Free The Whole Truth by Nancy Pickard Page B

a sprinkling of the homeless men who sometimes haunted even the most posh boulevards. And her eye was definitely caught that morning by a figure she originally mistook for a boy. Dressed in an outrageously garish mix of yellow and pink, topped by a green baseball cap, he looked as if he had been wildly overdressed for the beach by his mother.
    But on second glance, Robyn decided that the skinny, boylike body was more mature than that. It was a youngish man, Robyn decided then. She couldn't see his face under the bill of the cap, but she sensed how intently he stared at the busy activities of the police, and how very alone he appeared even while standing in the middle of a band of gawkers beyond the police barricades.
    Robyn not only filed him away in her memory, she also sauntered over to the crime scene unit photographer and directed him to get a picture of "the fashion plate in the dirty pink."
    "Maybe it was intuition," Robyn says. "Or, maybe it was experience. But if somebody told me that I had to pick the murderer out of the crowd, or die, I'd have pointed to him."
    And she was right.
    Locating and arresting the suspect turned out to be almost as fast and easy as identifying the victim had been.
    "We should have known it was all too easy," Paul Flanck says, bitterly. "I should have known it was all bound to get more complicated down the line." But then, he's an admitted cynic and pessimist. "Protective coloration" Robyn calls it. She claims that some cops need that kind of attitude to protect themselves from overwhelming disillusionment. When Paul hears that, he laughs and retorts, "Oh, come on, Robyn, I'm a realist, that's all."
    He adds, "The world can always prove to me that it's a better place than I think it is. In the meantime, I'll just go ahead and continue to expect the worst of it."
     
    Robyn Anschutz remembers the exact pieces of the puzzle that came together with such amazing speed to point an arrow sharply at the Checker Crab Water Transit Company.
    "We have a veteran chopper pilot, Broyle Crouse," she explains. "And when Broyle heard which bridge we found the body at, he remembered the water taxi he'd seen there the previous night. He didn't really think it was connected to the murder, but he called my partner anyway. They're old buddies from way back. They like to fish and fly together.
    "So, Crouse tells Paul about how he saw the number six Checker Crab right up next to the big Hatteras parked— docked—on the northeast side of the bridge and how he saw one person in it. He thought it was a guy, he said. So Paul puts that together with the footprint he found on the deck of the yacht and the cigarette ash. And then we had the unbelievable break of that 911 call from the old lady who saw a black-and-white checked boat right at the McCullens' dock. And the other 911 call from the boatyard owner. Bing, bing, bam, everything came together all at once. It was the 911 operator who took it on herself to tell us.
    "It was like everybody was upset about this little girl getting killed and how her little body was left like that to hang in public, and so everybody went on hyperalert and remembered the things they needed to."
    Detectives Anschutz and Flanck obtained a search warrant.
    Water taxis are a lot of fun. Tourists love them, and they're cheaper than cabs. Locals use them sparingly for special treats, like children's birthday parties, and for out-of-town guests. In Bahia Beach, there are three licensed companies that putter along the water routes, competing for hotel and restaurant business, and carrying tourists to attractions such as Ocean World down in Lauderdale, or even to shopping malls.
    It's a wonderful ride, day or night.
    During the day, tourists get a water's eye view of the fascinating boat traffic that rides the Intracoastal, and they can ogle the backyards of the mansions that line the canals. At night, they get a glamorous tour with all the glittering lights reflected in the black water. As