Authors: James W. Hall
No one lived along this stretch of water, though he saw what looked like abandoned fishing shacks through the trees, summer cabins perhaps, where city people had once come before the river grew so contaminated it lost its appeal. There were half-sunk floating docks and diving boards fixed to the edges of back-porch decks, automobile tires washed ashore, all but hidden beneath years of river mud.
A clear-cut acre appeared to his right. Stripped of timber, the land had grown scar tissue of weeds and saplings, and as he passed by the current seemed to grow faint as if the river were honoring the loss of foliage. Sunning itself in that open space, a great blue heron was flushed by Thorn’s passing and with a startled cry it rose awkwardly then swooped forward in front of his canoe and raced along before him skimming the water with the tips of its wings, leaving its brief autograph.
He missed the channels of deeper water and ran through a series of small foaming rapids, the canoe scraping hard across the rocky bottom, bumping against hidden rocks, then washing over a four-foot dip, a mini-waterfall, and floundering for a moment, barely averting another pinwheel slide.
Around him the river made a low humming sound as soothing as the gentle wash of surf. In the nearby forest crickets were perfecting their tedious drone. Here and there clusters of dead fish floated in patches like shiny silver oil slicks and above him a few dragonflies who’d lingered into winter were lacing knots in the still air. He could smell the rich moldy shoreline, generations of leafy decay, the rank metallic aroma of damp clay rarely touched by the sun.
In its way the terrain was as wild and gorgeous and as jeopardized as the Florida landscape he felt so passionate about. This place needed defending too, needed people like Flynn and Cassandra who were willing to put all else aside and risk themselves to rescue what was left of it. Hog farms that fed an insatiable national hunger were clearly not the only dangers. There was a listless, undervalued quality to the land itself and to its people. They seemed more like captives than citizens. No one with the stomach for a brawl. So much already lost, there was little left to fight for.
When he came upon the dogleg bend then saw the collapsing dock, its appearance was so sudden, he had to back-paddle hard, putting on the brakes, and swing the canoe at nearly a right angle to the current, and even with a flurry of deep and urgent strokes, he missed the remains of the dock by several feet and plowed the canoe into a soft, sloppy embankment.
Thorn climbed over the duffel and hopped across to the slope, pulled the canoe forward till it was half out of water. He left the duffel behind and scrambled up the bank, punching footholes along the way as if he were scaling a snowy cliff.
At the summit of the bank there were knee-high weeds and a rickety chain-link fence that had lost its battle with rust and gravity and toppled over and was laying nearly flat before him.
NO TRESPASSING
signs were nailed to several trees, though they looked as ancient and unattended as the fence.
He stopped for a moment and peered into the shadowy woods, and when his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out the vague outline of a cabin but no sign of activity. Perhaps he’d landed too soon, and this wasn’t the property Ladarius had directed him to. Then again, he’d not seen any docks farther up the river and this was the first enclave he’d seen in the last half hour with even a remote chance of being occupied.
Following the remnants of a path, he waded through the weeds, heading toward the house. He was twenty yards off when just a few feet to his right the gleam of metal surprised him.
A girl of seven or eight with blond curls that hung to her shoulders sat in an adult-size wheelchair. She was dressed in a cowgirl shirt with red and black checks and blue jeans with fancy stitching. The legs of the jeans hung loose and flapped in a river breeze. A brown paper sack with a grease stain sat in her lap.
Beside her stood an enormous yellow dog, mostly Lab but partly Saint Bernard or some other long-haired giant breed. It had been focused on the girl and the bag in her lap, but as Thorn approached it swung its massive head around, its neck hairs bristling, and began to make a low rumbling growl.
“You Thorn?”
“I am.”
“I’m Emma,” she said. “They’re in the house. Mom and the others. You like chocolate chip cookies?”
Thorn took a slow breath. He hadn’t realized how rattled his nerves were, how trip-wired he’d become from the drugs and the violence but mostly from hearing how badly injured Flynn was.
“Sure, I love chocolate chip cookies.”
She rolled forward, then tucked a hand into the bag and came out with a cookie, extending it to him. The dog followed her, still growling, and watching Thorn with an unsettling focus on his throat.
“Every Sunday Mama bakes them, a special treat if I’ve been good all week. Usually I’m good. Sometimes I’m not, though, sometimes I get a little peevish. Do you get peevish?”
“I do. More often than I’d like.”
“It’s hard to be good all the time,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s hard?”
“The hardest thing there is.” He sampled the cookie. Chewy and fresh, warm from her lap, the sun, or just out of the oven. “Your mama is Millie?”
“Everybody knows Mama. She’s famous in Pine Haven, best waitress in the county.”
“She’s excellent.”
“The boy inside, the one that’s hurt, you’re his dad?”
“I am. Can I see him now?”
“That’s why I’m parked here. To show you where he is. This is Duke. It’s short for Marmaduke, but we just call him Duke. He’s friendly, you can pet him if you want, but don’t touch his head, he doesn’t like that, or his ears.”
He passed on petting Duke but asked Emma if he could help roll her chair up to the house, and she shook her head.
“Like doing it myself. It builds my muscles. A girl needs muscles, don’t you think?”
“I do,” Thorn said. “Muscles come in very handy.”
“Come on, Duke,” she said.
The big dog followed them up the path toward the house, nosing Thorn hard in the butt twice along the way.
TWENTY-EIGHT
SUNDAY WASN’T THE BEST DAY
for it, but Sunday was all Sugarman had. Midafternoon, blasting along I-95 at twenty miles an hour above the limit, traveling the same route as two days before, cell phone pressed to his ear, calling the Florida Highway Patrol office in Tallahassee.
After fighting through the phone cascade, then half an hour on hold and four handoffs, he finally found a state employee willing to help track down the green Nissan Tina Gathercole had hijacked from the Shell station in Vero Beach two days earlier.
Sheila Barnes had a south Georgia voice, sweetly asking him to identify himself, which Sugarman did by giving his old badge number and work history from twelve years ago when he was a deputy for Monroe County sheriff’s department. Sheila sounded skeptical, then put him on hold, and Sugarman thought, shit, here we go, impersonating an officer, but she came back in a few minutes and said that, yes, in fact, two days ago a green 2003 Nissan had been found abandoned in the emergency lane three miles south of the Vero Beach exit, and it was subsequently ticketed then later towed to an impound lot servicing Indian River County. Sheila gave him the name of the trooper who’d written the violation and the phone number for the garage where the car was being stored.
Sunday must’ve been a big day for the impound garage because a gruff guy snatched it up on the first ring.
Yeah, they still had the car, at least for the moment. Vehicle was stolen from a Miami shopping mall three days ago, the owner was on his way up right now to collect it. No, there was no blood or sign of struggle inside the car, and nothing of note left behind. A few CDs, some cigarettes, loose change, he’d check again if Sugarman wanted, but he was pretty sure the car was clean.
Sugar asked him, if he didn’t mind, to give it another look, but don’t touch or disturb anything, this was a homicide investigation. The driver’s body was found a few hours north of the location where the car was abandoned and Sugarman was trying to piece together exactly what happened. When the tow truck guy started hemming and hawing, Sugarman told the guy that the driver of the car was a woman and she’d been killed by being suffocated with meat.
The guy groaned, set the phone down, and came back in a few minutes. Quieter, subdued. No, he’d found nothing in the car. Clean as a new whistle.
One last thing Sugarman wanted to know. Was the tow truck guy absolutely one hundred percent positive the car was found south of Vero Beach exit 147, not north? The guy huffed, smacked the phone down again, and came back in two or three minutes, paper rattling in the background.
He had the record sheet in his hand. Yeah, yeah, it was three miles south of exit 147. South, south, south. Now you got everything you want?
“Don’t go near the car again,” Sugarman said. “And don’t deliver it to its owner. The car’s an active crime scene. FBI will be contacting you shortly.”
If the car was found south of exit 147, it meant Tina was heading home after playing her part in Cruz’s bogus sting operation. Which meant somebody intercepted her, and that person was likely in league with Cruz. It was hard to imagine how the guy managed to shield what he was doing when he bound her up and tossed her in the trunk, all this going down along a busy section of the interstate. People whizzing by.
Sugarman settled on a more likely scenario. The killer hailed Tina, got her to pull over, then he strong-armed her into his vehicle, took her to a remote location to truss her up and put her in the trunk. In that case, Tina probably recognized the person in the car, which meant this encounter may have been a part of the plan from the outset. Cruz promising she’d send somebody to extract Tina from the stolen vehicle and drive her home to Key Largo, then double-crossing her big time. All of it was speculation, but Sugarman was sure it was one of those versions, or something close.
He called Sheffield. Got him as he was about to enter a Home Depot to buy a few more gallons of paint.
“You might want to call a pal at the bureau, let them know the car Tina Gathercole was kidnapped from is about to be delivered to its owner, contaminating a crime scene.”
Sheffield sighed, took down the number of the impound lot.
“That it?”
“No. One more thing.”
Sugarman asked if he’d be willing to throw some weight around with the St. Johns County sheriff’s office, find out the name of the homicide cop assigned to Tina’s case, see if he was available for a sit down in half an hour.
“You’re asking me to impersonate my former self?”
“If you’re uncomfortable with that, I’ll find another way.”
“Will this make us even?”
“We’re even now.”
“I’ll work on it,” Frank said. “Give me ten minutes.”
A little guilt, Sugarman thought, could work a lot of magic.
Fifteen miles up the interstate, Sheffield called back.
“Deputy David Randolph is waiting for you at the sheriff’s office. He’s not the lead investigator, but that guy, name of Dickerson, apparently he’s a pompous shithead. Randolph sounds like a decent guy. I asked him to open the murder book for you, share whatever case files they’ve got. Told him it was part of a federal investigation. For the rest of the afternoon, you’re an FBI agent. Enjoy it, because this is it, Sugar, all the assistance I can provide. I don’t want them to yank my goddamn pension before I get the first check.”
The St. Johns County sheriff’s office was twenty minutes off the interstate on a stark stretch of roadway across from an industrial park. He found Randolph at the coffee machine refilling the reservoir with water.
Sugarman introduced himself, apologized that he was in a bit of a hurry, had an urgent appointment a few hundred miles up the road. Randolph didn’t ask for any identification.
The deputy was a good six-four with a hard-looking body and a soft face. Mouth on the edge of a smile like he was easily amused or in on some cosmic joke. There’d been a time when Sugarman wore a similar smile and had a similar outlook, and maybe someday that sensation would return. But for now his own face felt like he was wearing a plaster cast set in a scowl of outrage. Behind his eyes he’d been feeling a pressure building like a gallon of hot tears dammed up back there.
Randolph led him to a conference room and laid out on a long table the documents they’d collected so far. Two murders, an eighteen-year-old African American male and Tina Gathercole.
“You want some privacy?”
“I could use that, yes.”
“I gotta say, you seem pretty courteous for an FBI guy. I haven’t met that many, but you’re not like the others. Abrupt, abrasive. Bunch of a-holes, mainly.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Randolph left him with the ME’s two autopsy reports along with sets of photos for each, and the two crime scene accounts, photos of the scenes and investigators’ notes. There was also a handful of photos that were still shots taken from the security video footage at the burger place’s drive-through window and more images from another camera mounted above the rear door.
In the set of photos from the drive-through, a round-faced stocky man with big lips and a shaved head was leaning out the window of a four-door sedan.
The other security camera at the rear of the burger joint had caught the same husky guy approaching the rear door of the restaurant. The time stamp marked it at 2:23
A.M
.
Sugarman didn’t bother with the autopsy photos. He’d seen more than his share of those kinds of images and didn’t want them skittering around in his head the rest of his life, especially the ones of Tina. He scanned the ME’s report and learned the meat crammed into the mouth of the young fast food worker was uncooked, while the meat Tina had choked on was flame broiled and there were no signs of bread or condiments, mayo, ketchup, pickles, or lettuce in her airway.
The manager of the burger joint had given a detailed statement, which was translated into familiar cop euphemisms that were meant to be neutral and professional but always sounded to Sugarman like deadpan satire.