Fatal Decree (2 page)

J.D. put down the binoculars, rubbed her eyes, and went to the bathroom. She shucked the T-shirt she had slept in and stepped into the shower. She knew from experience that she wouldn’t be going to Publix that day.

She was stepping out of the shower when her phone rang. The expected call. She answered. It was Deputy Chief of Police Martin Sharkey. He’d been running the night crew of late, going on patrol, enjoying himself. It beat the paper pushing that had come with the rank.

“J.D., you up?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a body in the water off Sister Key.”

“Yeah. I saw it.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes. From my sunporch. Anything suspicious about it?”

“Yeah. Dennis says there’s a bullet hole in the back of her head.”

“Her?”

“Definitely a woman. The body’s nude. When you’re ready, call Dennis on his cell, and he’ll run over and pick you up at your dock.”

“I’ll meet him there in ten minutes. Can you call him while I get dressed?”

“Sure.”

“And, Martin, put a total blackout on this one. At least until we can talk. I don’t want a bunch of gawkers.”

I slept in that morning. Jock Algren and I had made a night of it at Tiny’s, the neighborhood bar, and we hadn’t left until owner Susie Vaught shooed us out. I was a bit hungover, but it had been a fun evening. Jock had arrived from Houston in the late afternoon. He hadn’t visited the island in several weeks and wanted to catch up on the gossip. He had a lot of friends on Longboat Key, and everybody wanted to buy him a drink. By the end of the evening, he was floating on a sea of O’Doul’s, the nonalcoholic beer he fancied, and I had pretty much finished off Susie’s stock of Miller Lite.

I was puttering around in the kitchen, brewing coffee and getting some breakfast pastries. I heard Jock’s shower running and knew he’d be joining me in a few minutes. If he doesn’t get his coffee right away, he gets a bit testy.

My name is Matt Royal. I live on Longboat Key, an island off the southwest coast of Florida, south of Tampa Bay, about halfway down the peninsula. My key is ten miles long and no more than a half-mile wide at its broadest point. If you leave the island on the south end, you cross a couple of bridges, wind your way around St. Armands Circle, one of the best dining and shopping venues in Florida, cross another couple of bridges and find yourself in Sarasota. On the north end you cross the Longboat Pass Bridge to Anna Maria Island, drive into the beach town of Bradenton Beach, turn right, cross the Cortez Bridge, and end up in the aging fishing village of Cortez.

I was a soldier once, an officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the storied Green Berets. I saw some action, came home, and went to law school. I had been a trial lawyer in Orlando for a number of years until I tired of the rat race, lost my wife to divorce, said the hell with it, sold everything I
had, and moved to paradise. I wasn’t wealthy, but if I lived carefully, I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life.

I’m six feet tall, and weigh the same 180 pounds I did when I got out of the army. I have dark hair and a slightly off-center nose. I run four miles on the beach most days and work out weekly with a martial arts instructor. I find that I have to push myself a bit or I’ll succumb to the indolence that seems to be a part of island living.

Longbeach Village is the official name of my neighborhood, but everybody just calls it “the village.” It takes up the far north end of Longboat Key and is the oldest inhabited part of the island. Not counting the Indians, of course, who had lived there for hundreds of years before the Europeans showed up. There are no condos in the village, and most of the houses are small and quaint, owned by a lot of people just like me who could never have afforded the expensive mansions and condos that took up most of our island. I owned a cottage that backed up to Sarasota Bay, giving me a view out my sliding glass doors that made me glad to be a Floridian. I never tired of watching the seabirds that nested on nearby Jewfish Key and the myriad boats that plied the Intracoastal Waterway.

My doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. Ten o’clock. I was wearing cargo shorts, a T-shirt with the logo of an island restaurant long out of business, and boat shoes. I opened the door to find a beautiful woman standing on the stoop. She was about five feet seven, and this morning her shoulder-length dark hair was fashioned in a ponytail. She was slender, her body honed by years of regular workouts. Her face was a bit pale, her green eyes troubled, and tension lines were etched around her mouth. She was the Longboat Key police department’s only detective, and she was my friend. She wore a pair of jeans, a golf shirt, and running shoes. “Come in, J.D.,” I said. “Are you okay?”

She came through the door, looked at me, and said one word. “Coffee.”

“Coming up. Sit down. I’ll be right back.”

Jennifer Diane Duncan, known as J.D., had come to our key a year before. Her mom had lived among us for the last several years of her life, and when she died, J.D. inherited her condo.

J.D. was in her late thirties and had joined the Miami-Dade Police
Department after receiving a degree in Criminal Justice from Florida International University. She’d risen quickly through the ranks, and after a couple of years as a patrol officer, became the youngest detective on the force. She worked in the fraud division for a while and then moved to homicide where she eventually became the assistant commander of the unit.

When her mom died, J.D. saw an opportunity to leave the stress and danger of the big city and move to Longboat Key. Bill Lester, the chief of police on the key, had jumped at the chance to hire her as Longboat’s only detective. She had moved into her mom’s condo and quickly became a part of our island community and my good friend. So far, our relationship hadn’t moved beyond the friendship stage, and maybe it never would. But, a guy can hope, can’t he?

I returned from the kitchen with two mugs of black coffee and handed one to her. I didn’t say anything. She was obviously troubled, and I knew her well enough to know she would tell me what she thought I needed to know. I took a seat next to her on the sofa. I waited.

J.D. sat quietly for a few moments, sipping her coffee. “Did you ever see a ghost, Matt?”

“No.”

“I did. This morning.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Twelve years ago, when I first made detective in Miami, I worked three murders that had taken place in about a six-week period. We called them the whale tail murders. Or at least, the press did. You know how they like to sensationalize everything. The cops picked it up.”

“Each of the women was middle aged or older, and they were found naked and bound to trees with ropes. Shot in the back of the head by the same twenty-two-caliber pistol. They were always found near water, once a lake, another time on the Miami River, and the third time in the Everglades in the western part of the county. We were dealing with a serial killer with big-time issues, and we put a lot of effort into finding the guy.”

“Did you get him?”

“No. The killings stopped. There were only those three women. The
killer was very careful. He didn’t leave any evidence behind, and we even had a hard time identifying the women. Turned out that one was a maid at a high-rise office building, another was a prostitute, and the third was the wife of an accountant who lived in Miami Lakes. We never found any connection between the women. Except that they all had a similar appearance. Caucasian, fairly tall, between forty and fifty-five, shoulder-length hair dyed blonde.”

“Why the name, whale tail?”

“That was very strange. The killer pinned an identical small silver whale tail earring through the lobe of his victims’ left ears. The medical examiner said they were all done postmortem. We never figured out if the killer was trying to tell us something or if the whale tail had some deep meaning for him. Even the profilers couldn’t come up with anything that made any sense.”

“And the press got hold of that little detail?”

“Yeah. One of the reporters interviewed the husband of the first victim. He mentioned that she did not own any jewelry that looked like a whale tail.”

“Maybe the killer moved on. Started all over in another town.”

“We checked periodically and our murders were described in detail in a federal database so that if any similar murders cropped up, the investigators could get hold of us. There was never a similar murder. Anywhere.”

“What does this have to do with the ghost you saw this morning?”

“It was another woman about the same age and appearance and she had a whale tail earring in her left earlobe.”

“Copycat?”

“No. There was one item we never released to the press and didn’t put on the federal database. The killer had carved initials into the back of the neck of each of the victims. Again, postmortem. They were covered by the women’s hair and were picked up by the Miami-Dade medical examiner on the first autopsy. The same initials on all three women. KKK.”

“The Ku Klux Klan?” I asked.

“We didn’t think so. All the women were white and of European descent. No reason to think the guy was a Klansman.”

“What did the profiler think?”

“She didn’t have a clue. Thought it might just be something to distract us.”

“And you found the same initials on the woman this morning.”

“Yes. It was the first thing I looked for.”

“Where was the body?” I asked.

“Floating just off the channel that runs on the west side of Sister Key.”

“Didn’t you say that the whale tail killer tied them to a tree near the water?”

“Yes, and apparently he did this one that way. We found a rope tied around her torso. The end was frayed, so we assumed she had been tied up at some point, and the rope broke. It wasn’t cut. Maybe the tide came up and tugged her into the water, putting a strain on the line.”

“Has she been identified yet?” I asked.

“Not yet. The M.E. will take her fingerprints and we’ll see what they come up with. I’ll go through the missing person reports for Sarasota and Manatee counties and see if anything’s there. Sooner or later, we’ll know something.”

“Any thoughts?”

“She may have been a Longboater. She was nude, but she had recently had a manicure and a pedicure and she wore a diamond-encrusted wedding band on her ring finger. We don’t have any idea where she was killed or where her body was put in the water. The tide was going out this morning, so she could have been swept along from farther up the bay.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

“Doubt what?”

“That she was dumped farther up the bay. She would probably have caught on one of the shoals that are just south of the channel down where it turns east. That tidal current moves slowly. If she’d been put in the water farther out in the bay, say up around marker seventeen, the deep water would have kept her moving, but she would have probably been pushed into the shallows on the east side of Sister Key.”

“You know this water a lot better than I do. Where do you think she went in?”

“Probably no farther south than Emerald Harbor.” I was talking about an upscale subdivision that fronted on Sarasota Bay a couple of miles south of the village. “Did you check the tables to see when the tide turned this morning?”

“No. I’ll do that when I get back to the station.”

“I’ll check online,” I said.

Jock came into the room dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and pressed beige shorts, sandals on his feet. He stands six feet tall and has the wiry build of a distance runner. His mostly bald head is fringed with dark hair, a vestige of his youth. His skin is as tan as a beach bum’s, the result of the many hours he spends in tropical climes doing the work of his employer, a U.S government intelligence agency that is so secret it doesn’t even have a name. He smelled of expensive aftershave.

Jock Algren and I had met when we were children, growing up in a small town in the middle of the Florida peninsula. We’d become best friends, and over the many years since we’d graduated from high school, we’d maintained a close relationship. Our friendship had survived the years and the miles of separation, and we were closer than brothers. J.D. stood and hugged him.

“That’s what I came for,” said Jock. “How’re you doing, J.D.?”

“Not good.” She filled Jock in on what she’d told me.

“J.D.,” I said, “the tide crested this morning at three a.m. I can’t do the math, but I’d think that would have given the body time to drift from the area of Emerald Harbor. The flats in front of your condo would have been covered with plenty of water at high tide so that she wouldn’t have gotten snagged on the shoals. But I don’t think she could have been put in the water much farther south. She wouldn’t have drifted this far north in the amount of time after the tide started out.”

“That’s helpful,” she said. “I’ll have some people start canvassing Emerald Harbor to see if anybody knows anything.”

“I guess dinner is off for tonight,” I said.

“Do you mind?”

I shook my head. I knew she’d be busy. The first few hours of a murder investigation were crucial. J.D. would work through the day and
evening, running down any leads she could find. The medical examiner would put this one at the head of the line, and evidence would trickle into the detective’s office. By nightfall, she would hopefully have the beginnings of a solution, or at least the outlines of one.

“I’ll make it up to you guys,” she said. “Soon.”

“Anything we can do to help?” I asked.

J.D. smiled, shook her head, drank down the last of her coffee, and left.

I poured more coffee, and Jock and I moved out to the patio. It was quiet at mid-morning as we sat and sipped and watched the pelicans dive for breakfast in the bay.

Jock grinned. “You’re not getting any closer to her, are you, podna?”

“We’re just friends.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“It’s not like I have a choice. But, yeah, I’m okay with it.”

“I thought you had put everything out on the table for her.”

“I did. Sort of. We had a conversation one night at Mar Vista, but it was kind of vague. I think she has some feelings for me, but not like I do for her. She’s never brought it up again, and, frankly, I’m afraid to mention it. I don’t want to scare her off.”