures on the back of the piano, detachment became more difficult. In Evan’s experience, it was the personal details, the loved ones, that drove some cops to divorce, pills, and alcohol. The line between professional detachment and personal burden was a tough one to walk.
“You have anything in line ahead of this one?” Evan asked.
“Nope. Just some prints and DNA from that robbery in White City,” she said. “Moving that back.”
“Good. I’m gonna go see if anything useful has turned up in the canvass,” he said.
“A neighbor who answers the door holding a bloody knife would be nice,” Paula said.
“Wouldn’t it?” Evan walked over to where Goff and a group of several deputies and patrolmen were clustered. He recognized a few of them as being officers he’d sent out on the first canvass.
“Anybody get anything worthwhile, a witness, anything?” he asked.
“Not really,” Goff answered. “One lady over on Marvin, right across from the park, said her dog went nuts around 6:30, but she just yelled at him to shut up, so she doesn’t know if it meant anything. Another guy,” Goff looked down at his notes, “name of Brewster, lives on 20th. He says he’s always up by five. He went out to his car to get something around twenty after six and said a guy jogged by, guy he’s seen jogging before. Description he gave sounds like our vic, but he said he didn’t see anybody else.”
Evan sighed. “How many people didn’t answer their doors?”
“Maybe twenty-percent for me,” one patrolman said.
“Yeah, about that,” Crenshaw added.
“Okay, hand your streets over to some fresh blood, have them check every resident that hasn’t been spoken to yet,” Evan said. “Some were asleep, some were already out buying blankets and mittens, and so on. I want you to keep passing addresses down until everyone has either been spoken to or confirmed to be dead or up north.”
The Gulf County Sheriff’s Office was located on a nondescript, almost treeless stretch of Cecil G. Costin, Sr. Boulevard, which became Hwy 71 a few blocks further on. Hwy 71 was mainly used by locals and tourists traveling to and from points east and north.
The Sheriff’s Office was set quite a way off the road, sandwiched between the library and the county courthouse. All three buildings were of characterless architecture and painted in various shades of what Evan thought of as Florida government desert camo. Of the three buildings, the SO was the smallest and had the least parking.
Evan pulled into his usual spot. He and Goff said their hellos or returned nods as they made their way to Evan’s office in the back. Just outside his office, serving as both a barrier and an anteroom, was the kingdom of Vi Hartigan. As he made his way down the hall, he could see Vi stationed at her desk, tapping away on her computer.
Vi was a slim, deeply tanned woman somewhere in her sixties, with sparse, close-cropped hair that looked like the down of some exotic red bird. The birdlike appearance was somewhat enhanced by her beaklike nose. Perched at its tip was a pair of teal bifocals on a beaded chain. The glasses matched her dramatic dreamcatcher earrings.
When Evan and Goff walked through the open doorway to her office, she frowned up at them and removed her glasses, letting them fall against a blouse covered in palm trees.
“Mr. Caldwell,” she intoned in a voice that always reminded him of Walter Cronkite. “Why are you here?”
“You called me, Vi.”
“I relayed a request for you to respond to the scene, as you should given the severity,” she replied. “I did not intend for you to come back to the office.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Perhaps because you’ve worked every day for the last thirty-two days.”
“I think your math is wrong,” Evan said.
“Aw, geez,” he heard Goff mutter behind him.
“Is that so?” Vi asked, pulling a desk calendar toward her. She dropped her glasses back onto the tip of her nose and read, flipping pages with more violence than was probably needed. “Work. Work. Work. Oh, you’re right.” She looked up at him. “I apologize. You took an hour off to get your hair cut three weeks ago, on the 5th.”
“You’re here,” Evan responded.
“I’m scheduled to be here every other Saturday, as you know.”
“I appreciate your concern, Vi, but we have a homicide on our hands,” Evan said. “We need to maximize our time in the next few days, and there are things I need to get done. Now.
”
“I see.” She peered at him over her glasses, and Evan thought he felt Goff move back just a hair. “Between us, Sgt. Goff and I have over fifty years’ experience in this department. Is there something on your agenda so complex that it precludes delegation to one of us?”
“Background checks and phone calls to the contacts the victim’s wife gave me.”
“Oh, my. That is intricate,” Vi replied flatly.
Goff coughed softly behind Evan. “Reckon he was just about to hand that off to me, Vi,” he said.
Evan scratched at his scar for a moment. “I thought maybe Goff could make the phone calls and you could pull the background checks,” he lied.
“Excellent,” she replied, looking back at her monitor. “Please get me the names as soon as possible. I need to get home in time to make my no-bake cookies for Scrabble club tonight.”
“How long can it take to not bake cookies?” Evan asked, against his better judgment.
Vi’s forehead compressed like an accordion as she glared over her bifocals at him.
“Thank you, Vi,” Evan said, and walked to his door and opened it.
Goff followed Evan in, then quietly shut the door behind him. “I don’t know why you’re so compelled to push with that woman,” he said.
Evan smiled. “I’m not scared of Vi.”
“Nobody is until they are,” Goff replied. “You know she’s the Jacker Whacker, right?”
Evan sat at his desk. “The what?”
Goff deposited his bony frame in the vinyl chair in front of Evan’s desk. “Few years back, feller tried to snatch her keys from her over at the Dollar General, while she was putting her bags in the trunk. Almost dislocated her shoulder. She beat the crap out of him with a jar of bread-and-butter pickles, then backed over his foot when she was pulling out. Called it in herself at the red light.”
“No kidding.”
“Nope. It was all on the parking lot cameras. We played it at her birthday party last year.”
“Your cautionary tale is noted,” Evan said, pulling out his black notepad. “Okay, this is the handful of contacts that Karen Bellamy was able to give me. She has phone numbers for most. We also need to pull contacts from Bellamy’s phone. You handle the calls. Split them up with someone on duty if you want to. We want to know when these people last saw or spoke to Bellamy, if they knew of anyone he had problems with, if he’d discussed anything weird or upsetting or just out of the ordinary. I know you know what we’re after; I’m running over it as much for myself as for you.”
“Gotcha,” Goff said.
“Here, do me a favor, have Vi make a couple copies of this, will you?”
Goff took the notebook and walked back out to Vi’s area, shutting the door behind him.
Evan sat back in his leather chair and ran a hand over his face. He was, according to the foster care system, half Cuban by way of his teenaged mother, but he hadn’t been out in the sun much lately. Though Cubans weren’t necessarily naturally dark, he knew he was looking a little pallid. When he’d gotten up this morning after a night of intermittent sleep, he’d thought about taking the boat out today. Then everything got screwed up, Jake Bellamy got dead, and Evan knew for a fact that he’d been glad to spend his day thinking about someone’s life other than his own.
Goff came back into the office, and when he made to close the door, Evan waved at him.
“Leave it, it’s stuffy in here with this heat on,” he said.
Goff left the door open and came back to the desk, slid the notebook back across. He held a copy of the contacts list.
“Thank you,” Evan said.
He was about to say something else when the intercom buzzed. He pressed down on the button. “Yes, Vi.”
“This is Vi,” she said in stereo. He could hear her through the open door. “I have my list.”
“Okay,” Evan said.
“You’re free to go.”
An hour later, Evan walked past the Dockside Grill, an indoor/outdoor restaurant located at the front of the Port St. Joe Marina. It being a Saturday afternoon, the place was hopping. Popular with local as well as visiting boaters, the Dockside did a good business. It had good fresh seafood and burgers, a friendly staff, and a tiki-tropical feel to the outdoor dining decks. Speakers strewn around the place played a combination of 70s pop and reggae, but not so loud that Evan hated them for it.
Evan walked down the wide steps that led from a firepit/conversation area down to the dock, two grocery bags in each hand. Piggly-Wiggly was at the entrance to the marina, and he’d gone back to finish his grocery shopping on the way home.
He turned left and headed around the fish cleaning station and along Pier A, nodding at a few people who were doing some of the endless housekeeping familiar to all boat owners. Other folks lounged on deck chairs, sipping bottled beer or reading paperback books borrowed from the marina library.
Evan’s houseboat was located at the end of the pier. He’d been lucky to snag the T-head spot with 50amp service. It was easy to dock his 50-foot boat and to get underway, and he was allowed to tie his much smaller Sea Fox up behind his stern as long as no one needed the space. He had a great view from his starboard side of the channel and St. Joseph Bay, separated from the Gulf by a thin spit of land called the St. Joseph Peninsula, which belonged to the St. Joseph Bay Aquatic Preserve.
Evan’s home was a 1986 Chris-Craft Corinthian that Evan had managed to get for a song when he’d moved to Port St. Joe. The owner had been meticulous in his care of the motor yacht, and it was worth a lot more, but the guy had been involved in a nasty divorce and needed to unload it fast. Even after selling his house in Cocoa Beach, medical bills left very little for living expenses. Slip rent on the boat was less than a decent one-bedroom condo, and Evan was grateful for it.
It had a spacious aft deck, with room for a grill, a rattan dining set, and a few chairs. The aft deck had been the deciding factor for Evan. He slipped out of his deck shoes and picked them up, then stepped onto the deck. He stowed the shoes in a cubby next to the glass door, then went inside.
The taupe carpet in the salon and staterooms was one of the few things Evan didn’t like about the boat. It was clean enough to look new, but Evan preferred wood, especially with a cat that tended to yak and hack. Evan had never had a cat before, or any other pet for that matter, and he had no idea if this was normal behavior, but he took it personally anyway.
There was no sign of Plutes as Evan crossed the salon and took the three steps down to the galley, but once there, he found the huge, black cat sitting on top of the refrigerator. His wife had brought the thing home about two weeks before her accident. It was only after she’d been hurt that he’d learned the cat had actually belonged to his wife’s boyfriend. It was the boyfriend that had shared that information with him. Even if Evan had been a cat person, which he was not, this would have worked against their chances of a relationship.
Evan put the grocery bags on the dinette booth, then unclipped his badge, removed his service weapon from its holster, and put them down as well. As he started unpacking the bags, he saw that the salt shaker lay on its side on the small gas stove, salt spread around it like arterial blood. A few days earlier, Evan had found the ruined body of an African violet on the couch. A trail of black dirt led back to the shelf under the window and the remains of a little clay pot. Evan was becoming used to these types of commentary.
“You should know that I’ve spent a good part of my day pondering the cat food situation,” Evan said as he put away a couple of ripe tomatoes. Plutes regarded him through narrowed eyes, one ear flattening backward. “Although, having now read the labels on all the crap I’ve been buying you, I can almost understand your issues.”
Evan placed a head of lettuce in the fridge and took out a pint carton of coconut water. He popped the tab, took a swallow, then put it down on the counter. He pulled two Styrofoam trays of fish out of the last bag.
“We’re grilling some fish tonight,”
Evan said. “I’m having this gorgeous grouper, with a little tarragon and lime. You’re having tilapia because you can’t read.”
He stuffed the grocery bags into the little plastic container hanging by the utility cupboard, then pulled out his Dustbuster, and clicked it on.
“If you’d like some salt for your fish, you can come lick it off of the stove, because we are now out of salt,” he said as he vacuumed the grains from the stove.
He looked up at Plutes, then pointed the Dustbuster at him. The cat jumped from the fridge to the counter and from there over to the dinette table. Evan turned off the Dustbuster and put it away. When he turned back around, Plutes was doing his impression of Don Knotts choking on a chicken bone.
“Not on the—get down!” he snapped. He went to reach for Plutes just as the cat opened his mouth and something like a furry, black, baby anaconda slid out onto Evan’s badge. Evan sighed, and the cat peered down at his product like he was Inspector #12, then jumped down from the table and trotted up the steps to the salon.
Evan had read somewhere that slugs vomited up their young. He looked at the thing on his badge, which was beginning to sweat, and could see why slugs had never really taken off as house pets.
“Dinner will be ready in thirty minutes,” Evan called out. “Go wash your feet.”
SIX
IT HAD INDEED GOTTEN as low as twenty during the night, and each time Evan woke up, he had pulled the covers a little higher, burrowing in a pocket of warmth that should have brought a more peaceful sleep. He’d finally gotten up at just after six and turned off the phone alarm that he rarely needed.
Dead Center (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 2) Page 5