Nobody Knows (5 page)

He was slathering on some sunscreen over his tanned forearms when the dispatch call came in. “Proceed to Old Pier. Human hand found at the seawall.”

“Say again?”

“Caller says a male youth found a severed hand.”

As Danny climbed onto his ATV, his wife, safe at home with Robbie, their eight-month-old son, flashed through his mind. He’d really have something to tell her tonight.

The ATV sped up the relatively empty beach, leaving its distinctive tire print in the damp sand. Scattered early morning walkers and joggers, a few shell collectors, and lots of seabirds occupied themselves on the shoreline. But as the deputy got closer to the northern tip of the beach, he could see a cluster of people gathered at the seawall. The small crowd parted as Danny dismounted the sand cruiser.

A sandy-haired kid, whom Danny judged to be about nine or ten years old, stood proprietarily next to the clump of seaweed. There was something familiar about the boy, but Danny couldn’t quite place him.

“I found it, mister, but I put the seaweed back on top of it, so the sun wouldn’t bake it,” the boy said with pride, bending down to pull away the thick grass. The officer stopped him.

“That’s okay, kid. I’ll take over now. Okay, everybody. Stand back,” Danny ordered. The onlookers inched away, wanting to stay close enough to get a good view. The deputy slipped on a rubber glove and swallowed before he lifted the greenish vegetation.

It was a hand all right. The stench was awful.

The hand had been through only the good Lord knew what. The crowd was growing now as every curious resident or vacationer who had ventured out on the beach that morning was eager to see what was going on.

Danny rose from his crouching position. “Come on, folks, move along now. Please, move along.”

As far as the deputy could tell, no one moved. So much for obeying authority. He needed to get some help. This was no one-man job. He pulled out his radio
and called the supervisor. “We need some detectives and somebody from the crime scene forensics unit out here.”

While he waited for backup, Danny started the paperwork. He took the initial offense report form from the aluminum strongbox fastened to the back of the ATV, filling in the date and time. Then he asked the boy his name.

“Vincent. Vincent Bayler.”

“How old are you, Vincent?”

“Eleven.”

On the small side for eleven, the deputy thought. This kid looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors. The tips of his eyelashes were bleached white. So were the hairs on his bronzed arms and legs. Danny stared at Vincent, still not able to put his finger on where he had seen the boy before. “Address?”

“603 Calle de Peru.”

Now he remembered. He had responded to a call at this kid’s house last winter. This Vincent had called 911 when his little brother had some sort of coughing attack. Yeah, that was it. The little guy had cystic fibrosis.

The mother had left the older brother in charge while she was working. But, to her credit, Danny remembered, she’d come running when her son phoned her. She was the one who told Vincent to call the police while she was on her way. The deputy and the mother had arrived at the tiny bungalow at about the same time. It had been raining. He recalled the sound of the heavy tropical raindrops falling on the tin roof, persistent background noise for the younger boy’s racking cough.

The call had ended with a ride to the hospital emergency room, where the sheriff’s deputy had left the family of three. Danny was ashamed now that he had never followed up to see how they had made out. But, as he recalled it, that was the night before Colleen gave birth to Robbie. Yeah, he remembered clearly now. Looking at his healthy baby in the nursery bassinet and saying a silent prayer that his tiny son would never have to go through the agony that the little Bayler boy had gone through the night before.

Now, the deputy regarded Vincent’s solemn face with respect and compassion.

For an eleven-year-old kid, Vincent had a lot of responsibility. It couldn’t be easy having a brother as sick as that. Plus, there didn’t seem to be any father around. There was an air of sadness about the boy. Too sad and too serious for a young kid.

Deputy Gregg could not know that Vincent was trying with all his might to keep the solemn expression on his freckled face as he answered the officer’s questions. He recounted how he had discovered the hand and then flagged down a jogger and asked him to find a telephone and call the police. The deputy noticed that the boy told his story with his fists clenched and stuffed into the pockets of his baggy shorts. But he couldn’t see that Vincent’s left palm was closed around the ruby ring the boy had twisted and pried from the severed hand before he called for help.

Showered, dressed, and made up, Cassie drove her Ford Explorer through the guardhouse and clicked her battery-powered opener to raise the security gates. On the way out to Biscayne Boulevard, she stopped for gas at the Texaco station that also served as a mini–grocery store. A working girl’s best friend, the convenience store had milk, juice, bread, snack food; it even stocked a decent wine selection. Cassie didn’t like to recall how many times she had stopped on her way home after a long day and picked up a bottle of Kendall-Jackson Merlot knowing that it would keep her company for the rest of the evening.

As she inserted the nozzle into the gas tank, she thought with a pang about why she’d chosen this vehicle from the used-car lot. She had purchased the gold-colored SUV when she arrived in Miami because it was relatively cheap and would have space for the gear for all the things she told herself it would be great to take up. Scuba diving, sailing, golfing, weekend trips to the Keys. Things that Cassie hoped would lure Hannah
down to visit. Activities and trips that hadn’t materialized. Hannah had refused to come down. Cassie hadn’t had the desire to follow through on the planned activities on her own.

“I’ll take a lottery ticket, Manuel,” she said as she paid the cashier.

“You feel lucky, señora?” The cashier smiled as he handed her the ticket.

“Yes, Manuel, so lucky. You wouldn’t believe how lucky I feel.” She tried to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

At the beginning of the five-mile drive south from her condo to the office, Cassie passed a country club, a few churches, and a couple of shopping centers. Then the neighborhood took a decided turn for the worse as she drove by sleazy, no-tell motels. It wasn’t that Washington didn’t have any seamy neighborhoods, Cassie reflected. Far from it. But Cassie didn’t have to drive through any on her way to and from work every day. Her life had changed dramatically, and she was still shell-shocked.

If she felt like a sleepwalker going through the motions of her day-to-day existence, Cassie wondered how Pamela Lynch was faring. Any FBI director was held under a magnifying glass, but for the first female director the scrutiny was ratcheted higher still. Pamela Lynch was expected to do her job each day, and though it was tragic that her daughter had killed herself, in the end no one but her family and friends really cared. The press corps wouldn’t give her any passes if she fouled up. She had to perform every day, whether her heart was broken forever or not. In that way, Cassie supposed,
she and the powerful woman who was suing her were a lot alike. Of the two of them, though, Cassie knew she had the better deal. She would rather be herself, tangled though her life might be, because Pamela Lynch’s daughter was dead and nothing could bring her back. Cassie’s Hannah was alive, and Cassie still had a chance to make things right between them.

For the rest of her life, Cassie knew she would regret Maggie Lynch’s death and the part she had played in it. She could try to rationalize it with the belief she had been doing her job and the public had a right to know that the director was using the FBI to find her daughter’s attacker. Yet a young woman whose promising life lay before her couldn’t face a world that knew her secret. A secret that Cassie had broadcast to the entire country.

Cassie wished, oh how she wished, that she could turn back the clock.

Though she was extremely worried about the lawsuit, part of Cassie felt she deserved to be sued. If the reverse had happened, and something Pamela Lynch said or did had contributed to Hannah’s death, a lawsuit would be a poor substitute for the more visceral urge to use her bare hands to take revenge on Lynch.

The voice from the Explorer’s radio pulled Cassie from her reverie. “That tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico is building quickly. They’re calling it Giselle. Winds are being clocked at seventy miles per hour.”

Cassie had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Most mornings Etta Chambers came home from her early morning search on Siesta Beach with her plastic bag filled with a nice assortment of shells. Turkey wings and whelks, conches and cockles and lion’s paws. Occasionally she came across an unbroken black sand dollar or a starfish. Since they were still alive, Etta always threw those back into the ocean. But today there was very little in Etta’s shell bag. Her search had been interrupted by the ruckus at the beach.

“Charles? Charles!” she called out as she came through the front door of the town house she shared with her husband of forty-seven years. “Charles, where are you?”

“I’m out here, Etta. Where I am every morning when you come home from the beach, honey.”

Etta followed her husband’s voice to the screened lanai, where Charles sat with his feet up in a lounge chair reading the newspaper. “Charles, you’ll never guess what happened!” she said, continuing on before he had a chance to respond. “A woman’s hand was
found on the beach. You know that boy we always see with the metal detector? He found a woman’s hand!”

Charles closed the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
and put it in his lap to listen to Etta’s story. The boy, the seaweed, the police. Charles was impressed by Etta’s description of the hand and the fact that his usually squeamish wife had gotten so close and taken in the gory details so thoroughly.

“The hand was all bloated and some of the fingertips were actually missing,” said Etta, her eyes wide. “But I think there was a delicate bone structure beneath the puffiness. And I’m sure it was a woman’s hand because there was bright red polish still painted on some of the fingernails. I think she was a racy kind of woman, Charles. There was a little black spiderweb painted on the pinkie nail.” Though it was growing warmer by the minute on the lanai, Etta rubbed her bare arms as she finished relating what she had seen. “You don’t think this kind of thing happens around here much, do you, Charles? This is the type of thing we wanted to get away from up north.”

“Etta, we’ve been here almost a year now, and this is the most exciting thing that’s happened yet.”

“Exciting? How can you say it’s exciting? It’s horrible!”

Charles shrugged. “All right. Horrible. It’s a horrible thing, Etta, but I’m sure it’s not reflective of life down here. And, as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t say that we retired down here to get away from this sort of thing up north. McLean, Virginia, wasn’t exactly the inner city, dear. We came down here to get away from the cold and the gray winter days and because the kids
had moved out so there wasn’t any sense in having that big house anymore. Now we don’t have to rake leaves, shovel snow, or scrape ice off the car.”

Etta waved at her husband dismissively. “You know what I mean, Charles. I like to think of this as our little island paradise.” She looked through the screen out to the expanse of green water that led to the Gulf. A heron swooped gracefully across the sky. “I don’t want crime and ugliness to invade our world here, Charles. We’ve worked very hard, and now I want to sit back and enjoy life. I don’t want to worry about murder and someone lopping someone else’s hand off.”

“Who said anything about murder?” asked Charles. “Maybe the poor soul had an accident or committed suicide.”

Etta paused to consider her husband’s theories, but it wasn’t long before she was distracted. “What time is it?” she asked sharply.

Charles glanced at his gold watch. “Almost nine.”

“Oh. I have to get into the shower,” she said, forgetting the hand on the beach for the time being. Forgetting until she got up to the Ringling grounds and could tell the other volunteers who staffed the art museum, the circus museum, and Cà d’Zan, the former winter residence of John and Mable Ringling. Etta had hurried to get involved as soon as they moved down here. She worked at the gift shop or staffed the admission desk, and she was studying to become a docent. She looked forward to being able to give visitor tours and answer questions about the history of the Ringling
family and about John Ringling himself, the man who had forever linked the circus with Sarasota.

“You won’t forget to meet me at Dr. Lewis’s office at eleven-fifteen, will you, Charles?”

“Don’t worry, Etta, I’ll be there.”

Etta turned and went back into the town house and up the stairs as her husband rose from his lounge and walked slowly from the lanai through the living room and into the galley kitchen. He pulled a quart of orange juice from the refrigerator and poured himself a tall glass.

“Ahh,” he said to no one but himself. The orange juice just plain tasted better down here. So did the fruit and the vegetables and the chicken.

Charles shook his head as he went back into the living room and switched on the TV. He couldn’t believe how much time he spent thinking about the quality of his food these days. For four decades of his job as a contractor, he hadn’t cared what Etta served for dinner at night—as long as it was ready when he got home. Now, not only did he care but he was doing most of the shopping and cooking.

He had to admit Etta had been making more of a life for herself here than he had. Not only did she volunteer at Ringling but she had joined a book club and a garden club. She had made friends, and Charles had the distinct feeling that she could be doing more with her new pals if she so desired. He’d heard her turn down telephoned luncheon invitations many times. When he’d asked her why she was declining, Etta had pecked him on the cheek and told him that she’d come to
Florida to spend her days with him. It was her husband she wanted to be with, she said, but still, she knew they couldn’t be together every minute. They would drive each other insane.