Collateral Damage Read Free Page A

years on the Miami-Dade police force, ten as a detective, and the last few as assistant homicide commander. When her mom died and left her a condo unit on the key, she’d decided to leave the stress of Miami and join us in paradise. She’d gotten the job with the Longboat Key Police Department a few months before and had quickly become part of our island community.
    I took a quick shower, put on a clean T-shirt and cargo shorts, and set the coffee dripping. My doorbell rang. I opened the front door to find J.D. standing next to a tall man in civilian clothes whom she introduced as Chief Warrant Officer Jacobi. The Coast Guard accident investigator.
    The dectective was in her late thirties, stood five feet seven inches tall, and wore her dark hair just short of shoulder length. Her green eyes could stare down a criminal or crinkle in happiness. She had a smile that made you just want to get up and dance, a straight nose, laugh wrinkles bordering her eyes, and a complexion that could only have been the result of good genes and skin care products. She was slender, small waisted and long legged with full breasts that could not quite hide beneath her clothes.
    I invited them in and poured coffee for each. We sat in the living room. Jacobi was a couple inches taller than I and weighed thirty pounds less. He wore civilian clothes, was about forty years old, had a head full of brown hair with some gray starting to show at the temples. His nose was a bit small for his angular face and his chin had that tucked in look that you get with a large overbite. A chipped left upper incisor would have given him an odd smile. He seemed to be a serious man and I doubt that he smiled much.
    â€œWe’ve got two murder victims on
Dulcimer
,” J.D. said.
    That brought me upright. “Murder victims?”
    â€œYes,” said Jacobi, his voice rumbling in the deep register I’d heard on the phone. “They were both knifed and thrown overboard.”
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked, trying to get my head around this new piece of information.
    â€œDid you see anything that looked out of the ordinary?” he asked.
    â€œYou mean other than a hundred-ten-foot boat running hard aground and throwing passengers into the water?”
    â€œYou know what I mean,” he said.
    â€œIf you’re asking if I saw any bodies, the answer is no.”
    Jacobi looked hard at me for a moment. I suspected he had practiced that stare in the mirror, the better to intimidate witnesses. I wasn’t impressed. I looked back passively, waiting for another question. He broke eye contact, looked over at J.D., shrugged.
    â€œOne of the victims was the husband of the woman you fished out of the water,” J.D. said.
    â€œWhat do you know about them?” I asked.
    â€œThe husband was a fifty-two-year-old lawyer from Jacksonville named Peter Garrison,” said J.D. “The other victim was a twenty-five-year-old woman from Charlotte, North Carolina.”
    â€œWhen did you find them?”
    J.D. took a sip of her coffee. “A few hours ago. When the Coast Guard got
Dulcimer
back to the dock, we let the passengers off. No reason to hold them. The paramedics brought the woman you picked up,” she paused, looked at her notes, “Mrs. Betty Garrison, from Moore’s over to
Dulcimer’s
berth. She couldn’t find her husband. It seems she’d gone to theupper deck to have a cigarette and left her husband in the dining area on the second deck. She was leaning on the rail and when the boat hit the sandbar, she was tossed into the water.”
    â€œWhere were the bodies?” I asked.
    â€œWashed up on Sister Keys, right near where
Dulcimer
went aground.”
    â€œWho’s the young woman?” I asked.
    Jacobi broke in. “According to her driver’s license, she is Katherine Brewster, single, lived with her parents. I had to break the news to them about thirty minutes