Damaged (Maggie O'Dell #8)

“What floor are you on?”


“Platt, I swear if you ask me what I’m wearing, I’m hanging up.”

“Just go out on your balcony.”

Maggie hesitated. The balcony door was open. She had wanted to listen to the sound of the waves. She walked out onto the small balcony.

“Now look down on the beach,” Platt told her.

There he was waving up at her.

“Buy you a drink at the Tiki Bar,” he said.





CHAPTER 40





Maggie spent the rest of the afternoon back in her hotel room. Outside, the parking lots were filled with people packing up their belongings and getting ready to evacuate the beach. Most of the businesses were closed, the owners starting to board up windows and doors. However, surfers were still riding the waves. Some of the restaurants remained open. The Tiki Bar had a huge sign out front offering free drinks till they ran out.

The hotel manager had told Maggie he’d stay until the authorities closed the bridge. Maggie and Wurth were welcome to stay until then. Almost all of the other guests had checked out. Maggie suspected, from the absolute quiet, that she was the only one on her entire floor.

Sheriff Clayton had been gracious enough to drive her back to Pensacola Beach after the autopsy.

“Sorry, I can’t be of much help,” the sheriff had told her. “I’ll contact Vince Coffland’s next of kin. But anything else will have to wait until after the storm.”

Maggie asked him to give her cell-phone number to Coffland’s widow. If she wanted to talk about the details of her husband’s disappearance, Maggie would be interested in listening. Clayton agreed.

Now, as she sipped a Diet Pepsi and waited for her laptop to boot up, she kept glancing at her cell phone. No calls. No messages … from anyone. She had the TV turned on to the Weather Channel but muted. Every once in a while she glanced at the onscreen graphics of Isaac’s progression. She noticed one of the weather reporters, handsome, shaved head, nice legs, standing in front of the Gulf with its emerald-green rolling waves. She read the crawl: JIM CANTORE REPORTING FROM PENSACOLA.

“Oh Charlie, he’s here.” She smiled as she started jotting down things she wanted to remember.

Clayton had been correct about the severed hands and the fingerprints. None on file. They would need to wait for DNA to see if any of the hands belonged to Vince Coffland. A simple blood test had already found the foot to be someone else’s. Vince Coffland was type B. The foot’s blood was type O.

On the hotel notepad she wrote:

Coffland disappeared July 10

Port St. Lucie over 600 miles (land miles) away

Foot: metal debris; belonged to a 2nd victim

Plastic: heavy ply (commercial use?)

Fishing cooler: Why?

Tie-down: man-made synthetic rope, blue and yellow fibers



Had the foot belonged to Vince Coffland, Maggie was ready with an explanation. She’d heard of storm victims—victims exposed out in the open—sometimes ending up with an odd assortment of items like pieces of insulation, asbestos, vinyl siding, and glass embedded in their skin.

She’d asked Dr. Tomich if she could borrow one of the pieces of metal. Now she fingered it, still encased inside its plastic bag. She set it on the desktop in front of her. It was definitely metal, bent and distorted. But where did it come from?

Perhaps the metal was something that had gotten ripped apart during the hurricane-force winds. If the foot didn’t belong to Coffland, was it possible it belonged to another person who had gone missing during Hurricane Gaston?

She added to her list:

Check other victims missing after HG



Maggie had handed over to Sheriff Clayton the label—or what she suspected was a label—that she found inside the cooler. However, she had memorized the faded printing and written it down exactly as it had appeared. She pulled out her copy and laid it on the desk beside the metal fragment.

AMET

DESTIN: 082409

#8509000029



She believed the second line was “destination” and a date, 082409, which translated to August 24, 2009. She had no idea what AMET was. Probably an acronym but for what? The last line might be a serial number. It didn’t, however, match the defibrillator.

Maggie glanced at the television and the map that Jim Cantore was showing of the Florida Panhandle. Then she did a double take. Off to the right side of Pensacola was Destin, Florida. Was it possible the second line of the label wasn’t meant to be an abbreviation for destination, but rather Destin, Florida?