Mortal Dilemma (30 page)

“I guess we better get started reviewing all that crap.”

We sat at the table Reuben had vacated. The restaurant was starting to get busy, so we ordered a beer for me and a glass of wine for J.D. We divided up the stack of documents and went to work.

*    *    *

In the end, we found only one email exchange on each of the pages. They were short and to the point, but the point was often opaque, so it turned out not to be that much to review and even less that made any sense to us. But there was one email string that rang some bells. The smoking emails, J.D. called them.

The email string was between Charlie Bates and Wally Delmer on the previous Friday, the day after Skeeter tried to kill J.D. on I-75. It said:

Bates: “Did you hire somebody else to take out that detective?”

Delmer: “So what?”

Bates: “That's my hit, that's so what.”

Delmer: “You're the backup plan.”

Bates: “I'm not the second string here.”

Delmer: “You were paid up front. If the idiots had got her in Gainesville, you'd have been paid for doing nothing. Now you need to get her.”

Bates: “Okay. I'll do it. Fuck you.”

Delmer: “I've got another job for you. I need you to take out Fortson.”

Bates: “When?”

Delmer: “Tonight.”

Bates: “Send my fee to the usual place.”

Delmer: “Done.”

“I think we solved the murder on the beach,” J.D. said after reading the emails. “And I bet our friend Bates was the guy who hired the young man to kill Rachel.”

J.D. called Reuben and asked him to forward the emails to Parrish and an email address that belonged to Dave Kendall and not to forget to set up the video feed for the next morning. She then called Parrish and told him about the emails between the dead Charlie Bates and Wesbert and Wally Delmer. She said she thought there might be something important in there that the FBI interrogator would like to look at before he talked to Gilbert.

I called Kendall. I wanted him to be completely informed about Delmer and Gilbert and their ties to Ishmael's Children and to Fortson's murder. I gave him a detailed report of what we knew, what
we suspected, and what we speculated about. I also told him to watch for the emails Reuben was sending him.

When J.D. hung up from her call to Parrish, she said, “Well, at least we know for sure that Bates, Wally Delmer, and Gilbert are connected.”

“That's something,” I said. “Those sandwiches at lunch didn't go very far. You want to get something to eat?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Let's go down to the Sandbar. It'll probably be crowded, but with all the snowbirds coming back, there's not likely to be any Longboaters there. We won't have to talk about our day.”

“I have to change clothes and I want a shower,” she said.

“My place?”

“Sure.”

As we drove away from the Seafood Shack, we saw dark clouds moving in from the Gulf. A storm was coming, the temperature dropping precipitously as the cooler air pushed by the storm crossed the beach and engulfed the island. It was pouring by the time we reached my house, and we got soaked running from my driveway to the front door.

After we took a long hot shower together, we dressed, used umbrellas to get to the Explorer, and drove to the northern end of Anna Maria Island, sloshing through a downpour reminiscent of our daily summer rainstorms.

The Sandbar Restaurant sits right on the beach and provides a wonderful view of the white sand and the Gulf's placid water. We were a little early and the crowd had not yet gotten too big. We were seated right away at a table for four next to a window overlooking the beach, but the view was lost in the dark and the rain by the time we sat down.

The server had just gotten our drink orders when J.D.'s neighbors, Susan and Tom Mink, walked through the door, saw us, and came to our table. “Are you guys all right?” Susan asked.

“We are, thanks,” I said. “Will you join us?”

“I wish we could,” Tom said, “but we're meeting a couple from back home in Baltimore for dinner.”

“J.D.,” Susan said, “one of your policemen came by today and showed me a picture of the dead man, a mug shot I think you call it. That was the same man I saw running through our hedge yesterday.”

“You're sure?” J.D. asked.

“Positive. And Marylou Webster agrees with me.”

“I'm glad to know that. I don't guess he'll be bothering us again.”

Susan laughed. “You guys sure bring a little excitement to the neighborhood. I know this must have been horrendous for you, J.D. I'm sorry it happened. If you need anything, let me know.”

The Minks went to meet their friends. J.D. said, “They're good people. I was pretty sure Bates was the guy trying to get in my place yesterday, but it's good to have it confirmed. I'll rest easier.”

We spent another hour in the restaurant, eating and talking about things not connected to either the Fortson murder or Jock's situation. It was a pleasant ending to a day that had started out so wrong.

T
HURSDAY
, N
OVEMBER
6

T
HE HEARSE PULLED
to a stop in front of the modest house on the north side of Tallahassee. It was three o'clock in the morning. The night was clear and quiet and the tree canopy blocked what little light the stars and a half moon produced. A streetlight hung from a pole two houses down from the one in which Wally Delmer lived, providing little illumination, but enough that the neighbors, if they were awake and watching, could see the hearse.

Jim Austin walked purposely to the front door, pantomimed knocking, and quickly slipped a pick into the lock and opened it. He entered, walked toward the back of the house where he assumed the bedrooms to be, and stood quietly for a moment. He heard the sound of light snoring coming from one of the two bedrooms. He walked in, silently, and saw the lump of a man sleeping under the covers. He pulled a small instrument about the size of a cell phone from his pocket, placed it against the sleeping man's neck, and pushed a button. The Taser activated and Wally Delmer awoke, twitching and moaning, powerless. Austin turned him on his stomach, pulled his arms behind him, and handcuffed him.

The Taser charge was wearing off and Delmer was sputtering, trying to talk. Austin pulled a strip off the roll of duct tape he carried in his cargo pants pocket and slapped it over Wally's mouth. He clicked twice on a small handheld radio attached to his belt.

Moments later, Austin heard the front door open and two men came in carrying a gurney they'd found in the hearse. They moved Wally onto it and covered him with a sheet.

Austin took a few minutes to go through the house looking for computers. He found two laptops and put them on the gurney under the sheet. He motioned to his men to leave. They took the gurney containing Wally and the laptops and stashed them in the hearse. Austin took a few moments to look around for anything else he might need. Nothing. He followed the men out the door and into the hearse. They left the quiet neighborhood and drove toward the funeral home where they had appropriated the hearse a half hour earlier.

*    *    *

Jim Austin had been watching Thursday Night Football at his home in Northern Virginia when he got the call from his boss, Dave Kendall. “Suit up, Jim,” Kendall said. “You're going to Tallahassee, Florida. There's a team and a Gulfstream waiting for you at Reagan National. A car will be in front of your house in ten minutes. Call me when you're airborne, and I'll fill you in on the mission.”

“Yes, sir.” The line went dead. Austin was the duty agent for the Eastern United States for the week, a job that rotated among the agents assigned to the agency's Washington, D.C. office housed in the CIA building in Langley, Virginia. That meant that when an emergency arose, he went.

Austin went to the closet in his bedroom, grabbed his ready bag packed with his toiletries, a change of clothes, and two nine-millimeter pistols. He bent over to kiss his sleeping wife.

“You got a call?”

“Yes.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eleven,”

“Who won the game?”

He chuckled. “Still going on. It's in overtime. I'll call you tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll be back before noon.”

“Be safe.”

“Always.”

Austin left his house and walked down the sidewalk to the staff car waiting at the curb. The familiar tingle of anticipation ran up his spine, the thought of a mission into the unknown teasing his adrenal glands. Every assignment started this way. A phone call or a text message, and he was off into the nether world where he and his colleagues operated, the jungle where the predators hide and attack at will.

*    *    *

Austin's team consisted of two men, both of whom he knew to be agents recently out of the rigorous field training. The call to Kendall was short and devoid of much information beyond the name and address of the target.

“You're going to Tallahassee to pick up a man named Wally Delmer and bring him back to D.C. I'll have a vehicle meet you at Reagan National when you return, and we'll take him off your hands.”

“I take it he's not going to come willingly,” Austin said.

“I doubt it. Here's the plan. Tell me if you don't like something.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There'll be a car parked in the short-term parking area at the Tallahassee airport. Keys are on the front right tire.” He gave the tag number. “Drive the car to a funeral home, whose address I will text you in a few minutes, and steal a hearse. They park them in the open, so you won't have to break in. Did the pilot give you a bag?”

“He did.”

“You'll find a Taser, handcuffs, and keys to the hearse you're going to steal.”

“No keys to the car in the bag?”

“Didn't have time for that. I called the rental car office at the airport, paid for the rental, and told them what to do with the keys. I couldn't get that done for the hearse, so we went online, got the vehicle identification numbers of all four of their hearses and got keys to all of them from our stash of standard automobile keys. You might have to try several before you get the right one.”

Austin checked the bag. “Everything's here,” he told Kendall.

“Get the guy and bring him home. Take the hearse back to where you got it, and hopefully no one will notice it was used.”

*    *    *

As the hearse pulled away from Delmer's house, Austin took stock of the man he'd incapacitated. He was about six feet tall and he had that emaciated look that reminded Austin of the pictures he'd seen of the Nazi concentration survivors. Not that bad, of course, but headed there. Austin was told that the man was fifty years old, but he appeared to be in his seventies. My God, he thought, had they gotten the wrong man? It'd be kind of funny if they had grabbed the old next-door neighbor of the man they were looking for. It'd generate a few laughs around the water cooler, but he'd never live it down, and his career prospects would be greatly diminished.

The man was regaining his senses, and Austin asked his name. “Wally Delmer. Who the fuck are you?” Austin grinned and stuck a hypodermic into Wally's upper arm and, within a minute, he was still. He'd stay that way until he woke up in a safe house somewhere in Virginia.

T
HURSDAY
, N
OVEMBER
6

T
HE
L
ONGBOAT
K
EY
police station is a little over a mile south of J.D.'s condo, where we'd spent the night. As we drove to the station to watch the interrogation of D. Wesley Gilbert, I was thinking that one day we'd have to give up on this peripatetic lifestyle, moving between my cottage and her condo, never knowing from one day to the next where we'd end up spending the night. We'd talked about marriage and moving into my house, but not very seriously. She'd been married when she was a young police officer and it had turned out badly. One night, during a heated argument, her husband decided to take a swing at her. Big mistake. She kung-fued him, broke his arm, messed up his face, and the next day had her friend Deanna Bichler file for divorce.

My marriage had ended badly, but that was my fault. I drank too much, worked too hard, involved myself in all the things young lawyers do as they are trying to build a practice and a reputation. I kept putting off having children, something my wife wanted desperately. Finally, she'd had enough of me and my ego, and although she professed to still love me, she moved on. We remained friends after the divorce, and she married a good man and raised his children and then died way too early. I suspect J.D. and I were both gun-shy, but for different reasons.

At the station, we sat in a room filled with audio and video equipment. The geek's lair, it was called. One wall held a sixty-inch flat
screen TV that showed a fidgety D. Wesley Gilbert sitting in a chair in front of a small table that held a bottle of water. The room he was in had bare walls and no furniture that I could see, other than the table at which he sat. We were getting the live feed from the video camera perched high on the wall of the interview room.

J.D. was on the phone with Parrish. He told her that the documents she'd had Reuben send him the afternoon before were full of good information, enough for the FBI to arrest Wally Delmer in Tallahassee at daybreak. Parrish told her they were ready to start the interview and we watched a man in a suit walk into the room and introduce himself to D. Wesley as FBI agent Sam McFarland. He sat across from Gilbert and asked some preliminary questions, such as name, age, today's date, their location. It was standard procedure designed to show that Gilbert was not mentally impaired. That he was fully capable of answering the questions put to him.