Dead Wake (The Forgotten Coast Florida #5) (12 page)

“Quite.”

“Someone was either very angry, or they panicked,” Maggie said, speculating aloud. “Sometimes people are so surprised that they actually stabbed someone that they do it again and again. Like they can’t go back, so they want to make sure it’s fatal.”

Larry didn’t respond, just took a sip of his tea.

“What else can you tell me so far?” Maggie asked him.

“Well, the wounds have a slightly upward trajectory, but the liver is quite high. If the assailant were roughly the same height as Mr. Crawford, I would expect the wounds to be lower in the abdomen, or at less of an angle. So I think it’s safe to say the person who did this was significantly shorter than Mr. Crawford. Based on his height, I’d say somewhere between five-six and five-nine.”

“Why not a taller man, thrusting fairly straight from the elbow?”

“The angle would be quite different, I think,” Larry answered. “Also, the person who did this was left-handed.”

Maggie tilted her head and looked at the body, thought about the second man who had been seen with Crawford that night. “It could have been a taller, right-handed man, attacking from behind, couldn’t it?”

“Again, the angle. In that instance, it still would have been more severe.”

Maggie nodded. “Okay.”

“Mr. Crawford will be heading to Tallahassee this afternoon,” Larry said. “They’re much better able to examine a body of this vintage. I’ll let you know what they find, but I thought this might be a helpful beginning.”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “It’s a start.”

The crime scene techs had given the “all clear” on the flower shop, so Maggie let William and Robert know that she was going to take one more look around and then return their place of business to them. She tended to want a last “feel” of a crime scene before it returned to being whatever it had been prior.

The day was once again unseasonably warm and, as Maggie parked in front of the shop, she hoped they would soon see what passed for autumn in the Panhandle.

A few fall tourists checking out the shop windows watched her as she yanked the crime scene tape from the door and fumbled with the lock. She was used to people rubbernecking at crime scenes, but there were still times when she felt like they were blaming her for the fact that there
was
a crime scene.

She shrugged off her innate sense of guilt and entered the shop, closing and locking the door behind her.

It was odd to be in the shop alone. She’d been a customer many times, of both the flower shop and the hair salon, but she’d never been the only person in the building. The solitude made the silence quieter, the dark corners more shadowy. It wasn’t so much that there had been a body there—Maggie was used to being where bodies had been—she just didn’t do alone very well, no matter where she was. A remnant of her past.

She turned on the overhead lights and walked around the cash register counter. Most of the brick wall had been removed, along with the two-by-fours that had framed Crawford in somewhat. Maggie knew they’d been stained with Crawford’s bodily fluids as he’d decomposed. They’d probably remain in some evidence locker somewhere, or perhaps be donated to some place where people like her learned about two-by-fours that had been stained by decomposing bodies.

She stood in front of the hole where Crawford had been, and stared at it for a while. She could now see clear through to the room beyond the wall. She stepped inside the space, then turned around to face the main room of the flower shop, much as Crawford had. She looked up, and around her, at what remained of the wall, then turned and stepped into the room beyond it.

Apparently, the room was mainly used for storage. There were several shelving units lined with vases, shopping bags, wrapping paper and other supplies. Along one wall were two coolers filled with jars and boxes of blooms, some of them past their prime.

Maggie stepped back through the hole in the wall and dusted some mortar from her jeans. The hair dryers had stood here, back when this was a salon. Maggie thought back, tried to remember getting her hair done for prom, the only time she’d ever sat beneath one of the odd-looking machines.

She moved a few steps to the right of the hole. Here; she’d sat here, less than three feet from Crawford’s corpse, wishing she could skip the baby blue satin dress, that she and David could just grab a six pack of RC and go out on Daddy’s boat instead. They’d gone to the prom. Both of them had hated it.

Maggie stood behind the counter and looked toward the windows. She had no way of knowing whether there had been blinds or shades on the windows back in 1977. How much privacy had there been in this room when someone had been building—and filling—a wall?

There was a building housing several shops across the street. Directly across from the flower shop was a store that sold expensive clothing and accessories with a coastal flair. It had been there at least since she was about twenty. She couldn’t remember what it had been before that.

She walked to the front of the shop, her hiking boots thumping against the beautiful new bamboo floors, and pulled the string to lift one set of blinds. The sight of William and Robert staring in at her made her lungs shrivel for just a moment. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then went out to the sidewalk.

“Are you done?” William asked her without preamble, smoke swirling out of his nostrils.

“Yes, I think so,” she answered.

Robert heaved a sigh of relief. “Good, because we can’t afford to stay closed like this.”

Maggie handed him the keys to the shop.

“Sorry, guys,” she said. “It’s all yours.”

“Is there somebody we can call, like a real
Sunshine Cleaning
company?” William asked. “Because I need Amy Adams to come deal with this.”

Maggie hesitated a moment before answering, unsure if he was joking. Judging by the expectancy on his face, he was not. “There’s a company in Tallahassee. I can get the name for you, if you really need me to.”

“It’s okay, William,” Robert said. “We just go in and bleach the snot out of everything.”

“It’s not okay,” William told him before looking at Maggie. “I am not smitten with the idea of going in there with my little Magic Eraser, scrubbing away at smears of who knows what.”

“There’s really nothing there,” Maggie said. “The crime scene techs took anything with any evidence on it.” She rethought that for a second. “There may be some stained bricks, I don’t know. But honestly, you’re not facing anything awful.”

Robert jingled the keys in his hand like he was weighing them. “I’m going to go assess the situation,” he said, heading for the door.

“I’m going to finish my cigarette,” William said.

“Okay, but then let’s get this over with,” Robert said. He opened the door, but didn’t go in. Maggie sensed he was stalling a moment. “We’ll finish taking down the wall, reopen the shop, and once we’ve made up some of the money we’ve lost, we’re going down south for a few days to recover.”

“We’re
not
going to Key West,” William said firmly. Robert waved him off, then went inside and closed the door. William exhaled a plume of smoke, then looked at Maggie. “All those gays get on my final nerve.”

Maggie didn’t smile, but it took some effort.

“I see,” she said.

M
aggie was setting the table out on the side deck when Wyatt pulled up out front. She would have known it was him by the sound of his truck, but Coco’s keening and groaning as she raced around to the stairs was a dead giveaway.

Maggie walked around the corner as Coco dissolved at Wyatt’s feet in the gravel driveway. Stoopid came flapping around the other corner and immediately began breakdancing his way down the stairs. He was halfway down when Wyatt and Coco were halfway up, and seemed disgusted that he had to turn around and retrace his steps.

Wyatt reached the deck and gave Coco’s head one last scratch before looking at Maggie. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Wyatt and Maggie had been close friends, buddies really, for so long that their new relationship was still sometimes awkward. It didn’t always feel natural to kiss or to hold each other until they were actually doing it. They still fumbled a bit at the moments when people who had started out as a couple would normally hug or kiss.

This was one of those moments, and when Wyatt gave her a half smile and held out an arm, Maggie felt self-conscious and clumsy until she was actually up against his chest. Then the uneasiness drifted away. It was replaced by a sense of peace, and an underlying, more subtle chaos.

Maggie lifted her face and accepted a kiss that tasted of Mountain Dew and mouthwash and sincerity, and was almost glad when she heard Sky’s voice pop up from the front door.

“Put a lid on it; teenager on deck,” Sky said.

Wyatt pulled away from Maggie, but left an arm wrapped around her waist.

“Hiya, Sky,” he said.

“Hey, Sheriff,” Sky said as she came out onto the deck. “Mom, can we have a few extra bucks to grab a burger on the way?”

“Why don’t you just eat with us before you go?” Maggie asked.

“We don’t have time.”

“I thought you guys were hanging out with us,” Wyatt said.

Sky tossed him a grin capped with slightly-rolled eyes. “Yeah, as much as we like watching you guys watching each other, we’re gonna bail,” she said.

“
The Martian
,” Maggie told Wyatt.

“Yeah, and it’s already been out for like ten minutes, and little nerd man is in there practically vibrating out of his clothes,” Sky said.

“The show from the sixties?” Wyatt said.

“You need to bone up on popular culture,” Sky said.

“Science geek nirvana,” Maggie explained to Wyatt.

“Okeydokey,” he said.

Kyle came out onto the deck, the anxiousness coming off of him in waves. “Sky, are you ready?”

“Yeah, dude, hang on,” she said, then looked at Maggie.

“Go ahead,” Maggie said. “My purse is on the table.”

“Cool.” Sky disappeared back into the house and Kyle gave Wyatt a wave.

“Hey, Wyatt,” he said.

“Hey, Kyle, how’s it going?”

“Okay.”

Maggie pulled away from Wyatt. “I’m gonna go make sure Sky doesn’t break me,” she said, and maneuvered around Stoopid to get to the door. Coco was content to sit at Wyatt’s feet, gazing up at him like he was the inventor of the tennis ball.

Maggie opened the screen door, and used her bare foot to gently sweep at Stoopid, who was excited about her plan to go indoors, where the refrigerator was kept.

“Not you, Stoopid,” Maggie said, and slapped the door shut behind her.

Wyatt watched Stoopid walk huffily over to the wood pile and hop atop it, then he looked over at Kyle.

“So, what are you doing with yourself now that baseball season’s over?”

Kyle shrugged a little. “Not much. Working on my Minecraft mods, skateboarding a little. Reading.”

“Did you finish that James Lee Burke I gave you?”

“Yeah. I’m ready for the next one,” Kyle said. “Robicheaux’s a cool guy.”

“Burke makes you feel like you’re right there in Louisiana, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah. I want to go to New Iberia sometime,” Kyle said. “I looked at some of those places on Google Earth. It’s cool ’cause they’re real places.”

“Your Mom loves Louisiana,” Wyatt said.

“Yeah, I know. Mom and Dad got Coco there when I was little.”

Coco smiled at Kyle in that way she did, and Wyatt gave her a pat.

“Maybe we could drive over there for a few days,” Wyatt said. “When you’re out of school.”

“You and me?” Kyle asked.

“The two of us, all of us. Whichever,” Wyatt said.

“That’d be pretty awesome.”

Kyle looked out at the yard, his face gone a bit wistful, and Wyatt wondered if he was thinking about his father.

“You know, I was a football guy, not a baseball player like your dad,” Wyatt said, “but if you want to practice, stay in shape, I know enough to throw the ball around with you.”

Kyle looked back at Wyatt. It took him a moment to answer, and Wyatt thought he was going to say something about only practicing with his dad.

“I need to work on my swing,” he said instead.