Blood of Cain (Sean O'Brien (Mystery/Thrillers)) (41 page)

“No, Mike, and I wish I had more time to explain. I spoke with Dan Grant, Volusia County S.O., and he told me how you ran the prints on the carny worker and you found one that matched the latent pulled from the ice pick on the carnival homicide in Volusia.”

“Yeah, the homicide that’s causing this political train to become a run-away-train. You don’t think the girl did it, huh?”

“No, the question is do you believe the perp you’re holding did the killing and maybe the other two?”

“Could be. He says he can’t remember doing it, although he was working at that carnival when the homicide happened. I can’t sniff out bullshit from him. My deception meter isn’t reading crap coming outta the perp’s mouth. It’s damn weird, Sean. This guy is telling me he doesn’t remember doing it … but he sort of remembers some guy telling him to do it.”

“Dan Grant said the perp admitted he’d been hypnotized to deal with his fear of riding a motorcycle in the Cage of Death.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.”

“Did he say who hypnotized him?”

“Says he can’t really remember. He said it was someone who’d worked the carny circuit. A guy who supposedly could mass hypnotize an entire audience. The perp said the rest of it is like bits and pieces of a dream that he can’t remember the whole picture. It might not be enough to get your girl off the meat hook, but it does establish that at some time and some place the perp had his hands on that ice pick. Right now we can’t prove when and where.”

“How long can you hold him?”

“Bond’s been set at a half mill. The guy’s a habitual criminal, flight risk, plus we got him on enough stuff to send his ass to Raiford for a long damn time. Gotta go, Sean. Late for a depo.”

***

Two hours later I arrived back at Ponce Marina, skirted around the news media in the parking lot, and made my way down L-dock. I sat in the cool salon on Dave’s trawler,
Gibraltar,
the air-condition humming, Max half asleep on my lap, Dave in his canvas director’s chair nursing a cocktail, and Nick sitting at the three-stool bar. They listened intently as I shared with them the events I’d gone through the last four days.

When I finished, Nick looked at me, his black eyes wet, absorbed in the story. He was speechless, which was saying a lot for Nick. Then, like coming out of a trace, he sipped from his bottle of Corona and said, “Man, I’m so damned sorry to hear about your mother.”

Dave said, “That goes for all of us, your marina family.”

Nick blew air out of his cheeks, his face flush. “Sean, what happened to you is so unfair. You met your mother, and you had to bury her. You find out you have or had a sister who was murdered, and the guy who did it is your freakin’ brother, the brother you never even knew you had. Heavy shit, my friend. A heavy load to tote.”

Dave said, “Based on what you told us your brother said, it’s apparent he’s as mercenary as the guy who shot through the window of your Jeep … maybe even more so because an assassin-for-hire is playing by his employer’s rules. If your brother has some God complex, and he’s a full blown sociopath, he believes the rules, the laws of a civil society, don’t apply to him. A man like that shares many of the same mental traits associated with Hitler, and, in his own sphere of influence, can be just as deadly. The allusion to Cain and Abel isn’t a stretch.”

Nick drained what was left of his Corona and said, “From the day that the girl Courtney first walked on this dock … the girl we now know is your niece … I told you shit was gonna happen. I just didn’t know how deep it was gonna get.”

Dave grunted. “That’s not exactly what you said, Nick. The Forrest Gump suggestion is well-founded, though. Sean, to say how sorry we are for your loss doesn’t scratch the surface of what you just experienced—you find your mother and give her a funeral all in the same week.” He shook his head and sipped his drink, gesturing toward the book on the table, and he cut his eyes back up to me. “I’m reading
Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann. Joseph Campbell was influenced by some of what Mann had to say. Campbell, of course, distilled it down to the hero’s journey. And a lot of it is exactly what you went through—what you’re going through. But when that journey takes you into the bowels of a dysfunctional family you never knew existed, I’m not sure how you return from a quest so intimate, so personal, without experiencing profound change akin to surviving a war.”

“I haven’t returned. I’ve made a detour to regroup. A lot of my next direction depends on the ID of the girl they pulled out of the Louisiana swamp.”

Dave nodded. “Unfortunately, there are too many missing young women. Police say she’s a Jane Doe until a family comes forth to connect her to a missing persons report or some kind of DNA evidence. In the case of Courtney Burke, without DNA from Courtney, there’s nothing to match to the dead girl. One news commentator is calling for Andrea Logan to give a DNA sample to see if a dotted line can connect to the corpse. Hell, Sean, Logan’s Democratic opponents might be coming after you for a DNA sample. With the election coming very soon, it’s gone from mudslinging to throwing feces like hardballs.”

Nick got up from his barstool, stepped to the port side of Gibraltar, and stared out the window toward the marina office and the Tiki Bar. “Looks like a few more TV news trucks have set up camp. Maybe something’s breaking. Sean, maybe they’re linking you to blowin’ up the cigarette boat in South Carolina.”

“I don’t think so. The closest eyewitness was a train engineer, and he saw my back as I was running for my life.”

Dave said, “So you believe the sniper who shot your windows out, who came within an inch of taking your head off, was the same guy you got on camera saying Timothy Goldberg and presumably Senator Lloyd Logan had issued orders to take Courtney out?”

“I recognized the boot tread, down to a cut on the sole of his left boot.”

“But yet somebody sends you a text message threat, saying that the rifle bullet through your Jeep windows was a warning shot, along with the demand about the video. Maybe the shooter just missed and they made it seem like a warning because you were still alive.”

Nick said, “Just from those glass cuts on your face, you’re damn lucky you didn’t lose an eye.”

Dave stirred the ice in his drink. “The irony is you pull this assassin out of the St. Johns River, literally, as a big gator is closing in, and then you take him out, or vaporize him, in the Savannah River. You’re going to release that video, aren’t you?”

“It was an insurance policy to keep Courtney safe. If they killed her … I’ll release it and let Logan’s handlers handle that.”

Nick glanced up at the TV screen behind Dave’s bar. The sound was muted, but the picture was on, images of a reporter near a wetland in New Orleans. “What’s this?” Nick asked, reaching for the remote control. He turned up the sound.

I wasn’t ready to hear it.

Max barked, her hound dog ears following movement on the dock. Nick looked out the starboard side of
Gibraltar
. “A news cameraman is walking toward your boat, Sean. The guy decided to go around the locked gate and the no trespassing signs. I see another one following him.”

Dave said, “It’s the tip of the iceberg, and right now
Gibraltar
is beginning to feel a bit like
Titanic
. As long as you stay sequestered aboard, Sean, we should avoid a collision with a media mob. I’ll call security and the sheriff’s office. Turn up the sound on the TV, Nick. Looks like they have reason to call what I’m seeing as breaking news.”

The scenes were of a Louisiana parish sheriff and two FBI agents holding a news conference in front of the sheriff’s headquarters. The voice-over came from a news anchorman who said, “That was the scene minutes ago when the results of forensics tests were announced by Sheriff Ralph Perry and special agents with the FBI. Let’s go to Peter Zimmer live at the crime scene where the girl’s body was found. Peter …”

The camera shot cut to the field reporter, a square-jawed, dark-haired man wearing an open sports coat, standing next to an airboat. “That’s right, Larry, police and FBI say they have made a positive identification in the tragic death of a young woman found here in Barateria Swamp by a tour boat operator. Investigators are saying the body is that of nineteen-year-old Gina Boudreaux, reported missing more than a week ago. Two remaining teeth in the girl’s body matched with dental records. Then police got a DNA sample from the Boudreaux family in St. James Parish. Also, we’re told there was an apparent match of a small tattoo, a sunflower, on the girl’s left shoulder. Her distraught parents say the last time they saw their daughter was last Saturday when she came into New Orleans to visit the area voodoo shops. Gina Boudreaux’s car was found abandoned three blocks from the French Quarter. Police and federal agents have few leads and apparently no suspects in this grisly murder. Reporting live from Barateria Swamp, this is Peter Zimmer, now back to you in the studio.”

The image cut to a blonde news anchorwoman who said, “Thanks, Peter. On a national scale, the news of the murdered girl’s identification means that the whereabouts of Courtney Burke, wanted in connection with the deaths of three carnival workers, and the young woman who may be the daughter of Andrea Logan and her college boyfriend, Sean O’Brien, is still unknown. Andrea Logan’s husband, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Senator Lloyd Logan, says he stands by his wife, and says that their long-time relationship and marriage has no bearing on what happened in the past, after Andrea Logan gave a baby up for adoption twenty years ago. More on this breaking story tonight at eleven.”

Nick hit the mute button and turned toward me. “Wow, what the hell are you gonna do now?”

“Find Courtney.”

“Nobody can find her, and everybody is looking.”

“But they’re not looking in the right place. I don’t know why she went to New Orleans, but I know where she’s going. She’s trying to find her uncle, my brother, Dillon.”

“Why?” Dave asked, turning his head from the television to me.

“Retribution, among other things. He killed her mother, his sister—our sister, and raped Courtney when she was a young woman. I have a feeling in my gut that he killed the three carny workers.”

Nick’s dark eyebrows lifted. “What? You said Miami cops just picked up a guy who left a thumbprint on the ice pick.”

“They did. His print along with Courtney’s print is on the same ice pick. No eyewitnesses. No security camera video. The suspect says he wasn’t there and didn’t do it. But he was there, at least working for the carnival as a motorcycle stunt rider. He’d been hypnotized to become fearless to drive a motorcycle in the Cage of Death. If hypnosis, with a guy like that, can remove his fear of death, could it eliminate his fear of capture or guilt in a killing?”

Dave said, “Killing as in murder, of course. Not self-defense.”

“Exactly. What if a master hypnotist could plant a post-hypnotic suggestion, or a command, to have someone killed? Maybe that order is triggered from a cell phone call or some other remote way to prompt whatever psychological tripwire that’s needed to send this person into a robotic kill mode and not recall anything after it’s done. The killer could beat any polygraph because he has absolutely no connection to the act. Courtney said Dillon Flanagan is a master hypnotist
.
He knew Courtney was going to cause trouble for him, bring in murder and rape charges. He killed her mother and father. He’d have no hesitation to kill her, or frame her for murder … especially if he could hypnotize someone else to do it.”

Nick said, “This kind of brainwashing sounds like the
Manchurian Candidate
movie.”

Dave nodded. “It’s mind control. The CIA experimented with it for years. Began in the 1950’s as something call MK-Ultra, or code name
Artichoke
. Candidates, if you will, most susceptible to it, are subjects with what’s called a dissociative mental state, in other words, those who’ve been hurt or abused, even those with PTS … people who found detachment in creating more than one personality.”

Nick popped the cap off a Corona. “But for the average Joe, you can’t manipulate his personality to assassinate another human if that truly goes against the person’s conscience.”

Dave said, “We’re talking subconscious, Nick, which means a much altered state-of-mind. To engage an unconscious action that doesn’t have the rational parameters found in the conscious mind. And that, for most of us, comes with a guilty conscience if we cross the line—the scruples and morality factors found in our knowledge of right and wrong. So in mind control, to bypass that, the hypnotized person might answer his or her cell phone and hear the words
yellow-dog
, and then become an assassin, following a preprogramed post-hypnotic command.”

I said, “And, in theory, they have no memory of how they were hypnotized, or who did it. This creates the ultimate mole or spy because, even under torture, they can’t break since they have no source memory of the connection—the orders and who gave them.”

Dave stirred his drink. “And you think Dillon, your biological brother, might be capable of this level of hypnosis?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s beginning to look like that’s how he functions.”

“There’s no expiration date for a post-hypnotic suggestion, or in this case, command. If he’s that good at entering the human subconscious and essentially derailing the ethics of the conscience, then what if he has a band of followers he’s recruited. People he’s met, mesmerized, and hypnotized to do his bidding at his will? Would they be his subservient drones—each person fundamentally two people in one body?”

Nick ran his fingers through his hair, glanced out the window and said, “This is getting crazier by the hour. You have a mastermind psychotic brother, with a Cain complex, and a politician with a littler pecker personality, and both of ‘em have a hard on to screw you to the floor. More news types are shooting video of your boat, Sean. We got to get you the hell outta here. Someplace safe. Someplace where you aren’t bothered by what amounts to a bunch of paparazzi.”