The Shop

by J. Carson Black

  Franklin said to Jolie, “What do you mean, connected?”

  “The VP is dead, Frank. Grace is dead. Somebody wants to cover this up. More than you already did.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But there was something in his voice that told her she was close to the truth.

  “What did you do, Franklin? Take your boat out in the middle of the night? Chain him to an anchor and dump him in the bay?”

  Kay clapped her hands over her ears. “Shut up! Shut up!”

  “Frank, is there more I don’t know?”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “Why now? Why did the VP die now? You had it all covered up—”

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  “You leave us alone!” Riley shouted. “You’re just jealous because we never wanted you, we—”

  Jolie tried to keep her voice level. “A boy was killed, Frank.”

  Kay glared at Jolie. “I don’t believe you! Frank wouldn’t do that.”

  “What about the guy who took us hostage, Franklin? Is he a part of the cover-up?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I think you know him. I think you planned this.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  Something jabbed her shoulder. A crooked finger, ending in a yellowed nail.

  Her grandfather, the senator. His hawk nose was inches from her face, eyes like shiny black beetles. “I’ve been stewing about this for a long time, and I just can’t let this go.”

  Jolie opened her mouth to reply, but he was ahead of her. “How could you do it?”

  “Granddad,” Kay said, her voice unusually high. Alarmed. “Granddad, that’s not Dorie, that’s your granddaughter, Jolie, remember? She’s grown up, she’s a policewoman…”

  He ignored Kay and grabbed Jolie’s shoulders. He launched into a tirade, spittle flying from his mouth, a jumble of angry words. For a moment Jolie couldn’t comprehend what she was hearing.

  Then she understood.

  “What kind of mother tries to kill her own child?”

  56

  Landry kept watch on the causeway and on the bay. Several cars went by on Route 30, but none slowed near the turnoff to the causeway. But when he looked into the bay again, there were more boats. A flotilla of them—and they weren’t fishermen. They were photographers.

  A car door slammed, the sound carrying across the water—a Channel 7 news van parked on Cape San Blas road just outside the gatehouse. More cars coming, a line of them, like cars let out of a stadium parking lot after a football game. Parking on both sides of the highway, cameras out, large and small. A Tallahassee network affiliate satellite truck, this one WCTV.

  He looked back at the boats. Pleasure craft, jammed with people. Jammed with people with cameras. No helicopters, though. He doubted any city news affiliate within five hundred miles of here could afford a helicopter.

  If this was the raid, it was elaborate—a cast of thousands.

  This was a storm all right. A media storm.

  Just the three of us.

  Jolie sat with her back against the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. She’d relocated to the bathroom, where she couldn’t be watched. She felt like a traffic accident everyone had slowed down to see.

  Jolie tried to put away her emotions, see it as a story that had happened to someone else. As a cop, she’d witnessed plenty of senseless carnage over the years. The sordid homicides, the lives turned upside down. A moment of blatant stupidity. An uncontrollable rage. If you looked at it as a cop would, you could be dispassionate about it. She should be dispassionate—it was a long time ago.

  But she died of an aneurysm.

  “No,” Kay had told her. “There was no aneurysm. She didn’t die. Not then.”

  Then there was the move to New Mexico. Jolie didn’t remember the move to New Mexico, but she remembered the move back.

  Her father had kept her away from them, the family. Only twenty miles away, but the gulf between them was immense. He didn’t forbid her from seeing them, but Jolie felt as if an invisible fence had been built around her. She couldn’t remember how she got the impression that the Haddoxes were wealthy and powerful and had no time for her. They couldn’t accept that her mother had married her father. She didn’t even know if her dad said these things, couldn’t remember an instance when he did, but Jolie arrived at these conclusions nonetheless. Maybe she’d been the one to fill in the gaps. A child who loved her father. Adored her father. She knew they had rejected him, and she took it personally. She knew he was an outsider, so she’d stood with him.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you,” Kay told her.

  You almost did.

  “I didn’t think it would be something you’d want to know.”

  No, thought Jolie. Who’d want to hold that conversation?

  “That’s why I left yesterday. I couldn’t say it.”

  But it was all out in the open now, wasn’t it?

  Belle Oaks wasn’t a retirement facility. It was a home. Belle Oaks was an old mental hospital upgraded and changed to accommodate people with psychological and neurological problems. Schizophrenics and bipolars, people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The suicidal. Belle Oaks was a private hospital where the rich sent their family members to be warehoused.

  Dorie had lived to be fifty-eight.

  Fifty-eight.

  Kay told her Jolie’s mother died last year, of a heart attack. In Tallahassee, only a hundred miles away.

  And Jolie never knew it.

  “She didn’t know who anybody was,” Kay told her. “She suffered brain damage when she fell.”

  Jolie asked Kay for all of it, and Kay told her all of it.

  Jolie’s mother’s instability and anger. How she’d fly into rages. How she’d become increasingly dissatisfied with her life. Her growing regret about everything she’d thrown away to marry Jolie’s father.

  Their side of the story.

  According to Kay, the one thing that kept her going was the Petal Soft Baby Soap contest. The company flew mother and daughter to New York and shot the commercial there.

  It was all Dorie could talk about. But more and more she confided in her older sister, Kay’s mother. How she missed her family, how she missed Indigo. How disappointing her life was, except for the Soap Baby.

  Then it ended. The baby soap people tried a different kind of advertising campaign, and life became unbearable again.

  The rages started back up.

  Jolie’s mother hated her life. Maybe she hated Jolie’s dad.

  Maybe she even hated Jolie.

  Jolie’s back was getting tired. She stood up, did some stretching even with her taped hands, and then leaned against the wall. The room smelled of bathroom cleanser, and underneath the cleanser smell was the faint odor of urine. The cloying smell of roses over-lying all of it. In the other room, people talked in hushed tones. Jolie heard the word “she” a lot. She tuned them out.

  The reason Jolie was still here, the reason she was alive, was because her father had lost his job at the ironworks factory. He came home in the middle of the day to find his wife sobbing and screaming as she held her baby underwater in the bathtub.

  And Jolie wondered why she’d freaked out in the tub.

  There was a struggle, and her dad saved her. In her thrashing, Dorie slipped on the tile, fell, and hit her head.

  Emergency surgery and a coma followed.

  Jolie closed her eyes. She could hear the murmuring in the other room. They were talking about it. Weighing every nuance, turning over every lie.

  Dorie regained consciousness, but when she did, she had the intellectual ability of a seven-year-old. No more rages, though. Those were gone.

  The rose smell got stronger, seemed to seep under the door along with the voices. A sickly sweet smell. I named a rose for you.

  Jolie’s dad called the only people who could really help him: the family. They sent a private ambulance. They got the best doct
ors. Had plenty of conferences in the waiting room, at the house on Indigo Island. A plan was made. Dorie Haddox Burke died of an aneurysm, sudden and heartbreaking for her family.

  Jolie remembered the photo in their family album—a white coffin under a mound of white lilies.

  Her father, who hated to see even a butterfly die, must have been relieved to spare her a story like that. The story that went like this: Your mother didn’t want you. Your mother hated you so much she tried to kill you.

  So instead he knitted the fabric of their lives together into a new story. A new story with a sad ending. It was always “just the three of us.” A loving father, a loving mother, and the child they doted on.

  Jolie left the bathroom and went up to Kay. “You knew it all this time, and you never told me?”

  Kay looked helpless. One of the few times she was at a loss for words.

  “All this time?”

  Kay opened her mouth to speak, stopped.

  “Save it,” Jolie said, tired in her bones. “I can’t think about this right now.”

  57

  Mike Cardamone parked the old Subaru several blocks away from the safe house. The Subaru rattled and the oil light stayed on permanently, but he’d picked it up yesterday for cash from a man who was as secretive and paranoid as himself.

  He put the sunscreen in the windshield, locked up, shouldered his duffle, and started walking.

  The subdivision was empty in the steaming heat of summer. Blinds were closed. Cars locked up in garages. Abandoned houses on every street. It was not yet seven a.m., but the heat was already oppressive, and by the time he reached the house on Sea Oats, he was wringing wet.

  He stared at the house, 8459 East Sea Oats, closed-up and blank-faced. It gave him a bad feeling. He continued around the block, went into the alley, and hopped the wall. After making sure the neighbors were nowhere in evidence, he unlocked the back door.

  A fly zoomed out, clipping his cheek. And another, followed by the smell. Underlying the smell of the hot, closed-up house was the bloated stench of death.

  He stepped back out into the yard. They’d need a cleanup crew pronto. But even as he punched in the number, Cardamone realized he had to go in.

  He had to know what happened here.

  The cleanup crew on the way, Cardamone reached into the duffle and pulled on a jumpsuit, plastic booties, a shower cap, and gloves.

  He started with the hallway and checked the back rooms. The corpses were no shock; he’d expected to find them there. Jackson, Davis, and Green were recognizable from the photos he remembered. Professional job. He was only surprised by the third one, Green. Green, of all people, had put up a fight. Glued to the floor by his own gore. Arterial blood had arced up and out, spraying the walls.

  Do not go gentle into that good night…

  His mother’s favorite poem.

  He searched the rest of the house with mounting unease.

  Where was Peters?

  Another surprise—two bodies in the garage. Neither one of them was Peters.

  With a shock, he recognized them: Salter and Bakus.

  So where was Peters?

  On his way back to the rental house, Cardamone’s thoughts raced. He needed to discipline himself, think this through. The house would be wiped clean. No worries there.

  But where was Peters?

  A couple of phone calls confirmed what Cardamone already knew: there had been no raid on the compound off Cape San Blas.

  Could Peters have done all this?

  Cardamone searched his memory banks. Peters’s real name was Cyril Landry. Had Landry connected up with Franklin somehow, or was there someone else?

  He would have to call back the second team. It would take time to get them all back together, and an assault on the island right now would not be optimal. Not if Franklin knew about the raid. Not if there were hundreds of reporters with cameras roaming the island. Better hope the storm came in on time and chased the media away.

  It all came down to this: was Franklin behind this? It seemed impossible. Franklin was such a screwup.

  In fact, it was one of Frank’s adventures that made Mike decide to pull the plug.

  Franklin told him about his long-lost cousin, Nick Holloway, who was chronicling Brienne Cross’s reality show for Vanity Fair. He told Mike he’d had no choice but to save Nick’s life.

  Frank knew a congressman from Colorado who had a son named Mars. Mars lived in Aspen, couldn’t keep a job, and partied all the time. “Kid’s a real sociopath,” Franklin said. “Perfect for the job.”

  Frank had had to do it all on the fly, but Mars was easy to find. The kid liked the easy cash, thought it would be a lark. Mars tried to lure Nick away from the party, but that didn’t work. Ultimately he put Rohypnol in Nick’s drink, rolled him down the walkway, and pushed him into the garage and under Brienne’s car.

  When Mike found out about it, he sent one of his operatives to scrub Mars. That was how it was: Mike always had to clean up Franklin’s messes.

  Turned out Mars was already dead. Someone had gotten there ahead of him.

  Or else the kid really did OD.

  He needed to get the team back here. He might not use them, but at least he’d have them if he needed them. He called Gulf Homes, his clearinghouse for sensitive communications, and set it up.

  He discovered, miracles of miracles, that his jet wasn’t en route to Atlanta, as had been planned. It was still in Tallahassee. A mechanical problem had kept it on the ground—a lucky break. The jet was ready to go, and presumably his team was still in Tallahassee.

  It was meant to be.

  And this time, he’d be with them, to make sure nothing went wrong.

  Back at the house, he turned on the TV so he could follow the news while he waited for his team leader’s call.

  Something one of the anchors said caused him to look at the TV.

  He saw an empty space, trees in the background, some wind. The camera swung to a familiar figure striding across a green lawn and onto a white shell road.

  Staring at the television, Cardamone sat down on the bed, his heart rate increasing to jackhammer speed. His ears burned. He stared a hole in the TV set, but the image didn’t change.

  The attorney general had thrown down the gauntlet.

  58

  When their captor came for Jolie, her first emotion was gratitude. She’d wanted to get out of that room and away from those people in the worst way.

  Inside the security center, he motioned her to a chair. Overhead was a bank of LCD screens, three vertical rows, six screens across, capturing images from remote cameras all over the island.

  Bringing her out here, wanting her to watch the cameras—he must trust her on some level. Jolie could use this. “You want me to be a lookout.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I should at least know your name.”

  “It’s Cyril.”

  “The old man needs medical attention. He’s confused, frightened. Terrified.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “He needs to get off the island.”

  “How would you do it?”

  Jolie tried not to show too much eagerness. “We could take the Hinckley.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “Do you know what the stakes are?”

  “I know there’s a terrified old man, innocent people are hostages—”

  “That’s nothing.”

  “Nothing? These people did nothing to you.”

  “Franklin did.”

  “Franklin? What did he do? If we’re going to leave, we have to go now. The storm is—”

  He slammed his hand on the desk. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  She stared at him.

  “You remember Michael Jackson?”

  “Michael Jackson?”

  “His death blotted out all the news—it was all Michael Jackson all the time. Remember? Nothing else could get through. Cable TV, radio, newspapers—i
t was all-consuming. Do you remember Iran?

  “Iran?”

  “The riots? That girl, Neda, who was killed? All of that ended when Michael Jackson died.”

  She did remember, but she was confused. “What does that have to do with getting out of here?”

  “Listen to me. That’s what these guys did. Your uncle and Cardamone—Cardamone owns a security firm called Whitbread Associates. The government outsourced a program to Whitbread that would—every once in a while, not very often—take a high-profile celebrity out.”

  Jolie stared at him, unable to make sense of what he was saying.

  “They killed celebs to cover up other stuff.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Sure it’s crazy. Doesn’t mean they didn’t do it. Governments act crazy all the time. Wiping out a whole people like the Nazis did? Crazy.”

  “What proof do you have?”

  “I worked for them. I killed Brienne Cross.”

  Jolie heard the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter in the distance. The rain falling, dripping from the eaves. The cold air blowing in with the scent of magnolia through the open doorway.

  Time seemed to stand still. I killed Brienne Cross. Did he really say that?

  He held her eyes steady. She noticed the small scar, like a satin stitch, along his jaw. A strong jaw. Some would even say he was handsome.

  I killed Brienne Cross.

  She noticed his hand, complete with wedding ring, curling and uncurling. Pictured him—she’d seen the photo of the house—pictured him stabbing those people in the house.

  A killer with a wedding ring…

  The women screaming, dying. The young men…

  He leaned toward her and she cringed. But all he did was remove the duct tape that bound her wrists. She rubbed her hands and looked at him.

  Then he bent down and clamped a manacle around her ankle, wrapping the leg chain around the table legs and padlocking them together.

  “I’ve got things to do.” He instructed her on what to look for on the monitors, and left her there alone.