He took the Governor-elect’s hand and shook it.
“I’ll draft the announcement of your appointment tomorrow,” Gil said. “When the election is over, give me a week to start the transition. I’ll announce your appointment then.”
“Perfect.” Remington fought to contain his excitement that his play had worked.
He was going to be the freaking Chief of Staff to the Governor of Florida. Take that, Dad!
Gil turned away from him and walked to the door. He pushed it open slightly, but looked back at Remington.
“Oh, but take a goddamn shower, man,” he said. “You smell like a damn skunk.”
Remington swallowed and nodded his head. When Gil was gone, he sat in silence, barely able to keep himself from grinning like an idiot. He decided to celebrate by getting a large mango tea to go. He’d definitely spend a few minutes in Gram’s room when he got hom— His thought was interrupted by the memory of the skunk. He checked his phone… nothing from animal control. He dialed again and got what sounded like a part-time employee who knew nothing about nothing. She took his name and number and said the techs would call him back.
He got into his car and pulled out. Maybe, if he was lucky, the skunk would’ve found a way to get out and would be gone when he got home. He didn’t care. In a month or two, when he took over his new office, he’d be moving out of that crap-hole anyway. He lowered the windows and cranked the A.C. Geezus, the smell was still so strong.
He was so distracted that he never saw the Ritz-Carlton maintenance truck pull out of the parking lot behind him.
14
Whadda Ya Know, Joe?
Troy Bodean and Jack Colpiller sat in the Miami Police Department waiting area. The seats were rigid plastic half-egg shapes with metal legs—middle school style contraptions that seemed more appropriate for the Spanish Inquisition than a classroom.
Detective Joe Bond walked into the room with his hand outstretched and a huge smile on his face. “Now, there’s a face I never thought I’d see again,” he said and practically jerked Troy out of his seat, wrapping him in a bear hug.
Troy thought Joe looked good. His skin was tan and taut, his desk-cop paunch was a little smaller, his eyes were bright, and his shoulders were pulled back. In short, he looked nothing like the burned-out NYPD—and then Key West—cop, that Troy had met a few years ago.
“Joe,” Troy said, smiling back at him, “you look good… dang good! What’s up with that?”
“Here,” he said, motioning him toward his office, “let’s step in here.”
“Oh, um,” —Troy looked back at Jack— “and this is Mr. Colpiller. The father of the girl whose car you’ve got.”
Joe reached is hand out to Jack. “Right, right. Come on in, sir. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Jack Colpiller shook Joe’s hand and they all scooted around the array of steel desks toward his office. He motioned for the two men to sit. The chairs were old steel and covered with faux leather, but at least they were cushioned. Troy sat and rubbed his knee. Sitting too long was the worst on his old injury.
The office was decorated in typical cop décor; a few medals here, a couple of certificates there, pictures of Joe with other cops, and all that jazz. Troy spotted a picture on his desk of Joe standing next to R.B.—Troy’s brother, Ryan Bodean—on the floats of Gidget. Gidget was the seaplane of R.B.’s flying ferry business out to Fort Jefferson in the Keys.
Troy pointed at it. “So, what gives? Why’d you leave all that to come back to this?”
“Well, hell, you know as well as I do that it was paradise,” —the detective leaned back in his squeaky chair— “but I found that sitting in the cockpit of the plane for more than thirty minutes aggravated my back.”
He turned toward Jack, seeing that the man was completely out of the loop of the story.
“Had a bullet near my spine from an old NYPD shootout,” he said.
Jack nodded.
“But anyway,” Joe said, and turned back toward Troy, “I just couldn’t do it. Your brother was amazing, by the way. Helped me get hooked back up with this job.” He leaned forward and turned a picture frame around to face the two men. “And that’s when I met Olga.”
The picture showed Joe lying in a hospital bed with a beautiful blonde nurse leaning over kissing him on the cheek. “The pain in my back got worse and worse,” Joe said, absentmindedly rubbing his leg, “shootin’ down into my legs. I don’t know, maybe somehow all those hours cramped up in the plane dislodged the bullet or something, but it got to where I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand, and I sure as hell couldn’t lay down.”
“Geezus, man,” Troy said, whistling, “what’d you do?”
“Hell, I got a consult from a doc here in Miami,” —Joe clicked his tongue— “said he could get the bullet out, and there was a chance it would paralyze me.”
Jack Colpiller grunted. “Damn.”
“You’re telling me.” Joe nodded toward him. “But I was in such pain, you just wouldn’t believe it. And I hadn’t slept in weeks. I checked into the hospital, thinking I may never check out again.” Joe’s voice cracked slightly, and he took a moment to regain his composure.
“After the surgery, I woke up to the face of an angel. Olga Nielsen, my recovery nurse.” He traced his finger on the picture frame as he spoke. “I woke up fine. No paralysis and no pain. It was a miracle. For two weeks though, I was rehabbing in the capable arms of Olga. When I went in for my last session, I asked her out on a date. The rest is history.”
“Hot dang, man,” Troy said, slapping his knee, “that’s one hell of a story!”
“All true, my friend,” Joe said, smiling widely.
Jack Colpiller cleared his throat. “I appreciate the catching up and all, I really do, but is it possible that we could move on to my daughters?”
“Oh, wow, Mr. Colpiller,” Joe said, “I am so sorry.”
Joe pulled a folder out of his desk drawer and opened it in front of them. There were several pictures of the car with numbered evidence cards positioned in various places of interest. Beneath that was a sheet clearly showing a D.N.A. test. There was also a set of keys in a baggie, and shockingly, another containing a cell phone.
“We found the car parked in a nightclub parking lot. It had not been valeted. It was in perfect condition, meaning, it hadn’t been vandalized or broken in to. The keys were under the driver’s seat and the car was unlocked when we found it.”
Joe read the report, then looked up at Jack Colpiller. “We found a trace amount of blood on the steering wheel.”
Jack leaned forward and started to speak. “I—”
“Some of it matched a man named Adrian Hull,” Joe cut him off, “an immigrant from New Zealand. We also found secondary blood… but we couldn’t get a match on it.”
The revelation sat heavy in the air.
“So we’ll need a D.N.A. swab from you, Mr. Colpiller.”
“Of course. But who the hell is Adrian Hull?” Jack asked, “and why the hell was he in my daughter’s car?”
Joe shuffled a couple of papers. “He is employed at the… Ritz-Carlton Tennis Garden of Key Biscayne. According to his employee file, he listed his home as Tasmania.”
“Taz,” Troy said, the information clicking into his brain.
“Beg pardon?” Joe asked.
“He goes by Taz,” Troy said, “a nickname maybe from bein’ Tasmanian, the ol’ devil.”
Troy smiled and looked up, expecting a response to the Looney Tunes reference. He got nothing, so he let it drop.
Joe scribbled a note on the report. “We’ll want to talk to this guy. We called the Ritz, but they don’t have anything—or at least that’s what the girl said on the phone. He may not have been able to rent an apartment or get a phone in his name, since he was moving from overseas when he applied for the job. You know of his whereabouts?”
“He was supposed to have a tennis lesson with Mindy—the other Colpiller twin—tonight,” Troy sa
id, “but, I went down to the Tennis Garden and there was no sign of either of them.”
A sense of dread settled quietly in the room. First Caroline had gone missing, and now Mindy. And seemingly at the center of it all was this joker named Taz. And now he was gone too.
“May I see my daughter’s phone?” Jack asked.
Joe pulled a pair of latex gloves from his desk. “Put these on please.”
Jack complied and Joe handed him the phone. Jack clicked the power button and the phone flashed to life. He entered a passcode and looked up at the two men.
“I paid for the phones and the service,” he said. “I know the codes.”
Troy raised an eyebrow.
Jack clicked a few times, then turned the phone to face Joe. “This must be it,” he said to the detective.
It was a text message thread from Taz to Caroline. Above it was a number. Joe scribbled it down. “Would you mind telling me the passcode so our forensic team can go through those messages?” Joe asked.
“It’s her birthday. 0817.”
“Thanks.”
Jack handed the phone back to him and looked at Troy. “Seems like you were right about this Taz character.”
Troy nodded. “Seems that way.”
Joe pushed a button on his desk phone. “Cindy, can you get me the tracer?”
“Coming right up,” a voice replied.
“Let’s give this guy a call,” Joe said. “He probably has a prepaid, burner type phone, so there won’t be any way to get the tower pings quick enough. Luckily, I have friend pretty high up in the C.I.A. who set me up with a new GPS tracker toy. I’ll have him on speaker, but I need to keep him on for at least a minute to get a trace.” He looked at Jack and then at Troy. “No matter what he says,” Joe said, “please don’t speak. It’s imperative that we locate him.”
“Of course,” Jack said, his eyes glazing over.
Troy could sense the man was terrified. He’d been convinced that his daughters were safe… off on rich girl adventures, soon to return home. But now that scenario had been replaced with a far darker one. One that didn’t seem to have a happy ending.
A woman, presumably Cindy, walked in, carrying a machine that looked like an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and handed it to Joe. The tracer.
“Thanks, Cindy,” Joe said as he began connecting it to his desk phone.
“Mr. Colpiller,” Troy said softly while Joe was busy hooking up the tracer, “this might be the time to bring up the investigator you hired. Any info is good info.”
Jack nodded. “Detective,” he said, and cleared his throat, “there is the matter of a private investigator that I hired to find my girls.”
Joe tapped a finger on the top sheet of paper in the file. “Yes, a Mr. Remington Reginald?”
Jack cocked an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”
“It seems he was in contact with another detective here,” Joe said, “running the plates and trying to find your daughter’s car. But when we found the blood in the vehicle, the level of the case had to be raised to—” He stopped short.
“Raised to what?” Jack demanded.
“Well,” Joe said, scratching the back of his neck, “raised to homicide.”
“Dangit,” Troy muttered.
15
Turnabout
Taz sipped his drink from the Pollo Tropical and was finally feeling normal again after his vomitous run-in with the foul smell in Mr. Smith’s apartment. Bizarrely enough, he’d been in the drive-through at the fast-food place when Mr. Smith drove right up, got out of the car, and walked inside. He parked across the lot from the man’s car, slumped down inside his truck, drank his soda, and waited.
He was inside for at least an hour, but finally exited in a rush. He jumped in his car and Taz followed. His heart sank a little when he realized the man was headed back to his apartment. He parked and watched him go inside, then gave him fifteen minutes to get to his apartment and get settled in.
When he was sure enough time had passed, he opened the glove box and found a red bandana crumpled up inside. It smelled of sweat, but he didn’t care—it would be better than the skunk smell by a long shot. He tied it ninja style around his face, covering his nose and mouth. Exiting his car, the smell hit him like a slap to the face again, but it wasn’t nearly as bad with the bandana on. He walked to the elevator, took a deep breath, gagged a little, and punched the button for the third floor.
Knocking on the door, he tried hard not to inhale the smell still lingering there, but the bandana helped a bit. The vomit stains were still on the door. He listened for sounds of Mr. Smith moving around inside, but heard nothing. He knocked again. Still nothing.
He positioned his ear against the door and listened closely to the tinny sounds of music that now drifted out of the apartment. Mr. Smith was obviously listening to it, and apparently couldn’t hear the knocking.
Taz reached down and turned the knob. Locked. He pulled his pocket knife out, shoved it into the door jamb where the lock was, and pushed hard with his shoulder. Surprisingly, the door swung open easily. Cheap ass apartment, Taz thought. The inside was just as he remembered it. The kitchen table had a few papers spread out over it, likely those that had spilled out of the briefcase when he’d run down the hall. A fan sat in the open sliding doorway out to the balcony, expelling the awful smell. It was definitely skunk. Taz thought he must be getting desensitized to the smell, or maybe it was actually getting better. Either way, he was able to proceed in without blowing chunks.
He walked over to the kitchen table and scanned the papers stacked in neat little piles. Some were about his case and some were about the other case—the senator who maybe killed an intern, or something like that. He picked up the sheets about him and stuffed them into his pockets. Evidence was easy to get rid of, but this was about a payday now. He was looking to take a cool two-hundred and fifty-thousand from Mr. Smith. After that, maybe Mexico or somewhere. He’d never have to hit another damn tennis ball again.
The music drifted from the door to his right and he thought he might’ve heard Mr. Smith humming along with it. It was the same door the man had been behind when he broke in before. Ugh, I hate classical music.
He inhaled as deeply as he could to steady himself, regretted it immediately, then walked to the door. It appeared to be closed but not latched completely. Mr. Smith had clearly been in a rush. He put his fingers against it and pushed softly. The door swung open soundlessly, revealing one of the most bizarre scenes he’d ever witnessed.
Brant Reginald, of the Heavenly Father’s Holy Sanctuary Church of Fairhope, Alabama had his palm pressed against the forehead of a young man seated in a wheelchair. Sweat beaded under his eyes from the exertion he felt as he prayed… or maybe it was from the hot studio lights blasting down on them.
He spoke earnestly and with vehemence, emphasizing every other word in an almost hypnotic trance. His lilting Alabaman accent had the effect of rising and falling waves pushing power out from his mouth.
“Turnabout, demon,” he belted out before the crowd of two-hundred in the studio audience, “turnabout and be gone. This man is a child of God, and has confessed to all his sins and repented in the presence of the Holy Spirit. He is under your purview no more. Turnabout and be gone!”
Turnabout was his signature phrase. He wasn’t sure when it had become so associated with him, but he used it every week now, and it certainly seemed to give the demons pause and blast them right out of his sinning and broken audience.
The young man in the wheelchair was rocking back and forth, swaying with the power of God. His acting is brilliant, Brand thought to himself. In a few months, they’d have to find a way to get this kid back on the show.
The production of this segment of the show was also excellent. In the booth, Ricky Seamus had his hand on the dial controlling the house lights. He pulsed them ever so slightly, matching the waves in Brant’s voice. The kid in the chair had worked with Ricky on exactly when the healing m
oment would occur, and the lights would match the “sacred” moment perfectly.
Brant was holding the crowd in his palms, as well as the kid’s forehead, and knew exactly how to work the scene for maximum effect. The kid would know to jump up and be healed when Brant gave him a squeeze on his temples. The studio audience was breathless. They hung on the edge of their seats, and the thundering echo of Brant’s words—augmented by a few digital effects in his mic—were the only sound in the hall.
His voice rose. “It is time, in the name of the Heavenly Father’s Holy Sanctuary, for you to get out, demon! Turnabout, and BE GONE!!!”
As he boomed the last words, he squeezed the kid’s forehead. The young man burst up out of the wheelchair, and stood with his back arched as the house lights went bright white. The effect was awesome. Even Brant felt a tremor inside his heart. The Lord was truly in this place… even if a little Hollywood magic was required to help Him show up. He whipped up a few dramatic yet subtle tears as ushers came forward to help the boy down the stairs and clear the wheelchair from the stage.
Brant Reginald turned toward the camera. He was nearing sixty, slightly overweight—an ex-football player kind of overweight. His eyes were brilliantly blue, and his hair was salt-and-pepper gray, giving him the gravitas of an old biblical shepherd. Tan makeup enhanced his own natural tan, and helped to even out his sunglasses raccoon eyes—from the golf course.
He used to wear a robe on stage, but the new-age of the church didn’t require such formality. Nowadays he wore short-sleeved Columbia PFG fishing shirts and occasionally his favorite Tommy Bahama silk shirts. Both were infinitely more comfortable under the glaring stage lighting.
In his pocket he kept a handkerchief, tucked away to wipe his brow in particularly sweaty moments, but he never let the crowd see him do it. He timed it perfectly with prayers, soloist performances, and naturally, commercial breaks.
“Friends,” he spoke in earnest, “we have witnessed another miracle. In the most concrete of ways, our Lord has made Himself known. The work of the Heavenly Father’s Holy Sanctuary Church of Fairhope, Alabama, must go on.”
The Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Series Boxset Page 51