Death Among the Mangroves
Also by Stephen Morrill and Untreed Reads Publishing
Death Among the Mangroves: A Troy Adam/Mangrove Bayou Mystery
By Stephen Morrill
Copyright 2016 by Stephen Morrill
Cover Copyright 2016 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Ginny Glass
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
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This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Also by Stephen Morrill and Untreed Reads Publishing
Mangrove Bayou
Death Among the Mangroves
A Troy Adam / Mangrove Bayou Mystery
Stephen Morrill
Chapter 1
Saturday, December 21
Lee Bell and Troy Adam were making love on an early Saturday evening when one of their three cell phones rang. Troy paused and then rolled over. “Oh for Heaven's sake, Lee gasped. “Not now.”
“It's the department phone.” Troy thumbed the answer button. “Yeah, there better be something on fire someplace.” He realized he was still breathing hard.
“Busy, are we?” Angel Watson said. Angel was a
petite blonde who doubled as the department computer guru
when not out on patrol.
“Well, I was. Not so much now. What is it?”
“Got a missing girl. A tourist. She's been gone since yesterday afternoon. I'm at the Gulf View with the manager and two of the girl's friends. Room 221. I think this needs the special chief of police touch.”
“All right. If you say so. Someone else was needing the special chief's touch too.”
Angel laughed. “Tell Lee I said hello.”
Troy rolled over to look at Lee. “Officer Watson says hello.”
“I hate you, Angel!” Lee shouted at the phone.
“She says⦔
“I heard her,” Angel said, laughing as she hung up.
The Gulf View was a two-story motel built on pilings with parking beneath, and seven blocks south of Troy's beachfront rental condo at the Sea Grape Inn. He showered, dressed, walked and was there in twenty minutes. It was the shortest day of the year and at six p.m. the sun had set, though there was still light in the clear cloudless sky above the remote southwest Florida town of Mangrove Bayou.
Several hundred tourists milled along Beach Street and along the streets back of the beach that were lined with restaurants and shops. Some tourists were on the beach itself, and a few brave ones were in the water. It was chilly and Troy wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and a windbreaker over that to keep his gun warm.
He smiled at the sight and recalled how, when he had first moved to Florida, he had braved Clearwater Beach in winter and thought nothing of it. Today, like most Floridians, Troy wouldn't go into the water until June or July, and by October the water was too cold for him. Northern tourists were made of hardier flesh. They seemed to like the cold water. At least, he thought, it didn't have ice floating in it like he had seen coming down the Hudson when he was a child in The Orphan's Home in Troy, New York.
Troy climbed the stairs to room 221 of the Gulf View Motel and found Angel Watson with two college-age women and Loren Fitch, the elderly motel manager. Angel was in uniform, the khaki long-sleeved shirt and matching trousers for colder weather and a matching safari hat with the
MBP
logo.
The two girls had long brown hair, almost identically combed back and down, and they wore shorts and tee shirts and running shoes that Troy assumed cost more than his weekly salary. One girl's tee shirt had Cornell with the university logo surrounding the shield on the chest. Troy smiled.
Go Big Reds,
he thought. He'd graduated from Cornell, probably when this girl was an infant. The other girl's tee shirt had a pocket but was otherwise blank, something almost unheard of in Mangrove Bayou. Troy doubted that it was even possible to buy a tee shirt in Mangrove Bayou without some sort of slogan on it.
Loren Fitch had a white short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, and shapeless black trousers to go with his two-day growth of beard. The shirt had button-down collars that were not buttoned down and the tips curled up. Fitch often ran his fingers through his halo of white hair.
“What's all this, then?” Troy said to Angel.
“Who are you?” the girl with the Cornell shirt asked.
“I'm Troy Adam, the⦔
“He's the chief of police here,” Angel said.
“Oh. That's good.” Troy could see the girl rapidly adjusting to that. Troy was part black, part Asian and part Caucasian, with light brown skin, just a hint of the Orient in his jet black eyes, and short, straight black hair. He had been seeing that rapid reassessment in people's eyes for thirty-five years.
“Jodi and Brett, here,” Angel indicated the two beside her, “came down for a week after finals. They're at SUNY Albany. But the third girl, Barbara Gillispie, went out with some guy she met on the beach. Yesterday afternoon. She's not back yet. And the girls are about to leave to head up to Naples to catch their flights back north. They're worried. Barbara should be here by now.”
“You don't go to Cornell?” Troy asked Brett, who was wearing the school shirt.
“No sir. My boyfriend does, though. I only get to see him on weekends now and he couldn't come down here with us. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.” Troy looked at Loren Fitch. “You got this room booked for tomorrow?”
“ 'Course. It's the season. And these two are past checkout so I have to charge them another night.”
“We were going to check out earlier,” Jodi said. “But when Barbara didn't show up we didn't know what to do.”
“Did you have the room booked for tonight?” Troy asked Fitch.
“No. But got people tomorrow. Still gotta charge the extra night.”
“I think you can get by with a late checkout charge,” Troy told Jodi. He turned to Fitch. “I'll stop by tomorrow to get a copy of the girl's bill. Better not see a full day extra charge on the bill. Am I clear on that?”
Fitch combed his hair with his left fingers. “I suppose.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jodi said to Fitch. She smiled at Troy.
“So,” Troy said. “Jodi and Brett, you are assuming this is not just a situation where Barbara got what we might call a better offer.”
“Well, we thought that last night,” Brett said. “You know, when she never came back. But you would think she would call. We all have cell phones. But today? She would never miss her flight home, or Christmas with her parents.”
“We called her cell phone. Several times,” Jodi said. “No answer.”
Troy nodded. “She have a smart phone or a dumb phone?”
The girls looked puzzled. “What's the difference?” Brett said.
“In an emergency, and in most places, the police can get the phone company to track any cell phone that's turned on,” Troy said. “But basic tracking works by triangulating the phone's position among a number of cell towers. We only have one cell tower here in Mangrove Bayou and all the others, farther north and one to the south, are out of range for that. We cannot track a dumb phone from a single point. But smart phones also have GPS, an entirely different system. That we can track, and quite accurately.”
Brett looked at Jodi. “She has an iPhone.”
“That's one of the smartest,” Troy said. “I'll get on that. What's her number?”
Jodi looked on her own cell phone and read off a number, which Troy jotted down in the notebook he always carried. Beside him, Angel typed the number into the notepad app on the department smartphone she was carrying.
“Someday you have to teach me how to do that,” Troy said. He was, of course, carrying the other department phone.
“Doubt that I can,” Angel muttered as she typed with her thumbs. She didn't look up at Troy.
“Takes you longer to do that than for me to make a note on paper,” Troy said. Angel looked up then and gave him her
You are so Neanderthal
look. Troy turned back to the two girls. “How old is Barbara?”
Brett looked at Jodi. “Same as us, I think. Twenty. She goes to school with us.” Jodi nodded too.
“So not old enough to drink, at least not in a public bar, or at least not in a public bar that carded anyone, which, around these parts, is a sometime thing.”
“We try,” Angel said. “Lord knows we try. I could write a book of excuses for bartenders not checking. Heard 'em all.”
“Do you have a picture of Barbara Gillispie?” Troy asked. “Better yet, that and also a picture of this guy she disappeared with?”
The two girls looked at each other. “We have some pictures of us, you know, on the beach,” Jodi said. “Or at dinner. We both have phone cameras. Never took a photo of the guy.”
“He was from here,” Brett said. “I heard him say so. Lives here in town.”
“He driving a car?” Troy asked.
“Probably,” Brett said. “Never saw it, though.”
Both department cell phones rang. Troy motioned for Angel to take it. She stepped outside the motel room door and onto the balcony overlooking Beach Street and the Gulf of Mexico.
“I'm going to want you two to download every photo in your phones,” Troy said. “Every one that you took here in Mangrove Bayou that is.”
“That would be a lot of pictures, at least for me,” Brett said.
“I know. But Officer Watson can help you with that. She's our expert in all things electronic. The police department is just a few blocks away. Give Watson all your contact information at homeâphone, address and emailâand the same for Barbara, if you know them. And I want as good a description as you can give her of the boy and of what each was wearing last time you saw them.” He looked at Fitch. “You get any look at this boy?”
The manager shook his head and held his arms out, palms up. “These kids. They come around in swarms. I can't tell one from the other.”
“You got a car here?” Troy asked Brett.