CHAPTER ONE
It was a windy night out on the bay, very windy for a late-July night without any tropical storms in the area. Maggie Redmond’s long, dark brown hair kept trying to fly out of its clip, and she struggled to get it all tucked and out of her way one-handed. Her right arm, the one she really had a close relationship with, was still in a sling, after she’d been shot by some low-life on her own property.
She gave up on the clip and grabbed onto the portside rail, then looked up at Wyatt Hamilton, who was towering over her, holding binoculars to his face as he looked out to the bay.
She, Wyatt, and Dwight, one of the deputies who worked with them at the Sheriff’s office, had taken her Dad’s fishing boat out past St. George Island to do a little sunset fishing. Wyatt had just been reeling in a nice-sized redfish when they got the call.
It probably wasn’t especially appropriate for them to respond, given that Dwight had had a few beers, Maggie was on leave and one-armed, and Wyatt didn’t look especially official in his cargo shorts and red Hawaiian shirt. However, they were already halfway to the location, and would beat the Coast Guard by at least five minutes.
“Can you make anything out yet?” she yelled over the Chris Craft’s engine.
“Not really,” Wyatt barked. “It’s too dark. But they’re right, it is on fire.”
Michael Vinton and Richard Farrell, two shrimpers that Maggie knew only passingly, had come upon it as they were headed out for the night’s work. They’d called the Coast Guard and the Sheriff’s Office, and someone at the office had called Wyatt.
Dwight was with them, so it wasn’t technically their second date, but Wyatt was a little put out nonetheless.
“Let me look,” Maggie yelled up at him. She was short to begin with, but being one-armed besides made her feel even smaller next to Wyatt, who, at six-four, was more than a foot taller than she was.
“No,” Wyatt said. “You have one hand and Dwight’s hitting every damn wave like he was getting points for it. You’ll drop my binoculars.”
“No, I won’t. Let me look.” “I said ‘no,’” Wyatt told her.
He took the binoculars down, looked at her, and gave her an eyebrow waggle. “My mom got me these.”
Maggie and Wyatt had worked together at the Sheriff’s Office for six years and had become good friends over time. They’d only started seeing each other over the last several weeks. It was, of course, forbidden by the department, so they’d been keeping it quiet. This was fairly easy thus far, as most people thought they acted like an old married couple anyway.
Wyatt had lost his wife to cancer shortly before movin to Apalachicola, and Maggie’s friendship had helped him heal. Maggie had lost her ex-husband, who was also her best friend, just a few short weeks ago. Wyatt was helping her heal, too.
Nevertheless, she thought he was a jerk.
As they got closer to their destination, Maggie could see Michael and Richard in the lights of their trawler, anchored just yards away.
A few minutes later, Dwight cut the engine, and they coasted up to about ten yards from the flames. The shrimp boat’s engine was silent as well, and the only sounds Maggie heard were the hiss and pop of the flames and the lapping of the wake as it slapped at the sides of the boat.
“What the hell?” Wyatt asked, as he and Maggie walked to the starboard rail and looked at what they’d come for.
Maggie didn’t recognize the old wooden skiff, and the name had been scratched or blasted off of the stern. But the lack of a name, and even the fact that it was on fire, weren’t the details that stood out the most. The man hanging from the front of the cabin, and currently aflame, was more of an attention grabber.
“Now what?” Maggie asked.
“Well, we don’t get too many Viking funerals around here,” Wyatt said. “So I don’t think it’s that.”
He grabbed one of the long metal fish hooks from its holder and poked at the burning skiff to keep them from bumping. Then he bent over sideways, to look up at the face.
Meanwhile, Dwight began looking like a cat with a hairball, and Wyatt heard him coughing into his hand.
“You all right, Dwight?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, but, uh, the smell.” Dwight gulped, looked away from the burning body. “I’m a vegetarian, you know?” “Well, don’t worry. We’re not going to have to taste it.”
Dwight took two steps to the port side and threw his beer up over the rail.
“Sorry,” Wyatt said.
Maggie sniffed the air. Aside from the rather horrid odor of burning flesh, she could pick up no, propane or other fuel that might have been used as an accelerant. That would help explain why it was burning so slowly.
“Well, that’s kind of an interesting thing,” Wyatt said, standing up.
“What is?” Maggie asked. “That’s Rupert Fain.” “What?”
Rupert Fain was the drug dealer that was suspected of blowing up her ex-husband on his shrimp boat at the town’s 3rd of July celebration. They’d been looking for him since.
“It’s Fain,” Wyatt said, frowning. “I memorized his damn mug shot.”
“He’s from Gainesville. What’s he doing out here?” “Confirming the existence of karma, primarily.”
* * *
The remainder of Maggie’s and Wyatt’s second date was attended not only by Dwight, two shrimpers and a burning dead guy, but also a dozen Coast Guard and assorted folks from the Sheriff’s Office.
The fire was put out, the body brought aboard the Coast Guard cutter, and the oyster skiff, which had begun to sink, hauled ashore.
Terry Coyle was meeting the cutter at the marina in back of Sea-Fair Seafood, where the SO kept its boat. This would be his case, partly because he was, aside from Maggie, the only other Investigative Officer for the SO, and therefor on duty, and partly because Maggie wouldn’t have been allowed to work the crime scene, anyway.
Rupert Fain was believed to have killed her ex-husband and she wasn’t going to be allowed within twenty feet of the case.
Maggie docked her father’s boat in its slip at Scipio Creek Marina, then she and Wyatt walked the half-block distance to the docks behind Sea-Fair. Dwight opted to skip a visit in favor of going home and inhaling a quantity of both Vick’s and Budweiser.
Once she and Wyatt got to the docks, Maggie headed for the gurney on which the body of Rupert Fain was being placed.
“What are you doing?” Wyatt asked as he followed her.
“I just want to see,” Maggie answered.
“See what? You already saw it out there,” Wyatt said.
“I want to see his face.”
“You have his mug shot on your desk,” Wyatt countered. “I catch you looking at it all the time.”
Maggie and Wyatt arrived among the group of EMTs and SO personnel near the gurney. Terry and the elderly medical examiner, Larry Davenport, were bending over the body.
“I want to look him in the face, Wyatt,” Maggie said firmly.
Maggie could see enough of Fain’s profile to know that his face was smoke-stained and perhaps just a little singed. Dirty-blond hair cut very short.
Larry was on the opposite side of the gurney from Maggie, and was inspecting the head. Maggie tried to peer around Terry’s back to get a better look, but one of the EMTs was in her way, as well.
“No, I’d say he was already dead when he was set on fire,” Larry was saying, peering over his bifocals. “One shot from what looks like it might be a .22, some small caliber, at any rate.”
Larry turned the head so that the face was pointing toward Maggie. “No exit wound. Definitely a small caliber. I’d say it turned his brain straight to pudding, rattling around in there. Merciful, I suppose.”
Maggie slapped the EMT on the waist, and he turned to look at her. “Hey, Bret,” Maggie said. “Can you scoot over a little?”
He stepped aside just a bit and Maggie looked at the face of Rupert Fain, just a few feet away. He had a slightly surprised expression, and a neat bullet hole dead in the center of his forehead.
Maggie stood and looked at him for a long moment while Larry talked primarily to himself and secondarily to Terry. So this was the man.
This was the man they suspected of blowing up her ex-husband. Her kind and gentle ex-husband, who had made the mistake of getting into the pot transportation business when his shrimp boat was repossessed after the BP oil spill, and then made the mistake of getting out of the business just last month.
The prevailing theory, which she and Wyatt had refined over the last few weeks, was that Fain had suspected David of stealing about fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of pot, and using the proceeds to buy himself a new boat. If so, he’d been mistaken. Wyatt had found bank statements proving that David had taken two years to painstakingly earn every penny he’d paid for the old wooden Jefferson trawler. What had happened to Fain’s pot had yet to be discovered, but it didn’t look like David had done anything other than deliver it.
The middleman between Fain and David had been found fried to a crisp in an old car in Gainesville a few weeks back, and David was dead two weeks later, blown up his new boat in front of the ex-wife who still considered him her best friend.
Then someone had sent an ex-con named Mel Harper to kill Maggie, too, a mission he’d failed in only because Wyatt had been on time for dinner.
Maggie knew it was a solid assumption on Wyatt’s part, that Fain had sent Harper to kill her, and even that Harper had been the one to kill David. But Maggie had never told Wyatt what Harper had said before Wyatt showed up. Maggie had lain on the ground after being shot in the shoulder, and watched Harper walk toward her.
When he’d stopped a few feet away, he’d said, “I’m tired of cleaning up Boudreaux’s messes.” And that was a whole different kettle of fish. She wasn’t too sure that Fain had sent Harper to kill her, but she was sure that Fain was responsible for the death of her ex-husband, the man she had loved since fifth grade.
Maggie bent over to get a closer look at Fain, looked into his dead brown eyes that even now looked small and shifty. She could feel everyone, particularly Wyatt, watching her.
“I hope you’re grateful,” Maggie said quietly. “I wouldn’t have shot you first.”
After telling Terry he’d read his report in the morning, Wyatt practically shoved Maggie toward the Scipio Creek docks. They walked for a few minutes without saying anything.
“This both complicates and simplifies my search for Fain somewhat,” Wyatt finally said.
“Any ideas?” Maggie asked.
“Well, no,” he said, sounding irritated about it. “You would be my first suspect, but you’ve screwed that up by being with me.”
Maggie looked at him. “Oh come on, you wouldn’t actually suspect me, would you?”
“Not really, no. You’re not the vigilante type, but if you were, you wouldn’t have let him off that easy.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way to their cars. Wyatt leaned against his cruiser and Maggie leaned up against the passenger side door of her black Cherokee.
Wyatt glanced over at a couple of shrimpers who were heading out late. He and Maggie were in clear view of a few other people on the docks, as well as anyone on the deck at Up the Creek, the raw bar across the parking lot.
“There are probably a hundred people that wouldn’t mind seeing Fain dead,” Wyatt said. “He was a violent scumbag. But as far as I can tell, those hundred people are all in Gainesville. I can’t think of one good reason for him to be dead here, instead of being dead there.”
I’m tired of cleaning up Boudreaux’s messes. It was Bennett Boudreaux who had pointed at Fain as a likely suspect for David’s murder, or at least the contractor thereof. A few days later, the man who tried to kill her invoked Boudreaux’s name.
“You don’t have anything at all that might be a solid connection between Harper and Fain?” Maggie asked.
“No.”
“Maybe I could look through the file. Maybe a fresh pair of eyes—”
“Your eyes, fresh or otherwise, will stay out of my case file,” Wyatt said. “If there’s anybody left to arrest for David’s death, I’d like the charge to stick, not get thrown out of court because you were dragging your eyeballs across the documentation.”
Maggie sighed. “I’m not implying that you’re not doing a good job.”
“I’m not inferring it, either,” Wyatt said. “Nevertheless, you will stick to the foot and stay away from this one.”
Wyatt was referring to the severed leg of Sport Wilmette, which was pulled up out of the ocean in a shrimper’s net a few days before David’s death. Wilmette was Maggie’s case, though he probably shouldn’t be.
She didn’t remember ever meeting the man, but she had learned during the investigation that they shared one terrible moment in their histories, one that made her investigation of his death unethical. One that she hadn’t shared with Wyatt.
She shrugged that line of thought off, needing to spend more time thinking about it before she decided what kind of person she was to withhold the information, especially from this man who was her close friend and quite possibly the second man she would love in her lifetime.
“Okay, I’ll stick with the foot,” she said. “Hey, I get the stitches out and the sling off tomorrow.’
“Already? Geez. Used to be, you got shot you were in the hospital for weeks,” Wyatt said. “Now, they boot you out of the hospital the next day and yank your stitches out a week later.”
“Two weeks,” Maggie said.
“Whatever.” Wyatt looked back over toward the docks. One of the shrimpers raised a hand in greeting, and Wyatt raised one back, then sighed, arms folded across his chest. “I bet clandestine romance is simpler in Orlando.”
“I’m not moving to Orlando just so we can go unnoticed,” she said, smiling.
“You still haven’t cooked me that dinner,” he said. “Maybe we should do that for our third attempt at a second date.”
“Let’s do that,” she said.
They looked at each other for a minute and Maggie wished that Wyatt wasn’t her boss and her children’s father wasn’t dead. That she hadn’t started keeping so many secrets.
“Well, okee-doke,” Wyatt said, opening his car door.
“Pretend I kissed you goodnight.”
Maggie smiled as he started the car. “Pretend I liked it.”
Wyatt laughed sarcastically. “You’re just adorable. We both know your knees were knocking.”
Maggie watched him drive off, her smile fading. Too many secrets.
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning, Maggie went to the doctor to get her stitches out, which she endured with an embarrassing amount of wincing, mewing and gasping, at least for someone who carried a Glock.
Afterward, she was desperate for coffee, and longed to get a café con leche from the restaurant of the same name, but she hadn’t been there in weeks. It was right across from Riverfront Park, where David had been killed, and she hadn’t been able to bring herself to go back yet.
Instead, she drove over to Delores’s Sweet Shoppe, a local institution and Maggie’s second-favorite coffee spot. She needed a little extra down time after her harrowing experience, so she ordered her coffee to drink there, sat down at one of the little round tables, and practiced using her right hand again.
She was on her second cup of coffee, and contemplating ordering another to go, when a slightly raised voice from near the counter got her attention.
“Oh, it’s the little sheriff!”
She looked up to see William and Robert, who owned the local flower shop, descending on her in a quiet flurry, to-go cups of coffee in hand.
“We need to talk to you about this newest nonsense,” William said, sliding into the chair across from her. He was in his early fifties or so, short and slight, with golden hair that couldn’t possibly be natural but looked good anyway. Before Maggie could answer, Robert, much larger, a few years younger and with slick black hair, slid into the chair beside William and nodded.
“Complete nonsense,” he said in a hushed voice. “I’m sorry, what do you mean?” Maggie asked.
“The burning boat guy,” William said in a stage whisper.
“Completely uncalled for,” Robert said.
“How do you know about this?” Maggie asked, and immediately felt stupid for the knee-jerk response. There were fewer than three thousand people living in Apalach. Everybody knew everything.
“It’s in this morning’s paper,” Robert said.
“Front page,” William added. “Do you not read the paper?”
Robert put a hand on William’s wrist. “Rude. She doesn’t need the paper, she has a police radio.”
William flicked his hand off and looked back at Maggie. “What on God’s green earth is going on?”
Maggie put her coffee cup down. “Well, it’s not my case, so I really couldn’t say.”
“This is not a useful occurrence in the middle of summer,” William said. “First your foot, and now a burning boat man.”
“It’s very bad for business,” Robert said. “Yours is good,
ours is bad.”
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said.
“Who wants to come down on vacation if they have to worry about being chopped into pieces or burned at the stake?” William said, almost whispering.
“Well, he wasn’t exactly—”
“Not to be impolite, but whatever,” William said. “Some guy was out on the Bay doing his Joan of Arc impression and the tourists are going to be taken aback for sure.”
“They’re gonna rethink,” Robert said.
“Those talentless hacks in Destin—” He looked at Robert. “Who are those people?”
Robert gave him a dismissive wave. “Bountiful Buds.” William looked back at Maggie with a pinched mouth.
“Sounds like they’re selling beer. Anyway, the tourists will be in Destin, getting all their bouquets from those hussies, and we’ll be on the longest smoke break in florist history.” “I’m sure Sheriff Hamilton and the rest of the department will be bringing the case to a quick close,” Maggie said. “And I doubt too many people outside of Apalach are reading our paper this morning.”
“Oh, you don’t know,” Robert said. “Those vacation rental people, they read it online, check the weather and whatnot.”
“They look for shark reports and early bird coupons,” William explained.
Maggie took another swallow of her coffee and picked up her keys, hoping to look like she really needed to be off. “Listen, you guys, I’m really sorry, but it’ll be okay,” she started.
“And what about the foot, anyway?” Robert asked. “We’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one.”
William slapped at Robert’s wrist.
“No, really,” Robert said. “We keep expecting more pieces to wash up on the beach or something.”
“Or for some pelican to yak up an elbow in front of The Soda Fountain,” said William.
“Guys, the rest of that body is long gone,” Maggie said, and jingled her keys to signify her being needed somewhere that wasn’t there. “We’re not going to find anything else.”
She stood up and pulled her purse onto her shoulder.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll go straight to the office right now and see what we’ve learned about the man in the boat, okay?”
William and Robert stood up. “Oh, good,” William said. “And let me tell you something, we will give you free weekly arrangements for life if you people would just keep any subsequent serial killer activity quiet.”
“Nice arrangements,” Robert said.
“These cases have nothing to do with each other,” Maggie said. “There’s no serial killer.”
“Three whacked out murders in like three weeks—” William started, then gasped as Robert slapped him on the shoulder.
Maggie swallowed and tried to smile.
“I’m so sorry,” William said in a pained whisper.
Maggie started away from the table. “It’s okay,” she said. “But I really need to go.”
As she opened the front door, she heard Robert back by the table.
“Why are you retarded?” he asked William rhetorically.
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