Collateral Damage A Matt Royal Mystery - By H. Terrell Griffin Page 0,9

a worn wind-breaker over the shirt, slipped into his gym shoes, and walked toward the house where his girl and their friends waited.

It was only later, when Marcus didn’t show for the party, that Riley and her brother went looking for him. They followed the route along which he would have walked on the way to Riley’s parents’ house. And it was there, in the gathering dusk of a cool spring evening in the far north of America, in a ditch beside the road, that they found his lifeless body. The hard-working, honorable young man who loved a girl named Riley had been shot through the head.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I was sitting on the patio of my cottage staring at the bay. It was early on a Monday morning near the end of July. The sun had barely risen over the mainland, the heat of a summer day lingering just over the horizon, the air not yet soggy with the humidity that would come with the sun. This was the favorite part of my day, a time to sip my coffee, read the morning’s paper, and enjoy the slight breeze blowing over the water.

The lead story in the Sarasota paper was about the murders that had taken place on our key six weeks before. There had been no progress. The police had no clues, no suspects, and no indication that the cases would be closed anytime soon.

I’d kept up with the progress of the cases during my regular visits with J. D. Duncan. She was stymied. She could find no connection between any of the victims. As far as she could tell, none of the dead had known any of the others. There was no reasonable place that their lives would have intersected. Garrison was an aging lawyer in a silk-stocking firm in North Florida who handled real estate matters. Katherine Brewster was a waitress at a Hooters Restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Desmond had just finished college and had been accepted at the Georgia State University Law School in Atlanta for the fall semester. He hadn’t made up his mind to enroll and had been looking for a job in the Atlanta area. His brand-new wife was from Savannah and was planning to teach at an elementary school in the Atlanta suburbs.

The captain of Dulcimer had been murdered. Somebody broke his neck. The first people on the scene didn’t pay any attention, thinking that since there was no blood, he must have died of natural causes. As soon as the medical examiner took a look at the body, he realized that the captain’s neck was broken. The autopsy confirmed and the official cause of death was listed as “mid-level cervical fracture caused by a person or persons unknown.” Death had been instantaneous.

The island had been quiet, the gossip trailing off as the mystery of the murders wore on without solution. The days became hotter, the humidity more pronounced, the sun brighter. Summer on Florida’s southwest coast is a time of aimlessness, the people lethargic and huddled in their air-conditioned homes. The brave ones venture out to the Publix market or lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant. The outdoor dining areas, aswarm with snowbirds during the season, were empty. No self-respecting Floridian would dine al fresco in the summer heat. Time itself seemed to slow, the earth’s rotation sluggish in its daily movement, the heat only slightly diminished by the afternoon thunderstorms that prowled the state, regular as a Swiss timepiece, bringing the deluge that caused the pavement to steam and the air to hang ever more heavily over the sweltering peninsula.

I looked out over the bay, a flat gray expanse of still water, not a puff of wind to disturb its quiet surface. Recess sat quietly in her berth, no movement, the lines holding her to the dock were slack. A brown pelican sat in repose on a piling, still, as if not daring to move for fear that the heat would overcome him. A fish jumped nearby and the pelican took no notice. A kind of torpor had settled over the island, bringing with it a stillness of body and mind. I sat and watched and tried to summon the energy to head for the beach and my morning jog.

My doorbell rang, a strangely discordant note in the early morning quiet. I looked at my watch. Not yet seven o’clock. It was either bad news or a friend who knew I was an early riser dropping by for a cup