Dead Center (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 2)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Have you called them?”

  “No, that’s what I’m fixing to do now,” Goff answered. “How are you faring on your end?”

  “Trigg got into the guy’s iPad, but it’s just Netflix, a bunch of fishing apps and a ton of Kindle books. Still waiting for anything she got from the scene.” Evan swung his chair slowly to the left, then to the right. “I haven’t heard back from the doctor, but now that we have next of kin and we know what was going on medically, he probably won’t be much help.”

  “Anything from that date book?”

  “Not really. The guy had no social life at all.”

  Goff nodded, tugging at each end of his mustache.

  “Danny’s got a lot on his plate today,” Evan said. “Apparently three people were brought in late last night from a single vehicle wreck over in Wewa. He says he probably won’t have anything until Monday morning, but from what he said at the scene, he’s betting it’s the same guy.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna put good money down on that bet,” Goff said.

  “No.” Evan sighed. “Okay, go ahead and make those calls. I’m going to go grab Vicaro’s and Bellamy’s laptops again. We’re missing the connection here, and there is one.”

  “You ever work a serial before? ’Cause that’s what we might be looking at here if we can’t find something ties these folks to one another.”

  “No, I haven’t. But I do know that the victims of serials, by and large, fit a certain profile. The only characteristics all three of these people have in common is that they seem to have been nice, normal people. Who were killed while they were doing something that was a regular part of their routine. Bellamy ran every Saturday. Vicaro worked second shift for the last sixteen months. And Overstreet went fishing every Saturday morning that he could. Possibly to the jetty.”

  “So, you’re thinking this guy’s watching these folks, picking his best opportunity.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Evan sighed as he stared at his desktop. “He’s watching them. We just don’t know why.”

  Evan was pulling into Sunset Bay late in the afternoon when he realized that he had forgotten to visit Hannah the day before. It stunned him so thoroughly that he’d sat in the car, staring out the windshield for several minutes.

  In 291 days, not one had gone by without him sitting or standing at her bedside, even if only for thirty minutes. A very small part of him thought that she never knew he was there, that she didn’t hear him rectifying his failure during the previous four years to communicate with her about his day, something she had often mentioned to him.

  But another part of him sat there in the car, frozen by guilt, believing that she had noticed yesterday and that she had thought it typical of him to be absent. It surprised him to realize that part of what kept him in the car was his uncertainty about what he should say, of how to justify his being so wrapped up in the case that he had not only forgotten to come see her but failed to notice that he’d forgotten.

  Eventually, he’d gone inside, and when he’d stood at her bedside, he’d simply apologized. No justification, no explanation, just a simple apology that felt simultaneously inadequate and unnecessary. When he’d driven back out of Sunset Bay, he’d felt the weight of guilt in his chest, been so uncomfortable looking at himself in the rearview mirror, that he’d decided he needed to get out on the water before he found himself indulging in an evening of self-serving malaise.

  There was still a good hour of daylight left when he got to the marina, so he quickly went down to his stateroom to change. He hung his suit blazer in the hanging locker, where it brushed up against the dry-cleaning bag holding his sheriff’s uniform. Technically, he was supposed to wear it, but as a lieutenant in charge of the Criminal Investigations Department, back in Brevard County and now here, he’d been allowed to wear a suit, and he had no desire to change that.

  He’d worn the uniform once, at Hutchens’ funeral, and felt particularly awkward in it given he was attending the service of the man who’d worn the same uniform just previously. Quillen had mentioned the lack of uniform twice, but then had let it go, telling Evan that at least he looked ‘more Fed than flunky.’ Evan didn’t think any of his guys in uniform looked like flunkies, but he let that go, too.

  Once he’d changed into cargo pants and a sweater, Evan grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and went out to the aft deck. The harness that had been so spectacularly useless the night before hung on the doorknob and jingled against the glass as he opened the door. Plutes was curled on top of the grill, soaking up the heat of the sun-warmed metal cover.

  Evan hopped from his dive platform to the Sea Fox’s bow and walked back to the cockpit. He hopped down and had just finished checking the oil reservoirs for the twin 115 Suzuki 4 strokes when he heard a soft thump on the bow. He stood up and craned his neck to see Plutes sitting near the bow pulpit like a hood ornament.

  “Come on,” Evan complained as he walked up to the bow. “I don’t have much daylight left.”

  Plutes flattened his ears as Evan heaved him up and dropped him over the side onto the dock. A few minutes later, after he’d dropped the propellers, checked his fuel, and started the engines priming, he looked up to find Plutes situated back on the bow, this time looking through the windshield at Evan like he was waiting for Evan to tell him to get the bowline.

  Evan sighed and stared at the cat a moment, then moved forward to evict him again, but Plutes jumped to the dock on his own. Evan pursued him, snatched him up, and put him in the salon, making sure to close the window he always left open for the cat to get to the litter box. It would probably mean he’d come home to some sort of urinary statement, but at least he wouldn’t have to fetch the cat out of the Gulf.

  It occurred to him, as he was motoring out toward the St. Joseph Peninsula, that if he was going to be saddled with a cat, one who seemed to enjoy boating was as good as he could expect.

  Once Evan had rounded the north end of the peninsula and entered the Gulf proper, he felt himself beginning to relax. He opened the throttle up and smiled as the bow bounced gently through the waves. Growing up in Miami, Evan had started surfing when he was eight, thanks to a foster brother who was an avid surfer. In surfing, Evan had found a release that he hadn’t been able to duplicate in any other way.

  He still had two boards, crammed against the bulkhead in the V-berth, but he’d only surfed twice since he left his favorite breaks in Cocoa Beach. Both times, he’d made the short trek out to St. George Island.

  While it was no substitute for the intimacy between man and wave that surfing provided, getting out on the Sea Fox and opening her up was a decent stand-in. As the wind battered his ears and a light sea spray coated his skin, he felt himself relaxing, leaving the dead bodies and missed connections and silent, disappointed wives behind him, if just for a little while.

  EIGHTEEN

  FIRST THING MONDAY MORNING, Evan stood at the front of the small, and rapidly shrinking, conference room. About a dozen-and-a-half steely faces stared back at him. If the room had been larger, there would have been more. The PSJ chief of police stood silently in the back of the room, flanked by two investigators from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Chief Beckett from Wewahitchka and one of his officers were propping up another corner of the wall. The other sets of eyes belonged to Evan’s deputies, and the PSJ police officers assigned to the expanding Bellamy et al Taskforce.

  Evan understood what the presence of the state investigators meant – his time to solve this was running out. One more body and they would take over. Evan couldn’t justify his resentment – somebody had to stop the murders and so far, he had failed – but he felt it nonetheless. As he prepared to address the crowd, his mind reviewed the moves he had made since finding Bellamy. There was nothing the state investigators could have done that he hadn’t tried. He gratefully accepted their offer to help, but did not, in the least, feel that the responsibility to solve the case had been lifted from him.

  Beckett’s pres
ence was also unsettling. The Wewa Chief had called and offered any assistance Caldwell might want. Evan needed the manpower but couldn’t quite decide how he felt about Beckett. He had asked Beckett to send over an officer if he could spare one – Wewahitchka only boasted a police department of four– but he had tried to hint that the chief’s presence was not required. As they eyed each other from either end of the room, Evan realized that was probably exactly why Beckett had decided to attend.

  Goff had started the meeting with a quick synopsis of the case so far, bringing the newcomers up to speed, filling in all the details Evan had not provided to the media, and correcting the numerous inaccuracies the media had concocted to replace that missing information. Now, Evan stepped up to introduce material that would be new to everybody.

  “I’ve just returned from meeting with the M.E. or, with his assistant, that is. No surprises there. Mr. Overstreet’s wounds indicate that he was killed by the same person who killed Bellamy and Vicaro. The size and shape of the blade match. The angle of attack indicates that whoever attacked Overstreet was the same height as the person who attacked the other two. More than enough similarities to say it is our guy.

  “There are a few differences. Overstreet was attacked from the front. Vicaro, from behind. Bellamy may have been attacked from the front, or the side, though he was stabbed from several different angles. However, in each case, the killer focused his attack on the upper right torso.” Evan used a pointer to tap at diagrams depicting the locations of the wounds on each victim.

  “Another, worrisome difference,” Evan continued, “Overstreet had fewer stabs than Vicaro. Vicaro had fewer than Bellamy. Overstreet also had fewer defensive wounds, and the killer left almost no forensic evidence at this third attack.” Evan pause to let the team assimilate what he had said. “That means he’s getting better, more efficient, and probably more comfortable. It means, unless we can find the connection between these victims, we’re going to have a whole lot more.”

  “Connection?” Deputy Holland scoffed. “It’s a young, single woman, a middle-aged loner, and a family man from out of town. Totally different profiles, totally different groups of friends. This guy,” Holland said, waving a hand at Overstreet’s picture, “didn’t even have friends.”

  “There has to be a connection. These are not random victims. He chose them, stalked them, was lying in wait for each of them,” Evan said. “The fact that Overstreet has no social contacts means that whatever ties these three together is probably more likely to be a professional contact of some sort, rather than a personal one. “

  “The news is all over this, but they haven’t even given this guy a nickname,” Holland argued back, “because there is no common thread.”

  “Except that he stabs all his victims in the same place,” Goff said. That tickled something in Evan’s mind, but he lost the thought before he could lock onto it.

  “How about ‘the Saint Joe Stabber,’” Beckett suggested, sounding amused, “not too original, but it does have a bit of a ring to it.”

  “Don’t give them any ideas,” another deputy put in.

  Somebody chuckled. Mutters and whispers rippled through the crowd. Evan heard somebody ask, “Why the right side? You’d think he’d go for the heart.” To which another replied, “Maybe he’s dyslexic.” Someone else was still fixated on the name. “What about, Joe the Ripper?”

  Evan knew that an outside observer would think the remarks cold and inappropriate to the loss of life, but he also knew that they weren’t making the remarks because they didn’t care. They were simply distancing themselves, objectifying the victims in a way, yes, but in order to not be distracted by their humanity.

  “We ain’t here to name him,” Goff snapped. His voice was quiet, but it quieted every other voice in the room. “We’re here to identify him and sack him up.”

  “We’ve had a murder every three to four days,” Evan said. “He watches these people and knows their routines, so he is an opportunistic killer, but if we simply look at the time between murders, he’s due to kill again tonight or tomorrow. We can not let that happen. You each have an assignment. The connection is in there somewhere.” He indicated the files stacked neatly by the door. “Somehow, somewhere, these three people crossed this man’s path, and we’ve got to find that path.”

  Hours later, after talking with several local contacts who knew Mitchell Overstreet, going over to the bullpen to spend wasted time on the man’s desktop, and dragging his eyeballs through the reports from task force members, Evan felt no closer to finding a reason for even one of the killings, much less all three.

  In one part of his mind, he’d felt like he’d missed it, and in another, he felt like its discovery was imminent, like watching the horizon for land, certain that he’d charted his position properly and only needed to stare long enough to know he’d found his destination.

  Late in the afternoon, his eyes weary from printed and pixelated text, Evan set the deputies’ reports and his own case files aside, in their separate stacks, neatly lined up with the top left corner of his desk. Then he grabbed a bottle of water from the break room, stretching his legs as a bonus, and came back to his desk.

  He took a few swallows of water, stared at the two neat piles of paperwork, and tried to decide which piece of this case he wanted to go over for the tenth or fifteenth time. He’d stacked his files in reverse chronological order, with Overstreet on top. When he opened it, the brown agenda was on top, and he almost felt like handwritten notes would be a refreshing change, so he slipped it out and opened it to the first two pages, January of the prior year.

  Deep down, he was certain that this was going back too far, but he hoped, weakly, that some pattern would emerge that he hadn’t noticed when looking for individual bits of information. He’d reached November by the time he’d decided that he’d been too optimistic but, having gone that far, he committed to finishing.

  He was looking at his last two pages, for the current month, when he found himself vaguely bothered by two entries. The first, on Thursday the 13th, was a note to renew his license online. The second, on Monday the 17th, was a note to go to the DMV.

  The first notation stuck out at him because it had several blue lines drawn through it. Other notations, appointments, and reminders throughout the book that had been crossed out had been done so with one neat, blue line.

  As Evan looked at the two notes simultaneously, he concluded that the first task was actually scratched out, undone, rather than completed. That bugged him somehow, but he didn’t know why. Something niggled at him, like a mosquito that had landed but not yet bitten, but staring at the pages wasn’t producing a reason.

  Finally, frustrated, he grabbed his cigarettes and lighter from his lap drawer, told Vi he was going out for a smoke, and hit the back door.

  He was sick to death of sitting, so Evan paced around the concrete picnic set. He cupped a hand over his lighter to shield it from the light breeze and lit up. He took his first, long drag as he tucked his smokes into his pants pocket, then stood staring at the backs of the private vehicles belonging to staff members, his own Pilot, and the Culligan water truck.

  He was reminded, for probably the fourth time, that he had wanted to ask the guy about getting the water delivered to his boat. He could put the dispenser in front of the sink in the V-berth, which was just forward of the galley, and it would save him using up all his bottled water for his coffee. City water was fine for cooking and the cat, but beneath his consideration for his café con leche.

  He didn’t want the distraction of actually having a conversation with the guy once he came back out, so Evan pulled his wallet from his back pocket, fished out a business card from his auto insurance agent, grabbed his pen from his shirt pocket, and jotted down the number on the side of the Culligan truck. He was jamming the card back into its slot when his eye was caught by his driver’s license, crammed into the little plastic window that never comfortably accommodated any license known to man.
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  He didn’t know why he was looking at it, why it had caught his attention, but that niggling was there again, so he read. His name, Evan Patrick Caldwell. The address of the marina. Height: 6’1. Weight: 170, though he suspected he might have gained a pound or two since getting his Gulf County license back in September. And that’s when it hit. The thought that had been eluding him all day burst in his brain with sudden clarity.

  In his haste to shove his wallet back in his pocket, he dropped it, cursed and was already running for the back door when he snatched it up.

  He hurried soundlessly down the carpeted hallway and charged into Vi’s office. She looked up sharply, her big dragonfly earrings trembling.

  “What’s happened?” she demanded to know.

  It killed Evan to pause, but he did. “Get hold of Goff. I think he’s in the bullpen. Tell him to get over here quick.”

  He didn’t wait for her to answer, just hurried on into his office. He slid the agenda to the side and pulled his case files toward him. He opened Overstreet’s to the second page, where the copy of his license was secured. The real license was in his wallet in the evidence room. Evan set it to one side, pulled Vicaro’s file on top of that, and found the corresponding page in her file. His intercom buzzed. He mashed at the button with one finger, striking twice before he got it.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Vi. Sgt. Goff is mid-urination and will be here momentarily.”

  “Okay.”

  Evan grabbed Bellamy’s file and had just folded back the cover page to expose his copied license when Goff opened the door and scurried in, every single thing on his gun belt rattling like a broken wind chime.