“We’re all here,” she assured him.
He thanked her and hung up. He headed first to his office, sinking into his chair. The desk sergeant gave him slips with all the calls they had received from the local media, so he quickly wrote up a statement for what they knew thus far and set the desk sergeant to returning the calls with the information. It was a mistake to tell media “no comment.”
They would make up their own comments. And Key West was certainly small enough for everyone out there to know that the body of a local had been found on the Merlin property.
Liam’s first order of business was to find Chris Vargas. He and Gary White had been caught together seeking some small item to steal from the Merlin estate.
A walk down Duval Street and a few questions to old conchs and fresh water conchs might help him find out where Vargas had last been seen. Bartholomew, who had been pacing quietly beside him, said, “You know, she saw me today. Or she heard me… Felt me, at least.”
“What are you talking about?” Liam asked.
“Kelsey Donovan. She was rather breaking my heart at the cemetery. I touched her cheek. I whispered to her. She heard me,” Bartholomew said. “You should tell her that I exist.”
“Just like that. Hey…you sensed something at the cemetery. Don’t worry. It’s Bartholomew, the ghost of a pirate—”
“Good Lord, when will you stop saying that? I was a privateer,” Bartholomew interrupted, deeply aggravated. “Over and over again, I must explain this fact!”
“I’m sorry. Truly sorry,” Liam said, almost as aggravated. “You look like a pirate.”
“Then every man of my decade looked like a pirate, as well,” Bartholomew said.
“All right, so we associate the fashion of the era with pirates,” Liam said, distracted. “Bartholomew, I have a dead body on my hands. I think the fellow was murdered, because I don’t think he headed out to the Merlin property to die of natural causes or to commit suicide. We need to concentrate on the murder.”
“You don’t know that it was a murder. You don’t know that Cutter Merlin was murdered,” Bartholomew protested.
Liam stopped in the street and stared at him.
“All right, so…there is something going on at the house, and it certainly looks as if the fellow, Gary White, was murdered,” Bartholomew said. “But I think you’re overlooking someone who can really help you solve everything that’s going on.”
“Oh? Who?”
Bartholomew looked at him seriously. “Kelsey Donovan,” he said.
Liam paused, hands on his hips. “Okay, Bartholomew, when you think that she has actually seen you, we’ll bring her on the paranormal side. Otherwise, I can’t just ask her to go into a trance or something and connect with the ghosts of her dead grandfather, her mother—or Gary White!”
“She’ll see me soon enough,” Bartholomew assured him. “It would be easier if you just told her about me first, but…”
Liam groaned and kept walking. He realized a moment later that the privateer was no longer following him.
He stopped by a coffee shop and questioned a man who hired Vargas now and then for cleanup work. The man shrugged and told him that when Vargas wasn’t working, he usually spent his days on U.S. 1 with an inventive sign so that he could beg cash from visitors.
Liam drove around the island and found that Vargas was doing exactly that—he had a sign that proclaimed him a Desert Storm vet, a family man with kids to feed, who was just out of luck.
Vargas saw him, and paled.
Liam parked his car and walked over to the sidewalk by the light where Vargas had been begging.
“You gonna arrest me?” Vargas asked.
“I should.”
“I’ll quit right now,” Vargas said earnestly. “It’s just been bad lately, you know? I mean, stockbrokers are out of work, you know?”
“Yes, it’s been a bad time,” Liam agreed.
“So…you gonna give me a break?” Vargas asked.
“I need to know about the last time you were with Gary White,” Liam told him.
Vargas looked puzzled and scratched his head. “Gary? Well, we went to the Merlin place together—but you know that. You saw us together. Why? Oh, Lord, what did Gary do?”
“Gary is dead,” Liam told him.
“Dead?” Vargas said, horrified.
“Dead.”
“Dead—as in deceased?” Vargas said.
“Very. He’s been dead for days—I don’t know how many,” Liam said.
“Oh, God!” Vargas said. He put his hands on the sides of his head and sank down to the sidewalk. “Dead…how? Where?”
“I found him on the Merlin estate. I don’t know how he died yet. The medical examiner is going to have to answer that question,” Liam said. “I need to know the last time you saw him.”