In his previous life, Greg had been a cop—that kind of cop, as Airman Fleshman would see it—with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. In addition to his other duties, he’d served as a SWAT team sniper. After joining AFOSI, he’d qualified through the Air Force’s Close Precision Engagement Course to maintain his sniper status.
Once a sniper, always a sniper. You never knew when it might come in handy.
Like today.
Greg kept his Remington 700 behind the seat of his truck. He scooped up a handful of rounds of ammo, hoping he’d only need one, and jogged back to the location.
The gator hadn’t moved, fortunately. Vernon said, “We’ve established that the area behind the gator is clear.”
“Yes, sir.” Greg loaded the rifle, stretched out on the ground, and sighted, lining up the gator’s right eye. Easy peasy, he thought, and squeezed the trigger.
The gator bucked on impact, then collapsed onto the ground as its tiny gator soul ascended to gator heaven. Its jaws relaxed, and the dead man’s body shifted forward. Greg stood and unloaded the remaining rounds from the rifle, then brushed himself off.
Mindy said, “Nice shot.”
“Thanks.”
Vernon took out his phone. “I’ll contact OAFME.” The Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, who would be performing the autopsy. “Call Agent Wells over here, then secure the scene and start gathering evidence.”
Greg, Mindy, and Tom said in unison, “Yes, sir.”
The four agents gathered at a spot about ten yards from the gator and studied the scene. Tom asked, his voice quavering slightly, “Are you sure he’s dead?”
Mindy smirked. “Oh yeah, he’s dead. How shall we approach this, Detective Marcotte?”
Once again, the others turned to Greg expectantly. He sighed inwardly; he’d known this was coming. The others were outstanding investigators—they’d have never made it through training if they weren’t—but they didn’t have his experience.
Mindy had encountered a few dead bodies in the Everglades but hadn’t worked the cases. She was their team’s expert in drug investigations. Zach was a captain in the Air Force, a graduate of the USAF Academy, and had flown F-16s in Afghanistan, hunting the Taliban. His specialty with AFOSI was threat assessment, and he was superb at it.
Tom had a master’s degree in aviation finance from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, up the road in Daytona Beach, and had joined AFOSI right after graduating. He didn’t have a passion for law enforcement, but he did know a ton about rockets…and about the private companies that were renting space on the launch pads at Canaveral these days. Knowledge that would come in handy, assuming this was the missing Skyose employee.
But when it came to death investigations, the entire team—even Ward Vernon—turned to Greg. Because when he hadn’t been SWATting with CMPD, Greg had been a homicide detective.
Greg passed out clean latex gloves. “Let’s work our way toward the body.”
They approached gingerly, despite Mindy’s confidence in the gator’s demise. When they reached the scene, they relaxed. The back of the gator’s skull was obliterated where Greg’s round had exited. Zach aimed the camera and started snapping photos. Greg squatted a couple of feet from the body and studied it.
The dead man fit the description of the missing Skyose employee. It wasn’t entirely clear—half of the torso was still in the gator’s mouth—but it appeared to Greg as if the guy had been shot or stabbed in the chest. The front of his shirt was drenched in blood. The only other finding of note was that the guy’s face and shirt were coated in sand.
Tom was still hesitant, standing back about a foot behind Greg. “Did the gator kill him?”
“I doubt it.” Greg pointed to a set of punctures on the left arm. “The gator grabbed him there, but the bites didn’t bleed. He was already dead.”
Zach said, “I predict that when we pull him out of there, he’ll have a big ol’ hole in his chest.”
“Sounds right to me.” Greg stood. “Zach, why don’t you let Tom handle the documentation?” If Tom was observing the scene from behind a camera, maybe it would provide enough distance to overcome his squeamishness.
Zach caught on immediately. “Sure.” He handed the camera to Tom, who gladly accepted.
Mindy said, “He’s wet.”
“Yeah.” Greg reached down and touched the guy’s shirt. It was saturated. So were his pants and shoes. “He’s been in the river at some point.”
The Banana River wasn’t really a river, but a lagoon, separating Cape Canaveral and KSC from Merritt Island. It was a refuge for manatees, but also provided a home for a healthy population of alligators.
Greg asked, “So did this fella find the dead guy in the water and decide to move him? Or did he drag the body into the water, then changed his mind?”
Mindy said, “My guess? He found the body in the water and was moving him to his den. Gators will store big prey underwater for a while before…” She noted the green tinge on Tom’s face and stopped. “Sorry.”
Greg said, “Mindy, wanna see if you can find drag marks? Follow them to their origin?”
“You bet.” Mindy readied her phone to record video and circled the gator. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got a trail.” She headed off to the south. Tom followed her, snapping photos.
Zach said, “Not much else we can do until the ME gets here, right? We can’t move the body.”
“No, but let’s search the pockets we can reach.”
Greg found the dead man’s wallet in his left rear pants pocket. He handed it to Zach and reached into the left front pants pocket. “Bingo.”
“What?”
“Phone.” Greg extracted the phone and examined it. “It might be ruined.”
“I’ve got SoChlor in the car. The granules will soak up the blood and water.”
Greg took back the wallet and handed Zach the phone. “Good. Stick it in an evidence bag with some of that.”
“You bet. I’ll be back.”
Greg opened the wallet just as his own phone buzzed in his back pocket. He pulled it out and found a text from Ryan. Boat’s cleaner than the day you bought her. How’s it going?
Greg smiled despite himself. Good man. It’s complicated here. Found a body in the debris field.
WTF??
Exactly. You going home?
Nah. I’ll wait.
It’ll be late.
‘S cool. :-P
Greg grinned. All righty then. See ya.
Ryan replied with a thumbs up.
Greg returned to his examination of the wallet. The interior had been mostly protected from the water and was only damp around the edges. Maybe the body hadn’t been in the river that long. The driver’s license identified the dead man as Roy Shaw, of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The slots were all filled with credit cards and photos, several of a couple of kids at various ages.
Shit.
He counted the cash; $157 in bills. Robbery wasn’t part of the motive. Greg hadn’t thought it would be.
He’d partially pulled the cash from its slot, so he tried to tuck it back in, only to realize there was something else in there. He peered into the opening and spotted a slip of paper.
It was a phone number with a 321 area code. Brevard County. A local.
Greg considered calling the number, then decided against it. He’d wait until he was back at the office.
He was bagging and tagging the wallet when Tom jogged up. “We think we found the crime scene. There’s blood on the river bank.”
“Excellent.” Greg showed Tom the wallet and phone number. “Our first lead.”
“Good.” Tom squinted at the bright blue sky. “Shouldn’t we get a canopy over the body?”
“Yeah. Then we’ll check out the river.”
Tom went to the cars and returned with Zach and a canopy, which the three men spread over the palmettos, then tied on each corner to a nearby frond. Zach stayed to guard the body while Greg followed Tom to the river, where Mindy was looping crime scene tape around a scrubby tree near the bank.
She pointed. “Blood’s over there.”
Greg studied the scene. Mindy finished taping and came to stand beside him. “Scenario?”
“Let’s say he was shot from the front.” Greg pointed to two shallow, scooped-out indentations in the sand, behind the blood pool. “The shooter has his right side to the river, the victim is opposite. Victim falls to his knees, then falls onto his face. The distance is about right. Then…these look like drag marks to you?”
“Yep. Straight from the blood to the water.”
“It would explain the sand on his face and chest. The killer either thinks the water will conceal the body longer, or that a gator will dispose of the remains before they’re found.”
Mindy nodded. “Which said gator was in the process of doing when we came along and ruined his day. The gator drag marks start over here.” She pointed a few feet to the north of the human-created drag marks.
Greg’s phone rang; it was Vernon. “Greg, the medical examiner is en route, ETA about an hour. Zach told me what you’ve found. Collect samples for the ME. We’ll meet you at the body when he arrives.”
“Yes, sir.”
Greg, Mindy, and Tom spent the next thirty minutes collecting soil and blood samples. After a discussion of angles and distances, they also found five 9mm casings in the spot they’d predicted. Mindy held one of them between her gloved thumb and forefinger, frowning at it. “Five shots? Overkill?”
Tom said, “Not law enforcement or military.” They’d all been taught shot placement: two to the chest, one to the head.
Greg agreed. “No. Maybe someone with a hair-trigger gun, who panicked and emptied the clip.”
They recorded measurements of every angle and distance they could think of, then headed back to the body. The ME and his forensic team had arrived, as had a gator trapper, who would remove the beast once all evidence was collected. Greg, Mindy, and Tom turned over their blood and soil samples to the forensic techs, then watched as a couple of them removed the body from the gator’s jaws. Those techs began swabbing and lifting evidence from the victim’s clothing and the gator’s teeth, while the ME bent over the body. “Multiple shots to the chest and one to the shoulder.”
Mindy said, “Yes, sir. We found five casings.”
A Skyose employee ID on a lanyard was stuffed into the victim’s right shirt pocket. The ME allowed Zach to bag and tag it, and listened to the agents’ recitation of the events of the morning. Another half hour passed. Greg was trying to decide whether or not to pass out from hunger when the ME said, “All right, we’re done here. Autopsy will be first thing tomorrow morning. Col. Vernon, we’ll be in touch.”
Vernon said, “Appreciate it.”
Greg and the others drove back to Patrick and logged their evidence into its designated secure locker; then Vernon gathered them in his office. He plucked a rook from the chessboard he kept on his desk and rolled it between his hands as he spoke. “I’ve instructed everyone that we are maintaining absolute silence on this. We will not notify Skyose or Ideodax. The killer might have been one of the victim’s colleagues. If asked, we’re investigating the employee’s disappearance. Understood?”
They replied in unison. “Yes, sir.”
“All right. What’s the plan going forward?”
Greg said, “The victim’s phone needs to dry out. I’ll request records in case it turns out to be unsalvageable. And I found a local phone number in the victim’s wallet. I’ll call it and see who it belongs to.”
“All right. Zach, Mindy, dig into our victim’s background, see what you find. Tom, I want an org chart on Skyose, all this fella’s responsibilities, other jobs he’s held within the company, all that. All of you, I want a list of suspects by the end of the day.”
“Yes, sir.”
Vernon nodded to them. “Get to work.”
The agents scattered to their desks. Mindy, Tom, and Zach jumped onto their computers and began the quest to uncover the intricacies of Roy Shaw’s life. Greg shoveled a handful of peanuts into his mouth while he booted up his computer, then realized there wasn’t much he could do. He didn’t know what company the victim used for cell service, and probably wouldn’t until Monday.
But he did have a phone number.
He’d made a note in his own phone of the number from the scrap of paper in the victim’s wallet. He ate another fistful of peanuts, lifted the receiver on his desk phone, and dialed.