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

  Evan looked at him over the top of his legal pad for a long moment, but Goff didn’t look up. Eventually, Evan said, “Well, I appreciate that.” When that got no response, he asked, “Was there talk or suspicion of an affair?”

  “Nope, none that I’ve ever heard,” Goff said. “Kinda hard to be running around on your old lady when she knows where you are every minute of the day.”

  “What about her?” Evan asked. “Did Hutch know where she was every moment of the day?”

  This time, Goff did look up. His eyes narrowed. “I don’t think he felt like he needed to know. Marlene’s a good woman…and folks around here know better than to be stepping out with the sheriff’s wife.”

  “What if the sheriff was out of the way?”

  Goff leaned back in the chair, producing a dry creak. Evan didn’t know whether the sound came from the chair or Goff himself. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to add that to your list there. But I can tell you, ain’t nobody gonna believe Marlene had anything to do with this.”

  Evan nodded and looked down at his notes. He wouldn’t write it on the pad just yet, but he wasn’t dismissing the idea either. There was something unnerving about the way this case was coming together. It had a vibe, a hidden energy, like a current moving beneath a deceptively calm surface, that Evan perceived but could not yet quantify. He couldn’t even guess yet where this case would go, but whatever path it took, Evan doubted there would be anything routine about it. He sensed the final resolution would be somehow very personal.

  When he raised his head again, Goff was studying him. Evan placed his legal pad on the desk and slid it across to Goff. “Do you feel comfortable making the assignments?” he asked. “You know our team better than I do. I think you’d be good at matching skills to tasks.”

  “Sure,” Goff said. “I can do that.”

  “Pair me up with one of the senior deputies and give us three or four of the more interesting names on that list. We’ll do a couple interviews and by the end of the day some of this other info should be filtering back in.”

  Goff nodded as he perused the list. After a moment, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Dive team? Dead Lakes is ‘bout as black as three-week old coffee…and not the good kind, neither.”

  Evan wondered what kind of coffee Goff considered ‘the good kind’ but decided it might be better if he didn’t know. Instead, he asked, “You don’t think they’ll find anything down there?”

  “Oh, they’re like to find just about anything,” he said, shaking his head. “No telling what folks get up to out there. More than likely they’ll find evidence of cases we don’t even know we have, yet. But as far as Hutch’s gun, or his cell phone…I wouldn’t put money on it.”

  “You think we’ve got guys willing to give it a try?” Evan asked.

  “We don’t have an official dive team, but you’d have a hard time finding a deputy here who doesn’t dive.”

  “You dive, Goff?”

  “Not in this century, but I could if called upon.”

  “I’d rather have you working elsewhere,” Evan said. “Do we have dive equipment?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got the underwater metal detectors and some dive gear,” Goff said as he went back to reading Evan’s list of investigative inquiries. After a moment, his eyebrows knotted and he said, “You got ‘Cell Phone’ on here. I told you I tried to get the phone company to ping his cell. Got nothing.”

  “Right,” Evan said. “It’s probably in the swamp, along with his gun and the murder weapon, if the killer had any sense. But the cell company should be able to tell us which towers it was pinging before they lost it. They should also be able to tell us what time it went dead, presumably shortly after Hutch was killed.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” Goff nodded. “And I’m figuring once we pull call records from his home and office, you’re gonna want someone to talk to everyone he talked to?”

  Evan nodded. “Someone to talk to them, yes, as well as a list of all the names, regardless of the reason for the call, even if it was just a telemarketer.”

  “I think we should go ahead and round up any telemarketers we come across. Lock ‘em up for general malfeasance.”

  Evan tried not to smile as Goff scratched and scribbled on Evan’s pad for a few minutes, then cleared his throat, nodded to himself, and said, “Yep, I think that oughta just about do it. You want to look over this before we present it to the troops?”

  “No, as long as you’ve got someone covering each of those, I think we’ll be all right,” Evan said. He looked at his watch again, then said, “Let’s go see what they think.”

  TEN

  ONCE AGAIN, all conversation ceased when Evan stepped out of his office. All eyes turned to him. The faces of the deputies and volunteers no longer showed a scattered blend of sorrow, shock, anger, or detached confusion. Their expressions had hardened to smoldering determination. These men and women intended to pour all their combined energy into running Hutches’ killer into the dirt. The only thing Evan could not tell was whether they saw him as part of that pursuit, or as an impediment.

  Evan made his way into the conference room, Goff just behind him, and found some open space at the long, oval table. Through the wall of windows at the far end of the room, he could see the palm trees getting excited about some kind of upcoming weather. He wished he was out there.

  “Everyone,” he addressed the room, “As I’m sure you’ve already heard, the commissioners have appointed me to run this office until a new sheriff can be elected. I know some of you disagree with that decision. I understand that, but I don’t much care. I didn’t have any more say in it than you did, and we have much more important things to do, so I don’t expect us to waste any time bickering about it.” He paused, then asked, “Are there any questions or comments on that matter?”

  The crossed arms and set jaws of his deputies suggested that the issue was not settled, but none of them chose to pursue it just then. A few pairs of eyes just dropped to the carpet when his gaze passed them.

  “Very well,” Evan continued, “Let’s focus our attention on the matter at hand. Here’s what we know at this point. The sheriff was killed early Friday morning, between the hours of midnight and two-thirty a.m. The cause of death was a single gunshot to the back of the head. He was kneeling at the time he was shot.”

  This produced low, agitated murmuring in the crowd. Evan let them have their moment before he continued. “The murder weapon is a .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun. We don’t know make or model yet, but ballistics has the slug, so they should be able to give us that information soon. We have not recovered a possible murder weapon. The Sheriff’s duty weapon and cell phone are also missing.”

  “I just spoke with the M. E’s office, and have reviewed the initial crime scene forensics. Whoever shot Sheriff Hutchins didn’t leave us much to work with. We have very little in the way of physical evidence. At this point, we have several dozen interviews that need to be conducted. I want to reconstruct every hour of Hutch’s week prior to his death. I want to know everyone he met with or talked to on the phone, and I want us to talk to each of them.”

  There were a few quick nods and raised eyebrows around the room. Evan sensed he’d earned some credibility for actually knowing how to do his job.

  “Vi will be setting up an hour-by-hour calendar on the wall here,” he continued. “Goff’s working on pairing officers up with each interview. As you conduct your interviews, add your information to the appropriate place on the calendar, in addition to the regular reports you file. This will allow all of us to see the progress and look for leads or avenues of investigation.”

  Evan heard someone toward the back of the crowd whisper, “Avenues of investigation,” giving the phrase an uppity sneer. A couple people chuckled dismissively, but the majority of the deputies either ignored the jibe, or turn annoyed faces in the direction of the comment. Evan knew their disapproval had more to do with their respect for Hutch than their defense of himsel
f, but he was grateful for it all the same.

  He continued without reference to the comment. “Goff has a list of duty assignments for each of you. These consist primarily of these interviews with people who had contact with Sheriff Hutchins over the last 72 hours. Most of these people aren’t suspects in any way, we’re just building the history. Make your reports thorough. If you believe the subject you’re interviewing might need a closer look, note it accordingly in the file and pass it back to Sgt. Goff for follow-up.

  “Those of you not assigned to interviews, and the community volunteers, will be heading out to Dead Lakes to do a wider sweep, looking for either the murder weapon, the sheriff’s duty weapon, his cell phone, or any other evidence that may be connected to this killing.” Evan looked around at the few volunteers who had managed to find a spot in the conference room. “Sgt. Goff will brief you volunteers in more detail later, but please, if you find something, call out, text, dial the phone...but do not pick up anything you think might be evidence. We all appreciate your willingness to help, but we need to be very, very careful about the handling of evidence. When we catch the person responsible for Sheriff Hutchins’ death, we will not be watching his lawyer get him off for a mistake we’ve made.”

  Evan caught a few nods of agreement in his peripheral vision.

  “If any of that’s there, it’s in the water,” someone said from the back of the room.

  Evan turned to look at a man in faded jeans and an Apalachicola Seafood Festival T-shirt from 2010. “Most likely,” Evan said as he nodded. “We’ll be sending divers into the lake.”

  A couple of deputies whistled through their teeth.

  Goff cleared his throat, silencing the dissent. “I made the assignments,” he said. “Come find me out back of the station if you got a problem with it.” No one expressed any interest in taking him up on that offer. Goff was a little guy, Evan thought, but he came across big.

  “Look, people,” Evan said, “this is going to be a difficult few days, but we all want the same thing. Everyone in this room is here to solve this killing, to find out who killed Hutch and bring that killer to justice.” Evan looked around the room, making eye contact with everyone he could. “The dedication and loyalty on display here would have made Hutch proud of all of you. It would have made him proud to be your boss. Let’s use that loyalty and determination to motivate us to work together to get this job done. Can we do that?”

  Heads nodded and several deputies made mmm-hmm noises. A big bull of a man named Holland had been leaning against a file cabinet. He now stood up straight and asked, “What about the part where you tell us to act professional and not take matters into our own hands?”

  “Do you need that part of the speech? I’m sure you’ve heard it enough on TV.” Evan said. He returned Holland’s challenging stare., but noted that one corner of the man’s mouth had kipped slightly upwards.

  “Nah,” Holland said. “Saw that just last week I think.”

  Evan turned to the rest of the crowd and said, “If you did need that reminder, you just heard it from Holland. I don’t doubt your professionalism or your dedication.” What he didn’t say was that if they needed that reminder, it wouldn’t have done any good coming from him, anyway. He closed with, “Goff has your assignments.”

  Goff had paired Evan with one of the other three sergeants in the department, a man named Peters. The man hadn’t given any indication, one way or the other, how he felt about Evan. He was around forty, with hard planes to his face and a blond crew cut that would have made any drill sergeant happy. He had been on the job almost twenty years and had the respect of his fellow deputies.

  As they walked to an unmarked Crown Vic assigned to the Criminal Investigation Unit, Evan noticed a tattoo peeking out from below the sleeve of Peters’ uniform shirt. The tattoo was faded to a faint blue. It looked like the Marine insignia, but Evan couldn’t tell for sure.

  Peters had the keys to the Vic. Evan walked to the passenger side and waited for Peters to unlock it. There were woods on two sides of the property, and Evan watched the smaller branches waving in the damp wind that had advanced on Port St. Joe in the last hour or so. A look at the sky told him rain was coming eventually. He’d appreciate the drop in temperature, but wondered if the rain would come through the window he always left open for the idiot cat to get out to his litter box.

  “Who we looking at today?” Peters asked, as Evan got into the car.

  Evan began to flip through the six files Goff had handed him, these from the stack Vi had compiled. He recognized two of the names, but was unfamiliar with the cases. The last name he remembered well.

  “We pulled Johnny Bowles, Eric Scruggs, a couple of Eubanks, a Morrow, and Ricky Nickell Jr.”

  “There’s a bunch of winners for you,” Peters said as he cranked up the AC. “ If brain cells were dynamite, all of ‘em together couldn’t blow each other’s noses.”

  “I don’t know much about Bowles or Scruggs, but I helped Hutch serve a protection order against Nickell. Seemed like a real piece of work.”

  “Yeah that boy’s got some issues, alright. We call him Ricky Take the Nickle,” Peters said. “He can’t keep his mouth shut to save his life.”

  “Take the nickel as in the fifth amendment?”

  Peters grinned and shook his head, making a sheeesh noise through his teeth. “Nickell stood up in court, behind the defense table, mind you, while he’s on trial for domestic violence. This joker stands up and shouts, ‘Yeah, I slapped that woman. She don’t know when to shut her damn pie hole!’” Peters let out a high-pitched laugh, then said, “Man, I can’t tell you—I was assigned court duty at that time, working as the bailiff—can’t tell you how hard it was not to crack up right there on the spot. Nickell spent his time in county for the DV, plus an extra three days for contempt of court.”

  “Huh,” Evan mused. “Hutch told me, when we served the protection order, that Nickell has so many protection orders against him that if I see him with any female, it’s PC for an order violation.”

  “That might be overstating it, but not by much,” Peters said. He had sobered significantly at the mention of Hutch’s name. “Nickell is up in White City. Marrow is, too, but the rest are here in town. You wanna take a run at Scruggs first?”

  “Sounds good,” Evan said, pulling out of the station onto Highway 71, “What can you tell me about him?”

  “The short version? Eric’s a small-time hood. He’s got a big mouth but not much to back it up. He’s usually got a little meth or weed on him, so we can bust him on that if we need to, but he’s not worth the trouble. That’s my guess, anyway. He doesn’t have the stones for something like this.”

  “No?” Evan asked. “Why is he on our radar?”

  “Oh, ‘bout five years back, before the high school expelled him, he was on the football team. Hutch was, well, I guess you’d call him the ‘co-coach.’ He wasn’t gonna be anybody’s assistant anything, but he had too much on his plate to be the fulltime coach, so he was there when he could be and let the real coach run the show the rest of the time. You get me?”

  “Sure,” Evan said, “sounds like Hutchins.”

  “Well, Hutch busted Eric and a couple other boys for smoking weed after a practice. He tried to handle it off-book, you know, scare the boys straight but not jam them up too much. It worked on the other boys, but Eric took offense. Since then he has made threats on line and in person.”

  “But you don’t think he would have made good on those threats,” Evan said. “Does he have any violent crimes or weapons charges on his record?”

  “Nah, like I said, he’s got a big mouth, that’s about it,” Peters said. He tapped the files on his palm and smiled. “Now, his dad is a different story. William ‘Willy’ Scruggs has the reputation, and the rap sheet to back it up. If this was twenty years ago, I’d say he was our man, for sure. But he’s not getting around too quick these days.”

  “He’s the one that was big into liquor store
and gas station robberies?” Evan asked.

  “And meth running and auto theft and any other vice that was dangerous enough to pay big and pump adrenalin”

  “I didn’t see him in the files Vi pulled. Is he somebody we need to be talking to?”

  “Well, we’re probably going to be talking to him. Eric lives with him. But he’s not a player anymore. He and Hutch knocked heads a few times back in the early nineties, when Hutch was just a deputy and Scruggs was a mullet-wearing Trans-Am driving bad ass. But Scruggs got old early. Meth’ll do that to you. He hasn’t had any run-ins with us for over a decade.”

  Peters pulled the cruiser in to the driveway of a squatty little white duplex with a wheelchair ramp on one side and a Little Tykes play kitchen on the other.

  “Scruggs is gonna be on the right, with the wheelchair ramp,” Peters said. “For Willy, not Eric.”

  He and Peters exited the vehicle and knocked on Scruggs’s door. After several seconds with no response, Peters pounded the door again, calling, “Sheriff’s department. Open the door!”

  They heard movement inside, and a not-unusual noise that Evan recognized as grumbling. Peters looked at him and shook his head. The noises inside grew louder. When the door opened, they were met by the older Scruggs, Willy.

  “If you’re here for the kid, you ain’t up on local gossip,” he said by way of greeting. He was in his mid-fifties, but his grey skin and faded-out eyes made him look closer to seventy. A clear tube ran oxygen into his nostrils from a tank on wheels that stood beside him. His torso seemed somehow disproportionate, as if he had been stuffed by an unskilled taxidermist.

  “We just want to have a word with Eric,” Evan said. “May we speak to him?”

  Willy Scruggs chuckled. It sounded like a kid blowing bubbles in chocolate pudding with a straw. He looked at Evan and said, “This must be that new hotshot they got from Fort Lauderdale or wherever.”

  “Cocoa Beach,” Peters corrected.