Winner The Crystal Awards 2016, Best Multimedia Story (3d Place).
A spinster doctor rents her spare room to a brain-damaged patient who doesn't know he is a former undercover agent targeted for execution by a powerful criminal.
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A few weeks before the discovery of a naked, unconscious John Doe on Elliott Key.
At a Key Largo fishing pier, divers, fishermen, boat crews, and tourists milled up and down the planks amidst dozens of docked and moored boats. Above their heads a banner stretched, proclaiming the "25th Annual South Florida Spearfishing Rodeo."
A few miles out into the Florida Straits, in the waters above a coral reef, a boat rode at anchor, flying a smaller banner that read, "Spearfishing Rodeo."
Red-and-white "divers down" flags bobbed in the blue-green seas surrounding the boat. A wet-suited diver, carrying a spear gun, leapt from the boat into the water and disappeared beneath the surface.
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On the same day, in a cemetery two highway hours north of Key Largo, a somber caravan of automobiles wound its way between old trees and mildewed headstones. A long, black hearse led the cortege, followed by two black stretch limousines and, bringing up the rear, a battered 12-year-old sedan.
The hearse stopped at the foot of a grassy knoll. Trees, grass, granite monuments, all were dripping from an earlier heavy rain. Freshly turned earth lent its husky aroma to the sweetness of a rain-cleansed breeze and the delicate scent from a nearby hedge of jasmine.
Carinne Averell, looking innocently pretty and naively young, emerged from the first limousine behind the hearse. In her exquisitely tailored black mini-dress and Jimmy Choo shoes, she walked carefully across damp grass to the top of the knoll, where pallbearers would set a casket in place over an open, new grave.
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Thirty feet below the sea's surface, a spearfishing diver swam through a wall of rainbow-colored parrotfish. Around him the living reef was a fairyland of waving, pastel pink fan coral and spring green fernlike plants dancing in the current. Before he could find and spear the massive grouper he sought, the diver would displace from his path many orange clownfish, with their black and white stripes, as well as a dozen species of yellow, blue, green, and even red, finny reef denizens.
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