The Blood-Dimmed Tide (John Joran Mysteries Book 22) Read online

  We have been told that the direction of trees is dependent on which side of the eye of the storm they were actually on, that the two sides of the storm spin in different directions. Air moving northward on the east side of a hurricane acquires clockwise spin while air moving southward west of the storm acquires counterclockwise spin.

  The change in the direction of the leaning and fallen trees is surreal and jarring, but so is every other aspect of our environment these days.

  “Where are we?” Anna asks. “We’ve traveled this road thousands of times but I have no idea where we are on it. It’s so disorienting. It’s like we’re in an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

  “We’ve entered another dimension . . .” I say. “‘A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.’”

  “It really is what it’s like.”

  We both look around at the storm-altered world in silence for a moment.

  Eventually, Anna glances at her watch. “What’s your plan when we ever get back?”

  It’s early afternoon on an unseasonably warm Tuesday in October—one day shy of two weeks since Hurricane Michael forever altered the landscape and our lives. We are out of court earlier than we had expected.

  “Touch base with Reggie and follow up on the new missing persons reports. You?”

  “I have some more work I need to do for tomorrow,” she says. “Think I’ll leave Taylor with the sitter a little while longer so I can get it done.”

  “If I get done early I’ll pick her up,” I say.

  “Dinner at seven okay?” she asks. “I was gonna see if Carla and John Paul could join us.”

  I nod.

  Even in this new post-apocalyptic landscape, even while on trial for the wrongful death of an adolescent boy, we have children to care for, domestic duties to coordinate.

  Single mom Carla Pearson and her infant son John Paul are part of our unofficial extended family and often join us for dinner.

  “You sure?” she asks. “It’s fine if you’re not up for it after today.”

  “No, I’d like to see them. Need to actually. Just wish Johanna could be there too.”

  Johanna is my daughter by a previous marriage who is only with us on the weekends, holidays, and summer break, and I miss her every moment she’s not here.

  “I know,” Anna says, “but she’ll be here this weekend. Just a few more days.”

  Before I can respond my phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out and hand it to Anna to read to me since I’m driving.

  “‘Call me as soon as you’re out of court,’” she reads. “‘We’ve got another.’”

  I wonder if she means another missing person or another body, but I don’t have to wonder long. Within moments my phone starts vibrating again.

  5

  The hydraulic arm of the grapple truck is still extended, the claw dangling some twenty feet above the piles of debris on 2nd Street below.

  This strip of 2nd Street, between Church Street and Lake Grove Road, is residential, but the old firehouse and city hall can be seen in the next block.

  Traffic in both directions is stopped, restless and nosey drivers leaning out of their windows, impatience and ill-tempers intensifying more quickly in the cauldron of the post-storm environment.

  The grapple truck is a super heavy-duty dump truck with a white cab and a black bed that resembles a huge, high-sided industrial dumpster. Attached to the back is an enormous hydraulic grappling claw capable of lifting large sections of giant trees. This particular type of truck is known as a double because it also pulls a trailer that looks identical to the truck’s bed.

  These enormous truck-trailer combos can be seen racing up and down the roads around here at all hours since shortly after the storm. The debris removal process in place involved these vehicles picking up all the trees and limbs and building material debris that citizens can pile at the edges of their property next to the road. These contracted cleanup trucks aren’t allowed on private property.

  For nearly two weeks now, neighbors have been helping neighbors, and volunteer groups like the evangelical organization Samaritan’s Purse have been helping everyone, with the cleanup. Together they chop and cut and saw and drag and haul and pull the millions of branches and the thousands of trees mangled by Michael to the edges of every commercial and residential piece of property in the area. And almost as quickly as the piles are picked up, they are replaced by others.

  There’s not a street in Wewahitchka, Port St. Joe, Mexico Beach, or Panama City that isn’t lined with detritus of the demon storm that unleashed hell on earth here.

  When I pull up, Reggie is waiting for me. As usual of late, she is flanked by Raymond Blunt and Phillip Dean, two of the cops from Sarasota assigned to her.

  Blunt is a meaty middle-aged man with deeply tanned skin, coarse salt-and-pepper hair that never moves, and intense green eyes. He’s never without the flat gold chain around his neck and the gold nuggets pinky ring on his right hand, as if they are as essential to his identity as the badge on his belt. His silent partner, Phillip Dean, is a tall, thin forty-something man with pale skin and a hairless head. They are two among many cops from around the state who have been here since the storm, aiding and assisting, protecting and serving.

  As I walk up to where they’re standing, Reggie is telling a couple of deputies to tape off a larger area and redirect traffic and asking Ray and Phillip to go deal with the gathering crowd.

  As they move off to carry out her orders, she looks at me. “How’d it go today?”

  I shrug. “Anna was spectacular, but if the jury buys into Gary Scott’s narrative it won’t matter much how good she is.”

  “They won’t,” she says. “The good guys are going to win this one.”

  The traffic in both directions is slowly turning around and drifting away.

  “How many missing persons cases we got right now?” she asks.

  Since the storm, we’ve had a rash of missing persons reports filed. Some were just loved ones from outside the area requesting wellness checks on those they were still not able to get in contact with, but many were for people who are actually missing—either displaced by the storm or their dead bodies yet to be recovered. Some victims were washed out into the Gulf during the tidal surge. Others remain beneath rubble heaps or inside debris-covered vehicles.

  In addition to dealing with the aftermath of the hurricane, my court case, and trying to wrap up the investigations into the murders of Father Andrew Irwin and Joan Prescott, I have been trying to help on the many missing persons cases, but have been falling way behind.

  “Ten active, I believe,” I say.

  “It’s nine now,” she says, and nods up toward the dangling grappler claw.

  I follow her gaze to the tangled, jagged web of limbs caught in the claw and see human limbs mixed in with them—at least an arm and two legs are visible.

  The pendulous limbs of a person peeking out of the branches suspended above us is disorienting and discordant, and I have to refocus several times to take it in.

  The soiled and tattered jeans and the dirty, misshapen sneakers appear to be the ill-fitting and unwashed garments of a homeless person. Between the gaping opening of the sneaker and the faded and frayed bottom of the jeans on the right leg, the DIY-looking tattoo of a solid black circle with arrows coming out of it in every direction is visible on the filthy ankle.

  “ME’s investigator and FDLE crime scene are on the way, but they’re going to be a while,” Reggie says.

  In addition to the torn-up terrain of the post-Michael landscape and the additional traffic, all agencies are operating in critical mode right now and have more to deal with than they can handle. This is truer of the medical examiner’s office and its makeshift portable morgue than any other agency.

  “I’m thinking we let Jessica get pictures,” Reggie says, “and go ahead and bring the grappler down and see what we’re dealing with. More likely than not it’s an accidental death related to the storm.
”

  I nod. “All they’re going to do is bring it down once they get here.”

  She calls forensics officer Jessica Young over, and has her take pictures of the pile of debris the body had been a part of, then the body in the grappler from beneath, and then we call the operator back over to his truck and have him lower the arm, bringing the grappler to hang just a few feet off the ground.

  As a deputy escorts the operator back behind the cordon again, Reggie, Jessica, and I ease in toward the grappler to take a look.

  “That’s . . . PTSD Jerry Garcia,” Reggie says. “He wasn’t one of our ten, was he?”

  I shake my head. “We’ve been looking for him,” I say, “but no one turned in an official missing persons report on him.”

  “No one would, would they?” she says, a shade of sadness in her voice.

  PTSD Jerry Garcia is the nickname for one of Wewahitchka’s more colorful characters, a fringe figure with mental issues who resembles the Grateful Dead guitarist.

  I find the creativity, accuracy, and ubiquity of nicknames in Southern small-town culture fascinating. If a kid doesn’t pick up a nickname from his family or while in school, then it happens on a barstool in a local drinkery, at the intersection of idleness and inhibition. This latter was the case with PTSD Jerry, who had moved to town only recently.

  Often heard babbling to himself and occasionally acting out like someone with shell shock, PTSD Jerry Garcia drank to excess and slept rough, but avoided altercations with law enforcement and functioned well enough to survive in an indulgent small town. Though not officially a missing person, a bartender at the Saltshaker Lounge had notified us that she hadn’t seen him since the hurricane and asked if we’d keep an eye out for him.

  “He smells like an old kerosene engine,” Reggie says.

  In addition to the sickly sweet fetid stench of decay, the pungent odor of alcohol is present.

  It’s obvious that’s he’s been dead for a while. What isn’t obvious is how he died. What little visible damage to his body that can be seen could have been made by the grappler claw and doesn’t appear to be the kinds of wounds that would be fatal.

  Reggie says, “Is it possible he was stumbling around drunk and decided to climb inside this pile of debris to sleep and somehow got killed—more debris being piled on crushing him or something?”

  “It’s possible,” Jessica says. “There’s no obvious signs of that kind of severe trauma, but it’s hard to see him and we have no idea what the back of the body looks like. Probably take the autopsy to know for sure.”

  I step closer and examine the body more intensely.

  Like the Grateful Dead guitarist, PTSD Jerry Garcia has a full head of thick gray hair and a big gray beard. Unlike the famous front man, our Jerry’s hair was always greasy, always framing a grimy face. There are other differences also. Our Jerry is—or was—a good bit younger than the original, smaller and thinner too.

  His smaller, thinner body is mostly hidden by the large steel grappler and the tree debris it holds inside the tight clench of its iron fist, but there’s no blood visible and no severe signs of violence—nothing obvious that can’t be explained by the damage done by the grappler and limbs. His soiled, ill-fitting clothes are crumpled in a few spots that they shouldn’t be and at least one of his legs is bent back in an unnatural position.

  It could easily be an accidental death, and yet there’s something about it that gives me pause.

  I can’t quite identify what it is, but something, perhaps subconsciously, is linking it to another victim I had seen recently.

  Last Friday, a week and a half after the storm, I had been called to an old collapsed cottage on St. Joe Beach where a cleanup crew found the body of Philippa Kristiansen, a twenty-something waitress from Shipwreck Raw Bar. Like PTSD Jerry, we couldn’t be sure if her death was accidental—we’re still waiting for the autopsy results.

  “What’re you thinking?” Reggie asks.

  I tell her.

  “Please tell me they’re not connected,” she says. “Except by the storm.”

  “Probably what it is,” I say. “But . . .”

  “What?” she asks, her voice full of impatience and dread.

  “The house Philippa was found in . . . It wasn’t hers. We can’t figure out why she was in it.”

  “Lots of people took refuge in whatever was still standing during the storm,” she says. “Seems I recall you doing that. Maybe the place she was staying in became uninhabitable or she thought it was about to be and she runs into the one she was found in and . . . sadly it falls down on top of her.”

  “That’s what we were thinking at first,” I say. “Until . . .”

  “Until what?” she asks. “I haven’t received an update.”

  “We’ve got a witness that swears Philippa survived the storm,” I say. “Says he saw her long after the storm had passed, long after the house she was found in had been destroyed.”

  6

  Otto E. Hausmann is a tall, thinnish older man with pale skin and fine red hair going to gray. For reasons I don’t understand, everyone calls him Pete.

  He’s pleasant and polite, and when he smiles it pushes up his black-framed Buddy Holly–style glasses.

  “I hope you’re here to tell me what exactly’s going on?” he says as I near his front porch.

  His small home is made of dark brick that looks like slate and sits some twenty-five feet back from 2nd Street and the sidewalk that lines this side of it. Like every other house in the area lucky enough to still be standing right now, its roof is missing a number of shingles and its yard is missing nearly all of its trees.

  He stands up from the wooden rocking chair he had been in and meets me at the bottom step with his hand extended.

  The pile that PTSD Jerry was found in was on Pete’s property, so while Reggie deals with the medical examiner and FDLE, I have walked over to find out what he knows.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” I say, “but I’m here to ask questions more than give answers.”

  “Least you’re honest about it. Come on up and have a seat. Would you like some iced tea or a cup of coffee? Glass of water?”

  There’s something about him that I associate with the Midwest—a hint of it in his accent perhaps, maybe his manner and bearing, or it could be his politeness and hospitality, which though are similar to the South, are somehow also different.

  I accept a glass of water and we sit in the two University of Missouri rocking chairs on the porch—each painted yellow and black with the school’s tiger logo across the back.

  Though he’s new in town and I have no idea what brought him to Wewa, I’ve heard that his family was in the oil and gas business wherever he relocated from, which based on his rocking chairs I’m guessing might be Missouri.

  “Can you tell me about the piles of debris on the edge of your property out by the street?” I say.

  “We were told to drag everything out there and the city would have it picked up. Is that not right?”

  “No, sir, it’s just right. How long have your piles been out there?”

  “Well,” he says, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “I started dragging the smaller limbs and branches out there a day or two after the storm—soon as I got word the city would be picking it up. But . . . at my age . . . I can only do so much before I’m hunting one of these rockers and a glass or bottle of something cold. So I’ve just been doing a little at a time, here and there. The nice church people came with chainsaws a couple of days ago and cut the fallen trees into manageable pieces and carried them out there for me.”

  The “nice church people” are volunteers with Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical organization created to help people in extreme crises. Since shortly after the storm, they have been set up in the parking lot of First Baptist on Main Street, their many volunteers helping locals in a variety of ways—from distributing supplies to cleaning up debris.

  “So you’ve added a little each day, startin
g with the smaller, lighter limbs, and the volunteers with Samaritan’s Purse came a few days ago and cut the bigger stuff and tossed it on top?”

  He nods. “That’s about the size and shape of it.”

  “Do you know the older gentleman with the big gray beard who walks around town talking to himself?”

  “Looks like Jerry Garcia? People call him PTSD? I don’t know him but I know who you’re talking about, of course.”

  “His body was found in your center debris pile.”

  “What? No. Please tell me you’re not serious,” he says. “How can . . . His body? You sayin’ he’s dead?”

  “I’m afraid he is.”

  “And he was found in with my trees and limbs?”

  I nod. “Any idea why he would be in there?”

  “None whatsoever. Absolutely not.”

  “Was he around at any point while you were dragging the limbs out or while the Samaritan’s Purse people were here?”

  “Not that I saw,” he says. “I’m trying to recall the last time I saw him. Had to be before the storm. Can’t recall seeing him since . . . though might have done. Everything’s so chaotic.”

  “Yes, it is. Anyone else live here with you who might have seen Jerry or . . .”

  “Just me, I’m afraid.”

  “Did the Samaritan’s Purse volunteers use a tractor or any heavy equipment?”

  He shakes his head. “Just wheelbarrows and tarps. They’d pile the tarp with the debris and then several of them would drag the tarp around front and throw the logs and things onto the pile.”

  “You and Jerry ever have any kind of conflict?”

  “What? No. I only spoke to him a few times—and that was just waving to him from my porch. Bet I’ve never been within ten to twenty feet of him. Ever. But . . . asking a question like that . . . I mean, surely it was just an accident, right?”

  7

  I notice Reggie stiffen a bit and run her hand through her hair.

  A thick-bodied tomboy who dresses down and rarely wears makeup, yet is naturally attractive, even pretty in an unfussy way, it’s funny to see Reggie act in any way that shows concern for her appearance.