Death Among the Mangroves (23 page)

He parked his van by his assigned unit. It had a rolling vertical door that he raised on its tracks. Inside was clean and swept. He looked around for a few minutes, not because he wanted to store anything but because he was curious. He examined the door tracks and checked that there was a handle on the inside too, and tested the door, running it down and then back up a few times. Inside was dark with the door down and there were no lights or electricity. He supposed that most people just left the doors open while working inside their units. He left the door open.

Inside his van he got out a long zippered bag. He transferred to it his bolt cutter, a padlock he had bought that morning, a small box of miscellaneous tools, a Nikon camera with built-in flash, and a large flashlight. He put on some latex gloves. In all this time nobody drove past his unit or even down that lane. On a Tuesday morning the place was deserted.

He left the van and walked briskly down the lane and around the corner, whistling the tune from
Spanish Harlem
as he walked, and up the adjacent lane, counting off the unit numbers until he stopped in front of the one rented by Hans Stider. He used the bolt cutters on the small padlock there and put both the bolt cutters and the cut-off padlock into his bag. He hoisted up the door, entered, and pulled the door back down. He'd forgotten to turn on the flashlight first and had to fumble around in his bag to get that out and lit. He aimed it at the ceiling. It was so powerful that it lit the small space nicely.

He looked around. The storage unit was only a third full. Plenty of room for him to work. There were the usual odds and ends of furniture. Cord decided that people always seemed to store that stuff when they ought to have given it to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. He opened a half-dozen stored suitcases of various sizes and they were all empty. There were a dozen or more terracotta flower pots, five large glass water jugs that would go on top of an office water dispenser, some rope, anchors and seat cushions for a boat, a green plastic case on top of a large blue zippered bag with “WFO Sportfishing” on the side, an old Smith-Corona portable typewriter with a spare ribbon cartridge stuck down into the workings, several large blue plastic tarpaulins folded up, and several cardboard boxes full of files. And that was just what was in front.

Cord looked at the files. Files were always a number-one priority when it came to searching. But these appeared to be old and from the days when Hans Stider had a law practice in Fort Myers. Cord opened up the green plastic case. Inside was a .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol. The gun looked like a 1911 .45-caliber but on steroids. It was done with a gold finish. Cord pulled it out of the box, which was the one the pistol came in from the manufacturer, and racked the slide and one round popped out and landed on the concrete floor. He dropped the magazine and checked once more to make sure the thing was empty. He sniffed at the end of the barrel. When he did so he noticed a tiny smudge, some brown substance, on the leading edge of the front sight. He put the loose round and the magazine, and the gun, back into the green case. He photographed the gun and case. The WFO Sportfishing bag had several boxes of ammunition for the gun, a cleaning kit, some paper targets, gun oil and cleaning patches. He put all that back into the blue bag and resumed the search, whistling as he worked.

Chapter 37

Tuesday, December 31

When Troy came to work on the last day of the year he had email from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement office that had been examining the Stider boat chart plotter. There was a lot of discussion of the type of plotter, that it was IP7-rated to withstand submersion to a depth of one meter for thirty minutes, and other things. Troy opened the attached files, which were images of routes taken by the boat. The FDLE had been able to extract the previous twenty routes and superimpose those over a nautical chart.

Troy took his radio off the charger on his desk and called Bubba Johns, who was on day shift and out patrolling. While Bubba was driving in, Troy transferred the FDLE files to a thumb drive. He went to the lobby. June Dundee was filing her nails.

“June, got some investigating for you to do.”

“Like a real police person?” June Dundee said. She wasn't actually an officer. She womaned the front desk five days a week but often was the only person in the station.

“Just like. It's exciting. I want you to telephone every medical clinic around. See if they ever treated Martha Stider. I think she's been abused. Is being abused. Start next door with Doc Vollmer, but also call anywhere in Marco Island, Everglades City, Naples. Make a list of who you called and any results.”

“Is that all?”

“Actually, no. I also want to know if anyone named Stider had a Porsche detailed at any car wash around here.”

“How do I find car washes?”

“The Internet, of course. Where we find everything these days.”

“That sounds incredibly boring.”

“Welcome to police work.”

Troy went through the connecting door to the town hall, then down a hallway to a connecting door to the town clinic. He found Dr. Barry Vollmer in his office reading a Sharper Image catalog.

“Please tell me you don't buy your instruments out of Sharper Image,” Troy said.

Vollmer looked up. “Maybe some. Just the sharp, pointy ones. Why, are you sick? I'm short a nurse. If you crap or barf I have to clean it up myself. So don't do that.”

“Where's Sasha Thompson?”

“Gone. Quit. Moved to Atlanta. Said we were all too prejudiced here.”

“Does she think it's any better in Atlanta? Or Chicago? Or Nome, Alaska?”

“Beats me. At least in Atlanta nobody has shot her dogs yet.”

“Good point. I'm sorry to hear that she's gone. She did get mistreated. I tried to help, break through. Seen it too often. Felt it too often myself. I mean, look at me. One of the worst things about being racially profiled or discriminated against is that it's only natural to reciprocate, to lash out. You don't just have to be twice as good; you have to be twice as tolerant. For some, it's just too much.”

“She did have a bit of a chip on her shoulder. But she liked you. She told me so.”

“She will need to come back sometime, testify against that son of a bitch who shot her dogs.”

“I wouldn't count on that. I think we are pretty much in her rear-view mirror.”

“Well, I got the perp on a weapons charge. That's actually better anyway. And I don't need her testimony to push it.”

“Was that why you came by? To ask about Sasha Thompson?”

“Came to get a body bag.”

Vollmer put down the catalog and stared at Troy. “You got a body?”

“Not yet. I'm about to go hunting. Keep that to yourself for now.”

“I think I have two bags left.”

“I'll take one. Just in case.”

Back at the station Troy found Bubba sitting at Troy's desk looking at the Stider boat routes on Troy's computer. Troy laid the heavy rubber bag on the coffee table and sat in a visitor chair. “Les Groud might want to see this,” Bubba said.

“Why?”

“They must really like this one fishing spot,” Bubba said. “Eighteen of the twenty trips were out to that one spot.”

“Was that spot out in the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Nope. Some teensy hole back in the north part of the Everglades park. Must be some good current through there, some reason for fish. Why?”

“If they had been out to the Gulf, they might be running drugs. Getting them off a mother ship. But back in the Park, not likely. Too shallow.”

“Right. Well, the routes aren't dated. Too bad. But the one out to the Gulf of Mexico ends out there. No return trip. That's the one where we caught up to the boat and you cut the chart plotter out of the console. It stopped recording when you cut the power supply from the boat's battery. Then there's this one trip totally different, run up north of Faka Key in the Ten Thousand islands.”

Troy nodded. “Let's get out our boat and go look at that route.”

Chapter 38

Tuesday, December 31

They went in Troy's Subaru so that they would not take one of the police trucks out of action for the day, and launched the RIB at the boat ramp at the Snake Key boatyard. Bubba drove the boat. Troy had brought a laptop and had the thumb drive plugged into that. He sat that up on the top of the center console so Bubba could compare that to their own chart plotter.

“We're sort of all boated up here this week,” Troy said. “Got Domino going out this afternoon on that tug from Marco Island. Lift that boat the Stiders sank.”

“They would go a lot farther out. You want we should just go slow along the whole inside route? Could take all day.”

Troy shook his head. “Let's go on out to the farthest point of the route and look there first. That was, apparently, their destination. We don't find anything there we can go over the whole thing slowly.”

Bubba nodded. “That fails, we check the place they went eighteen times. But by then we'd be pretty desperate. They didn't sink a body in the middle of their favorite fishing hole.”

“Who knows? They might have done just that.”

“Huh,” Bubba said. “I wouldn't eat the fish.” He took them outside, into the Gulf of Mexico. It was a calm day with a bit of chop and the boat splashed up some spray from time to time. Bubba kept the throttle down to where the boat rode comfortably.

“They went up the inside,” Bubba said. “Faster for us to go the long way around in the open.”

They ran up the coastline, the Ten Thousand Islands to their east. Troy sat on the equipment box in front of the center console and watched the mangroves slide by to his right. Even knowing, as he did, where some of the channels were that led back into the islands, he found that they were difficult to pick out at any distance. Up close in a canoe, he knew, navigation was easier and a person had time to pause and consult a chart and compare landmarks, the few that existed. Out here a few hundred yards off, and in a fast-moving boat, what were, in fact, scattered islands, looked like a solid wall of equal-sized trees.

After a half-hour Bubba slowed the boat and they picked their way back into the mangrove forest though narrow channels overhung with branches, Bubba steering and watching out for tree limbs and oyster bars and Troy watching the laptop and comparing that to the boat's chart plotter. Once Bubba had to back out when a large fallen black mangrove blocked the path. It had probably gone down in the hurricane the previous July.

“We could use the chainsaw,” Troy said.

Bubba shook his head. “No need. Easier to find another way.”

The hard bottom of the RIB scraped over a bar. Bubba winced as if he personally was being dragged across oysters. “Ouch,” he said. He raised the motors to an angle, and kept going. With the motors angled, the prop wash sprayed into the air behind them. “Anyplace they can take that fishing boat, we can get into too,” Bubba said.

“We got a spare prop or two in this thing?”

“Oh yeah.” Bubba grinned. “Nobody comes in here without a spare prop, extra shear pins and cotter pins. Nobody that wants to get home alive at least. Got a big roll of duct tape, too.”

They finally reached the location where the route from the Stider boat's chart plotter stopped and went back the other way. They were in a small bay. No matter where you were in the mangrove forest, Troy thought, it always seemed as if you were in a circular pond totally surrounded by land and trees. It was an illusion. There was always a channel because a huge amount of water had to filter into these islands and then back out again on the next tide. Among the trees, though, the channels could be invisible from more than a few feet away. And the charts and chart plotters were of limited use because every major storm rearranged the islands slightly, rendering the charts more and more useless. The sheer difficulty of finding your way through this was one reason Troy loved to canoe in this mangrove forest, one of the largest on Earth and one of the most remote places in the United States.

“Well, let's poke around here a bit,” he told Bubba. “The chart shows a couple of dead-end channels out of here, plus the one we came in on and one going out to the east. That's the one the Stider boat came through to get in here. Let's start there.”

“Good,” Bubba said. “Just go clockwise around. That way we get all the channels and small spots and don't get confused.” He got out a short length of rope and tied that to a red mangrove limb. “Marker,” he said. “Start here. Finish up here.”

“Sounds good, Bubba.”

They poked into one dead end after another, sometimes Bubba goosing a few yards out of the engines, sometimes using paddles, one from each side. They had one long push pole that was more effective than a paddle. Once, Troy had to use the chainsaw overhead to clear room for the hardtop and radar to pass. On the fourth dead-end channel they got into Bubba said, “Whoops. Smell that?”

“I do,” Troy said grimly. It was what he had been hoping for and fearing at the same time. They paddled deeper into the narrowing channel. A small flock of seagulls flew out and past them, startling Troy and Bubba both. The body had been dragged a few yards into red mangroves. Those tangled prop roots would ensure it would not drift out on any tide. In another week there would be no smell and in another few weeks nothing left but bones fallen into the water among the mangrove roots, and never to be seen again.

They went over the side of the boat into waist-deep water. Bubba brought the body bag and they tried to get the body out of the roots. It was not easy. The body was clothed, with shoes, though the swelling made the jeans and shirt and bra seem much too tight. But the clothing had partially protected it from the birds and the small and large crabs that had eaten most of the hands and face and the flesh off the neck and head.