CHAPTER ELEVEN
The file was not large, not for a murder investigation. J.D. explained there just wasn’t much to go on. Very little evidence. There were statements from witnesses, but none of them were even sure where the shot came from. They had been on the beach and saw young Desmond fall backward when the slug tore into his chest.
J.D. and I were sitting in my living room, the file spread out on the coffee table. I was sipping from a can of Miller Lite and the detective was easing into a bottle of Chardonnay, one glass at a time. It was a little after five in the afternoon. The sun was moving toward the west, toward the sea into which it would soon sink. I looked at my watch. We had about three hours until sunset. The day was clear with a smattering of clouds hanging low over the Gulf. It would be a spectacular sunset, and I wanted to be sitting on the deck of the Hilton watching it.
“You got time for dinner at the Hilton tonight?” I asked. “We could sit on the deck and watch the sunset.”
“Sure. Just us and all the other tourists.”
I smiled. I loved our sunsets and she always kidded me about it. Said it was something for the tourists to enjoy. I took the position that sunsets were tonics for beach bums and since I was a beach bum we had to watch the sun set.
I pulled some photographs from one of the folders. They were grainy, black-and-white, some kind of security photos probably.
“From the elevator at the Grand Beach condos,” J.D. said.
“You’re pretty sure that’s where the shot came from?”
“Yes. It’s the tallest building in that area and we found a filtered cigarette butt and some scuff marks on the flat roof at about where the shot had to come from.”
“Did you find the slug that killed him?”
“Yes. It went right through him and hit the sand. We found it with a metal detector.”
“Did the bullet tell you anything?”
“Only that it was a thirty caliber.”
“Anything else?”
“No. And we couldn’t pull any DNA from the butt. We don’t even know if it belonged to the shooter. We’re thinking it didn’t, because it’d been on the roof long enough that the weather had degraded any DNA that might have been there.”
“You’re sure you’ve got the right building?”
“Pretty sure. The crime-scene techs were able to figure a pretty good trajectory of the bullet. It fits with the Grand Beach and the scuff marks we found on the roof.”
“I’m not sure I understand the significance of the scuff marks.”
“We’d had a gully washer the night before. Lots of rain. It would have washed off any marks that had been on the roof. The new ones had to have been made that morning and the maintenance guys were the only ones with keys to the roof. Neither of them had been up there that morning.”
I held up the photographs. “Elevator surveillance?”
“Yes. Not much help.”
I looked closely at the pictures. Each one had a time stamp in the bottom right corner. Several were taken about an hour before the second group. I separated them out according to the time stamp. I saw a man wearing a light windbreaker jacket made of some dark material, jeans, running shoes, and a ball cap pulled low on his forehead. He never looked at the camera. In all the pictures, he had his head down.
“He knew about the camera,” I said.
“Yes. We never got a shot of his face.”
“He’s carrying a briefcase in all of them.”
“We’re assuming that was a container for his rifle. He could break it down and it would fit perfectly in the case.”
I looked more closely at the pictures. “Are you sure this is a man?”
“Because he’s small?”
“Yes. It could be a woman.”
“I thought of that, but it doesn’t seem too plausible. Women usually aren’t professional killers. They have to have some other motive. Jealously, sometimes money, something that rattles their system and makes them angry enough to kill. Besides, most women wouldn’t be trained snipers, and we think this guy had to have been well trained in order to hit the target at that range.”
I sat quietly for a moment, staring at the pictures. “How did the killer know that Jim Desmond would be jogging on the beach that morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you considered the possibility that the murder was random? That the killer just went up on that rooftop with the idea of killing somebody, anybody, and Jim came trotting up?”
“We considered that. But there have been no other killings in the past three years in Florida that match the pattern here. I think if it was just random, we’d have had more murders just like this one. A serial killer can’t stop with just one.”
“What about the killings on Dulcimer?” I asked.
“No connection that we can see.”
“What if the sheer randomness of all the killings is the connection?”
J.D. shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. One was a long-range shooting and the others were knifings. The captain was killed by someone skilled in martial arts. Either that, or the killer was very strong. Up close and brutal. And we’re pretty sure there had to be a team of at least two people working the boat. One to take care of the captain and another to kill the passengers.”
“And you never found any connections between any of the four dead people.”
“None.”
“If Jim’s killing wasn’t random, then the killer must have known that Jim would be on the beach that morning. Any thoughts?”
J.D. nodded. “Desmond had been at the Hilton for three days before his wedding. He jogged the beach every morning at about the same time. We think the killer was betting on his being at the same place at pretty much the same time on the day of the murder.”
“Do you think there was anything significant about the fact that he was murdered on the day after his wedding?”
“I thought about that, but decided that it was probably a coincidence. If the new wife had been part of it, it would have made sense for her to wait until she was married to have him killed. Then she would inherit.”
“Jim came from a wealthy family. Maybe that was a motive.”
“Meredith, the wife, has more money than the whole Desmond family. Her grandfather was richer than I can imagine and set up a trust fund for Meredith. She came into control of it on her twenty-first birthday. Even if she inherited the entire Desmond fortune, it would only be a drop in the bucket of the money she already has. As they say, that dog won’t hunt.”
“I guess not. Didn’t you tell me that the couple was leaving that afternoon for a honeymoon in Europe?”
“They were.”
“Then if the shooter missed Jim that day, if Jim had not jogged, or gone on the street or the other way on the beach, the killer would have missed him.”
“I guess so,” she said.
“But if the killing wasn’t random, then there must have been a contingency plan.”
She was quiet for a moment, sipping her wine. I heard a dog bark in the distance, the screech of one of the peacocks that run wild in the Village, an outboard engine chugging at idle speed up the lagoon where I lived. “Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe?”
“The Grand Beach condo building takes up the whole area between the beach and Gulf of Mexico Drive. There are no obstructions on the roof that would have kept the shooter from moving across it. There are a bunch of air-conditioning units up there, but nothing that would stop him from moving from the front of the building to the back. If Desmond had come up the sidewalk on Gulf of Mexico Drive, all the killer had to do was move to that side of the building.”
“What if Jim had jogged north on the beach?”
“I see your point. How would the killer have gotten to him? And if he hadn’t gotten him that day, then Desmond would presumably have been out of reach in Europe. That’s an argument for randomness.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe there was another shooter on the roof of another building to the north of the Hilton.”
She sat quietly for a beat. “Damn. We never thought about that. There’re some buildings to the north that could have hidden a sniper.”
“If you’re going north from the Hilton,” I said, “there are several low-rise buildings, no more than three or four stories high, until you get to the Tropical Condos. That building is eight stories. There are no others that tall all the way up the island.”
She pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll get a crime-scene unit up there now. It’s probably too late, but we’ve got to check it out.”
She made arrangements to meet the crime-scene people at the Tropical in thirty minutes. “If your theory is correct,” she said, “there had to be at leasttwo shooters.”
“I know.”
“I’ll meet you later at the Hilton,” she said, and was outthe door.