Dead Wake (The Forgotten Coast Florida #5) Read online

  Maggie studied the body as she heard Wyatt shuffle around the counter. She stepped a little to the side as he started clicking away.

  “What do you think, Lt. Redmond?” she heard Robert ask quietly behind her.

  After a moment, Maggie answered over her shoulder. “Well, you’re right. He’s definitely dead.”

  “This we parsed out on our own,” William said snippily. “We’ve watched every single episode of Bones.” He looked to Robert for confirmation. “Have we not?”

  “Well, until Season Six. Then there was the thing.”

  “Oh, yes. The Mr. Nigel Murray thing. We cut our ties.”

  Robert snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  Maggie looked over at Wyatt to see if he had a straight face. Admirably, he did. He was focused on taking pictures of the body. She took a step closer to the wall and peered at the face. Up close, the smell was enough to elicit a gentle cough, but at this point in the body’s tenure, the odor could easily be mistaken for black mold. This was aided by the fact that there was black mold in the wall from the recent flooding.

  She turned to look at William and Robert. “The wall was here when you bought the place?”

  “Yes,” Robert answered.

  “When was that?”

  “1993,” William said.

  “Ninety-two,” Robert countered. “Remember? Hurricane Andrew hit like three weeks after we moved up here.”

  “1992,” William said to Maggie.

  Maggie looked over at Wyatt. “So, this man has been here for at least twenty-three years.”

  “We’ve had wine and cheese parties in here for crying out loud,” William said.

  Maggie looked back at the body as Wyatt snapped some more pictures. This type of body was way beyond her expertise. As one of two full-time investigators for the Sheriff’s Office, she’d been extensively trained in crime scene investigation and gotten a good deal of training and experience in examining remains, but she’d never had to examine a body that had been dead for more than a year.

  She pulled out her cell phone and dialed Larry Davenport, the county medical examiner.

  “Who are you calling?” she heard William ask.

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “The medical examiner.”

  “We’re doomed,” he said.

  “Done for,” Robert added.

  “You’re not doomed,” Maggie said. “And I don’t have any choice. This is the procedure.”

  “Can’t you guys take him wherever he needs to go?”

  “What, in the back of my Jeep?” Maggie turned back around as Larry answered the phone. “Larry, it’s Maggie Redmond.”

  “Good evening, Maggie,” Larry replied. “How may I help you?”

  “We have a dead body at The Blooming Idiot,” Maggie answered.

  “Goodness. It’s neither William nor Robert, I hope.”

  “No, this has been here for a while. They found it in one of the walls.”

  Larry was quiet for a moment. “Well, that’s curious. Let me call a crew and I’ll be there in a few moments.”

  “Do me a favor and come through the alley, okay?”

  “We can do that.”

  Maggie said goodbye and disconnected the call. When she looked over her shoulder, William and Robert were looking at her like she’d just kicked their new kitten.

  “Guys. This is the way we have to do things. I can’t just sneak him out of here for you. I can’t touch him at all until Larry signs off.” Maggie sighed. “It’s not like everybody won’t know about it by morning anyway. The newspaper’s a block away.”

  “That ferret-faced Woody Dumont,” William said, meaning the newspaper’s perpetually agitated editor. “He’s going to think it’s his birthday. He loathes us.”

  Wyatt spoke into his own phone. “Hey, Carol. I need a cruiser over here at The Blooming Idiot to secure a crime scene. Just one cruiser, and tell them to skip the lights and sirens. Time is not of the essence.”

  He hung up and looked over at the flustered florists. “Why don’t you guys go home? It’ll be easier if you’re not in the way. I can come over there and ask you some questions when we’re done here.”

  William and Robert looked at each other, then back at Wyatt.

  “How long will you be here?” Robert asked.

  “I don’t know. An hour, two?”

  William leaned over and whispered something to Robert, who whispered something back. Then he held out his hand and Robert dug a set of keys from his pocket and handed them to him. William held them out to Wyatt.

  “You’ll lock up?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Wyatt answered as he took the keys.

  “Make sure they zip him up tight in one of those bags,” William said.

  “They will,” Wyatt answered, frowning.

  “If they get any of his flotsam or jetsam on our new bamboo floor, I’ll throw myself in the street,” William explained firmly.

  “No flotsam or jetsam,” Robert repeated for clarity.

  A few minutes after Wyatt scooted the men out the door, Larry Davenport arrived, tattered black medical bag in hand, and picked gingerly through the bricks to stand in front of the wall.

  Larry was somewhere in his seventies and well over six feet tall, but built like a Sandhill crane. With his carefully combed tuft of white hair and his black plastic glasses, he always put Maggie in mind of a science teacher from some 1950s movie.

  He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looked at the body in the wall.

  “Well, well,” he said after a few moments. “I thought he’d never turn up.”

  Maggie looked from the body to Larry. “He who?”

  Larry stepped closer to the wall and tilted his head up to adjust his bifocals. “If I’m not mistaken, this is Holden Crawford.”

  “How can you know that? And who is Holden Crawford?’ Wyatt asked.

  Larry looked over his shoulder at Wyatt. “He used to own this building, back when it was part of Crawford Seafood. Back when there was a Crawford Seafood. He went missing some years ago. We finally presumed him dead.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” Wyatt said.

  “Oh, this was well before your time,” Larry said. Wyatt had been hired to sheriff Franklin County only ten years prior. “Decades.”

  “Which decade?” Maggie asked. She didn’t recall the name, either.

  “The seventies,” Larry said. “I’m not sure which one. Seventy-five, seventy-six, perhaps?”

  “So why are you so sure this is him?’ Wyatt asked.

  Larry turned back around to peer at the body. “Well, aside from the fact that he’s here, in this building, there’s his Dickies.”

  “His what?”

  “Dickies. His overalls. You can make them out there, through the plastic. Holden wore nothing else, except for church or a funeral.”

  “I see,” Wyatt said.

  Larry got his face within inches of the face in the wall, and looked down through his bifocals as though he were about to ask the man if he was in fact Crawford. “Yes, I believe that’s who we have here. Of course, that’s not official.”

  “It’s unlikely we’ll have any DNA on file for him,” Maggie said.

  “No, certainly not,” Larry replied. “But before Victor Manning was the only dentist in town, his father Karl was. I imagine there are records somewhere. I’ll request them.”

  “What were the circumstances of his disappearance?” Maggie asked.

  “Oh, goodness, I don’t remember all the details. I wasn’t the medical examiner back then. I was just running my practice. I do recall, though, that the prevailing theory was he’d been killed.”

  Maggie stared at the body. “Since it’s unlikely he bricked himself up in that wall, I’d say the prevailing theory prevails.”

  “We can assume that for the moment,” Larry agreed.

  Maggie focused on the body again for a moment, chewing at the corner of her lip.

  “What bothers
me is that he had to have smelled pretty bad back then,” she said finally.

  “Most likely. Most of what we’re smelling right now is black mold.” Larry agreed. “But back then, the wall wouldn’t have done a thorough job of containing the smell. He’s not wrapped especially well, and fluids would have seeped through in any event. That’s if he was interred shortly after death. If someone waited a while and then moved him here, he might not have been quite as…soppy, shall we say.”

  Wyatt finished taking pictures and sighed. “Delightful.”

  He pulled his phone back out and dialed. After a moment, he said, “Hey, Dwight. I need you to dig up an old missing persons case from the seventies. Holden Crawford. Just leave it on my desk and I’ll take a look first thing in the morning.” He hung up and looked at Maggie. “A forty-year old case is going to be an asspain. But at least there’s one nice thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, since he didn’t move here until the eighties some time, I’d say we finally have one case this year that doesn’t involve Bennett Boudreaux.”

  “You don’t,” Larry said from where he crouched on the floor.

  Maggie and Wyatt both looked over at the birdlike old man. Wyatt sighed and put his hands on his hips. “Why not?”

  “I don’t remember why exactly, but I do remember that most people assumed Bennett Boudreaux did something with Holden.”

  Maggie felt a sinking sensation in her chest as Wyatt looked over at her, his formidable eyebrows knotted together. Maggie’s odd friendship with Boudreaux was the one discord between herself and Wyatt.

  He curled his finger at her, and she followed him into the back hallway. Halfway to the open back door, he stopped and turned on her. “He didn’t even live here yet and he’s a freaking suspect!” he said, managing somehow to yell in a whisper.

  “I haven’t had a decent case in over a month,” she whispered back. “You are not taking it away from me just because Larry says he thinks maybe Boudreaux was involved. He’s got to mean Boudreaux’s father. Boudreaux was still in Louisiana back then.”

  Maggie was only five-three and Wyatt more than a foot taller. He loomed over her, but she jerked her chin up at him defiantly as he poked a finger in her direction.

  “See?” he spat out. “Asspain.”

  “Let’s just see what the case file says before you get all worked up over Boudreaux.”

  “We’re working it together. Regardless of what the case file says.”

  As the Sheriff, Wyatt oversaw all cases, but he and Maggie had the most investigative experience in the department, and they had partnered on cases together many times. It was how they’d become best friends. But Maggie took a modicum of umbrage over the fact that he was insisting on it this time, good reason notwithstanding. True, she had come to kind of like Boudreaux, but that didn’t mean she’d lost all impartiality.

  “Larry’s remembering it wrong. He’s gotta be thinking of Boudreaux’s father.”

  “Well, I’d be delighted if one dead guy killed the other dead guy, but Larry specifically remembers that it was Bennett that was under suspicion.”

  “Larry came to court last week wearing one brown shoe and one black one.”

  Wyatt was about to respond when the paramedic truck pulled up to the back door. He looked over his shoulder at it, then looked back at Maggie. He jabbed his finger at her chest one more time, then turned and went to meet the EMTs.

  A little over an hour later, Wyatt locked the front door of the shop from the inside. The deputies who’d secured the scene had marked the outside of the door with yellow crime scene tape, though only a few people, including the newspaper editor Woody Dumont, had noticed the hubbub.

  Maggie and Wyatt walked silently out the back door, locking it behind them, as Larry and the EMTs pulled out of the alley and headed for Weems Memorial Hospital, where Larry’s small morgue was located.

  Wyatt followed Maggie around the corner and to her Jeep, then they leaned on opposite sides of the Cherokee’s roof and stared at each other.

  “You want to come with me to take a statement from the guys?” he asked her finally.

  “Yeah.” She played with her keys for a moment as she looked off down the street, chewing her lip in the way she did when she was thinking.

  “What’s on your mind?” Wyatt asked her after a moment.

  “I’m wondering how long it takes to put up a brick wall,” she answered. “I mean, this was a place of business. People were around, right?”

  “We would assume.”

  “So, somebody not only knew how to put up the wall, they also knew they could get it done without anyone seeing them do it. Or questioning it if they did see it.”

  “Good point.”

  Maggie’s phone chirped at her, and she pulled it out of the back pocket of her jeans. It was her seventeen-year-old daughter, Skyler. “Hey, Sky.”

  “Hey. I know you and Wyatt Earp are on a date and everything, but Kyle just yakked all over the kitchen and the bathroom. I guess he’s sick. What do you want me to do?”

  “Does he have a fever?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t checked yet.”

  “Well, take his temperature for me.” Maggie looked over at Wyatt. “I’ll be home in a few minutes.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I got called out on a case, anyway.”

  “The mummy at the flower shop?” Sky asked.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Dude. Twitter.”

  Maggie sighed and disconnected the call. She looked over at Wyatt, who was frowning at her as he drummed his fingers on the roof.

  “So, this was fun,’ he said.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I would have preferred slow dancing, too,” Maggie said.

  “It doesn’t really, but thank you.” Wyatt said. “Everything okay at home?”

  “Kyle’s sick.”

  “Well, take me back to my car and I’ll go talk to the guys myself. Then I’ll go home and stuff my salad back in the bag.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said.

  They looked at each other for a moment.

  “I don’t think we’ve quite got the hang of dating,” Wyatt said finally.

  Maggie lived several miles north of town, at the end of a dirt road that was itself at the end of Bluff Road. Her home was a cypress stilt house on five wooded acres on the river. Her father’s father had built it back in the 1950s, and her parents had given it to her when she and her late ex-husband had married.

  Maggie drove past the chicken yard and the raised bed garden, and parked in the gravel area in front of the house. As she climbed out, her Catahoula Parish Leopard Hound, Coco, raced gravity down the deck stairs, managing not to crash in a heap at the bottom.

  Maggie knelt down as Coco jubilantly met her halfway to the house.

  “Hey, baby, how are you?” Maggie asked as she rubbed the dog’s neck. She straightened up and looked around for the other half of the property’s security team, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  Coco followed her up the stairs, solid new stairs Maggie and her dad had built a couple of months ago, after the original stairs were washed away during Hurricane Faye. Maggie reached the deck and stopped in front of the door. There, on the other side of the screen door, was her Ameraucana rooster, Stoopid.

  He had his neck feathers fully-deployed and his wings partially so, and was sending his usual barrage of news and questions through the screen. Stoopid had been under a great deal of stress since hatching, and always had a lot to discuss when Maggie got home. None of it was intelligible, but all of it was clearly urgent.

  “Why are you on that side of the door?” Maggie asked him. He hit her with another string of brrps and coughs and other assorted noises she was supposed to understand, then backed up and did a few tight circles as she opened the door and walked in.

  “Relax,” Maggie said to him as she walked past him and headed for the kitchen. “It wasn’t the re
al Lon Chaney.”

  Coco tossed Stoopid a resentful look that was largely ignored, then dog and bird followed Maggie into the small kitchen off of the open living and dining area.

  “Y’all, I’ve told you to stop letting Stoopid in the house,” Maggie called out. She dropped her purse and cell phone onto the kitchen counter, then nearly tripped over first Coco and then Stoopid as she turned back around.

  Sky came around the corner from the hallway.

  “If we leave him out there, he just does his weirdness in the windows,” Sky said.

  “Let him,” Maggie answered. “He’s gotta get over the idea that there’s such a thing as a house rooster.”

  Maggie had brought Stoopid into the house during the hurricane, and he’d remained inside for a couple of days while Maggie had recuperated at the hospital from related injuries. In the two months since, he had insisted he was an indoor pet.

  Maggie had learned that trying to catch him and chuck him out the door was more aggravation than she needed. Stoopid would run around the kitchen island, or back and forth over its bottom shelf, until she was sorely tempted to drop-kick him into the crock pot.

  Instead, she opened the fridge, an act Stoopid found endlessly exciting, and grabbed a handful of apple peels from the scrap bowl. Stoopid tapped along after her as she went to the front door, swung open the screen door, and tossed the peels onto the deck.

  He flapped out after his snack, and Maggie let the door slap shut. “Go tend to your women while you’re out there,” she said, and turned back to Sky.

  “Is Kyle lying down?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What was his temperature?”

  “It was only 99.5. But he threw up again,” Sky said. “’Course, that might have been because I told him I accidentally used a rectal thermometer.”

  “Sky,” Maggie said, then sighed and jammed her fists onto her hips.

  “Come on, it was funny.”

  Maggie stared at her daughter. Sky was nearly her double, with long dark hair, large green eyes, and full lips. One of the few differences was that Sky had her father’s cleft chin. She was incredibly beautiful, and almost resentful of it.