“It confirms what I know. So I guess that’s a help.”
“What’s your interest in King?”
“The security video showed him talking to our shooter just before the murder. King was gone by the time Goodlow was killed, but I want to talk to him.”
“Do you think he’s got something to do with the murder?” Sharkey asked.
“Probably not, but I’ll interview him. See what he does know. I’ll keep you posted.”
J.D. hung up and pulled out onto Gulf of Mexico Drive, heading north toward her condo. It was time for lunch and she didn’t want to fight the crowds. She’d make a salad and get back to work.
She gradually became aware of the black Toyota a couple of car lengths behind her, driving at the same speed she was. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, except that she’d seen the same car, or one just like it, behind her as she was leaving Matt’s house that morning. She picked up her phone and called dispatch. “Who’s on road patrol this morning?” she asked.
“Steve Carey is the only one working right now. The other guy is in court in Sarasota.”
“Do you know Steve’s location?”
“He just radioed in. He’s watching traffic in front of the Catholic church.”
“Thanks,” said J.D. and hung up.
She dialed Carey’s cell phone. “Steve, it’s J.D. I’ll be passing you northbound in about three minutes. There’s a black Toyota Corolla following me. I’ve seen him twice today. Will you pull in behind him and run his tag for me?”
“Sure. You want me to pull him over?”
“Let’s check on the tag first. If it turns up as stolen, get him. If not, stay with him, but call me back with a name.”
“Got it.”
J.D. passed the parked patrol car and gradually slowed her speed by ten miles per hour to give Steve a little more time. She decided she wouldn’t turn into the road that led to her condo, but keep driving. If Steve didn’t get back to her, she’d keep going and cross the bridge onto Anna Maria Island. Her phone rang.
“J.D.,” said Steve, “the car’s registered to a corporation named SMI, Inc., based in Tampa. No reports of it being stolen.”
“I want to know who’s driving that car. I want you to drop back way behind him.”
“I’ve already done that. Didn’t want to spook him.”
“Okay. I’m going to speed up to about sixty miles per hour. If he wants to stay with me, he’ll have to break the speed limit. You get him and give him a ticket for speeding and let him go. Treat it like any traffic stop. His license will tell us who he is.”
“If it’s not a fake.”
“That’s the best we can do for now. I don’t want him to realize I’ve made him. I’m up to sixty now and he’s keeping pace.”
“I’ll have him in a minute,” said Steve, and J.D. heard the wail of the siren cutting through the cool air.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dusk shrouded the islands as darkness swallowed the day’s final moments, the last traces of light bleeding slowly from the sky. I drove across the bridge and onto Longboat Key, glad to be home, tired from the drive, and in need of a cold beer. I’d called J.D. from the road and arranged to meet at Tiny’s.
The place was quiet, a few locals enjoying the short interval between the time the afternoon crowd left for home and the evening crowd began to stir. J.D. was at the bar talking to Logan Hamilton and his girlfriend, Marie Phillips. She apparently hadn’t dumped him yet.
A cold bottle of Miller Lite appeared on the bar as I sat down next to J.D. She kissed me on the cheek. “You have a good day?”
“I did. How about you?”
“Made some progress on the murder, I think,” she said. “Were the Basses any help?”
“Maybe. Did you ever get the impression that there was trouble in Jim and Katie’s marriage?”
“Not really. She’d complain about him sometimes, but I always thought that was just the usual ebb and flow of marital bliss. Why?”
“I’ll fill you in later. Hey, Logan, Marie.”
“Matt,” Logan said, “heard you were off-island.”
Our key leaks information, most of it no more exciting than the comings and goings of the islanders. “Just for the day,” I said.
“Where’d you go?”
“Orlando.”
“That doesn’t sound real exciting.”
“It wasn’t. How’re you, Marie? Still putting up with my buddy, I see.”
“He needs supervision, Matt,” Marie said, “and I’m the only one crazy enough to take on such a long-term project.”
“You guys want to go to dinner?” Logan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Too many people this time of the year.”
“We could go to the Haye Loft,” he said. “Pizza and dessert. If we go now, we’ll beat the crowd.”
I looked at J.D. “Sounds good to me,” she said. “I need to make an early night of it.”
Pizza and beer topped off with a calorie-laden piece of key lime pie had lulled me into a near torpid state. J.D. and I were huddled on my sofa, the sound of her voice pushing me closer to sleep. “And so,” she said, “I stripped naked and jumped on top of old Bob, just about giving him a heart attack.”
“What? Who the hell is Bob?”
“Are we awake now?”
“Geez, yes. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Fantasy, dear. Nothing more, but it appears to have woken you up.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was kind of dozing off.” I sat up straight. “So tell me about your day.”
“Not a lot to report. I found out the name of the man we saw on the security tape talking to our shooter. Porter King. He lives in the complex, but apparently is out of town. I’ll try him again tomorrow. The big surprise was that somebody was following me today.”
“Following you? How?”
“In a car, dummy. A black Toyota Corolla.”
“I’d think a black Lincoln Town Car would have been more intimidating.”
“Probably, but the Corolla was bad enough.”
“Any idea who it was?”
“A private investigator from Tampa.”
“You been fooling around with a married man?”
“Not lately.”
“Any idea why he was following you?”
“No. I had Steve Carey pull him over for speeding and find out who he is. I don’t think he would have connected the traffic stop to me. I’m going to find out a bit more about him before I do anything.”
“Want me to go talk to him?”
“No. Not yet, anyway.”
“I could send Jock to see him.”
J.D. laughed. “The guy would die of fright. When’s Jock due in?”
“Sometime this weekend. He’ll let me know when his plans gel. He’s taking a little downtime in Rome.”
“Must be nice.”
“He’s been doing agency work,” I said, “so I don’t know what kind of shape he’ll be in when he gets here.”
J.D. was quiet for a moment. “Matt, if he needs you, I’ll stay at my place. Let you two do what you do. Get him clean. I’ll stay out of your hair.”
“Thanks, but I hope it won’t come to that. He and Logan are supposed to play in a golf tournament next week at the Longboat Key Club, so maybe it won’t be too bad. I appreciate your understanding, though.”
“I love him, too, you know.”
“I know you do.”
“He’s family.”
I smiled. “He is.”
“So, what did you find out in Winter Park?”
“I’m not sure. I think there was trouble in Jim and Katie’s marriage.” I filled her in on my discussion with the Basses. “Do you think Jim was abusive?”
“I never thought about that,” she said. “But it did seem that Katie withdrew during the three or four years before she disappeared.”
“How so?”
“She hardly ever called. For a long time, we t
alked every week or so, but then the calls almost came to a halt. When I called her, she always seemed to be in the middle of something and couldn’t talk more than a few minutes.”
“Did you see much of her during that period?”
“No. She almost never came to Miami, but I used to visit her in Sarasota a couple times a year. The invitations stopped about the same time as the phone calls. I didn’t attach any significance to it. I just figured she was building a new life here with Jim and I wasn’t part of it. Friends do grow apart, you know, so I thought that was what was happening.”
“The same kind of thing was going on with her parents. George seemed to think she was being mentally abused. They didn’t think it was physical.”
“Jim was always pretty intense. Maybe the pressures of the law practice were making him worse.”
“Did Katie ever talk to you about having children?”
J.D. smiled. “Yeah. She wanted a houseful. I don’t know why she didn’t start a family. I thought it might be a physical problem with one of them, but it wasn’t my place to ask.”
“Did she ever say anything about Jim not wanting kids?”
“No.”
“She told the Basses that Jim didn’t want children. Apparently he was adamant about it.”
“Katie never said anything to me.”
“Do you know why Captain McAllister would still be calling the Basses to ask if they’d heard from Katie?”
“No, but I assume he hasn’t given up. He and Jim were buddies, and there is always one case a cop can’t solve and can’t let go of.”
“Do you have any of those?”
“A couple, but when I left Miami, I put them behind me. I wouldn’t be able to work the cases from here, so I had to let them go. But they still haunt me.”
“I think you might want to have another talk with McAllister,” I said. “See if he’s found out anything more.”
“I plan to do that. I’ve been debating whether to show him the picture of Katie.”
I thought about that for a minute. “I don’t think I would. Not yet, anyway. That’s kind of our ace in the hole. If Katie’s alive, she’s either being kept somewhere by somebody or she’s intentionally hidden herself away from her world. If she’s reaching out to you after all this time, there must be a reason.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I guess you’re no further along in your investigation of Ken Good-low’s murder.”
“No. I went to see Bud Jamison again this afternoon after I got away from the P.I. He gave me the names of all the people who were in the picture from 1948, but the ones he knows about are all dead. There were a couple of people who moved away over the years and he lost contact with them, so he doesn’t know whether they’re dead or alive.”
“Cracker Dix knew Goodlow,” I said. “He used to have coffee with him, Jamison, and two other old men over at the Cortez Café. He said they all just stopped showing up for coffee, and Ken never would give him an answer as to why.”
“Did Cracker know any of them by name?”
“He didn’t remember them, but he said they might be in his journal.”
“Cracker keeps a journal?”
“You don’t want to know. He did tell me the men died over the past couple of years. Goodlow and Jamison were the only ones left. Do you think they may be important?”
“I doubt it, but I need to cover all the bases. I’ll talk to Cracker tomorrow, show him the old pictures. If he knows the names of the old guys he had coffee with, he can tell me whether they were part of the crowd back in ‘48.”
“Why don’t you just ask Jamison?”
“I will. But if I know the names of the old gents and those guys were in the pictures, I can tell if Jamison is lying if he says they weren’t.”
“Why would he lie to you about something like that?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably not pertinent to anything.”
“Sounds like you’re just scratching around.”
“That’s half the job.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The night often brings disquiet and dreams of dead soldiers and jailed clients, the ones I couldn’t save, the ones who didn’t deserve death or incarceration. That night, I dreamed of Jock Algren. We had grown up together in a small town in the middle of the Florida peninsula, best buddies who struggled with dysfunctional families and survived the trials of our teen years.
When Jock graduated from college, he joined the most secretive agency of the federal government, one so secret it didn’t even have a name. Over the years, he had become one of their top agents and he reported directly to his director and to the president of the United States. Jock had extraordinary powers given to him by the president and Jock gave the president deniability, cover from any mission that blew up in the politicians’ faces. So far, that hadn’t happened.
Jock was called on to do many things in fighting terrorists and other enemies of the United States. Sometimes he killed the bastards in cold blood, and while every one of them deserved his fate, when the body count reached some sort of undefined critical mass, the actuality that it was he who sent them to hell would sporadically slam Jock into a state of wretched self-loathing. He would slink onto Longboat Key and hole up in my cottage on the bay, watching the boats and birds and people and slinging back glass after glass of good bourbon. He’d talk and tell me about the horrors he’d seen, the men he’d killed, the destruction they had wrought that made them undeserving of mercy or due process. Just death at the hands of an assassin they had not seen coming. And when he’d drunk himself into a stupor, Jock would crawl into bed and sleep for hours. Some nights I’d hear him sobbing through his pain, and the next morning he’d attack another bottle of bourbon.
Three or four days would pass without my leaving him. I made sure he ate enough to survive and I listened as he poured out the details of a life that was his personal scourge. And on the fourth or fifth morning, he’d wake up early, shower, and drink glassfuls of water. “Ready to run?” he’d ask, and I would know it was over, the bad days that we called the “cleansing time.”
We’d run the beach, pounding the booze out of his system, and then we’d go to the Blue Dolphin Cafe for a huge breakfast and lots of coffee. The old Jock would be back, the self-assured man with the ready smile and a kind word for everybody. He’d stay a few more days, play golf with Logan, drink his nonalcoholic beer at Tiny’s or the Hilton or Pattigeorge’s, joke with his many friends on the island, and then fly off to Houston and home until the wars again came knocking on his door, bidding him to join up and start the terrible process all over again. It was Jock, and men like him, who stood between us and the devils who crashed planes loaded with civilians into buildings filled with office workers. His work was honorable, but I knew that he left a little of himself on the battlefield after every skirmish. Someday, there would not be enough left of Jock Algren for me to help rehabilitate. And then my friend would die and a large piece of my life would go to the grave with him. I wasn’t sure how I’d survive that.
I tossed and turned in the bed, the dreams and thoughts crashing around in my turbulent brain. I felt J.D.’s hand on me several times, her quiet whisper letting me know she was there. Finally, I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Four a.m. on a dark Thursday morning. A time when predators roam the earth.
I took my cup into the living room and sat in the dark, staring at the bay through the sliding glass doors that opened onto the patio. The security lights on my dock cast shadows on the black water, providing an unsettling sense of dread.
I crept back into the bedroom and retrieved a pair of shorts, a sweatshirt, and my running shoes. I put a note for J.D. on the kitchen counter and left the house. The only way to rid myself of this creeping anxiety was to run it out of my system. I jogged down Broadway to Gulf of Mexico Drive and headed south, past Cannons Marina and the Euphemia Haye Restaurant. I turned around at the Centre Shops and picked up speed as I ra
n north toward the village. I slowed to a walk when I reached Broadway and ambled toward home. It was still dark, and the coolness of the early morning was quickly drying the sweat I’d exuded during the run. The endorphins had kicked in and my mood was definitely on the upswing.
A car turned onto Broadway from Gulf of Mexico Drive, its headlight beams startling me for a second. I moved to the left edge of the road, giving it plenty of room to pass. I could hear the car as it approached and knew it was slowing. I looked over my shoulder, but the headlights’ glare obscured my view. I stepped onto the grass berm, looking for an escape route. I had no reason to fear a strange car in my own neighborhood, but the adrenalin was beginning to flow into my system. I told myself I was being stupid, imagining things, finding threats where there were none. Still, better safe than sorry.
I was a step or two from bolting into the yard of a dark house, when the car came to a stop and a familiar voice said, “Hey, Matt. You’re out early.”
I turned to see a Longboat Key Police squad car and an officer I’d known for years. “Morning, Joe. Just running off last night’s pizza. How’s the night shift working out for you?”
“Kind of quiet, but I did see a black Corolla that’s on my ‘watch for’ list. The same one that was tailing J.D. yesterday.”
“Where?”
“Parked a couple of houses down from yours. I ran him off, but I’ve been driving by every half hour or so to make sure he hasn’t come back.”
“Was it the same driver Steve Carey stopped yesterday?”
“Yeah. Some private eye from Tampa named Ben Appleby. Said he was working a case but wouldn’t tell me anything else. I had no reason to hold him, but I told him it would be in his best interest to get off the island until daylight.”
“When was that?”
“A little after two. He hadn’t been there long. I drove by an hour or so before, and he wasn’t in the area.”
“Thanks, Joe. I’ll tell J.D. I wonder what this guy’s up to.”
“No telling. Take it easy, Matt.” The window slid up and the car moved on.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was still dark and J.D. was fast asleep when I returned to the cottage. I looked at my watch. Almost six. I took a shower in the guest bathroom and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt I found in the dirty clothes hamper. They would probably last one more day. I drained the coffee pot and made fresh, poured myself a cup, and went back to the sofa.
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