“On Chokoloskee.”
“Right. On the island.”
“And then what? A few weeks go by . . .”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “You know, we partied, we fucked, we went out on his boat a few times. And when he didn’t come home for two days, I went out to the boat and found him like that.” She took another chip from the bag and ate it, Tom thought, in a way meant to convey mourning.
“And the spot where he parked the boat — you said your family owns that? The property there?”
“Right. My daddy.”
“And where’s your daddy?”
Rhodes spoke up for the first time. “Hardee Correctional.”
Tom returned his attention to Iowa. “And your mother? Any other siblings around here?”
She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate.
“Whose idea was it for him to park his boat there — yours, or his?”
She blinked, and Tom thought she was genuinely fuzzy on the details. Partying, indeed.
“I think it was . . . mine. Yeah. I told him, er, he said we ought to go for a ride, and then I told him about my dad’s place down here. Yeah. That was it.”
Tom clicked off his pen and folded his arms. He leaned back a little. “Iowa, did Brian ever say anything about someone who might want to hurt him?”
“No.”
“How about friends who came to visit him?”
“Not that I know of. Hey, I work six, sometimes seven shifts a week at that shithole. I get done work, sometimes me and Jenny, we go up to Naples, or Marco, I would just go home to Brian. He was sweet.” She studied the contents of her gas station purchase some more.
“And he never said anything. About his life, his past, who his friends were, nothing.”
“Jesus,” she said. She glanced at the impassive Rhodes again, standing there like the Marlboro Man with one boot heel pressed against the wall. “No. Okay? He talked about no one. You’re making me feel stupid. Alright?”
Tom uncrossed his arms, held up his hands. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to.”
“Well, you do, alright? Making it seem like I was with someone for almost two months and didn’t know anything about them. Some people are just private, okay? You guys always think people are hiding something from you, maybe they just want their privacy, okay? Don’t want you looking in every second, seeing everything they do.” She grabbed up her items and stuffed them in the bag. Flakes of lettuce remained behind on the table. Then she stood and glared at Rhodes. “Can I go now?”
Rhodes cut Tom a look.
Tom nodded.
Rhodes barely moved, just extending his arm to push open the door.
Iowa Schnell gave Tom one last glance over her shoulder as she left, her bright hair bobbing, bracelets clanking, remnants of food still on the table. She didn’t strike him as a ‘private’ sort of person, if that was what she’d meant.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The cost per gallon at the local gas station was cheaper than anywhere in Naples or Bonita Springs. Tom stood with the spigot in the gas tank looking into the intersection of 41 and 29.
He pulled out his phone and used one hand to thumb through his contacts. Blythe’s voice mail picked up, he listened to it and left a message.
“Blythe — hey, so I’m down here in Big Cypress country. Just talked to Schnell . . . She’s an interesting character.” The trigger on the spigot popped and Tom returned it to the holster. He switched the phone between his ears and looked up at the communications tower jutting from the Sheriff’s Station next door. “Listen, I think Hamer was into something with computers, maybe even counter-surveillance. Makes sense with his history. I’m even thinking — well, maybe we should just talk. Call me back.”
He hung up and headed into the gas station convenience store. He’d already swiped his card at the pump but he wanted a pack of smokes.
He looked through the glass wall as the clerk rang up his purchase. Route 41 led back home, 29 stretched on toward Everglades City. One way in, one way out. As he exited the convenience store he saw Agent Rhodes pull into the gas station. Rhodes drove a white Impala with mud splattered on the sides, around the wheel wells and doors.
Tom approached as Rhodes slowed to a stop and rolled down his window. “We doing this or what? It’s not every day such a fine upstanding young man as you invites me to lunch.”
Tom turned back to the Durango. Called over his shoulder, “I’ll follow you.”
* * *
The truck-stop diner was only half-full, though it was smack in the middle of the lunch hour. Tom and Rhodes had their pick of a couple tables and chose a booth by the window. Rhodes slid across the seat until he was up against the plate glass overlooking the highway. He lifted his hat, ran a hand through his silvery hair, set the hat back on his head.
Iowa Schnell showed up, preoccupied with the waitress pad she was scribbling in. She snapped her gum and looked up at the agents. “You two again?” She looked the same except she’d tied a grease-stained apron around her waist.
“I’ll take a black coffee,” Rhodes said.
“Just water,” Tom said.
She gave them each a look, snapped her gum again and walked off.
Rhodes watched her go. “There’s a lot of beef in that steak.”
Tom felt himself grimace. “Please. You could be her father.”
“I could be a lot of people’s father.” Rhodes perched the hat back on his head. “Anyway, she’s not my type. Now, Blythe, on the other hand, Blythe’s more my speed. For one thing, we’re both Southern.”
“I thought Southerners didn’t consider Florida part of the South.”
“The panhandle is. It’s more Texas than Florida.”
“Is that where you get your accent from?”
“Accent?” Rhodes pulled a face. “What accent?”
“Blythe doesn’t have a Southern accent.”
“She probably had it driven out of her in the military.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works . . .”
Rhodes shrugged. He settled in, put his leg up on the seat and tipped his hat down like he was going to take a nap.
Iowa returned with their drinks. Tom thought the water looked a little brown. He hadn’t even glanced at the menu yet. But Rhodes held up two fingers. “Dos especiales, por favor.”
Iowa turned on her heel, writing without looking at her pad, and her swaying hips carried her back through the diner toward the kitchen. The bell rang as an order came up.
“She’s not telling us everything,” Tom said in a low voice.
“No shit.”
“What do you know about counter-surveillance?”
Rhodes dropped his leg down and sat up. He leaned against the table, his blue eyes locking on Tom. “Like what?”
“Frequency finders, bug detectors, wireless camera detectors.”
“What do I know? I know it’s getting harder every day to put surveillance up on the bad guys and get anything out of it. Plus, down here, you got this family of stone crab fishermen, and they go out onto the water and make their deals, very hard to keep on top of it.”
“It’s the Vasquez family down here.”
“That’s right. I mean, this is your county. I’m sure VNB has a moving truck’s worth of files on Vasquez. I mean, as a manner of speaking. Most of it’s all digital.”
“So why are you here?”
“Aside from my charm? I guess I’m here because Everglades City is equidistant to Fort Myers and Miami and I was available.”
“How’s Miami these days?”
“Gone crazy. Columbia stopped taking down their poppy fields and marine interdiction has just about died. So, yeah, we’ve taken a greater interest in this little area.”
Tom thought about Jack Vance saying drug traffickers were proliferating in southwest Florida. And Coby mentioning counter-surveillance acuity among Palumbo’s crew.
“I did a little research and a lot of this counter-surveillance stuff i
s available online,” Tom said. “Companies like Red House Security, Gotcha Tech, there’s a few others.”
“One thing that’s out there,” Rhodes said, “called a Brat, this thing scrambles a cell phone location. So you’re tracking a guy, you head to Tampa, he’s over in Nogales.”
Tom nodded. “So, this Brian Hamer was a smart guy. IQ probably somewhere around 160. Managed to defraud the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He evaded the authorities for years. I’m thinking he excelled at counter-surveillance. Not to mention he pretty much lawyered himself out of the whole fraud thing.”
“Well, sure. But he wasn’t alone. In the lawyering.”
“No?”
Rhodes sipped his coffee. “No. He had help. Some ACLU lawyer took an interest in the Fourth Amendment aspect, helped him to file the Motion to Suppress that was enough for the feds to back down. The feds didn’t want it to become a huge deal. For one thing, these are methods you don’t want the bad guys knowing about. For another, yeah, it’s a constitutional gray area. But the courts hadn’t caught on yet.”
He’d thought the same thing about the FBI letting Hamer off the hook — the feds hadn’t wanted use of StingRays to become more public information than it already was. And they were going ahead where there was no judicial precedent.
“Hamer started to become something of a civil rights crusader after that,” Rhodes said. “Kept his real name, though, and I think stayed working above board.”
“Yeah, but he was doing something to make a buck. What if he was contracting out services to do a little hacking and spying? Maybe for Palumbo.”
Rhodes shrugged. “Yeah, I’m sure. Once a thief, you know? He’d stayed up in Michigan for the rest of his probation, then wound up down here . . . So, right, I see where you’re going — Hamer hacked the county jail, had a look at who was coming and going freely through security.”
“Yeah. Like that.” Tom looked around the diner at the various patrons eating and chatting. Mostly men. Iowa Schnell was hip-swinging her way among the tables, grinning, jawing her gum and revealing eyefuls of thighs and cleavage as she leaned over to pour coffees.
Rhodes sniffed, sat back, put his arm up on the seatback.
Tom asked, “Who was the ACLU lawyer?”
“Uhm, I forget. Indian guy. Ayaan-something. I can look it up for you.”
Tom was lost in thought when Iowa slid the two steaming plates in front of the agents. She offered a manufactured smile and asked, “Anything else?”
He looked over the pile of steak, eggs, hash browns and white toast saturated with butter. Enough to stop a heart after the third bite. What had Blythe been saying about taking care of himself? At this rate he’d be looking like Rhodes in five years. He said to Iowa, “Is your friend Jenny here?”
“No. She’s off today.”
“I’d like to have a look at your place on the island. If it’s alright with you.”
“Fine.” She couldn’t get away fast enough. Rhodes gave Tom a glance, waggled his eyebrows, tucked into the food.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There was Everglades City, which was small, population around four hundred, everything bushy and green but dry, souvenir shops all over, modest homes, and then there was Chokoloskee Island, accessible by taking a long causeway across the bay called Smallwood Drive. The island was quaint, just as dry, like a pancake of floured dough, with many fishing and island-touring charters along its edges. There was one trailer park and it looked out on the ocean. Rhodes pulled in ahead. Tom got out, white dust boiling in the air, the scents of fish and salt water, and walked with Rhodes to a trailer modified to look like a small house.
The agent waved a hand like a maître d’. “Here you go.” He opened the door, said, “After you,” and Tom stepped inside.
Iowa Schnell wasn’t much of a housekeeper, her place as messy as Hamer’s boat. Rhodes stayed by the door as Tom poked around, moving first into the small bedroom — walled in fake wood panels, the double bed just a mattress and box spring, unmade. The bathroom smelled sweet and sticky with hairspray. Only the kitchen was kept, not a dish in the sink or stain on the counter.
“I had a K-9 unit here,” Rhodes said from the doorway. “Found nothing. If there were any drugs, Miss Iowa got rid of them before we were ever here. We took a few of Hamer’s personal effects into evidence. Nothing earth-shattering.”
Tom checked the cabinets below the sink. “Where’s the trash?”
“Say what?”
“Trash. Refuse. The British say ‘rubbish’.”
Rhodes turned his head to look outside. “The bins all line up over at the road there. I don’t think there’s any way of determining whose crap is whose though. That’s what we call it in Texas. ‘Crap.’”
Tom scanned everything one more time then nudged past Rhodes. Back outside, he circled the trailer, which sat on several stacks of concrete blocks for a foundation. He headed for the row of trash bins but detoured toward a pile of junk.
Rhodes caught up as Tom browsed some ragged pieces of corrugated metal, a busted microwave, a battered DVD player. Tom moved on to a stack of cardboard and sifted through it. Postal boxes that had been broken down, some bearing the Amazon smile logo.
“That’s the recycling,” Rhodes said.
“Why’d you move from Texas to Florida?”
“It’s a long story. It begins with a woman, ends with me broke and looking for a job.”
“You weren’t always dying to be a state cop?”
“My daddy had a ranch outside of Houston. That was my future. I still go back, much as I can.”
Tom grabbed the corner of a shiny collapsed box and slipped it from the stack. He rotated it around in the air as Rhodes came closer. “Fusion?” The agent scratched his head.
Tom felt a little rush. “This is a synthetic voice generator. People who can’t speak use it.” He looked into Rhodes’ eyes. “Very possible that the person who called Heather Moss was using something like this. See here? It comes with phone adapters. You plug it in, then type what you want to say.”
Rhodes blinked. “But Hamer was dead by the time Heather Moss got that phone call.”
“Right. But I’m thinking he detected the wireless signal from the jail cameras going to the sheriff, hacked in, found out about Heather Moss’s easy access. This is a guy who knows his tech. Someone hired him to get all this stuff, to do this. Then they killed him and got Heather Moss to finish the job on Declan. We need to look at Hamer’s laptop history.”
“Already on it. Where to next, Columbo?”
“Please don’t call me that. Well, okay. If you must.”
* * *
Ten minutes later Lange was stepping aboard the fifty-foot schooner where Brian Hamer had died. The deck looked like it had on the video: neglected, as if no one who’d boarded in the past few months was doing any real fishing or chartering, just keeping up appearances to that effect. The bait was bits of dead fish, desiccated in the sun, smelling something awful.
“We ran the hull identification and vessel registration numbers,” Rhodes said. “The boat was registered seven weeks ago at the local tax collector’s office in Marco Island. Proof of ownership came from a place called Aquatropics — they sell new and used boats. Mostly fishing boats. This one was used. Way used.”
Tom squeezed down the narrow stairs beneath the pilothouse into the living quarters below. Everything about it was claustrophobic — low ceilings, small porthole windows. Smelled bad in there, too. Like death.
The bed where Hamer was found had been stripped to the mattress, but his fluids had soaked through and stained the blue-striped fabric. Everything had been photographed and documented; still, Tom wore plastic gloves as he moved around the cramped space.
In the tiny bathroom — Rhodes called it a “bulkhead” — Tom opened the medicine cabinet and peered inside. There was a near-empty bottle of Pepto Bismol, an aid for stomach troubles. Some Aspirin, a heavily-used toothbrush, a couple of
Q-Tips.
“The techs didn’t take this stuff to the ROC?”
Rhodes stuck his head in the doorway. “They got the sheets, mud on the carpeting, blood on the walls, dusted it, the whole nine yards.”
“Yeah well, they missed the trash at Iowa’s trailer, and look what we found. Let’s bag this stuff. You got any bags?”
Rhodes just gave Tom a look.
“Come on,” Tom said. “You got anything we could put these toiletries in?”
Rhodes slipped out of the doorway and Tom heard him climb the stairs and leave the boat, mumbling as he went.
Tom stepped out of the bulkhead and continued to rummage around in the main quarters, pulling out the drawers of a small dresser bolted to the wall. He poked around at some underwear and socks, then found a couple of blank postcards, both from Marco Island. A beaded necklace, a bottle of cologne, a hair brush, a belt, some swim trunks faded from years of use.
There were dirty dishes in the sink nearby. A pot with dried-up noodle remnants congealed inside. Two cabinets above the sink — dishes and a wooden box inside. He pulled out the wooden box, shook it gently, heard the cutlery clattering inside. He put it back and closed the cabinets, saw more drawers beneath the blood-stained bed.
Tom got down on his knees and pulled the drawers out. Each one was empty. But the way the bed was built, he thought there was more hollow space in the drawer housing. He set each drawer aside and clicked on his pen light, bent and looked around in the space.
He heard Rhodes clomping back down the stairs behind him.
“There,” Rhodes said. He’d brought a small evidence bag with him. “I’m pretty proud of myself, I have to admit, keeping these in my — what have you got?”
“Nothing.”
Tom got back to his feet. They bagged up the items and Rhodes left. Tom looked around the small space one last time, trying to see it with fresh eyes, thinking about Mario Palumbo going through all this trouble to get Howard Declan — and then also thinking about a serial killer who targeted men.
But that was a long shot, at best. What else linked the men besides the ostensible poisoning? His vibrating phone interrupted his train of thought. Blythe.
Special Agent Tom Lange Box Set Page 41