The Apostle

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“This no place to leave a corpse, Carson,” Deb said. “The perp would have to cross the yard, set off a half-dozen yappy dogs. Seems more likely it was dumped upriver.”

I looked upstream and saw Dixie Highway bridging the canal, the traffic a line of fast metal. I heard the roar of heavy trucks and motorcycles. Belafonte saw where I was looking.

“Even at night, there’s a lot of traffic on Dixie. Better would be Ponce de Leon Boulevard, just past Dixie. Traffic’s lighter. But she could have been dumped anywhere above here.”

“Wonder what the flow rate is?” I said, studying the waves.

Belafonte bent to the water’s edge and found a sodden cigarette butt. She flipped it into the canal and watched it float lazily away.

“The water’s moving a quarter-mile an hour, give or take.”

“How’d you know that?”

“Bermuda’s a dot in the Atlantic. You get to know water. This close to the Bay there’d be a tide effect. Charts might help. I’ll make a few calls.”

“First we got a date at Missing Persons.”

The Missing Persons department at MDPD was overseen by Rod Figueroa. We’d had a rocky start a year ago, but he’d overcome some personal demons in the interim and was now a solid cop. Figueroa was tall and well-built, with long blond hair over an attractive but slightly lopsided face, the result of a jet-skiing accident when he was a teenager. He was also openly gay, another difference from last year.

I laid out our story. All we had on the body was an approximate height since, like Kylie Sandoval, the corpse was charred and covered with burned fabric. Figueroa opened a file and nodded as he flipped through pages.

“We had a woman in first thing this morning, Carson. Said her twenty-five-year-old daughter was supposed to pick up her kid a bit past four in the a.m.”

“Four a.m.?”

“The daughter does night stock at a Publix. When the daughter didn’t show up, Mama called the store. The night manager said the kid, Teresa Mailey, left on schedule. According to the mother, you could set your watch by the daughter.”