“Did he say anything else?”
“No, he paid his bill and left a ten dollar tip.”
“Dumb on his part. Leaving a tip that large for a seven dollar meal sticks out.” I picked up my cell phone and started dialing.
“What can we do?” Elizabeth put the sketch back in the folder and closed it.
“I’m calling Detective Sandberg.” He answered on two rings. “Detective, the man in the composite is not some figment of Luke Palmer’s imagination.”
“What are you talking about, O’Brien.”
“I showed the sketch to Elizabeth Monroe. She recognized the man. Said he came into her restaurant right after Frank Soto was picked up. Ordered breakfast, made casual conversation with her, and then prodded around, trying in a covert way to see if Molly enjoyed camping, alluding to state parks and places like the national forests. Elizabeth told him nothing. He finished his breakfast and left.” I heard Sandberg make a long sigh.
“O’Brien, Miss Monroe may recognize the man in the composite, but it doesn’t mean he killed her daughter. He’s probably complicit with whoever is running the pot farm, and Luke Palmer is most likely the trigger man.”
“You could find out if that’s true when you release the image to the media. Maybe somebody out there will recognize this guy. You’ll get a name and more leads, and some of them might incriminate Palmer. Maybe they won’t. Now you have another witness, someone who recognizes the man in the picture. And that someone is the mother of a young woman who was murdered.”
“I’ll run it by Sheriff Clayton. I see your point, O’Brien. But until things play out, the sheriff might not release the composite.”
“Detective.”
“Yeah?”
“If the sheriff doesn’t… you can tell him that I will.”
“Don’t go there, O’Brien. You’d be stepping in more shit than you realize.”
SIXTY-TWO
After Detective Sandberg disconnected, I set the phone down on top of the file folder with the composite sketches. Elizabeth sat slowly at the table. “What did he say?”
“Even though you corroborated Palmer’s ID of this guy by recognizing him in the sketch, Sandberg said there’s no guarantee the sheriff will release it to the media.”
“I heard you say that the detective can tell the sheriff if he doesn’t then you will. Be careful, Sean. If you make enemies of the police, we’ll never bring Molly and Mark’s killer to justice.”
“If they arraign and try an innocent man, if he’s found guilty, but he really isn’t, what then? What if Palmer’s sent back to prison on not much more then circumstantial evidence while Molly and Mark’s killer or killers walk free?”
“The deer blood on his clothes. It matches the animal taken out of that hole where they buried my daughter.”
“That doesn’t mean he shot them.”
“But he’s an ex prisoner. A man just out of jail. How can we really believe him, Sean? Why do you believe him? He could be conning you as easily as anyone else.”
“He could be, but he’s not. He—”
“No! You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’re not some damn psychic! The dogs tracked him to the river. He was running because he was running from something, the murder of my daughter. You don’t have a child. You could never understand. Maybe the sheriff’s right not to release it.”
“I may not feel what you’re feeling, but I understand this: no one shoots a deer, cuts the bullet out of its muscle, drops the carcass into a hole, and then keeps the bullet on him. If he did it, he’d have tossed it. I believe Palmer found the deer critically injured, like he said, thought about field-dressing it, but became spooked when he heard them trying to find him, and he ran.”
“You could be wrong.” She stood and stepped to the kitchen wall and turned on the floodlights. She looked back to me, her eyes welling with tears. “I need to be alone tonight.”
“I thought you wanted me to stay. It might be dangerous if you—”
“I’ll be fine. What are they going to take from me now? They’ve already taken my daughter. I didn’t know about the marijuana operation until you told me, so what value am I to these creeps. Palmer’s in jail, and maybe the guy that came to the restaurant worked for Palmer. I’m not going to let fear control how I live my life.”
I said nothing.
She swallowed hard, eyes blinking back tears and said, “I just need some rest. I haven’t had eight hours of sleep since that day Frank Soto pulled the gun on Molly and me. Maybe tonight I will.”
On the way to Ponce Marina, I played back conversations in my mind. Much of it from the things Luke Palmer had told me. He tossed a cigar out the window and almost started a forest fire. I put it out and buried the damn thing under dirt. If I could find that cigar, and if the DNA was still intact… just maybe… but if two teams of deputies couldn’t find evidence, and couldn’t find pot plants tall as stalks of corn growing deep in the forest, how could I find a half smoked cigar under some dirt?
I probably couldn’t.
But I knew one man who could.
SIXTY-THREE
When I pulled my Jeep into the Ponce Marina lot, there was only one customer left at the Tiki Bar. He was a charter boat captain I recognized. He wore a Gone Fishin’ hat, permanently stained from perspiration and faded in color. He sat at the bar in shorts, flip-flops, nursing a sweating bottle of Bud and watching Kim Davis wash and rinse beer mugs while a sit-com flickered silently on the TV screen behind the bar.
She looked up at me, her smile warm and genuine. “Hi, Sean. Thirsty?”
I smiled, “Could use a beer.”
She reached in the ice, pulled out a bottle of Corona and popped the top before setting it in front of me. I sat down and took a long pull from the bottle, the back of my neck tight as a coiled spring.
“The captain raised up his blonde eyebrows on his sun-scarred forehead. His eyes, crusted and red, looked incapable of opening all the way, a cold sore glistened on his lower lip. He said, “Now she don’t know my beer, and I’m in here least twice a week.”
Kim smiled. “That’s because you switch between Bud and Miller. Sean stays with the same thing, Corona.” She turned back to me. “I saw the news, the funeral and all of those people who turned out for that poor girl. Saw you on TV, too. Was that the mother of the dead girl, the woman walking next to you?”
“Yes.”
“I feel so bad for her.”
I said nothing. Sipped the beer and thought of Elizabeth back at her house, checking windows, double locking doors, turning on floodlights and turning off her judgment, which now was emotionally short circuited.
“Are you okay, Sean?”
I looked across the bar at Kim and smiled. She leaned in closer, a strand of dark brown hair falling over one eye. I said, “I’m okay. Have you seen Max tonight?”
“She sat on Nick’s lap earlier, during happy hour. I fed her a burger patty. She likes cheddar more than Swiss on her burgers.”
I shook my head. “Max has dog food on Jupiter, and I have more in this grocery bag, so it’s not as if she’s food deprived. Hanging out here, she’s going to start looking more like a pot roast than a wiener dog.”
“A tiny tummy and some curvy hip padding could be a sexy thing.”
“Just don’t pierce Max’s ears.”
“Does that mean I get to baby-sit my gal pal?”