Fallen Tide: A Jesse McDermitt Novel

Book 8: Caribbean Adventure Series

by Wayne Stinnett

Genres: Sea Adventures

Synopsis

Coral branches rarely wear a wristwatch. That was Jesse McDermitt’s first thought when he found a partially denuded human arm, teeming with crab, lobster, and fish life, during his morning ocean swim. The discovery of a drifting mega-yacht the following day while fishing the Gulf Stream, causes quite a stir among the many alphabet agencies of the federal government, not to mention one shaggy canine. A severed leg and two whole bodies are discovered aboard. The find links the disappearance of the yacht’s owners to the arm Jesse found twenty miles to the north, near his home in the back country of the Florida Keys. Black marketers from Eastern Europe have set up a base of operations too close to Jesse for comfort. The rescue of the yacht-owners takes on national security importance, but it’s even more important to one of Jesse’s closest friends. High speed boats and planes race across the Gulf Stream, causing the Cuban Air Force to become nervous. Will Jesse and his crew reach the victims in time?

Release date: November 8, 2015

Publisher: Down Island Press

Print pages: 272

Sample

Chapter One

It was the large number of lobsters clustered together that caught my attention, distracting me from my morning swim. Every morning, I swim the same three miles, looking at the same bottom. I know the contours of the sea floor and where to make my turn, without having to look up. But every morning it’s different. Every morning, there’s something new to see. Which is why I started wearing swimmers’ goggles a few months back. Lobsters are nocturnal, but occasionally during my swim I’ll see a late forager still out on the grass flats after sunrise. Sometimes I’ll see a nurse shark as well, still hunting for late-foraging lobsters. Usually, both are tucked away in the thousands of cracks, crevices, and ledges, or the many patch reefs in the back country of the Middle Keys where I live.

The presence of so many lobsters, along with what appeared to be an equal number of crabs of assorted species and sizes, piqued my curiosity. I stopped to watch as the occasional damselfish or blue-striped grunt darted into the fray. A thick dead branch of what looked like staghorn coral stuck out from the roiling group of crustaceans and fish. Normally, a broken piece of dead coral wouldn’t get my attention. As I floated on the surface, I realized it wasn’t a coral branch at all. I knew this because staghorn coral branches rarely wear a wristwatch.

Lifting my head to take a breath, I pulled off my goggles to determine my location. I was in about eight feet of water nearly a mile from my island on the edge of Harbor Channel, and there wasn’t a boat anywhere in sight. Knowing it was slack tide didn’t change what I knew I had to do. The tide would be rising very soon, meaning the severed limb would be carried away with the current. If a hungry shark didn’t find it first.

Floating above the edge of the channel just a few yards away was one of Carl’s and my lobster trap floats, the trap itself set in twenty feet of water against the steep drop-off. Though I hated to do it, I knew what had to be done.

Putting my goggles back on, I arched forward and dove. When I reached what I now knew to be a detached left arm and hand, the lobster and all but a handful of tenacious crabs scattered. I grabbed the arm at the denuded end, where the bone stuck out, and returned to the surface, the last couple of crabs dropping off as I rose. Dangling my grisly find, I sidestroked to the float and took a deep breath before submerging and pulling myself along the trap line, one-handed. The irony of that set in. I had a third hand, but was only using my own right.

It was only twenty feet to the bottom, but I had to pause several times to equalize the pressure in my ears, trying not to drop the arm or let go of the rope for long. Reaching the trap, I quickly opened the top and tipped the concrete-based trap on its side, releasing a half dozen lobsters, before thrusting the arm inside and closing it again. At least the arm would still be here when I returned in my skiff, but it was a damned shame to let all those lobsters go.

Swimming quickly back to the north pier, I dried off as I hurried toward the foot of the pier. Spotting Carl working in the aquaculture garden, I called out to him as I jogged toward my house and the dock area beneath it.

Carl and his wife, Charlie, are the caretakers of my little island in the Content Keys, north of Big Pine Key. He’d been a shrimp boat captain until a couple years ago, when the two of them came to work for me and built a small house on the west side of the island. Carl still owns the shrimp boat, but no longer goes out, content to fish, dive, and work on projects around the island. His former first mate, who worked for me for a short while, now skippered the Miss Charlie.

“Carl, drop what you’re doing and call the sheriff. Have them send a boat out to where the number four trap is located.”

Carl looked up as I ran past. “Poacher?”

Trap poachers were common in the Keys, but rarely ventured this far north. My island is six miles from the nearest road, and nearly double that taking all the cuts and channels to get here.

“Not unless he’s missing an arm,” I shouted back. “Tell them to hail me on the VHF.”

As I disappeared under the house, Carl headed up the steps to the deck, the only spot on the island where a cell phone can get a signal. While I untied and jumped aboard my Maverick Mirage flats skiff, I heard him talking on the deck above my charter boat. Punching the button on the key fob, I activated the release on one of the large doors, and it slowly began to swing open on giant spring-loaded hinges.

The outboard started instantly, and I idled out from under my little house and into Harbor Channel, just a few yards to the south. Turning sharply into the channel, I brought the little boat up on plane and steered a rhumb line toward where I knew our trap was located. Approaching it, I stood up at the helm and looked all around. There wasn’t another boat in sight and it’d been several days since we’d heard or seen one.

Coming off plane, I approached the trap’s green-and-yellow float, then reversed the engine and came to a stop, drifting in the still water right next to it, and shut down the outboard. I quickly tossed the anchor in the direction of the spot where I’d first seen the arm and let out a good twenty feet of rode. It was still half an hour before the current would start picking up, the tide carrying nutrient-rich water from the Glades through the long archipelago known as the Florida Keys, and into the Atlantic, renourishing the reef that thrived there. I was pretty sure the sheriff’s office would want to know exactly where I’d found the arm.

As I was pulling up the trap, a familiar voice came over the radio. “Deputy Phillips hailing MV Gaspar’s Revenge.”

After hoisting the trap and its grotesque contents aboard, I grabbed the mic. “I’m on the skiff, Marty. Go to sixty-nine.”

Deputy Marty Phillips was dating my daughter Kim, who was in college up in Gainesville. Maintaining a long-distance relationship wasn’t easy for them, but they seemed to be handling it well. She came down here once a month and he went up there just as often.

When I’d changed frequencies, Marty hailed me again. “Carl called something in and told dispatch to hail you. What’s up, Jesse?”

“Do you have a diver with you? I found an arm.”

There was a moment of silence. “Did you say you found an arm? You mean like a human arm?”

“Roger that,” I said, opening the lid on the trap and examining it more closely. “Looks like a man’s. Severed at the middle of the upper arm, and the bone’s cut pretty clean.”

“I’ll have another boat with divers aboard on the way in a few minutes. Where are you exactly?”

“Northeast of my house about a mile,” I replied. “On the north side of Harbor Channel, just across from Cutoe Banks. Tide’s slack right now, but it’ll change in less than an hour.”

“I’m not far. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Have you moved it?”

“Well, yeah,” I replied. “I spotted it on the bottom during my morning swim and thought you guys might want to have a look at it before a hungry spinner came along and stole it from the crabs and lobster that were feasting on it. I stuck it in one of my traps and just hoisted it on deck. I’m anchored over the spot where I found it.”

“That’ll have to be good enough. See you in a few minutes.”

“Roger that. Back to sixteen.”

Switching the radio back to the hailing frequency, I sat down at the helm and studied the thing in the trap. What was left of the arm was nearly bare bone from where it was cut off to just below the elbow. The flesh on the forearm moved, giving me a start. Then a small spider crab wiggled free and fell between the two bones of the upper forearm, just below the elbow.

The rest of the arm was fairly intact, just a few scrapes and cuts, probably where it’d been dragged and rolled across the bottom with the current. Looking south, I could see in my mind’s eye how the current flowed through the back country. We’ve had stuff wash up at low tide that obviously came from the Atlantic, floating more than ten miles through the several natural cuts and channels.

Looking back at my grotesque find, I noticed that the fingers were thick and meaty, the nails trimmed short. There was part of a tattoo left on the top part of the forearm, though it looked to be old and faded. The watch was cheap, but waterproof.

Marty arrived a few minutes later, cutting across the flats from Spanish Channel into Harbor Channel, his blue lights flashing. As it slowed, the big center console came down off plane and he idled up alongside. I tossed a couple of fenders over and helped him tie off.

“Divers will be here in twenty minutes or so,” Marty said as he stepped over the gunwale and looked down into the lobster trap. Squatting, he looked at it more closely and then glanced up at me. “Where exactly did you find it?”

Looking at my anchor line and over the side at the bottom, I pointed off to the north. “Just a few yards beyond the edge of the drop-off.”

Sitting back on the casting deck, Marty removed his sunglasses and dipped them in the water before pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping the water off. “Sure looks like a clean cut on the end of the bone, but the coroner will be able to tell for sure. You make anything of the tattoo?”

“Some kind of tribal design, maybe. Black ink, faded to gray. I don’t think it’s military.”

“Could be a gang tat,” he offered. “But yeah, it looks to be older.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Wait for the divers and coroner, I guess. I just respond to calls and write tickets to people breaking the law.”

Stepping back over to his boat, he lifted the seat in front of the console, took two water bottles out of the cooler, and handed me one.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the bottle and drinking half its contents. “Any other body parts wash up lately?”

“Nothing that I’ve heard,” Marty replied. “But, like I said, I’m not an investigator.”

Minutes later, hearing the distant whine of an outboard, I stood up and looked to the east. “Looks like your divers.”

Marty and I watched as another sheriff’s boat pulled alongside, with a deputy and two divers aboard, already suited up. As one of the divers started to tie off to Marty’s boat, I said, “Best if you drop your own tackle. We’re on mine, and once the current picks up, it won’t be big enough to hold all three boats in place.”

I recognized the deputy at the wheel, but didn’t know his name. I’d never seen the two divers before. “Did you find it in that trap?” the deputy asked.

“No, I found it a few yards that way,” I replied, pointing in the direction of my anchor. “Idle around us and drop your hook near mine. That’s pretty close to where I found it.”

As the deputy maneuvered around us, another boat crossed the flats and headed toward us. It was a larger center console, with blue lights flashing. On board were another deputy in uniform and two more divers, still struggling into their equipment. Two more men, both dressed in gray coveralls, were with them. One was older than the others by several decades.

“That’s Doc Fredric,” Marty said. “He’s the chief medical examiner, lives in Marathon.”

“Seen him around,” I replied.

Minutes later, after Marty scrambled and added his anchor close to where mine was, all four divers rolled backwards into the water to begin their search for the rest of the body.

“Mind if I step over?” the doctor asked.

I nodded by way of reply and moved toward him to give a hand. But the old man easily stepped down to my skiff by himself. His hair was snowy white and his skin was tan and weathered. Squatting down, he pulled on a pair of blue rubber gloves and examined the arm in the trap.

“Pass your back board over, Marty,” Fredric said without looking up.

With the back board on the deck, Fredric lifted the limb from the trap and placed it on the board. It looked a lot more out of place there than in the trap. He then lifted the board up onto the casting deck and examined it from end to end.

“How long ago did you find it, Captain?”

“Less than an hour ago, Doctor. Just call me Jesse, everyone else does.”

He looked up at me, over the top of his glasses. “Jesse McDermitt?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

He fluttered a blue hand around. “Just Leo or Doc, Jesse.” Then with a half smile he said, “I’ve heard of you. This isn’t your handiwork, is it?”

The glint in his sharp blue eyes told me he was pulling my leg. “Might have been,” I replied with a crooked grin. “Hard to keep track.”

The older man laughed and then motioned me over. When I squatted beside him, he produced a small magnifying glass from his pocket and handed it to me. “Look close at the proximal end of the humerus.”

Guessing that he meant the end where the bone was cut, I held the glass close to it and leaned in. The end of the bone was cut straight across and fairly smooth. “A saw of some kind?” I asked.

“Look just to the left of the end. See that notch?”

About a quarter of an inch down the bone, there was indeed a straight notch, probably a quarter of an inch wide and a fraction of that deep. It was on the side of the bone where the biceps would be, if that muscle were still there.

“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.”

Chapter Two

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 revved 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!”