Found: A Matt Royal Mystery by H. Terrell Griffin Read Free Book Online

truck. The Jag started to move out of its parking space. It drove toward Goodlow and stopped. The driver’s side window glided down, and the man behind the wheel leaned his head partially out. Goodlow turned, as if the man in the Jag had said something that caught his attention. We watched the old man toss an envelope through the open window of his truck and walk toward the Jaguar. As he got close, the man in the Jag raised a pistol and shot Goodlow in the forehead. The old man fell to the pavement, and the Jag sped out of the lot, turning north onto Gulf of Mexico Drive.
    I put the other CD into the drive and pulled up a page containing a dozen thumbnail pictures. They were black-and-white and showed several young men and women at a party on a bayside beach. I clicked on the first picture and blew it up to full-screen size. There were three men and threewomen dressed in summer clothes sitting at a picnic table eating from plates heaped with what appeared to be fried fish. They were smiling and looking into the camera. Another group of people was in the background, huddled around a brick-bordered fire pit. A large pot was suspended over a fire and a man was stirring it with an oar that had likely come from one of the small Jon boats beached nearby.
    “Do you see anybody that looks familiar?” I asked.
    “No, but I wouldn’t expect to. Look at their clothes and that car in the background. A long time ago. Ann Kuehnel said Goodlow told her these were taken soon after World War II. Those people are all either dead or very old now. Bud Jamison said he thought they were from a July Fourth picnic in 1948. He can probably tell us who they are, but I don’t see how they would be important. I doubt they had anything to do with Goodlow’s death. They’re just pictures of dead people.”
    “It’s kind of sad, isn’t it?” I asked.
    “What?”
    “The people in these pictures were all young and had most of their lives ahead of them. They were happy and enjoying a day on the water. The camera caught them in an instant in time, one very minute portion of their entire lives. And yet, here we are, in a sense reliving that very second that happened well before we were born. I wonder how their lives turned out, what kind of joy or hurt they experienced before their lives ran their courses.”
    “Yeah. Life doesn’t last very long, does it?” she said. “Let’s look at the rest of the pictures.”
    I scrolled through the remaining photos. They were all of the same group, maybe twelve or fourteen in all, an equal number of men and women. The shadows cast by the trees in some of the photos indicated they were taken in late afternoon. J.D. didn’t see anything that seemed to have any significance to Goodlow’s murder. I put the CDs back in their plastic cases and put my computer in sleep mode.
    “Did you hear anything from the phone company about the picture you got this morning?” I asked.
    “Yes. It’s confusing. The photo was sent from a disposable phone in Detroit, but there’s no record of that phone receiving any text messages.The phone was only activated this morning and the only thing it was used for was to send me that one text.”
    I chewed on that for a couple of beats. “That can be explained if the picture was taken with a camera in the phone.”
    “That was a real cheapie bought in Atlanta. It didn’t have a camera,” she said.
    “Then the picture would have to have been uploaded from a computer or another phone.”
    “But what’s Katie doing in Detroit?”
    “If that was Katie.”
    “It was her,” J.D. said.
    “There are a number of computer programs that could have put that picture together so that it looked like Katie. They could have easily inserted a copy of today’s paper into the picture.”
    “I know. But what about the message? Nobody would know about her calling me Jed.”
    “Your sorority sisters would, wouldn’t they?”
    J.D. frowned. “I guess. And maybe some other people we knew