My plan was to drive back to Ponce Inlet, pick up Max and head to our river cabin and try to assess what to do next. There, at least, I could be somewhat isolated from the news media, let calm return to Ponce Marina, and have a more secure fortress to lie low in the event I was still being followed. I had no idea where Courtney was, where she’d been, or where she was going. I thought I was close to finding her before all hell broke loose, before a man was shot between the eyes, and one of his trailers became scorched earth with the charred remains of two bodies under the rubble.
The one thing I was certain of was that the two dead guys didn’t follow me to the Fish Camp. They knew about it probably very close to the time that I figured out that Courtney might be hiding there. And this meant one thing: my phone was tapped. That’s a good and bad thing. Bad because privacy is lost. Good because I can set a trap.
A half hour later, I parked in front of the trailer where I’d seen the woman in the red bathrobe standing when I first arrived at the Fish Camp. Her small yard was cast in deep shade, red and white impatiens planted in a circle around the base of a live oak tree. I heard her talking loudly before I actually saw her. Gladys Johnston sat on a rattan couch inside a screened-in porch, fanning her face with a Japanese hand fan. I said, “I just wanted to personally thank you. My name’s Sean O’Brien. Thank you for talking with police.”
“Come in.” I heard her say a fast goodbye to whomever was on the phone. She stood and smiled as I entered the porch. Her aged face was still attractive. Her eyes were robust and the color of blue swimming pool water. I could tell she would have been a striking woman in her prime. She said, “I’ve seen you on TV. Was the senator’s wife really your old girlfriend?”
“That was more than twenty years ago.”
“And now they’re saying you two might have a daughter.” She fanned and dipped her head slightly. “That’s who you’re hunting for, right?”
“Did you see a girl staying at the Fish Camp?”
“Most folks who rent Boots’ trailers are repeats. Snowbirds who’d come down from up north every winter. They usually stay through tax time, middle of April. Mostly fishermen and their families rent here in the summer. But Boots, I can’t believe what happened to him; he was such a nice man. He only had six rental units on that three-acre property. The one that blew up and burned to the ground was the most isolated.”
“Do you think the girl may have been staying there?”
“Maybe. Boots, sweet as he was, was a little weird. And I don’t mean in some kind of sexual deviant type of way. I come from a circus background, okay, so when I say weird, I know what I’m talking about. He was always on, as in on stage. He sort of kept to himself, though.” She glanced across the street to the Fish Camp, a piece of ripped yellow crime-scene tape flapping in the breeze. Her eyes narrowed a notch. She touched her lips with two bent and swollen arthritic fingers. “Something’s different and for the life of me I don’t know what it is.”
“Since you shot video of those men arriving, maybe I could take a look, okay?”
She cocked her head and lifted one manicured eyebrow. “I can do that.” She set the hand fan down on the coffee table and picked up her iPhone. “Here it is. I’ll play it for you.”
I moved over and sat beside her on the couch. She tapped the stationary image and video filled the screen. Although the images were grainy, shot under the light of one street lamp, I watched as two men appeared from the shadows, one quickly picking the lock and both entering the building. The video ended at that point.
“Here’s where I started again,” she said, tapping a second frozen image, the video began to play.
I watched myself enter the building, the fire raging beyond the office. I saw something in the second video, something missing. “Did you see that?” I asked.
“See what?”
“There’s something gone from the second video.”
“What’s gone?”
“A pickup truck. In the first video, I noticed one very small portion of the tailgate. It was to the far left of the screen, which means it was parked to the left of the circular drive. It was gone in the second video, which you shot only a few minutes later, correct?”
She looked up from the phone screen to across the street. Her mouth opened, eyes unsure. “Yes. Boots always kept an old red Toyota truck parked under the live oak to the left of the front door. It’s gone.”
“When did you last see it parked there?”
“Before I went to bed. Didn’t notice it during all the commotion. The cops hauled that SUV away. They left Boots’ Ford, and I’m pretty sure they left the truck, too.” She turned her head towards the open door to the mobile home and shouted, “Ike, when’s the last time you saw Boots’ truck?”
I heard a man clear his throat and yell, “Yesterday I think. Can’t be a hundred percent sure anymore.”
She turned back to me and folded the Japanese fan, putting it on a glass coffee table next to a vase with plastic blue flowers. “If the girl was there, maybe she stole the truck.”
“Maybe Boots let her borrow it.” I smiled.
“That’s a possibility. But whoever took the truck must have done it when I went to get my husband out of bed. I showed this video to police, they made a copy, but I don’t think they noticed the small section of the truck that you saw. You’re observant.”
I smiled and stood up to leave. “If you don’t mention it to them, they’ll never know it’s gone.”
She reached for the fan and opened it like a peacock spreading its feathers. She fanned her face and said, “I hope you find her.”
50
I was leaving Gladys Johnston’s driveway when a propane gas delivery truck rolled to a stop in front of the Fish Camp. The side of the red truck with the large white propane tank read: Paul’s Propane Service. I watched a twenty-something service tech get out of the truck, clipboard in hand, toting a small camera. He looked at the crime scene tape flapping in the breeze and made a decision to enter the property. I parked and followed him.
He was about halfway down the property line when he stopped, almost like he had paused to pay his respects to those in a funeral procession. He stared at what was left of the trailer. I walked up behind him and said, “I don’t think they’ll be needing gas for the immediate future.”
He jumped like he’d been touch with a cattle prod. “Man! You scared the crap outta me.”
“Sheriff’s deputies will scare you more if they see you traipsing through a crime scene.”
“I thought that yellow tape was just hanging all over the ground, like they’re pretty much done.”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll be quick, I’m just taking a couple of pictures. It’s for insurance. I can see it wasn’t our tanks that exploded. They’re still in one piece, pretty black from the fire, but they didn’t blow. Man, I just filled ‘em, too. Couple of days ago. So if somebody left the gas on, they got lots of gas to ignite.”
“When you filled the tanks did you see the girl living in the trailer?”
“She was feeding some ducks down there in the creek.” He turned and looked closer at the remains of the trailer. “She wasn’t hurt … was she? The news said two guys were killed in the fire.”
“She apparently wasn’t home when it happened.”
He inhaled deeply, reassured, nodding. “That’s good. She was real nice. This explosion and fire’s bad enough, but when you know somebody involved it sort of makes it personal.”
“Yes, it does. What’d she look like?”
“The girl?”
“Yes.”
He looked back down to the creek as if she was standing on the bank. “She was really pretty. About five-five, I’d say. She had dark brown hair … and her eyes.” He glanced back at me. “Her eyes were the prettiest I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to describe them.”