Low Tide (2 page)

Wyatt had come to Apalachicola from Cocoa Beach a little over six years ago, following his wife’s death from breast cancer. Between his widower status, the tinge of gray in his light brown hair and mustache, and his bright blue eyes, he’d quickly become the unconcerned darling of the women of Franklin County. His combination of goofy, self-deprecating humor and movie star looks made him equally popular with men and women.

Maggie knew that, his laid-back approach notwithstanding, Wyatt was smart as a whip and actually took his job pretty seriously, despite the fact that Apalachicola’s crime rate made Cocoa Beach look like Detroit.

She grabbed Wyatt’s coffee and handed it to him as the wind whipped her long, dark brown hair around her head.

“So, what’s the story?” she asked as she yanked her hair into a ponytail.

Wyatt took an appreciative swallow of his coffee before answering.

“Vacationite by the name of Richard Drummond found the body at 8:15 while he was walking his dog. A Golden Retriever mix of some kind. Might be a little Lab in there.”

Maggie grabbed her coffee out of the console, handed it to Wyatt and slammed her door before heading to the back of the Jeep.

“When did Larry get here?” she asked, referring to the medical examiner.

She opened the gate and pulled out her crime scene kit.

“About ten minutes ago,” Wyatt answered. “He’s talking to the deceased now.”

“Who got here first?” she asked him, squinting over at the other cruiser.

“Dwight got the call from dispatch, got here at 8:25,” Wyatt said. “He called me on the way and I got here a little after 8:30.”

He took another swallow of his coffee and held hers out to her.

“No one else has happened on the scene and Dwight’s got it taped off. I took lots of pretty pictures for you.”

Maggie reclaimed her coffee and took a long swallow before they started walking the twenty or so yards along the path through the sea oats. Wyatt was more than a foot taller than Maggie and she took two steps to his one.

“Are we sure it’s suicide?”

“’course not,” Wyatt answered. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Couldn’t you get Terry to handle it?”

“He’s over in Eastpoint working that robbery,” Wyatt said. “That’s what happens when you’re fifty percent of the Criminal Investigation Division, Maggie. You want guaranteed days off, move to Tallahassee.”

They reached the beach and Maggie saw the scene about ten feet further east. Larry Wainwright, a hundred years old if he was a day, was perched gingerly in the sand and leaning over the body. Sgt. Dwight Shultz, also known as Dudley Do-right, was keeping the seagulls out of the way by tossing them potato chips a few yards down the beach. The two EMTs stood nearby, with nothing really to do but wait to be dismissed.

Maggie and Wyatt stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and stopped near Gregory Boudreaux’s splayed and loafered feet.

“Morning, Maggie,” Larry said over his shoulder.

“Morning, Larry,” she answered. “So what do we know so far?”

“Well, rigor’s set in the face. It is now 9:20,” Larry answered, checking his watch. “Between that and body temperature, I’d say time of death was between 6:00a.m.and 6:30.”

Maggie finished pulling on her Latex gloves and crouched on the other side of the body with a few baggies in her hand.

A .38 revolver lay next to Gregory Boudreaux’s right hand, his thumb still stuck in the trigger guard. She glanced over at Larry.

“Wounds seem consistent with a .38?”

“They do,” Larry answered, and gently placed a gloved finger on the chin to turn the face toward him. “As you can see, we have quite the exit wound, which we’d expect from something of that caliber.”

“So it appears to be self-inflicted then?”

“I’d say so at this point. I don’t see anything at this juncture to argue against it,” Larry told her. “As you can see, there’s quite a bit of blowback on both hands, as well as residue.”

“Kind of unusual, it being so close to the body,” Wyatt mentioned noncommittally.

“True, true,” said Larry. “The kickback will usually send it flying. But I’d say it stays nearby or even in the decedent’s hands about twenty percent of the time.”

“You know Gregory Boudreaux, Maggie?” Wyatt asked her.

“Some,” she said.

“Can you think of any reason he might want to blow his brains out?”

“I can’t really think of any reason why he shouldn’t,” she said evenly, focusing on Gregory’s lifeless right hand. There was a good bit of blood splatter.

“Well, then,” Wyatt said. “Can you sugarcoat that more specifically?”

Maggie took a slow breath and removed Boudreaux’s thumb from the trigger guard and placed the revolver in an evidence bag. She breathed out only after she’d sealed the bag.

“Not really,” she answered finally. “He was just your average Boudreaux, entitled and self-absorbed.”

The medical examiner struggled to rise and Wyatt hurried over to give him a hand.

“I’ve got what I need in the immediate,” Larry told them. “I’ll take one of those responder boys back to the van to get the body bag. Once we get him up, you’ll find most of the rest of the skull fragments are underneath his shoulders. Indicates to me he was seated when the gun was fired. I’ll know more in a couple of days.”

Larry called for one of the EMTs to come get a body bag, and Maggie watched the old man make his way back toward the parking area before she squinted up at Wyatt.

“Where’s the guy that found him?”

“I told him he could go on back to his rental,” Wyatt answered. “I took his initial statement. He and the dog left the rental for their walk about 8:00, according to the
Today
show. He didn’t hear anything unusual prior to that, no gunshot or anything. You want to talk to him when you’re done?”

“How long is he here for?”

“He checks out of the rental on Monday.”

“I’ll wait. So far, it looks like a straight suicide. I don’t see any reason – was there a note?”

“Not so far. Checked his car, but I didn’t check his pockets.”

Maggie looked down at the body and sighed.

“Getting squeamish in your old age?” Wyatt asked her with a quick smile. She’d only just turned thirty-seven.

Maggie shot him a look, then reached into the right front pocket of Boudreaux’s khakis. A set of keys to the Saab and a stick of Dentyne. She bagged them and reached over the body to the other pocket, pulled out the empty bread bag.

Maggie and Wyatt exchanged a look and Maggie looked back toward the path to the parking lot.

“Well, I don’t think he left a trail back to his car,” Maggie said.

“Dwight said it looked like he’d been feeding the gulls. When he first got here, there were a couple of birds with some splatter on them.”

Maggie looked over at Dwight, who had run out of potato chips and was shaking the bag at the remaining few birds, yelling, “Git!”

“Dwight, you think he was feeding the birds?” she called, holding up the bread bag.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, flapping his arms. “He liked to come out here a lot.”

Maggie frowned at Dwight’s back.

“How well did you know him?” she asked. Dwight looked over his shoulder at her.

“I didn’t, really,” he said. “But back when my brother Rob was still drinking, they used to hang out from time to time. They came out here to fish quite a bit and he told me once that Boudreaux almost always brought something for the seagulls. It bugged Rob, ’cause they’d hang around and try to get at the bait.”

“Okay,” Maggie said and bagged the bag. Then she looked at the body for a minute before looking just past the head, where a few bits and pieces of skull and hair had been glued to the sand by tacky blood. She looked back at the dead, meticulously manicured hands, and stretched her neck to conceal the shiver that went up her spine.

“Would you mind bagging the hands for me while I get what’s on the sand there?” she asked Wyatt.

“Sure.”

Wyatt squatted on the other side of the body and set his coffee down behind him while Maggie took some baggies and tape out of her kit. She handed them to him.

“Thanks,” she said, not looking up at his face.

She pulled a folding shovel out of her kit, opened it up, grabbed a few more bags and gently scooped up the remains and some sand, placed them in bags without talking further. As she slid the last scoop of sand and brain matter into a bag, a deformed .38 round revealed itself in the depression she’d left.

“Got a bullet,” she told Wyatt and picked it up and dropped it into its own bag.

“Did you get to see your kids this morning?” Wyatt asked her.

“Only long enough to walk them to the school bus,” she said.

“Sorry about your day off,” Wyatt told her. “I know you needed it.”

“It’s okay,” she answered. “I don’t think this is going to amount to anything, do you?”

“Doesn’t appear that way,” he answered.

“Well, then I might still get tomorrow off,” she said quietly. “I’ve got a bunch of squash and peppers to pick for tomorrow.”

Two days a week, local gardeners brought produce to Battery Park next to the marina, to be distributed among oyster-fishing families still trying to recover from the latest oil spill. The oysters still hadn’t come back to their former numbers and maybe they never would. They’d already been in decline, thanks to the two previous spills and Atlanta’s insistence on stealing water from the Apalachicola River to fill its swimming pools.

“I’m assuming Bennett Boudreaux is the next of kin?” Wyatt asked as he handed Maggie her roll of tape.

Maggie looked up at the Sheriff.

“I would say so,” she answered. “He was the only child of Boudreaux’s only brother. His parents died when he was about twelve, I think. I don’t know anything about the mother’s family. They’re in Mississippi or Texas, something like that.”

“Well, notification should be fun,” Wyatt answered. “Wanna come?”

“Yeah,” Maggie answered distractedly.

“It’s a Friday, which one of his businesses should we visit first?”

“He usually works out of the Sea-Fair office,” Maggie answered, referring to the plant where Bennett Boudreaux bought, processed, and shipped oysters and Gulf shrimp. “But I hear he doesn’t go in all that much anymore.”

“Well, then let’s try the house,” Wyatt told her.

Larry and the EMT came back, carrying a gurney over the deep, powdery sand. They released the legs once they reached the body, and the medical examiner unfolded a black body bag and laid it next to the body.

When the EMTs lifted the body by the shoulders and feet, a small chunk of bloody skull dropped to the sand, joining several other bits of hairy bone in the bloodstained patch of sand that had been beneath Gregory Boudreaux.

It wasn’t until the men had the body on the gurney and began zipping the bag that Maggie looked at the face. There were burn marks on one side of the open mouth, and the top teeth that remained looked almost out of place in the bloody mess that surrounded them. Gregory’s eyes were closed, a fact for which Maggie was grateful.

Maggie felt a small wave of revulsion creep through her stomach. As the bag zipped shut over his face, she tried to summon some measure of human or at least professional sympathy, but the only thought that came to mind was,
Better late than never.

For a town with one traffic light and a population of fewer than three-thousand people, Apalachicola had a preponderance of historic buildings. Between the old warehouses and quaint shops and cafes downtown along the bay and the residential historic district, there were around nine hundred buildings on the National Historic Register.

The architecture of Apalach was a mixture of Greek Revival and Florida Cracker, brick mansions and squat shotgun houses. Apalachicola often put visitors in mind of a Floridian version of Nantucket. There were quite a few people who had come from up north to spend a weekend and ended up retiring there. There was also a substantial artist community in town.

The result was a town that looked like it was stuck in the past, but which was actually surprisingly progressive in many ways. Fifth-generation oystermen with GEDs had lively discussions with former professors from Yale, and gay activists checked their event schedules with those of the DAR so that Battery Park didn’t get overbooked.