Dead Reckoning (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 1)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  Evan looked out at the lake. The boat and marker buoys floated on the water far from where he had expected to see them. He noticed the white canopies on the shore, also not where he thought they would be, and realized he ran the risk of getting himself lost if he wandered too far from the lake.

  He wasn’t sure how best to answer Scruggs. He had no way of knowing if the man’s information was of any value at all. He had received several dozen tips so far and none had led him anywhere. He hadn’t had to haggle for that information, and didn’t believe he should have to trade for information that ought to be given freely.

  Of course, should and ought were concepts that didn’t often figure heavily in a murder investigation. If people behaved as they were supposed to, there wouldn’t be any murder investigations.

  Evan said, “Mr. Scruggs, if you had an understanding with Hutch, I believe I can honor that as well. If your daughter has trouble with her ex, she can come to me.”

  “I don’t want her to have to come to you!” Scruggs yelled, or tried to yell. It set off another coughing spell, which he choked down to finish his thought. “I want you to be there for her. I want you to make sure folks know that my girl has got someone looking out for her.”

  Evan waited, making sure Scruggs was finished. Then he said, “I can do that, Mr. Scruggs. I can do that with significantly more focus once I’ve cleared Hutch’s murder. If you know something about that, you need to tell me.”

  Scruggs made a sound that could have been a growl, or a grumble, or maybe he was just suppressing another cough, Evan couldn’t tell. Then he said, “Fine, alright, here’s the deal. There’s a crew of guys looking to move some, uh, product up the coast. They’ve been scouting the area the last few months, just getting the lay of the land, mostly, right? And these guys have been getting local charter guys to take them out, show ‘em the area.”

  Evan waited, walking a bit farther into the shade of the trees, while Scruggs choked back another coughing fit.

  “This crew, folks call ‘em the Tallahassee Ten. They didn’t have nothin’ to do with killing Hutch. In fact, the only reason I heard any of this is I know some guys that were hoping the Tens were gonna want to move their stuff through this area, were hoping to get in on a piece of it, right? But now they’re all pissed ‘cause once Hutch got shot the Tens decided it was way too hot to make any moves anywhere near here. A murdered sheriff is real bad for business. You with me so far?”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Evan said. He was walking again, following a path along the water’s edge. Something wriggled away from him just beneath the lake’s dark surface, a frog or small snake, perhaps.

  “Well, here’s the inside info; the Tens had pulled out already, before Hutch got shot. They got spooked because they found out that their charter guy was working as a CI for Hutch. He was GPS’ing all their routes and stops, collecting names and itineraries, and passing all of it straight to the sheriff. And that guy works out of the marina right here in Port Saint Joe.”

  Evan hadn’t heard a peep about this from Hutchins, but he knew the Sheriff kept some of his cards very close. He asked, “So, you think maybe the Tallahassee Ten killed the sheriff because he knew too much about them?”

  “No! I just told you, the Tens didn’t do it. They wouldn’t have got nothing from killing the sheriff except more heat. These guys aren’t idiots,” Scruggs said. “It was the charter guy, must have been. He got squeezed in the middle – rock and a hard place sort of thing I reckon. Hutch made some deal with that guy, and it went bad, and the kid shot him. Simple as that.”

  “Okay,” Evan said, stepping over a fallen pine bough.

  “You start working as a CI, you’re putting your butt on the line, big time. The ‘C’ in CI stands for confidential. That means the sheriff’s got to keep your identity secret. That’s the deal. If I ever took a CI contract and the cop screwed up and leak my info to the Tens, I’d put a bullet in that dude’s head faster than he could turn around. It’s the way the game is played, man. You get me?”

  “You’re telling me you believe the shooter was a charter boat captain operating out of the Port St. Joe marina?”

  “It’s a kid they call MacMac. Probably thinking there’s no way he could have done it, but go check it out. Get into Hutch’s CI files. You’ll see. He’s your man.”

  MacMac was Mac McMillian, a cocky blond beach bum who lived on his boat and paid the monthly mooring fee by taking tourists fishing. Calling him a charter boat captain was a bit of a stretch. Thinking he had somehow got Sheriff Hutchins to kneel down and take a bullet in the head was a giant flying leap. On the other hand, Evan remembered seeing his number several times on Hutch’s cell records, which was odd. MacMac did not seem like the type of guy Hutch was likely to socialize with, and Hutch had his own boat, had no need of a charter service.

  Evan thanked Scruggs for the information and assured him the he’d keep a sharp eye on Jordan, then clicked off. Across the expanse of dark water, a diver surfaced. He held a short discourse with his partner in the boat, both shaking their heads, then the diver climbed aboard. A moment later, the boat slowly motored to shore. Evan felt his heart sinking.

  An old pine had fallen and now lay sideways across the path, jutting out over the lake. A spinning lure and a tangle of monofilament line dangled from one branch. Evan sat down on the log, with his back against the trunk of a cypress, and tapped a cigarette out of his pack. As he lit it, he thought about what Paula had said about wasting time. Wasting time was all well and good until you ran out of the stuff. He wondered if that was what Hutch had been thinking in his last moments. His mind started trying to connect that idea with decisions he would soon need to make about Hannah, but thoughts like that were deeper and blacker than this lake, and too dark to consider just now.

  He drew the smoke in, watching the cherry flare, then rolled his head back until it rested against the cypress. That’s when he saw the .45 aimed directly at his face.

  SIXTEEN

  EVAN CHOKED, coughing up the lung-full of smoke he had just inhaled. Three different thoughts stamped themselves into his mind at the same instant, but none of them made sense.

  There was no need to duck for cover or draw his weapon, as his reflexes indicated he should. The gun was aimed at him, but there was no one to pull the trigger; nothing waited behind it but tree limbs and clear blue sky. The pistol was tangled in a clump of Spanish moss, snagged on a low-hanging pine bough about ten feet up in the air.

  Evan stared at it for a long moment, bemused almost to the point of being mesmerized. He understood what he was looking at, but the ramifications were staggering. The killer had attempted to throw the murder weapon into the lake, but somehow managed to hook it on this overhang instead. Fishing lures festooned that branch, and those around it. The shooter had made the same mistake that countless anglers had made before him, casting a little too high.

  But there would have been no splash. The killer should have realized the gun didn’t go into the lake. There’s no way he would have gone to the trouble of walking the gun all the way out here just to leave it hanging in the tree, Evan thought.

  “But there was a splash…” he whispered to himself, because the shooter didn’t just throw his gun, he would also have thrown Hutchins’s gun, and his cell phone. Evan let his mind play through the scenario.

  After shooting Hutch, the killer wanted to get rid of the weapon, but knew better than to toss it in the lake near the body. Evan looked across to where the dive team was enjoying their lunch break. He could hear them laughing and talking around the table, though he was too far to make out any words. At the rate they had been going, it would have taken weeks to search from their current location to this spot.

  So, after the killer shot Hutch, he came all the way down here to throw the guns, phones, and anything else that might cause him trouble. Maybe enough of that stuff hit the water that the killer didn’t realize the actual murder weapon had not gone into the lake. Or maybe he noticed,
but couldn’t find it in the dark. The killer was nervous, anxious to get out of the area, and who would have guessed that a gun tossed into a lake could end up caught in a tree? It was almost ridiculous enough for Evan to start laughing…almost.

  Instead, he dialed Trigg, intending to ask her to bring the dive team across to his location to see what else the killer had tossed, and to collect the pistol from the tree. The call didn’t go through. Evan was about to try again when he saw the ‘no service’ indicator in the upper corner of his phone. He frowned at it. Scruggs had called not twenty minutes ago, where had the signal dropped?

  Evan didn’t want to walk away from the weapon. An uncharacteristic superstition had gripped him, a surety that if he took his eyes off that improbably suspended weapon, it would disappear, or he would be unable to find it when he returned with the evidence tech. He didn’t want to disrupt any evidentiary value by collecting the gun himself. And he didn’t want to fall in the lake, which was the likely outcome if he attempted to climb up the tree to retrieve the gun.

  He tried the cell again, and again it told him there was no service. Evan looked up at the pistol, a black Glock, .45 caliber. Sunlight winked and twinkled through the thick canopy. It flashed off lazy ripples in the black water.

  Evan sighed, and felt a shiver go up his spine. He’d run into plenty of sharks in his time, had been caught in more than one rip current, been bitten by a barracuda, and stepped on a homicidal sea urchin down in St. Thomas. He understood the dangers of salt water, but loved it all the same.

  He didn’t understand fresh water, or the smelly crap people called fresh water. He didn’t know the snakes that were reportedly everywhere, or which ones were venomous. He didn’t trust the sticky, heavy, hairy crap at the bottom of inland waters. He was going in anyway, just a little.

  He slipped out of his shoes and socks, hiked up his pant legs and waded out into the water, just far enough to be in full sunlight. A million years’ worth of decomposition squished up between his toes, and he wondered where he’d get new feet.

  He eyeballed the angle of his shadow, calculated the approximate position of the sun, then used the flat glass face of his cell phone to flash sunlight across the lake at Paula and the deputies gathered at her table.

  He could see them starting to notice; one head turned, then another, but Evan wasn’t sure if they would understand his intent. He was trying to remember if he knew enough Morse Code to try that. He could Google it on his phone if he had service. But, of course, if he had service he wouldn’t need to. He was relieved beyond measure when his phone rang.

  “What are you doing?” Paula asked when Evan answered.

  “Um,” Evan said, “Trying to communicate. With you.”

  “I see,” she said. “Anything in particular, or are you just going for a merit badge?’”

  “My phone said no service. I tried to call a few times, but…you know, nothing.”

  “Yeah, there’s only the one cell tower out here. It doesn’t usually get much use, but with all the deputies and reporters, there’s not enough band width for all the calls and texts and emails. You got a fifty-fifty chance of getting through. What did you call about, anyway? And what are you doing all the way over there?”

  Evan nearly forgot what he had called about. What Paula told him about the cell tower was suddenly as important as the recovered murder weapon. A single cell tower for the whole area, a tower that rarely saw much traffic, could narrow a very long list of possible suspects down to maybe three or four, maybe one or two.

  “Evan?” she prompted

  “Oh, right,” he said. “I found the gun.”

  Lunch was over. Within minutes of Evan’s call, Paula Trigg and all four divers arrived at Evan’s location. Less than half an hour after that, a diver located Hutchins’s revolver. A total of four cell phones were recovered from that area over the following two hours, as well as a few unrelated artifacts of backwater Florida. Two of the phones were later found to belong to Hutchins, his work phone and his personal phone. The other two turned out to be burners.

  It took several attempts to retrieve the tree-bound Glock, and one deputy did end up falling in the lake during the process, but they eventually managed to get it bagged without it going into the water first.

  It was sneaking up on two o’clock, the minutes slipping by almost unnoticed, by the time all these pieces had been recovered, documented and packaged for transport. Evan felt the momentum of the case suddenly shifting in his favor.

  He called Marlene. It took six tries before the call went through. He informed her that he wouldn’t be able to make it to her house for their two o’clock meeting. He apologized and assured her that he would come by the following day. She thanked him for the call, sounding just as dazed and vacant as she had that morning, but Evan felt a good deal better than he had on his way out there.

  He was beginning to doubt that the probable domestic abuse had anything to do with the case. If Beckett had been involved, Evan felt pretty sure he wouldn’t have made such a clumsy mistake with the gun. And the depth of Marlene’s distress argued against her willing participation in the murder. Evan felt that the visit with her was no longer the top priority in the investigation. He did need to know one thing, though, and he felt comfortable asking this over the phone.

  “Marlene,” he said, “when was the last time you saw Hutch’s boat?”

  She hesitated for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice carried more emotion than Evan had heard in it all day. “He took me out in it. Last Wednesday. Took the afternoon off work and…” she trailed off. Evan heard sniffling. Then she finished, “We stayed out until after dark. It was nice. Sunset on the water. We had a fish he caught. It was very nice.”

  “That was Wednesday?” Evan asked. “Six days ago?”

  “Was it only six?” Marlene said, “I guess it was just six days ago.”

  “Ma’am,” Evan asked, “do you know where his boat is now?”

  “Why, I’m certain it’s at the marina,” she said. “That’s the only place it ever is if he’s not on it. Sometimes it’s here at the house. But not now. It must be at the marina, isn’t it?” She had slipped back into her detached voice.

  Evan assured her it was nothing to concern herself with, told her he would visit her the next day, then clicked off. He scratched some notes on his pad, then called Goff…or tried to, anyway. After the third failed attempt, he decided to postpone the call and instead went to check on Paula’s progress.

  The divers had been eager to go under, once the first phone had been recovered, but now that they had found everything that Evan had hoped to find, their enthusiasm had waned. No one complained when he told them to pack it in. After a few quick instructions to the crew and a brief conference with Paula, Evan hopped in his car and headed down Highway 71, back to the office. Halfway there, he managed to get a signal and called Goff. He asked Goff to put out a BOLO on Sheriff Hutchins’s boat, a 1989 twenty-three-foot Sea Ox, white, with a two-foot diameter Florida Gators decal on both sides of the bow. Then he asked Goff to pull up all the cell records they had received.

  Paula had no trouble finding finger prints on Hutchins’s phones, even after three days under water, but all the prints belonged to Hutchins. The burners, his revolver, and the Glock had all been wiped clean. All four sim cards were missing from the phones. The serial number on the Glock had not only been filed off, but a line of X’s had been stamped into the bare metal where it had been. Paula explained that this would make it almost impossible to recover the numbers through any of the common forensics tricks.

  This was a disappointment, but in light of the day’s developments, not a major one. Paula packaged the Glock and prepped it to be transported to the ballistics lab in Tallahassee where it would be tested to confirm that it was, in fact, the murder weapon, and to attempt to match it with any other shootings in the data base.

  Evan felt like celebrating. He might go home that night and smile at the cat.

>   SEVENTEEN

  “SHERIFF CALDWELL? THIS IS Officer Cal Rochester over here at Panama City Police. I have that boat you’re looking for.”

  Evan’s eyes shot to his clock. It was just past four and the BOLO had been issued less than two hours ago. “That was fast,” he said. “Listen, can you keep an eye on it until I arrive, should be under an hour. If you see anyone aboard, hang onto them until I get there.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, followed by an uhhhh… sound, suggesting Rochester was confused. When he finally spoke, he said, “No, I mean I have the boat. I bought it from Hutch a couple weeks ago, just picked it up Thursday afternoon.”

  This time it was Evan who was thoroughly confused and unable to respond for a moment.

  “Sheriff?” Rochester asked, “You there?”

  “Yes,” Evan said. In addition to the unexpected status of the boat, Evan still felt uneasy about being addressed as Sherriff. “So, you have the boat in your possession? You bought it from Hutchins?”

  “Yes sir,” Rochester affirmed. “I’ve been hounding him for years to sell me that boat. Been kind of a joke between us for a while. Then a couple weeks ago he says, ‘Hey, Roach, you really want to buy that boat? It’s yours, man.’ He named the price and I paid it, simple as that. He wrote me a bill of sale, if you want to see it.”

  “Well, I guess I better have a look at that,” Evan said, feeling almost as dazed as Marlene had sounded. “How much did he sell it for?”

  “Eighty-five hundred. Probably could have got ten for it, but like I said, I got the buddy discount. I doubt he would have sold it to anybody else.”

  There had been no indication in Hutchins financial statements that he had received that much money anytime in recent months. Evan made a note to re-examine the financials, but had a hunch the money wouldn’t turn up there. He asked, “Did you pay him in cash?”

  Rochester hesitated. When he spoke, his voice carried a hint of caution. “As a matter of fact, it was cash…took it out of my boat fund. I’ve been saving up for years. You can check. Man, I didn’t have anything to do with what happened out there, brother. No one in all the Panhandle would believe I had anything to do with that. Hutch was one of my best friends, man.”