Dead Reckoning (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 1) Read online

  “I think he’s still half blitzed,” Peters said.

  “You’re half blitzed, pig!” Ricky shouted.

  “Go ahead and cuff him up,” Evan said. “We’ll let him stew a bit. The weapon and the weed will get us a warrant. We can search this place and use anything else we find to motivate some cooperation out of Mr. Nickell, here.”

  “I ain’t got no weapons, man. No firearms at all, ‘cause of my DV’s,” Ricky protested. “Not allowed to possess a gun. That’s why I have the Daisey.”

  “On your feet, Ricky,” Peters said.

  “Wait, no, man. You can’t arrest me. It was self-defense. I told you…”

  Peters expertly stood Ricky up, spun him around and snapped the cuffs on him as he Mirandized him.

  His protests continued as Peters dragged him out the door. “Man, I ain’t got nothing on, man! I ain’t got no pants. My pubicals’ll be hanging out all over the place, man! You can’t take me in like this!”

  “Nobody cares about your pubicles, Ricky. Now shut up and sit still or I’ll go get the Daisy,” Peters said as he slammed the car door.

  Evan joined Peters by the cruiser, and looked at his watch. “Have we actually got time for this?”

  “Not to do it right,” Peters said. “If you really want to book him and toss this place we’ll have to head back to Port Saint Joe. You didn’t leave but one or two deputies in town, so you and I’ll be stuck with all the paperwork. It’ll be dark before we’d have a chance to get back to our next interview.”

  Evan wished they had driven separate cars, but that had not been an option. The fleet was a bit light to start with, and with the extra manpower today, every vehicle was in use. He looked to the trailer, then over to Kinzey, and finally to Ricky Nickell.

  He said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Toss him in the tank and book him on simple assault. We’ll seal this place, but not waste time on a warrant just yet. If he’s still all wound up in the morning, we can use the threat of a warrant to squeeze a bit of cooperation out of him.”

  “If I just do the biographical input today but hold off on writing up the report until the morning, we should be able to get back out here in under an hour,” Peters said.

  “Let’s give that a try,” Evan said, then nodded to Kinzey, “What are we going to do about her?” She had taken up scolding the fender of the white truck.

  “She likely won’t be coherent ‘till next week,” Peters said. “I’ve got a cousin, Sheryll, here in town. She knows Kinzey. I’ll give Sheryll a call, see if she can come pick her up, run her home.”

  “Ask your cousin if she can drive her down to Sacred Heart Hospital. Get her checked out, and have them document the welts.” Evan said.

  Peters nodded. He had already dialed and was holding the phone to his ear.

  Evan watched Kinzey while Peters conversed with his cousin. The girl had apparently given up on convincing the fender of anything. She got down on all fours, matted hair draping her face, weeping and explaining the inner workings of her mind to insects that probably didn’t exist and certainly didn’t care.

  Evan grabbed the cold bottle of Fiji water he’d stopped for on the way, and walked over to the girl. “Kinzey,” he said quietly. She looked up at him, some mixture of fear and anger on her face. Evan held out the water, condensation cooling his palm and dripping from his fingers. After a moment, she took it, then sat down in the dirt. When Evan turned back to the car, she was clutching it to her birdlike chest. For the hundredth time in his career, Evan was grateful he didn’t have a daughter.

  Peters waved him over, although he was halfway there already. “Sheryll’s on her way, should be here in about two minutes. You want to take off?”

  “Let’s wait,” Evan said. “Just for her safety.”

  “Not sure there’s much left to save,” Peters said.

  “You ever get the feeling you’ve missed something?” Evan asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like some worldwide paradigm-shift where it makes sense for a girl to do that to herself?”

  Peters studied Evan for a moment, then said, “Let’s just see if we can figure out who killed Hutch, huh? Then we can focus on trying to save her for the eighteenth time.”

  Evan nodded, still watching Kinzey. A few minutes later, Peters’ cousin arrived and escorted the girl away. Ricky Nickell had fallen asleep in the back of the cruiser. Evan and Peters drove the seven miles back along Highway 71 primarily in silence.

  TWELVE

  RICKY NICKELL DID NOT want to be booked for assault, or anything else, for that matter. His protests, general lack of cooperation and an episode of fainting caused the process to take much longer than it should have. It was well past five by the time Peters managed to get Ricky tucked in. Evan used the time to type up a search warrant application for Nickell’s trailer and emailed it to the judge, but had not yet heard back. He could have called and asked for a rush on it, but decided to hold off. The judge would see it first thing in the morning. He didn’t need to rush to tick off the local judges by keeping them in their offices late.

  Many of the deputies were returning to the station after pursuing their assigned tasks. They were recording their findings on the white board Vi had placed in Evan’s office. He decided to conference with his people now and put off the second trip to White City. Once the warrant came through, he would do the search and the Morrow interview in the same trip.

  It had been a long, full day, and tomorrow promised to be just as demanding. The dive team would begin their search around 10:00 a.m. Goff expected to receive a full report from the cell phone company in the morning. Evan was encouraged by the vigor with which the deputies had tackled their assignments. The whiteboard calendar was almost completely filled in, and a thick stack of reports waited for him on his desk.

  Two items in particular caught his attention. First, Paula Trigg had left a folder containing eight photos of the tire tracks Goff had pointed out. Evan realized all eight were actually the same shot but processed using different filters. It was clear Paula had spent several hours digitally manipulating the image to maximize its clarity. At the back of the folder, she had included a hand-drawn sketch of the tire track and a note. The sketch highlighted an odd feature that was evident in some versions of the photo; the edges of both tire tracks had a dull saw-tooth pattern, but the right tire track also displayed a repeating void along its outside edge.

  Paula’s note explained her deduction about the significance of this pattern: The ragged appearance of the tires’ edges suggests these were off-road tires with a coarse, open tread, probably from a ‘mudder’ or ‘swamper’ type tire. The void along the outer edge of the right tire indicates one of the lugs is missing from that tire. I calculated the tire’s diameter at approximately 120 inches, based on the distance from one void to the next. These will look somewhat out of place as they are fairly large. Especially considering the wheel-base and track calculations, which indicate we are looking for a smaller truck.

  The second item that caught Evan’s interest was a note from Vi. She had taken a call from Sally Bivens, a local real estate agent. Sally claimed she had seen Sheriff Hutchins’ boat at a dock in Mexico Beach, a tiny coastal town a few miles west of Port Saint Joe. Vi had included in her note that Sally tended to be a bit flighty, and a bit of an attention hog, so to take the tip with a grain of salt.

  The note was one of many dubious tips that had come in over the course of the day, but this one interested Evan because, until he read it, Hutch’s boat had been the last thing on his mind. He had known that the sheriff owned a boat, and that he spent many hours a week fishing from it. Evan had seen his boss on the bay more than once.

  But now that he stopped to think about it, he hadn’t seen Hutch’s boat in any of its usual places since the sheriff had been shot. He looked at Vi’s note for several minutes, trying to recall the last time he had actually seen the boat. It bothered him that he hadn’t included it on his list of investiga
tive inquiries.

  He placed the note on top of all the other files. When he returned to work the following day, his first priority would be to contact Marlene Hutchins and ask her where she believed the boat to be. Then he would call the realtor. For now, he needed to get away from all of it.

  The Dockside Grill always did a good business, between boaters who found it convenient and locals who liked the feeling of having a boat without actually getting one. Evan liked the place. The food was good, the staff, mostly college kids, was friendly and efficient, and if he couldn’t cook for himself at least he could be within sight of his home while someone else did the cooking.

  Tonight, Evan sat out on the covered side patio, along with half a dozen other diners. He leaned back against his chair as he sipped from his bottled water, looked out at the boats and the sunset, and awaited his grouper Po-Boy.

  Although Evan rarely went out at night, or at all, he sometimes found himself wanting the company of strangers. Not that he talked to anyone, other than the bartender or server; he seldom did, unless spoken to first. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to be with people. It just made him feel less alone to be among them. Sometimes, he just needed to be around people for whom violence didn’t seem to be an everyday thing. He didn’t need it very often, but he did tonight.

  The little red-headed server who was majoring in marine biology headed his way. He couldn’t remember her name, and he stole a quick glance at her name tag while she set down his food.

  “Here you go, Mr. Caldwell,” she said, placing a small bowl of cheese grits beside his plate.

  “Thanks, Rene,” he said.

  “You want another bottle of water?”

  “Actually, could you ask Benny to pour me a glass of cranberry juice?” Benny was an African-American kid with a short afro who tended bar and was getting ready to get his Masters in Elementary Education. He wanted to teach kindergarten, and Evan just liked that for some reason. When he did want to talk to somebody, he sat at the bar and listened while Benny told one story after another. It was soothing.

  “Sure thing,” Rene said, already zipping away. “Back in a sec.”

  Evan scraped half of the remoulade from his sandwich, unrolled his silverware, and started eating. The air was heavy and dank and he wished it would rain. He also wished the sound system was playing something other than 70’s rock. Although he liked a varied selection of music, he had no affection for Queen.

  Rene came back with his cranberry juice, and Evan asked her to deliver a five-dollar bill to Benny next time she went to the bar. He ate most of his sandwich alone, watching the water in the marina turn from a gray-green to just gray and then moonlit black in what seemed like just a few minutes.

  Then he paid his check, leaving Rene ten dollars he didn’t have a better use for, and headed back to his car.

  Few cars waited in Sunset Bay’s front parking lot that evening. Evan was later than usual, and most other visitors had gone home. He finished his cigarette, thought of his hard-won victory over smoking, of the twelve years he’d proudly done without it, and how he’d started again the day they’d told him Hannah would never wake up. He’d lost two things that day.

  On that cheerful note, he walked inside and down the almost silent hallway to her wing. Here and there, he heard muffled voices behind closed doors, but this wasn’t a section of the facility where many patients talked, or where many people talked to them. He’d been told that Hannah was one of only three comatose “residents,” but this wing was devoted to those who spent much of their time unconscious or in some kind of critical state.

  He lifted a hand to the two nurses that were working the station, and a moment later he entered Hannah’s room, letting the door swoosh shut behind him. Hannah’s curtains, curtains she’d made for their breakfast nook, had been drawn shut against the night, and the room was almost cozy, bathed in the soft, amber light of her bedside lamp. He’d wondered once what the nurses would do if he’d just gone to sleep in the stuffed chair and stayed the night, but he never had. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but as much as he needed to be here, he was always relieved to leave.

  He stopped at her nightstand for a moment, saw the latest card from Hannah’s mother. She had mourned already, though she drove up once every couple of months from Melbourne Beach. She always left some trinket of Hannah’s, some memento. But she never called or tried to see Evan, and she always came during the day so she wouldn’t run into him.

  Though he and Marjorie had never grown close, they’d been friendly before the accident. Marjorie wasn’t slighting him or even blaming him; she just needed to not see him, or listen to him talk about Hannah. Evan understood that she’d needed to move past the loss of her only child, and he bore her no ill will for it.

  Evan sat down in the chair, slid his feet partway out of his shoes to give them some respite.

  “So, I met this girl today,” he said, as though they were in the middle of a conversation. “She was strung out on meth and who knows what else. I couldn’t help thinking that you would have immediately gathered her to your breast and tried to nurture her out of her misery.” He sighed. “I didn’t mean that as a snipe. I just knew you’d want to fix her.”

  Hannah had been an event planner by trade, and a very successful one. But she’d spent a lot of time working with a non-profit that mentored high-risk girls. Evan had been proud of her, but he couldn’t remember at the moment if he’d ever actually told her that. There were a lot of things he’d just assumed she knew.

  “Your cat is intact, by the way,” he said.

  Just then the door opened slowly, and the young nurse named Jessica stepped in hesitantly.

  “Mr. Caldwell? May I come in?”

  “Of course,” he answered. She let the door close, and stepped farther into the room. “How are you tonight?” he asked politely.

  She nodded and smiled as an answer, and put one hand on Hannah’s bed rail. She used the other to smooth down the top of her sheet. Evan guessed her to be in her early twenties. He knew she’d only been a nurse for a couple of years. He watched her fiddle unnecessarily with Hannah’s pillow, waited for her to say or ask whatever she’d come to say or ask.

  He was trying not to expect something bad concerning Hannah when she finally spoke. “Have you caught the person who shot Sheriff Hutchins yet?” She was looking at Hannah when she asked.

  “No, not yet,” Evan answered, taken aback. “But I really can’t talk about that, Jessica.” He said it politely.

  She nodded for a moment, then took a deep breath and let it out. She finally looked at him. “I wanted to talk to you about something I really can’t talk about, either,” she said quietly. “I feel like I should, though. But, then I think I’d be hurting someone rather than helping anybody.”

  Evan picked at his thumbnail for a moment while he tried to look accepting and kind.

  “Jessica, I’m guessing this isn’t about Hannah,” he said gently.

  “No.”

  “Whatever it is you have on your mind, it’s up to you whether or not you talk to me about it,” he said. She just nodded. “Is it about this case?”

  She let out another breath, this one slower. “Yes. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I never felt right about nobody ever looking into it.”

  “I understand you being hesitant,” Evan said. “Clearly, your intentions are good.”

  She nodded again. “I think it’s the right thing, but maybe not the best thing.” He waited. “Before I came here, my first year out of nursing school, I worked in the ER at Sacred Heart.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, one night my second or third month there, Sheriff Hutchins brought his wife in with a dislocated shoulder. They said that they’d been coming home from going out to eat, and his wife opened her door and started to fall out. They said he’d grabbed her forearm to try to keep her from falling out, and he’d accidentally hurt her.”

  It took Evan a moment to speak. “Was she intoxic
ated?”

  “No,” Jessica answered, shaking her head. “She said the door was just really heavy, and she’d lost her balance when it swung open. Something like that.”

  “But it bothers you,” Evan said.

  She sighed. “I was new here. I’m from New Smyrna Beach originally, but I came up here for nursing school, at West Florida. I didn’t know the sheriff or anything.” She looked down for a moment, rubbing her finger along the bed rail. When she looked back up, she seemed resigned. “I said something about it to the other nurse that was with me, when we were going back to the nurse’s station later, and she said it wasn’t the first time. She seemed like she wanted to just forget it, and I dropped it. But I always felt wrong about dropping it.”

  Evan tried to ignore a sinking, slightly nauseating sensation in his stomach. “What about the doctor? Did he question it?”

  “He asked them questions, but he didn’t seem to think there was any reason not to believe them, or to doubt their explanation.”

  Evan was lost in thought for a moment, running various “if then, do” loops around in his brain.

  “I really wasn’t sure what to do when I heard about the sheriff,” she said after a minute or so. “I mean, if he was abusing her and she did something about it, he probably had it coming, frankly,” she said, standing up straighter, ready to defend her position. “But it still seems right to say something.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” he reassured her. “Try not to second-guess it too much.”

  “I just don’t want to do her any harm,” she said.

  “I don’t want to hurt her, either, Jessica.” Evan slipped his feet back into his shoes, though he wasn’t ready to leave yet. It didn’t feel right to be conducting official business in his Nautica socks. “Even if her husband hurt her, that doesn’t necessarily mean she had something to do with his death. But I have to look into it.”