Deadly Catch (19 page)

Kate gave my arm a playful slap. “No, not Sandra Bullock. Tonya Randall, Lamar’s daughter. She starts tomorrow.”

I was up before daylight, made a pot of coffee, filled my thermos, and drove to Canal Park. I parked and walked out onto the seawall. The wind was blowing steady out of the west or southwest, and even in the pale light of dawn I could see whitecaps dancing far out in the bay. I was still after my gator trout; the fifteen-hundred-dollar prize for first place in the speck category was tempting, but I decided the fifty-five-buck entry fee wasn’t worth risking the rental boat or my own ass over. I’d wait for the conditions to improve. If worse came to worse, I could always drive to the island and wade the grass flats.

I watched as a couple of charter boats eased out of the canal and over the sandbar, then throttled up and headed southwest, bucking over the choppy bay waters. These were the big-money boys, heading for the open gulf and the serious prize money categories like snapper and grouper or trolling species. It was still dark enough that they were burning their running lights.

I waited until they were as small as toy bathtub boats, then tossed the dregs of my coffee and headed back to the truck. I drove past the marina; the lights inside the store weren’t on yet. I wanted to talk to Kate, but I knew she’d be busy all day, probably even work through her lunch hour. I had my fishing gear and boots packed, so I decided to head to Five-Mile Island and try my luck from shore.

Learning that Tonya Randall would be working with Kate and Sara at the marina store was a stroke of good luck. Kate promised she’d keep her eyes and ears open around the two teenagers. There was a chance she might pick up some useful bit of info by careful eavesdropping that neither of the girls would be willing to volunteer openly.

Seeing Ben Merritt and Clayton Barfield last night had turned my theory about the case on its head. I’d assumed all along that Brett was dead, and he still might be, but Barfield’s behavior last night didn’t point that way. Of course Kate kept insisting the two were arguing, but that’s not the way I saw it. I was sure of Brett’s involvement with marijuana, but I’d thought his was a small-scale independent operation—growing and selling what he could handle alone or maybe with one or two trusted cohorts. The fewer the better in that type of business; less chance of someone’s big mouth spilling info.

Was Clayton Barfield running drugs? I recalled my heated meeting with Sheriff Pickron after I’d visited his sister, Marilyn Harper. He’d mentioned how Barfield had worked hard to turn his family’s struggling business into one of the most successful on the Gulf Coast. Had Barfield’s success come entirely from long hours of hard work and sweat, or was there more to this rags-to-riches story than met the eye? A fleet of fishing vessels would provide the perfect means to smuggle a big score of marijuana or other drugs into the country. Meet a supply boat miles out in the gulf, stash the drugs under the false bottom of fish boxes with tons of fish and ice on top, then motor your “catch” right through St. George Bay to home port at Barfield Fisheries. It made sense, and it had been done before. While I was researching Panama Red on the Internet I came across just such a scenario that had been pulled off successfully on the West Coast.

Why not here, especially if you had the local authorities in your pocket?

I stopped for breakfast at the Trade Winds Restaurant. Figured if I was a paying customer they wouldn’t mind me parking and fishing there. I planned to fish until noon or one, then break for lunch at the restaurant, too.

After I’d eaten I pulled on my boots, grabbed my gear, and walked down behind the cabins to the shore. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I tried not to stare at the area where I’d hooked Maddie’s body. I walked west along the shore for about a hundred yards, rigged up, and waded out to the side of a large grassy patch. I started casting, but my heart wasn’t in it. There was a conundrum that kept bugging the hell out of me as I ran what I knew, or thought I knew, about the case through my mind again: The Barfields and Harpers got along about as well as the Hatfields and McCoys, yet Chief Ben Merritt appeared to be feeding from both families’ troughs. If my theory was correct about George Harper being Brett’s biological father, then Harper had paid Merritt to keep his son out of trouble more than once. Beating a simple possession charge was one thing, but Chief Merritt had obviously framed his own man, Sergeant Tom Mayo, after Mayo busted young Barfield with a considerable amount of pot in his vehicle. It wound up costing Tom Mayo his job and maybe his life.

Marilyn Harper hated the Barfields with a passion, especially Nora and Brett, who she most likely knew was her husband’s illegitimate son. George, the former high school stud who drove the fancy cars and whose daddy owned a successful auto dealership, had once dated Nora Johnson but dumped her for Marilyn Pickron, one of the local sheriff’s pretty and popular twin daughters. That had been while the Barfields were struggling and the Harpers were in high clover. But later, George took over the family’s auto business and ran it into the ground. The deaths of Marilyn’s twin sister and brother-in-law had remedied that problem, bailing George out of debt and handing him and Marilyn a beautiful home and successful real estate business.

The problem was, the majority of the Harper money would become Maddie’s when she turned twenty-one, and with Maddie and Brett expecting a child and planning to marry, the Barfield family would be wed into the Harper fortune.

If Chief Merritt was on the take from George Harper to keep Brett out of trouble, wouldn’t Clayton Barfield be aware of it and be grateful for whatever political pull George used to help their “mutual” son? Was Friendly George in cahoots with Barfield’s drug operation? After all, he stood to lose a ton when Maddie turned twenty-one. Maybe the drug operation was a way for him to build a tidy nest egg once Maddie claimed her inheritance. But knocking off his niece, who he’d raised like a daughter—I just couldn’t buy that. Then again, at the funeral George hadn’t seemed all that broken up over poor Maddie’s death.

And what about Lamar Randall—where did he fit into all this? He had “Mare”—Marilyn Pickron Harper’s nickname—stenciled across the fingers of his right hand. Was it just a coincidence that he’d suffered an eye injury around the same time that Maddie died and Brett disappeared? He’d obviously had a thing for Marilyn at one time, and Marilyn hated Brett. Could Marilyn Harper have used Lamar’s unrequited love for her to sic him on Brett, to pressure Brett to leave Maddie alone? My puzzle was jumbled worse than ever, and there were more than a few pieces missing.

My head was about to bust wide open trying to make heads and tails out of this scrambled mess when my cell phone rang. I unbuttoned my shirt pocket and grabbed the phone. “This is Mac.”

“Hello, Mac? Mac, is that you?”

“Yeah, speaking,” I said. The connection wasn’t the greatest, and I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Mac? This is Jerry Meadows. You best get over here quick as you can. Your trailer’s on fire.”

By the time I drove back to Gulf Pines Campground there wasn’t much left of my home-sweet-home. A blackened frame piled with twisted, melted siding resting on tireless rims was about all there was to see. Luckily, the volunteer fire department had arrived in time to keep the LP cylinders hosed down so they wouldn’t explode. The hitch wasn’t in bad shape either. It might be worth a couple of bucks in scrap metal. If somebody was trying to send me a message, they’d sure done a bang-up job of it.

I was standing just across the road from the still-smoking ruins talking with Jerry and Donna when Ben Merritt’s blue-and-white cruiser drove up. The driver’s side door opened, and the shocks sighed with relief as the chief hefted himself out of the vehicle. The passenger door opened, and Patrolman Owens exited.

“Well, Mac,” the chief said as he lumbered over, “looks like bad luck follows you around like an albatross.”

“Looks that way, Chief,” I said. “Least I got insurance.”

“You want me to take some pictures, Chief?” Owens said to Merritt, waving a camera in his face.

“Yeah, go take some damn pictures, but don’t go touching nothing,” his boss said.

“You forget to unplug your coffee pot or something this morning?” Merritt said, a smirk spreading across his face.

“Not that I know of. I’d put my money on an arsonist,” I said, staring him down. “Jerry here says Tom Mayo used to keep a good eye on this place.” Over the chief’s shoulder I saw Owens stop and glance my way at the mention of Tom Mayo’s name. “You boys ought to be out patrolling more often to keep things like this from happening.”

“And you ought to keep your nose out of where it don’t belong,” Merritt snapped back. “What’d the fire chief have to say?”

“Beats me,” I said. “I haven’t seen him.”

“Chief Daniel done been here and gone,” Jerry said.

“Well, reckon I’ll just go have a little talk with him,” Merritt said. He cut loose a loud whistle. Patrolman Owens looked over at us.

“You about done, boy?”

“I took a few, Chief.”

“Well, let’s go then.”

They climbed into the cruiser and slammed the doors. Ben Merritt leaned out his window. “Sorry about your camper there, Mac,” he said, grinning. “Be seeing you.”

After Merritt left and Jerry and Donna went back to their duties running the campground, I walked around the burned hulk of my late home wondering what the hell I was going to do now. I needed to call about the insurance and get a room somewhere, that much was for sure. I felt like buying a couple of six-packs and heading for the beach to stare at bikinis and get buzzed, but there was no sense in putting off the inevitable.

As I turned back to my truck something lying near the electrical box at the edge of the scorched grass caught my eye. I bent down and picked it up: a man’s tortoiseshell pocket comb, partially melted, with
KENT
stamped in the center inside an oval. Funny that I’d never noticed it before, since Jerry was a stickler about keeping the grass and weeds trimmed around the sites. Maybe one of the firefighters had lost it. I tossed it onto the burned carcass of my home and headed for the Silverado.