Fallen Tide: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 8)

by Wayne Stinnett

  “What caused that?” I asked, returning the little magnifying glass.

  “Chain saw, most likely,” Doc replied, leaning in closer.

  “A chain saw?” I asked. “I thought that only happened in movies or TV.”

  “Happens more than you’d think,” the old man said. “There’s a whole science on the many cutting tools used to dismember a body. The blade must have bounced off the bone with the first attempt.”

  Looking at the bone without the magnifying glass, the notch was barely visible, and he’d found it without the glass. “What else do you see, Doc?”

  The old man grinned. “Everything, Jesse. I’ve seen everything.” He bent over the end of the bone and looked again, handing me the magnifying glass. “Look here. See that small spur on the back side of the bone?”

  I looked through the glass at the end of the bone, where it’d been cut. “Yeah, I didn’t notice it before.”

  “You do much carpentry, Jesse?”

  “Some. Why?”

  “When you cut a two-by-four with a power saw, you sometimes leave a spur, almost always on the end that’s supported, when the other end falls off.”

  “I thought you said chain saw, Doc?”

  He looked at me with eyes twinkling the way a good teacher’s would, when a pupil grasps a concept. “Yes, I did. The length of the spur is dependent on the amount of leverage applied to the blade. With a circular saw, the weight of the tool and the push of your hand puts most of the force on the severed end. If you use a lightweight handsaw, you rarely have a spur, or it’s very small. With a power saw, or in this case, a chain saw, you’re able to apply more leverage, snapping the board when the blade is still further from the end.”

  “A good argument for using hand tools,” I said, handing the glass back once more. “But wouldn’t the pressure exerted with a chain saw be directly on the cut?”

  “You have a sharp mind,” Doc said with a quick smile. “Once I get this back to the lab, I think I’ll be able to confirm why the spur is where it is.”

  Turning to Marty, he said, “Call it in, son. Desecration of a corpse at the very least, but I’m guessing this happened during the commission of a homicide. White or Hispanic male, thirties or forties, not married, close to six feet tall and muscular. Blue-collar type, probably made his living on the water.”

  The man’s head slumped forward as his body sagged. Jerking back upright, he looked around the dark confines and wondered how long they’d been held. It’d probably been an hour since he’d awakened with a terrible throbbing in his head, but he couldn’t be sure, as he kept nodding off. Darius Minnich was unaccustomed to such harsh treatment. He looked over at his wife of six years. Celia was even less accustomed.

  Darius was twenty-five years older than his second wife. She’d been a research assistant with his company when they’d first met. CephaloTech was struggling and near bankruptcy then. His first wife had left him, filed for divorce, and taken nearly everything he had, leaving him destitute and almost penniless.

  Two months after the divorce was final, came the company’s big breakthrough in their fiber-optic suit technology. Her lawyer had been good, but had neglected to attach future earnings to the alimony payment, and Darius became a fifty-two-year-old multimillionaire overnight. His alimony payment now represented less than one percent of his income, and there was nothing she or her lawyer could do about it.

  Celia had been a nubile twenty-seven-year-old lab assistant at the time. Tall, blonde, and shapely, with a quick mind and wit, she knew what she wanted in life, and suddenly her newly-single boss had it. Some women peak in their early twenties, but not Darius’s trophy wife. At thirty-three, she was even more beautiful than the night she’d easily seduced him in the lab, after the big announcement of the DoD contract and the subsequent celebration. They were married two weeks after that. Darius had even sent his ex-wife an invitation to the wedding. It was held on the exclusive private island of Petit Saint Vincent, in the Lesser Antilles. She didn’t come.

  Celia was still passed out. Like Darius, her feet were tied to a post and her arms to a crossbeam at shoulder height. Her blouse was torn at the shoulder. She’d fought back against their attackers with a vengeance. The dried blood on the left shoulder of her light green blouse proved it. It had come from a gash in her forehead where one of their attackers had hit her with the butt of an assault rifle.

  Darius calculated that they’d been trussed up like this for nearly a full day. However, with no windows in the dark and musty room they were in, he couldn’t be certain. How long they’d been knocked out before getting here, he couldn’t even guess at. His mouth was parched, his lips cracked and dry. Their captors had gassed them shortly after the attack, and the effect of the gas was only now dissipating. It could have been hours or days, he had no way of knowing.

  Hearing a moan, he looked to his left and saw that Celia was just beginning to come around. He’d woken twice that he knew of since the attack, but Celia had already been beaten unconscious before they were gassed. He had no idea if she’d awakened before now.

  “Celia,” Darius whispered, though he didn’t know why. “Are you okay?”

  Slowly, she lifted her head, her normally lustrous blond hair now matted with blood and hanging down over her face. When she tried to shake her hair back, she winced in pain. “Yeah, I think so. Where are we?”

  “I don’t know. All I remember is someone putting something like an oxygen mask over both our faces right after one of them hit you.”

  Celia started to say something more, but just then a door opened just twenty feet in front of them. The brilliant glare from outside hurt both their eyes, and they tried to turn away as two men walked in, one carrying a large object in his right hand. The door slammed shut, the hollow ring echoing throughout the room.

  “I see you are awake,” one of the men said, with a slight accent Darius couldn’t place.

  He stopped a few feet in front of Darius. The other man stood off to his right, slightly behind the first man. Darius could no longer see anything, his eyes blinded by the sudden light. He tried to squint to see the man, when suddenly the beam from a flashlight blinded him again.

  “You have something I need,” the man said. “You will make arrangements for it to be delivered to me electronically.”

  Turning his head from side to side, trying to avoid the bright light, Darius finally lowered his head. “I have no idea what you want.”

  “Come now, Mister Minnich. You have no idea?” He crossed over to Celia and took a handful of hair in his hand and jerked her head up, causing her to scream in pain. “Go ahead and scream, whore!” the man yelled. “Scream all you want, nobody will hear you. Oleg, look at her. She is beautiful, no?”

  “Keep your hands off my wife,” Darius grunted.

  “Or what, pindos?” the man snarled, ripping Celia’s blouse open, scattering pearl buttons across the dirt floor. “I give the orders here.” The man pulled aside the tattered blouse, exposing Celia’s firm belly and frilly satin bra. “Oleg, how much do you think this whore will bring?”

  “Half a million rubles, easy,” the man holding the flashlight replied, with a grunt. “If it survives.”

  “What do you want from us?” Darius yelled.

  The man released Celia’s hair and her head slumped back down. He took the flashlight from Oleg and stepped over in front of Darius. Pulling his head up by the hair, the man shined the light in Darius’s face. “Your individual stealth technology. All of it.”

  “No!” Darius replied. “I won’t do it. I can’t. You may as well just kill me.”

  “Oh, I am not going to kill you, Mister Minnich. However, you may wish yourself dead in the very near future.” The man released Darius and stepped back. “Oleg? What do you think a one-armed whore will bring?”

  Darius heard a sputtering sound, followed quickly by a loud roar. The man turned the flashlight toward Oleg. Darius watched in horror as Oleg wielded a chain saw and revv
ed the engine, filling the small confines of the room with acrid oil smoke. Oleg slowly approached Celia, raising the chain saw to shoulder level.

  Somewhere in the back of Darius’s mind, a memory exploded into clarity. Just after the mask had been placed over his face, he had seen this same man using the same chain saw to dismember one of Darius’s crewmen on the yacht. The crewman was alive and awake when it happened.

  “Stop!” Darius yelled, the pain and revulsion stinging his mind. “I’ll tell you anything, give you anything you want! Just don’t hurt my wife!”

  By midafternoon, I was sitting at my favorite watering hole, the Rusty Anchor, in Marathon. Being a Friday, I was there to catch up on the coconut telegraph and wait for my girlfriend, Linda. She works for FDLE, out of their Miami office, and always leaves work early on Friday to meet me here and spend the weekend on the island.

  “I haven’t heard of anyone missing, bro,” Rusty said. “And if any watermen in the area were missing, I’d know about it.”

  It was true. If anything of significance happened in the Middle Keys, Rusty Thurman would know about it within hours. Half a day at most, for the rest of the island chain. I’d known Rusty all of my adult life. We’d served together in the Corps until he got out after his first tour. A short man, barely five and a half feet tall, he weighed a good three hundred pounds, but had recently started working to get some of the weight off. It never seemed to slow him down, though.

  “Doc Fredric feels pretty certain he was a waterman,” I said. “Maybe a crewman from a boat that was passing through?”

  “How could he tell that from just an arm?” Rusty asked.

  “Not only that, but he could tell his height and build and what kind of saw was used to cut the arm off,” I replied.

  “Could be a cruiser, man,” Jimmy said. “Wouldn’t be the first time a boat was taken by pirates. But chopping off arms isn’t their thing. Usually, it’s just a bullet to the head and a shove over the transom.”

  Jimmy used to be my first mate, but now he works for a fly fishing school for kids. He still mates for me from time to time, though. Not that I really needed a mate, since I’d cut back so much on charters. A couple of decades younger than me and Rusty, Jimmy was very wise and in tune with everything around him. He claimed to have an old soul.

  “Doc said he’d call me if he learned anything more. Outside of what I already told you, that’s pretty much it.”

  “This the weekend that Kim’s coming home?” Rusty asked.

  “No, Marty’s probably headed up there right now. The arm caused him to get a late start.”

  “Then that ain’t his pickup pulling into the lot?” Rusty asked, nodding toward the window.

  Turning on my stool, I looked outside to see Marty climbing out of his Dodge pickup. He was still in uniform and came straight to the door. He paused just inside, taking off his sunglasses.

  “Thought you’d be halfway to Miami by now,” I said as he crossed over to the bar.

  “Change of plans. The sheriff assigned me the arm case and now I’m working the weekend.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?” Rusty asked.

  “I guess so,” Marty replied, sitting down next to me and accepting the bottle of water from Rusty. “At least, it would be if I could find out who the guy was and who did it. I mean, there’s little chance of that, with nothing but an arm to go on. At least he authorized overtime. That never hurts. Kim said she’d come down here instead. Should be here in less than an hour.”

  “Anything come back on the guy’s prints, man?” Jimmy asked.

  “Nothing, but IAFIS computers are sometimes slow.” IAFIS is the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a vast network of computers that store criminal fingerprints and can match them a million times faster than by eye.

  “So, if you’re working this weekend, why’s Kim coming here?” I asked. “Not that I don’t want to see my daughter, but you guys seem to have worked out a schedule.”

  Marty grinned, uncomfortably. He still wasn’t at ease talking about his relationship with my youngest daughter. But, Kim’s eighteen now and he’s only a couple of years older.

  “Yeah, she likes things scheduled,” he said. “I think she’s more concerned, because it was you that found the arm, though.”

  Just then the door opened and we all turned toward it. Seeing Linda’s figure silhouetted against the still-bright afternoon sun, I rose and met her halfway.

  “Why is it always such a chore to get out of Miami on a Friday?” she asked, wrapping her arms around my neck and kissing me deeply.

  I took Linda’s hand and led her to the bar, where Rusty already had a cold Michelob Ultra on a coaster for her. “’Cause everyone and their grandma wants to get outta there,” he said. “Good to see ya again, Agent Rosales.”

  Linda smiled at Rusty. “So very nice to see you as well, Mister Thurman.”

  Jimmy and Marty both shifted over a stool, allowing Linda room next to me at the end of the bar. “What are you doing here in uniform, Marty?” Linda asked as she slid onto the stool. “Shouldn’t you be in Gainesville this weekend?”

  “I found an arm out on Harbor Channel this morning,” I said. “Marty’s been assigned the case.”

  She turned her head quickly toward me, tossing her auburn brown hair over her shoulder, concern in her dark smoky eyes. “You found an arm?”

  “What was left of one, anyway,” I replied. “The coroner suspects murder, said it was cut off with a chain saw.”

  Though she was a seasoned special agent for the state’s top law enforcement agency, she visibly shuddered, but quickly gathered herself and turned to Marty. “An arm from a John Doe? Any leads?”

  “Nothing yet,” the young deputy replied. “I think the sheriff only gave me the case because none of the investigators wanted it. Hard to find out whodunit if you don’t have a whole body.”

  “True,” she said, “but if you do, it’d be a big step up for your career.”

  “Think so?” Marty asked.

  “Absolutely. If I can help in any way, just ask. In fact, I met a woman up in Tallahassee who is doing forensic research on this very subject. I’m sure she’d love to come down, consult with you and examine the limb. Want me to call her?”

  “I don’t have the authority to hire outsiders,” Marty said.

  “I doubt you’d have to. She’s flown all over the country on her own dime to research dismemberment cases.”

  “Doc Fredric seems pretty sure it was a chain saw,” I offered.

  “He’s good, but I bet this woman could tell what kind of chain saw was used and if the person who did it was right- or left-handed. And if you ever locate the saw, she could match the tool marks in the blade to the bone, at a microscopic level, and say for certain it was or wasn’t that particular saw.”

  “They can do that?” Marty asked.

  “Sure,” Linda replied. “There was a time that matching a bullet to a specific gun was considered hokey science.”

  The door opened again and it was Marty’s turn to meet Kim halfway. They hugged and joined us at the bar, where Kim gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Think you can keep my boyfriend away from me by getting him involved in a murder case, Dad?”

  I raised both hands defensively. “Whoa, now. I’m not the sheriff.”

  “I’m just messing with you,” she said with a wink and a punch to the shoulder. “I know you like Marty.”

  Kim saying that seemed to please the young man. “We’ll have a little time. The sheriff won’t make me work too many hours.”

  Linda looked back toward me and asked, “So what’s on the agenda for the weekend?”

  “Why don’t we all go fishing?” I suggested. “The Revenge hasn’t been away from the dock in two weeks. You busy, Jimmy?”

  “Not a bit, dude. We just graduated a class the other day, and the next one’s not due to start until Monday. I can get all my stuff ready for it on Sunday.”

&nbs
p; “I’m meeting Doc Fredric in an hour,” Marty said. “Then I’ll be busy all day tomorrow, checking missing persons all across the state. Hopefully he can help ID the guy.”

  “I’ll go,” Kim said to me. “If Marty’s gonna be working, I want to fish.”

  The others laughed and Rusty said, “At least one apple didn’t roll far. Count me in, too. Rufus can handle things here for half a day.”

  Rufus is Rusty’s chef. An older guy, maybe mid- to late sixties, nobody really knows for sure. Once you start talking to him, it just feels unseemly to ask. Several years ago, just after his wife passed away, he’d retired from his job as the head chef of a five-star resort on his home island of Jamaica. He’d spent part of his youth here in the Keys and returned about the same time I retired from the Marine Corps and came here to live.

  Finishing her beer, Linda declined another. “Are we ready?” she asked, standing up. “I’m anxious to get away from civilization.”

  Kim rose and gave Marty a quick kiss. “Me too. But you’ll be out later this evening?”

  Marty glanced at me and I gave him a slight nod. He smiled and rose from his stool, giving her a quick hug. “Sure, Kim. I’ll see you then.”

  As he started for the door, Linda said, “I’ll get in touch with my forensics friend and have her call you.”

  Standing up, I said to Rusty and Jimmy, “About zero seven hundred?”

  “You got it, bro. We can have breakfast here before we head out on the blue.”

  “See ya in the morning, dude,” Jimmy replied.

  As Marty made his way to his pickup, the three of us went down to the dock, untied the Knot L-8, and climbed aboard. Carl and I had built her last winter and spring. All wood and a throwback design, with two big inboard V-twin engines for power, she turned heads everywhere.

  All three of us got in the forward cockpit and I started the engines. We’d found that she was actually more economical to operate than either Carl’s Grady-White or my big Winter center console, and she could run circles around either. More efficient as a people mover, anyway. What she lacked in cargo-carrying capacity, she more than made up for in looks. I shoved the bow away from the dock and engaged the transmissions.