"Three o'clock this morning, to be exact."
"I thought you might want to tell me something."
"For God's sake, Tyler, what's so damned earthshaking that you couldn't have waited until tomorrow morning?"
"About an hour ago, I got a call from some Fed in Washington." Sweat paused to ease the throttle up a notch. "Said he was with a domestic intelligence agency I'd never heard of. I won't bore you with his downright belligerent talk. Never can understand why everybody up North thinks they can blindside a Southern boy. The upshot was he demanded we turn over the dead from the blimp to federal authorities."
"Which federal authorities?"
"Refused to name them. Got vague as hell when I pushed."
Rooney was suddenly intensely interested. "He give any hint why they wanted the bodies?"
"Claimed it was a security matter."
"You told him no, of course."
"I told him I'd think about it."
The turn of events and the gin combined to make Rooney forget his fear of water. He began to notice the trim lines of the fiberglass craft. It was Sheriff Sweat's second office, occasionally pressed into service as a backup police cruiser, but more often used to entertain county and state officials on weekend fishing trips.
"What do you call her?" Rooney asked.
"Call who?"
"The boat."
"Oh, the Southern Comfort. She's a thirty-five-footer, cruises at fifteen knots. Built in Australia by an outfit called Stebercraft."
"To get back to the LeBaron case," Rooney said, sipping at his martini, "are you going to give in?"
"I'm tempted," said Sweat, smiling. "Homicide has yet to turn up lead one. The news media are making a circus out of it. Everybody from the governor on down is pressuring my ass. And to top, it off, there's every likelihood the crime wasn't committed in my jurisdiction. Hell, yes, I'm tempted to pass the buck to Washington. Only I'm just stubborn enough to think we might pull a solution out of this mess."
"All right, what do you want from me?"
The sheriff turned from the helm and looked at him steadily. "I want you to tell me what's in your report."
"My findings made the puzzle worse."
A small sailboat with four teenagers slipped across their bow and Sweat slowed down and gave way.
"Tell me about it."
"Let's start at the end and work backwards. Okay with you?"
"Go ahead."
"Threw the hell out of me at first. Mostl
y because I wasn't looking for it. I had a similar case fifteen years ago. A female body was discovered sitting in a patio chair in her backyard. Her husband claimed they'd been drinking the night before and he'd gone to bed alone, thinking she would follow. When he awoke in the morning and looked around, he found her right where he left her, sitting on the patio, only now she was dead. She had all the appearances of a natural death, no marks of violence, no sign of poison, just a generous amount of alcohol. The organs seemed healthy enough. There were no indications of previous disease or disorder. For a woman of forty she had the body of a twenty-five-year-old. It bugged the hell out of me. Then the pieces began to come together. The postmortem lividity-- that's the discoloration of the skin caused by the sinking of blood due to gravity-- is usually purplish. Her lividity was cherry pink, which pointed to death from either cyanide or carbon monoxide poisoning or hypothermia. I also discovered hemorrhaging of the pancreas. Through a process of elimination the first two were discarded. The final nail in the coffin was the husband's occupation. The evidence wasn't exactly hard core, but it was enough for the judge to put him away for fifty years."
"What was the husband's line of work?" asked Sweat.
"He drove a truck for a frozen-food company. A neat plan. He pumped booze in her until she passed out. Set her inside his truck, which he always took home nights and weekends, turned up the refrigeration unit, and waited for her to harden. After the poor woman expired, he put her back in the patio chair and went to bed."
Sweat stared blankly. "You're not saying the corpses found in the blimp froze to death."
"I'm saying exactly that."