Death Among the Mangroves Read Online Free

thought.
    “I’m Troy Adam, the Mangrove Bayou police chief.” He showed the man his badge since he wasn’t wearing a uniform. “You aren’t in trouble but I’d appreciate it if you could step outside with me a moment. No need for the kids to be hearing this.”
    The man, looking puzzled, stepped outside and closed the door, and he and Troy stood on the porch. “Eduardo Martinez,” the man said. “What’s going on?”
    Troy explained the situation. Martinez, of course, protested. “I paid my rent. Broken no laws. Never broke in here.” He looked angry about it.
    “I suspected as much,” Troy said. He actually had no idea at this point that the Martinez clan was innocent but he was a good judge of character and liked what he saw. “You didn’t create this mess. But you’re in it now. Fact is, the man who rented this place to you apparently did so illegally. The real owner wants you evicted so he can sell the house. I don’t have any choices here, and neither do you. Who rented this house to you?”
    “The Reverend Heth Summerall. He’s a minister of some sort. Got to be some kind of mistake.”
    “Not one that I can find,” Troy said. “But I only stopped by this evening to talk to you and give you a heads-up on this. Why don’t you come by the police station some time tomorrow and you and I can figure out what to do about it.”
    “This is bullshit.”
    “Yes, it is. I’ll try to buy you some time to look for another place to stay, do what I can for you. Seems to me the main thing is not to upset the kids. But the law is the law and the Reverend Heth Summerall appears to have violated it and you are the victim. Come by and see me tomorrow.”
    Troy drove away and started patrolling the town. He didn’t mind arresting people for the big crimes, he thought as he drove. It was the little things that he sometimes had to do that bothered him. Kicking people out of their home at Christmas time had to be right near the top of horrible things to have to do. It was, he thought, almost Biblical.

Chapter 4
    Sunday, December 22
    Jeremiah found Barbara Gillispie’s cell phone after several hours of searching and tossing out trash from the Dumpster. It had the ringer turned to vibrate-only. He brought that back to the station in an evidence bag and someone at the strip mall got the job of shoveling everything else back into the Dumpster. There was no sign of Barbara Gillispie and there were no useful phone calls listed on the phone.
    Troy spent Sunday morning organizing a search for her. For a community dependent upon tourism, losing a visitor was bad for business and everyone knew it. With Mayor Lester Groud’s help, he divided up the inland bays and salt marsh into sections and some of Groud’s fishing-guide friends went out in shallow-draft boats to look. Others headed out to pick through the nearby mangrove islands, a far harder task. They also covered the three larger islands making up the town itself, and the sheriff’s department had a helicopter buzzing around the offshore mangroves too.
    Cilla Dowling rang the station’s front doorbell just after eleven a.m. Dowling was the local editor and reporter for the town online newspaper, the Bayou Breeze . Troy let her in and they went back to his office. She was about fifty, a thin, tough five feet, six inches with a tanned, weathered face, brown hair and eyes. She always wore her hair long in a single braid. She was wearing blue jeans and a matching denim blazer over a purple shirt with the collar out.
    “No bulging chest today?” Troy said. Cilla was usually seen in too-tight tee shirts with journalism slogans across her large breasts.
    “Too cold for that. Besides, I already know I can’t vamp you out of a story. Why waste them. You must know why I’m here.”
    Troy saw no reason not to tell Cilla everything he knew about Barbara Gillispie’s disappearance, which, at this point, wasn’t much. “And all the help, tips, anything at all that I