Collateral Damage A Matt Royal Mystery - By H. Terrell Griffin Page 0,4

be any casualties, except for the captain. He’d apparently had a heart attack or a stroke and died at the helm. The investigator said he’d call me the next day and come by and get a statement.

It was midnight and my friend Debbie the bartender was trying to kick us out. Logan and I had been joined by a few other villagers who were interested in all the commotion out on the waterway. We filled them in on what we knew, and after I talked to the investigator, they all knew as much as I did.

Logan paid our tab and we walked down to the dock and boarded Recess. I pulled away from the dock and threaded my way around the sand-bars and idled toward my cottage. We could see the activity over on the Intracoastal where two small towboats were hooking up to the bow of Dulcimer. They’d see her home.

“I wonder why they don’t just take her home under her own power,” I said.

“Gotta pay the towboat captains anyway. Might as well make them work for their money.”

“Probably makes it easier to justify calling them out in the first place.”

“The bureaucratic mind,” said Logan, “never fails to amaze me.”

I slid Recess into her home berth, tied her off, and told Logan I’d wait until morning to wash her down and flush the engines. “I need sleep.”

“Me too,” he said. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”

Logan went to his car, and I opened the back patio sliding glass door and went in to bed.

My cell phone rang, waking me from a troubling dream of soldiers falling off boats into subtropical waters. Daylight was creeping through my windows overlooking the bay. I looked at my watch. A few minutes after six. I rolled over and picked up the phone.

“Matt,” a soft voice said “this is J.D. May I come by with the Coast Guard investigator and talk to you?”

“Sure. When?” I was puzzled as to why she was calling me so early.

“Now. There’s been a bad turn on the Dulcimer grounding.”

I sat up in bed, a little surprised. It had seemed pretty routine last night.

“Give me ten minutes to jump in the shower and put some coffee on.”

“We’ll be there in fifteen,” she said, and hung up.

J. D. Duncan was my friend and Longboat Key’s only detective. She’d spent fifteen 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.

“We’ve got two murder victims on Dulcimer,” J.D. said.

That brought me upright. “Murder victims?”

“Yes,” said Jacobi, his voice rumbling in the deep register I’d heard on the phone. “They were both knifed and thrown overboard.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to get my head around this new piece of