Cooler Than Blood (4 page)

“Always.”

“Don’t give me that crap.”

“Okay.”

My conversation with Kathleen faded in my mind and was replaced with my reflection in the glass. I turned away. It was time to return to Susan Blake’s house. This time I’d have to get out of the truck.

CHAPTER 5

S
usan lived on a street named after a bird. Other streets on the island were named after states. Not the most creative effort, but it sufficed, and at least they gave Carlos a break.

Her house, halfway down on the south side, was a golden stucco ranch with sculptured hedges and a shaved lawn. It backed up to a canal that led to Estero Bay, where at the moment, tailing reds lay in the shades of the mangroves, waiting for me to drop a live shrimp on them. Not today. A dark sedan rested in her driveway, so I pulled up behind a car the color and size of a large fresh lime. An osprey screeched, and monk parakeets chirped back. Crushed seashells littered the street. Fort Myers Beach, like the island I lived on and hundreds more throughout Florida, was nothing more than an inhabited sandbar.

I hit the doorbell before I had time to think. Susan opened it, and I followed her on a wood floor with varied-width planking through a great room to her back lanai, a spacious area that overlooked a small pool, her dock, and the canal. A twenty-foot Grady-White rested on its lift.
Impulse
is a twenty-seven-foot Grady. The back of Susan’s home, like mine, faced south. Fate speaks a strange tongue. I tried to rein in my mind, which insisted there was a damn good reason she and I had connected that night. I avoided eye contact with her, which I thought was a totally gutless thing to do, but there you have it.

A man in tan slacks and a blue blazer stood and extended his hand. The sports coat appeared as if it hadn’t seen a dry cleaner since he’d snatched it off the discount rack. His short-cropped hair matched his physique. His left shoulder was slightly lower than his right.

“Detective Patrick McGlashan, Lee County Sheriff’s Office.”

“Jake Travis.”

A quick word about the fuzz and me: I avoid them at all cost. In my experience, there are two types of people with guns: those against me, who I want to put a bullet in, and a buddy in my foxhole, who I’d take a bullet for. I don’t know where a man with a badge, or in this case, a man in a disheveled suit, fits into that world.

I shook McGlashan’s hand. One finger sported a Super Bowl ring. I’m sure he was proud of that and was used to questions, but he wouldn’t get any acknowledgment from me. We each claimed a wicker chair as if they had our names on them. He started right in.

“Ms. Blake wanted me to bring you up to speed. You work in the boat-recovery insurance-fraud business?” Translated:
you don’t have a job, so why do I have to sit here and chat with you?

“That’s correct.” My work for Colonel Janssen was strictly off the books.

McGlashan eyed me with a natural squint, as if he were looking right through me. I’d been verbose in my reply. I could have gone with “yes.” Neither of us spoke until Susan broke the impasse.

“Detective, I’d like you to go over the crime scene with Mr. Travis. I know you’ve been over it with me, but I’d like him to hear it from you.” Then she added, no doubt for both alpha males, “It would be most helpful.”

McGlashan and I, while she spoke, held each other’s eyes in a death duel. Like he was going to play ball with some beach bum. Like I gave a rat’s ass about a Super Bowl ring.

“My pleasure,” he said, but his eyes never left mine. I caught Susan out of my peripheral vision.
Help me out here.
Like a siren’s song, her presence turned my head and consumed my full attention. I couldn’t ignore her now like I had when I’d walked into her house and stared at her wood floor and then out toward her dock and the canal.

She wore a pink Blue Heaven T-shirt and white shorts. No shoes. Her dark chocolate-brown eyes, a perfect match of her hair, lay deep behind the edge of her thick bangs. Her pug nose and high cheekbones made her as attractive as I remembered. Her combination of strength and vulnerability, which I’d found so irresistible, was now tilted away from the former and toward the latter. She sat deep in her chair. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her. Suddenly Mc-whatever-his-name wasn’t even there anymore. I tried to push away my feelings, but Sisyphus would have had an easier time of it.

“What do you got?” I said, and switched my attention from Susan to McGlashan. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. A real team player.

“It’s what I already informed Ms. Blake,” he started in.

We got it, jock-o-boy. You don’t want to be here
, I thought, but said, “And what would that be?” I stared at McGlashan, but my mind took off on its own. I wondered if Morgan was at Fish Head yet, and if Melissa, the blue-eyed Aussie bartender who had informed me that she was gay—I must have been
totally
orbital that year—was still there. I thought of Susan in that tight black dress she’d worn out to dinner and wondered how many men had seen her in that. When I glanced back at her, she crossed her legs and uncrossed her arms. She had the thinnest, most muscular, feminine calves I’d ever had the pleasure of trying not to stare at. If the survival of the species depended on her calves and me—well, I’d find a way.

McGlashan cut Susan a look as if he wanted credit for cooperating. “Three nights ago,” he started, “Ms. Blake received a phone call at ten thirty-five from Ms. Spencer requesting that she return home immediately.”

I asked, “What phone did she call from?”

Susan took it. “Her cell.”

“Where was she when she called?”

“Here, like I told you when we talked. She was at the beach and hadn’t taken her phone with her.”

Susan, to get the ball rolling, recapped for McGlashan what she and I had discussed during our phone conversation while I drove the truck and Morgan bounced his ponytail to whatever tune bounced in his head. She explained that when she had come home, she’d found Jenny recently showered and sitting calmly on the porch. Jenny told her a man they’d seen earlier that day had appeared on the beach and attempted to rape her, and she, in response, had picked up a stick, become a
matador de toros,
and gored him. Jenny, according to Susan, displayed alarmingly calm behavior.

I interrupted her. “She was in quiet repose when you found her?”

“Yes. As she told me the story, I thought she might be in shock, but she never showed any other signs.”

“And what would those signs be?” My question came with an unintended tone of harshness, but I doubted Susan had ever seen anyone in shock, let alone known the difference between circulatory shock and emotional shock. McGlashan gave a smirk and settled back into his chair to enjoy the show. Susan gave me a look. We were all getting along just swell. Maybe before we parted, we’d draw names for Christmas.

“I know,” she said in a tone that shut the door to further questions regarding her qualification to diagnose shock. “We sat for hours that night, right here. We talked through the night. Around four thirty, I suggested we call the police. I hadn’t wanted to do that before I felt she was composed.” She knifed McGlashan a look. I surmised that he had already drilled Susan regarding the long wait to contact the authorities. “I wanted to make sure her initial calm was real and not masking anything.”

I glanced at McGlashan and asked, “How did it play out?”

“When the call came in,” he started in a tone that adequately conveyed his impatience with having to rehash the night to me, “it was assigned to me and another detective. Goes by the name of Eric Rutledge.” He placed his elbows on the armrest of the chair and straightened himself up. “We arrived at the house, and Detective Rutledge did the interview. I went to the crime scene.”

“Where exactly was that?”

“Are you familiar with the beach?”

“I am.”

“South end, where the mangroves are. About a half mile from the end of the island. An inlet cuts in; evidently at high tide, the beach is gone, and there are paths and clearings in the mangroves. We found the victim in such a clearing.”

“And the crime scene?”

McGlashan leaned in a bit. “You walk the beach? See the birds attack a French fry or a dead fish?”

“Ghoulish art.”

“Mulched him over three square yards. We secured the crime scene, which at that point was a feast of the gulls.”

I said, “Did you talk to Jenny?” But I was thinking,
Did she do that to a man on her own? With no help?

“I stayed at the scene, and Detective Rutledge conducted a recorded interview with Ms. Spencer until six seventeen a.m. His report indicates that Ms. Spencer did not know the assailant, Billy Ray Coleman. She’d seen him only once before the attack, and that was when he stopped earlier that afternoon to talk to Ms. Spencer and Ms. Blake while they were…sunbathing on the beach. Neither noticed anything unusual about the man other than he was about to forfeit a layer of skin to the sun.”

“I said he hit his head,” Susan cut in.

“That’s correct,” McGlashan said. “Ms. Blake does recall Coleman striking his own head, and Ms. Spencer did mention that in the interview.”

I looked at Susan. “How was she during the interview?”

“I was here for only the first ten minutes or so. Then I had to get to one of my bars. I returned a little before six thirty, just as they were finishing. Jenny said it went fine, but she didn’t really want to talk about it.”

“You went to one of your bars?”

“Someone broke into Water’s Edge and grabbed a case of liquor. Third time this year. The alarm went off.”

“And you went?”

Susan brought her legs up underneath her. “Jenny said she was fine. I didn’t plan to be gone as long as I was.”

“Did Rutledge tell you anything about the conversation that took place in your absence?” I asked her.

“No.” She gave a disgusted look and crossed her arms again. Half her chair held no purpose; she couldn’t possibly occupy a smaller space. “He asked me to follow him to his car. But then he hit on me. He’s one of those guys who won’t shut up about himself. I thought it was inappropriate. Yakked about how after his sister—she had been sick and never married—had recently died, and he had to get a fresh start. Said he was new to the area but had a house on the island, not far from me.” She shook her head. I shifted my gaze to McGlashan, but his face was stone. He made no attempt to defend his coworker.

“Did her statements to Detective Rutledge differ in any manner from what you and she discussed?”

“I haven’t listened to the recording of the conversation she had that night with Detective Rutledge.”

I shot McGlashan a glance. Certainly he would want to compare notes as to what Jenny had said immediately following the incident versus what she recited hours later.

“We planned to do a follow-up interview with Ms. Spencer,” McGlashan said as if reading my mind, “and then have Ms. Blake listen. Ms. Blake had already indicated to us that she and Ms. Spencer discussed very little of the incident that evening.”

I asked Susan, “What
did
you discuss?”

“Her life.” It came out defiant, as if I’d attacked her and she’d victoriously countered. An osprey’s call pierced the silence. I caught a glimpse of a Fountain speedboat slinking out of the canal. The name on the side was
Seaduction.

McGlashan cleared his throat. “Detective Rutledge,” he said, “stated that Ms. Spencer informed him that she and Ms. Blake reviewed the incident only briefly then talked for hours, without, apparently”—he cut Susan a look—“further discussion of the attempted rape and murder.”

“Anything else that night?” My question went to McGlashan.

“Nothing.” He shifted his gaze to me. “The following morning we received a lead on a deceased girl in Kentucky and a possible tie-in to a rape-murder in Georgia. Our break was the guy in the Peach State did it at a storage unit.”

“Cameras?”

“Seven. Three busted, two with nothing, and one just fuzz.”

I waited, but he was done. He wasn’t under any obligation to pass the pipe with me. I asked, “And the seventh?”

He smiled. He knew he’d made me earn it.

“He slowed down going over a pothole. Good enough to put an alert out on the car. We found Coleman’s Honda around ten the following morning, but there was little of interest inside it. The trunk had been jimmied with a crowbar and was open. Nothing but fast-food debris and fifty-three cents. Wiped clean around the trunk.”

It was my turn to lean in and drill him. “Clean? As in no prints?”

“Not around the trunk.”

“Why a crowbar? Why not break the glass and hit the trunk release lever?”

McGlashan seemed to consider that, or me, for a moment. “The lever was inoperable. We checked it. Busted on the floor of the driver’s side. It had nothing to do with the damage caused by the break-in. A preexisting condition.”

“Where was the car?”

“Few hundred feet from the scene. A little parking area that only holds a handful of cars.”

I knew the area. Heavy oleander bushes draped the beach access lot like a vaudeville stage curtain. Except for a few units in an apartment complex directly across the street, the parking spot was barely visible.

Susan said, “Tell him about the…about her T-shirt.”

McGlashan gave a slight shake of his head, as if he had no defense. “Ms. Spencer,” he started in, “said her T-shirt was left on a branch. We found the rest of her clothing but not that. She insisted it wasn’t ripped—she wasn’t sure how he’d gotten it off her—but she was adamant that she’d left it hanging on a mangrove branch.”

“And?” Susan asked, without letting air in between McGlashan’s last word and her question.

“Her name was on the shirt.”

“Someone beat you to it,” I said. “Both the crime scene and the victim’s car.”

McGlashan leaned with his elbows on his knees, as if he were trying to restrain himself from vaulting out of his chair. A vein on the left side of his forehead came to attention, as if it also wanted to get in on the action. “We talked before you came. Ms. Blake said you served?” He asked it like a command.

I stayed with my back rested against the wicker chair but kept my eyes straight on his. “Five years. Rangers.”

The vein backed down, but not McGlashan. “My son’s there now. Final tour and due home in little over a week. Been working with the British SAS. Know anything about them?”