Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  As Sugar inquired about the clothing Abigail Bates was wearing when her body was found, Mary stared down at her telephone, and her right hand inched toward it as if she was considering summoning security.

  Sugarman waited, staring at the top of Mary Suarez’s head. He was trying his damnedest to give the woman the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was weak on social skills. Bashful, tongue-tied.

  “May I assume your office returned Ms. Bates’s property to the next of kin?”

  She flicked her eyes up and took him in. No, not bashful—something else entirely. She studied the baseball cap he was holding. She probably assumed he’d doffed it in a display of servitude.

  Sugarman bulled ahead.

  “So I’m asking if you kept any record of those articles in your evidence package? Photos of her clothes, jewelry, things of that nature.”

  The woman clucked her tongue three times. “Are you insinuating this office is less than professional?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m not doing that.”

  “Well, of course we keep records of the deceased’s possessions.”

  Sugarman shrugged.

  “I need to take a look.”

  Before she could refuse, Sugar said, “As Dillard told you, I’m here to double-check the sheriff’s work. Something doesn’t smell right.”

  “Well, it’s about time someone double-checked that woman.”

  Mary Suarez pushed back her chair, got up, and tramped into an adjoining office. In half a minute she returned with a red file folder. She slapped it down on the edge of the desk and stepped back out of Sugarman’s range as if sharing his breathing space might pose a health risk.

  Carefully, Sugarman set the Marlins cap on her desk, picked up the folder, and leafed through the documents and photos. Same autopsy shots he’d viewed earlier. And there were pictures of Abigail Bates’s clothes laid out flat on what looked like a surgical table. A vented fishing shirt, frayed jeans, white lacy underwear, and one pink tennis shoe with plaid laces.

  “Nobody asked me,” Mary said, “but it’s obvious there was foul play.”

  “So you agree with Dr. Dillard.”

  She weighed her response with an evasive light playing in her eyes. Not about to be conned by some outsider.

  “Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m not so sure,” Sugar said. “The sheriff’s decision might be right. This whole thing could be nothing more than an accidental drowning. I’d have to see something a good deal more convincing than some bruises on the woman’s arms.”

  “Oh, my,” she said, her voice tightening. “I didn’t realize I was in the presence of a forensic pathologist.”

  Sugar touched the bill of the cap.

  “There’s a hair snagged on the snap of this ball cap,” he said, keeping his voice as quiet as he could manage. “Please treat this item with the same care you’d use on any crime-scene evidence. And when he returns, have Dr. Dillard check that strand of hair for postmortem banding. Pay special attention to the proximal root.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “DNA analysis will be critical. That strand of hair might belong to Ms. Bates, or it might belong to the killer. You want to write that down, Mary, or can you remember it?”

  She gave him a freeze-dried smile.

  These people were starting to seriously piss him off, but somehow Sugar managed to bid the woman good-day and get out of the office without strangling her.

  It had been such a long time since he’d felt the death-ray of bigotry aimed in his direction, he wasn’t sure if he was reading it right. Maybe he was just being thin-skinned. Yeah, he’d have to work on believing that.

  He was getting into his car when his cell phone chirped. He dug it out, snapped it open, and Thorn spoke his name.

  “Hey, Thorn? How’s it going?”

  But the connection broke. Sugar sat for a minute waiting for Thorn to call back, but he didn’t, which didn’t surprise Sugar. He could count on one hand the times Thorn had used a cell phone. Had to be something pretty special to make him do it now. Probably wanted to brag about a fish they’d caught, some hundred-pound tarpon. Sugarman got the cell number off his ID screen and returned the call, but was forwarded to the automatic voice-mail system. The party he was calling was unavailable.

  Sugarman tried to hear again the tenor of Thorn’s voice. A little strained, hurried. Not surprising that he might be getting cranky after twenty-four hours crammed together with so many people. Sugar let it go.

  Sasha cut the engine and the boat coasted deeper into the narrow inlet. Griffin was propped up against the transom, eyeing Milligan, who stood on the other side of the console. The big man would have to take two or three steps to be in arm’s length of Sasha, time enough for her to put three rounds in him.

  “I can deliver Thorn,” Milligan said again. “No risk to you. End this whole thing. You take him down, we get out of here, nobody has to know who you are or why you did it. You just disappear.”

  “We’re past that point,” Sasha said.

  “Mona put you up to this. My daughter’s paying you.”

  “Sit down and shut up.”

  “Then it was Carter. Carter Mosley. That bastard wants control. He’s behind this whole thing. Tell me, goddammit. It’s Mosley, right?”

  Sasha cut her gaze to Griffin. He had his eyes open and he was sitting up, his breath noisy, but he was still alive. His skin had taken on a waxy gleam.

  “Get over the side,” Sasha said.

  “What?”

  “Over the side. Into the water.”

  “I’m offering you a deal. I’ll give you Thorn. That’s who you want.”

  “Over the side,” she said. “I’m not saying it again.”

  “Look, I’m an ally. I can make anything happen you want. Name it, it’s yours. We’ll find your son the best damn doctors in the world. A new home, cash. You tell me what you want. A million dollars, two. Give me a number.”

  “Your mother said the same thing, just about those exact words. Right before I drowned her.”

  “What does it accomplish, killing me, killing the others?”

  “Head of the snake,” Griffin said.

  Milligan stared at the boy.

  “I know who you are,” Milligan said. “I recognized you this morning. You’re the Olsen woman. Your husband was the one who died. An activist, worked at Pine Tree School. Taught science or something. Got the natives all riled up.”

  “Died of lung cancer,” Sasha said. “Same as my boy.”

  “Same as me,” Griffin said.

  “Whoever you’re dealing with, I’ll double whatever they’re paying you. Hell, I’ll triple it. We’ll cease the mining operation. We’ll cap that gyp stack next to the school. What do you want? Name it, make me a list.”

  “I want you to get overboard, Mr. Milligan, into the water.”

  She gave him a good view of the .45.

  “Why?”

  “We’re going to find out how long you can hold your breath.”

  He was a big man, wide shoulders. Early sixties but without paunch or jowl. Good head of hair, clear pitiless eyes like his mother’s. Sasha had seen him a few times before, strutting around Summerland like he owned the world and simply out of the kindness of his heart was allowing a few others to share it with him.

  A bullet in the leg or shoulder, something to weaken him, to even up the odds, that would have been the wise thing.

  “Nice and easy, slip in the water. I’ll be with you shortly.”

  Milligan seemed to be making the calculation most men his size and strength would make. He didn’t smile outright, but she could see the cunning play on his lips.

  “Shoot him, Mama. Don’t risk it.”

  Milligan sat down on the starboard gunwale.

  “You and me in the water? That’s what you’re saying? Hand to hand.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I’m not an eighty-six-year-old woman.”

  “Go on, Mr. Mill
igan.”

  “Shoot him, Mama.”

  “No, son. She thinks she can drown me. Your mama’s a certified loony.”

  “I don’t want to shoot you, Mr. Milligan. But I will if you don’t get in that water. Right now.”

  He swiveled on the gunwale, brought his legs over the side. He looked down between his knees into the shallow creek. Pushed off and splashed.

  He treaded water five feet away, stirring up the muddy bottom.

  “Come on in, gal, the water’s fine.”

  “Mama, goddammit, use the pistol. He’s too damn big.”

  She set the .45 on the console.

  “At least leave me the gun.”

  “No need for that.”

  “Mama, don’t.”

  “I’ll be fine, son. It’s not the size of the muscles, it’s what you’re willing to do with them.”

  Sasha climbed onto the gunwale, winked at her boy, and hopped into the water. It was nice and warm. Much warmer than the Peace River.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Pine Tree School was two miles north of Summerland at the end of a gravel lane that was lined with a dozen wooden signs. On each sign a one-line saying had been carved into it, the grooves filled in with bright red paint. Every ten feet there was another one.

  Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

  Aim above morality. Be not simply good; Be good for something.

  In wildness is the preservation of the world.

  Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

  Each of them was a quote by Henry David Thoreau.

  Halfway down the entrance road, Sugarman stopped and scribbled down a couple of the quotations. Something he could trot out later, amuse Thorn.

  At the end of the lane, he rolled into a large gravel parking lot. To his right was a one-story cinder-block building with covered walkways and lots of picture windows and a flat roof covered with aluminum ductwork. Apparently air-conditioning had been added as an afterthought. It was an architectural style Sugar had noticed several times since arriving in the region. Built back in the sixties, the school looked like a cheap motel of that era, or a child’s creation built of Legos. Military-barracks motif. A stark concrete block that no one had bothered to stucco or beautify in any way. In the relentless Florida sun, the yellow paint job had blistered and faded almost to white.

  On that Friday afternoon the parking lot was swarming with kids. A handful of teenagers skulking among the gradeschoolers. The yelps and squeals of several girls playing tag, darting through the crowd. Backpacks bulging with books, bright lunch boxes, a few kids clamped inside headphones, a couple on cells. Most of them in old jeans, T-shirts, a few plain dresses, some overalls. Lots of baseball caps. Off in the shadows, a few of the big kids were sneaking smokes.

  But what drew Sugar’s attention was what loomed behind the school. Rising above a stand of pines was the treeless slope of a solitary mountain. Sugarman had seen a half-dozen of them earlier in the day. Steep, grassy berms that funneled upward a couple of hundred feet. From a distance they resembled the unnatural humps of abandoned landfills. This one was even more massive than the others he’d spotted in the distance as he drove down the back roads of DeSoto and Manatee counties.

  Its shadow enveloped the school building and most of the parking lot. As Sugarman pushed open the car door and stepped onto the gravel, some harsh scent carried by the breeze stung his nostrils and thickened in his lungs. The odor had an industrial density, a scent blend in the same family as roofing tar, with a bitter edge of ammonia. After two breaths the compound nearly triggered his gag reflex.

  He was halfway across the parking lot, wading through a throng of chattering kids, when he spotted Sheriff Timmy Whalen’s patrol car rounding the last turn and idling up to park beside his Honda.

  He stopped and waved hello, but either Timmy didn’t see him, or else he’d been demoted to her shit list. She was all business, cranking her shifter into park, pushing her door open, and stepping out with no eye contact, no acknowledgment of any kind. Some of the moms and dads parked nearby watched her warily as she bent back into her car to adjust something in the backseat.

  While Sugarman waited, he noted that the chemical smell had subsided. After only a minute or two, his olfactory nerves were nearing exhaustion, same as it happened upon entering a bakery, when that initial burst of yeast, cinnamon, and warm dough wore off, passing swiftly into forgetfulness.

  Sugar looked back at the school building, at the shadow lengthening across the parking lot. Kids racing to waiting pickup trucks and vans and dinged-up cars, and a couple of half-sized yellow school buses with desoto county printed on their sides. Mothers and a few fathers, most dressed in jeans and shabby shirts, were standing around chatting, with an eye out for their kids and an occasional glance in the sheriff’s direction.

  Although the odor had died away, there was now a metallic film growing in Sugar’s mouth, a tingle on his tongue like the afterburn of spicy food.

  He walked over to the cruiser as Timmy Whalen was snapping off the two-way radio fixed to the epaulet on her left shoulder.

  “Alone at last,” Sugar said and smiled.

  Timmy took a step back and studied him with cool neutrality.

  “I understand you’ve been turning over a few rocks.” She moved past him, heading at a good pace toward the school. Sugar put it in gear and caught up.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been spying on me.”

  “In this town, you kick over a rock, I choke on the dust.”

  Sugar chuckled. “What’s the deal? Now I get the sheriff’s official-politeness routine.”

  She stopped and gave him another careful look.

  “You’re a tricky bastard, aren’t you? All your straight-shooter bullshit, that’s an act. You’re just trying to wheedle whatever you can out of me.”

  “Not really.”

  “Yes, you are, Sugarman. You may not be conscious of it, but you’re a cagey guy.”

  “Does it count if I’m not conscious of it?”

  “There,” she said, pointing at him. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Sugar raised both hands in helpless surrender.

  Timmy sighed and waded on through the swarm of children. He saw her touch a finger to a wave of hair that had fallen low on her forehead and nudge it back in place. A gesture Sugarman found pleasantly feminine.

  He assumed that in the hours since he’d seen her last, Whalen had taken time to reassess the threat of Sugarman’s investigation. That easy rapport they’d had from the get-go was over. Still, it was better she was treating him with blatant distrust than to be coming on with the smiley-face act she used on her other constituents.

  Not that it changed anything for Sugarman. He had only one gear. Straight on, no bank shots, no subtle spins.

  He waited till she was almost to the entrance to the school, then said, “I found a couple of items. A pink tennis shoe, for one. With plaid laces.”

  She halted, kept her gaze fixed on the school’s front door.

  “It’s in my car. Want to see it?”

  “Where’d you find this shoe?” She swiveled her head slowly and stared at him, one eyebrow arched as if she’d caught him in a lie.

  “Seven feet down in the Peace River, wedged into a crack in the rock.”

  He plucked at the leg of his black jeans.

  “See?” he said. “I’m still damp.”

  She pursed her lips and blew out a shot of air.

  “While I was underwater, pulling it out of the crevice, I saw a root—cypress, pine, or something. It was bowed out from the bank. Probably make a good handhold if you wanted to keep from bobbing back to the top. You know, while you drowned somebody.”

  “A root,” she said.

  “Found a Marlins baseball cap, too. It was buried in the mud along the bank, same location, about two miles upstream from the takeout. Big boulders on the north shoreline, a sharp easterly crook in
the river. Pretty convenient location to lie in wait, get the jump on somebody passing by. I left the cap with Dr. Dillard because it had a hair snagged to it. Thought he might want to look at it under one of his polarized-light microscopes.”

  “We searched every inch of the riverbank. Searched it several times, hundreds of man-hours devoted to that.”

  “I got lucky,” Sugar said. “Nobody’s criticizing your effort.”

  “Wedged in a crack of a rock?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Consistent with a struggle. Like maybe Ms. Bates was kicking, trying to break free. It gets stuck.”

  Timmy was silent for a moment. Probably seeing the same ugly scene that was playing in Sugarman’s head.

  “Thing I’m curious about,” Sugar said. “How’s the assailant know Abigail Bates is going canoeing at that particular time? Killer’s got to get to the ambush spot, set up shop, which had to take some advance planning. Somebody had to pass the word, somebody who knew Ms. Bates’s schedule that morning. Which suggests an insider. Someone on her staff, maybe. Friend, relative.”

  The sheriff stepped aside for three squealing boys rushing out the entrance. She watched them merge with the larger group of kids in the parking lot. Sugarman was no expert on body language, but Timmy seemed to be drawing deeper breaths than earlier, as though working to stay calm.

  “Way I see it,” Sugar said, “you find out who knew Abigail was going on that canoe trip, you’re a giant step closer to your suspect.”

  “No one knew.”

  “No one?”

  “I questioned all her staff, associates, family members, and no one knew she was planning that trip. Mona had been campaigning for her to do it for months, trying to soften her up about stopping the mining. But Mona didn’t know Ms. Bates had chosen that particular day. In fact, she was surprised Ms. Bates decided to do it, and felt responsible for putting her up to it.”

  “She was telling the truth?”