Death Among the Mangroves

by Stephen Morrill

  “What’s the difference?” Troy asked.

  “You got me. Less beating them up first, I guess. Anyway Chief Redmond ignored us. He ignored the girls who complained.”

  “And Duell? He ignore them too?”

  “Pretty much. Duell really doesn’t have time for teaching or running the schools. He’s too busy polishing the nameplate on his desk.” Troy, whose desk and office door had no names at all, smiled at the image.

  “Chief Redmond was sort of a Judge Stider toady,” Christine said.

  “Well, Redmond is sort of gone now,” Troy said. “I’m the chief and I guess Mark is on his own.”

  “Not while his dad is around,” Toby said. “At least the kid left town. Good for us; bad for wherever he went.”

  “Apparently he’s back, at least for the holidays,” Troy said.

  “Is this about that missing girl?” Christine asked.

  “Just doing some backgrounding,” Troy said.

  “Yeah. Sure you are,” Toby said. “Girl is missing and the chief of police is out on a Sunday waving around a photo of a kid known for abusing young women. I’m guessing he’s not wanted for littering. Do the world a favor. Put a bullet into the little bastard. Improve the gene pool.”

  Chapter 8

  Sunday, December 22

  By evening the search was winding down. Townspeople went home to their lives and their dinners. The Sunset Bay boat ramps by the police station were busy with people hauling the boats they had used to search the Gulf in front and Oyster Bay in back. Lester Groud’s friends in the guide and crab communities had taken their boats back to the boatyard on Snake Key where they kept them at docks. A few larger boats were nosing back into the Osprey Yacht Club docks across the Collier River. The sheriff’s helicopter had long since gone away to refuel and then on to other duties.

  Troy watched some volunteer firemen getting into their cars in the parking lot behind the town hall and driving away. He had a hollow feeling in his stomach. They had looked in every obvious place and all the nonobvious ones too and there was not a trace of Barbara Gillispie.

  Troy had his officers resume their normal schedule. That evening Troy went to Lee Bell’s house. Lee had set up a ten-foot-tall Christmas tree and she and Troy spent an hour stringing lights and decorations around it. Such domesticity was foreign to Troy, to whom holidays meant nothing much.

  “Where did you get this enormous tree?” Troy asked. “And did you bring it home strapped onto your Corvette?”

  “The nice man at the tree lot over on Barron Key delivered it,” Lee said. “It was the largest one he had.”

  “Lee, men are always nice to you. You’re gorgeous.”

  “Thank you.” She grinned. “And isn’t that…nice.”

  Lee had a few wrapped presents for Troy and for some other people she knew in town and she spread those around beneath the tree. Troy had no present for Lee and apologized.

  “I can’t take time off right now to go shopping in Naples or Fort Myers,” he said. “Or Miami.”

  “You ever hear of the Brown Elves?” Lee said.

  “The what?”

  “UPS, stupid. Santa’s neighborhood elves in the big brown trucks. You shop online. They deliver. No problem.”

  “Oh. I guess I’m old-fashioned. I like to go look at things before I buy them. Feel them. Buying a personal gift online is almost as bad as simply handing someone you love a store gift card. Where’s the romance, the feeling, the personal attention?”

  “Am I hearing that you love me?”

  “Well, of course I do.”

  “You never say it.”

  “Lee Bell, I’m in love with you.” He grabbed her and they kissed.

  “Good,” she said breaking off the kiss. “Now what are you going to do to show your love?”

  “Probably have a UPS driver hand you a store gift card.”

  Lee punched him in the arm. She was tall and strong and had a good punch, and it knocked him sideways slightly. “That’s it,” she said. “You go home and sleep in your cold, lonely bed.”

  “Won’t that make your bed cold and lonely too?”

  “Good point. I’ll let you stay. But only if you make mad love to me.”

  “Sure thing, little lady,” Troy said. “Think of it as the gift that keeps on giving.”

  “You wish.”

  Chapter 9

  Monday, December 23

  The man clutched his ex-wife tightly, her back against his chest, his left arm around her under her breasts, his right hand holding the steak knife to her neck. He looked at the other Tampa police officers and then sideways at Troy.

  “Put down the knife,” Troy said. “Nothing is so bad we can’t work something out to help you. You don’t want to hurt her. You love her.”

  “I can’t go on like this,” the man said. The woman was weeping silently, her eyes on Troy as if he were her salvation. “I can’t go on without her.”

  “Please help me,” Wanda Frister cried out in her front yard in Mangrove Bayou. Billy Poteet only pressed the barrel of his handgun tighter against her head.

  Even in the dream, a part of Troy’s consciousness wondered what had happened to the man with the knife from so long ago. He seemed to be having two intermingled dreams.

  The man with the knife shook his head. “You’ll just put me in jail. I’ve been to jail before. I’m never going back.”

  Troy had his Glock lined up on the man’s right ear, about the only thing he could clearly see behind the terrified woman. “I came this far,” the man said. “I’ll take it all the way.”

  Billy Poteet’s right hand pressed the handgun harder against Wanda’s throat.

  “Don’t do it,” Troy said. “I can’t let you do it.”

  Billy Poteet bent his head to look when Milo Binder fired off some shots to get his attention. Suddenly Troy was seeing Billy’s right eye and part of his skull over the top of the sights on the Colt. Troy started to squeeze the trigger.

  “You win,” Billy said. “I don’t really want to do this.” He took away the gun. He let Wanda go. And Troy’s Colt Commander went off and killed him.

  As always, Troy woke at this point and leapt out of bed. He was in Lee Bell’s house and not his own condo but he knew the way to the bathroom. He’d made the run before. In the bathroom he got the toilet lid up and threw up at once, before even getting to his knees beside it. He waited and then threw up again. He heard a sound behind him and twisted to see Lee, in her knee-length tee shirt she wore to bed, running the cold water tap in the sink. She had a washcloth.

  “Rinse out and then put this on your face,” she said. Troy got to his feet and washed out his mouth. He took the cloth and wiped his face. It felt better.

  “Thanks.” He laid the washcloth aside.

  “Same dream as always?” Lee said.

  “Sorry to wake you up,” Troy said.

  “That doesn’t matter. You matter. How do you feel now?”

  “Same dream. Well, no, not really. I now seem to have two dreams that get interchanged, back and forth. The guy in Tampa, years ago, and Billy Poteet six months ago.”

  “You had no choice about Billy Poteet.”

  “I had no choice about either of them. And how come I never dream about the gangbanger with the water pistol?”

  “You didn’t know it was only a water pistol.”

  “I know that now.”

  “What does Doctor Groves say?”

  “He rarely says much. He says I’m supposed to figure it out on my own.”

  Lee smiled. “Well, that’s sort of how therapists work. Can you come back to bed now? I can hold you while you go to sleep.”

  “You know I can’t. Never can. I’ll get dressed and do a little patrolling around town. I like to do that anyway, early mornings. And it keeps the night officer alert and not sleeping behind some store.”

  Out on the road, Troy drove his Subaru Forester slowly down Airfield Road. He paused to let a raccoon cross in th
e light of his headlights and fog lights that he never turned off. Probably get a phone call about the raccoon sometime later today, he thought. Airfield Key people were not accustomed to wildlife. He reached the short concrete bridge and crossed over onto Barron Key and then left onto Barron Road. He drove slowly the five miles out to U.S. 41—the Tamiami Trail—and then back again.

  He parked in the lot behind the town hall. He still didn’t feel sleepy. May as well go do something useful, catch up on paperwork, he thought as he unlocked the back door to the police station and let himself in.

  Chapter 10

  Monday, December 23

  Troy had Juan Valdez, on Sunday afternoon, and Dominique Reiss, in the evening, show Mark Stider’s and Barbara Gillispie’s photos around the Gulf View Motel and Beach Street area. They came up with two people who had seen Gillispie and Stider together.

  By Monday morning Troy had lost most of his volunteer searchers as they went back to work or just got sick of it, but they had looked every place a person could be on the several islands that made up the town of Mangrove Bayou. He had Lee Bell and two men from the volunteer fire department up at first light to fly a larger circle than the sheriff’s helicopter had done. It wasn’t likely they would see anything among the mangroves but they could be effective over the inland marsh.

  By eight a.m. there were three television trucks parked in front of the station door on Connecticut Avenue and a half-dozen reporters milling in the lobby, each demanding to speak to him one-on-one. The dispatcher and receptionist, June Dundee, didn’t work Mondays so Troy had Bubba Johns keeping reporters herded together and not wandering around the station. Bubba was two inches shorter than Troy’s six feet but thicker. He had taken over the station temporarily when the town council fired the previous chief, and had been happy to hand the job over to Troy. When not patrolling in town he ran the town police boat and, though a white man, he was actually darker than Troy. And he was perfectly capable of herding a pack of wolves if Troy told him to do that.

  Troy looked at the staffing schedule for the month and then called in Juan Valdez.

  “I’m pulling you off patrols,” he told Juan. “Until we find this missing girl. I want you working to find Barbara Gillispie, or anything related to that, full-time.”

  “I can use the spare office,” Juan said.

  “Yes. I need feet on the ground out there, on this alone, and I need a second brain and pair of eyes too.”

  “You’re smart. You’re the high-IQ guy,” Juan said. “And you see things most people miss.”

  “No one is smart enough. No one sees everything. Make no assumptions here, Juan. Look at everything fresh. The Gillispie file is on the computer server. Read it all. Read it all half a dozen times. I have. Give it some thought.”

  “Does this make me a detective? With a big salary increase? I’m already the official diver for the department.”

  “What did I pay you for that?”

  “You gave me a free swear word per month. And you paid for my air refills on my tanks.”

  Troy smiled. “There you go. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. I’ll toss in another free swear word. Use it wisely. Meantime, I have a job for you.”

  “A detective-type job?”

  “Absolutely. I want you to track down any and all real estate the Stiders own.” He spelled the name.

  “Judge Stider?” Juan said.

  “None other.” Troy explained about the photo of Mark Stider.

  “Holy…um…wow,” Juan said.

  “Exactly. And keep this to yourself for the moment. I want to know about other homes, rentals, anything.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But I need more information. Right now, knowing what time it is would be an improvement.”

  Juan smiled. “Still, finding property owners isn’t hard. Property appraiser’s got that right on his web site.”

  “This is true. Do that for every Florida county.”

  “For God’s sake! There are sixty-seven counties in Florida.”

  “Used up your free word already. Welcome to detective work. Full-time. Count yourself lucky, I believe Texas has nearly double that number of counties. The Department of Revenue web site has a full list of appraiser offices with URLs and phones.

  “But that’s not all I want. I need you to check with every rental storage place from Everglades City to Fort Myers. Collier and Lee counties. Use your own car and clothes, low key. Show photos of Judge Stider and Mark Stider. I want to know if they rented a storage unit recently, or ever.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. Welcome to detective work.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Yes, I did. And it’s ninety-nine percent wasted effort on anything at all that might give you a thread to pull on.”

  “How many of those storage things do you suppose there are?” Juan asked.

  “No idea. Not all that many. Maybe three dozen in the area I specified. They’re easy to locate; they all advertise, and national chains have web sites. The property appraisers in each of those counties could probably turn them up with a simple web search for zoning or whatever. I printed out the judge’s photo from the court web site and the Mark Stider photo is the one we already had.”

  “Is that all? What did you want me to do day after tomorrow?”

  Troy smiled. “Cocky. I like that. And while you’re doing property searches, find out Mrs. Stider’s maiden name and check that against any properties too.”

  “How would I know that?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the detective. They must have gotten married someplace.”

  “Well, that books me through Wednesday. What after that?”

  “I’ll think of something. And there’s no law against your coming up with your own ideas and investigating those. Keep me informed if anything pans out. And good hunting.”

  A few hours later Lester Groud came through the connecting door to the town hall offices and back to Troy’s office. Troy was sitting with one foot up on an open desk drawer, contemplating the boat ramp scene across Sunset Bay in back of the station.

  Troy’s radio was in its charger on his desk. Groud picked it up and stared at it a moment, then put it back. “You got to say something to those reporters,” Groud said.

  “Why?”

  “Because this is bad enough without it turning into a them-against-us circus. Talk to them.”

  “I don’t know anything yet.”

  “Then tell them that.”

  Troy nodded. He walked out to the lobby. “My name is Troy Adam. Adam with no S. I’m the director of public safety here in Mangrove Bayou, but you can call me the police chief. And let’s all go outside.” He walked through the crowd and out the front door. The reporters followed. He noticed that Cilla Dowling wasn’t there. She already knew he had nothing to say and would say that.

  “New rules,” Troy said. “No reporters inside the station. It’s just too small for all of you, and I assume there will be more to come. No tying up our few phone lines with your questions. No following our officers around like a pack of hungry dogs. No harassing the townspeople.” He looked to his left down the side of the building. “And no trampling down the shrubbery trying to look into my office windows. That’s just creepy.” There was a general laugh. “Anyone breaking the rules, I’ll think of some way to blight your life and career.”

  Troy looked around the street. “We may soon have to figure out some better way to park all these trucks and get you people some toilet facilities. I’ll work on that. You cannot all be using our one toilet in the station, not when there are more of you. As for why you’re here, I’ll give you guys an update every evening at seven p.m. for as long as this lasts. We do that right here, me in front of the door, you on the sidewalk and street in front of me.”

  That caused a small rebellion. The television people wanted something no later than four so they could get it onto their five and six p.m. newscasts. Troy st
uck to seven, which was the time he normally went home anyway. The few newspaper journalists who were there smiled happily.

  “Now, here’s what I know so far,” he said, once the reporters had gotten themselves and all their equipment arranged to their satisfaction. “A young woman named Barbara Gillispie is missing. As is obvious, if you looked around town yesterday, we’re turning over every rock to find her. We’re still looking, just not in places you can easily see. We take the safety of our citizens and of our visitors very seriously.”

  “What about state help?” one reporter asked. “Or the county. Is your tiny police force up to finding a missing girl?”

  “We’ll find out. If I need help from FDLE or Highway Patrol or the sheriff’s office I will not hesitate to ask for it. But at the moment we’re handling it. The problem isn’t any shortage of manpower. The problem is a shortage of information, clues.”

  A woman spoke up. “The helicopter you had yesterday has left. Does that mean you don’t think she is out in the swamp?”

  “Actually, there’s no swamp,” Troy said. “We have a salt marsh between us and the mainland, and a mangrove forest, a lot of small islands, between us and the Gulf of Mexico. And we have a private aircraft out right now, looking in a wider circle,” Troy said.

  “Have you talked to the girl’s parents?” a man asked.

  “First, let’s call her by her name. She is Barbara Gillispie. She’s a daughter, a schoolmate, a person. She’s not some anonymous girl. Yes, I spoke to her father. I will again, any time he wants or any time I have news.” Troy decided not to mention calling the Albany P.D. to ask them to set up a kidnap investigation up there. Let them deal with their own media frenzy without him making it worse.

  “That’s it for now,” Troy said. “I’ll talk to you again later today. Thank you.”

  He turned and walked back in through the door and closed it to shut out the shouting. “Jesus,” he muttered. He locked the door. He took out a dollar and looked around. “Where’s the Bad Word Jar?”