Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery (15 page)

J.D. had closed her office door, muting the cacophonous din echoing down the corridor. She was contemplating the email she’d received early that morning from Detective Brad Corbin in New Orleans. It contained a DNA analysis on Connie Pelletier and a note explaining that the ballistics people at the Orleans Parish crime lab had determined that the gun used to kill Connie was the same one that had killed Officer Tatum. The connection to the murder of a police officer spurred the lab to a frenzy of overtime, resulting in a quick turnaround on the DNA.

J.D. emailed a copy of the report to Bert Hawkins with a note asking him to compare Connie’s DNA to Linda Favereaux’s, and imploring him to let her know something as soon as possible.

Corbin’s email also told her that he had found regular cash deposits into Tatum’s bank account beginning two years before— at about the same time that he became one of the records clerks. Corbin had also checked the bank account of Tatum’s predecessor, a civilian who had held the job for twenty years. He’d received monthly cash deposits for most of that time.

J.D. looked at her watch. Almost nine. Corbin would be at work. She dialed his cell phone, identified herself, and told him she appreciated his email and the rush on the DNA. “What more can you tell me about the money going into the records clerks’ accounts?”

“Not much,” Corbin said. “They were cash deposits, probably made by the account holder. But they were regular as clockwork. During the first week of every month, Tatum’s predecessor made a five-hundred-dollar deposit. Apparently, Tatum got a raise. He was depositing a thousand bucks a month.”

“The other guy was a civilian. Why did they replace him with a cop?”

“I asked the chief about that. It seems that internal affairs had some indication that when Tatum was a patrol officer, he was on the take from some pretty bad people down in the Quarter. Apparently, just penny-ante stuff for the most part. Look the other way on small crimes like prostitution being run out of some of the bars, that sort of thing. They never could get the goods on him. The chief didn’t have the grounds to fire him, so he brought him in-house to take care of the records. He figured Tatum couldn’t get into trouble in the records room.”

“Looks like the chief was wrong,” J.D. said. “Did you follow up with the civilian to find out where the money was coming from?”

“Unfortunately, no. He died about six months ago. Heart attack.”

“Did the money going to him ever stop?”

“There were no more cash deposits after he retired.”

“Were you able to check to see if any of your other records are missing?”

“I’ve got our information technology people on that, but they may never find anything. We’ve got thousands upon thousands of files, and a few could have been taken out and not returned, and we’d never know, unless we were looking for a specific file.”

“What about the computer files? Wouldn’t the IT people be able to find out if any of those were erased?”

“They’re trying to reconstruct that now. We’ll know more in a couple of days.”

“Thanks, Brad. I’ve sent your DNA results on Connie to our ME for comparison with my victim’s. I’ll let you know what turns up.”

J.D. hung up and went to her computer. There were still no reports of any activity on James Favereaux’s credit cards. She dug through her inbox. Junk mail, memos about nothing important, and a report from the Sarasota County crime lab on Favereaux’s car that had been found at the Tampa airport.

J.D. groaned out loud. The report was dated the Wednesday before. It’d probably shown up in her inbox on Thursday morning while she and Matt were en route to New Orleans. She had forgotten about it.

The report was detailed, giving a description of the meticulous search of every part of the vehicle. Nothing out of the ordinary was found. Just the typical detritus found in most cars after they’d been driven awhile. There was a McDonald’s bag on the floorboard of the back seat. It contained, among other things, the remains of a meal and a receipt for a Big Mac, fries, and a Diet Coke, bought at an all-night McDonald’s on Cortez Road at twenty-five minutes past midnight on Monday morning, the night of his wife’s murder. Was this before or after she died?

J.D. remembered that the ME’s assistant could only give an approximation of the time of death. She pulled the autopsy report from the file and found the estimated time of death. Midnight, Sunday, give or take an hour. She thought about it. If Linda had been killed early in that two-hour window, James would have had time to kill her and get to the McDonald’s shortly after midnight. If she had died late in the window, James would have had time to get his burger and drive home and kill his wife. Was he that devoid of humanity, that big a monster? It didn’t fit with the fact of his philanthropy to USF, the endowed chair in African-American studies.

She went back to the forensics report and found the mileage that showed on the car’s odometer at the Tampa airport parking garage. She toyed with that, but since she had no way of knowing what the mileage was when he pulled into McDonald’s, there was no way to determine if James had driven straight from the restaurant to the airport or had made a detour to the key to kill his wife.

It hit her like a lightning bolt. Cameras. The town had recently installed cameras near the bridges at either end of the island, part of a system known as Automatic License Recognition System. The cameras took pictures of the license plates of any vehicle that entered the island or left it. The plate numbers were instantaneously fed to a computer that checked the plates against those listed for stolen cars or ones owned by people who had suspended or revoked licenses, or a myriad of other things. A number of islanders had complained about Big Brother, but the cameras had been installed and were being tested. Maybe they caught James Favereaux’s plates.

She called Sharkey and asked how to find out the information she needed. He said he’d run it for her if she could give him a plate number. She gave it to him and in a few seconds, he said, “Here it is. He left the island on the Longboat Pass Bridge at eleven-fifty on Sunday night and returned at twelve-forty-five in the morning. He left again via the Longboat Pass Bridge at twenty minutes after one.”

“Okay. So he has a Big Mac attack and goes to McDonald’s. He crosses the bridge at eleven-fifty, takes about thirty-five minutes to get to the restaurant, order his meal, and start home. He comes back across the bridge twenty minutes after he pays for the meal. Not much traffic that time of night, and it would be about a fifteen to twenty-minute drive either way.”

“Sounds about right,” Sharkey said.

“So what about the fifteen-minute gap? There was thirty-five minutes between the time he left the island and the time he paid for the meal, but it took him only twenty minutes to get home.”

“Maybe he stopped for gas. Maybe the Cortez Bridge was up on his way to McDonald’s and he had to wait for a boat to pass. Any number of things could have delayed him.”

“You’re right. Thanks, Martin.” She hung up and thought some more. It didn’t make sense that James killed Linda, went to McDonald’s, and then returned to the island. When he came back from McDonald’s, he crossed the bridge at twelve forty-five, and would have driven the ten minutes farther to his house. That would have put him at home within the kill window. She knew those windows were not very precise. They could be off by an hour or more depending on a lot of variables.

Still, Favereaux could have murdered Linda, left his house at ten minutes after one, and crossed the bridge at one-twenty. The time frame fit. Did something happen, a violent argument perhaps, within the fifteen minutes or so between the time he arrived at the house and the time he left?

What happened in that fifteen minutes? What was the murder weapon and where was it now? Probably in the Gulf of Mexico. Something didn’t fit. A man leaves his house, drives a half-hour to McDonald’s at midnight, eats his sandwich in the car on the way home, kills his wife, and leaves again. She shook her head. Could she assume that he ate the sandwich? Did it make any difference? The remains of the sandwich wrapping were in the car. The sandwich was gone. Maybe he threw it out the window, but why would he do that? Suppose he wanted to establish a time line by leaving the time stamped receipt in the car. Did he know about the cameras on the bridge? A lot of islanders weren’t paying attention to them yet, so maybe it wasn’t something he thought about. If he’d thought about it, he would have known that the cameras would have established his time line.

If he knew about the cameras and planned to kill his wife, why take the chance that somebody could figure out the time line that put him in the house during the period when the murder took place? And if he were just trying to establish a time line with the McDonald’s receipt, why not stop for gas at the 7-Eleven store at Cortez Road and Palma Sola Boulevard? It would have been closer, and the gas receipt would have served the same purpose.

She had no answers, but her growling stomach was telling her that it was lunchtime. Her phone rang. Bert Hawkins. “I don’t know what you’re working on, J.D.,” he said, “but the DNA report from New Orleans makes things interesting.”

“How so?”

“The dead woman in New Orleans was, without a doubt, the mother of Linda Favereaux.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was time for me to have a conversation with Robert Shorter, the man with anger issues who had left his fingerprints in Bannister’s condo. I drove twenty miles south to a Siesta Key condo that sat on the bayshore near the southern end of the island. I knew from my search of the Sarasota County property appraiser’s website that the building in which Shorter lived was only about five years old, but it was not wearing well. Stucco was peeling from the underlying concrete block, leaving bare patches in the walls. The wooden trim appeared to be rotting away, the landscaping was minimal, and neighboring condo buildings nearing completion were encroaching too closely on Shorter’s building and severely limiting the view of the bay. It made me wonder if someone had greased the palms of a building official to get the necessary permits to build.

The man who answered the door was squat, about five feet six and two hundred pounds. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties. His belly, not quite covered by a thin t-shirt, overflowed the waistband of his shorts. He was wearing flip-flops and a scowl. “Whadda you want?” he asked.

I stuck out my hand. “I’m Matt Royal, Mr. Shorter. I’m a lawyer—” I got no further.

“Get the fuck outta here.” He started to close the door.

I put my hand out to stop the door. He pulled it quickly, opening it all the way. “I’ll kick your slimy ass,” he said.

I smiled. “I guess the anger management classes didn’t take.”

He threw a punch. I saw it coming. There was a split second there when his eyes squinted and his right shoulder twitched and the fist started upward. I reacted instantly, old army training kicking in. I stepped back and his fist whizzed past my chin, missing completely. His body followed his hand, the momentum twisting his torso to his left, opening up his right rib cage. I reacted reflexively, no thought, no debate about the wisdom of my response, or the consequences. Just action. I jabbed him with a left, hard, just below his right ribs. I’d learned long ago that when you punch somebody, you don’t aim for the place you’re planning to hit. You aim several inches beyond, so that when you connect, it’s with all the power you can generate. That stopped his forward movement and turned him toward me. I followed up with a right to his solar plexus. He went down, gasping for breath, falling into his apartment.

I followed and closed the door behind me. I stood over him, waiting for him to catch his breath, hoping for a return to lucidity, and feeling a bit sorry for the man. I had reacted to his assault without thinking, but it was never a contest, and I probably didn’t have to hit him the second time. He looked kind of pitiful lying there on the floor, and I felt like a bully.

His breathing became shallower, his eyes focusing on me. “Who are you?”

“I was telling you when you went all Rambo on me. I’m Matt Royal. I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing the woman accused of killing Nate Bannister. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot. Can we start over?”

“You bastard,” he said. “I ought to call the cops.” He still had some fight left in him, or maybe just anger. He was lying on the floor, seething.

“Who do you think the cops will believe? A scumbag arrested twice for assault and battery, or an icon of the Bar, a lawyer of impeccable standing, the epitome of all that’s right and good in our society.”

“You have a pretty high opinion of yourself,” he said.

“Alas, I may be the only person in the whole world with that opinion, but I’m certainly not a scumbag.”

“Are you calling me a scumbag?” The feistiness was back.

“No, sir. I’m just pointing out how you might appear to an officer of the law.”

“Okay. Tell me why I ought to talk to you. You sucker punched me.”

“You swung first.”

“Yeah, but I missed.”

“Let’s look at the situation we’re in, Mr. Shorter,” I said. “I can just kick the shit out of you and call an ambulance, or we can sit down and have a rational discussion, just like regular human beings.”

“You think you can take me?”

“I already did.”

“You’ve got a point,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Get up off the floor and we’ll talk.”

“You’re not going to hit me again, are you?”

“Do I have to?” I asked.

“No. We’re okay.”

He pulled himself up and sat in a chair, massaging his side. “You pack a hell of a punch,” he said. “For a lawyer.”

“Why did you swing at me?”

“I don’t like lawyers.”

“Most people don’t,” I said, “but generally they’re at least civil to me.”

“I didn’t kill that bastard, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Why would I think that?”

“You’re here, and I was arrested a couple of years ago for taking a swing at Bannister.”

“Why did you go after him?”

“Did you take a look at this place?”