Death Among the Mangroves (5 page)

Troy nodded. “Anyone else know about these dogs or that woman?” The other four women looked at one another and at Troy and shook their heads.

“Juan, get names and all that. Wait here for Tom to show up and do his thing. When he gets here, take this dog to the vet's office. I'll go look for the other dog. Thank you, folks. I appreciate it. Sorry you had this scare. We have the guy who shot off the gun.”

Back on Marshall Road he turned the other way from Gerry's house. He walked a block and heard yelping. There was another small block house—most houses on Snake Key were small block boxes or trailers—with a fenced back yard. A gate was open in the chain-link fence. It had been locked with a padlock but the padlock and the remains of the hasp were lying on the grass. In the back yard Troy found a black Lab lying on its side covered in blood. The dog was still alive. Troy beat on the back door but nobody answered.

“Christ!” Troy muttered. He got out his department cell phone and scrolled down the contact list to Manuel Gonzalez, the town veterinarian. He explained things to Gonzalez, who was at home but who said he'd head for his office right away. Troy then ran back down the road to his own car.

By the time he drove back there was a Prius stopped in the driveway and a sobbing dark-skinned woman in a blue medical-staff outfit in the back yard with the dog.

“It's all right,” he said, hands out, as she leapt to her feet. “I'm the police chief. I've called the vet. I can take you and the dog…”

“Martin,” the woman said.

“Martin, then, in my car.”

“Where's Bobby?”

“Bobby your yellow lab?”

“Yes. How did they get out? A neighbor called me and said some people had shot my dogs. I came right home.”

“What's your name?”

“Sasha Thompson.”

“Sasha, Bobby's dead, I'm afraid. Let's get Martin to the vet. We can talk then. Follow me in your car.”

Troy picked up the dog and laid it in the back of his Forester, thankful that he had paid for the rubber lining option for the storage area. He could sponge out the blood later. With Sasha following in her car, he drove Martin to the veterinarian's office on Barron Key.

As it turned out there was not much they could do for Martin. He'd been shot several times and one bullet was still in his lung. “He's torn up inside, intestines shredded,” Gonzalez said as he opened the dog up.

Troy was watching. “Shot in the ass, more or less,” he said. “Dog was shot running away.”

Manuel Gonzalez euthanized Martin just minutes later. While Sasha Thompson wept in the lobby of the tiny veterinary clinic, Gonzalez dug out the one bullet still in the dog. “Good shape,” Troy said, as he washed it off in a sink. “Can you keep him here on ice or something? My guys will bring in the other dog too.”

“Sure. Did you find the bastard who did this?”

“Yep. Got him in custody.”

“Can I have five minutes alone with him?”

“I'll think on it.”

“Yeah,” Gonzalez said. “You do that. You think real hard.”

Chapter 6

Sunday, December 22

Back at his office, Troy called the duty clerk at the Naples state attorney's office and got someone working on asking a judge for a search warrant for Gerry Whyte's house, property and car. He called Lee Bell.

“Going to be in the office today, I'm afraid,” he told her.

“I expected that anyway, what with the missing girl,” Lee said. “Want me to stop by and keep you company?”

“No. Just had to deal with two dead dogs, shot by some loony guy, and also with the dog's owner. I'm feeling a little grumpy.”

“Where's loony guy now?”

“Cell three. Manuel Gonzalez, our veterinarian, wants to have five minutes alone with him. I'm restraining myself.”

He used his computer to look at some photos he had picked out earlier from more than one hundred that Angel Watson had downloaded from the cell phones belonging to Brett and Jodi. He also had some photos taken off Barbara Gillispie's iPhone. Troy was looking for someone matching the description he'd gotten from the two girls of the man with whom Barbara Gillispie had disappeared. The advantage of digital cameras over the old film cameras, he thought, as he paged through photo after photo, was that you could take a lot of photos for free. But that didn't mean the photos were any better.

He found a likely candidate in the background of three of those. He printed several copies of the best image. The photo Troy chose was fairly sharp and showed a tall, skinny man in his mid-twenties with a deep tan and blond hair and short but full blond beard. The man was wearing dark jeans and a light blue long-sleeved denim shirt and what looked like red high-top sneakers. His hair stuck out in all directions, wildly. Troy decided the hair was probably spiked with hair gel and he looked, to Troy, like a sunflower with legs. Troy printed out several good photos of Barbara Gillispie too.

Because the girls had said the boy was a local, Troy telephoned high school principal Howard Parkland Duell.

“This is Doctor Howard Parkland Duell, town councilman of Mangrove Bayou, and principal of the Mangrove Bayou high and middle schools,” an answering message told Troy. “If you are calling for any business reason whatsoever, call me at the school during normal business hours. If you are soliciting, or selling anything, do not call back; we do not accept calls of that nature. All others, leave a brief message at the beep.”

At the beep, Troy asked Duell to call him at once on important police business. Dominique Reiss was finishing her workout in the small gym in back and Troy asked her to stop in his office before going out on patrol.

Reiss was nearly as tall as Troy and darker, a deep mocha color, and with the big shoulders of a swimmer, which she had excelled at in high school and college. She was the only officer besides Troy with a college diploma, hers in anthropology from Sarasota's New College. Troy had only recently hired her to replace an officer who had not worked out. She had showered after exercising and was wearing her “longs” too.

“Whatcha need, Chief,” she asked.

“Looking STRAC, Domino,” Troy said. “I need you to take some of these printed photos around to the beachfront businesses.”

“This the missing girl?”

“And also a man seen with her. I need to know if anyone saw them, singly or together, Saturday afternoon or night.”

He next called Barbara Gillispie's parents in Albany, New York. That call went about as well as he had expected.

“Barbara's friends came home already and told us about this,” Peter Gillispie said. He was barely controlled, Troy could tell. “Now my daughter's missing in some southern redneck town and a bunch of ignorant local yahoos can't find her!”

“Actually, I'm from Troy, New York,” Troy said. “About ten miles from you on the other side of the river.”

“I don't give a damn where you're from. What else are you doing to find my daughter?”

“Half the town is looking today. It's a small town and that won't take long. It's possible that your daughter has been kidnapped. You may be getting a call for a ransom. I'm going to call the Albany police and have them set up with you to receive that, listen in, all that.”

“Doesn't getting the police involved in a kidnapping just make the kidnappers want to kill the victim? I have money. I can pay a ransom.”

“Your best bet, if she's been kidnapped, which we don't know yet, is to cooperate with the police. That is more likely to get your daughter, to get Barbara, home safe.”

“You'll call the Albany police?”

“I'll do that. They'll be in touch to set things up. At that point I'm out of it so far as the Albany side goes. They will call me if they need anything here.”

“You'll still look there for Barbara.”

“Peter, I will never stop looking for Barbara. If she can be found then I will find her. And you feel free to call me any time, day, night, whatever, any time you have a question or have more information for me.”

“I'll do that. But then what?” Peter Gillispie had settled down a little when faced with definite actions to take.

“We have to wait and see,” Troy said. “If it is a kidnapping, it's a little trickier than most because she would be somewhere in Florida and you and the money are in New York.”

“
If
it's a kidnapping? You think it might not be?”

“Keeping all possibilities on the table,” Troy said.

“Are you going to find Barbara safe?”

“I'm going to try.”

Troy was about to say more but he heard Gillispie sobbing aloud and then the phone connection went dead. Troy put his phone down too and stared at it a moment. “Sometimes this job really sucks,” he said aloud.

He sighed and picked up his radio when it squawked at him. But it was just one of his officers reporting in, another sector searched, no results. Troy called the Albany police and explained things to them, then sent them an email with more details. He took more calls, some by radio, some by phone, from search parties, and reallocated people to new search areas.

Mayor Lester Groud walked into Troy's office and sat in one of the two visitor chairs. Troy finished a radio call, put the radio back into its charger on his desk, and looked at Groud.

“You look tired,” Groud said.

“Up all night and now this.” Troy took a cell phone call and sent some volunteer firefighters out to Government Key to look there.

“And get the keys from someone in maintenance,” Troy said. “I want you to open and look inside of every shed out there.”

“She can't possibly be out on Government Key,” Groud said when Troy had disconnected the call. “That's a half-mile out of town and surrounded by a chain link fence, even where Barron Road runs along one side.”

“I agree. You want to not look and have some maintenance worker find her dead body in the town's equipment shed next week?”

“No. Of course you're right.” Groud looked out Troy's west window at the boat ramp on Sunset Bay. “Are we going to find this girl? This is going to be so bad for business, you can't imagine. This season's economy depends upon finding her, and quick.”

“Bad for Barbara Gillispie, too,” Troy said, “if we don't locate her and soon. Doing what I can, Les, with what I've got.”

“Maybe we can get you more manpower. Sheriff's, national guard, I don't know. Something.”

“I'll keep in touch with the sheriff's office,” Troy said. “But at the moment we are searching everywhere she could be, dead or alive. Town's not that big. Putting more eyeballs out there isn't going to help at this point. We need something more.”

“Like what?”

Troy looked at Lester Groud for a long moment. “Like a miracle. Or a clue. Working to locate the man Barbara Gillispie went off with the day before she came up missing.”

“You think she was kidnapped,” Groud said.

“I think maybe she was kidnapped. That would be the good news. At least there would be a small chance of getting her back alive.”

“How big a chance?”

“I don't know. There are all sorts of kidnappings and reasons for them. But kidnappings of adults for ransom, the odds are around fifty-fifty if you can get to the victim, and the kidnappers, within a day or two. Three days out the odds go down pretty fast. A week and there's almost no chance.”

“But if her parents paid a ransom?”

“Ransom doesn't affect the outcome that much. The penalty is very severe, the kidnappers know that, and their victim is also their greatest danger. She can I.D. them. It's only good sense to kill the eyewitness, whether you get any ransom or not. By the way, half of female victims are also raped. Just a side benefit for the kidnappers.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Two bucks, Les,” Troy said. “But odds are she's dead by now. I'm not going around saying that out loud to anyone else yet. Maybe there will be a ransom demand to her parents. A kidnapper might make a ransom demand even after killing the victim.”

“That's just so…I don't know what it is,” Groud said. “Have you talked to the parents?”

“I've already called them in New York. Also the Albany police.”

“Shit.” Groud, who knew the system, pulled out his wallet and took out three dollars. “I'll put this in the jar on my way out.”

Troy nodded. “I'll keep you in the loop all the way on this,” he said. “Best I can offer at the moment.”

Chapter 7

Sunday, December 22

When two hours had passed with no response from Howard Parkland Duell, he of the many titles, Troy got his car and drove to the principal's home. Duell was there and answered the doorbell wearing some sort of red velvet sport coat with a tie-belt in front in place of buttons. Duell looked annoyed. “What is it? I'm busy.”

“Doing what?” Troy asked. “It's Sunday afternoon. Didn't you get my message?”

“Didn't you listen to my outgoing message,” Duell snapped. He walked back into his living room and sat on a recliner. “No, knowing you, probably not. Business calls I take during business hours, at my office at the high school.” On the television there was a movie playing, a western. Troy stood in front of the screen and Duell craned his neck to look around him at the movie.

“That would seem inappropriate were the call about town council business or even police business,” Troy said. “At school you should be focused on school business.” Duell always irritated him, and, obviously, vice versa. In fact Duell had opposed hiring Troy and hadn't changed his mind in the months since. Troy told himself to stay calm.