Mangrove Bayou (31 page)

“I bet,” Lee said. “Speaking of Airfield Key, what's the latest on Kathleen Barrymore, one of my neighbors?”

“Ah. She's likely to spend a long time in durance vile…”

“Southern redneck police chiefs don't say, ‘in durance vile,'” Lee said.

“I'm a director of pubic safety, remember. Says so on my door. And Kathleen is in durance vile for the moment, probably for some time to come, perhaps for life. We matched both Tats Michaels' blood—he was her longtime boyfriend—and her own DNA, mixed together on the clothing and the shoes she had buried. We tracked down, by the serial number, the store that sold her husband the bicycle and also matched the bicycle tire tread with the cast the Collier County Sheriff's deputy made. The concrete block and PVC pipe and the electric drill she swiped from the construction guys working on her house were not so conclusive. Never got useful prints off any of those. We have the motel records for when they stayed together and your flight logs for when John Barrymore was out of town.”

“Poor guy,” Lee said. “He was foolish, but you shouldn't have to die for being foolish.”

“I agree. Anyway, it's enough, barely, to convict her for the murder of her boyfriend. We might be able to link her to the murder of her husband, though we assume that Tats did that, using an electric drill she provided for him. She probably got him onto the boat too, using the swim ladder so nobody at the yacht club would see him walking in the side gate or around the docks.”

“Why kill her boyfriend?” Lee asked. “If she had not done that, you wouldn't have had that truck, and Michaels' body, and the hole full of bloody clothes, and the bicycle. All you would have had would have been a dead body on a boat that the medical examiner said was an accident.”

“Well, who knows,” Troy said. “There would have been two people knowing one secret and no secret is safe that way. He was a loose end so far as Kathleen was concerned. My guess? He was the one who killed John Barrymore. She didn't know enough about boats and tools. He did.”

“She got too greedy,” Lee said.

“That she did. Greed is the whole framework for this. Greed to get her hands on her husband's money. Then greed to keep it all to herself. With her husband dead she inherited four million dollars. Why split any of that with a boatyard mechanic boyfriend nicknamed Tats? She had moved up the social ladder by then. She was already trolling for her next fish at the Osprey Yacht Club. I saw her doing it.”

“I hear a lot of mights and maybes.”

Troy shrugged. “What can I say? It's not a perfect world. I suppose, if it were, nobody would need me. Lucky for me most criminals are stupid.”

Lee looked sideways at Troy, sitting next to her. “You do tend to rate people by their intelligence, don't you?”

“Do I?”

“You do. It's a character flaw.”

“Don't complain. It's why I like you.”

“You like me because I'm the sexy redhead who grabbed onto you at the yacht club Hail and Farewell.”

“That too. But sexy women are common…”

“Well, excuuuse me!”

“…but truly intelligent women—and men—are rare.”

“Well, all right then. But it's still a mistake to judge people only in terms of their IQs.”

“I'll try to do better. You sexy thing.”

“Speaking of doing better. Has the Mangrove Bayou town council decided to keep you on permanently?”

“I'm still a probie. The mayor likes me. Howard Duell seems to have had a mad-on about me from the get-go. The swing vote is Max Reed. I would say he's 60-40 for me.”

“What about the shooting? You had to kill that man. That must have been awful.”

“It was awful for Billy Poteet. And in some regards it was almost the exact repeat of the time in Tampa when I killed that man with the knife to his ex-wife's throat.”

“The one in your nightmares.”

“The one in my nightmares.”

“And you also got investigated. For this latest one, I mean.”

“Standard procedure after a police-involved shooting. The state attorney's office cleared me.
‘Following the completion of this investigation it appears that Director of Public Safety Troy Adam was in the legal performance of his official law enforcement duties and acted within the scope of his legal assignment,'
” Troy quoted.

“So that's good. And if they make you the permanent chief…”

“Director of pubic safety.”

“…director of pubic safety, do you get a real police car to replace your nunmobile?”

“I don't think so.”

About the Author

Stephen Morrill was born into the Army, served there himself, and wandered the world for thirty years, living in twenty-one cities in six countries. He attended various universities for seven years without ever amassing enough credits in any one subject to get a degree. Finally he settled, like a barnacle holding fast to a piling, in Florida.

“When it came time for me to pick a place to settle down I wanted water activities and beaches,” Morrill says. “I also decided to live and work in a place everyone else dreams of retiring to. It's a decision I've never regretted.”

Since then he has canoed and sailed almost every Florida waterway and SCUBA dived on almost every reef and wreck. He has been a reporter for a wire service, written for magazines, edited several magazines, and written books, including several Florida travel works.

“I suppose I'm a native now. As they say, I have ‘sand in my shoes.'”