Special Agent Tom Lange Box Set

by T. J. Brearton

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  They were silent for a moment.

  “There was a high speed chase,” Blythe finally said. “This was back when I was a trooper. Everglades County was involved, Lee County, FHP, all of us. Two suspects tearing it up, doing a hundred-plus miles an hour. One of the deputies from Lee County was this guy I didn’t like. I’d had words with him in the past. He was Zone A in Lee County, District Three. And that was around where I was usually stationed. So we’d butted heads. Anyway, this deputy, he claims he gets a visual on the bad guys. Says they appear to be juveniles. So we had to give up chase.”

  Tom understood. He listened to Blythe intently, realizing it was the most personal she’d gotten with him since they’d met.

  “And then the bad guys ended up colliding with another car, T-boning it, killing the passengers.” Her eyes alighted on him. “The passengers included one thirteen-year-old boy.”

  “Oh man . . .”

  “That was twenty years ago,” Blythe said. “Seven years later, I moved from the highway patrol and into the agency. That deputy from Lee County had risen through the ranks and was a captain. There was an investigation. The captain was keeping drug money, dealing, even involved in two murders. That’s when I met Coby, during that investigation. It took us six months to build the case. And we put him away.”

  Tom tried on a smile. “Bet that felt good.”

  “Point is, I wanted that son of a bitch for almost eight years before I got him.”

  Tom dropped his gaze and nodded soberly. She was telling him, once again, to be patient. The wheels of justice were slow to turn. He knew she was right. If she wanted to bring Coburn in and entertain a possible drug connection to their Rookery Bay victim, she had the experience and he needed to trust her, even if he didn’t know the why. Maybe she didn’t, either, and was working off a hunch.

  “And that’s why we’ve got Gomez,” Tom said.

  “Gomez knows the drug scene. If there’s anything to it, he’s the guy to spot it. But you’re the homicide investigator on this, not him. It’s your show.”

  Tom nearly told her Gomez hadn’t spotted diddly shit in Carrie’s apartment, namely, the hidey-hole in the wall, exactly the type of place someone would hide drugs, but he thought it best to keep it to himself.

  He set down his coffee and ran a hand over his face. Something else crossed his mind and he asked, “What color was Parsons’ truck?”

  “What color was it?”

  “Yeah. With the coke in the back.”

  “Blue. Why?”

  “Nothing.”

  Blythe watched him a moment, then sat down at her desk. She feathered her hands over her MacBook keyboard. The screen blinked on with her prompt.

  “They’ve had George Parsons’ phone contacts for a while.” She brought up her email and Tom leaned in to read the message. She continued speaking as he scanned it — a note from Coburn.

  “I made a request to Coby after Parsons’ arrest, asking him for Parsons’ contact list. Coby’s team refers to any cellular customer they’re tracking as a ‘subscriber.’ So, there are several subscribers in the Tampa Bay area. But these guys get tricky, and don’t use their real names, just aliases — Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd. Real creative stuff.”

  Tom pulled the chair over from the next desk. “They know they’re being watched.”

  “Well, they protect themselves, but they don’t always know. In fact, one of them was tracked to this location just a week ago.” She opened another window, a map of Tampa, with an arrow pinpointing the location. Tom looked closer, envisioning the used car lot, the plaza, the strip club and the dead-end street.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Coby doesn’t have the subscriber’s ID yet. The alias for this one is Wile E. Coyote. We don’t know if it was a customer yet or an employee, but we know someone Parsons was talking to was at that club.”

  “What are the times?”

  “They’re not always tracking every subscriber. So it could be multiple times. But they were getting ready to move on Parsons a week ago, then something happened — Coby hasn’t said what — and they backed off. At that time they were actively surveilling Coyote and had his location at Hush. We know he was there last Sunday, from six thirty-two to eight forty-four in the evening.”

  Tom thought the times made it more likely to be a customer than an employee. But, like Blythe had said, drug gangs were getting smarter. They swapped phones frequently.

  Or, it could be as simple as an employee — he was thinking about Bosco, maybe even Sasha — who was there for a little while, then left.

  “Where did Coyote go after that?”

  Blythe turned to face Tom. “This is where it gets dicey. These are very quiet operations.”

  “I’m sure any vice narcotics operations are protected by court order.”

  “Exactly. Vice narcotics operate under the Sheriff, who is the law of the land, a servant of the people, authority protected by the Florida constitution. We start poking around with our murder case, questioning people based on data we got from a large-scale narcotics operation, it could blow the whole thing for them. Coby was reluctant to share even this much. We have to use what we can and go it alone for now.”

  Tom soaked this in, thinking Blythe had the unquestionable lead here. She’d already deferred to him on a few things, like having him observe the autopsy and taking point in Tampa. She would ferret out the possible drug connection, with Gomez’s help. For now, she was looking at Tom to get back on track, make the right moves — his first week and already his career was hanging by a thread.

  “We need Carrie Hobson’s data,” Tom said. “I want to subpoena AT&T, her carrier. And she has a Gmail address, and a Match.com account.”

  Blythe nodded, a subtle glint in her eye. “Right. That’s the route we can go for now. Get to work on it.”

  * * *

  Tom walked out into the bright sunshine and took a path through the landscaped trees towards the County Courthouse. The freshly planted palms had structural supports around the base and were yet to develop fronds — just green shoots sprouting for now. One thing he’d come to notice about Southwest Florida was the lack of shade trees. People planted palms to give the place that tropical look, but it was otherwise a concrete world baking in the heat.

  He slipped inside the courthouse and endured the process of entry through the metal detector. A security guard ran a wand over his body while Tom stood like a scarecrow.

  Police could get phone records without a warrant thanks to Smith v. Maryland, a ruling which found the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure didn’t apply to a list of phone numbers. That was very helpful for someone like Coburn, with large-scale drug ops requiring wiretaps and all sorts of surveillance. It also greased the wheels for Tom, who wanted the phone data for a homicide victim. But it still required mounds of paperwork.

  Tom opted to take the stairs up to the County prosecutor’s third-floor office suite, to keep his train of thought uninterrupted. His footsteps echoed in the cool stairwell as he ascended.

  The courts hadn’t issued a definitive ruling on social websites, but most were stringent about warrants, and Match.com was one of them. Tom could view her public profile, but he wanted Carrie’s private messages, and that meant data from other, living people. The same privacy laws protecting people under Coburn’s surveillance protected people on dating sites. And unlike subpoenas, warrants and court orders required judicial review.

  He gathered the forms he needed with the help of a young clerk and found a quiet spot to sit and get to work.

  Gleaning location data from Carrie’s phone would be the hardest of all. Every U.S. cell phone was required to have some type of location-based technology. The technology enabled emergency dispatch centers to find a 911 caller’s real-time location and number. And all cell phones registered their locations with the cellular networks several times a minute. But, phone carriers tended to use one
of two methods: using satellites, or, triangulation based on cell towers. Steve Hobson said Carrie had used a smartphone, which accessed a Wi-Fi network and could disclose more or less precise information about the phone’s location depending on how the ISP provided the wireless connection. It was a toss-up which kind Carrie’s phone had used — which meant double duty for the subpoenas.

  All this paperwork and nothing would come of it for at least twenty-four hours. Tom wanted the files in Carrie’s phone that could reveal her past communications as well as her locations. He wanted to see her private messages on Match.com. But the law would make him wait.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  By one o’clock in the afternoon, Tom was ravenous. He felt edgy after spending the morning pushing papers. There was a plaza two blocks from the County Courthouse with a Mexican restaurant called Amigos. He slipped in to the dimly lit room, found a booth, and ordered the special — shredded beef empanadas. He devoured the complimentary tortilla chips, and stared out into the bright street.

  When the food came he wolfed it down. Halfway through the meal he started to feel human again and took out the murder book.

  He hunched over it, starting with the timeline. Steve Hobson moved from Jersey to Tampa four years ago, with his girlfriend Donna Pitt, who was pregnant with their son, Harley. Three years ago, Steve Hobson met Carrie on Match.com.

  Tom pulled out his phone, found the dating site and searched for Carrie Anne Gallo. There she was, Midwestern-fresh with sandy hair. The picture was tasteful, showing her from the waist up, modeling a frilly teal blouse. Her smile revealed rows of white teeth.

  He browsed her profile. Just a small town girl who loves to dance, looking for fun and adventure with a companion. That was it, short and sweet. She listed her interests as reading, hiking, swimming, snorkeling, and kayaking.

  Tom grew still.

  Kayaking.

  He closed the browser and made a quick note, then called the Sheriff’s Office and asked to speak to Katie Mills, with the County crime scene bureau. A deputy forwarded the call to her cell phone.

  Mills answered, the connection scratchy.

  “Katie, it’s Tom Lange.”

  “Hi Tom. Been expecting to hear from you.”

  “Yeah. This case has moved in about ten different directions at once. How’s things on your end?”

  “Good. We’re getting ready to fold up our tent here at the estuary.” Tom could hear the wind blowing around her.

  “What’s the story down there?”

  “Not much to tell, I’m sorry. We can’t even disinfect the site where the body was found.” She gave a small laugh. “First, it’s protected. Second, you know, it’s water.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, kind of tough for clean-up. Listen — what’s the word on the kayaks? Any other boats found, anything like that?”

  “The word is the same. All Susan Libby’s boats are present and accounted for. No one else had any boats go missing.”

  “And nobody’s found a missing kayak paddle, nothing like that.”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “Alright, thanks, Katie.” He hung up and went back to Match.com. One thing his criminology professors had driven home was that there were no coincidences in investigations. Everything always meant something.

  He wondered if someone had lured Carrie to Rookery Bay, promising a kayaking trip through the mangrove canals.

  “Anything else?”

  The waitress made him jump. He smiled. “No, thanks.” She took his plates away and he handed her his debit card before she left.

  He turned his attention back to the timeline in the murder book.

  Steve Hobson and Carrie were married for ten months. According to Steve Hobson, the couple had divorced eighteen months ago. Hobson had the divorce certificate to prove it and said Carrie had moved out that same month. But Derrick Massey, the shifty landlord, had records indicating Carrie began renting twelve months ago. That left a six-month gap.

  Tom flipped to the copy of Carrie’s DMV abstract. According to it, Carrie’s address was in Tampa Heights. She hadn’t updated her driver’s license with her new address, and Derrick Massey hadn’t required Carrie to list her previous residences.

  Tom didn’t know where Carrie had been living in between the rented house in Tampa Heights and her apartment in East Tampa. Maybe she’d gone home to Boise, Idaho, for a few months.

  He grabbed the tab for the section marked “Family” and opened it up. Eileen Gallo, Carrie’s mother, had booked a flight for ten that morning. Tom glanced at his watch — it was one-thirty now. Eileen Gallo would be flying in any moment, and making her way to the Medical Examiner’s Office. Like any grieving family member, she would want answers. She would also want her daughter’s body released to her right away. And chances were, she’d be upset an autopsy had been conducted without her knowledge.

  He pulled some photos of Carrie’s body at the death scene, then looked at some from the autopsy. Ward wouldn’t confirm it yet, but the death looked to be from blunt force trauma to the base of her skull. Someone had hit her with something from behind, killing her.

  Like a paddle, Tom thought.

  He couldn’t get the kayak scenario out of his head.

  Or the stain found on Carrie’s clothing — just a tiny splotch of blood on her shorts.

  The kayaking concerned him, Carrie’s finances also concerned him.

  Back to the timeline: Sasha claimed that Carrie had been working at Hush for a year. That was consistent with what Massey said and confirmed by Carrie’s employment records.

  Sasha said Carrie did well working at Hush — just that Carrie blew her money on frivolous things. But Tom hadn’t seen anything flashy in Carrie’s apartment. Steve Hobson said Carrie asked for a loan five months ago. Tampa had arrested Carrie at the same time and charged her with indecent exposure. It was highly probable that the money she’d asked Steve for was to pay the fine, but Tom couldn’t be certain.

  The monthly payment on her sensible car was two hundred a month, her apartment cost eight hundred, not much for city living. Yet she’d taken an extra job stripping at a bachelor party. And such parties happened all the time. Tom bet Carrie had done more than one gig. She was earning this extra money, no signs of big expenses, and yet she asked her ex-husband for cash and her co-worker said she was broke?

  So where was the money going?

  A drug problem was one answer, but nothing circumstantial so far pointed to drug abuse. With the blood toxicology report still in the pipeline, however, Tom couldn’t know for sure.

  “Here you go.” The waitress was back with the receipt. She was giving him a strange look. He realized some of the crime scene photos were showing and quickly closed the murder book.

  “Do you kayak at all?”

  The waitress just stared, then blushed and shook her head.

  “Sorry,” he said clumsily. “Thanks.”

  She moved off, and he drummed the table with his fingers, thinking. Carrie’s last shift at Hush had been the previous Tuesday. Now Tom and Blythe had this new information from vice narcotics — Wile E. Coyote, or his phone, at least, had been at Hush for approximately two hours the Sunday evening prior to Carrie’s final worked shift.

  Then, after that Tuesday shift had ended at 7 p.m., Carrie disappeared. According to Ward, she was murdered sometime between Wednesday and Friday morning.

  Tom grabbed his things and left. On his way out he rang the ROC and asked for Kurt Bronson, who had headed the forensic team deployed to Carrie’s apartment the previous day.

  “Was just going to call your office,” Bronson said. “We’re analyzing all the prints — should have that later today. DNA will take longer. But what I can say now is that there is no evidence of a crime committed in the victim’s apartment. No blood, nothing broken, everything peaceful and quiet.”

  “Thank you,” Tom said.

  Blythe called while Tom was hurrying back to the field office. “Eileen Gallo just a
rrived at the ME’s office. We’re going over. Where are you? I’ll pick you up.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Eileen Gallo was a frail-looking woman, her eyes bunched with sorrow. She wore pleated white slacks and a flowery blouse and had short, bleached-blonde hair. Tom could see her resemblance to Carrie in her nose and cheekbones. She sat with her hands clasped together, across from Tom, Blythe, and Dr. Ward in a special room used for just such sad, but necessary conferences.

  At first she was quiet, as Ward explained that the investigation into her daughter’s death was being conducted by the Medical Examiner’s Office, the Everglades County Sheriff’s Office, and the FDLE.

  “Is that what you call a task force?” Eileen Gallo asked, her big eyes going back and forth between the three of them.

  Blythe smiled politely. “Something like that. Mrs. Gallo, I understand you lost your husband?”

  “Yes. He got the cancer. Died two years ago.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that. Is there anyone else you’d like here? Have you been in touch with your daughters?”

  “Well, sure I have. Catherine is tied up at work but she’s going to try to get here. Cindy is . . . well, I have trouble talking to Cindy sometimes.”

  Ward jumped in, explaining in general terms that the autopsy had been necessary, and Carrie was being treated with the utmost care and respect. “Everything is being done to find out what happened to her.” Tom noted how Ward omitted the words homicide and killer.

  Eileen nodded at Ward’s remarks. She seemed shocked, somewhat uncomprehending. “So I’ll see her now? I don’t want to just look at photos. I was very clear on the phone, I want to see her in person.”

  “Yes,” said Ward. “But we ought to discuss the funeral arrangements.”

  Eileen stood up. Her forehead knotted in a frown. “Well, I’ll be taking her home to Boise. No need for that here . . .”

  Ward looked at the agents, and Blythe rose to her feet. “Mrs. Gallo, your daughter is still part of an ongoing investigation.”