Death Among the Mangroves

by Stephen Morrill

  “I don’t know what to do,” Martha said. “I came to you because you once said you could help me.”

  Troy nodded. “And so I can. Not personally, but I know people. June, how about taking Martha into the break room and sitting with her a bit while I make some phone calls.”

  Troy called Sondra Lowe, director of The Women’s Center. “Sondra? Troy Adam. I need your help,” he said.

  “You at the station?”

  “Yes. I have…”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Good. I have a….” Troy realized he was talking to a dead line. That was Sondra, he thought. It occurred to him that once Sondra arrived he was going to have a hard time questioning Martha. He went to the break room and sent June back to her counter in the lobby. He took Martha back to the interrogation room next to the back door, where he could have her give a formal statement.

  Troy turned on the video and sound and explained things to Martha. She didn’t seem to much care. Once she had started talking, it all spilled out. Yes, they both beat the hell out of her any time either one of them got frustrated, which was often.

  June knocked on the door and Troy let her in. “Sondra is out in the lobby,” June said. “She’s hopping up and down.”

  Troy nodded. “Sit down with us and listen.” He gently slid into discussion of the murder of Barbara Gillispie and Martha said she heard Mark telling Judge Stider about it. Mark had raped the girl, threatening her with the gun. When Barbara fought back too much he had pulled the trigger. Mark and the judge had put the body into the boat, then gone off in the boat. The two of them had spent an entire night trying to clean up the car and the boat. The judge had told Mark that they needed to get rid of both of those because he didn’t think they would ever get all the blood out.”

  “Why didn’t they also get rid of the gun?” Troy asked.

  “You have Mark’s gun?”

  Troy nodded. “It was in a rental storage unit in Naples.”

  “Mark must have put it there. The Judge told him to get rid of the gun. Mark argued about it. He told The Judge nobody was ever going to find the body anyway, so there was no reason to throw away the gun. I could hear them when I lay on the floor in my bedroom and put my ear to the air conditioning duct.”

  “Clever,” Troy said.

  “Well, if they thought I was listening they beat me. But they never knew about the air conditioning thing. Anyway, The Judge and Mark had a big fight about it but I heard Mark say he’d thrown the gun into the swamp.”

  When they were done Troy asked June to stay with Martha. He went out to the lobby. Sondra Lowe was sitting, fidgeting, in a chair and she now leapt to her feet. She was an even five feet tall, a 45-ish blonde with pale blue eyes and short pixie haircut. She looked like a chuckle-brain teenager and she didn’t have a humorous bone in her body. “You told me you had a problem and when I get here you leave me cooling my heels?”

  “I didn’t tell you to run right over,” Troy said. “But I’m glad you’re here now. He outlined the situation. “Can you take her in at The Women’s Centre? And if you do, can you and I keep the Stider father and son from getting to her in there?”

  “That’s what we’re for, protecting abused women and children. But I see your point about the judge and his kid. I’ll take her now, but later today I’ll run her up to a place in Fort Myers. We sometimes swap off clients like this to get them out of the town where they have the problem.”

  “Think she’ll be safe there?”

  “Listen,” Sondra said. “They got security girls up there they keep in cages when they don’t need them. Leave this to me.”

  “Sondra, I think I’ll leave this to you.”

  Chapter 50

  Thursday, January 16

  Judge Hans Stider darkened Troy’s office door the next morning. “Where the fuck is my wife?” he hissed.

  Troy put down a report he had been reading. He opened the right top drawer of his desk, where he kept the Glock. “Did you wish to report a missing person or something?” he asked.

  “No, damn…well, yes. I suppose.” Stider sat in a visitor chair. “My wife wasn’t home when Mark and I came back from Naples last night. There was no supper ready. And she never came home.”

  Troy nodded. “Your house was dark and your pots were cold.”

  “An odd way to put it but…well…where is she? Can you find her?”

  “Where’s Mark right now?”

  “I don’t know. He bought a new car, a Jaguar this time.” Hans Stider laughed and shook his head. “That boy sure loves those sporty ones.”

  “Where does an unemployed ex-law student get the money to buy these cars?”

  “Well. He’s my boy. I mean…what are fathers for?”

  Maybe I was better off not having a father at all, if he would have been like this idiot, Troy thought.

  “Has Mark ever had a job?” he asked. “One where he earned his own money?”

  “Well, of course not. What for? He went from high school to college and from college to law school. I paid for his college, like all parents do.”

  Troy wondered, briefly, how it would have been to have had someone pay for his college. He had worked his way through school flipping burgers and clerking in a grocery store to earn extra.

  Troy decided this was a good time to light a fuse and see what happened. “Your wife is in a safe place,” he told Stider. “She came to me yesterday and gave me complete statements on how you and Mark had abused her, how Mark told you, in her hearing, that he had shot Barbara Gillispie, how you and Mark together took the girl’s body out on the boat, and how you and Mark then got rid of the car and the boat.”

  “That filthy bitch!” Stider shouted. “I’ll kill…”

  “I have the boat and the chart plotter,” Troy went on. “The chart plotter led me to Barbara Gillispie’s body. That’s her on my desk.” He pointed at the framed photo. Stider didn’t look that way. “I have the gun Mark used to kill her. He lied to you about throwing it into the swamp. I have all the DNA and fingerprint evidence anyone could ask for. I don’t think Mark is going to be driving that Jaguar very long. And you’re going to prison too.”

  “That stupid cow!” Stider hissed. “I should have dumped her long ago. I only kept her around so the boy could have a mother.”

  “You must have loved her at one time,” Troy said.

  “I needed a son to carry on the name. Once I had that, why keep the brood-mare?”

  “Romantic.”

  “Oh, bull. But I did keep a roof over her head all these years. Now she does this to me. Shows how little gratitude she has.”

  “You kept her penned up. No car. No money. Just a slave cook and housekeeper. You and your oxygen-wasting son used her for a punching bag every time you got mad at each other. By the way, I also have her medical records for all that.”

  Stider got to his feet and headed for the door. “I’m going to bury you in lawsuits. Like I said before.”

  “You’re in luck,” Troy said. “Prisons have law libraries.”

  Stider ignored that and walked out.

  Question now is, Troy asked himself, what’s Mark up to with his new wheels? He had confiscated Judge Stider’s revolver at the time of Stider’s arrest but there was nothing stopping the Stider menfolk from rearming. He looked up, online, gun stores in Collier County. There were more than a dozen, including some big-box discount stores. That was pointless, he thought. He called the Collier County Sheriff’s office, identified himself, and asked for the person who processed gun purchase requests. Florida had a 72-hour waiting period before a buyer could take a gun home. Concealed-weapons permits allowed the buyer to bypass that rule. Supposedly, shops ran the buyer’s name past local law enforcement. Troy knew that Mark did not have a CWP, as did Judge Stider, so Mark couldn’t just walk in, buy a gun, and walk out ready for action.

  He was in luck, as it happened. A sergeant DeLuca confirmed that one Mark Stider had, indeed, bought an AR-15 rifle i
n .223-caliber. He’d bought the gun two days before. DeLuca would release it on Friday after noontime.

  “Listen, sergeant, that boy is out on bond now, on a murder charge.” Troy was not, technically, lying, since ROR was a form of self-guaranteed bond. “He’s sworn to kill me. I confiscated a Desert Eagle from him and it’s the murder weapon.”

  “Nice gun. More than I can afford.”

  “Yeah, me too. Point is, I don’t need that kid running around my town with a rifle. Can you deny the purchase?”

  “Humm. I’m not sure. I can deny it if he is a convicted felon. I can deny it if he’s got a documented history of mental illness—as if anyone ever tells us about that. I’m not sure I can deny the purchase because you don’t like it.”

  “So what can you do, Sergeant DeLuca, to keep me from getting shot in the back?”

  “Hang on a second while I look up some criminals.”

  DeLuca tapped away on his computer. Troy waited. In a few minutes DeLuca was back. “Son of a gun,” he said.”

  “So to speak,” Troy said.

  “What? Oh. Hey, that was pretty clever of me wasn’t it? No, here’s what I just discovered. The request for Mark Stider was garbled a bit into Snider. I must have accidentally had a slip of the pen there. And we have a Snider in the system. Bad guy, too. I certainly don’t want Mr. Snider to have a rifle, and he’s a convicted felon.”

  “Clever.”

  “I thought so too. It won’t hold. They’ll just resubmit and I can’t go on looking stupid forever. But it can buy you a few days, maybe a week.”

  “I owe you. Case of beer’s on me next time I’m up that way.”

  “Hell. For a case of beer I’ll drive to Mangrove Bayou, if I can find it.”

  Chapter 51

  Friday, January 17

  Friday afternoon Troy’s phone line buzzed. It was Sergeant DeLuca.

  “Bad break,” DeLuca said. “That Mark Stider you called about yesterday came back for his gun. The waiting period was over. The store had the screwed-up paperwork like I told you I’d create.”

  “Good.”

  “Not so good. Instead of resubmitting the paperwork, Mark Stider cancelled the sale and left. A couple hours later some guy named Hans Stider walked in to the same gun store. You know him?”

  “Yep. He’s the boy’s father.”

  “Well, Hans bought a Ruger Super Redhawk revolver in .44 magnum.”

  “Could frighten off an Abrams tank with that. I’m sort of honored.”

  “Yeah. Honored. Right. That thing hits you, won’t be anything left but your high-top sneakers. The good news is, it’s the model with the short barrel. Beyond ten feet, more effective to just throw the gun. But he also bought a Ruger .223-caliber rifle, just in case you’re more than ten feet away. And he walked out of the store with them and with a box of ammo for each.”

  “I guess Hans likes Rugers,” Troy said. “I do too. How did all this happen?”

  “First off, this guy had a concealed-weapons permit.”

  “So he didn’t have to wait three days.”

  “That’s right. Second, I was out on street duty and the guy here signed off on the phone call from the store. By the time I knew about it, the guns were out the door and headed your way. My guess is that Hans was committing a ‘straw man’ purchase in buying a gun for someone not authorized to have one, or not have one so quickly.”

  “That would be my guess too. But you’ll never prove it. How do you know what Hans bought?”

  “We don’t keep records. State law. God forbid we violate anyone’s right to kill their fellow citizens while maintaining their privacy. I called the store and asked and I know the owner and he told me. But I’m not permitted to write that information down anywhere.”

  “Well, what’s done is done. Thanks for the warning.”

  “You’re welcome. So do I still get that case of beer for stopping the kid?”

  “Talk to me in two weeks. If I’m still around.”

  “Damn. So I guess that means no.” DeLuca hung up.

  Troy pushed the intercom button. “June, call all officers, on duty and off duty, to come in to the station right now.”

  “Something I need to know, Chief?”

  “I’ll tell you when they’re all here. Also, lock the front door and the town hall connecting door. Close the blinds in the lobby. And go in the break room to make those calls.

  “Jesus. Will do, Chief.”

  The rear door was always locked anyway but the station lobby had large windows facing the side street. Troy got up and closed all the blinds in his office, then did the evidence room and two offices on the north side between his corner office and the lobby. He went into the break room to close those blinds too.

  It took a half-hour to get everyone together. In the break room he told his troops about Judge Hans Stider and Mark Stider and the guns.

  “Mostly, I think they hate me, personally,” Troy said. “But if either of them sees a Mangrove Bayou police officer, no telling what they’ll do. No telling what they’ll do anyway, especially that kid.”

  “Why the hell aren’t those two in jail?” Tom VanDyke asked.

  “They’re model citizens, apparently,” Troy said. “They didn’t even have to put up bail. They were released ROR. It’s good to be a judge. Or, I suppose, to be the son of a judge.”

  “How are they able to get more weapons even after being arrested?” Tom asked.

  “They’re not yet convicted of anything. The Second Amendment says they might want to form their own well-regulated militia sometime, and so they have the right to bear arms.”

  “Yeah, well those aren’t muskets and black-powder pistols they bought,” Bubba Johns said.

  Troy had to smile. “No,” he said, “they’re not. Ain’t modern technology grand? Count your blessings. If the Florida legislature got any more scared of the gun lobby than they are already, the Stiders would have been buying anti-tank weapons.”

  “Probably getting those outta some guy’s trunk in Miami,” Dominique Reiss said.

  Troy laughed. “Probably. Got to say one thing for the Stiders. They buy quality. None of that cheap Brazilian junk off some drug dealer.

  “So here’s what we do,” Troy said. “First, you’re all on duty as of now. I’ll try to get some of you some sleep starting at midnight, and then we’ll rotate. You won’t wear uniforms. Everyone in civvies. Wear your Kevlar vests and take your duty belts and guns but wear some kind of windbreaker or whatever so they’re not so obvious. Drive your own cars; we’ll leave the Suburbans in the lot out back; they make too-easy targets for someone wanting to ambush one of us.

  “I’ll assign three of you to watch the schools during the day. At least they’re all together, so that will be simpler. And two of you will watch The Woman’s Centre. Martha Stider isn’t in there but Judge Stider doesn’t know that.”

  “The schools?” Domino said? “You don’t really…”

  “No, I don’t. But let’s be safe. One of you on the schools will have one department rifle. One of you at The Women’s Centre will take the other. Same with the shotguns from the trucks.”

  “Why would Mark Stider go back to his old school?” Bubba Johns said.

  “I can’t imagine why,” Troy said. “But too many kids have died in past years because some cops could not imagine some mental case would go to a school. You see either Stider go near those schools, you stop him. Or them.”

  “Stop?” Bubba said. “What does that mean.”

  Troy looked at all of them, around the table. “It means tell them to halt and hit the ground spread-eagled and you call for backup. And kill the sons of bitches if they so much as twitch. Am I clear on this?”

  His officers all looked at one another. For the first time they looked a little scared.

  “I’ll assign two of you to monitor the Stiders if we can catch them at home. Here are the Stiders’ vehicle descriptions.”

  Troy passed out printed descriptions
of the Mercedes SUV and its plate. He had pulled the record for Mark’s new Jaguar and printed that description too. “Of course, it’s got the paper dealer tag still,” Troy said.

  “What are we supposed to do when we see them, Chief?” Milo asked. “Assuming they’re not attacking school kids.”

  “Nothing unless you see them breaking even the tiniest law we could arrest them for. One of them drops a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, I want to know about it. But don’t try to take them one-on-one. Try not to let them see you. Don’t be a hero. Stay away from them. Report and follow. We’ll work it out as we go so that we don’t have all of us trooping along in a pack a block back from Judge Stider as he goes to eat his lunch in some restaurant. It’s mid-season, so there are a lot of people on the streets to give us concealment. The bad news is that there are a lot of people on the streets.”

  “What about our regular enforcement?” Juan Valdez asked.

  “I’ll stay here in the station to be in overall charge and sort of patrol around the immediate vicinity until something interesting happens.”

  “You mean you’re gonna stroll around acting like the tin duck in a shooting gallery,” Bubba said. “That’s stupid. The ducky gets knocked over and the shooter wins the little prize.”

  “You’re probably right, Bubba. But the ducky isn’t looking for the shooter. The ducky doesn’t dodge and the ducky doesn’t shoot back.

  “Still, if anything happens to me, Juan takes over. Juan will take the other department cell with him. June, you will go home and stay there.

  “But…

  “No buts about it. One of the Stider clan smashes out a window and breaks in here, what would you do about it? You aren’t a law enforcement officer and you’re not armed. No, go home.”

  “Last thing. In the Army we said we had to move, shoot and communicate. I want you out there moving and communicating. I hope you won’t have to do any shooting. But, if you do, do it well. I’ve made you all practice once a month with handguns, shotguns and the rifles. If you have to use one, remember your training.”

  They scattered, some to change out of uniforms, and one by one the private cars drove off from the rear parking lot.