CHAPTER ONE
The sky over Apalachicola Bay, in the Florida panhandle, had just gone from orange to pink, and then blue. Here and there, small, wooden oyster skiffs dotted the shallow waters, punctuating the start of the long oystering day.
Further out, larger shrimp boats, their nets spreading like pterodactyl wings, were coming to the end of their day. One of those boats belonged to Axel Blackwell, whose twenty-seventh cigarette was dangling from his lips as he watched his crewmen, Daryl and Petey, swing the second shrimp net over to hover above the deck.
Axel was tired and irritated. They’d been out since seven the night before, trying to harvest enough shrimp to pay the two crewmen, pay Axel, and still have money to pay for the fuel they’d need tomorrow night.
Shrimping was all Axel did and all he’d ever wanted to do. His father had made his living with this same boat for forty-five years, and his father’s father had died doing it, due to an unfortunate mixture of fuel leak and chain smoking.
Axel had come out to the bay straight from high school, and he was going to eke a living from it until either they drained the Gulf or the oil companies did it in for good.
He weighed the net with his eyes as Daryl moved in to untie the rope at the bottom that held it shut. This was a good load. As long as there were some nice big ones in there among all the peewees, they’d do all right.
Daryl, big as a truck and blacker than good dirt, yanked the knot loose and stepped back as the load poured out in a rush, spreading out somewhat before piling up in a heap at the center. Petey, small, wiry, and gray in the beard, hopped over a writhing sea trout as it slid right at him.
They all stared at the three hundred or so pounds of sea life and seaweed.
“Oh, my sweet dear Jesus,” Daryl said quietly.
Petey leaned over the side and threw up into the bay.
The tip of Axel’s cigarette flared up as he inhaled, then he let a finger of smoke escape his clenched lips.
“Crap,” he said. “We might want to get that crab off that foot there.”
* * *
Maggie Redmond’s long, dark hair whipped around her face as she ran the Sheriff department’s speedboat at full throttle across the bay. She turned around and looked at Wyatt Hamilton, her boss and the Sheriff of Franklin County, who was standing just behind her, holding onto the starboard rail.
“Hey!” she called. He looked over at her. “Steer for a second, would you?”
Wyatt stepped over and took the wheel, and Maggie dug a ponytail holder out of her jeans pocket and restrained her hair. She was short to begin with, but standing next to Wyatt, who was six-feet four, she always felt like she needed to stand up just a little straighter and display her holster a little more prominently.
Maggie took the wheel again, and Wyatt remained standing next to her.
“You know Axel Blackwell?” he yelled over the engine. “Yeah, we went to high school together,” she yelled back.
“Straight shooter?”
Maggie couldn’t help laughing just a bit. “Yeah, you could say that.”
They were silent for a few minutes, as they passed St. George Island to the left, which sat five miles or so off the mainland. Hwy 300, or the causeway, or the bridge, depending on who was talking, connected St. George Island to the mainland like a suspended shoestring.
Maggie turned away from the sight of the bridge and focused on the water. Last week, a damaged but courageous young girl had floated off of the bridge in her pale yellow dress, having decided that dying was better than living the only life she’d been allowed to live.
After a few minutes, Maggie pointed out to the west. “There’s it is,” she yelled.
It took them just a few more minutes to reach Axel’s boat, the Ocean’s Bounty, which had dropped anchor before Axel called Maggie.
Axel leaned over the port side as Maggie cut the engine and coasted over, then he grabbed the line Wyatt tossed at him. Maggie dropped a couple of bright orange bumpers into the water to keep the boats from scraping each other. Maggie reached over to the bench seat and picked up her red crime scene case, a tool box really, and stepped up on the bench.
Wyatt stood aside and let Axel hand Maggie aboard first, then he grabbed Axel’s hand and did the same. Maggie and Wyatt both stopped in the middle of the deck and looked at the pile in front of them. Wyatt sighed, then looked at Maggie and waggled his eyebrows.
“Hey, Maggie.” Axel leaned back against the helm, drinking from an aluminum travel mug. “How’s it going?” Maggie looked over at him and smiled. Axel had always been her favorite among her ex-husband David’s friends. They’d grown up together, and if she hadn’t loved David since fifth grade, she probably would have gone for Axel, though that would have been a mistake. He was a looker, in that rough, slightly scruffy way that some men were, but he wasn’t exactly marriage material, as his two former wives would attest.
“Not much, Axel, what’s going on with you?” she asked, setting her case down beside her.
His green eyes squinted under his beanie as he grinned. He pointed at the pile of shrimp with his hand. “We got an extra foot in our last load.”
Wyatt and Maggie, both with their hands on their hips, stared down at the pile of several hundred shrimp and one human foot that laid on the deck.
“Well then,” Wyatt said after a minute. Maggie looked at Axel. “Where are the guys?”
“Below,” he said, taking off his beanie and running a hand through his brown hair before slapping the hat back on. “Daryl’s still discussing the situation with Jesus, and I got tired of watching Petey throw up his shredded wheat.” Maggie nodded as she looked at the foot. It was actually most of a calf as well as a foot. Most of the flesh from the calf had been nibbled away by the sea life, leaving just the tibia and fibula bones to represent a former leg. The foot itself, however, was mostly intact. In fact, it still wore a man’s Docksider and a brown sock, which, without any flesh to hang onto, had crumpled around the bottom of the ankle. According to the shoe, they had a right foot on their hands.
“Did you guys touch it or anything?” Wyatt asked. “Well, I tried to roll his sock up for him, but it didn’t take.”
“You’re such a jerk,” Maggie said, trying not to smile.
Axel nodded in agreement as he lit another cigarette.
“Yeah, but my kids seem to like me.”
Maggie pulled a pair of blue latex gloves out of her case and started snapping them on. “Is this all that’s here? I mean, did you sift through the rest?”
“We kicked it around a little. There’s nothing else in there that’s not supposed to be.”
Maggie reached over and lifted the leg up a little by the end of the fibula. “Well, he wasn’t eaten by a shark,” she said, lifting the foot a little higher as Wyatt leaned over to look.
“It’s been cut,” he said.
Maggie turned the foot to get a look from the other side.
“Yeah.”
Axel whistled around his cigarette. “You sure it’s a guy?”
“Yeah, look at the shoe.” Maggie turned the leg upside down to look at the sole. “Size 10.”
“I haven’t seen any missing persons reports come in lately, have you?” Wyatt asked.
Maggie broke her neck looking up at him. “Uh-uh.”
“If his DNA’s not in CODIS, we might have a little trouble identifying this guy,” Wyatt added.
“Yeah,” Maggie laid the foot back down.
“If it was me, I’d start lookin’ around town for somebody with a peg leg,” Axel offered.
Maggie and Wyatt both shot him a look, then Maggie stood up and pulled off her gloves.
“Well, Larry will be here in a few minutes to have a look,” she said, referring to the elderly medical examiner. “Dwight’s bringing him out.”
She looked back toward St. George Island and saw a speedboat off near the tip. “There they are.”
She pulled her digital camera out of her case, dropped her gloves on the deck, and handed the camera to Wyatt. “Here, you take better pictures than I do.”
“That’s because I have an artistic eye,” he said.
He squatted down and started taking shots of the foot, while Maggie walked over to Axel.
“Give me a sip of that coffee. You woke me up.”
Axel smiled and handed her the travel mug. She turned it up and took a drink, then choked a bit before swallowing.
“Bourbon, Axel?”
“Hey, this is my happy hour, Maggie. Except I’m not especially happy.”
Maggie nodded and looked at the pile of shrimp. “I’m sorry, Axel. You know you’re gonna have to throw them all back.”
“I don’t know why,” he answered. “This is my golden hole, Maggie. You know I’ll probably catch half of ’em again tomorrow night.”
“Yeah, I know. But we won’t know that for sure.”
“I’ll be honest with you, I was within a gnat’s ass of throwing that thing back over the side. This is a pretty nice haul.”
Maggie nodded again as she watched Wyatt get some pictures from the other side of the foot.
“I know. I don’t blame you,” she said.
A few minutes later, Wyatt helped Larry Wainwright, white-haired and crane-like, board the Ocean Bounty, as Deputy Dwight Shultz held his black leather case for him.
“Well, well,” Larry said, as he peered at the foot over his bifocals. He grabbed Wyatt’s hand to hold himself steady as he gingerly knelt down.
They watched him lean in and stare at it up close for a minute.
“What do you think, Larry?” Wyatt asked.
Larry looked over his shoulder and craned his neck to look up at Wyatt. “Well, it’s not a good candidate for reattachment, I can tell you that.”
CHAPTER TWO
After taking the statements of Axel and his crew, Maggie and Wyatt took the department boat back to the dock the SO used in Apalachicola, just next to Sea- Fair, Bennett Boudreaux’s seafood processing business.
The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office was located in Eastpoint, connected to Apalachicola on one side by the John Gorrie Memorial Bridge and to St. George Island on the other by Hwy 300 or the causeway.
Apalachicola was a throwback to an earlier time, and looked more like coastal Connecticut than most people’s visions of Florida. Located in the Panhandle, about an hour southwest of Tallahassee, it was primarily a fishing town, famous for its Apalachicola oysters and Gulf shrimp. Like nearby Gulf towns in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Apalach had been hit hard by disasters both natural and oil-made, but it had a small tourist trade that managed to keep it afloat when fishing and oystering got hard.
Tourists came for the oysters, the fishing, the beaches of St. George Island, and the nine hundred historic buildings turned into gift shops, nautical art galleries, and restaurants. The town had one traffic light, a passing acquaintance with severe weather, and fewer than three thousand residents. It had been Maggie’s home her entire life and she loved it, and the people in it, fiercely.
After getting the boat stowed away, Maggie and Wyatt walked across the oyster shell parking lot toward their cars. Maggie was just under five-foot three, and with her slight frame and long, dark brown hair, she looked younger than her thirty-seven years, especially walking next to Wyatt. Wyatt was eleven years her senior and stood more than a foot taller. His moustache was also quite a bit more impressive than Maggie’s, and the tinge of gray in his thick brown hair lent him an air of dignity that his dimples and occasional goofiness tended to ruin. But, while he had a knack for one-liners and a laid-back demeanor, he was sharp, dedicated, and occasionally intimidating.
He and Maggie approached their cars, his department cruiser and her ten-year old black Jeep Cherokee, and Wyatt took off his SO cap, and ran a hand through his damp hair before putting the hat back on.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“You got me,” Maggie answered. “It looked a little too neat for a propeller.”
“Yeah. I didn’t see anything that looked like a nick on the rest of the leg bone there.”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Drug deal gone bad?” “Maybe.” Wyatt leaned up against his door. “So, I’ve
been thinking about our first date.”
“Yeah? Did we have fun?” Maggie asked, smiling. “You’re precious. No, I was thinking that we should have one.”
Last week, after several months of occasional light flirtation punctuated by the odd mutual stare, Maggie and Wyatt had had what Wyatt now called “The Test Kiss”. The test, on Wyatt’s part, was whether Maggie was genuinely interested in him. On Maggie’s part, it was an experiment to see if she could be comfortable kissing anyone other than the ex-husband that she had loved and been best friends with since fifth grade.
They both passed, but a Sheriff dating one of his two investigative officers would not go over very well, although if he were dating Terry Coyle, it would be even less well-received, especially by Terry’s wife.
“Well, I’m okay with that,” Maggie said. She opened her cargo door and put her crime scene case inside.
“Good. I was thinking you should come to my house for dinner.”
“You want me to come to your house for our first date?” “Well, it is more fun if we’re both in attendance.” “Isn’t that a little more questionable than being seen out in public?”
“People see us eating out together all the time,” Wyatt said.
“Yeah, with guns on, in broad daylight.”
“The Jorgensen’s are in bed by seven and the guy that lives on the other side of me has an illegal cable hookup, so I don’t think he’s going to be a problem.”
Maggie smiled at him. “Do you cook?”
“I am a man, as an investigator of your caliber has probably noted. I grill.”
“David cooked on the stove, too.”
“David is a pantywaist,” Wyatt said mildly. “Do you want to come?”
“Yeah, of course I do.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. Tomorrow night okay?” “Okay.”
“Okay.” He stared at Maggie, as though he wasn’t sure what to say next.
“Do you need me to sign something?” she asked, grinning.
“Or we could skip it.” “I’m kidding. Yeesh.”
Wyatt grinned at her and pulled his keys out of his pocket, opened his door.
Maggie opened her own door. “Hey, we still have some time before Woody goes to press,” she said, speaking of the editor of the town’s weekly paper. “I think we should give this to him, see if he’ll find room for it.”
“Well, he’d probably have to ruffle some feathers over at the Junior League, boot the coverage of their bi-monthly meeting.”
“Maybe some oysterman or shrimper saw something out on the Bay that he doesn’t know he saw yet.”
Wyatt nodded. “Maybe. Why don’t you run over there and ask him?”
“I can’t. He’s still pissed at me.” “Oh, yeah,” Wyatt said.
In last week’s edition, he’d referred to Grace Carpenter, the young girl who’d jumped from the bridge, as ‘a drug dealer’s teenaged girlfriend’. She’d been much more than that, and Maggie had confronted him more loudly than she’d intended at Delores’s Sweet Shoppe. It had ruined his appreciation of his morning cinnamon roll, and he hadn’t spoken to her last Saturday when they’d seen each other at Battery Park.
“Never mind, I’ll go,” Wyatt said. “Why don’t you go back to the office and see if we missed a missing person.”
“Okay. I’ll see you later.”
They both got into their cars, and Wyatt let Maggie pull out first. She stopped halfway out and rolled down her passenger window.
“Maybe you should take him some cinnamon rolls,” she said.
Wyatt put his car in gear and rolled his eyes at her.
“Don’t tell me how to do sheriffy stuff.”
* * *
Maggie was stopped at the one red light downtown, on Hwy 98, when she decided to make a right, rather than a left.
Apalachicola wasn’t like other places on either of Florida’s coasts. It didn’t have any suburbs or McDonalds or even a Walmart, something of which the residents were quite proud. There was no sprawl; there was just downtown and not downtown. What Apalach lacked in square miles, it made up for with historic ambience. What it lacked in big commerce, it made up for with an actual soda shop and more than its fair share of good raw bars, in a per capita sort of way.
It was only a few blocks from the traffic light to the Apalachicola City Cemetery.
Maggie drove in, parked her Jeep, and walked between the graves and the palms and the live oaks. The sun was already blistering and its light was so harsh and so white that it faded what color there was in the old cemetery. Green became gray, gray became white and white just disappeared.
Although rare for the end of June, there was no rain in the forecast other than the usual summer shower, which arrived somewhere around three in the afternoon every day and evaporated by three-thirty. Maggie sucked a hot lungful of the morning air and wished for a tropical depression. Maggie looked at the small, simple headstone, which said only Grace Carpenter, and below that 1996-2015. Maggie and her parents had paid for the headstone, and Maggie had wanted it to say something more. Maybe to say that she was a good mother. But Grace had had her newborn taken away, as well as the two little children belonging to her now dead boyfriend, meth dealer Richard Alessi, because she’d been foolish and lonely and plain enough to fall in with a man like Ricky.
It hadn’t mattered that Grace, bony and small and brave, had, of her own volition, put herself in danger by trying to help Maggie to arrest Alessi. It hadn’t mattered that she’d done it to give her child, and his children, a better life.
Grace had known she wouldn’t get her kids back, even though Maggie had promised to find help. Grace had known the workings of Children’s Services better than Maggie did, and she’d driven to the bridge. It just didn’t seem right to Maggie to mention on the headstone that she’d loved her children.
But the guys from the Sheriff’s office and the Apalachicola PD had known, and they’d all chipped in to pay for the plot. It had been a small service, just Maggie and Wyatt and a few of the officers who had worked the Alessi case. Maggie had gotten her ex-husband, David, to come, and they’d stood under a tin-colored sky while he played Wayfaring Stranger on his guitar. Then they’d all walked away and left her as alone as she’d been most of her short life.
Oddly, the casket had been paid for by Bennett Boudreaux.
Boudreaux was Apalachicola’s version of a crime boss or head of a Mafia family, though he’d never been convicted of a crime and was Cajun by birth rather than Italian. He owned several seafood-related businesses in town and several in his home state of Louisiana. He sponsored community events, had his picture taken with local politicians, and his son Patrick was the Assistant State’s Attorney for Franklin County. It was all very cozy and polite, but a lot of people were afraid of Boudreaux and most of them had a reason to be.
But Boudreaux had actually tried to use his influence to help Grace, at Maggie’s request. It just hadn’t come through in time.
Maggie squinted up at the sun and sighed. Then she kissed a finger, touched it to the headstone, and turned and walked away.
* * *
Wyatt walked into the old brick warehouse downtown that now housed Apalach’s weekly newspaper, The Apalachicola Press, and smiled back at Maureen Dailey, the elderly lady who had been the receptionist/secretary/everything at the paper since the headlines had been about Vietnam.
“Why, how are you, Sheriff Hamilton?” she said over her computer monitor.
Wyatt walked up to her desk and took off his sunglasses. “I’m fine, Mrs. Dailey, how are you?”
“Fair to middlin’,” she answered. “It’s press day, you know. Busy, busy.”
“Is Woody in?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Well, that is, he’s in, but no, don’t talk to him today.”
“Well, I have to, sorry.”
“Can it not wait until tomorrow?”
“No, I need him to put something in the paper for me.”
“Oh, no, that won’t do.” Mrs. Daily started fiddling with the chain on her bifocals. “The paper’s almost set to go.”
“It’ll be all right, Mrs. Daily.” Wyatt started heading toward the hallway that led to the press room and Woody’s office.
“Oh, it won’t,” she said. “Mercy, I’ll have to listen to him all day.”
Wyatt walked back to the small office belonging to Woody Dumont, the paper’s editor. The office was the only enclosed area in the back of the building. Beyond it was an open area with several desks, where reporters and other employees tapped away on their keyboards or squinted at ads and graphics on their monitors. Beyond the staff area was the actual press.
Woody, a slightly-built, balding, and chronically agitated man in his early fifties, was standing at a table against a windowed wall, inspecting a physical mock-up of the paper, with various articles cut and taped onto newsprint. Wyatt rapped on the door jamb and Woody looked over his shoulder.
“Oh, hey, Sheriff,” he said cheerfully.
“Hey, Woody. I need you to do something for me,” Wyatt said, walking into the office.
Woody turned around and craned his neck to look at Wyatt. “What do you need?”
“I need to you to put something in the paper for me.” “Tomorrow’s paper?” Woody asked.
“Yes, please.”
“Nope.” Woody started shaking his head emphatically. “No, can’t do that. I’m sorry.”
“I need you to do it anyway,” Wyatt said, trying to soften it with a smile.
“I can’t,” Woody said, waving a hand at the mock-up behind him. “Paper’s all set.”
“It can’t wait for next week, Woody, and the Press could
be instrumental in helping us solve a case.” “What case?”
“A shrimper found a foot in his net this morning. We’re hoping maybe someone saw something that can help.”
“A foot? What kind of foot?”
Wyatt looked down at his sizable shoes. “Just like the ones you and I still have.”
“A human foot?”
“Yes. And we need to find out who it belongs to and whether anyone saw anything recently that might be important.”
“Oh, this is awful! This is—oh, for crying out loud! A shark? Was it one of those ridiculous Bull sharks you think? It’s those people shore fishing, you know.”
“No, it wasn’t a shark. This foot was cut. Chopped off.”
Woody stared at Wyatt for a moment. “You mean deliberately?”
“That’s the assumption, yes,” Wyatt said patiently. “Oh, well, dandy! That’s even better. Half the people who read it will think we have sharks and the other half will think we have serial killers.” Woody patted at his chest with his hands as though he were checking for something in his pocket, although he didn’t have one. “This is not good for the tourists, Sheriff.”
“Well, I realize that, Woody, but—“
“I mean, we’re online and everything, now! The people out on St. George are gonna pack up and the ones getting ready to book their vacation rentals, why, they’ll go to Destin or, heaven help us, Daytona, if they think we have sharks or serial killers.”
“We don’t have sharks and serial killers, Woody. Everybody knows serial killers don’t hang out in Apalach.”
“It could be a passing-through serial killer.”
“Well, then he’s gone,” Wyatt countered. “Where’s the rest of the body?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Oh, this is not good.” Woody shook his head. “The rest of it’s gonna wash up on the island and everybody’s gonna be running up and down the beach with their arms in the air. It’s gonna be like Amity Island all over again.”
“That’s not gonna happen, Woody.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, in all likelihood, pieces would wash up on the beach, not a body missing one foot.”
Woody gave Wyatt a stricken look and Wyatt held up a hand.
“I’m kidding, Woody.” He pulled a piece of note paper out of his shirt pocket and held it out to the other man. “I wrote some notes down for you. Just keep it short and simple. I appreciate it.”
Woody stared at the paper for a moment, as if not taking the paper might make the foot go away.
“Woody,” Wyatt said firmly.
Woody reached out and took the note with two fingers. He shook his head slowly. “Between BP and storms and the feet, we just can’t get a break down here.”
Wyatt headed for the door. “Cheer up, Woody. The weather’s looking good.”
He waved goodbye to Mrs. Dailey, as he hotfooted it to the door before she could tell him how upset she was with him. The mid-morning heat blasted him as he stepped outside to the sidewalk. The air was humid enough to make him feel like he was wading to his cruiser rather than walking.
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