The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “He may be responsible for the murder of a friend of mine.”

  “And you were going to do what? Make a citizen’s arrest?”

  “I had no plan to approach him. All I wanted to do was follow him and see where he went.”

  “What were you going to do once you found out?”

  “I was going to take that information and add it to what I already know and… process it.”

  From the side I thought I saw the beginning of a bemused smile. Apparently he found me more amusing than threatening. I didn’t know if that was bad or good. He looked over and another part of him emerged from the black mask. He had a nice smile.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you.”

  It pained me to agree, but it would have been difficult, absurd, even, to ignore the facts. “I’m new at this.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “No.”

  “I can guarantee you the boys in that yard were armed tonight. Heavily. You have no idea how much danger you were in back there.”

  “I’m beginning to appreciate how much. But once you get to a certain level of danger… I would say to the point where your life is threatened as it probably was tonight—”

  “Not probably.”

  “Then incrementally speaking, increasing amounts of danger on top of that don’t make the situation worse. In other words, the risk does not increase proportionately with the recklessness of the act, once you pass the point where it’s your life that is at risk, because that’s the ultimate risk.”

  He gave me a sideways glance.

  “You can only die once, is all I’m saying, no matter how stupid you are.”

  “Maybe so,” he said. We drove for a few more miles before he spoke again. “Is that how you respond to being scared? Intellectualize? Analyze the thing that scares you?”

  “No.” I shifted in my seat. “That’s how I respond to everything.”

  He chuckled. “Here’s more input for your calculation. Bull was very close to chasing you down back there. If he had caught you, he would have pulled you to the ground so he could get to your throat, because that’s how animals kill. They attack the most vulnerable spot. You would have tried to fight him off, and his teeth would have shredded your arms down to the bone, and you wouldn’t have been able to push him off anyway because he’s too heavy. He would have wrapped his jaws around that soft tissue”—he made his right hand into a vise and placed it on either side of his throat and for a second reminded me of how John had died—“sunk his teeth in, and ripped everything out. There would have been blood everywhere—your blood—because he would have torn the major arteries, and then—”

  “What is your point?”

  He left a long pause before he answered and when he looked at me, he wasn’t smiling. “There are ways to die, and there are ways to die. Being mauled by a vicious animal is not one of the better ones.”

  I stared out my window at a drainage canal that paralleled our road. It was bone dry. I ran my fingers over the cuts and scratches on my arms. Superficial wounds from the bushes and branches. Mr. Jack Dolan had done what I had failed to do for myself. He had scared me.

  “Avidor is not running drugs,” he said, changing the subject at just the right moment. “So if your murder victim—what was his name?”

  “John McTavish.”

  “If John McTavish was killed over drugs, you’ve got the wrong man.”

  “No.” I turned my attention back inside the car. “It’s not the drug piece we’re sure of; it’s the other way around. We know John came down to Florida to see Bobby Avidor, and I’m reasonably sure Bobby set him up to be murdered. That it was about drugs is the speculation.”

  “By whom?”

  “John’s family. His friends. Coworkers.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “Friend,” I said. “John and I worked together at Majestic in Boston.”

  “Is Boston where you live?”

  “For another week. If it’s not drugs, then—”

  “Here’s why I’m asking. Wherever your home is, you should go there. You don’t belong in places like we just came from.”

  Of course he was right. I just didn’t like being told. “How do you know I’m not FBI or DEA or ATF? I could be a private investigator. I never told you I wasn’t.”

  He looked at me with raised eyebrows and half a grin that said he didn’t take the comment any more seriously than I did.

  “Just tell me what it is they do,” I said. “What is Bobby into if it’s not drugs?”

  “Parts.”

  “Parts?”

  “Aircraft parts,” he said.

  “Stealing aircraft parts?”

  “At a minimum. My bad guy does the whole buffet—stolen parts, recycled, counterfeit, back door, strip-and-dip. You name it. If Avidor is hooked up with him, he’s into parts. Bad parts.”

  “You won’t tell me the name of this bad guy? This J.Z.?”

  “Who said it was J.Z.? Where can I drop you?”

  I hadn’t even noticed that we had made our way back to civilization. The lights were on. Traffic was flowing. We were back in Miami. “You can drop me at the airport.”

  “Now you’re talking. What airline?”

  “No airline. I’m staying at a hotel there.”

  He checked his blind spot and changed lanes. “You’re not going home?”

  “Not right now. And you can’t take my car. I need it.”

  “I wasn’t planning on taking your car. Where do you want it parked?”

  “The Dolphin Garage. Where is yours?”

  “My truck is back at the salvage yard where I left it. But it’s parked far enough away that I can get to it without anyone seeing me.” He enunciated clearly, just in case I didn’t catch the instructive tone.

  “I can drive you home,” I said. “Where do you live?”

  “No thanks. Plenty of cabs at the airport.”

  “How do you think a cabbie is going to respond to your camouflage?”

  “This is Miami,” he said. “The cabbies have seen worse.”

  We were at the airport now, approaching the parking garages. “Let me take you to get your car tomorrow. It’s the least I can do.”

  “Did you say the Dolphin Garage?”

  “We can talk more on the way out there. I have more stuff to tell you.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Which is exactly why I need help.”

  “I generally get paid for providing that kind of help.”

  “Okay, that’s fair.” He pulled the ticket at the garage and the gate went up. I had to think fast. “I could hire you. And I could pay you. Eventually.”

  “I already have a job. I just told you that.”

  “You could do both jobs at once. Obviously we’re after the same players. Earn two fees for one job. It’s synergistic. Economies of scale and all that.”

  “Economies of scale?” He was circling the garage looking for a space. “I’m going to try to get close to the elevator,” he said. “So you don’t have to walk far. These damn places are dangerous for women.”

  “I have something—” Something to show you, I thought, if I trusted you. I’d been burned before. I took another look at him in the better light offered in the garage. Strong jaw. Hands resting easy on the steering wheel. Eyes that were always moving, but with the purpose of seeing, as opposed to Bobby’s jittery eyes, which seemed to rove incessantly for the express purpose of not being seen. I decided to trust Jack Dolan.

  “I have something that might be useful to you. My friend, John, before he died, he sent me an aircraft logbook and a diamond ring.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe for safekeeping. I think his intention was to talk to me about it when he got back from Florida. But he never came back.”

  “Are you sure it’s a logbook?”

  “I used to wo
rk for an airline. I know what one looks like. And it’s trashed. It’s muddy and sooty and ripped up. I’m trying to track down which airline.”

  “You need to work through the homicide detectives,” he said. “Whatever you have, give it to them.”

  “The police think it was a drug killing.”

  “Then it probably was.” He pulled the car into a spot and killed the engine. “They’re generally right about those things, which is because they do investigations for a living.” There was that instructive tone again.

  “They’re not right about this,” I said. “At least not completely.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They think John was setting up a drug deal. He wasn’t. He might have been doing something for his brother, but—”

  “His brother?”

  “It’s complicated. That’s part of what I have to tell you.”

  The first thing he did when he got out of the car was check the damage to the door from Bull’s head. I walked around to see for myself. My ankle had settled down during the long ride in, but now that the blood was flowing, it was really thick and sore.

  Bull must have had a rock for a head. There was no way I was getting away with a dent like that on a rental car, which meant I was going to have to pay for it because I hadn’t paid for the insurance, which reminded me of my financial crisis, which reminded me of my call to Paul Gladstone and the ticking clock. I had already used up two of the extra seven days he’d given me to get to Detroit. The thought made my head throb as much as my ankle.

  “Just let me run you out tomorrow to pick up your car,” I said. “Please?”

  “You’re trying to rope me in. You think if you have another couple of hours to work on me tomorrow, you’ll talk me into it.”

  “Pretty much.”

  He smiled. “At least you’re up front about it.”

  I followed him to the elevator, which wasn’t far. It arrived with a clear ding that felt loud in the deserted space. He held the door so I could limp in.

  “Do you know South Beach?” he asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “I’ll be at Big Pinks in South Beach tomorrow for breakfast. Meet me there. You can give it your best shot.”

  And then we walked, he in his black face and me with my limp, all the way across the garage, through the terminal, and to the elevator at the hotel.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ​The phone had probably been ringing for a while. The sound seeped into my awareness gradually, like a tune I was humming without knowing what it was. It took a long time for me to realize it was a phone ringing, and an equally long interval to remember what I was supposed to do about it.

  “Hello?”

  “What, you don’t answer your phone down there anymore? What the hell’s going on?”

  I was lying on my stomach with my head on one of the flat pillows, which was like no pillow at all. I adjusted slightly so I could see the clock radio. “Dan, how can you call me at six o’clock in the morning?”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “I was in a coma.” Every nerve ending in my body objected when I rolled onto my back, reminding me of what had happened last night. Actually, a few short hours ago. Parts of my body that weren’t twitching, aching, or stiff were hard to identify. The makeshift ice pack I’d rigged around my ankle was now a soggy, gooshy, cold towel under the sheets at the foot of my bed.

  “What do you want?”

  “Your logbook belongs to Air Sentinel.”

  I sat up. Fast. “What?”

  “I said your logbook—”

  “No. I heard you.” My head was swimming and it was hard to get my thoughts together. To top off everything else, I hadn’t gotten enough sleep. And there was something bothering me. Something floating out there in the ether that I thought I was supposed to be paying attention to. “How did you figure it out?”

  “I traced a couple of the mechanics’ signatures by their license numbers. Turns out they worked at Sentinel. Then I took one of the part numbers that was in the book and called their maintenance manager here at Logan. He’s an old buddy of mine. So I call him and I ask him to look up the part for me as a personal favor. I figured he could tell me what aircraft it belonged to and we’d know where the book came from. Ten minutes later he’s standing in my office.”

  “It’s at least a twenty-five-minute walk from Sentinel to your office.”

  “This is what I’m saying. The guy’s sixty pounds overweight and he’s sucking wind when he gets here, all red in the face, asking me where I got that part number.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Something about how Sentinel borrowed it from our inventory at O’Hare and I was trying to track it because we thought it had been stolen and… I don’t even remember. It was a complete load of crap.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. That’s the weird part, Shanahan.”

  “Why is that weird, Dan?”

  “This guy, my buddy, he’s usually got diarrhea of the mouth; I can never get him to shut up. But this thing, he wouldn’t say another word. I ask him, ‘How come you blew a gasket hauling your ass over here? Is there something special about this particular part?’ All he said was that I could stop looking for it, that he would make sure Majestic got paid for it. And we should do lunch sometime.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  “Beats the shit out of me. I thought you would have had it all figured out by now.”

  “I’ve got some pieces coming together. It’s just that they’re from an entirely different puzzle than the one we’ve been looking at.” I told him what had happened the night before, about chasing Avidor out to the salvage yard and meeting Jack Dolan. I left out the parts that made me sound like a complete bonehead, which left only the marginally boneheaded moments. “Jack says this guy that Avidor went to meet is a known player in the bogus parts trade, which means Bobby is probably involved, too.”

  “No shit. Involved how?”

  “Probably stealing them.” I knew I sounded like more of an expert than I was. “And reselling them on the black market. Maybe worse.”

  “Stealing from Majestic?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No wonder Johnny was so pissed at him.”

  “Yeah.” I peeled the covers back to sneak a peek at my ankle. Ugly, as expected. As I stared down at it, an awareness started to emerge from my subconscious. I was supposed to be doing something. I had left something undone somewhere. I had no idea what. I swung my feet around to the floor, intending to get up and start the blood flowing. That was until the blood made it to my ankle and the throbbing commenced. I tossed a couple of pillows down to the foot of the bed, leaned back against the headboard, and propped up my injured limb. There would be no running today. Walking was going to be a challenge.

  “Doesn’t it seem to you,” I said, “that a logbook would have more to do with parts than drugs?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Avidor is stealing from Sentinel. Or selling to them. Maybe he sold them a bad part. Or he sold it to a broker who sold it to them. Dan, Sentinel had a crash not too long ago.”

  He was quiet for a microsecond. “Oh, shit yeah. A bad one down in Ecuador or Salvador or some fucking place. Took them forever just to get to the site.”

  A thought had popped into my head and tumbled into another couple of thoughts rattling around in there and pretty soon they were starting to stick together and form a critical mass and, damaged ankle or not, the momentum lifted me off the bed and pulled me across the room to dig around on the dresser where I’d dumped my keys and my money from the night before. “I have to find…”

  “Find what?”

  “Find my messages from last night.” That’s what it was. That’s what was bothering me. “I had a message from the jeweler.”

  “What jeweler?”

  “The one who appraised the ring, and I think the message was that he figu
red out who it belonged to, but it was this long, confusing message that went over to the back of the page and I was so out of it when I came in…”

  The messages weren’t on the dresser with my keys. I looked around for my jeans, which turned out to be on the floor in the bathroom.

  “How in the hell could he figure that out? There were no marks on that ring anywhere. I looked all over it.”

  “This Gemprint thing they do. They have this laser process where they can read the way a diamond is cut, which is never the same way twice, apparently. So it’s like—”

  “Snowflakes?”

  “Yes, but more to the point, it’s like fingerprints. People can have their diamonds identified and the information banked so that if the stone gets lost or stolen and turns up, it can find its way back. Only most people don’t know about this process, so the jeweler said it was a real long shot but he took the reading anyway and I think…” I’d tried three pockets of the jeans. The messages were in the fourth, folded neatly, right where I’d stuffed them. One from Dan. One from Paul Gladstone in Detroit. One from the jeweler. And I was right. His message was that the diamond ring matched one in the Gemprint database belonging to a Belinda Culligan Fraley. Something else was written there that was trying to pull together all the other things I’d been thinking, but not comprehending. I was already moving toward my laptop.

  “Hey!” Dan was still there, and he wasn’t pleased to be left out. “What’s up?”

  “The woman who owned this ring is dead. I’ll call you back, Dan.”

  “Shan—”

  The image that filled my laptop screen was dim and blurry. The figures that moved through it looked like ghosts in hazard suits, stepping through a dark landscape, picking their way over dangerous terrain in the herky-jerky motion of an Internet video feed.

  The first time I’d watched the short clip, my face had burned hot, almost as if the waves of searing heat from the fire had transcended time, distance, and the limits of technology and come through the screen. With my heightened sense of smell, I even thought I could detect the faint odor of jet fuel as it leached into the soil on a mountainside six thousand miles away.