Artifacts (19 page)

Liz felt a case of the willies coming on, herself.

A morning spent mucking around in Joyeuse’s dirt was never a morning wasted, but Faye still wished she’d found something worth selling while she was playing in the mud. Joe, bless his heart, had come out to help her, and his company had made the fruitless hours pass pleasantly. They had chosen a spot within view of the great green-and-blue Gulf and the sea winds had brought the salt smell to them where they worked.

When she went inside, Faye decided it wouldn’t be time-effective to primp for her date without simultaneously doing something productive. So while her facial mask dried, she sloshed Abby’s silver chain around in the cup of formic acid that she hoped would soak off its encrusted grime. It emanated a chemical odor that made Faye think of two things: a manicure and another necklace she had found and cleaned years before, then stored away.

It was a pendant necklace and it was old, a hundred years or more, but worth no more than the current market price of silver. She had cleaned it, admired its delicate scrollwork, and wondered about the woman whose initials—CSS—were engraved on the back. Intriguing though it was, it hadn’t been worth selling, so she had stashed it in her jewelry box and forgotten it.

Now Faye cradled it in her palm and put to sleep the everpresent appraiser in her head, the one who knew the street value of everything. She considered it for its aesthetic value. It was dainty, pretty enough to impress a senator, and broken. She debated whether to throw it back in her jewelry box, saving herself the trouble of dragging out her needle-nosed pliers and magnifying glasses, but she’d kinda been saving it for an occasion like this.

There was enough time before her date with Cyril to give herself a manicure or to fix the pendant, but there wasn’t enough time to do both. Faye opted to fix the pendant. It was one-of-a-kind and having it around her neck would make her look a lot more distinctive than the same red-painted claws anyone else could buy and glue on.

Sheriff Mike was inexpressibly tired in body and soul. There was nothing much he could do about his body. If a case kept him awake nights, then he missed his beauty sleep. It had happened before. It would happen again. But he didn’t often let a case rumple his soul like this one did. Maybe it was because the dead kids’ weeping parents made him think of Irvin Williford.

Yesterday, he had excused himself from a pointless meeting in Tallahassee and gone looking for a heckuva big church, one where he could find a priest saying mass in the middle of a day that wasn’t Sunday. And he had found one, too, but he’d left with his soul still rumpled, because the redoubtable Dr. Magda Stockard was there. The woman prayed as fiercely as she did everything else.

She had raised her head and conveyed, in a single moment of eye contact, her disdain for his failure to lock somebody up for the murder of her kids. Then she’d gone back to praying.

So here he was, trying to answer her prayers. The forensics lab report from the murderer’s campsite was spread across his lap. It was thorough, but that didn’t make it useful.

His detectives had found a few hairs, two of them gray, but none with root bulbs, so there would be no DNA evidence. They had overcome the devilishly difficult job of finding anything at all on a windswept, rainsoaked, outdoor murder site by locating a few fibers to go with the hairs. As luck would have it, the fibers were blue. They were cotton, for God’s sake, nothing exotic. How was he supposed to convict somebody when he knew nothing about him except that he owned a pair of jeans or a cotton workshirt?

His investigators were doing a hell of a job. He would grant them that. In fact, he doubted that big-city officers could do as well if faced with a murder scene in the wilderness. But just having evidence wasn’t enough. It had to be evidence that pointed to a single unique individual, or all this effort led to emptiness.

He was fighting like the devil to keep this case. Calls from the Feds grew ever more frequent. They were convinced that drugs were involved and they were itching for him to ask for their help.

He had fumed. He had spewed vitriol. Sometimes he could drive away pestering Yankees with a good old Southern tantrum, spiced heavily with nonsensical metaphors.

“Son, I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by an owl. The FBI cannot have this case and could not solve it if somebody gathered up the evidence and handed it to them in a Sir Walter Raleigh can. I’ll make myself clear: the Federal Bureau of God-damned Investigation couldn’t find the floor with their own two feet. Do you hear me, son?”

The young voice on the other end of the line hadn’t quavered much as it said, “Yes, I do.”

“Then don’t call me back unless you want to be rowed up Salt River.”

Then today, feeling merciful, Sheriff Mike had thrown the guy a bone. “Tell you what let’s do, son,” he said. “If you’ll leave me alone for, say, three days, I’ll give you something to do with your time. We had a little scuffle at a local marina. A man pulled a gun on one of the customers, and the short order cook settled things with a pan of hot grease. Unfortunately, when I got there, the assailant was gone and so was the victim. So all I’ve got is a gun and the cook’s word that the assailant has grease burns all over his midsection. Think you could do something with that? Try to link the gun to some other crimes? Check the ERs for burn victims? You think so? Well, good.”

Sheriff McKenzie thought maybe the federal agent had enough of a stick-to-it nature to do credit to the task. The boy had certainly been diligent in the thankless task of pestering him. Every day, he’d wager that the young man was completely cowed, then another call would come. The content of the calls never changed. The kid always pointed out that the location of the murders on an offshore island and the absence of a motive suggested a drug deal gone bad. Or so the Feds wanted to think.

He had pointed out their idiocy more than once. By that logic, any crime committed in his coastal jurisdiction could be declared drug-related. If mere location was enough to claim jurisdiction over a murder case, then he might as well close up shop.

The phone rang. Since he’d already heard from the FBI that day, he knew it was time for the other call he’d gotten every day since the killings. It was somebody’s secretary, calling from Quin Land Development, wanting to know when he was going to release the island crime scene, so that pre-development activities could resume.

Every day, he said, “This investigation is unusual in a lot of ways. Any evidence left in such a natural, unprotected place is fragile. The crime scene will remain cordoned off until all the lab work is back.” The secretary was beginning to sound bored with these exchanges. It wouldn’t be long before Quin Land Development called in the big guns and he started hearing from their lawyers.

Lawyers made him want to heave, so he returned his attention to the information-free lab report. His field crew had lifted a print of a man’s tennis shoe, cheap, size twelve, in the equipment shed. Dr. Stockard said that all of her site workers wore safety boots, all the time. Besides, even if they did wear tennies, he privately doubted any of those fashion-conscious kids would shop at Bargain Shoes-for-Less.

This is the culprit
, he thought. But what did it really tell him? That the killer was a man. Well, he already suspected that, but now he knew. Half the human race was easily eliminated, unless a big-footed woman was running around in men’s shoes.

The shoe size was a little large, even for a man, but still common. Casts of depressions in the sand around the bodies suggested that he was tallish and of average weight for his height. They already knew he had a least a few gray hairs. Reckon how many thousands of men fitting that description could be found in a five-hundred-mile radius of where he sat? Speaking of where he sat, he himself fit the description.

Magda thumbed through
Architecture of Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Tabby Dwellings
. The title alone gave her the approximate construction date and the actual building material of Faye’s mystery house and it raised an interesting question. Tabby was once used extensively as a construction material along the Atlantic coast of Florida, but there was no way that Faye was commuting more than a hundred miles to Saint Augustine. The only tabby buildings Magda knew of along the Florida Gulf coast were near the mouth of the Manatee River, more than two hundred miles away as the crow flies over the Gulf and double that by car.

Was there a house located a reasonable distance from Faye’s stated mailing address, Wally’s Marina, that was constructed all or partly of tabby? Not according to official records, but tabby was nothing more than concrete made with local materials—sand, lime, shell. It was often plastered and painted to mock a pricier material like stone or stucco or plastered brick. Maybe its humble origins had escaped the architectural historians.

Magda reached behind her without looking and grabbed her copy of the Historic American Buildings Survey catalog, Florida section. If the mystery house still stood, then it was standing in the 1930s and the dedicated public servants performing the survey had found a way to get there and document it.

Magda had long ago gone through this catalog and sought out as many of the buildings as she could find, marking “deceased” in the margins of the entries documenting structures which no longer existed. The few buildings she couldn’t locate sported question marks in their margins. Surely a scientist of her caliber could quickly come up with a short list of candidates for Faye’s tabby house. A scientist of her caliber could probably even find a photograph of it.

Faye hooked the repaired necklace around her neck, then went to check Abby’s necklace. She swooshed it up and down in the solvent and was glad to see some of the crud rinse away. Dabbing at it with a soft brush revealed more of the original surface. Ignoring the ticking clock that said it was time to put on her makeup, she sat down and worked with the brush until she could rinse even more corrosion away.

The surface of the necklace’s pendant was heavily decorated. She perched her magnifying glasses atop her nose and could immediately see a cross with four equal sides engraved on its circular face. On the right arm of the cross was the figure of a man bearing a child on his back that was oddly familiar. The words “Protect Us” beneath his feet helped her decode the words arching over his head: “Saint Christopher.” Her knowledge of Catholicism was embarrassingly sketchy, but she had certainly encountered the ubiquitous Saint Christopher’s medal that many faithful travelers trusted to protect them against storms, pestilence, and nose-picking kids.