Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

to ask for their help.
    He had fumed. He had spewed vitriol. Sometimes he could drive away pestering Yankees with a good old Southern tantrum, spiced heavily with nonsensical metaphors.
    “Son, I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by an owl. The FBI cannot have this case and could not solve it if somebody gathered up the evidence and handed it to them in a Sir Walter Raleigh can. I’ll make myself clear: the Federal Bureau of God-damned Investigation couldn’t find the floor with their own two feet. Do you hear me, son?”
    The young voice on the other end of the line hadn’t quavered much as it said, “Yes, I do.”
    “Then don’t call me back unless you want to be rowed up Salt River.”
    Then today, feeling merciful, Sheriff Mike had thrown the guy a bone. “Tell you what let’s do, son,” he said. “If you’ll leave me alone for, say, three days, I’ll give you something to do with your time. We had a little scuffle at a local marina. A man pulled a gun on one of the customers, and the short order cook settled things with a pan of hot grease. Unfortunately, when I got there, the assailant was gone and so was the victim. So all I’ve got is a gun and the cook’s word that the assailant has grease burns all over his midsection. Think you could do something with that? Try to link the gun to some other crimes? Check the ERs for burn victims? You think so? Well, good.”
    Sheriff McKenzie thought maybe the federal agent had enough of a stick-to-it nature to do credit to the task. The boy had certainly been diligent in the thankless task of pestering him. Every day, he’d wager that the young man was completely cowed, then another call would come. The content of the calls never changed. The kid always pointed out that the location of the murders on an offshore island and the absence of a motive suggested a drug deal gone bad. Or so the Feds wanted to think.
    He had pointed out their idiocy more than once. By that logic, any crime committed in his coastal jurisdiction could be declared drug-related. If mere location was enough to claim jurisdiction over a murder case, then he might as well close up shop.
    The phone rang. Since he’d already heard from the FBI that day, he knew it was time for the other call he’d gotten every day since the killings. It was somebody’s secretary, calling from Quin Land Development, wanting to know when he was going to release the island crime scene, so that pre-development activities could resume.
    Every day, he said, “This investigation is unusual in a lot of ways. Any evidence left in such a natural, unprotected place is fragile. The crime scene will remain cordoned off until all the lab work is back.” The secretary was beginning to sound bored with these exchanges. It wouldn’t be long before Quin Land Development called in the big guns and he started hearing from their lawyers.
    Lawyers made him want to heave, so he returned his attention to the information-free lab report. His field crew had lifted a print of a man’s tennis shoe, cheap, size twelve, in the equipment shed. Dr. Stockard said that all of her site workers wore safety boots, all the time. Besides, even if they did wear tennies, he privately doubted any of those fashion-conscious kids would shop at Bargain Shoes-for-Less.
    This is the culprit , he thought. But what did it really tell him? That the killer was a man. Well, he already suspected that, but now he knew. Half the human race was easily eliminated, unless a big-footed woman was running around in men’s shoes.
    The shoe size was a little large, even for a man, but still common. Casts of depressions in the sand around the bodies suggested that he was tallish and of average weight for his height. They already knew he had a least a few gray hairs. Reckon how many thousands of men fitting that description could be found in a five-hundred-mile radius of where he sat? Speaking of where he sat, he himself fit the description.

    Magda thumbed through Architecture of Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Tabby Dwellings . The title alone gave her the approximate construction date and the actual building material of Faye’s mystery house and it raised an interesting question. Tabby was once used extensively as a construction material along the Atlantic coast of Florida, but there was no way that Faye was commuting more than a hundred miles to Saint Augustine. The only tabby buildings Magda knew of along the Florida Gulf coast were near