Memorial Day weekend, traditionally the start of a summer filled with beach parties, scuba diving, and Keys vacations for Florida folks. Fewer tourists, lower prices, slower pace. Good times… if you’re lucky enough not to get stuck with an investigation that darkens your soul and wrecks your life. I wasn’t lucky, not even close.
Flies buzzed and flitted over her naked body lying face up by the picnic table. A line of ants marched across her torso, skin dappled by early morning sun penetrating the leafy canopy. A faint smell of necrosis assaulted my nostrils. Then an irrational feeling of failure engulfed me, draining my soul as the death of a young woman always did, but stronger than usual, maybe the strongest ever.
“Is this her, Luke?”
She wasn’t the smuggler’s girlfriend I’d been trying to find, but there was something about her… something familiar. I glanced at OC and said what I was sure he already knew, “This isn’t the girl I’m looking for.”
Though death had slackened her face, she was still beautiful. I couldn’t pinpoint what was familiar. Around twenty years old, long blonde hair, glazed-over blue eyes, medium height, good body, not much makeup, pale lipstick, clear fingernail and toenail polish. A black beetle crawled over blonde pubic hair trimmed short and shaved into a small triangle.
Flawless, except for a bullet hole under her left breast, but not much blood. The bullet must have wiped out her heart instantly. What a fucking waste. I failed her. The world failed her.
“Is this how she was found?”
OC shook his head. “White panties pulled down to her knees and red sandals on her feet. A red top and bra and a white skirt were next to her body. Harlan bagged all of it. That was the only evidence besides the shell casing. No tire prints or footprints in this sand and rock.”
I was glad the panties were gone. Somehow that intimate garment would have made her seem even more violated than her total nakedness. I squatted and touched her left shoulder… flesh cold, so different from the warmth she radiated just hours earlier. My feeling of failing her deepened.
I looked up at OC. “What’d the medical examiner say about time of death?”
“Between ten and midnight, maybe as late as one this morning.”
No blood around her. I lifted her shoulder. Flies swarmed off. No blood on the ground underneath her. “Exit wound?”
“No exit wound. Doc rolled her far enough to see her back. And no sign of sexual assault.”
I stood but a translucent image of me touching her shoulder remained. I shook my head to clear the illusion and said, “Obviously shot while undressing. Gunpowder stippling on her chest. The killer wasn’t far from her.”
“The casing’s a .380. With that stippling pattern Harlan thinks it was about two feet. He’s going to check his charts.”
I leaned forward and studied her face, trying to visualize her alive. “Any idea of who she is?”
“Not yet.”
A second beetle caught my attention and the flies were bringing in reinforcements. Masking the emotions the dead girl had churned up, I said, “Might as well let the meat wagon take her while there’s something left to autopsy.”
OC turned and waved his arm. A deputy moved the crime scene tape blocking the park entrance and the ambulance rolled in. We were silent while the paramedics put the body on a gurney, loaded it, and closed the doors. After the ambulance started back toward the highway, we walked in the same direction.
“The ME finished up a few minutes before you got here,” OC said, “but I wouldn’t let them haul the body till you saw it.”
“Thanks, we don’t usually get called in until the body’s been six feet under long enough to be a fossil and the case is colder than a penguin’s ass.”
I stopped and looked around. Tall water oaks shaded River Bluff Park. Calling a strip of land on the Persimmon River with one picnic table a park was a stretch. A moonlit night about six years ago with a woman who worked for the Treasure County Sheriff’s Department entered my mind. That pleasurable memory of the park was quickly ruined by the dead girl’s glazed-over blue eyes fading in. I blinked them away.
“Really appreciate you comin’, Luke, swamped as you always are.”
Although concentration lines and thinning gray hair had always made OC appear older than his years, my good friend had aged more than he should have in what? Six months? Six months since I’d seen OC. Hard to believe. A hell of a way to get together.
“When,” I said, “did the Florida Department of Law Enforcement ever turn down your request? I’m damn sure I haven’t personally because I’d still be hearing about it.”
“This is different. You don’t work this area anymore and could’ve gotten out of it. But it’s a bad situation and I’ve seen you figure out what happened before anybody else even realized a crime had been committed.”
I held up a hand as though stopping traffic. “You don’t have to lay it on so thick. I’m already here. Did you really think this girl was the one I’ve been looking for, or was that a con job for Tallahassee’s benefit?”
We ducked under the crime scene tape, walked past two sheriff’s department marked units, and crossed River Road where our cars were parked on the shoulder.
“Both,” OC said. “She looked enough like the girl in the photo that I couldn’t positively say it wasn’t her. And I knew your Fort Pierce office couldn’t help much what with the vacancies and some major cases they’re involved in, but most of all, I need you on this.”
OC looked at his watch. “Roughly two hours ago, which was about fifteen minutes before I called you, Harlan had just finished the other crime scene. He got the call to come here and found the same caliber shell casing. With the bodies only bein’ about two miles apart, the homicides could be connected, and the girl maybe bein’ the one you’re interested in, I figured it was an FDLE case.”
“The part about possibly being the girl I’m looking for was a masterstroke. Tallahassee didn’t hesitate about me coming up here. What’s the story on the other victim?”
“Alvin Wayne Reynolds, called Big Al. His body was found inside his house in Persimmon Estates. You know where that is, don’t you?”
I nodded. I knew the place. I’d made an arrest there six years ago. If I’d gone straight on Bridge Road instead of turning toward the park, I’d have come to it about a mile past the bridge.
A strident electronic tone blared out of OC’s cell phone. He pulled it off his belt. “Sheriff Lofton.” He listened but didn’t speak.
Thinking about Persimmon Estates, I looked west down River Road toward Bridge Road, the area as rural as when I’d first driven into Treasure County eight years ago as a rookie agent. Back then, 606 east from I-95 to Treasure Beach was rural too, with only a mom-and-pop gas station and a small local airport along that five mile stretch. I could cruise at a hundred plus and only have an occasional wayward cow to worry about.
This morning after driving past big gas stations and fast food joints crammed around the interchange, I almost rear-ended an idiot stopped in the road gawking at decorated conch shells and coconuts in front of a souvenir shop. Then before turning north, I got stuck behind a truck creeping through a construction zone.
Well, what the hell did I expect in a coastal county between West Palm Beach and Orlando in the budding twenty-first century? Fortunately, the zero-lot-line housing and strip malls sprouting in pastures and citrus groves soon petered out on Bridge Road. By the time I reached River Road, the terrain looked about the same as ever. The closer I got to the park, the more I realized it wasn’t overdevelopment aggravating me. It was knowing I was about to investigate the death of a young woman.
I took a deep breath of clean country air and tried to detach myself from the dead blonde. Some Memorial Day weekend, and it was only Saturday.
OC finally spoke into his cell phone. “Stevenson Community? Be right there.”
He disconnected. OC’s eyes were narrowed and his mouth was set in a hard line. “A three-year-old girl just died at the hospital. Parents brought her in a half hour ago, said she’d fallen into an abandoned well. The doc’s not buying it.”
I tried to talk but something had me by the throat. A faceless toddler under bright hospital lights taking her last breath filled my mind. A child, the only thing that hit me as hard as a young woman, maybe harder. Both, back to back. My neck spasmed. Bile in my throat.
OC blew out his breath. “All my investigators and six special-assignment deputies are working Big Al and this one. I know I got you up here for these cases, but I don’t have anybody to handle the little girl, except you and me.”
I forced out gravelly words. “Meet you at the hospital." ____________________________________________________________
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