"What happened?" Sims asked quietly.
I shifted my weight, looked at the detective. "A friend called and said Fats here wanted to see me," I said. "I came over. Fats hadn't asked to see me. We were discussing it when this guy came through the door with that shotgun leveled at us. I shot him."
Sims stared at me for a long beat. "That's a very short story. You can do better, Mr. Royal."
I was about to open my mouth when Bill Lester walked into the room. He was wearing his usual attire, but this time he had a sidearm strapped to his belt.
Sims turned. "Chief," he said, "what brings you to our side of the bridge?"
"I heard one of my citizens shot one of yours," Bill said.
"Royal's one of yours, but I got no idea who the dead guy is."
"Do you think it'd help if you looked at his face?" asked Lester.
"Might," said Sims.
He walked over to the body, pulling latex gloves out of his jacket pocket and putting them on his hands. He bent over and pulled the ski mask up off the corpse's face. He studied the dead man for a few moments, rose and said, "Don't know him. We'll run his prints through and find out who he is. Guy like this is bound to be in the system."
A voice from downstairs announced, "CSIs coming up."
Bill Lester started for the stairs. "I'll get out of your way, Detective. I'd appreciate it if you'd keep me in the loop."
"Chief," said Sims, "what's your interest in this?"
"I think this might be connected to a homicide I'm working on Longboat, and maybe to one that Bradenton PD is working from last night."
"Shit," said Sims. "About two too many jurisdictions in that mix. Why do you think they're connected?"
"Because my friend here seems to be connected to all of them." Lester was pointing at me.
Sims grinned. "I'll make sure to get a long statement from him. Do you know anything about a friend calling him this morning to tell him to come over here?"
"Yeah," said Bill. "That would be Cracker Dix. He's out in my car waiting for you to talk to him."
Sims waved his arm in my general direction, motioning me to follow him down the stairs. Fats brought up the rear.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The parking lot was crowded with police cruisers and crime-scene vans, all bearing the colors and logo of the Manatee County Sheriff. An unmarked police car was parked near the entrance. Cracker Dix was leaning against it, his arms folded, a bored look on his face.
Detective Sims and Chief Lester had stopped walking after leaving the building and were huddled in the shade of the roof overhang. Lester was talking, gesturing, Sims listening.
Fats and I went to join Cracker.
"Morning Cracker," said Fats. "That wasn't me talking to you earlier."
"That wasn't you who called me this morning?"
"Wasn't me," said Fats. "Matt like to have scared the shit out of me when he came busting into my place this morning. If I'd called, I'd have met him in the bar."
"Sure sounded like you."
"Cracker," I said. "Where's Logan?"
"Home, I guess. The chief came by my place this morning and said I needed to go with him. He didn't say anything about Logan. I thought I was being arrested again. Then he told me about you having to shoot that guy. I told him what I knew and he told me to come with him. Here we are."
I called Logan on my cell phone.
"You okay?" I asked.
"Yep, sitting here with a bowl of oatmeal, the paper, and a nine mil."
"Logan, keep an eye out. If that dead guy was after me, somebody's probably after you."
"What in the hell is going on?"
"I don't know. We must have kicked over a hornet's nest somehow. Maybe we'll know more after the cops get through comparing notes."
"Hope so," said Logan.
I hung up.
Sims and Lester came over. Sims didn't look happy. "Mr. Royal," lie said, "you have fouled my nest."
"Sorry, Detective," I said. "I sure didn't mean to."
Bill Lester was grinning. "Matt has a way of doing that. Never means to, either."
This was not helping.
The chief snorted with what passed for a laugh. "The detective wants statements from all three of you," he said. "We can do it at the Longboat station. Save you a trip downtown."
It was lunchtime when we finished with the statements. I drove Cracker back to the village and met Logan for lunch at Mar Vista.
"Somebody went to a lot of trouble to take you out," he said, when we were seated on the patio.
"There has to be a reason. Somebody tried to kill us on Coquina Beach, and now this. I wonder if somebody thinks we know something that we don't."
"Let's look at this logically. We're looking for Peggy. We talk to Varn and he's murdered. The same night somebody tries to take us out. Then we go to see Wayne Lee and within a few hours, he's killed. Next morning, they come for you again. It's got to be about Peggy."
"Not necessarily," I said. "Maybe it has something to do with the body I found at Pelican Man's."
"Has anybody been in contact with Vince Delgado?"
Vince, the curator at Pelican Man's, had left for Michigan to visit family the morning after we found the body. "He won't be back for a couple of weeks. He's in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan."
"I'm not sure it makes sense to try to tie these murders to the vulture pit guy. All you did was find a body. How would that tie you into anything that'd get people killed?"
"Suppose somebody thought I knew more about that body than I was supposed to, and they thought I was getting Varn and Wayne Lee involved in it somehow. Maybe they just took them out as a precaution, and they figured to do the same with me."
"That's a little far-fetched. The cops don't even know who the vulture pit guy is."
"Did you know that his body disappeared from the morgue?" I asked.
"You're kidding. How?"
I told him the story of the fake funeral home pick up, and the fact that the police had no leads.
"That's weird," said Logan. "Maybe you have a point. Have you discussed it with Bill Lester?"
"Not yet."
I brought Logan up to date on Debbie's research on Varn.
He shrugged. "Sounds like he was hiding out from the drug folks.
"But why show back up now? Even with a different name, you wouldn't think he'd get within a thousand miles of Florida. Not with a contract on his head."
"Did Bill ever get any info on the owner of the condo where Varn was living?"
"Sort of. I talked to him this morning about that. It seems that a Cayman Islands corporation, whose shares are held by a Cayman bank, owns the Bahamian corporation that owns the condo. Cayman banks are more secretive than those in Switzerland. Bill thinks we may have hit a dead end."
"Lovely," said Logan. "And somebody's trying to kill us."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I'd been staying in touch with Laura by e-mail, and I wanted to run some names by her. I doubted she would have ever heard of Wayne Lee, Fats Monahan, or Clyde Varn, but it was worth a try. Truth to tell, I just wanted to hear her voice.
I called her after lunch. Her husband, Jeff, answered the phone. I identified myself and asked if Laura was available.
"Matt, I've been meaning to call you all morning. Laura's missing." He was agitated, talking too loud, a little out of breath.
"What do you mean, missing?"
"I came home for lunch yesterday and she wasn't here. She hasn't been back."
"Police?"
"When she didn't come home by suppertime, I called them. Her purse was here, her cell phone, her car was in the garage. There was no note, nothing. That's not like her. If she was going out unexpectedly, she'd always leave a note."
"What are the police telling you?"
"Nothing, so far. They didn't even start looking until she didn't come home all night."