by Lyle Howard
“Dear God Toby, it was only a half-hour flight!”
He could barely hear her voice over the whapping of the rotor blades. Lauren King was standing over him, one hand on his back, the other trying to hold the hem of her navy blazer from flapping in the prop wash. “Are you going to be alright?”
Bilston was still on all fours as he shot an angry look over at the cockpit. The pilot was pointing at him and laughing hysterically. Toby waggled a finger of warning at his supposed friend and pilot, Chuck Wingate. Both men knew Toby’s revenge would come Sunday night as they faced each other across the table at their weekly poker game. “You just wait!” Toby mouthed.
Because of Wingate’s headgear and visor, only his mouth was visible, but the return grin was ear to ear.
“That son-of-a-bitch knows how afraid I am of heights, and every time he flies me somewhere, he pulls that aerobatic shit!” Toby snarled, as the helicopter lifted off.
King shook her head like a teacher scolding a misbehaving student. “It’s hard to believe you two can stop sniping at each other long enough to play a single hand of cards, much less share a pair of season tickets for all those Jaguars games! Aren’t you two ever going to grow up?”
Toby rose to his feet, dusted off the knees of his trousers and picked up his kit. Squinting against the sun, he watched as the helicopter banked to the east and vanished over the horizon.
“Sometimes I wonder what possessed me to make that idiot my son’s Godfather.”
Now that Toby was back on his feet and the correct hue was returning to his cheeks, Lauren King was no longer interested in small talk. Tall and shapely, she was the maverick of the Jacksonville Police Department’s Detective Squad, choosing to wear faded jeans, snakeskin boots, and a plain blue coat instead of the standard monotonous business suit. She didn’t dress down to flaunt her individuality, as much as to play down her distracting good looks. Her long red mane was tied behind her head with a simple elastic band, and her jade green eyes were almost cat-like in the way they darted about the airstrip, drinking in her surroundings.
The daughter of wealthy—but not particularly nurturing—parents, Lauren was born with a remarkably keen sense of intuition. Starting at an early age, while her neighborhood playmates were preoccupied with playing doctor and throwing tea parties, young Lauren found her entertainment in tracking down such things as a missing socket wrench that her father had absent-mindedly lent to another neighbor some six months earlier. It took her two long days, plenty of intense interrogation, and miles of legwork to finally reunite her father and the tool, but the sleuth bug had taken its incurable bite.
After receiving her degree in Criminal Justice from Florida State University, Lauren’s meteoric rise to the position of Homicide Detective was unprecedented in the history of the C.J.P.D. She graduated top of her class from the state-sponsored police academy, becoming proficient in weapons and tactics, as well as earning special recognition from her supervisors for the uncanny deductive skills she displayed during her training.
She served the minimum three years in uniform and was promptly tested for reassignment to the Detective’s Division. To her commanding officer’s delight, Lauren passed the rigorous examination with the highest possible marks. After less than a week in her new surroundings, she came to realize that she had finally found the missing piece in her life. This work gave her purpose, and King quickly earned the confidence and respect of her fellow investigators. Less than a year later, she was on the street and working Homicide. Lauren thrived on the adrenalin rush of the hunt. It was her drug of choice...and she was a junkie.
This wasn’t the first time Lauren and Toby were teamed together, but this case was high profile, so it went without saying that the Chief of D’s would personally request them both. They worked well together, complementing each other’s abilities and respecting each other’s boundaries. Lauren was the bloodhound, and Toby deciphered her findings. They knew each other’s limitations and demanded nothing less than excellence from each other.
Toby reminded Lauren very much of her late father. Not in the physical sense, but emotionally and sentimentally. Early on in their working relationship, Toby realized he was filling a crucial void in her life, and never minded being placed in that surrogate role.
In fact, the entire Bilston clan gladly welcomed her into their lives whenever Lauren needed somewhere to turn or someone to talk to. She held a particular fondness for Benjamin, and would quite often drop by just to keep the wheelchair-bound boy company. Sometimes they would talk for hours, and other times, King would push the teenager around the block, and they might never speak a word. It was these times she appreciated the most. The silence was truly golden, and each of them was wealthier for sharing in it.
“What have you got?” Toby asked, noticing the intense glare that soured her face whenever her senses were on the prowl.
“Not much access to this place,” she said, pointing at the wall of grass surrounding the field. “Runway’s all shot to hell. Notice any roads on our way in?”
Toby wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “You’re kidding, me, right? Do you really think I ever took one look out the window?”
Lauren shrugged. “Well, I didn’t see any. Flora and fauna are reclaiming this place. No access roads anymore.”
Less than three minutes on the ground and already Toby was beginning to sweat. He was a habitual sweater, and he did it profusely. If he could have done it for a living, he would have retired years ago as a wealthy man. He reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a spiral notebook, flipping it open to the first page.
“Just like you figured, the first unit on the scene couldn’t make it here by patrol car. The turnoff from the main road was overgrown with heavy brush. They were the ones to call in the choppers.”
Lauren toyed with her lower lip thoughtfully. “Then there are only two other ways in, I would imagine. The runway is too broken up for a small plane to land, so I figure the two ways in by chopper and possibly by airboat.”
Toby thought he had finally one-upped her. “Or possibly by foot!”
Lauren studied the tall grass as it gently swayed in the meager breeze. “Only if you don’t plan on making it back to civilization alive! Lions and tigers and bears...oh my!”
Toby wrinkled his nose. She was probably right. “Not to mention the alligators and panthers.”
Lauren never took her eyes off the dense wall of foliage. “So where is the helicopter then?”
The thunderous roar of an engine caught both their attention as the flat bow of a park ranger’s airboat burst through the bulwark of grass less than a hundred yards to their left. A distressed ranger quickly shut off the engine, jumped out of the elevated steering chair, and pulled the nose of the boat onto the concrete until he judged it wasn’t going to slide back into the underbrush.
Within seconds, two uniformed officers were leading the ranger away against his will. The ranger’s protests that the airstrip was situated on State Park property had apparently fallen on deaf ears.
“You see that?”
Toby nodded. “He was just trying to do his job.”
Lauren wasn’t referring to the ranger. “I’m not talking about the ranger; I’m referring to the airboat!”
Toby looked over at the flat-bottom. Everyone who lived in the State of Florida knew what an airboat was, and he saw nothing unusual about this one, but then again, he didn’t see it through Lauren’s disciplined lenses. “What am I missing?”
She started walking toward the boat, her pace picking up, mimicking her excitement. “Look at the way the bow of the boat broke down the roots of the foliage!” She knelt on the edge of the runway, the murky water lapping at the toes of her boots. “You see this? The branches down here at the roots are very rigid! When the boat busted through, the heavy bow bent the roots outward and even snapped some of them off! Look h
ere!”
Toby didn’t plan on getting too close to the stagnant water without his rubber gloves on. The water smelled awful, and who knew what kind of vile bacteria was having sex in it. “Only you would catch something like this,” he said, with a mixture of admiration and foreboding. “But don’t you think we should examine the body before we start worrying about how it got here?”
Lauren stood up and pointed out the periphery of the cordoned area. Her intuitive radar was sweeping the entire area. There was only a single tarmac and a dilapidated hangar at the end of the runway. The airplane-sized shed had one door hanging off its hinges and was overgrown with Kudzu, a weed-like vine that had been spreading throughout the Southeastern United States for years now. The leafy vine could envelop anything stationary in a matter of months. It had quickly become problematic when it was first introduced from Japan as a ground cover for farmers. Now, native plants were dying, and old buildings like this were being swallowed whole as a result.
“I want to get someone to walk the perimeter of this entire airstrip to look for this same kind of new root damage. It might give us a lead on how the body got here.”
Toby put his collection kit down, pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and dabbed his face. He knew better than to argue with her whenever she got like this, but he could see where she was going and didn’t want her rushing to conclusions just yet. “If you don’t mind me playing the Devil’s advocate for a few moments here,” he proceeded delicately, “according to the reports, this place has a reputation for being a hideout for poachers and drug runners.”
“So?”
Toby blotted the back of his neck with the monogrammed cloth. “Well, what happens to your theory, if some poachers or dope smugglers just happened to show up or maybe were already here when the Commissioner’s helicopter shows up?”
The detective took a step back. “What leads you to believe he was brought here by helicopter?”
Toby’s eyes widened. “You think he got here all the way from Miami by airboat?”
King pursed her lips dejectedly. “No, of course, I don’t.”
King pulled out a small spiral notepad from her breast pocket. Nowadays all of her colleagues were using tablets to track their case notes, but she found the old-fashioned way much simpler.
“So if there is a mysterious helicopter somewhere between this hell hole and Jacksonville,” Toby continued, “It’s vanished too.”
Bilston scratched at his beard. “This is ridiculous. How is someone supposed to check the flight records and manifests for all non-commercial air traffic that took off from any level surface in Miami and may have landed on any other level surface somewhere over the last two days? Freaking helicopters, they’re like mosquitoes. Speaking of which,” he protested, as he slapped the side of his face.
King jotted it all down.
Bilston did a three hundred sixty degree scan of the crime scene. “Okay, so let’s assume for argument’s sake that Arthur Beckworth left mid-party of his own volition or was somehow taken by force and loaded onto a helicopter that wound up landing here in the middle of bum-fucked Egypt. Then, something goes tits up for him, and he’s just left lying here out in the open?”
King grimaced. “Not the exact phraseology I would have used, but it’s one possible theory nonetheless.”
Toby fluttered his fingers. “And then our magic helicopter just takes off and disappears into the night sky without a trace.” He blew out a deep, frustrated breath. “This is the biggest bowl of spaghetti I’ve ever seen. Damn, it’s humid out here!”
Toby pointed toward the body that was being guarded by a group of air patrolmen. “Well, I can tell you that from over here that I can plainly see that the body is still intact, so it certainly wasn’t dropped from any great height. So the mystery helicopter had to have landed. And besides, look around here. If you were going to dump a person—dead or alive—out of an airplane or helicopter, how lousy would your aim have to be to miss the swamp? If someone would have dumped him out there,” he pointed toward the dense forestation, “no one would have found him before the wildlife and natural exposure consumed his body.” Toby waggled his finger. “No, someone wanted him to be found. Someone is sending a message.”
Lauren tapped her foot impatiently. “But there’s no record of Beckworth leaving by helicopter. The entire entourage was flown back and forth to Miami in Peter Mason’s own private jet.”
Toby shielded his eyes from the sun. “Only Beckworth wasn’t on the return flight later that evening. We’ve got to go over every inch of this place with a fine-toothed comb. We need to come up with something more definitive before we leave. I need to check out the body while you do your thing.”
Lauren wrote a few notes on her own thoughts. The list was growing longer by the minute. Engine problems, smugglers, payback, wrong time wrong place, they were all credible theories. She tapped her pen on the pad as she spoke. “Dope runners might have been out here when the helicopter developed engine problems,” she proposed. “They might have killed Beckworth for the interruption of their work, overpowered the pilot or threatened him into flying them somewhere.”
Toby shook his head. “But if this was a staging ground for drug smugglers, then why leave a body out in the open to draw attention to your ideal hideout? And for Pete’s sake, how did our bad guys get to and from this place? Do you think they were stranded out here and prayed for random helicopters with leaky gaskets to show up and save them? This has nothing to do with smuggling or drugs. You need to do some of what you do best when it comes to the late Commissioner. Dig into his background. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts this was a premeditated murder.” Toby’s eye’s narrowed. “We can’t leave any stone unturned out here. We need to see where the physical evidence takes us and leave the supposition for later. There are too many eyes watching us and waiting for our findings.”
The two investigators walked over to the corpse like a father and daughter. Toby set his evidence kit on the ground and removed his jacket. His white shirt was nearly transparent with sweat. “Whoever did this didn’t care whether or not we found the body; that’s why they left his wallet out in the open. Otherwise, they could have chopped him up and tossed the pieces into the swamp. This was an act of revenge or meant to give notice to someone.”
Toby gazed down upon the remains and then shifted his stare to the flock of vultures circling overhead. If the body had been here the majority of the time since the Commissioner first disappeared, it wasn’t going to be a pleasant examination. The heat, the carnivorous birds...he shuddered to think what the corpse had gone through. No one deserved such a gruesome fate.
Lauren understood Toby’s cynical attitude, and she learned from it. “So what do you think about my airboat theory? Do you think it’s even worth investigating?”
There is a Japanese proverb that asserts to teach is to learn, and Toby Bilston was a true believer in such sage wisdom. “Well,” he said, scratching his scalp thoughtfully, “if the perimeter is undisturbed, that would probably mean there were no airboats out here lately, and that alone would save us a heck of a lot of legwork checking out airboat registrations and rental places. So yeah,” he said, with a congratulatory grin. “I think you should definitely have a few officers check it out!”
Lauren smiled appreciatively as Toby waved for Tom Hopkins, a Sergeant from the Uniform Division, to join them. She understood the vote of confidence her mentor had given her, and she loved him for it.
“So if we both agree the motive wasn’t robbery, then this is quite a little conspiracy theory we’re concocting here,” she admitted.
“Let’s just focus on the facts for now,” Toby warned.
King asked Hopkins to have the perimeter searched, which he told her would be done immediately. She watched as he walked away and began recruiting uniformed officers to help check for any sawgrass that looked as though it had been
disturbed recently.
Bilston walked around the remains and from a safe distance began studying the position of the corpse. Commissioner Arthur Beckworth was a rather large African-American man, and somewhat on the hefty side. He had played on the offensive line for Jacksonville University in the late seventies and hadn’t lost much of his bulk since his college football days.
Beckworth was lying on his back while most of the skin on his exposed face and hands had been picked clean by the birds. He was barely recognizable. There was a large puddle of coagulated blood and bone fragments beneath his head. If the brain was exposed underneath, then the birds had most likely eaten it too. Bilston was genuinely surprised that Beckworth’s eyes were still intact, since those were usually the first thing the birds would go for. To the east, he spotted a trail of blood leading to the corpse that started near the overgrown hangar. It appeared that the commissioner had first been attacked over there and then dragged himself along the tarmac trying to escape his assailant. Any chance of discovering defensive wounds on his hands was pretty much a total loss by now, though.
While the airstrip itself was a beehive of activity, no one except the original pair of criminalists on the scene had gone anywhere near the body. Cross-contamination was the biggest hindrance to the successful completion of any investigation. One errant shoeprint could lead the detective team on a baseless tangent that could stymie the investigation for weeks.
Lauren stood quietly next to Toby as he squatted down to examine the remains from different angles. Not as flexible as he used to be, his knee joints protested loudly. He tipped his head from side to side trying to see the crime scene from every possible perspective. His gut instincts were like no one else’s. After a few seconds, and not wanting to disturb him, Lauren whispered to Toby that she was going to check out the hangar. Toby heard her, but he was already in a Zen-like state and didn’t acknowledge her either way.