Mangrove Bayou (12 page)

Troy was on the sidewalk on the Beach Street side of the brick wall, carefully examining the bikinis on several young women on the beach for any possible violations, when June called on his radio. “Chief, sheriff's deputies got an accident of some sort up on Forty-One. Said you might want to take a courtesy look.”

He took the radio off his belt. The new uniform shirts would have a place to hook on the lapel mike, but he wasn't wearing one yet. He thumbed the transmit button. “Where?”

“At the bridge over the river.”

“The Collier River?”

“We got any other fucking river?”

A few tourists looked at him. The two girls in the bikinis looked over, made some unspoken assessment of his character, and moved away.

“You owe a dollar.”

“I know. It was worth it.” June was laughing.

“On my way.” Troy headed to the station, a ten-minute walk, but that was where his car was.

From Mangrove Bayou to U.S. 41, the two-lane Barron Road was elevated on a continuous berm. On his left as he drove east out of town, Troy could see, just on the other side of the grass strip and the guardrail, a water pipe a foot in diameter that supplied the town from a filtration plant in Naples. Steel towers standing in the marsh adjacent to the road carried a power line to Mangrove Bayou. The road was actually built atop the fill originally put in for a railroad track in the 1920s. The fill had come out of what were now canals on either side of the road.

Barron Road met U.S. 41 at a “T” intersection with a flashing yellow light. In southwest Florida, U.S. 41 was historically called the Tamiami Trail, having been the route from Tampa to Miami. Sometimes people still called it that even though it was less used today. There was a billboard sign at the intersection reading “Mangrove Bayou, Sportsman's Paradise” with a crude painting of a 1930s-style Chris-Craft mahogany powerboat full of smiling fishermen. There was an arrow pointing down the side road. There were no buildings at the intersection, just more palmetto and scrub. The sign had bullet holes in it and was, aside from the flashing yellow light, the only thing to mark Barron Road as having any significance.

Troy turned left on U.S. 41 toward Naples. He rolled down the driver-side window. The marsh air was thick with water vapor and a hint of sulfur. In July all the standing water held the heat of the day and the air scarcely cooled overnight. Troy actually liked the smell, which reminded him of both death and life, the full spectrum of struggle, happening out there in the Everglades. There were occasional faded signs along the way advertising swamp buggy rides, airboat rides, even a helicopter ride. Anything to see the Everglades without actually having to come into contact with the Everglades, he supposed. Those and alligator wrestling (
Four Shows Daily!
) were occasional income-generators for the local Miccosukee.

He found two Collier County deputies parked off the southeast side of the highway just where it went across the Collier River bridge and beside a clump of bushes. Troy eased the Subaru in behind them.

“Need you to move along, sir,” a deputy said. “Nothing to see here.”

“I'm Troy Adam, the Mangrove Bayou police chief.” He took his badge out of his shirt pocket and showed it. “My dispatcher said you wanted me to stop by.”

“Kyle Rivers,” the deputy said. “Glad to meet you. Sorry about that but where's your uniform? He looked at the Forester and grinned. “Don't the chief in Mangrove Bayou get a cop car? Something with a si-reen?” The other deputy was down the embankment peering into a Chevy pickup truck that was half-submerged. There were tire tracks, in the soft soil and weeds that showed the truck had run off the road through a small gap between the guard rail along the highway and the concrete balustrade that was part of the bridge.

“New uniforms. Starting next Monday. As for the car, I'm only hired on six months' probation,” Troy said.

“They give you a police car after that?”

“Nobody ever mentioned it. What's with the truck?”

“Beats me. Joe, come up here and talk to us.”

Joe struggled up the bank. His shoes and pants up to his knees were soaked. “Driver-side window is broken and there's blood all over what's left of it and the driver's side of the interior. But there's no body.”

“Accident?” Rivers asked. “Put his head through the side window?”

Joe shook his head. “It's a lot of blood. Some other things, bone, brain. Truck's not bad damaged, just run into the water. Guy didn't just climb out and hitchhike on home.”

“Maybe a gator took it,” Rivers said, pointing. There were two that they could see just fifty yards away. Beyond the alligators was the vast stretch of Everglades, tall sedge that extended east to the far horizon, in fact all the way across the state to the outskirts of Miami. The inches-deep sheet flow that originated at Lake Okeechobee gave the Everglades the nickname of “River of Grass.”

“Maybe,” Joe said. “Driver door was open. No body. Strange.”

“Find anything else?” Troy asked. “Search the truck?”

“Quick look around,” Joe said. “Nothing in the back. I'll go over it in detail once we get it out of there and hauled into the impound lot in Naples.”

“Let me know if you turn up anything interesting.”

“Will do.”

“Bad luck,” Rivers said. “Only place for miles you could even get past the guardrail. And you'd have to take it at almost a ninety-degree angle to get through there.”

“You think it was bad luck?” Troy asked.

“No. Of course not. Someone thought they could sink the truck in the river. But it ended up stuck in the canal instead.”

“Why did you guys ask for me?” Troy said. “We're a couple miles out of my jurisdiction.”

“Ah. Let me show you something,” Rivers said. He led Troy behind the clump of bushes. There were some palmetto fronds on the ground. Troy squatted to look at them. The big fan-shaped leaves had been cut from a nearby plant. “Clean cuts. Sharp knife,” Troy said. “Fresh too. Fronds are still green.”

Rivers pointed. “Check the bike track.” There was a foot-long imprint in some mud of a bicycle tire. Troy and Rivers walked out to the road. There was a matching muddy print on the highway, repeating every time the wheel had rolled around to the muddy spot, across the road. Beyond that the tracks were smudged out by passing traffic.

“Observant,” Troy said.

Rivers grinned. “Maybe they'll make me a sergeant someday.”

“Bicyclist appears to be headed south on the highway. Whoever it was picked up the mud right here and made the marks going away,” Troy said. “And since the last rain. And the last rain was day before yesterday. At least in Mangrove Bayou. But summer thunderstorms are very local.”

“I figured the same and that's why we called you. Either he was some passing nut wanting to peddle from here to Miami, which sounds like suicide by sunstroke, or he was headed that way in order to turn and go down Barron Road to Mangrove Bayou. Only place close enough, to the south, to think of biking to from here. Even Ev City, where I'm stationed, is too far down the road. And why the cut fronds anyway?”

“Hide the bike from passing traffic, I imagine. In readiness until it was needed.”

Rivers nodded. “I don't think it's coincidence this truck is in the canal next to a hidden bike. If this all happened at night, someone might not have noticed he left a track.”

“Probably thought the truck would sink out of sight. Otherwise why bother with this?”

“Some times of the year he'd have been right. But the water level's still low.”

“You run the tag?”

“Yep. Truck is registered to Jarvess Michaels. Address in Goodland.”

“That name rings a bell,” Troy said. “Can't place it, though.”

“We know him. He's been in the system a few times and he's hard to miss. Nickname is ‘Tats' on account of how he's tattooed to a fare-thee-well.”

“A ‘fare-thee-well'? Big tough Collier County deputies don't say, ‘fare-thee-well.'”

“Been going to night school. It's like to ruint me.”

“That's better.”

“I need it to get promoted. There's a tow on the way. We'll have the truck gone over. We'll get a cast of the bike track and pictures too. Let you know if we find anything interesting. You do the same for us.”

“Will do. Email me those pictures. If you can get a make and tire name too, let me know. Good work here. Tell the sheriff I said to promote you.”

“That's the final thing I needed. Passed the test, got the time in. But I needed the approval of the Mangrove Bayou police chief.”

“Actually I'm a director of pubic safety. Says so on my office door.”

“Which, as I recall, is also a fire exit.”

“You've been to my office?”

“Sure. Back when Bob Redmond was chief.”

“What was he like? I never met him.”

“Flaming asshole, you want my opinion. He gave being a bigoted, ignorant, southern redneck small-town cop a bad name.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“So you won the lottery? How did you come out on top? You don't mind my saying so, you seem a little…
flavorful
…for Mangrove Bayou.”

“My charming personality, mostly. But also, of the two candidates, I was the one whose eyes both pointed in the same direction.”

“Damn. I could have applied. But why? Make more money on the sheriff's.”

“Know what you mean. So far, being unemployed would be a step up.”

Chapter 19

Wednesday, July 24

Back in his office, Troy looked in the file he had been sent on Kathleen Pragga, now Katie Barrymore. There was a booking photo of Kathleen, looking a little younger and a little stoned. Troy thought that most people looked stoned in booking photos, whether they were or not. Jarvess Michaels was also listed on the arrest report for the burglary. He had worked as a mechanic for powerboat dealerships in Ft. Myers, Naples and Marco Island. He'd gotten a year for the burglary; Katie had received probation. That had been years ago and Michaels would be a free man if he were alive. Troy downloaded the booking photos of Jarvess Michaels and Kathleen Pragga and printed out six copies of each. He put one of each into the file.

Troy called June on the intercom. When she came into his office he handed her the remaining photos. “Starting this evening, I want one of our two on-duty officers taking these photos around Mangrove Bayou first, then Goodland, then Marco Island. Show it to all the motel clerks, and owners if they can find owners. Restaurants too. Each officer covers
all
the motels and restaurants; those people have shifts too and we don't want to miss anything. I want to know if these two were together in any motel or eatery and when. I'll liaise with the sheriff's office and the Marco Island police so they know what we're doing in their jurisdictions.”

“Who's going to do half the patrols if we're one person short?”

“I'll do as many as I can stand. Tell the guys to use private cars, and civvies would be good too. Low key. I'll cover the
per diem
for the cars.”

“You're spending money like a drunken sailor,” June said. “Our town manager, Mortimer Potem, isn't going to like that.”

“I'll have to learn to live with Mortimer Potem's disapproval.”

Chapter 20

Thursday, July 25

The entire Mangrove Bayou town council stopped by Troy's office early the next morning. Mayor Groud and Councilman Principal Dr. Howard Parkland Duell took the two visitor chairs. Maxwell Reed came through the door last and lost the musical chairs contest. Troy pushed the intercom button on his phone and asked June to bring another chair. He laid some paperwork aside, sat up straight, folded his hands on his desk in front of him and looked attentive.

“We need an update,” Groud said. “You found a body on a boat out at the yacht club. People are talking. I need to know what to tell them.” June appeared with a chair and Max Reed sat down too.

“Got more and better office furniture coming,” Troy said.

“I know. I paid for it,” Groud said.

“Town council paid,” Max Reed said.

“Waste of money,” Councilman Principal Dr. Howard Parkland Duell said.

“Is there a fourth town councilman named Shemp?” Troy asked. Groud grinned. Reed and Duell just looked blank.

“Actually, Con Lohen, the Osprey Yacht Club dockmaster, found the body,” Troy said. “I looked at it. We had it taken up to Naples for an autopsy.”

Troy looked from one councilman to another. There was a silence.

“That's it?” Reed asked.

“So far. Haven't heard back from the M.E.”

“What's an M.E.?” Reed said.

“Medical Examiner. Last guy on earth you ever want to see. Of course by that time you're not seeing much anyway.”