Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (12 page)

“Let’s take a look,” Jock said.

J.D. brought her laptop to the table and booted it up. She found the
picture and turned the screen so that we could all see it. The picture was taken from a distance. It showed Katie standing in front of a nondescript two-story building constructed of concrete block that could have been in any city in the country. Katie was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her short hair in disarray.

“Can you zoom in on Katie?” Jock asked.

J.D. manipulated the mouse. Katie began to grow on the screen until the picture started to pixelate. J.D. stopped the zoom feature, freezing the photograph. “That’s the best I can do with the program I have. I think we could get a better picture with a more sophisticated program like the one we have at the station.”

“Can either of you make out what’s written on Katie’s sweatshirt?”

J.D. peered closely. “Damn, I wish I had a bigger screen. I can’t make it out.”

“How big is your TV?” Jock asked.

J.D. grinned. “Forty-two inches, and it has a USB port. I’ll plug the laptop into it.”

She set up the laptop so that the TV sitting in the entertainment center in her living room became the monitor. The pixelation was no better, but the bigger screen gave us a picture on which we could make out more detail. “I’ll be damned,” J.D. said. “Those are Greek letters on the sweatshirt. It’s our old sorority.”

“Zoom out a bit,” I said. “I think I saw some graffiti on that building.”

J.D. played with the mouse and moved the picture around, zooming in on the paint defacing the side of the building. “Damn, again,” she said. “Look at that.”

The graffiti was garish, the letters stylized, but the message was clear. “JED.” I looked at J.D. “I think she’s giving you some more information, letting you know it’s really her.”

“But where the hell is she?” J.D. asked. “Why not just send me a message?”

“Probably because she’s not sure yet who may be looking at her texts. She’s being very careful.”

“I’ll have the phone company see if they can tell me where this one came from, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I’m off to bed. You guys
do some catching up, and I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll leave the bathroom light on for you, Matt.”

After J.D. left the room, Jock sat grinning at me. “You look happy, podna.”

“I am, Jock. Happier than I can remember. How’re you doing?”

“I’m fine.”

“How was Europe?”

“Piece of cake. I spent a little time in Spain and some in Italy. Nobody died, and we gained some intel we didn’t have before. I’m fine, Matt. Really.”

“Glad to hear it. You look like you need a good night’s sleep.”

“Yeah. It’s a long trip from Rome. You bunking in with me tonight?”

I grinned. “Not even if it was your last night on earth, old buddy.”

It was still dark when the three of us left J.D.’s condo on Friday morning for our four-mile run. We stayed on the sidewalk that ran beside Gulf of Mexico Drive where the streetlights gave us some illumination. There was no chatter, just three people huffing and puffing as we ate up the distance, J.D. in the lead. At the two-mile mark we reversed our course. Light was seeping over the key as the sun reached for the eastern horizon, clawing its way into the dissipating night sky. By the time we returned to the condo, the sun was peeking over the bay, its rays painting brilliant colors on the clouds that skittered across its face.

Jock went to his room, and J.D. and I headed for her oversized shower. I soaped her down, taking more time than needed. Just making sure I didn’t miss any spots that might need attention. “You know,” she said, “Jock’s going to be waiting for us to go to breakfast.”

“He won’t mind a few extra minutes.”

“How few?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah. A lot.”

“Then maybe we ought to wait until after breakfast.”

“I’ve got to go to work.”

“A nooner then?”

“Not today. Too much paperwork.”

“After work?” I noticed a bit of desperation creeping into my voice. I hated to appear so needy.

“Jock’ll still be here.”

“I’ll send him to Tiny’s.”

“He’ll know why.”

“He’ll understand.”

“That’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Nah. I’ve already told him you’re insatiable.”

She threw a washcloth at me and stepped out of the shower. “You might be right,” she said, grinning. “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

“Are you thinking about more than talk?”

“Maybe.”

I sighed. Sometimes hope is all you’ve got.

The Blue Dolphin Cafe was crowded, and we had to wait for a table. Such are the hassles of the season. Jock was a familiar face on the key and people missed him when he was gone. We spent our time with him catching up with some of his island friends and J.D. answering, to the extent she could, the many questions about Ken Goodlow’s murder. I was generally ignored, but I’ve got thick skin, so it didn’t hurt too badly.

After breakfast, J.D. left for work. She said she’d let me know what she found out about the origin of Katie’s text. Jock and I took
Recess
, my twenty-eight-foot Grady-White fishing boat, out to a man-made reef about seven miles offshore. The fish ignored us, and after a couple of hours we gave up and headed in, running northeast toward the nearest inlet.

An offshore wind had kicked up and we were running head on into five-foot seas, the boat bouncing a bit as she cleared the tops of the swells. We made our way into the Passage Key Inlet, skirted the northern tip of Anna Maria Island, and found the channel into Bimini Bay. We pulled into the dock at Rotten Ralph’s, tied up to the pilings, and went to a table on the deck overlooking the small bay.

“Great day,” said Jock.

“Any day on the water’s great.”

“Beats golfing. Nobody keeps score.”

“Are you and Logan going to practice before the tournament?”

“I called him this morning,” said Jock. “He said he didn’t need any practice.”

I laughed. “He’s a terrible golfer.”

“He’s so bad that a little practice isn’t going to make much difference.”

My phone played the opening bars from “The Girl from Ipanema,” the special ringtone assigned to J.D.’s cell. “Catch any fish?” she asked.

“Not a one.”

“Sounds about right. I got some interesting information on that text from Katie. It came from another burner phone in Detroit.”

“I wonder what she’s doing in Detroit.”

“She may not be there. I got an e-mail on my office computer that was sent late last night. It came from an e-mail account of somebody I never heard of. It had a picture of a Tampa Police Department cruiser attached to it. The same building that was in the picture of her was in the background. The message said, ‘This is the kind of patrol car I mentioned to you recently.’ And the message was signed, ‘Jed.’”

“She’s telling us she’s in Tampa,” I said.

“I think so.”

“We need to take another look at the building in the texted picture. Maybe there’s something there that we were supposed to see. Something that’ll give us a better location.”

“I’ve already run the picture through the software here at the office. I didn’t see anything that we missed last night, but maybe you or Jock can find something. I’ve sent the enhanced picture to your computer. Can you take a look at it and get back to me?”

“Yeah, but we’re at Rotten Ralph’s on Bimini Bay, so it’ll be a while before we get home. Any chance of tracing that e-mail?”

“I asked our geek to look into it. He didn’t sound very positive. We’ll see.”

“Anything new on your murder case?”

“Nothing. I just got the reports from the forensics people. I’ll go over them and see if there’s anything new. If not, I may go back to Cortez and talk some more with Bud Jamison.”

“Was Cracker able to come up with the names of the two men he used to have coffee with?”

“Yes. He also told me about his journal.”

“Think you might have a chapter in it?”

She laughed. “He assured me he’d destroyed that part. Said it was just too hot.”

“What about the pictures?”

“He sold those to a magazine, you pervert. See you later.”

Bess Longstreet was enjoying the coolness of the late autumn as she sat on the long front porch of her parents’ home. A light breeze blew from the north, reminding her that winter was just around the corner. She’d trade her light blouses and skirts for sweaters and long pants, not much of a fashion statement, but one that fit the utilitarian life enjoyed by the fishermen and their families. It was late afternoon and she could hear her mother moving around the kitchen, the clang of pots and pans and dishes and bowls as she readied the evening meal. Bess’s dad, Captain Dan Long-street, was arriving soon, bringing his boat and crew in after two weeks at sea chasing the fish that drove the small economic engine that was the Village of Cortez.

She hoped her dad would be there for dinner. It was a ritual, this large meal prepared by her mom to welcome her man home from the sea. Sometimes the boat didn’t return as scheduled, and most of the food would go into the icebox that sat on the small enclosed porch off the kitchen. Worry would set in. Boats were lost and men never returned. The sea could be vicious, taking those who worked it without warning, flinging them into its depths, never to be heard from again.

Bess had watched too many wives and children of fishermen in the days after their boats missed their scheduled return. They lived in anguish, their hope turning to despair and finally acceptance of the truth that the husband and father would not return, that their lives had changed and they would live out their days in the village as wards of their neighbors. It was a pact tacitly made among the people who fished the seas, that if one
was lost, the others would come together to take care of the families. The widows would find work in the fish houses sorting the catch or in the coffee shops and cafés and bait shops that hung precariously to life in nearby communities. The boys would grow into teenagers and leave for the sea. Their sisters would wait a couple of years and then marry another of the young fishermen and spend their lives in the place where they were born.

Bess had seen the devastation that the war was bringing to the area. Many of the young men were in the military services and too often one of them would return home to Cortez, his remains hidden by a closed casket draped with an American flag.

The boats were crewed by men who were too old for the draft, but still young enough for the sea. Some of the older men, who had taken employment in the fish houses when they were too old for the boats, went back to sea, facing rigors to which their bodies were no longer able to adapt. Teenage girls and women, many of them married to men who’d left for war, replaced the old men in the fish houses, doing the work necessary to keep the small industry afloat in hard times.

It was time for Bess to help her mother in the kitchen. She was tired. She’d worked all day in the small office kept by her father, paying bills, balancing books, taking orders, the mundane minutiae demanded by any small business. The office was next door to the Longstreet house, sitting at the end of the long pier that was home to her dad’s small fleet of three boats. Two of them were sitting idle, awaiting the time when Bess or her dad could find men to crew them.

She saw her dad’s boat coming north from Longboat Pass, staying to the middle of the channel, its wake spreading out onto the flats that bordered the edge of the bay. A great sense of relief washed over her, the same one she felt every time she saw the boat coming home, another dangerous trip behind it, her dad and his crew alive. “Mom,” she called. “Daddy’s coming up the bay.”

“Thanks, honey. You sit a while longer. I’ll let you know when I need some help.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Bess sat for a time, letting her mind wander. Life had always been hard for those who go down to the sea to take their living from an unforgiving
ocean, but the war had made it worse. The village had been drained of young men, leaving young women who wouldn’t find husbands. Some of the men would die and others, who were seeing the world outside their village for the first time, would decide to live elsewhere when the war ended. The life she had known since birth was being washed away like so much detritus of war.

She idly watched as a young man, a stranger about her own age, early twenties, walked up the crushed shell street that fronted her home, probably coming from the bus stop up on Cortez Road. He was tall and thin, angular in appearance, blond hair escaping from the Greek fisherman’s cap atop his head. He walked with a noticeable limp.

He saw her, smiled, and stopped, standing in the street directly in front of her. He removed his cap and said, “Good afternoon, miss. I’m looking for Captain Longstreet’s office.”

“The office is closed, but I run it. I’m Bess Longstreet. Can I help you?”

“I guess I need to talk to Captain Longstreet.”

“His boat came up the channel an hour ago. He should be here soon. He’ll have stopped at one of the fish houses to unload his catch, but that shouldn’t take too long. Why don’t you come on up on the porch and wait for him?”

“If that wouldn’t be an imposition.”

“Not at all.”

The young man climbed the three steps to the porch and took a seat in a chair facing Bess. “My name’s Bud Jamison,” he said.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Jamison. Can I get you some iced tea or water?”

“No. I’m fine, thank you. Are you Captain Longstreet’s daughter?”

“I am.”

“I heard he might be hiring.”

“He’s always looking for good men. Have you ever fished the boats?”

“No, but I’ve had a lot of experience at sea. Sailboats, mostly.”

“Where’re you from, Mr. Jamison, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“You’re a long way from home.”

“Yes.”

“How did you wash up on our shores?” she asked, and then caught herself. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jamison, that was rude. We just don’t see many new people around here. Forget I asked.”