“Yeah. Me, too. We tried for a long time to have a child. It never occurred to me that it would kill her.”
“You mentioned earlier that you had a daughter.”
“Yes. Melanie. She’s gone, too. Cancer. Died in August of ‘75.”
“Do you have any other family?”
“No. I was an only child, and my parents died in an automobile accident before the war. The people in this village have always been my family. Now most of them are dead. Getting old, Detective, is hard.”
“I keep hearing that age is just a number.”
Jamison laughed. “Don’t believe it. Age kind of creeps up on you and one day you wake up and realize that you’re old, that what was once your future is now all in the past. Suddenly, you’re staring into the abyss with nothing to look forward to but endless days of just surviving. I think some of us live too long.”
“How do we know when that is?”
“When you’re the last one left.”
J.D. nodded. Maybe he was right. She pointed to two men who were seated at a table in one of Goodlow’s pictures. “Do you know either of these men?”
“Sure. The one on the right is Mack Hollister and the other is Bob Sanders.”
“Do you know what happened to them?”
“Yeah. They both died.”
“When?”
“Why are you interested in that, Detective?”
“Just following up.”
“On what?”
“If I’m going to solve this murder, I need to know everything I can about Mr. Goodlow and his friends, his life here in the village. I need to know if there are any people left who might bear a grudge against him for something that happened in the past. Something that might have gotten him killed.”
“Are you going to ask me about every one of the people in these pictures?”
“I am. When did Hollister and Sanders die?”
“Mack passed about a year ago, Bob a month or two later. They were among the last of the old crowd to go.”
“How did they die?”
“Are you asking me the cause of their deaths?”
“Yes.”
“Old age. They just wore out.”
J.D. paused for a beat, looking closely for a sign that Jamison was lying. Then she pointed to another figure in one of the pictures. “Who’s this?”
Jamison identified the image, and J.D. asked about several more. Jamison told her the names and approximately when they died. Several of the people had moved away years ago, and Jamison had no idea what might have happened to them, whether they were alive or dead. But when J.D. pointed to one man standing near the fire pit, she noticed the same quirk she’d caught when she’d first interviewed him, that indescribable feeling that the old man had just lied to her.
“Who is this man? The one by the fire pit,” J.D. said.
“That’s Rodney Vernon. He moved to New Jersey back in the early ‘50s.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t have any idea. I haven’t heard from him since he left Cortez.”
J.D. sat quietly for a moment, looking at her notes. “Mr. Jamison,” she said, “I get the distinct feeling that you know more about Mr. Goodlow’s murder than you’re telling me. Why is that?”
“I don’t know where your feelings come from, Detective, but I can assure you that you know everything I know.”
J.D. stood. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Jamison,” she said. “I can find my way out.”
She drove to Matt’s house and let herself in. The place was quiet, no one home. The spot on the carpet where Tony had left his body fluids had dried, leaving no sign of the fight. The overcast sky had not cleared, and the bay outside the windows was an expanse of gray water, slightly ominous in appearance. Drops of rain started to fall, splattering the sliding glass doors that led to the patio. A boat was coming down the bay, running at speed. It looked like Recess, Matt’s boat. She watched as it came off plane, slowed, and began to make its way up the channel that led to the dock behind the house. She decided to let the men secure the boat. No need in her getting soaked.
She sat down at Matt’s computer and pulled up the picture of Katie in front of the building in Tampa. She examined it closely, but could not see anything she’d missed before. She stared at the computer screen, mentally begging the photograph to reveal its secrets. Maybe there weren’t any. She fiddled with the mouse and zoomed in on the picture. The resolution was much better after the department’s geek had worked on it.
There was something on the back of Katie’s right hand, a tattoo maybe. J.D. focused on the hand, zoomed in some more. The picture began to pixelate, just as it had the night before, but this time the upgraded resolution provided the image with much better definition. J.D. zoomed out in small increments until the picture cleared and she could read what was written on Katie’s hand. It wasn’t a tattoo, but something written in black ink. She studied the image, but could make no sense of it. Katie was trying to tell her something, but what? Why the subterfuge? Why not simply call her and ask for help?
J.D. studied the image, but couldn’t make out the words written on Katie’s hand. She downloaded the picture to a flash drive and inserted it in the USB port in Matt’s TV. In the larger picture, she was able to read the inscription, but it made no sense. A letter and a number. “U166.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We ate lunch as Jock told me about his mission in Europe. It was pretty run-of-the-mill compared to what he often had to do. I told him that my relationship with J.D. was ripening and that every day brought a new surprise, a new insight into this wondrous woman who loved me. “Life doesn’t get any better than this,” I said.
Weather was moving in as we left Rotten Ralph’s. It had slipped up on us as we ate and drank a couple of beers. The sun had disappeared behind the dark clouds that were rapidly moving in from the north. The wind increased, bringing cold bursts of air that rattled the halyards of the sailboats docked at Galati’s Marina next door to the restaurant.
“We’d better head for the barn,” I said. “We’ve got a cold front coming in. It’s going to get rough out there.”
Jock agreed. We paid our check and climbed aboard Recess. I started the engines as Jock handled the lines. We motored out of Bimini Bay and into the teeth of the wind blowing south across Tampa Bay. We had a wet run with quartering seas until I found the intracoastal channel that led from the bay into Anna Maria Sound and down to Sarasota Bay. It was slow going all the way home. The wind had whipped up the surface so that even as we moved out of Tampa Bay and into the lee of Anna Maria Island, we had to contend with whitecaps. Visibility was dropping and the rain was pounding us as we approached the Manatee Avenue Bridge. The span began to rise in response to a signal from a northbound sailboat. I moved to the right of the channel, leaving plenty of room for the sailor. We sat while he slowly navigated under the bridge, fighting the wind blowing in his face. He’d have a rough time of it on Tampa Bay.
The rain came down harder, riding the wind blowing from the stern and robbing us of much of our visibility. I set the throttles to a slow speed, barely keeping the boat on plane as we ran south, skirting Palma Sola Bay and slowing for the Cortez Bridge. I picked up speed as we made the run for home. The rain had slackened a bit as we outran the worst of it.
As we made our way down the channel that led to my dock, I saw that the lights were on in my cottage. J.D., probably, but it might have been Logan or anyone of several other people who knew where I hid the spare key and were close enough friends to make themselves at home even when I wasn’t there.
We secured the boat to the dock pilings and trooped up the walkway to the patio. We’d have to clean the boat and the fishing gear after the storm blew itself out. I could see J.D. inside, sitting at my computer, engrossed in whatever she was looking at. I knocked on the patio doors to get her attention. She came and unlocked the door to let us in.
“You’re wet,” she said.
&nb
sp; “It’s raining.”
“Go change. I’ve got something to show you guys.”
When we came back into the living room, J.D. pointed to the television screen that showed somebody’s right arm and hand. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Katie’s hand. From the picture she texted last night. Look at what’s written on it. Can you make that out?”
I stared at the screen for a moment, studying the hand. “Looks like it says ‘U166.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
“No. I thought you might have an idea.”
“A rock band?”
J.D. laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“How about something to do with your sorority?” asked Jock.
“I doubt it,” said J.D. “If it is connected to the sorority some way, I don’t remember it.”
“That’s not a tattoo,” I said. “Looks like somebody used a Sharpie to write it. Is Katie right-handed?”
“No. I already thought about that. She’s left-handed, so she could have written it herself.”
“It obviously has some meaning to her,” Jock said.
“Apparently so.” said J.D. “But why would she be trying to give me some information that I can’t decipher?”
“Either she thinks it’ll mean something to you or it’s some kind of code,” said Jock. “Maybe it’s only part of a message.”
“But why would she send me only part of a message?” J.D. asked.
“There’s probably more to come,” said Jock. “We’ll just have to wait until she sends you another text.”
“U166,” I said. “What the hell is U166?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
GULF OF MEXICO, JULY 30, 1942
U-166 was rigged for attack and running on the surface, racing at flank speed through the calm waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico, closing in on her target with the intensity of a cheetah going for the kill. The night was dark and hot and the German submarine was running without lights. Her target was blacked out too, no lights showing, but the lookout atop the U-boat’s conning tower had the passenger freighter in sight. She was an American flagged ship, the Robert E. Lee, although the U-boat’s captain, Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Günther Kuhlmann, had no way of knowing that. She was a medium-size American ship carrying passengers and cargo, and Kuhlmann didn’t need to know her name.
U-166 was a new boat, launched in 1941. She was a IX C class Unterseeboot, one of the infamous U-boats that stalked the seas, killing Allied seamen, and sending millions of tons of seaborne cargo to the bottom. She was two hundred fifty-one feet of steel with a range of thirteen thousand nautical miles. She had left her home port of Lorient, France, on June 17 and was now forty-three days into her first combat patrol under the command of Captain Kuhlmann, a twenty-eight-year-old career naval officer.
Kuhlmann had been tracking his target for several hours, keeping to the depths, viewing the Robert E. Lee through his periscope. He could only make four knots while submerged and because of the need to recharge the batteries that propelled his boat while under water, it was necessary to surface more often than the captain thought prudent.
The U-166 had been patrolling the approaches to the Mississippi River, the captain sure that sooner or later a fat target would present itself, either coming or going from the Port of New Orleans. It had been late in the afternoon when Kuhlmann first sighted the lumbering freighter on the horizon. He quickly ordered the boat onto a course to intercept the target and returned to his place at the periscope. The U-166 was in position an hour later. The target was headed straight toward the U-boat as she approached the mouth of the Mississippi. Easy pickings, Captain Kuhlmann thought.
As the target grew larger in his viewfinder, Kuhlmann saw another ship moving up from astern of the freighter. It was faster than the target and in a few minutes Kuhlmann identified the new ship as a U.S. Navy patrol craft. He quickly checked his book of silhouettes and determined that she was a new type, a sleek warship one hundred seventy-eight feet long with a top speed of twenty knots. She carried four large guns and equipment to launch depth charges from either side and off the stern. She was escorting the merchantman, and Kuhlmann knew that once he fired at the target, the escort would come after him. If he didn’t perform his killing mission with perfection, the depth-charge attack that was sure to follow might prove fatal to his boat and the forty-nine men under his command.
A surface attack with the U-boat’s torpedoes provided the best chance to make the kill, but it also gave the American patrol boat a better chance to find and destroy the submarine. Kuhlmann’s crew was anxious to sink something worthy of their efforts. The boredom of life at sea in a steel tube that spent all day underwater was taking its toll on their morale. They had only sunk three small vessels since they left France. Two of them had been too small to rate a torpedo and Kuhlmann had attacked on the surface, sinking them with gunfire.
The captain checked his position again. He was about forty-five nautical miles south of the entrance to the Mississippi River. The patrol boat had slowed and was now matching the speed of the Robert E. Lee, slogging along on her port side. Kuhlmann positioned U-166 so that he would be on the starboard side of the freighter as she came abreast of him. With any luck, he could get his torpedoes away and submerge before the patrol boat recognized the danger and came searching for the attacker.
Time seemed to creep by as the Robert E. Lee slowly sailed toward her doom, the patrol boat oblivious to the danger, unaware that a submarine lurked nearby. Kuhlmann looked at his watch, ten o’clock in the evening. He made a quick notation in his logbook and turned to the young Leutnant zur See sitting at the plotting table. “It won’t be long now, Paulus. We’ll take this one out and head for Texas.”
Leutnant zur See Paulus Graf von Reicheldorf nodded. He was not a submariner. He was a courier for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. Captain Kuhlmann was the only man aboard the U-boat who knew of his mission. Von Reicheldorf had come aboard shortly before the boat sailed, and his presence on the patrol had not been explained to the crew.
The captain activated his microphone and spoke to the crew. “We’re going after a cargo ship, but she has an armed escort. As soon as we fire the torpedo, we’ll dive and begin evasive maneuvers. We’re going to take some depth charges, but we’ve got a lot of water under us, so we should be fine. We surface in five minutes.”
Reicheldorf was twenty-two years old and had been in the navy since he dropped out of Heidelberg University. He spent his first year as an officer aboard surface ships. He’d inherited the title of Graf, which was the equal to the continental counts or English earls, when his father was killed in the Royal Air Force’s bombing of Hamburg on the evening of May 17, 1940. His mother had also died that night, leaving the young graf with no immediate family.
Admiral Canaris had been friends with the graf’s dead father since they’d first met during their time as naval cadets. Canaris had remained in the navy following the First World War and eventually became head of the Abwehr. Like most of the men and women of that agency, Canaris was not a Nazi. Paulus’s father had never accepted the party either, even though he served it as a diplomat. He saw himself as working for the greater good of his beloved Germany and thought that sooner or later the Nazis would disappear from the earth and sanity would again prevail in German politics.
When the elder graf died, Canaris plucked Paulus from the fleet and installed him in the Abwehr offices, thinking the new duty station would give him a better chance of surviving the war. The young officer worked for the agency for a year, acting essentially as a clerk. He chafed under the repetitive and boring tasks, and asked the admiral on several occasions to assign him work in the field. He completed some rudimentary courses, learning the basics of the spy trade, and hectored his boss to give him an assignment that would be more meaningful than filing documents sent by real field agents.
On a fine morning in early June in Berlin, when the sun shone ove
r the city not yet destroyed by the incessant bombing of the British and American air forces, the young graf was summoned to the admiral’s office. “Paulus,” the admiral began, “you’ve been after me to send you into the field, and I’ve resisted those efforts.”
Paulus smiled. “I’m aware of that, sir.”
“I brought you into the Abwehr because I wanted to keep you safe. You’ve already sacrificed too much. You lost both your parents to the British bombers, and I wanted to make sure that you survive this madness. You come from a proud family with a long history. I think it necessary for those good names to survive this war. Somebody will have to run Germany after the war.”
“Sir, I understand, but I think my father would want me to fight for the fatherland just as he did. Not spend the war shuffling papers.”
“I agree, Paulus. I’ve put a lot of thought into this and I think your father would be unhappy with me for keeping you here. I’ve decided to send you on a mission.”
Paulus sat back in his chair and drew a deep breath. “Thank you, sir.”
“You have a command of the English language that we need for this mission and, frankly, I don’t have any other agents available that can match that.”
“Am I going to England, sir?”
“America,” said the admiral.
“How?”
“A U-boat will be leaving Lorient, France, in a week, bound for a war patrol in the Gulf of Mexico. The captain’s primary mission is to destroy shipping, but he can take you in close to the Texas coast near Galveston. From there, you’ll be on your own.”
“Texas?”
“Yes. We have a very active ring working in San Antonio, right in the middle of several important military installations. Your job will be to deliver some documents to them.”
“How will I get from the coast to San Antonio?”
“Ah, my young friend, that is where your own ingenuity comes in. Since we don’t know exactly where the U-boat will be able to safely put you ashore, we can’t arrange a pickup. We don’t want you using a phone to call San Antonio, so you’ll have to make your own way. You’ll be provided with documents making you an American citizen. I don’t think it’ll be that difficult for you to reach San Antonio and make contact with our people there.”
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