Damaged (23 page)

Liz came down the steps from her bedroom and dropped her duffel bag in the foyer. She was about to tap on the master-bedroom door to say goodbye to her dad when she heard him in the kitchen. She found him down on his knees, rummaging through one of the lower cabinets. He had food packages scattered on the floor around him. And more surprising, he was dressed in his navy jumpsuit, his canteen uniform.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“Oh, hello, darlin’. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, I’m on my way out. I thought you’d be still sleeping.”

“Here they are,” he said as he pulled out a box. He stood and wiped at his knees while he handed her the box of power bars. “These are supposed to be really good. Lots of protein. They aren’t the cheap ones. Throw a few in your bag. Take the box if you have room.”

She took the box and watched him stuff the other packages back into the cabinet.

“You dug through the cabinet just for these?”

“I know they’ll probably have MREs for you but they get old fast. I bought these last week thinking you’d like them.”

Liz wondered if he was simply avoiding the subject of last night. Maybe he didn’t remember. She wouldn’t embarrass him.

“When did you get your car?”

So he did remember.

“Last night. Scott took me back to the beach.”

“Scott?”

“He was here picking up the generator you loaned him.”

Walter stared at her. “I know I had a bit to drink yesterday, but I haven’t talked to Scott in over a week.”

“Are you sure? Maybe he talked to you while you were at the Tiki Bar.”

“Nope. Had a few drinks with a friend of his from out of town.” He closed the cabinet and started pulling items from the refrigerator. “Nice enough but a strange young fellow. Told me his daddy’s name is Phillip Norris but he calls himself Joe Black. Now why would a boy not use his daddy’s name?”

“Maybe his mom and dad weren’t married. He told you he’s a friend of Scott’s?”

“No, not exactly.” He started searching through another cabinet, this time pulling out a small blender. “He said it was nice to be drinking with someone he liked. Said that he’d spent the last two evenings on the beach with a business associate who was a—okay, now this is his word, not mine—he said he was a dickhead funeral director. Doesn’t that sound like Scott? You saw Scott drunk the other night on the beach. It has to be Scott.”

Liz wondered if Joe Black was the friend of Scott’s who owned the fishing cooler. Didn’t he say it belonged to his friend Joe?

Her dad was gathering and arranging an array of items on the countertop: a banana, a bottle of honey, a jug of orange juice, and a carton of milk.

“What are you making here, Dad?”

“Oh, just something. I’ve got a little bit of a headache.”

“Like a hangover?”

He frowned and she let it go.

“You’re not taking the canteen to the beach today, are you?”

“Just for an hour or two.”

“Dad, they’re closing the Bob Sykes Bridge at one.”

“I’ll be gone by then. Right now there’ll be some hungry people on the beach. And I need to check on some friends.”

“Promise me you’ll be back here by noon.”

He nodded. “So I won’t see you until after the storm?”

“I’ll call and let you know when we get to Jacksonville. We’ll be doing search and rescue until they tell us to get to safety. I’m thinking that’ll be sometime this afternoon.”

“You be careful. No hotdogging.”

“You be careful, too, hot-dog man.”

He smiled and shrugged.

“I’ll talk to you later.” Liz kissed him on the cheek as he splashed milk and orange juice together into the blender. She thought the concoction actually looked too good to cure a hangover.

“I can’t believe Scott helped himself to one of my generators without asking.”

“Sorry, Dad. He made it sound like he’d talked to you.”

She grabbed the box of power bars, and as she headed out the door she heard her dad say, “He really is a dickhead.”

CHAPTER 51

Maggie thought Charlie Wurth was being a bit overprotective. She knew he felt responsible for bringing her to Florida in the middle of the storm, so she wasn’t surprised that all the way out her hotel door and down the hall he ranted about her staying on the beach. In fact, she could hear him still mumbling as he got on the elevator.

What she wasn’t prepared for was Platt’s reaction.

“You really can’t stay on the beach,” he told her almost as soon as she closed the door.

“I’ll be with the United States Coast Guard.”

He didn’t smile.

“Really, I’ll be okay,” she said.

“When the outer bands start, there’ll be torrential downpours, thunderstorms, possibly tornadoes. Have you ever been in a hurricane before?”

“No, but I’ve been in a tunnel dug under a graveyard with a serial killer.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“I wasn’t being funny.” She stood back and looked at him. She’d seen his serious side, the concerned doctor watching over his patient. This was something different. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can.”

He let out a deep breath and rubbed at his jaw, an exhausted mannerism Maggie recognized. It only occurred to her now that he may not have gotten as much sleep as she did last night. She’d been surprised, maybe disappointed, to wake up and not find him beside her.

“I worry about you,” he said.

She started to smile until she saw the look on his face. This wasn’t an easy admission for him. They teased each other a lot, but this was serious.

“I really can take care of myself,” she tried again.

“But somehow you manage to get in the way of suitcase bombs and the Ebola virus. Not to mention serial killers.”

“You’re the one going off on secret missions to undisclosed locations.” Maggie’s sudden switch in tone surprised her as much as it did Platt.

This time, however, he smiled and said, “So you worry about me, too?”

She shrugged then nodded.

“It’s annoying, isn’t it?” He was back to teasing. A more comfortable place for both of them.

His phone rang twice and stopped. He glanced down at the number.

“My ride’s here.” But he didn’t move. “Call me. Or text me. Let me know you’re safe.”

“Absolutely. You do the same.”

He picked up his duffel bag and slung it over his shoulder. He started for the door, then without warning he turned back.

“What the hell,” he mumbled and in three steps he was kissing her, one hand cupping the back of her neck, the other keeping his
duffel bag from banging her shoulder. “Make sure you take care of yourself, Maggie O’Dell.”

She was glad he sounded a little out of breath. As he headed for the door another damned phone started ringing. It was Maggie’s. She wanted to ignore it.

Platt smiled at her as he closed the door. “You better get that.”

She was shaking her head then realized she was smiling, too.

“Maggie O’Dell,” she answered.

“Yes, Ms. O’Dell, this is Lawrence Piper returning your call.”

Platt had made her forget her case. It took her a second to remember who Lawrence Piper was and why she had called him.

“You wanted to know about a delivery,” he prompted.

How could she play this? She couldn’t very well tell him she’d found his phone number on a label stuck to a cooler full of body parts. Or could she?

“Concerning Destin on August twenty-fourth,” she said, just as she realized the twenty-fourth was yesterday.

“I don’t understand. I told Joe we had to cancel Destin because of the hurricane.”

He sounded like a businessman. She hadn’t had the chance to research Advanced Medical Educational Technology. But there was nothing clandestine or sinister in his tone. The best interrogators Maggie had worked with had taught her that the less the interrogator said, the more the interrogated filled in. She waited.

“Are you working with Joe?” Piper asked.

“I’m trying to.” She kept her remarks innocuous.

Piper laughed and added, “I told him he needed an assistant. Look, Maggie—you don’t mind if I call you Maggie.”

A businessman but also a salesman, Maggie decided.

“Not at all.”

“I already told Joe I’d make this cancellation up to him. I’ve got a couple dozen surgeons coming to a conference in Tampa over Labor Day. I’m going to need at least twenty-two cervical spines. I’d prefer brain with skull base intact, if that’s possible.”

Maggie thought about the body parts found in the cooler, individually wrapped in plastic. Could it be that simple? A body broker making a delivery? From what little she knew, there was nothing illegal about it. Most federal regulations applied only to organs. Few states regulated anything beyond that.

“I don’t want to lose Joe,” he said when she didn’t respond. Evidently Maggie’s silence was disconcerting to Piper. “Can you tell him that? He hasn’t called and the number I have for him has already been changed. That’s an annoying habit your new boss has.”

“Yes, I know. He likes to be the one calling.” She wasn’t surprised.

“It’s tough to find someone with his skill and consistency. Especially someone who delivers and sets up. Can you tell him that?”

“Yes,” Maggie said.

As she pressed End, she noticed she had missed a call: Dr. Tomich.

Brokered body parts. It made sense. And it probably explained the identical cooler Liz Bailey saw outside a funeral home. It didn’t, however, explain Vince Coffland’s disappearance.

Maggie pressed Return Call.

“Tomich,” he snapped. His clipped manner made his name sound as if it were a swear word.

“Dr. Tomich, it’s Maggie O’Dell returning your call.”

“Ah yes. Agent O’Dell.”

Before she could tell him that the parts might be brokered, Tomich surprised her by saying, “It appears you were correct.”

“Excuse me?”

“After examining the X-rays I discovered a bullet in Mr. Vince Coffland.”

“Are you certain it wasn’t shrapnel? I think that’s what the metal is in the severed foot.”

“No, no, no. This is a bullet. I went back and extracted it. Looks like a .22 caliber handgun. The trajectory path would suggest that it entered somewhere below the occipital bone and above the cervical vertebrae.”

“In other words he was shot in the back of the head.”

“That would be within the broad range, yes. You understand I am speculating. Without the head and neck I do not have the entrance wound. But from where the bullet was lodged and from the downward path it left in the tissue, I would estimate that the victim may have been bending over when shot.”

Execution style? Maggie kept the thought to herself as she thanked Dr. Tomich and ended the call.

The body parts may have actually been meant for one of AMET’s surgical conferences. However, it looked like Piper’s connection, Joe the body broker, might also be a killer.

CHAPTER 52

Charlotte Mills packed up the last plastic container and hauled it upstairs. She had secured all her important documents, jewelry, and memorabilia, including photo albums, scrapbooks, and her collection of autographed novels. One container alone held all the newspaper and magazine articles about her husband’s “untimely death,” or as Charlotte called it, his Mafia-style murder.

The federal government had ruled the plane crash an accident, an unfortunate engine failure on the Lear jet that was supposed to deliver him to Tallahassee so he could testify in front of a grand jury. She had warned George months before that turning state’s evidence could mean his death. But he insisted it was the right thing to do, his penance for helping “the son-of-a-bitch” corrupt politician get elected. As a result, the son of a bitch kept his job.

That was fifteen years ago and Charlotte Mills had gotten nowhere in her diligent pursuit of the truth. Five years ago she gave up—or at least, that’s what it felt like, when, in fact, she had depleted all of her options. She didn’t want to also deplete her financial resources. George would have been furious with her if she had done that. So finally she accepted the life-insurance money, the policy
that George had invested in just months before the grand jury convened.

She had already quit her job to work full-time investigating George’s murder. It turned out to be way too many wasted hours. When she finally stopped she bought this place on the beach, and now she spent her days walking along the shore collecting shells. And she spent her nights reading all the wonderful novels she hadn’t had time for. It wasn’t a bad life and she wasn’t going to let some hurricane dismantle it.