No Virgin Island
A Sabrina Salter Mystery
C. Michele Dorsey
New York
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by C. Michele Dorsey
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-62953-190-8
e-ISBN: 978-1-62953-203-5
Cover design by Lori Palmer
Crooked Lane Books
2 Park Avenue, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10016
First Edition: August 2015
For Steve,
The best is yet to be . . .
Sabrina Salter was a woman who didn’t like surprises, even nice ones. Surprises were setups at best and almost always meant to benefit the donor. That was why the sight of the villa guest’s rental jeep, still parked in the driveway, made Sabrina’s stomach clench.
He should have been long gone. Checkout was at 10:00 a.m. That was the rule. It was already 10:35. But why should she expect him to follow the rules? St. John was a magnet for rule breakers, including her.
She pulled her ridiculous gecko-green-colored jeep behind his black-forest-green model, the color Sabrina had wanted to buy for the business, and decided not to bring in her cleaning bucket just yet. She got out, noticing that at least his duffle bag was in his backseat. But there was no sight of the large camera bag or backpack he’d had with him when she had picked him up on arrival. Maybe he was getting a couple of last shots.
She hesitated for a moment but then approached the gate to Villa Mascarpone, bracing for a fight she didn’t want to have. Sabrina hated conflict. But she had new guests arriving later that afternoon and plenty to do to get the house ready for them.
“Inside,” she called, using the island greeting to let him know she was entering.
No response. She tried again. Nothing. She pressed the latch to the periwinkle blue gate and pushed it open.
Sabrina knew the man in the hammock was dead because she knew what dead looked like. The bull’s-eye red stain in the middle of his Skinny Legs Bar and Grill T-shirt was a giveaway, not to mention the insects swirling around his sagging body. He was lying crooked, his sunglasses half slung off his eyes, as if he had been blasted by force back onto the hammock. He looked nothing like the rugged, handsome, bearded man who had booked an entire villa just for himself at the last minute.
Sabrina felt her spine arch as she looked to the left of the pool area where the hammock hung between two pillars that were part of a pergola, designed to offer shade from the blast of heat the tropical sun delivered each day. Seagulls and frigatebirds hovered above the pergola, which protected the corpse like an open-air mausoleum. Standing just inside the gate to the pool area, her flip-flops glued to the tile, Sabrina looked over to the other side of the pool, where the villa’s sliding glass doors were locked with a padlock, just as she instructed all guests to do upon
departure. She doubted anyone was in the house because it was built into a steep cliff, as most houses in St. John were, and the only entrance was through the sliders. There was no escape down the side of the cliff, where only goats could navigate the vertical slopes. The sole sound came from the surf crashing below.
Sabrina refused to move any closer to the body. He was dead and there was nothing she could do for him, poor soul. Her only contact with the local police since she had moved to St. John had left her reluctant to do anything that might antagonize them.
In the sliver of an instant, Sabrina knew her life had changed forever, simply because she had the bad luck to find the dead body of a murder victim. This was so incredibly unfair. She had just begun to feel like she had a life in St. John and was beginning to make friends, which she hadn’t dreamed possible after Nantucket. She’d even been invited to join a book club and had actually accepted the invitation. Now that was all slipping away along with the spirit of the dead man on the hammock.
Sabrina knew she should call the police immediately, but the thought of dialing 911 frightened her more than the idea that the killer might still be present, which she doubted. She knew one short telephone call would end the new life she had struggled so hard to create. It wasn’t a lavish life; why couldn’t she just be left alone? All she had wanted to do was to clean Villa Mascarpone, one of ten villas she managed on the smallest of the three U.S. Virgin Islands.
Her partner, Henry Whitman, had implored her, as only Henry could implore, to take this villa cleanup from his schedule because he’d happened to “get lucky” with a hot date that he was certain would last through this morning. Even though she had nothing to do with the death of the villa guest, the cops would want to connect her to this mess. They hated her being on their island. But she knew that she had no choice—that if she left and waited for someone else to discover the body and the police found out, it would look even worse. She dialed 911 from her cell phone, which the gods of the Caribbean had deigned to provide her with reception, for once. A dispatcher named Lucy Detree informed her the call was being recorded.
“I’m up at Villa Mascarpone in Fish Bay,” Sabrina said.
“What do you want, ma’am?” the female dispatcher asked, sounding bored by the call. Sabrina hated being called “ma’am.”
“I’ve found a dead body. He’s lying in a hammock. He’s got blood on his shirt,” she said.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Detree interrupted.
Was she sure? He looked as dead as her late husband had the night a bullet had blasted through his belly.
“I’m pretty sure. Do you want me to get closer to check? I know you guys don’t like people getting too close to the scene of a crime,” she added, desperate not to irritate the cops. She still wanted to be the good girl, the one who played by the rules and didn’t upset people, even though it
had never really worked. Whether she aimed for perfect or invisible, she still managed to be in the way.
“Why do you think he’s dead?” the dispatcher asked.
Sabrina described the amount of blood and the insects and mentioned that a couple of seagulls and frigates had begun swirling above the man.
“Okay, he sounds dead. What’s your name?”
“Sabrina Salter.” Silence lingered in the air.
“You stay there. Do not leave the scene. Do not touch anything, anything at all. You understand me, Ms. Salter? I have my men on their way, you get this?”
“Yes, yes, I follow you,” Sabrina said, looking over at the gulls laughing at the prospect of lunch in a hammock and wishing she could just turn the clock back and pretend this wasn’t happening.
“You got a lawyer on island, Ms. Salter? You might want to give him a head’s up,” Officer Detree said.
Instead, Sabrina called her partner. Henry was the one man on the planet Sabrina trusted. They had met during Sabrina’s frequent flights from Boston to New York, when she was working as a television meteorologist and Henry was working first class as a flight attendant for Allied Air. Henry would tease Sabrina about forecasters never getting it right. Slowly, after countless conversations during flights, they became friends. When Sabrina’s world fell apart, Henry called her to offer support. He had been the only one. Sabrina reciprocated when Henry had to resign from Allied Air after a scandal that nearly destroyed him.
She remembered she was not the only person who came to St. John to escape and hated telling him there had been a murder at one of the villas they managed.
“Why are you calling me? You said you’d cover,” Henry said, mumbling into the speaker, which Sabrina pictured lying on a pillow, barely aimed at his pouting mouth.
“Yeah, I said I’d cover for you and clean this place for the next set of guests coming this afternoon. I didn’t say I’d cover for you and discover the last guest had been murdered here,” Sabrina said, feeling angry with Henry for something she knew wasn’t his fault. She didn’t care. This wasn’t her fault either, but she knew it wouldn’t matter after the cops and the media were done with her. They would have her all over tabloid television again.
“Murdered?” Henry said, now sounding alert.
“Henry, get up here quick. Please, the cops are on their way. I don’t want to be here with them on my own.”
“I’m on my way, honey. Don’t let them bully you if they beat me there. Don’t say anything.” Sabrina could hear clothing rustling and him whispering good-bye to whatever lucky guy he’d been with.
“I won’t,” she said through the lump in her throat. “Thanks.”
“Just tell me so I know what we’re dealing with, sweetie. Did you do it?”
Sabrina stood in the driveway of Villa Mascarpone. Even with the midday tropical sun beating down on her, she felt chilled and wished she had a hoodie in her jeep. “Don’t touch anything.” “Call your lawyer.” The words of the dispatcher repeated in her ears, as if she had murdered the man, as if she’d done anything to him besides discover his body.
She heard the sound of Henry’s motor scooter in the far distance rounding the sharp curves on the dirt road leading to the villa, which sat at the top of a bluff with two others. It was a dead end. You could go no farther on St. John from this point without a boat or a pair of wings. She looked over at the other two villas, saw no one, no cars, nothing.
She was terrified. Not of the dead man. Not even of the person who had killed him. Sabrina had grown to consider her life in two segments. There was Before Nantucket, when she’d scrambled from a hellish childhood
into a modicum of success and normalcy. And there was After Nantucket, when she’d lost everything except her freedom. She was damned if she was going to let anyone threaten it now.
If there was anything good about her experience in Nantucket, it was that she had experience dealing with the police. She had a choice and needed to decide fast whether she would continue to play the good girl and sit on her hands while she waited for Henry and the cops or whether she should grab the next few minutes while no one was around and see for herself if there was anything the police would find that might complicate her life further. She didn’t believe there was anything that might implicate her, but she wasn’t sure what she might find. If she didn’t act now, the opportunity would be lost forever. She needed to conduct the search before Henry arrived to witness it so he wouldn’t be put in the position of having to lie to the cops about it.
Sabrina grabbed the vinyl gloves from her cleaning bucket out of her jeep and slipped them over her shaking hands. She walked over to the man’s rental jeep and opened the door. She grabbed the duffle, placed it on the seat, and unzipped it, rummaging through shorts and T-shirts and what smelled like sweaty socks. She found nothing of interest, although she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She just knew she didn’t need any more surprises in her life. The jeep was otherwise empty, with only a sprinkle of sand on the floor by the driver’s seat. The
guy hadn’t spent much time at the beach, which was odd, considering all the fancy camera equipment he came with.
Where was the camera bag? Was it with the backpack, which was missing as well? Sabrina doubted he’d left them in the house, but she wasn’t going to leave it to chance. She knew she had at least another five minutes before Henry or the cops arrived. While she was convinced the house was empty, the idea of confirming her theory was frightening. But more alarming was the thought that something inside the house could be used to pin the death of the man on her. She stepped through the gate once more, glancing over toward the sagging hammock weighted almost to the deck by the large man. Quickly confirming his backpack and camera bag weren’t there, she walked over toward the sliding glass doors, leaving the gloves on. The police would expect to find her fingerprints in the house, but not on the bags, and if she found either one, she planned to search it.
Without realizing it, Sabrina began to play the familiar tape in her head, the mantra given to her forty years ago by Ruth, the woman who had raised her, when she was just a four-year-old: “I, Sabrina, am not afraid. I, Sabrina, am fearless.” How many times had she whispered those words, spoken them inside her head, even occasionally shouting them?
Sabrina moved quickly through the four-bedroom villa, her eyes alert for anything out of order, while she silently chanted Ruth’s gift to her. No sight of either bag.
The place had been left in decent shape, given it had been occupied for two weeks by a man on vacation. Satisfied that there was nothing obvious the police could use against her, Sabrina put the padlock back on the door and retreated through the gate, tossing her purple cleaning gloves back into the bucket. She checked the driveways of the other two villas for vehicles. Still none.
She leaned against her jeep, catching her breath. Other than the sound of waves crashing onto jagged rocks hundreds of feet below, there was absolute quiet in Fish Bay, where Villa Mascarpone was perched on a steep, unpaved road with no guardrail.
Sabrina turned at the sound of a motor approaching and saw a cloud of dust rising up from the road before Henry appeared. He looked immaculate in white cotton Bermuda shorts and a white Oxford cloth button down with the sleeves rolled up to show his tanned forearms. A stifled cry of relief escaped from the back of her throat as Henry got off his school-bus-yellow scooter like a knight dismounting his stallion.
Sabrina stood planted in front of the open gate, hoping to block the view of the body for Henry until she could first describe the scene.
“How can you look so fabulous in such short notice?” she asked, marveling at how impervious Henry was to dust. She had a talent for attracting both dirt and dirtbags.
“Easy, I picked this outfit off the chair. I wore it to Asolare last night.” He gathered her in a big bear hug,
which brought his eyes just above her shoulders where a full view of the hammock could be seen.
“Oh, dear Lord,” Henry said, backing away from her embrace, the color of his face matching his outfit. Covering his mouth with one hand, he staggered toward the Plumbago hedge, which bordered the driveway, and retched into a Sago Palm.
“Are you okay?” Sabrina asked, watching Henry pull an ironed white hankie from his back pocket and dab at his lips.
“Well, I’m better than he is, that’s for sure. Who would do something like this? Why? How will we ever clean that stain off the deck? That stone is absorbent as hell. And what about the people who are due to arrive here at three?” Henry asked.
“We’ll have to switch them to another house,” Sabrina said, realizing how complicated the untimely death of the houseguest, whose name she had blocked out, had made her day. She looked around at the blues and greens of the Caribbean surrounding Villa Mascarpone, the cloudless sky above, and the tropical blossoms bursting everywhere. This was supposed to be paradise. She had talked Henry into joining her in St. John and starting Ten Villas when his life fell apart not long after hers. St. John was a perfect place for a fresh start, she’d told him. And it had been, until now.
Sabrina heard the sound of multiple sirens in the distance, growing closer as Henry took several deep breaths. Three police cruisers arrived in tandem, doors flying open, six cops popping out, all with guns drawn.
“Don’t shoot. We didn’t do anything.” Henry raised his hands in surrender.
“Where’s the body?” asked a tall, solid officer dressed in a deep blue T-shirt with a U.S. Virgin Islands emblem on a chest pocket. He wore matching blue pants, which had gold stripes running down the outside of his tree-stump legs. He was the police version of business casual.
Sabrina nodded toward the open gate.
“Did you touch anything?” he asked.
“No, of course not,” she said, insulted that he wasn’t giving her credit for her experience with dead bodies. She understood proper police protocol.
The officer’s name was Leon Janquar. Sabrina remembered him from the time there had been a burglary in one of their villas. During their brief conversation then, he’d told her that he knew about Nantucket. But today, he didn’t seem to remember her. Or maybe he did and the head games had already begun.
Janquar instructed one of the younger officers to remain with Henry and her in the driveway, while the other five approached the gate and proceeded inside.
Within five minutes, Janquar returned to the driveway and radioed headquarters in Cruz Bay that the victim discovered in Fish Bay was indeed dead, having bled to death after suffering a gunshot wound to the upper abdomen. Sabrina heard him say they found no other person present on the grounds and that the windows and doors leading to decks above ground level were all locked. Janquar
instructed whomever he was talking to on the radio to call St. Thomas to get the SOCO squad over to St. John.
Sabrina leaned over and whispered to Henry that they were calling for scene-of-the-crime officers.
“I know that. I watch CSI,” Henry said.
“Okay, which of you found the body?” Janquar asked.
“I did,” Sabrina said, making sure there was no hesitation in her voice. She remembered what they did to you if you didn’t sound sure of yourself.
“And who are you?” asked Detective Janquar.
Relieved that he really didn’t seem to remember her from the burglary at one of her vacation homes, Sabrina explained that she was the co-owner of Ten Villas and that Henry was her partner. Villa Mascarpone was one of the villas they managed and rented to vacationers.
“Did you rent this house to the victim?” Janquar asked.
“His name is Carter Johnson, Officer,” Henry said. Sabrina was grateful he had spared her the embarrassment of not remembering the dead man’s name.
“Do either of you have a key to that padlock on the sliders?” Janquar asked in a tone Sabrina found accusatory.
“We both do. We always carry keys to all of the homes we manage,” Sabrina said.
“Well, I’m only interested in the key to this house, so hand it over.”
Sabrina slid the key off the ring of house keys she wore attached to her belt next to her cell phone and a few small tools.
Janquar took the key off the ring and handed it to the two officers who had been watching the driveway.
“Make sure no one’s in there. Keep your weapons out until you’re certain,” he told them.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure no one is in there. It looks like he locked up and then was killed,” Sabrina said.
“You an expert in these matters, Mrs. Salter? I seem to remember you have a history with men killed on islands, don’t you?”
Henry stepped forward to stand next to her on the driveway.
“That was different. She was fully exonerated in Nantucket, sir.”
“And it’s
Ms.
Salter,” Sabrina said, knowing she might anger Janquar but no longer caring.
“So what do you know about this guy,
Miss
Salter?” Janquar asked, upping the ante.
“Only that he rented this house by himself for the past two weeks and that he was from New Jersey. And it’s
Mizzz
Salter, Detective.”
“How many times did you see him?”
“Just the day he arrived when I met him at the ferry, took him to pick up his jeep, and showed him the way out here and around the house.”
“Pretty big house for one guy. Are you sure he was alone?” Janquar asked, pushing his sunglasses back up from where they had slid down his sweaty nose.
“As far as I know,” Sabrina said. She could hear her voice becoming increasingly defensive and wondered when he would stop firing questions.
Henry chimed in. “Villa Mascarpone is one of our most popular villas. What with a view of St. Thomas and Puerto Rico from the back deck, St. Croix from the side porch, and Ram Head and Bordeaux Mountain over here, you have a perfect panorama, whether you are a party of one or of eight.”
“Save it for the website,” Janquar said.
“Do you have any more questions? Because we need to find alternative arrangements for the people who booked this house and are arriving on the three o’clock ferry.” Sabrina sensed that it was time for Henry and her to shut up and get out before they said something really stupid. She heard a car pulling up behind the police vehicles and wondered if the SOCO team had arrived.
“Oh, I have plenty of questions for you, Mizzz Salter,” Janquar said.
Sabrina heard the familiar voice of Neil Perry before she could see him.
“Well, they’re going to have to wait, unless you’re ready to charge my client with something. I imagine she’s shattered at finding a body, and I’ll need some time to speak with her alone before this interview continues.”