Dead Silence

28

The police detective, a woman named Shelly Palmer, told me she lived in Cape Coral, not far from Pine Island and the fishing village of Gumbo Limbo, where the late Bern Heller had owned a marina until he was sent to prison and his business went into foreclosure.

On the drive from Sarasota to Fort Myers, she had tried to bait me, saying things like, “I hear the man was a monster… Locals say the man who killed Bern Heller did the world a favor… What was he like, Dr. Ford… your personal opinion, I mean?”

Whenever she pressed, I removed my glasses and leisurely cleaned them, putting space between my anger and my intellect. She gave up after half an hour, as we traveled south on I-75, forty miles between the Sarasota County line and Lee County, our destination.

Now we were leaving a police substation in North Fort Myers after stopping to pick up her boss and assemble paperwork. I listened to Detective Palmer tell me, “We’re going to do what we call a roll-by. Attorneys and judges call it a show-up. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

A roll-by/show-up was a prearranged meeting with a witness who had consented to look at a suspect. It required two squad cars, the witness sitting anonymously in the back of one vehicle, while the suspect stepped out of a second vehicle and presented himself for inspection.

My guess: The woman Bern Heller had attempted to rape was waiting to inspect me somewhere nearby.

I said, “I wouldn’t have agreed if I didn’t understand what we’re doing.” Which wasn’t the whole truth.

Truth was, I was more concerned with Will Chaser’s deadline, eight hours away, than I was with protecting my legal rights. Under any other circumstances, whether I was innocent or guilty, I would have spent the last hour in silence after demanding an attorney.

It was a gamble, with two lives on the line, one of them mine. But even in a worst-case scenario, they would only lock me in a prison cell, not bury me in a box. I was willing to risk a few weeks in jail, waiting for a court date, on the chance of arriving at Tamarindo Island a few hours earlier.

Detective Palmer said to her boss, Captain Lester Durell, “He’s waived all rights, like I told you. He signed the consent sheet. Satisfied now?”

Durell said, “Well, they say scientists are eggheads,” exaggerating his southern vowels. “I guess this one’s proof enough.” He turned to look through the Plexiglas shield that separated backseat from front in this unmarked car, as Palmer drove us across the Edison Bridge into Fort Myers. “What happened to you, Doc? That big ol’ football player scramble your brain when he gave you that beatin’?”

Heller had almost knocked me unconscious a year ago only days before he murdered Javier Castillo.

I said, “That has nothing to do with it. I’m in a hurry. You know why.”

“Wish I could help.”

“I already told you how. Have your marine division get a boat to that island, with a chopper as backup.”

“Thirty years, I’ve fished these bays,” Durell replied, “and Tamarindo’s a name I’ve never heard.”

Was the man intentionally trying to make me mad? Twice, I’d explained why it wasn’t on charts.

I said, “Why not assume I’m right? Your people would get some extra night-ops experience, and just might make headlines if they find the boy.”

Durell didn’t want to hear it. “Who we supposed to believe? Our local guy at the FBI says you wore out your welcome. Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department thinks the same as this here lady detective: You’re lookin’ for a way to shift attention from a dead-solid murder charge. And even if you’re not”-he paused to take a cigar from the pocket of his sports coat-“doin’ this without talking to a lawyer is no excuse for bein’ so damn dumb.”

I wasn’t sure if he was putting on a show for Palmer or for me. Durell was a wide-bodied man who’d boxed Golden Gloves and played pulling guard for Florida State before taking his degree in criminology out into the much tougher world of law enforcement.

I had known him for many years. Once upon a time, we’d been peripheral friends. But cops on every level soon develop a social armor that separates them from the civilian world as effectively as it shields them and the inevitable scars that come with the job.

It was unlikely that he considered us friends now. Maybe he wanted to make that clear to Detective Palmer. Or me. If anything, a pro like Les Durell would be tougher on someone he knew. But he’d never struck me as the flaky, scalp-collecting sort of cop who viewed hanging an acquaintance as a badge of honor.

I said, “I signed the release. Isn’t that what Detective Palmer wanted me to do?”

Durell turned his back to me, grumbling, “Also a good way to risk screwin’ up this case if it gets to court,” which the woman ignored until the big man turned to look at me again.

“Shelly?” he said to her. “You got a problem with me sittin’ in the backseat with Dr. Ford? There’s a coupla things I’d like to discuss with the man. Personally, I think mosta the evidence your team scraped together ain’t worth a crap.”

When the woman snapped, “Yes! I do have a problem with it!,” I knew what they were setting up. Good cop, bad cop-an old routine. No, Lester Durell obviously wasn’t my friend.

I listened to the woman speak her lines, asking, “Who is this guy, another one of your locker-room buddies? Captain Durell, the days of the good-ol’-boy system are gone forever. At least I hope to hell they’re gone. But if you want to risk me filing an internal complaint-”

“Now, now, Shelly dear. This here’s a respected man. Lives out there on Sanibel with the rich folk, pays his taxes and obeys the law-mostly he does anyway. It can’t hurt letting the two of us just talk sorta privatelike-”

I interrupted, “Les, save us some time. You have questions? Fire away. I don’t mind if Detective Palmer listens.”

The woman said, “Should I be flattered?,” still in her bad-cop role-or possibly a woman who was naturally foul-tempered.

Durell said to her, “How long before we’re supposed to meet our witness?” It was 11:15 p.m.

Palmer replied, “She’s covering third shift but can take a break from the floor after she signs in, around midnight.”

In the dim light, I saw the man wince. He was pained by Palmer’s use of the gender identifier she. But the woman had told me far more than either realized with her one-sentence response.

Palmer had just told me that the witness worked at a hospital-nearby Fort Myers Memorial, most likely. Third shift wasn’t the woman’s normal schedule. It was probably changed to mitigate stress after the trauma of an attempted rape: She didn’t want to be alone at night. It also suggested that the witness was single, had no children and was receiving psychological counseling. And she wasn’t a nurse. She was either a physician or a physician’s assistant. Nurses don’t cover floors, they work in units: peds or ER or critical care.

Extrapolating from what I knew about Bern Heller’s many victims, the woman was probably Caucasian, between twenty-four and thirty-two years old, drove an eye-catching car and was sufficiently confident to park in unlighted areas of public parking lots. Odds were that she had shoulder-length brown hair, was fit, with small breasts and, although confident, had a friendly, eager-to-please demeanor.

Implicit was a scenario that included a successful young woman who had fallen for one of Heller’s many gambits after she’d finished her shift at the hospital and probably after working out at a nearby fitness center. But the witness was also a person with character. She had a strong sense of civic duty. Why else would she risk coming out at night to identify a man suspected of murder?

I said, “Who’s the witness? What can you tell me?”

Durell took the unlighted cigar from his mouth, his expression saying Nothing.

“Doc, what you’d better concentrate on is getting over your sudden case of the stupids. Personally, I don’t think our people got the evidence we need. But if you keep screwin’ up the way you are, I’m afraid you’ll make the Sanibel papers… after they burn you at Raiford.”

N ever lie to a cop…

An old rule. This time, I was sticking to it, even though Captain Les Durell was trying to make it easy to lie, offering ready-made excuses for his pointed questions.

Nudging a suspect into a perjury maze-another police gambit.

Now he was sitting with me in the backseat but with the Plexiglas safety screen open so Detective Palmer could listen. If she missed anything, the digital tape recorder clipped to the Plexiglas was available for her review.

It proved Durell was right. I had acquired a serious case of the stupids. I was answering questions that could lead to a murder charge, the electric chair, without a lawyer present or even a second tape recorder for my own files.

A worthy cause, I kept reminding myself.

My status had been upgraded from person of interest to person of reasonable suspicion, a legal term. It meant police believed they had enough evidence to warrant temporary detention. But because I wasn’t officially a suspect, I wasn’t handcuffed. I would have almost preferred it, because I found myself checking my watch obsessively, recalculating the deadline: eight hours thirty-one minutes… eight hours twenty-five-minutes…

So I tried to slow the minutes by focusing on Durell’s questions, learning what I could from the few facts he let slip. He didn’t slip often.

The man started by stating procedural formalities for the recorder-time, place, subject, names-then began with an easygoing southern congeniality that would have put me on alert if I wasn’t already.

“Right off the bat,” he said, “let’s deal with the sillier stuff our folks are calling evidence. I’m gonna be right up front with you, Doc. The medical examiner hasn’t issued his final report, but he thinks the football player died sometime between midnight and dawn on Friday, January sixteenth. We know you flew to New York Friday morning. Took the six forty-five Delta flight to New York. ”

“Newark,” I corrected, then listened to the man chuckle at his intentional error.

“Newark,” he echoed, making a note on his clipboard. “But you’re with me so far on the date and time of death? Heller washed up two days ago on Naples Beach, lungs full of water. But he died six days earlier while you were still on Sanibel.”

Lungs full of water. Heller had drowned. It was Durell’s first slip. I doubted if the medical examiner had issued such a narrow time window for the same reasons I’d explained to Tomlinson: Saltwater creatures eat land-dwelling creatures. Something else an examiner would have considered was the watch I’d planted. Its crystal was crushed, the date frozen on Saturday, January seventeenth, the day after I’d arrived in New York. Captain Durell was setting a trap.

I shrugged and said nothing.

“Our guys took statements from folks who said you and the football player got into a brawl ’bout a year ago. That he licked you pretty good. That true?”

I said, “I still have headaches.”

“Kinda surprising to me-you bein’ an All-American wrestler back in the day.”

“I wasn’t. I never made it to the quarterfinals at nationals.”

Durell said, “Even so, Heller musta jumped you from behind, huh?,” establishing a pattern by offering me an out.

“No,” I said.

It threw off his rhythm. “Well… that’s not the way I figured it. But then Heller was found guilty of murder, second degree. Shot a friend of yours, a Sanibel fishing guide.”

“Javier Castillo,” I said. “He’d moved his boat to Pine Island a few months earlier. Javier was a decent man.”

“He was a friend.”

“Close friend. Left a nice family, a wife and two girls… and no life insurance.” Then I added, “Javier crossed the Florida Straits in an inner tube, that’s how bad he wanted to get into the U.S.,” thinking Durell might be impressed.

Instead, he ignored me, saying, “I read about your fund-raisers at the marina. Only natural for you to have hard feelings toward a man who shot your Cuban pal. Anyone would.”

I didn’t respond. After a few seconds, Durell answered for me, saying, “But not enough to try some stupid vigilante stunt by killing him. I’ve told our people that, personally, I think they’re pissing up a rope. That you’re an educated man. Bookish and quiet. I told ’em, ‘Hell, look at his picture! Looks like a history teacher I had, Mr. Harrison.’ ”

He was studying the clipboard, the dome light on, chewing his cigar, as we passed mobile home parks, a Pizza Hut, lighted billboards. He said, “According to these notes, the folks at Dinkin’s Bay Marina wouldn’t hardly talk to our boys. That surprise you?”

“Next time, come at sunset,” I said. “That’s cocktail hour.”

“We heard that, too! Heard it from someone who went to the marina’s Friday-night party. Got a weird name to it, sounds like… Epcot?”

“Perbcott,” I said. “Sort of a local joke.”

“The person at that party said Heller showed up, and you two almost got into it again-this was just two weeks ago. But this person could’ve been exaggerating. They usually do when a cop shows up asking questions.”

I said, “It was the week before I left for New York. We didn’t know Heller had been released. And it’s not like the marina invited him.”

“Heller showed up on his own?”

“That’s right.”

Durell said, “Hell, then he came to Dinkin’s Bay looking for trouble!” He leaned toward the Plexiglas and said to the woman, “That’s a detail your team shoulda noted, Detective Palmer. Sorta thing that changes the whole story around.” He settled back. “That’s why it’s good we can talk like this, Doc. Get some of this puny-assed stuff straightened out. You were saying?”

I said, “Heller made a move on a woman who lives near the marina. Her name’s Marlissa Engle.”

“That the actress?”

He knew who Marlissa was. The islands attract a lot of famous people, possibly because they can leave more than the mainland behind when they cross the bridge. I could see Palmer watching me in the mirror as I said, “We dated for a while, now she’s a workout partner, when she’s in town. Marlissa told Heller to get lost, but he wouldn’t leave her alone.”

“Then I don’t blame you for getting pissed off,” Durell said. “The man’s a convicted rapist.”

“ Serial rapist,” I corrected.

“Thirty-some women, the feds are thinking now, coast to coast. But like you said, taking the law into your own hands isn’t something you would do.”

“You said that,” I replied. “Not me. If there was a legal way to get rid of Bern Heller, I would have given it serious consideration.”

Surprised, the man hunched over his clipboard to regroup. “But you didn’t really think about killing him, did you? Not seriously, I mean.”

I said, “There is no legal way, so why would I waste my time? But I’m glad he’s dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Durell was nodding, his expression saying Nothing wrong with that, before getting serious, his face showing concern. “But here’s the thing, Doc. The football player died between midnight and dawn on a Friday. Our guys spoke to some beach walkers who say they were out before sunrise that Friday morning. Near Lighthouse Point, looking for shells. You know how shellers are, doesn’t matter what hour as long as the tide’s right. Around four a.m., they said, a small boat came flying around the point. Only one person aboard.

“Then our guys talked to someone who lives bayside near your marina. This person was up at about the same time-I won’t say why-but this person says a flats boat came through the cut into Dinkin’s Bay between four a.m. and four-thirty. Your flight was at six forty-five?”

“Delta. Right on time.”

“Then even if this person was right about seeing a boat, you were already on your way to the airport. Most folks want to be at security two hours before.”

“Not me,” I said. “I left Sanibel around five-fifteen, got to the gate fifteen minutes before we boarded.”

“That unusual for you?”

“Not unless the flight’s international.”

“And you own a flats skiff?” Before I could answer, he said to Palmer, “A flats skiff’s a small boat built for shallow water. No cabin or windows, just a low hull and a big engine. Sorry, Doc. Go ahead.”

I said, “Yes, I’ve owned flats boats for years.”

The man nodded, as if pleased I was telling the truth, then demonstrated why. “Gotta admit, I’ve seen that fancy Maverick of yours. I hear them Mavericks ride like a BMW. They can plane on dew and run in a rain puddle.”

“Unusual boat,” I answered. “Magic hull. I use it more than my truck.”

“Just what I figured,” Durell said. “Which brings up something else. This person I mentioned-the one lives near your marina?-this person claims to have recognized your boat. People see that Maverick on the bay so often, you know? But, hell, there weren’t no moon at that hour. It was a black night, and sort of windy, too. No fisherman in his right mind would be out on that tide.” He paused. “It was a low tide, that right?”

A subtle trap. I watched the man’s careful disinterest as I hesitated, then stepped into it. “Dead low tide,” I agreed. “New moon wasn’t up yet.”

Durell took a deep, satisfied breath and leaned toward the front again, speaking to the woman. “You wouldn’t understand, not being a water person, Shelly, but no one would take a small boat into the Gulf on that tide. Not at four in the morning, when it’s black as the inside of a cow. Too many exposed bars. Even in a shallow boat, you’d have to be a magician to find enough water, running blind, to get around the lighthouse.”

Implicit flattery-a nice touch.

He continued, “And even if someone saw a boat coming into Dinkin’s Bay, there’s no way a lawyer could prove it. It was too blame dark to make a positive ID.” Durell returned his attention to me, smiling now. “See what I mean about some of this evidence being weak? A judge would laugh it out of court.”

The man wouldn’t have asked about it if he didn’t think it could be proven. I said, “You’re being hard on your witness, Les. The person’s right. It was me.”

I watched Detective Palmer’s eyes staring at me in the rearview mirror as Durell sat back in his seat. “Doc,” he said slowly, “you want to run that past me one more time?”

I said, “That was my boat. I was in it. Three hours before dawn, Friday, January sixteenth. It was me.”

Durell said, “You’re telling me you was out in the Gulf in your flats boat, four in the morning, the same time the medical examiner figures Bern Heller was murdered?”

I said, “I don’t know who the beach walkers saw coming in from the Gulf. You’re right about that. Too many exposed bars, it would be stupid to go offshore. And why would I want to be in the Gulf anyway? But at four a.m., I was running into Dinkin’s Bay, four or five miles to the northwest. I didn’t notice anyone watching from shore, but I was out there.”

Durell stumbled, unprepared, but managed to ask, “Why?”

“I’d been running shark lines, a half dozen hooks on buoys. Sharks die if you don’t get to them quick, so I wanted to make a final check, then clear the hooks, before leaving for New York. I don’t keep the sharks. I do tag-and-release. There was one small bull shark, I tagged it and let it go.”

Durell said, “Tagged it?,” and I knew he was wondering if there was a way to prove I was lying.

I nodded. “And while I was out there, I stopped and checked one of the transmitters Mote Marine set near the channel. They’ve sunk about two dozen between Boca Grande and the causeway. It was buoyed, but it looked like it had drifted off-station. So I stopped.”

From the corner of my eyes, I was gauging Palmer’s reaction-guilty people get overtalkative-but decided it was okay to add, “Mote sets out underwater monitors to track fish they’ve tagged-sharks, snook, some others. The transmitter I pulled had some benthic growth but looked okay. So I towed it closer to shore, but not as close as I would’ve normally, because the tide was so low. I didn’t want to risk running aground and missing my plane.”

Time for Durell to study his clipboard again. I had just used the man’s trap to give credence to my story.

He cleared his throat and said loud enough for Palmer to hear, “Mote’s about as respectable as it gets in the fish-research business,” but he wasn’t ready to abandon his plan because he offered another easy out. “If you work with Mote, there’s no judge or jury would question what you was doing on the water at that hour-even if the scientists at Mote can’t confirm you checked their transmitter thing. What is it, sorta like an underwater antenna?”

I said, “Looks more like a shock absorber on a car. They’re called VM-2s. The tags we use, PIT tags, they’re miniature transponders. Check with Mote. They might be able to confirm it, even give you the exact time because I was carry a tag coded with a personal ID. The VM-2 should have transmitted the number automatically. You know, keeping track of who services the equipment.”

The man said, “You sure about this?”

“Unless there was a malfunction, my ID should be in their computers.”

“Maybe you already talked to them, said you was out there.”

I said, “Nope.”

All true.

The big man sat back and placed the clipboard on his knees. He mulled it over as if deciding to stop playing games. “Doc, let me ask you straight out. Did you kill Bern Heller?”

Heller had drowned. The Gulf of Mexico had killed him, not me. “Absolutely not.”

“Did you have anything to do with it?”

I said, “They found his body on Naples Beach, you said. That’s forty miles south of Sanibel. Couch the question any way you want but my answer’s not going to change. I didn’t kill Bern Heller. I wasn’t anywhere near the man, wherever he was, when he died.”

Durell said, “Then why didn’t you return the calls our people left at your lab? We been trying to get in touch for two days. You don’t check messages?”

I said, “At first, I thought it was because you wanted my opinion about how long Heller had been dead. Your department’s hired me five times as a consultant. But when I realized it was because you were actually thinking of me as a suspect, I decided, screw you, I’m not in Florida, I have more important things to do.”

Suddenly not so friendly, Durell said, “Did you, now?”

“That’s right. Finding a kidnapped boy takes precedence over answering questions about a dead man I didn’t like to begin with. But if you’re interested in my opinion, I’ll tell you-no charge.”

Unconvinced but wavering, Durell said, “Keep talking,” giving me more rope.

“A more reasonable scenario is that Heller, a convicted serial rapist and murderer who had a limited amount of time…” I let Durell see me thinking about it before I asked, “How long before they sent him back to prison, a few months?”

Looking into my eyes, Durell said, “A few weeks, no more.”

I said, “A convicted murderer who had a narrow window, he might have headed for Mexico. It’s only four hundred miles across the Gulf. So he either hired some lowlife to crew aboard his boat or he hired someone else’s boat and they pushed him overboard. Took his money and kept going. Can you tell me how he died. A blow to the head? Drowned?”

Durell’s expression said no, so before he answered I asked, “How about the exact time the body was found? Six days drifting in the Gulf, his body should have been closer to the Dry Tortugas, not Naples, if he started off Sanibel… unless he got swept in by a vortex current. But if he went in the water off Tampa Bay, that would be about right.”

“Tampa, huh?”

“I’d check with the port, ask about tramp cargo vessels and shrimpers that left Thursday or Friday. Or… Heller could have been killed on Naples Beach, above the tide line. This phase of the moon, the tides get progressively higher every day, so it could have taken a while before-”

Palmer interrupted from the front, saying, “Heller was living on a forty-two-foot yacht parked at the marina he used to manage. We know for sure he was aboard the boat early Friday morning. If his body was drifting, how much difference would twenty-four hours make?”

I said, “You mean, if he went into the water on Saturday, not Friday?”

“Yes, off Sanibel.”

She was thinking about the watch with the broken crystal.

I said, “That works. Five days, the body would be off Naples or the Ten Thousand Islands. Again, depending on the vortexes.”

Durell slid his pen under the clipboard spring and sighed. “What do you think, Shelly?”

The woman said to Durell, “Can we verify what he just told us?”

Durell said, “Well, I dunno…,” as I asked, “What did the Coast Guard say?”

There was a silence, the two officers wondering if the other was going to answer. Finally, Palmer said, “They give us similar information. And… they also suggested we contact a local firm named Sanibel Biological Supply. Which is you.”

“Me and one part-time employee.”

“They said you’ve got charts and graphs, every missing boat and person, for the last ten years.”

I said, “It’s a hobby. Currents in the Gulf are tricky, and there’s never been a long-term study. I just told you what I think. If you provided more information, maybe I’d have a different opinion.”

Palmer said, “Even if we hired you, I couldn’t share-”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I wouldn’t work as a consultant in this case.

Aside from the ethical conflict, there’s a personal conflict: I’m glad the guy’s dead. If he was murdered, I agree with the locals: Someone did the world a favor.”

The woman’s smart, dark eyes filled the rearview mirror, looking into mine. “You realize you’re being recorded?”

I replied, “Yes.”

“Then I suggest you keep your mouth shut until we do the roll-by. I want to add, just for the record, that you don’t have to do the roll-by. Say the word, Dr. Ford, and I’ll cancel it. Or we can wait while you consult your attorney.”

Once again, I checked my watch. Eight hours ten minutes until deadline. I said, “I signed the papers. As long as we get this done as fast as possible, I’m willing. But, just for the record, Detective Palmer, whatever your witness says won’t change the fact I’ve been telling the truth.”