Collateral Damage A Matt Royal Mystery - By H. Terrell Griffin Page 0,19

have made sense for her to wait until she was married to have him killed. Then she would inherit.”

“Jim came from a wealthy family. Maybe that was a motive.”

“Meredith, the wife, has more money than the whole Desmond family. Her grandfather was richer than I can imagine and set up a trust fund for Meredith. She came into control of it on her twenty-first birthday. Even if she inherited the entire Desmond fortune, it would only be a drop in the bucket of the money she already has. As they say, that dog won’t hunt.”

“I guess not. Didn’t you tell me that the couple was leaving that afternoon for a honeymoon in Europe?”

“They were.”

“Then if the shooter missed Jim that day, if Jim had not jogged, or gone on the street or the other way on the beach, the killer would have missed him.”

“I guess so,” she said.

“But if the killing wasn’t random, then there must have been a contingency plan.”

She was quiet for a moment, sipping her wine. I heard a dog bark in the distance, the screech of one of the peacocks that run wild in the Village, an outboard engine chugging at idle speed up the lagoon where I lived. “Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe?”

“The Grand Beach condo building takes up the whole area between the beach and Gulf of Mexico Drive. There are no obstructions on the roof that would have kept the shooter from moving across it. There are a bunch of air-conditioning units up there, but nothing that would stop him from moving from the front of the building to the back. If Desmond had come up the sidewalk on Gulf of Mexico Drive, all the killer had to do was move to that side of the building.”

“What if Jim had jogged north on the beach?”

“I see your point. How would the killer have gotten to him? And if he hadn’t gotten him that day, then Desmond would presumably have been out of reach in Europe. That’s an argument for randomness.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe there was another shooter on the roof of another building to the north of the Hilton.”

She sat quietly for a beat. “Damn. We never thought about that. There’re some buildings to the north that could have hidden a sniper.”

“If you’re going north from the Hilton,” I said, “there are several low-rise buildings, no more than three or four stories high, until you get to the Tropical Condos. That building is eight stories. There are no others that tall all the way up the island.”

She pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll get a crime-scene unit up there now. It’s probably too late, but we’ve got to check it out.”

She made arrangements to meet the crime-scene people at the Tropical in thirty minutes. “If your theory is correct,” she said, “there had to be at leasttwo shooters.”

“I know.”

“I’ll meet you later at the Hilton,” she said, and was outthe door.

CHAPTER TWELVE

July on our key is a time when there are few tourists and we islanders meet for drinks and jokes and stories of other lives, those we lived before we found our paradise on Longboat Key. Some of the stories were probably even true, although we didn’t much care and never tried to sort out the truth from the fantasy. Everybody is entitled to start over, and our little island was as good a place as any for that.

I was sitting at the outside bar at the Hilton talking to Billy Brugger who had been slinging drinks in the place for a quarter of a century. He knew everybody, those still with us and those who had departed for other venues, those who had died and those who had simply moved away, perhaps tired of the essential sameness of our lives, bored with the little stimulus that island living provided, needful of the stress they’d left behind in the cities of the Midwest, or simply craving the daily contact of family and the familiar friends of their youths. He knew their secrets, the ones whispered to him over the bar late at night, when the whisperers had drunk too much and were a little maudlin, perhaps thinking of the homes they’d left to chase the sun to Florida. And Billy kept those secrets. He was as closed-mouthed as a sphynx, judicious in his friendships and in many ways a repository of all the island’s ills.

I’d stopped by Tiny’s after J.D. left. The chief was already into his second drink, chatting with one of