Brigands Key Read online

  BRIGANDS KEY

  A Novel

  by

  Ken Pelham

  Copyright © 2012 by Ken Pelham.

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, 2013 by Ken Pelham.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States, 2012, by Five Star Publishing, a Division of Gale Cengage Learning.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Pelham, Ken

  Brigands key / Ken Pelham. — ISBN 1-4328-2578-X (hardcover edition).

  For Laura

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to those who helped, and most of all to Dr. Frank Diefenderfer for his insights into dental forensics, and to Larry Bedore for help with technical aspects of the work of medical examiners. Special thanks to the staff at Five Star for their hard work in taking the first edition hardcover into publication. For their advice and support, Melanie Griffey, Susan Meyer, and Diana Morrison. For photography, Jeff Goodfellow. For website help, Mike Arlington. And, of course, for their love and support and avid readership across the years, my endless gratitude to my daughters, Amy and Jenny, and to my wife, Laura.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter One

  Carson Grant was happiest surrounded by ghosts. The good kind. The ancient, long-dead kind. So Tuesday morning he was ecstatic, anticipating a swim with ghosts in an ink-black cave at the bottom of the sea.

  The sun had kept its end of the deal, warming the Gulf of Mexico to a slow boil through midmorning. Clouds billowed over the western horizon, white, limned in slate.

  His twenty-four footer, Lost Expedition, rose and settled on the waves. The name, it had frequently been pointed out, begged disaster. He didn’t care. He’d endured his share of disasters and reasoned that reverse karma worked as well as any.

  Grant opened the small ice chest and withdrew a highball glass, a jug of pulpy orange juice, and a bottle of Dinsmoor Scottish vodka. He scooped ice into the highball glass, poured a shot of Dinsmoor, and drenched it in orange juice. He studied the drink, grimaced, and hit it with another shot. He toasted the good weather and drank it down. The morning dive that couldn’t be improved by an icy screwdriver was a myth, like Sasquatch. With less hair.

  He slipped over the transom and took a seat on the dive deck, dangling his legs in the warm sea. He squeezed his mask against his face, cinched his weight belt tighter, shouldered into his BC vest and air tank, took in the mouthpiece, and slipped under the water, knowingly and deliberately committing the cardinal sin of diving alone, the province of fools and divers with short life expectancies.

  Hell with it. Playing by the rules had gotten him nothing but screwed. He played by his own rules now. No job, no money, just his own rules. He could do archaeology without politics just fine, and without funding with no small effort.

  He’d lucked onto something big.

  The water was glass, as clear as it gets in the Gulf. He peered to the bottom, thirty feet down. There, amid rock and sand and swaying grasses, lay the object of his desire. Grant upended and kicked his fins, propelling himself to the dark hole in the sea floor to search for ghosts.

  A stingray, buried in the sand, shook off its cover in a small cloud and darted away as he neared.

  He paused at the entrance to the cave, admiring a miracle of nature. Here he was, twenty-two miles off the Florida coast in the Gulf of Mexico. In fresh water.

  He glanced at the surface above. Lost Expedition, its hull a dark spear point against a bright, watery sky, bobbed slowly with the waves. All good. The anchor line was holding. If the boat pulled free and drifted away, he would die out here. Being foolish had a definite downside, and a doctorate in archaeology wouldn’t float him twenty-two miles.

  Grant turned back to the cave and swam into its mouth. A current flowed from the cave and pushed at him. He pulled his regulator mouthpiece out and took a drink of the ocean, tasting it, swallowing it. Fresh water, in the salty open sea.

  Despite his current unemployment and poisoned reputation, a boatload of colleagues still owed him their jobs. He’d called in one of the debts, pestering Ginnie Pavlic at Cape Canaveral. He’d given her the range of the limestone shelf, a hundred miles of it, and prodded her for satellite geothermals.

  “How many?” she’d asked with her usual sigh.

  “Come now, Ginnie. All of them.”

  “How about last summer’s images?”

  “How about all of 'em. I need winter imagery. Cooler water. Shot on a calm day, one-foot swells, max.”

  “Is that all? Care for a nice café latte while you wait?” It had been February at the time, water temperature in the sixties. All she had to do was slide his request to the top of the list. Shouldn’t be too hard. After some wrangling over blackened grouper and cheap Riesling, Ginnie produced the images. They were worthless. Grant promised pricier wine and badgered her into refining the geothermals to hundredths of a degree. She nixed the wine but delivered the new images.

  There among sheet after sheet of blue images were a dozen yellow dots scattered along the sea floor, the proof of slightly warmer water in the sea. Proof of a freshwater submarine spring.

  The aquifers underlying Florida hold at seventy-one degrees, give or take, year round. A spot reading of seventy-one in a sea of sixty-degree water hinted that fresh water from the inland aquifer was spilling from the bottom of the sea. Of the springs identified, only the two within six miles of shore had been discovered and a couple more were rumored by fishing crews. This one, the largest and most enticing by far, may have gone undiscovered another hundred years if not for his innovation.

  The vent boiled from the top of a ragged cliff that teemed with a kaleidoscope of sea life. He gripped the rocky edge of the vent to anchor himself. The current pushed against him steadily, suggesting that this spring was fresh all the time. Most offshore springs pumped out brackish water, the freshwater flow insufficient to keep the heavier saltwater from intruding. Some were so weak they reversed flow with the tides, the saltwater pushing the fresh back upstream, inland, underground, ruining drinking wa
ter. The problem worsened each year as people crowded in, and thirsty lawns and bad habits sucked the aquifers dry.

  A shadow, large, dark, and scary, flashed to his right. Grant spun to face it, thinking shark. Big, toothy shark. He was relieved and disappointed to see a giant grouper, bigger than himself, darting from his sudden movement for a friendlier hole.

  He fidgeted with his BC vest and regulator, flipped the switch on his lamp. The beam illuminated the dark interior of the cave and he pulled himself in one handhold at a time.

  Claustrophobia, his old demon, revved his heartbeat up a notch. This is crazy, he thought. Not too late to choose the better part of valor.

  The vent was the narrow point. Just inside, the cave broadened into a room twenty feet wide by an indeterminate length, its far side vanishing into darkness beyond his beam.

  The walls and ceiling glowed with gorgeous sepia, deeply creased here and there with black. The water was liquid diamond, yet the cavern was barren, a desert undersea, in stark contrast to the teeming environment just outside the cave. Grant had expected this; the freshwater resisted the saltwater creatures outside and the constant pressure kept life from drifting or swimming in. Crawlers, like crabs, could drag themselves inside but they’d have no reason to stay in a desert with nothing to eat.

  Silt carpeted the bottom. He fanned it gently, swirling away a wisp of brown, exposing the rocky bottom. Respect the silt, he reminded himself. He drifted, studying the floor, searching.

  A small bump in the silt gave away the prize. He whisked it clean, uncovering an angular, serrated flake of stone.

  Pay dirt. He scooped up the stone and studied it. He’d take it back to shore, research it, photograph it, go by the book, but he knew what he had. The stone was chert, a crystallized chunk of limestone, worked into a razor-edged weapon. A spear point.

  He began to compose text in his head, describing, speculating, expounding. He stopped himself. Bad habit, that. Cart before the horse. He pocketed the spear point and whisked away more sand and silt. Bits and pieces of a long-ago culture began to appear. A fish hook carved from bone. A digging tool. A shell fashioned into jewelry. He left them untouched, much as he wanted to gather them all up. The spear point was enough for now. The day was young and he could set a work grid before it was over. Proper archaeology, done the right way. Despite his reputation, he knew he was among the best. He snapped a few more photos, secured the camera to his belt, and headed back to Lost Expedition to fetch gear for the grid.

  But before he got out of the cave, something caught his attention.

  The human mind works in mysterious ways. It seeks familiarity in a scary universe. It sees human faces in clouds, human manners in cats, Jesus in pizza toppings. Anything remotely human registers in the mind. Sometimes it’s a trick of the light. Sometimes it really is human.

  In a dark crevice of rock a shadowy shape registered in Grant’s mind. He swung his lamp beam toward it. Weird rock forms were always worth a look.

  The beam illuminated the pale nude body of a man.

  He stared at the body, his thoughts swirling. He was twenty-two miles from shore, in an undiscovered cave at the bottom of the sea. With a dead guy. Impossible, impossible.

  The guy looked fresh. Grant preferred finding bodies thousands of years old. Good and dead. Not recently dead.

  He’d done his share of fetching the recent dead, much as he hated it. In a previous life, three years ago, he regularly pulled unlucky and stupid divers from wet graves in the drowned caverns that laced Florida. He did it because he was good at it and because a pesky conscience demanded he do so. But he hated it. The eyes of the victims stared into your soul, scarring it. And regularly reintroduced themselves in your dreams. When he’d gotten away from body retrieval on his last trip to Guatemala, he swore he’d never fetch another stiff.

  Fresh was a relative term. He was used to locating the bodies of divers who’d perished within the last few hours. This one looked a bit more worn. The flesh had lost the pallor of the new, was puckered and drawn. Couple days old, maybe? Grant had little knowledge of these things.

  He gave a gentle kick and drifted closer to the body. He felt an uncomfortable stirring in his gut and could feel his face flushing hot, even in the cool water of the spring. Don’t lose it now, he thought. He knew what he had to do.

  The current had wedged the body into the crevice and pinned it there. The current also wanted to push Grant right onto it. He gripped the rock, anchoring himself inches from the body. It was turned half away, the face hidden. Grant had a sudden, uneasy thought. The guy’s not dead. He shook the thought away. Don’t get stupid. Course he’s dead. Stick to the job.

  Grant realized he’d stopped breathing, and sucked deeply on his regulator, drawing a long breath. Easy does it...

  The body was that of a white man. Average height, average build. Grant reached out and touched the body, suppressing his revulsion. The flesh was soft, yielding, but not overly so. He put his hand on the shoulder and slowly turned the body to face him. The eyes were glassy, sunken, sickly.

  Eyes, the poets say, are windows to the soul. The poets are misinformed. The eyes of the dead are windows to eternity and emptiness, and when you stare into them in an underwater cave, you see your own death.

  Grant felt a twitch in his gut, and another. His stomach lurched and its contents surged upward, burning his throat and mouth. He spat out his mouthpiece and vomited into the clear water, into the face of the dead man.

  Chapter Two

  Gerald Hammond stubbed his cigarette, sprayed a blast of freshener into his mouth, and wondered why he bothered. Everyone in Brigands Key knew he sneaked a smoke now and then. He’d been the only doctor in town worth a flip in twenty years and no one was going to run him out on account of that, so long as he had the decency to not cough smoke into their faces.

  He cupped his hand in front of his mouth and blew. Not bad. He stretched his back, relishing its satisfying pops, and went to the bathroom adjoining his office and studied his reflection in the mirror. A slight paunch, only a few wrinkles, and the wispy brown hair atop his head had not given up the struggle. Yet.

  Satisfied, he stepped into the exam room. A gentle rap came at the door. “The doctor is in,” he called.

  Jill leaned her head around the door, smiling. “Emma is here for her eleven a.m.,” she said, stepping aside and swinging the door open. Emma Watterson entered, pushing a dinged-up aluminum walker.

  “Emma! You look fine today,” Hammond said. “Like Audrey Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby.”

  “That was Katherine.”

  “The Philadelphia Story, then.”

  “You two have fun,” Jill said, handing him Emma’s file and closing the door behind her.

  Hammond flipped through the file, although he already knew it and her inside and out. “So, Emma, you turn seventy tomorrow. Congratulations.”

  “I could die tomorrow.”

  “You’re too mean to die. You’re strong as a horse.”

  “Horses my age get sent to the glue factory.”

  “Emma, be still. Let’s listen in on your heart.” He placed the stethoscope against her chest. “Are you ready for City Council’s big tussle next week?”

  “A hundred percent ready.”

  “You going to tell me which way you’re voting?”

  “I’m an aging hippie. You know my position.”

  “Stubborn thing.”

  “Carpetbaggers don’t always win, Jerry.”

  Hammond wrapped up her physical and jotted down a quick scrip and escorted her to Jill’s desk. Jill was on the phone, taking hurried notes. “Couple of these a day,” he said, “and you’ll be doing cartwheels.”

  “Will I be able to play piano?”

  “Not while doing cartwheels.”

  As Emma stepped out, Jill punched a button on the phone, set it down, handed him the note. “Time to change hats, Jerry. Randy’s got a John Doe coming in.”

  Hammond read the note
. “Cancel my afternoon. Tell him I’ll be at the Icebox in five minutes.”

  * * *

  The Brigands Key medical examiner’s lab was a Spartan affair in the back of the police department. Hammond had badgered the City Council skin-flints for years about the inadequacies of the Icebox, its lack of chill at the top of the list. Cold, he reminded them again and again, the lab must be cold. But that runs up the electric bill, they argued. Why keep a room bitter cold all year for one or two bodies a month? So instead of chilly he got lukewarm. When alerted that a body was on its way, he would rush over and crank the thermostat down. Half the time the body arrived before he did and lay on the slab festering. Unacceptable, he told the Council. Tough, they responded. They could always find another medical examiner.

  Which was malarkey. They pretended they were doing him a favor, supplementing his meager practice with a meager public servant’s salary. It was the other way around. He was keeping a job they’d never be able to fill.

  He wasn’t really even employed by them; he was an employee of the State of Florida. An associate medical examiner. Not many two-light towns had an ME of their own. Most relied on the medical examiner’s district, in this case District 8, operating out of Gainesville. Brigands Key got an ME of its own purely on account of the island’s remoteness.

  Hammond drove the three blocks across town from his office to City Hall, feeling guilty about using an excuse for not getting the exercise, although it was legit. The sooner he could ice the Icebox, the better. Even so, his car was a steam room, bottling the Florida summer up tight. He got a rolling sweat before he completed the one-minute drive. Wonderful. One surefire recipe for ruining forensics evidence was to sweat on it like a pig.

  The Brigands Key Police Department stood to one side of City Hall, suitably humbled by the elegant old brick building. Hammond pushed through the door and was welcomed by the cool breeze within. Deputy Tom Greenwood, seated behind his old steel desk, nodded and grinned eagerly. Something big was afoot.

  “What’s on the docket, Major Tom?” Hammond asked.