Free Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) by Wayne Stinnett Page A

mouth, before walking toward the shooters.”
    Where he took his stand was where his body was lying. Even I could tell that they’d forced him to his knees and shot him in the back of the head, while barely breaking stride.
    Following Nancy was easy for them. Hers were the only tracks in the sand. They found her in the first, narrow creek mouth. The tracks returned closer to the waterline, occasionally washed away by the small waves.
    “Here, they were dragging her,” Linda said as we followed the footprints back toward the camp. “One on either side. She struggled to get free right there.”
    Linda stepped closer to the tracks, where only two sets continued back to the boat, one much deeper than the other.
    “She got free for a second,” I said, pointing to where a scuffle had occurred. “One of the men probably knocked her out and carried her. See how one set of tracks is deeper?”
    Linda nodded and looked all around at the southern horizon.
    Nancy was gone.
    We heard the heavy whump-whump of an approaching helicopter and looked southwest. The unmistakable orange and white markings identified the Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk as being a Coast Guard bird.
    The chopper landed on the beach, just to the north of the Tolivers’ camp and two men jumped out. Both were armed. Linda approached them, holding up her badge to identify herself as an FDLE Agent, and explained what had happened. There was nothing they could do for Gene. The two Coasties stayed with us, asking more questions as the chopper lifted off and headed south, looking for the boat.
    Within an hour, more choppers had joined in the search and two small boats had arrived, one a launch from a Coast Guard Cutter lying offshore and another from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. Rusty knew one of the sheriff’s investigators and went over everything that had happened with him. The investigator said the sheriff’s office also had a chopper in the air and they were doing everything they could to find the missing woman.
    They found her another hour later. She was floating in Florida Bay near Sand Key, ten miles southeast of Cape Sable. She was wearing only a tee shirt, a hole in the back of her head.
    After making the plane secure and setting the big Danforth up near the beach, we walked back to our camp. The next high tide wouldn’t be until an hour before sunset and there was no chance of getting the Hopper off the bottom until the tide floated her.
    We portaged the canoes across from the lake and began taking down the camp, loading everything into them. It took a while, but we found the four smaller Danforths we’d anchored the plane with yesterday. We’d untied them from the plane in a hurry to get to the Tolivers’ camp.
    What the two men did made no sense at all. I know I shot one of them and he was injured. The smart thing would have been to get far away as fast as possible. Why had they taken the time to kill Gene, then kidnap and rape his wife, before killing her?
    We were in knee-deep water, pulling the canoes toward the plane two miles away. Rusty and Kim following along behind us. I’d so wanted this trip to be special for Kim. A trip full of the wonder and beauty that is south Florida. Instead, it turned into something a teenager might experience in Miami, or Chicago.
    “It’s not logical,” Linda said, as if reading my mind. “They should have hightailed it right back to where they came from.” Then thinking out loud, she muttered “Why stop and kill the Tolivers?”
    “I was thinking the same thing,” I replied as we trudged along, doing the stingray shuffle. “It’s almost like they were targeted for some reason.”
    “I’ll dig into his background when I get back to my office. Remember, he said he was a pilot, too. Whoever those men were, they might have thought your plane was his.”
    Except they escaped southeast , I thought. Instead of saying that, I said, “If they came hunting the Tolivers, they probably would have started in