Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (5 page)

“I’ve just come from Bud Jamison’s house,” J.D. said. “He’s taking it
pretty hard. He told me you had suggested that Mr. Goodlow go see Matt about some kind of legal problem.”

“Yeah. A couple of days ago. Ken told me he had a legal problem and asked if I knew a lawyer who worked cheap. He didn’t have much money, but he said he needed help. I know Matt helps out some of the islanders when they need a lawyer and can’t afford it. I thought he might be able to help Ken.”

“Was there anybody else in the bar when you talked about the lawyer?”

“Yeah. There were three or four. I remember Devlon and Mynu Buckner were here. Do you know them?”

“I don’t think so,” said J.D.

“They used to live in Sarasota. They’re both pharmacists up in the Tampa area now, but they come down for dinner every few weeks. They were on the other side of the bar and probably wouldn’t have heard anything. A couple of men I’d never seen before were also here. They might have heard something.”

“Do you know what kind of problem Mr. Goodlow had?”

“No. I pried a little, but he wouldn’t say anything. Said he needed to talk to somebody who couldn’t pass on what Ken knew. Said he didn’t want me to get in the line of fire, whatever that meant. I gave him Matt’s number, but he said he couldn’t talk to him over the phone. He was afraid somebody had bugged his line. I told him where Matt lives.”

“Do you know of anybody who’d want to hurt Mr. Goodlow?”

“I sure don’t. I hope you get the bastard who shot him.”

“We already have him. He drove off the Longboat Pass Bridge right after the shooting. We’ll know who he is as soon as we get his prints from the medical examiner.”

“Did Ken ever talk to Matt?” Nick asked.

“I don’t think so. Matt didn’t mention it to me. Bud Jamison said Ken was going to Longboat today to try to see Matt. I don’t think he ever made it.”

“It’s a damn shame,” said Nick. “Ken was one of the good guys.”

J.D. got off the stool and started for the door. “Call me if you hear anything, Nick.”

“I will. You take care.”

J.D. drove west across the Cortez Bridge and into the setting sun, a big orange ball just beginning to disappear into the Gulf of Mexico. She smiled, thinking about Matt who was still as excited by the sunsets as the newest tourist. She wondered if he was at home or down at the Hilton watching the day end. She’d call him as soon as she made a stop at the police station.

As she turned south on Gulf Drive, her phone rang. Martin Sharkey, her deputy chief. She answered. “Tell me we’ve got an ID on the shooter,” she said.

“Afraid not,” said Sharkey. “His prints aren’t in the system.”

“What about the car?”

“Stolen yesterday in Sarasota.”

“Dead end. Did you find the weapon used in the shooting?”

“We found a .22-caliber pistol on the floorboard on the passenger side. Untraceable. The serial number was filed off. Ballistics will run it to make sure it was the murder weapon, and we’ll put it in the federal database. See if anything turns up.”

“Nothing on the car or the weapon?”

“No, but we found a bunch of documents in the trunk. They were in a waterproof briefcase, so they’re in good shape.”

“Did they give us any leads?”

“Don’t know yet. We’re going to have to have them translated.”

“Translated? From what?”

“German. And get this, some of them are in Arabic.”

It was dark when J.D. called from the police station. “I’m about done,” she said. “I’m finishing up a report on what I did today. Got to keep the files current, you know.” She chuckled ironically.

The files were one of her least favorite things about police work. The paperwork was important, but it took a lot of time that she thought could be better spent on the investigation. On the other hand, she understood the importance of getting the day’s information into writing while it was still fresh in her mind.

“You need a secretary.”

“Yeah, right. The chief will probably put that in next year’s budget if I ask nicely.”

“Do you want to meet somewhere for dinner?”

“Are you at the house?”

“Yes.”

“You got any food there?”

“A couple of steaks, some salad, and garlic bread in the freezer.”

“Wine?”

“Sure.”

“Feel like grilling?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Sure.”

“I love you.”

“Sure. You’ll say anything for a finely grilled steak.”

“Sure,” she said, and hung up.

• • •

Dinner was a quiet affair, devoid of any talk of murder and loss. My sweetie wanted some downtime, she said, and would tell me about her day after dinner. I’d grilled the steaks on the patio, wrapped up in an old sweatshirt to ward off the cold wind that was blowing down the bay. J.D. kept me company, sipping wine and talking about unimportant things. When the steaks were nearly done, she tossed the salad and sliced the garlic bread that had been warming in the oven. We ate and talked and then cleared the dishes and sat by the fire I’d built in the fireplace, letting the warmth of the room lull us into a state of near lethargy. We were on the sofa and she was snuggled into the crook of my arm, her head resting on my shoulder.

J.D. stirred, picked up her wine glass, and disengaged herself from me. “I need more wine,” she said and padded barefoot toward the kitchen. “You ready for another beer?”

I nodded. When she returned, she handed me a cold can of Miller Lite and took the chair across from me. “I want to bring you up to date on my investigation and get your feel for what’s going on.”

“You can’t do that from over here?”

“If I stay over there on the sofa with you, we’ll end up doing something other than talking.”

“Is that bad?”

“No. That’s good. Maybe later.”

“Maybe?”

“Well, probably.”

“I can live with that.”

She smiled. “Did you know that Ken Goodlow was trying to meet with you?”

“No. I don’t think I’d ever heard the guy’s name until today. What’s that all about?”

“I talked to Bud Jamison this afternoon. He told me that Nick Field had given Goodlow your name to handle some kind of legal problem. Nick confirmed that. Said Goodlow didn’t have much money and needed a cheap lawyer.”

“Inexpensive,” I said. “Not cheap.”

“Well, anyway, Jamison said Goodlow didn’t want to talk to you by
phone because he thought there might be a listening device on his line. He was just going to show up at your door. That’s apparently the reason he came to Longboat today.”

“I never saw him,” I said. “If he came, it must have been after we left for our picnic.”

“Maybe he was planning to stop by after he saw Ann Kuehnel.”

“I guess we’ll never know. Did you get anything from the other witnesses?”

She told me about her meetings with Ann and Jamison. “I think Jamison was lying to me about not knowing anybody who would want to hurt Goodlow.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Just a feeling. Cop’s intuition, I guess. That’s what my gut was telling me.”

“Then you’re probably right. But why would he lie to you?”

“The answer to that question may be the key to solving this case. I’ve got a CD of the pictures Goodlow took to show Mrs. Kuehnel and another of the security camera at the condo where he was killed. Can we take a look?”

I booted up my computer and put the first disc into the drive. It was a black-and-white clip from the security camera. “The time stamp puts the start of this about an hour before the shooting,” she said. “I told the forensic guy to give me one hour on either side of the murder. The time stamp will give us an exact time of the murder.”

“Are you looking for anything specific?”

“I want to know when Mr. Goodlow and the Jag came into the parking lot.”

“What kind of car was Goodlow driving?” I asked.

“An old pickup truck. A red Ford, probably ten years old.”

I fast-forwarded the video until we saw the truck enter the lot. “There we are,” I said, and slowed the CD. We watched as an elderly man got out of the truck and went into the building.

“The time stamp puts that about thirty minutes before the shooting. Run it forward some more.”

Ten minutes later, according to the time stamp, the Jaguar pulled into
the lot. The driver found a parking space directly across from Goodlow’s truck, backed in, and sat. Ten minutes later, a man in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops came out of the building and talked to the man in the Jaguar, got into a black Acura SUV that was parked in the lot, and left.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Might be a resident. Can you get a better look at him?”

I fiddled with the mouse and isolated the best view we had of the man in flip-flops. I enlarged it until it started to blur, backed off a bit, and then homed in until I had a reasonably decent picture of the man. I printed two copies.

“Can you get another of his car?” asked J.D.

I repeated the process and isolated a picture of the car. I manipulated it some more and it began to blur. “I can’t get the license plate. The camera’s resolution isn’t good enough.”

“If the guy’s a resident, it shouldn’t be a problem. There’re only about ten units in that complex.”

“Even if he was a visitor, you should be able to get an ID from the other owners. I wonder why he didn’t come forward and let you know that he had talked to the man?”

“Maybe he was gone for the afternoon. I’ll follow up tomorrow. I’ll find him.”

We watched some more and finally came to the shooting itself. Good-low came out of the building and walked to his truck. The Jag started to move out of its parking space. It drove toward Goodlow and stopped. The driver’s side window glided down, and the man behind the wheel leaned his head partially out. Goodlow turned, as if the man in the Jag had said something that caught his attention. We watched the old man toss an envelope through the open window of his truck and walk toward the Jaguar. As he got close, the man in the Jag raised a pistol and shot Goodlow in the forehead. The old man fell to the pavement, and the Jag sped out of the lot, turning north onto Gulf of Mexico Drive.

I put the other CD into the drive and pulled up a page containing a dozen thumbnail pictures. They were black-and-white and showed several young men and women at a party on a bayside beach. I clicked on the first picture and blew it up to full-screen size. There were three men and three
women dressed in summer clothes sitting at a picnic table eating from plates heaped with what appeared to be fried fish. They were smiling and looking into the camera. Another group of people was in the background, huddled around a brick-bordered fire pit. A large pot was suspended over a fire and a man was stirring it with an oar that had likely come from one of the small Jon boats beached nearby.

“Do you see anybody that looks familiar?” I asked.

“No, but I wouldn’t expect to. Look at their clothes and that car in the background. A long time ago. Ann Kuehnel said Goodlow told her these were taken soon after World War II. Those people are all either dead or very old now. Bud Jamison said he thought they were from a July Fourth picnic in 1948. He can probably tell us who they are, but I don’t see how they would be important. I doubt they had anything to do with Goodlow’s death. They’re just pictures of dead people.”

“It’s kind of sad, isn’t it?” I asked.

“What?”

“The people in these pictures were all young and had most of their lives ahead of them. They were happy and enjoying a day on the water. The camera caught them in an instant in time, one very minute portion of their entire lives. And yet, here we are, in a sense reliving that very second that happened well before we were born. I wonder how their lives turned out, what kind of joy or hurt they experienced before their lives ran their courses.”

“Yeah. Life doesn’t last very long, does it?” she said. “Let’s look at the rest of the pictures.”

I scrolled through the remaining photos. They were all of the same group, maybe twelve or fourteen in all, an equal number of men and women. The shadows cast by the trees in some of the photos indicated they were taken in late afternoon. J.D. didn’t see anything that seemed to have any significance to Goodlow’s murder. I put the CDs back in their plastic cases and put my computer in sleep mode.

“Did you hear anything from the phone company about the picture you got this morning?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s confusing. The photo was sent from a disposable phone in Detroit, but there’s no record of that phone receiving any text messages.
The phone was only activated this morning and the only thing it was used for was to send me that one text.”

I chewed on that for a couple of beats. “That can be explained if the picture was taken with a camera in the phone.”

“That was a real cheapie bought in Atlanta. It didn’t have a camera,” she said.

“Then the picture would have to have been uploaded from a computer or another phone.”

“But what’s Katie doing in Detroit?”

“If that was Katie.”

“It was her,” J.D. said.

“There are a number of computer programs that could have put that picture together so that it looked like Katie. They could have easily inserted a copy of today’s paper into the picture.”

“I know. But what about the message? Nobody would know about her calling me Jed.”

“Your sorority sisters would, wouldn’t they?”

J.D. frowned. “I guess. And maybe some other people we knew back then, but somebody would have to go to a lot of trouble to figure that out.”

“Maybe not, if the person was still friendly with Katie.”

“Why would somebody go to all that trouble to send me that picture? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I agree. We need to know a lot more than we do now.”

“Matt, would you be up to doing me a big favor?”

“Of course.”

“Would you go to Orlando tomorrow and meet with Katie’s parents? I’ve got too much on my plate with this murder to be going out of town, and I want to get to the bottom of this thing with Katie. If that picture wasn’t just somebody’s bad idea of a joke, she needs me.”