Death Among the Mangroves

by Stephen Morrill

  Chapter 38

  Tuesday, December 31

  They went in Troy’s Subaru so that they would not take one of the police trucks out of action for the day, and launched the RIB at the boat ramp at the Snake Key boatyard. Bubba drove the boat. Troy had brought a laptop and had the thumb drive plugged into that. He sat that up on the top of the center console so Bubba could compare that to their own chart plotter.

  “We’re sort of all boated up here this week,” Troy said. “Got Domino going out this afternoon on that tug from Marco Island. Lift that boat the Stiders sank.”

  “They would go a lot farther out. You want we should just go slow along the whole inside route? Could take all day.”

  Troy shook his head. “Let’s go on out to the farthest point of the route and look there first. That was, apparently, their destination. We don’t find anything there we can go over the whole thing slowly.”

  Bubba nodded. “That fails, we check the place they went eighteen times. But by then we’d be pretty desperate. They didn’t sink a body in the middle of their favorite fishing hole.”

  “Who knows? They might have done just that.”

  “Huh,” Bubba said. “I wouldn’t eat the fish.” He took them outside, into the Gulf of Mexico. It was a calm day with a bit of chop and the boat splashed up some spray from time to time. Bubba kept the throttle down to where the boat rode comfortably.

  “They went up the inside,” Bubba said. “Faster for us to go the long way around in the open.”

  They ran up the coastline, the Ten Thousand Islands to their east. Troy sat on the equipment box in front of the center console and watched the mangroves slide by to his right. Even knowing, as he did, where some of the channels were that led back into the islands, he found that they were difficult to pick out at any distance. Up close in a canoe, he knew, navigation was easier and a person had time to pause and consult a chart and compare landmarks, the few that existed. Out here a few hundred yards off, and in a fast-moving boat, what were, in fact, scattered islands, looked like a solid wall of equal-sized trees.

  After a half-hour Bubba slowed the boat and they picked their way back into the mangrove forest though narrow channels overhung with branches, Bubba steering and watching out for tree limbs and oyster bars and Troy watching the laptop and comparing that to the boat’s chart plotter. Once Bubba had to back out when a large fallen black mangrove blocked the path. It had probably gone down in the hurricane the previous July.

  “We could use the chainsaw,” Troy said.

  Bubba shook his head. “No need. Easier to find another way.”

  The hard bottom of the RIB scraped over a bar. Bubba winced as if he personally was being dragged across oysters. “Ouch,” he said. He raised the motors to an angle, and kept going. With the motors angled, the prop wash sprayed into the air behind them. “Anyplace they can take that fishing boat, we can get into too,” Bubba said.

  “We got a spare prop or two in this thing?”

  “Oh yeah.” Bubba grinned. “Nobody comes in here without a spare prop, extra shear pins and cotter pins. Nobody that wants to get home alive at least. Got a big roll of duct tape, too.”

  They finally reached the location where the route from the Stider boat’s chart plotter stopped and went back the other way. They were in a small bay. No matter where you were in the mangrove forest, Troy thought, it always seemed as if you were in a circular pond totally surrounded by land and trees. It was an illusion. There was always a channel because a huge amount of water had to filter into these islands and then back out again on the next tide. Among the trees, though, the channels could be invisible from more than a few feet away. And the charts and chart plotters were of limited use because every major storm rearranged the islands slightly, rendering the charts more and more useless. The sheer difficulty of finding your way through this was one reason Troy loved to canoe in this mangrove forest, one of the largest on Earth and one of the most remote places in the United States.

  “Well, let’s poke around here a bit,” he told Bubba. “The chart shows a couple of dead-end channels out of here, plus the one we came in on and one going out to the east. That’s the one the Stider boat came through to get in here. Let’s start there.”

  “Good,” Bubba said. “Just go clockwise around. That way we get all the channels and small spots and don’t get confused.” He got out a short length of rope and tied that to a red mangrove limb. “Marker,” he said. “Start here. Finish up here.”

  “Sounds good, Bubba.”

  They poked into one dead end after another, sometimes Bubba goosing a few yards out of the engines, sometimes using paddles, one from each side. They had one long push pole that was more effective than a paddle. Once, Troy had to use the chainsaw overhead to clear room for the hardtop and radar to pass. On the fourth dead-end channel they got into Bubba said, “Whoops. Smell that?”

  “I do,” Troy said grimly. It was what he had been hoping for and fearing at the same time. They paddled deeper into the narrowing channel. A small flock of seagulls flew out and past them, startling Troy and Bubba both. The body had been dragged a few yards into red mangroves. Those tangled prop roots would ensure it would not drift out on any tide. In another week there would be no smell and in another few weeks nothing left but bones fallen into the water among the mangrove roots, and never to be seen again.

  They went over the side of the boat into waist-deep water. Bubba brought the body bag and they tried to get the body out of the roots. It was not easy. The body was clothed, with shoes, though the swelling made the jeans and shirt and bra seem much too tight. But the clothing had partially protected it from the birds and the small and large crabs that had eaten most of the hands and face and the flesh off the neck and head.

  “Hunh,” Bubba said as he unzipped the bag. “Do we get the reward for finding the body?” he asked.

  “You should live so long,” Troy said, grimacing as he pulled at a bloated arm.

  With some cursing and slapping away of annoyed crabs, they eventually slid the body into the bag and the bag up into the boat. Troy and Bubba stood in the water next to the boat, trying to wipe the smell off their hands. “Some things,” Bubba said, “you just gotta do without thinking about it.”

  “I know,” Troy said. “Might be a while before I want to go to Bert’s Crab Shack and eat blue crabs again, though.”

  Chapter 39

  Tuesday, December 31

  They were back by three p.m. and didn’t even ask Dr. Vollmer to look at the body. They loaded the body bag into the town ambulance and Vollmer’s clerk drove it up to Naples for the county medical examiner to have. Then Bubba went home and Troy took a long shower in the station bathroom. He put on a fresh uniform from his locker and bagged up the old uniform. He knew no amount of dry cleaning would get that smell out of the old one, at least in his imagination. He dropped the trash bag into the Dumpster in the parking lot.

  “You find anything about Martha Stider?” he asked June when he came back into the station.

  “File is in your computer,” June said. “Someone’s been whaling away on her for a long time. Broke her arm once, ribs a couple of times. Didn’t find the records here or Naples or close by. Found her records at Lee Memorial in Fort Myers.”

  “Different county. That’s smart. What about the car washes?”

  “Called locally and everyone I could find in Collier and Lee counties. Nothing. At least nobody paid for one by credit card. But, as I was told, maybe a dozen times, lots of people pay cash.”

  “They couldn’t remember being asked, by a tall skinny kid with spiked blond hair, to get a bucket of blood out of an eighty-thousand-dollar Porsche?”

  “Kind of people I talked to today should have their names and addresses pinned to their shirts so kindly strangers could help them get home after work.”

  “Ah. I see. Well, thanks for the police work.”

  Troy had a painful phone call to make. The Gillispies were still staying i
n Naples. He called and explained what he had found, giving no details, and asked that they go to the country medical examiner’s office and donate a DNA sample.

  He knew the M.E. would never show them the body; that didn’t worry him. He stared at the phone for a few minutes, reflecting that there were smells you couldn’t get rid of, things you could not just “do without thinking about it,” as Bubba had so correctly said. Talking to grieving parents about a beautiful daughter with her life ahead of her, found dead in some mangrove roots with crabs eating her decomposing body, was a memory no dry cleaning and no Dumpster could ever get rid of. Sometimes Troy wished that he drank liquor; it seemed to help some people forget things. One curse of a high I.Q., he knew all too well, was an extremely good memory. He looked at the photo of Barbara Gillispie on the corner of his desk. Sorry, kid. I’m so sorry. Things just didn’t work out for you. Barbara had nothing to say to that. He shook his head and went back to work.

  One thing he did right away was to telephone Cilla Dowling.

  “Does anyone else know about this yet?” she said. “Any other press?”

  “Probably not. The Bayou Breeze gets the scoop. The ambulance met us at the Snake Key boatyard. Nobody was around. It went straight to Naples, to the M.E. I would guess you have a clear field for a few hours at least. I’ll officially announce it at seven p.m.”

  “And just what is it you are going to announce.”

  “All I can say is that we have found a body. It appears to be a female. It was wearing clothing similar to what Barbara Gillispie was last seen in. We are awaiting the identification and also the autopsy results. And that’s about all you can write, too. Keep your skirts clean on this one, Cilla.”

  “I always have clean skirts. Good for waving my butt at men who know things I want to print.”

  “Seems to work. Got you this exclusive.”

  “No, it didn’t. You’re too clever for me. And I owe you.”

  Troy started to answer but she had hung up.

  He was just finishing writing up his report about finding the body when Lester Groud came in. The mayor was blunt. “That minister you arrested last Friday…”

  “Heth Summerall, of the God’s Lightning double-wide church.”

  “Yeah. That guy. He bonded out the next day. Today he filed a lawsuit against the town for false arrest, imprisonment, maybe—I don’t know—wholesale sodomy and worshipping a golden calf.”

  “Put the religious discussion on hold a sec,” Troy said. “Got some news for you.” He told Groud about finding the body that morning.

  “Is it her? How did she die?” Groud asked.

  “It’s probably her. No idea yet as to cause of death.”

  “Still,” Groud said. “This is great…”

  Troy’s department cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, held up a hand to stop Groud, and took the call. It was Dominique Reiss. “Yes, Domino.”

  “We got it, Chief. The boat’s up on the barge. All in one piece. Even kept the sandbags like you asked.”

  “That’s great. How long for you to get in to Snake Key and the boatyard?”

  He heard Domino asking someone a question. “Maybe three hours,” she said. “Gotta go slow with the barge.”

  He broke the connection. “Got the Stiders’ sunken boat,” he said. “Things are starting to swing our way.”

  “Hope it was worth it,” Groud said.

  “It was worth it whether we find anything or not. Got to check.”

  Groud sighed. “I know. Now, back to the Reverend Heth Summerall. He’s got some high-priced lawyer representing him. Where would a guy like that get the money to back his play?”

  “I don’t know. He takes in a lot of rents and isn’t spending that much on his church. I bet he’s got an impressive account in some bank. I would be surprised if that bank was even in the U.S.

  “But I smell Stider all over this.” Troy told Groud about Judge Stider’s threat to have him buried in lawsuits.

  “Well, that may be,” Groud said. “But now I got the other two councilmen on my case. They want you to drop the charges against the reverend. I’m not sure they’re wrong, either.”

  “Les, it’s too late for any of that. The good reverend has been processed. He’s in the system now. Jack DeGrasse, the state attorney, won’t care if I, or you, or the entire Mangrove Bayou police department and town council combined, want to drop the charges. This ‘adverse possession’ thing is a big issue right now across the state. The reverend, as it happens, had been stealing people’s vacant houses all up and down the coast and renting them out as his own. Rita Shaner, the assistant state attorney in Naples, told me that. His ‘church’ is nothing but a tax scam too. He’s laundering his money through it. He doesn’t appear to have a single parishioner. We were just the trigger for a much bigger explosion. DeGrasse likes the case. Rita Shaner told me her boss sees this as a good election issue. Bad guy with victims black and white. Frankly, we in Mangrove Bayou don’t have a whole lot to do with it any more.”

  “So what do I tell Max Reed and Howard Duell?”

  “Beats me. Lawsuits are a staple of police work. People get mad, or want to get even.”

  “Before you came here, we didn’t get lawsuits about our police department.”

  “Lawsuit. Singular. So far, at least. And before I came you didn’t have much of a police department either.”

  Chapter 40

  Tuesday, December 31

  Cord MacIntosh knocked on the glass panel that read “Director of Pu bic Safety” and came on in and took a chair. He was carrying a briefcase. Troy looked at the briefcase and raised an eyebrow.

  “Found some things you might want to see.” MacIntosh opened the briefcase and took out some 8x10-inch printed photographs. He laid those on Troy’s desk. The top photo was of the open green case with the Desert Eagle.

  “My, my,” Troy said. “This is a twenty-five-hundred-dollar gun. Big honker, too.”

  “Iron penis,” MacIntosh said. “Nobody can shoot something like this straight. Kind of person has this has serious self-respect issues he’s trying to overcome.”

  “Pretty much describes Mark Stider,” Troy said. He picked up the second photo, a close-up of the gun muzzle. “What’s the little stain on the front sight?”

  “My guess? Blood. Dried blood. Probably was more on the barrel and someone cleaned up but missed a spot. When I found it, it was loaded with five rounds in the magazine and one still in the chamber.”

  “One cartridge missing from a seven-round magazine,” Troy said. “Assuming it was fully loaded to start with. And where did you find this?”

  “Hans Stider’s rental storage unit. Oddly, for such a careful man, he had left it unlocked and open and I happened to see this green box as I was walking past and I said to myself, ‘Self, that’s a gun storage case if ever I saw one.’ And so I opened it and took these photos to bring to you, as any good citizen would.”

  Troy decided not to ask if MacIntosh had been trespassing or if he had cut off the lock. “You wore gloves, I hope?”

  “I always walk around town wearing those blue latex gloves.”

  “How odd. Don’t know if the gun matters but I’ll follow up on it,” Troy said. “Are the Stiders going to know about this any time soon?”

  “Ah. Upset as I was by Judge Stider having so carelessly left his storage unit unlocked, I supplied my own padlock and secured the premises. Here’s the key.” Cord slid a small brass key across the desk.”

  “Stider is lucky to have such a careful friend as yourself looking after his property,” Troy said.

  “This earn me any points with Peter Gillispie?” MacIntosh asked.

  “I hope so. It will if I have any say. I’ll call in just a moment and talk to him. And I have news too.” Troy told MacIntosh about finding the body.

  “Got to be her,” MacIntosh said. “Nobody else around here’s been missing.”

  “It’s her. Same clothes. Got the parents giving a D
NA sample to confirm.”

  “So how did she die?”

  “No idea. Body was pretty far gone. The M.E. has it on rush so I should know soon.”

  “Well, I think I’m about done here,” MacIntosh said. “Heading up to Naples, report in, and then on back to Tampa. “I talked to a lot of people around here,” he said. “And I was always two steps behind your guys. I told Gillispie about twice a day that you were onto something. I could tell.”

  “I know,” Troy said. “It’s not rocket science. Just dogged, persistent digging. And, in this case, a break.”

  “But what do they say, ‘luck is readiness meeting opportunity,’” MacIntosh said. “Who says that?”

  “The Roman philosopher Seneca, actually. Not in quite the same words. He used Latin.”

  “Can’t believe you knew that,” MacIntosh said.

  “Most of those ancient Romans spoke Latin.”

  “Funny. Well, I’ll settle up with Gillispie and head back home. Been fun visiting here. Nice town you have.”

  “Good to see you again, Cord, and I’ll keep you in mind if anyone down here needs some private help. My regards to Bust Prado, next time you see him.”

  As MacIntosh walked out Troy smiled at the thought of Bust Prado’s reaction. Then he picked up his phone and called Rita Shaner at the state attorney’s office in Naples to ask for a search warrant for the Stider storage unit.

  Chapter 41

  Tuesday, December 31

  An hour later June stepped inside his office. “You got visitors. Appears to be a Boy Scout troop.”

  “Really? I was one once. Maybe they want tips on making neckerchief slides. Show them in.”

  In came four high school boys. They were all big and one was the kid who had teased Troy about how boring Troy’s weekends must be without drugs. Troy motioned for them to sit on the large sofa, long enough for him to sleep on at night, which he sometimes did. He turned around one of the visitor chairs and sat across the coffee table from them. “What can I do for you gentlemen today?”