Death Among the Mangroves (7 page)

He parked in the lot behind the town hall. He still didn't feel sleepy.
May as well go do something useful, catch up on paperwork,
he thought as he unlocked the back door to the police station and let himself in.

Chapter 10

Monday, December 23

Troy had Juan Valdez, on Sunday afternoon, and Dominique Reiss, in the evening, show Mark Stider's and Barbara Gillispie's photos around the Gulf View Motel and Beach Street area. They came up with two people who had seen Gillispie and Stider together.

By Monday morning Troy had lost most of his volunteer searchers as they went back to work or just got sick of it, but they had looked every place a person could be on the several islands that made up the town of Mangrove Bayou. He had Lee Bell and two men from the volunteer fire department up at first light to fly a larger circle than the sheriff's helicopter had done. It wasn't likely they would see anything among the mangroves but they could be effective over the inland marsh.

By eight a.m. there were three television trucks parked in front of the station door on Connecticut Avenue and a half-dozen reporters milling in the lobby, each demanding to speak to him one-on-one. The dispatcher and receptionist, June Dundee, didn't work Mondays so Troy had Bubba Johns keeping reporters herded together and not wandering around the station.
Bubba was two inches shorter than Troy's six feet but thicker. He had taken over the station temporarily when the town council fired the previous chief, and had been happy to hand the job over to Troy. When not patrolling in town he ran the town police boat and, though a white man, he was actually darker than Troy. And he was perfectly capable of herding a pack of wolves if Troy told him to do that.

Troy looked at the staffing schedule for the month and then called in Juan Valdez.

“I'm pulling you off patrols,” he told Juan. “Until we find this missing girl. I want you working to find Barbara Gillispie, or anything related to that, full-time.”

“I can use the spare office,” Juan said.

“Yes. I need feet on the ground out there, on this alone, and I need a second brain and pair of eyes too.”

“You're smart. You're the high-IQ guy,” Juan said. “And you see things most people miss.”

“No one is smart enough. No one sees everything. Make no assumptions here, Juan. Look at everything fresh. The Gillispie file is on the computer server. Read it all. Read it all half a dozen times. I have. Give it some thought.”

“Does this make me a detective? With a big salary increase? I'm already the official diver for the department.”

“What did I pay you for that?”

“You gave me a free swear word per month. And you paid for my air refills on my tanks.”

Troy smiled. “There you go. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. I'll toss in another free swear word. Use it wisely. Meantime, I have a job for you.”

“A detective-type job?”

“Absolutely. I want you to track down any and all real estate the Stiders own.” He spelled the name.

“Judge Stider?” Juan said.

“None other.” Troy explained about the photo of Mark Stider.

“Holy…um…wow,” Juan said.

“Exactly. And keep this to yourself for the moment. I want to know about other homes, rentals, anything.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. But I need more information. Right now, knowing what time it is would be an improvement.”

Juan smiled. “Still, finding property owners isn't hard. Property appraiser's got that right on his web site.”

“This is true. Do that for every Florida county.”

“For God's sake! There are sixty-seven counties in Florida.”

“Used up your free word already. Welcome to detective work. Full-time. Count yourself lucky, I believe Texas has nearly double that number of counties. The Department of Revenue web site has a full list of appraiser offices with URLs and phones.

“But that's not all I want. I need you to check with every rental storage place from Everglades City to Fort Myers. Collier and Lee counties. Use your own car and clothes, low key. Show photos of Judge Stider and Mark Stider. I want to know if they rented a storage unit recently, or ever.”

“Why?”

“I don't know why. Welcome to detective work.”

“You already said that.”

“Yes, I did. And it's ninety-nine percent wasted effort on anything at all that might give you a thread to pull on.”

“How many of those storage things do you suppose there are?” Juan asked.

“No idea. Not all that many. Maybe three dozen in the area I specified. They're easy to locate; they all advertise, and national chains have web sites. The property appraisers in each of those counties could probably turn them up with a simple web search for zoning or whatever. I printed out the judge's photo from the court web site and the Mark Stider photo is the one we already had.”

“Is that all? What did you want me to do day after tomorrow?”

Troy smiled. “Cocky. I like that. And while you're doing property searches, find out Mrs. Stider's maiden name and check that against any properties too.”

“How would I know that?”

“I don't know. You're the detective. They must have gotten married someplace.”

“Well, that books me through Wednesday. What after that?”

“I'll think of something. And there's no law against your coming up with your own ideas and investigating those. Keep me informed if anything pans out. And good hunting.”

A few hours later Lester Groud came through the connecting door to the town hall offices and back to Troy's office. Troy was sitting with one foot up on an open desk drawer, contemplating the boat ramp scene across Sunset Bay in back of the station.

Troy's radio was in its charger on his desk. Groud picked it up and stared at it a moment, then put it back. “You got to say something to those reporters,” Groud said.

“Why?”

“Because this is bad enough without it turning into a them-against-us circus. Talk to them.”

“I don't know anything yet.”

“Then tell them that.”

Troy nodded. He walked out to the lobby. “My name is Troy Adam. Adam with no
S
. I'm the director of public safety here in Mangrove Bayou, but you can call me the police chief. And let's all go outside.” He walked through the crowd and out the front door. The reporters followed. He noticed that Cilla Dowling wasn't there. She already knew he had nothing to say and would say that.

“New rules,” Troy said. “No reporters inside the station. It's just too small for all of you, and I assume there will be more to come. No tying up our few phone lines with your questions. No following our officers around like a pack of hungry dogs. No harassing the townspeople.” He looked to his left down the side of the building. “And no trampling down the shrubbery trying to look into my office windows. That's just creepy.” There was a general laugh. “Anyone breaking the rules, I'll think of some way to blight your life and career.”

Troy looked around the street. “We may soon have to figure out some better way to park all these trucks and get you people some toilet facilities. I'll work on that. You cannot all be using our one toilet in the station, not when there are more of you. As for why you're here, I'll give you guys an update every evening at seven p.m. for as long as this lasts. We do that right here, me in front of the door, you on the sidewalk and street in front of me.”

That caused a small rebellion. The television people wanted something no later than four so they could get it onto their five and six p.m. newscasts. Troy stuck to seven, which was the time he normally went home anyway. The few newspaper journalists who were there smiled happily.

“Now, here's what I know so far,” he said, once the reporters had gotten themselves and all their equipment arranged to their satisfaction. “A young woman named Barbara Gillispie is missing. As is obvious, if you looked around town yesterday, we're turning over every rock to find her. We're still looking, just not in places you can easily see. We take the safety of our citizens and of our visitors very seriously.”

“What about state help?” one reporter asked. “Or the county. Is your tiny police force up to finding a missing girl?”

“We'll find out. If I need help from FDLE or Highway Patrol or the sheriff's office I will not hesitate to ask for it. But at the moment we're handling it. The problem isn't any shortage of manpower. The problem is a shortage of information, clues.”

A woman spoke up. “The helicopter you had yesterday has left. Does that mean you don't think she is out in the swamp?”

“Actually, there's no swamp,” Troy said. “We have a salt marsh between us and the mainland, and a mangrove forest, a lot of small islands, between us and the Gulf of Mexico. And we have a private aircraft out right now, looking in a wider circle,” Troy said.

“Have you talked to the girl's parents?” a man asked.

“First, let's call her by her name. She is Barbara Gillispie. She's a daughter, a schoolmate, a person. She's not some anonymous girl. Yes, I spoke to her father. I will again, any time he wants or any time I have news.” Troy decided not to mention calling the Albany P.D. to ask them to set up a kidnap investigation up there. Let them deal with their own media frenzy without him making it worse.

“That's it for now,” Troy said. “I'll talk to you again later today. Thank you.”

He turned and walked back in through the door and closed it to shut out the shouting. “Jesus,” he muttered. He locked the door. He took out a dollar and looked around. “Where's the Bad Word Jar?”

Bubba was still standing in the lobby and he bent to reach behind the dispatcher's counter. “Maybe, Chief, you should take this back to your office when nobody's up front.”

“OK. Wouldn't want to lose our pizza-and-beer money. Did I do good out there?”

“Perfect.”

Chapter 11

Monday, December 23

Troy went out the back door and got his car from the town hall parking lot. He drove to the Krispy Kreme shop and made arrangements there for several dozen doughnuts and some coffee and tea service each morning in front of his station. Then it was on to Bert's Crab Shack to arrange sandwiches for lunch. Bert Frey was also the town's licensed animal trapper. Bert always claimed to take the animals,
“Well, the scrawny ones, anyway,”
out of town to release them in some pristine Garden of Eden.

Everything on the menu at Bert's was either fish, chicken or crab. Bert did, indeed, buy fish and crabs from the local fisherman who came right up to the rickety dock behind the restaurant. Everything else, Bert said, tasted like chicken anyway. Most locals wouldn't eat at Bert's. Bert didn't eat at Bert's. Troy figured he could use the business.

Back at the station, Troy walked through the connecting door from the station lobby into the town hall offices. He found Mortimer Potem, the town manager, in Potem's office. Potem was in his chair, turned around from his desk, and staring at a large map of Mangrove Bayou on the wall, tapping on his chair arm with a pen in his right hand.

“Looking for some place for Max Reed to build a big-box Walmart?” Troy asked. Maxwell Reed was a land developer in a town with almost no vacant land left to develop. He was also a town councilman, and thus, one of Potem's—and Troy's—bosses.

Potem turned his chair around as Troy sat in a visitor chair. “We could use one,” he said. Potem wore a gray double-breasted suit. His black wingtip dress shoes gleamed with polish. His bald head gleamed too. Troy wondered if Potem polished that as well, and if so, with what. Turtle Wax? Potem's starched white shirt gleamed from behind his pale blue tie that featured Mickey Mouse. Potem had an assortment of ties with cartoon characters on them, mostly supplied by amused town residents. Pale blue eyes gleamed through his rimless small eyeglasses. A pale blue handkerchief poked modestly from his breast pocket. In a town where people showed up for the rare funeral wearing formal clothes smelling of mothballs, Potem ran the town hall for the town council and was never seen dressed informally or anything less than starched and gleaming. Troy had always suspected he wore his suit to bed.

“Just kidding about the Walmart,” Troy said. “I despise those big stores.”

Potem nodded, serious. “Everyone does. Then they flock in to buy the cheap goods. I tried to get one here, years back. We were too small for them.”

Potem started tapping his chair arm with the pen again. “You come in here to talk about Walmart?”

“Came in here to ask you to order up a couple of those portable toilets, the big blue things you get in when we have some special events. I don't know who handles that.”

“I handle that. We get those out of a supply in Naples. Used to have our own, but nobody wanted to clean them so now we use a service.”

“Need a few set up in front of the station on the Connecticut Avenue side,” Troy said. “For the reporters we have now and the many more yet to come.”

Potem nodded. The tapping stopped. “I'll get us two or three. Make more sense to put those in the parking lot out back.”

“Nope. I want them right across the street from the police station front door. You can do this? How soon?”

“Make the call now. By this evening, I imagine. Good timing for you.”

“How is that?” Troy said.

Potem stared at Troy, deadpan, small eyes behind small lenses. “When the time comes for the shit to hit the fan, you'll have a supply collected.”