DEAD OR ALIVE a totally addictive thriller with a breathtaking twist

by T. J. Brearton

  “I thought we had this talk already,” Blythe said.

  “Which talk?”

  “The evidence leads the way. Build your evidence then make the moves. With you, it’s make the move and hope to get the evidence to back you up.”

  “I thought about it some more and I think there’s a part missing from that.”

  She looked up at him. He could see the copper in her eyes, the strands of gray threaded through her blonde hair. “Which is?”

  “Sitting around and waiting for the evidence.” He stood, took out some cash and dropped it on the table. “Am I still on this?”

  She drew in air through her nose then relaxed. “Yes. Until it’s done.”

  “Thank you. Then I need to make a phone call.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: TAMPA

  Over at Tampa PD, Gomez was delighted to hear from him as usual. “Lange. The prodigal son. So, you’re looking back when? Two years?”

  “Yeah. Anything from two years to a few months ago.”

  “I mean, we’ve got enough unidentified, unclaimed bodies to fill Ray Jay Stadium. Unsolved murders? About thirty over the past three years.”

  “Nothing that jumps out as a Vasquez grunt?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you come have a look?”

  “I think I’ll do that.”

  He drove to Tampa. Habit had him pick up his phone to check in with Katie, in this case to see about Vance. But that would be selfish. He couldn’t use the terrible thing happening to Vance as a way to reestablish communication with Katie. He would call Vance directly. He tried but got Vance’s voicemail and didn’t know what to say so he hung up, defeated.

  The Violent Crimes Bureau was located downtown in the Tampa Police Department, a twenty-story building walled in glass. Gomez was narcotic and gang enforcement, basement floor, sharing the space with Undercover Operations, a place where guys still smoked and mashed out the butts in overflowing ashtrays, wore white short-sleeved shirts with ties and sized everything up with their stony and suspicious eyes. Gomez still wore the same snakeskin boots he’d sported during the Carrie Gallo case. Seeing them recalled the stranger with the GMC Yukon and his own snazzy footwear.

  Gomez smiled and stuck out a hand. “Fucking Lange,” he said.

  They spent the night going through unsolved murder cases that were drug and gang related, poring over pictures of bloodied bodies, gunshot and knife wounds, crime scenes under bridges and bodies floating in bays. Maybe Juárez didn’t have it over Florida after all. There were photos of gun seizures — smiling police presiding over piles of AR-15-style semiautomatic weapons — mounds of heroin and cocaine and meth, stacks of cash, mug shots, known associates, a list of drug gangs and gang players.

  All members of the Vasquez family were accounted for, everyone Tom already knew. There was no incident in which an identifiable Vasquez family member or employee had been found dead in the Tampa streets or even the Tampa Bay area, which spread to the edge of Lakeland — just the dozens of unknown subjects, dead on the ground, hands hooked into claws or faces blackened with blood.

  When Gomez left, Tom remained buried behind a stack of reports. He’d divided them up into two groups — unsubs on the left and identified decedents who could have been working as Vasquez dealers in some capacity on the right. He pulled the file off the top of that second pile and looked at it again.

  Jamal Washington was a street-level dealer who had an on-again off-again employment history as a dishwasher and sometimes line cook. Washington had been found floating in Hillsborough Bay by a couple of fishermen. The medical examination said he’d died from blunt force trauma. His body was badly beaten, like he’d run into some gang out for blood.

  It was getting late — Tom suppressed a yawn and flipped back through the file to the employment history section. He dragged his finger down the page and stopped on a restaurant called Ocean Prime. It was located on North Ashley Drive looking west over the Hillsborough River. Tom woke the computer at Gomez’s desk but needed a password. He used his phone instead, googled Ocean Prime and had a look at the menu. Then he turned his attention to the map on the wall. The restaurant was downtown, between the Channel District to the east and Hyde Park across the river to the west.

  He called Gomez.

  “I just got into bed, Lange.”

  “Jamal Washington. Found in Hillsborough Bay.”

  “Yeah, we figured he floated down the river.”

  “What have you got on drugs coming into the area, packed in with the stone crab shipments?”

  “What have we got? You want to open that can of worms, you’re a brave ass man. We’ve been working on that for six years.”

  “Looking at the Vasquez family?”

  “They’re not the only game in town. Jesus, Lange, you need to get out more often. It’s Florida. There’s not just one supplier of stone crabs in Tampa. There’s about forty.”

  “But you’ve had some cases where it looks like . . . Okay, Jamal Washington has possession and distribution priors. He was working at Ocean Prime as a sous-chef or line cook or something. Probably dealing coke and heroin out the back door.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. He’s, ah . . . he’s one of the unsolveds you’re looking at? Jamal Washington? You know what — you’ll get a kick out of this — I remember that one. Less than a year ago, I think, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Nine months ago.”

  “Yeah, right so — get this . . . I remember we talked to a guy. Lives in that area, has a pawnshop downtown. Got a real interesting alias considering what he does for a living . . .”

  Tom jotted notes from what Gomez had told him, took a quick pee break, washed his hands and face in the dungeon-like bathroom of Gomez’s unit, and headed out.

  Fifteen minutes later, he parked the truck in a low-income neighborhood on the outskirts of Tampa. He climbed out and saw the pawnshop had a neon sign in the window flickering, Open. He crossed the street and entered. A man behind the glass case glanced up. He was in his seventies or so, like Vance, named Walt Spiro. He set his phone aside and peered curiously out at Tom.

  “Help you?”

  Tom set his badge on the counter. “How you doing tonight?”

  The man looked at the badge like it didn’t worry him. “Good.”

  “You’re open late.”

  “I get a fair amount of business in the late hours.” There was almost a twinkle in his eye, a glint of the ironic.

  “Why do they call you ‘preacher?’”

  “Because I’m a preacher.”

  “A preacher with a pawnshop? Hard to believe places like this still exist in the age of eBay and Amazon.” It was probative — just to get a feel for the guy.

  “People without computers,” Spiro said.

  “You can’t be preaching now, officially. Not if you’re running this place.”

  “No — no, of course not. I was the pastor at Abundant Life, a holiness church on East 7th Ave. I was an exhorter-type preacher. Doesn’t help that the police shut down church volunteers feeding the homeless in a city lot right there by 275. Ordinance, you know. You got to have a permit to hand out food on city property. That was what they told us, but we all knew what it was really — it was a crackdown. Part of a cleanup effort ahead of the Republican National Convention. August 2012. That’s when I left Abundant Life. Bought this place.”

  “An ‘exhorter-type.’ How’s that go?”

  “We preach based on scripture. We preach for people to make a life change. It’s called ‘Preach for a Decision’. We want you to act. It’s not liturgical or mainline. You take the Bible . . . you preach the whole story to make your case. Or what you feel is the whole story.”

  Tom browsed the shelves, not really looking. There was another section, a room off the back with stringed beads hanging in the doorway.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Those are more . . . well, that’s what you’d call erotic entertainment.”

  Tom p
ushed aside some beads and got an eyeful of DVDs with lurid covers, stacks of magazines, even erotic instruments.

  “Ah, man. People pawning their sex toys? I’m gonna pass on that.”

  Spiro was unruffled. “I do all this to stay close. It’s the best place for me. It’s where God wants me.”

  Tom withdrew from the sex toy room, his curiosity alone aroused. “Yeah, someone told me you keep an eye on the neighborhood. You’re not shy about talking to the cops, either.”

  Spiro cast his gaze down, thinking. “I don’t have any moral conflict about that.”

  “Nah, I’m not judging. I was thinking that if word gets around you’re a CI, why would anyone trust you? Why would they come in here?”

  He looked up. “I think it works in a funny way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I think people — well, I’m not talking about hardened criminals, too far gone — but most people, I think they’re good. They don’t want to go down a certain path, but they find themselves on it.”

  Tom considered what he was saying. Maybe it was the late hour, when people had silver tongues. Maybe Spiro was genuinely unpretentious. There wasn’t much of that going around.

  “So, people come in here,” Tom supposed, “who know who you are, that you’re in contact with the police, but they’re okay with it — because maybe, subconsciously, they want to be stopped. That what you’re saying?”

  Spiro looked back with those lively gray eyes. “They want to feel connected. Lot of these people, they didn’t get that growing up. Didn’t get it from a parent, so they look to their peers. Before you know it, they’re in a gang. And that becomes their family.”

  “You have children?”

  “All grown. Three of them.”

  “What do they think of this?”

  “They understand.”

  Tom waved a hand. “All right. I don’t mean to get personal.”

  “I hear things, I see things. People talk to me. Not everyone knows that I . . . that I’m going to try to get them help.”

  Tom pulled out his phone and brought up the picture of Guttridge. “I want to know if you’ve ever seen this guy.” He set the phone down on the glass case. “First, he was hawking his own prescriptions, but that was in Lakeland, and he got busted. There’s no record of him checking into any of the local clinics here, but I think he was still dealing. In this neighborhood, maybe.”

  After taking a good look, the preacher shook his head. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “You mean — what does that mean? You haven’t seen him recently or . . .?”

  “I haven’t seen him recently.”

  That tickle again, base of the neck. “So, you know him? You’ve seen him before.”

  A nod. “I believe so.”

  Tom stepped closer. “Got a name?”

  “Frank.”

  “Frank? That’s it?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s it.”

  “And did Frank ever speak to you?”

  “No.”

  “No. Where did you see him?”

  “Just around the neighborhood. I asked about him. A friend told me who he was.”

  Tom pulled out his notebook and clicked his pen. “Who was the friend?”

  “Her name is Jeanie. Jean Ann Sweeney.”

  The name had a strange ring to it for Tom.

  “You know where I can find her?”

  “I’m not sure. Last I knew, she was staying around Gaslight Square.”

  “Gaslight Square Park? Right around here? She’s homeless, you mean?”

  The preacher nodded. Tom clicked off the pen. He looked at the preacher. “What made you ask about him? What made you ask Jean Ann?”

  “He was interesting. I saw him a few times in the neighborhood, like I said. He wore a green army jacket. Looked like a lost soul.”

  “Someone to bring into the fold?”

  “Maybe. But I never got the chance to speak with him. He never came in here.”

  “Thank you,” Tom said. He glanced at the bric-a-brac. Nothing good: one flat-screen monitor, a few cathode-ray TVs, a stack of battered laptops, bicycles, dubious jewelry in the glass case, recycled thumb drives for computers. He thought to ask about sitting here every day, handing out money for sub-par materials, trying to peddle it back to the street, what that did to you.

  * * *

  He checked into a hotel and, despite the late hour, found himself lying on top of the made bed, staring at the TV with the remote in his hand. He finally fell asleep and was up again in four hours. Katie did a breathing exercise called “chi” or “promoting your chi” or something which involved breathing in deep with your head back and arms out, then exhaling and tucking your chin to your chest. It was supposed to stabilize you, get your spinal fluid flowing. He did it nine times, rested, did nine more, took a shower and left.

  Lykes Gaslight Square Park, Gaslight Square for short, teemed with the homeless — or so it said on Yelp. Tom sat in the truck on Franklin Street, drinking a juice smoothie and eating an egg sandwich, watching the benches and winding walkways. At eight in the morning, the park was quiet, a pair of women jogging through, a lone man standing, talking on a cell phone. And, in what seemed like some kind of cosmic twist, there was the Tampa Bay Police Department, right across the street, the place that criminalized homeless food distribution sat overlooking the park with its glass exterior, its thousand window eyes. He could go in and talk to the desk sergeant, see if Jean Ann Sweeney was on a list somewhere, or he could talk to Gomez again.

  “Are we dating?” Gomez asked over the phone. “My own wife doesn’t call me this much.”

  “That’s for you to think about. Walt Spiro — the preacher — said Guttridge was around. Said Jean Ann Sweeney might know him.”

  “That guy’s clinically insane. You know that, right? Crystal meth fried his brain? Says he’s sober now. Okay. Still the craziest preacher I ever met, running a pawnshop.”

  “So how about it?”

  “How about what? I reach into my magic bag and pull out Jean Ann whatever-her-name-is?”

  “Jean Ann Sweeney.”

  “What do you want me to do with it? Unlike you, Lange, I catch multiple cases. You think I got time to play with you all day? Lange? You there? Hello?”

  “I figured I’d give you the chance to get off the phone. You’re still here.”

  “I liked you better when you were all nerves and tight jaw. What is it again? Jean something?”

  “Sweeney.” He spelled it. “Hangs out in Gaslight Square.”

  Gomez let out a rippling sigh. “Gaslight is in the 143rd district, hombre. It’s across the fucking street from me.”

  “I know. I’m looking at it.”

  “Why don’t you — Jesus, Lange. Walk in and give the desk sergeant a smile. Wiggle your hips.”

  “I’d rather not, man. I tell them what I’m doing and they start crawling this area and Guttridge is going to bolt.”

  “Oh, you think you got him boxed in.” Gomez’s tone was as sarcastic as ever.

  “I don’t know if I do or not. But if he’s around, I don’t want to risk it. I want eyes on then I’ll make the call. Just need a picture of Sweeney if you got one. That’s it.”

  Another sigh. “Fine.”

  He heard tapping on Gomez’s end. Noises in the background, phones ringing, people talking. Gomez came back over the line. “Okay. You know, this is it for me. Tell them to give you a vehicle with some connectivity in it. Jesus. Okay. Hello there, Ms. Sweeney. Yeah, we got her on a few things. You know, ‘quality of life’ crimes. Lodging out of doors. That was back in 2005, though. Short-lived ordinance, you know what I’m saying? A state court found that one unconstitutional. Got her in 2015 for trespassing on public land. I don’t have her for anything else. I’ll send you her sheet. She’s a beaut.”

  Gomez was kind of an asshole, but he’d been helpful. Tom thanked him and hung up, left the truck and wandered into the park, checking for the email on
his phone. Sweeney’s picture came up. She was predictably thin, straw-haired, hollow-eyed. Looked like a meth head.

  He spent the morning walking around, stopping people and asking if they’d seen her. No one had. Gomez had a strong point about bringing in local PD; they’d be able to canvass the area and this would go a lot quicker. He also needed to update Malone and the feds. He thought about Guttridge, whether he was anywhere nearby, hanging out in full view of the Tampa frigging Police Department. Hiding in plain sight.

  A few people slept behind bushes, some more brazenly under trees, along the benches. Tom woke a few up, showed them his phone. Most of them smelled pretty bad. No one recognized Sweeney.

  At noon, Tom got back in the truck and turned on the engine, plugged in his phone to charge it and called Malone.

  “The girl is sticking to her story,” Malone said. “We’re going to take Mick Lupton in the morning and get him to flip on Valentina. That way we got it solid and our case isn’t resting on a seven-year-old talking about melting ice. No one wants to see her have to take the stand, have some defense attorney try to pick her apart.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “If he doesn’t flip? We’ll execute the warrant either way. It’ll just be . . . Look, we’re going to get him to flip. What are you doing?”

  “I got something for you. Might have an eyewitness that puts Lupton outside Frank Guttridge’s house six months ago. Well, his ex’s house.”

  He brought Malone up to speed on Sarah Finley and what she’d said about being watched. Malone was asking about the daughter, Gloria, when Tom spotted a familiar face.

  “Hang on a second.”

  The woman walking into the park near the truck matched Jean Ann Sweeney’s description. Tom hopped out and caught up to her. “Hey, excuse me . . .”

  She stopped and looked at him with wary suspicion. It was her. He realized he’d left his phone back in the truck. Her eyes narrowed when he showed her his badge.

  “I’m not here to arrest you. Just want to ask you some questions. Would you step over here?”