Dead Wake (The Forgotten Coast Florida #5) Read Free Page A

that’s curious. Let me call a crew and I’ll be there in a few moments.”
    “Do me a favor and come through the alley, okay?”
    “We can do that.”
    Maggie said goodbye and disconnected the call. When she looked over her shoulder, William and Robert were looking at her like she’d just kicked their new kitten.
    “Guys. This is the way we have to do things. I can’t just sneak him out of here for you. I can’t touch him at all until Larry signs off.” Maggie sighed. “It’s not like everybody won’t know about it by morning anyway. The newspaper’s a block away.”
    “That ferret-faced Woody Dumont,” William said, meaning the newspaper’s perpetually agitated editor. “He’s going to think it’s his birthday. He loathes us.”
    Wyatt spoke into his own phone. “Hey, Carol. I need a cruiser over here at The Blooming Idiot to secure a crime scene. Just one cruiser, and tell them to skip the lights and sirens. Time is not of the essence.”
    He hung up and looked over at the flustered florists. “Why don’t you guys go home? It’ll be easier if you’re not in the way. I can come over there and ask you some questions when we’re done here.”
    William and Robert looked at each other, then back at Wyatt.
    “How long will you be here?” Robert asked.
    “I don’t know. An hour, two?”
    William leaned over and whispered something to Robert, who whispered something back. Then he held out his hand and Robert dug a set of keys from his pocket and handed them to him. William held them out to Wyatt.
    “You’ll lock up?”
    “Yeah, sure,” Wyatt answered as he took the keys.
    “Make sure they zip him up tight in one of those bags,” William said.
    “They will,” Wyatt answered, frowning.
    “If they get any of his flotsam or jetsam on our new bamboo floor, I’ll throw myself in the street,” William explained firmly.
    “No flotsam or jetsam,” Robert repeated for clarity.
    A few minutes after Wyatt scooted the men out the door, Larry Davenport arrived, tattered black medical bag in hand, and picked gingerly through the bricks to stand in front of the wall.
    Larry was somewhere in his seventies and well over six feet tall, but built like a Sandhill crane. With his carefully combed tuft of white hair and his black plastic glasses, he always put Maggie in mind of a science teacher from some 1950s movie.
    He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looked at the body in the wall.
    “Well, well,” he said after a few moments. “I thought he’d never turn up.”
    Maggie looked from the body to Larry. “He who?”
    Larry stepped closer to the wall and tilted his head up to adjust his bifocals. “If I’m not mistaken, this is Holden Crawford.”
    “How can you know that? And who is Holden Crawford?’ Wyatt asked.
    Larry looked over his shoulder at Wyatt. “He used to own this building, back when it was part of Crawford Seafood. Back when there was a Crawford Seafood. He went missing some years ago. We finally presumed him dead.”
    “I’ve never heard of him,” Wyatt said.
    “Oh, this was well before your time,” Larry said. Wyatt had been hired to sheriff Franklin County only ten years prior. “Decades.”
    “Which decade?” Maggie asked. She didn’t recall the name, either.
    “The seventies,” Larry said. “I’m not sure which one. Seventy-five, seventy-six, perhaps?”
    “So why are you so sure this is him?’ Wyatt asked.
    Larry turned back around to peer at the body. “Well, aside from the fact that he’s here, in this building, there’s his Dickies.”
    “His what?”
    “Dickies. His overalls. You can make them out there, through the plastic. Holden wore nothing else, except for church or a funeral.”
    “I see,” Wyatt said.
    Larry got his face within inches of the face in the wall, and looked down through his bifocals as though he were about to ask the man if he was in fact Crawford. “Yes, I believe that’s who we have here. Of course, that’s not