Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery (2 page)

Selena smiled, ruefully. “I get that question a lot,” she said. “I was born here. My parents were illegal but they were given amnesty back in the eighties and now have green cards. I’m as much American as you are, Detective.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You didn’t. I know you had to ask.”

“Do you know where Mr. Favereaux is?”

“No.”

“Was he here on Friday?”

“He was here when I left work on Friday afternoon.”

“Okay, Selena. That’s all I have for now. I’m going to need your contact information, address, phone number, that sort of thing. Where do you live?”

“East Bradenton.”

“I’ll get an officer to drive you home.”

“Thanks, but I’ll take the bus. I don’t want my neighbors seeing me getting out of a police car.”

CHAPTER TWO

“Good morning, Matt.”

“Ah, Longboat Key’s best detective.”

“And the only one.”

“And the most beautiful.”

“I’d normally love to hear your sweet nothings, but I caught a murder case this morning.”

“I told you it would have been better had you stayed at my place last night.”

“Yeah, but I needed some sleep. You tend to keep me awake.”

“I thought you liked it.”

“Your snoring?”

“Oh, that.”

The voice coming through my phone was that of Jennifer Diane Duncan, known as J.D., the police detective whom I loved. “Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m standing in front of that huge new house on the beach, the one they built a couple of years back when they tore down that little hotel just south of Pattigeorge’s Restaurant. Somebody murdered the lady of the house last night.”

“Who’s the victim?”

“Linda Favereaux. You know her?”

“I met her once at Pattigeorge’s. Sammy introduced me to her and her husband. I never saw them again. Any idea who killed her?”

“Not yet. The husband seems to be away. We’ll see.”

“I guess that means we’re not going to Egmont today.”

“Afraid not. I’ll see you tonight.”

“My place?”

“Yes. I’ll bring my earplugs.” She hung up.

This was supposed to be a day off for J.D. We’d planned to make a picnic lunch and take my boat to Egmont Key and sit on the beach all day. Egmont is a state park accessible only by boat. It’s about a ten-mile run from my house, and with the gorgeous weather we were having, it would have been a salubrious day.

My name is Matt Royal. I’m a lawyer and mostly retired. Other than handling the occasional legal matter for a friend who couldn’t afford a lawyer, I stay away from the courts and the practice of law. I was once a soldier, went to war and then to law school. I’d been a trial lawyer in Orlando, and when I grew tired of the rat race, I sold all my possessions and moved to Longboat Key. I’m young for retirement, but if I’m careful, the money I have will last the rest of my life.

My home is a cottage on the bayside of a wonderful little island about ten miles long and half a mile wide at its broadest point. Longboat Key lies off the southwest coast of Florida, south of Tampa Bay, about halfway down the peninsula, bordered on the east by Sarasota Bay and on the west by the Gulf of Mexico. I live in Longbeach Village, the oldest inhabited part of the island, if you don’t count the Indians who lived there hundreds of years ago. The village sits on the north end of Longboat Key and is populated by the best people on earth. Most of us spend our time in a sort of modified stupor, enjoying our days on the beach or fishing or boating. Our evenings are spent in restaurants and bars with our friends and neighbors. Some of the village people still work for a living, and we have an eclectic group ranging from industry moguls to carpenters and commercial fishermen. Everybody fits in.

J.D. Duncan had come into my life about a year and a half before, when she was hired as Longboat Key’s only detective. She’d worked for the Miami-Dade Police Department for fifteen years and risen to assistant homicide commander. Her mother had lived on Longboat Key, and when she died and left her condo to J.D., the detective decided to give up life in the fast lane that was Miami and move permanently to Longboat Key. My buddy Bill Lester, the chief of police on the island, had jumped at the chance to hire her.

J.D. and I had become friends and, more recently, lovers. She had changed my world and made living on an island paradise even better than I had thought possible. But she was a cop, and sometimes that meant that she had to take on ugly jobs.

I spend most of my days working at being a beach bum. It isn’t hard. Our island is full of people who have adapted to life on the key and spend their days lying on the beach, fishing, boating, and drinking in the bars. When I first moved to the key, I thought I might eventually be able to ease out of the fast lane and work my way into that island lifestyle. It took me all of two days to do so, and I became a confirmed beach bum. This life is a lot simpler than that of a trial lawyer. I was happy and satisfied and surrounded by friends. J.D. was the icing on the cake.

I called my buddy Logan Hamilton, and we loaded a cooler with ice and beer, stowed rods and reels aboard my boat,
Recess
, a twenty-eight foot Grady-White, and headed for the fishing grounds. I’d once read a t-shirt that said, “Longboat Key is an island of drinkers who have a fishing problem.” I always thought that pretty much captured the essence of our key. As the Bard said, “Truth will out.”

CHAPTER THREE

Officer Steve Carey looked agitated as he walked across the living room toward J.D. “Robin Hartill is outside.”

“Crap. What does she want?”

“What do you think? She wants to talk to you. She’s got her notebook and camera.”

“Okay. Tell her I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

Robin and J.D. were friends and often had a beer together at Tiny’s, a small bar on the north end of the key. But Robin was a reporter for the local weekly newspaper, the
Longboat Observer,
and J.D. had hoped to keep the press at bay for at least a few hours.

She went to the front door. “Hey, Robin. You sure got here quick. I was hoping to keep this under wraps for a bit. How did you find me out?”

Robin laughed. “The island telegraph. Gwen Mooney was on her way to work at Doc Klauber’s when she saw your car and a couple of cruisers parked out front. She called and told me something was up. What’s up?”

“Can we talk off the record for right now?”

“Will I get anything out of you that I can use today for our Internet edition?”

“Sure,” J.D. said, “just not now. I need a few hours before this gets out. I’ll call you this afternoon and cut you loose before the local TV stations go on air for their six o’clock news.”

“Sounds fair. What’s going on?”

“The woman who lives here, Linda Favereaux, is dead. It looks like murder. Did you know her?”

“No, but Gwen did. Said she was an asshole, excuse my language.”

J.D. smiled. If Gwen didn’t like someone, then he or she joined the list of assholes that Gwen maintained in her head. The list was fairly long. “Do you know why Gwen thought that?”

“No,” Robin said, “but you know it doesn’t take a whole lot to get on that list.”

“That’s for sure. I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll call you this afternoon.”

The morning dragged on. The forensic people were going through the large house with great deliberation. The body had been taken to the medical examiner’s morgue. The autopsy would get underway quickly, as it always did when the victim came from the high-dollar precincts. There was no sign of the husband. J.D. searched his bedroom for any indication of where he might have gone. She found nothing. A laptop computer sat on a desk in the corner of the room, but it was password protected. J.D. called the police department geek and asked him to come over and pick it up. See if he could get past the security.

It was nearing noon when J.D. left the crime scene. She needed to get back and start the paperwork. Her phone rang just as she was turning into the station at mid-key.

“Detective, this is Dan Murphy at the ME’s office. We ran the fingerprints on Mrs. Favereaux. There’s a problem.”

“Uh, oh. What?”

“The prints don’t belong to Mrs. Favereaux. They came back as those of a woman named Darlene Pelletier. She was arrested twenty years ago for shoplifting in New Orleans. That’s the reason she’s in the system.”

“Maybe Pelletier was Linda Favereaux’s maiden name,” said J.D. “Maybe Darlene is a first name and Linda is her middle name.”

“Could be. I thought you’d like to know.”

“I do, Dan. Have y’all finished with the autopsy yet?”

“Dr. Hawkins is working on that now.”

“Thanks for the call. I’ll see what I can find on Darlene Pelletier.”

J.D. parked in front of the station and was getting out of her car when her phone rang again. “Good morning, J.D. This is Harry Robson.”

“Hello, Harry. How are things on the mainland?” Robson was a detective with the Sarasota Police Department.

“A little hectic right now. Do you know a man by the name of Nate Bannister?”

“Never heard of him. Why?”

“He’s one of your citizens, I think. At least that’s what his driver’s license says. Apparently, he’s been living on the mainland, in a condo in one of those new high rises on Main Street. We found him dead this morning. Or at least his housekeeper found him in the living room of his condo and called us.”

“Foul play?”

“Gunshot to the head. Left temple.”

“Suicide?”

“Not unless he got rid of the gun between the time he shot himself and the time he died.”

“Well, as a trained detective, I’d begin to think it was murder. Good luck on the case. I’ll ask around and see if anybody knows him.”

“He’s pretty well known, I think. The Longboat Key address on his driver’s license is on Gulf of Mexico Drive, but he’d been living in a condo downtown for at least the last couple of months. He just moved into the condo two weeks ago. I’m told he has an estranged wife somewhere, maybe on the key. Do you have time to check out his house and see if it looks lived in?”

“And notify the wife if she’s still there?”

“That would be super.” Death notifications were the hardest part of a cop’s job and J.D. hated doing them, but Harry had done her some good turns, and she owed him.

J.D. made a U-turn in the police parking lot and drove several blocks north to a large bayside home. She rang the bell, waited, and then knocked on the door. No answer. She scrawled a note on the back of a business card asking that Mrs. Bannister call her as soon as possible. She stuck the card between the door and the jamb and left.

* * *

The police station was busy. Three people in shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops were sitting in the waiting room, looking anxious. A uniformed officer was sitting quietly in another chair. He nodded to J.D. Iva, the civilian receptionist, was on the phone, and waved a finger as the detective came through the door leading from the parking lot. Deputy Chief Martin Sharkey was coming toward her as she walked down the hall toward her office. “What’s that all about in the waiting room?” J.D. asked.

“Their car was broken into yesterday, and they want to file a report for insurance purposes.”

“Where was the car?”

“In the airport in Minneapolis.”

“You’re kidding. Why didn’t they talk to the police up there?”

Sharkey laughed. “They said they were running late for their flight and one of them had to go back to the car to retrieve something. The driver’s side window was smashed out, but he had to get back to the gate.”

J.D. shook her head. “Was anything missing?”

“The guy didn’t take time to look.”

“Good luck with that one,” J.D. said, as she moved on.

As she passed Chief Bill Lester’s office, he called to her. “Got time to bring me up to date on that murder?”

J.D. went into his office and took a seat. “Not much to report,” she said. “The husband’s in the wind. No one’s seen him since Friday. The back of her head was bashed in. That’s probably the cause of death. She was nude, and there were no other marks on the body. She probably fell face first, but the body was on its back on the floor, so somebody must have turned her over before we got there.”

“Sexual assault?”

“No obvious signs, but she’s on Doc Hawkins’ table now. We’ll know more this afternoon.”

“Any gut feelings?”

“You mean other than that the husband did it?”

The chief laughed. “The odds are usually pretty good on that.”

“We’ll see. Do you know a man named Nate Bannister?”

The chief’s face clouded a bit. “Yeah. I know him. A real piece of work. Why?”

“I got a call a few minutes ago from Harry Robson at Sarasota PD, asking about him. It seems that somebody found Bannister dead in a condo downtown this morning.”

“That’s not going to be any great loss,” Lester said.

“I didn’t know him. What was his problem?”

“He was just a mean son of a bitch. He was a developer here on the key until we got built out, and then he started developing on the mainland. Condos, mostly. He was rough on his subcontractors. Lots of complaints about shoddy work from the people who bought his places.

“We had to pull him off his wife a couple of times when he beat the hell out of her. She refused to press charges both times. She finally kicked him out a couple of months ago, filed for divorce, and got a restraining order against him.”

“Where is she now?” asked J.D.

“She’s still living in the family home on the bay.”

“Any children?”

“No.”

“How old was he?”

“Forty-five, maybe. Maggie, the wife, is about ten years younger.”

“Harry asked me to check the house and see if anybody’s there and to deliver the death notice. Nobody was home. I’ll try later.”

“I’ll go,” Lester said. “I’ve known Maggie for a long time.”

“Thanks, Chief. That’s a load off.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The call came at three in the morning, a time when a ringing phone can only mean trouble or tragedy, or maybe both. I fumbled in the dark, finally grabbing the receiver and answering.

“Matt,” the voice on the other end said, “this is Bill Lester. The FDLE just arrested Abby.”