The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “He’s got files in his office,” I said. “Anything that would be of interest to us is probably in there.”

  I led him back to George’s office. The door was open. Jack went behind the desk. I started with the credenza where a picture of a smiling George and one of his airplanes was proudly displayed. “It’s still hard for me to believe George is a money launderer. I can’t believe I was so far off on him.”

  “Sometimes good people do bad things.”

  Something banged against the wall from the other side. I stopped and listened. The other side of the wall was the hangar. More sounds—clattering and scraping. Someone was in the hangar.

  Jack listened, too, head cocked toward the sounds. “Did you hear voices?”

  I hadn’t. He pulled his gun, and then he was out the door, feeling his way in the gray light along the hall toward the front of the offices and the noise we’d heard. This time I’d remembered to bring the .22, so as he approached the first corner, I fell in behind him, back flat against the wall. It occurred to me that I knew the way and he didn’t.

  “There’s a short hallway around that corner,” I whispered. “There are two doors on the wall closest to us. One is to the stockroom. The other is to the break room. There’s one door on the far wall and it goes to the bathroom. There’s an extra-wide door at the end of the hallway. It goes out to the hangar, which is where the noise is coming from. They had a DC-8 in there.”

  He nodded. “The door to the hangar, which way does it swing?”

  I closed my eyes and pictured George holding the door for me. “In. It opens into the hallway. Toward us.”

  We crossed over to the far wall. We’d move a couple of inches. Stop. Listen. Move. We were halfway when we heard keys jingling. He was in the hangar, he was close, and he was coming in. Staring down the long hallway reminded me of the distorted view through the peephole, but it was only the sweat in my eyes. I took the safety off.

  The deadbolt slipped. The knob twisted. I raised my gun and squeezed it in both hands. Jack rushed the door just as it opened. A flash of yellow. A loud, hollow boom as the door slammed shut. A man’s high-pitched cry as Jack grabbed him and shoved him face first into the wall. Keys dropped to the ground. The man cried out again, a long, plaintive wail. I saw his face. It was white, a frozen twist of terror that pinned the heavy eyebrows to his forehead. Heavy eyebrows and a neatly trimmed goatee. A goatee?

  “Do you have him?” Jack shoved his knee in the small man’s back. “Alex, do you have him?”

  I leveled my gun at Julio Martin Fuentes. “Yes. And I know who he is.”

  I must have subconsciously expected to see George, because I was surprised when it turned out to be a small Hispanic man in a yellow T-shirt. Julio’s hands were uncomfortably high over his head. His eyes were squeezed shut, and if I understood his muy rápido español, he was praying.

  “Jack, that’s Julio. He’s okay.” I started to shove the .22 into my jeans, remembered the safety. “He’s the one who told me George was laundering. We’re scaring him to death. He probably thinks Ottavio sent you to kill him.”

  Jack let his hand slip from Julio’s back, but not before frisking him first.

  “Julio.” I touched his shoulder. “Julio Fuentes.” I wouldn’t call what he was doing shaking. It was more violent than shaking. “Está bien, Julio. Lo siento, señor. We’re sorry to have scared you.”

  He opened his eyes. First into slits, then wider. I didn’t know how to tell him in Spanish, so I signaled for him to turn around. “Está bien, Julio.” He stared at me until recognition replaced panic, then lowered his arms and turned to face us. His cheek where he’d been mashed to the wall was imprinted with the texture of the concrete blocks.

  “Señorita?” His voice was weak and wavering.

  Jack picked up the keys from the floor and handed them to him. I picked up his baseball cap, which had fallen to the ground, and gave it to him. He accepted each offering with a small bow and a “muchas gracias.”

  Jack also apologized. He spoke more Spanish than I did. I caught about every other word. One that kept coming up was policía. Julio asked to go to the men’s room, then darted across the hall and shut the door behind him. Jack and I went to the break room.

  “He thinks I’m a cop,” Jack said, pulling out a chair to sit. “I didn’t disabuse him of that notion.”

  “That’s probably how the cops behave where he’s from.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Colombia,” I said. “Can you understand him?”

  “If he speaks slowly,” he said.

  We waited for Julio to come back. I was still hyped up and dying to pace, but Jack thought Julio would relax more if we all sat with our hands on the lunch table. I asked Julio if he wanted something to drink before we settled in. He wanted a Coke from the refrigerator. I set the can on the table in front of his chair, but he didn’t sit. He stood holding his black cap in both hands, working it with nervous fingers the way he’d done at my hotel, and I realized he was waiting for me to sit down. I did, and put both hands on the table. Only then did he pull out a chair and sit. Stiffly.

  The three of us communicated as well as we could. Jack knew some words I didn’t and I had some on him. Julio knew almost no English, so it was a slow, painstaking process. Julio’s Coke can was empty by the time we had ascertained that George had shut down the business indefinitely, but he’d asked Julio to come in and do the payroll. He wanted to make sure his people were paid all the way through the end of the pay period. When Jack asked him why George had shut down, he ripped into another of his energetic monologues that went beyond what Jack and I could figure out together.

  I tried to tell him that we were looking for Felix, the kid who had been at the hotel with us. I thought he might have gotten it, but couldn’t understand his response. I kept asking about Vanessa Cray in every way I could think of in my stilted second language. I could not help but be reminded of how Vanessa spoke seven languages. She must have found it very easy to move through the world. I tried to ask if he knew her name. Didn’t seem to. I asked if he had seen George with a blonde woman. Margie, he wondered. No, I said. Vanessa.

  “Jack, I have an idea.” I pulled up my backpack and dug out a file. “I have visual aids.”

  Inside the file were pictures I’d accumulated of our suspects—mug shots for Arturo and Jimmy, and the newspaper shot of Vanessa hunting orchids. I asked Julio if he had seen señor George with either Arturo or Vanessa. I threw Jimmy’s picture out there just because I had it.

  Julio looked at the pictures and shook his head.

  It had been worth the thirty seconds to try. I started to collect the pictures, but Julio reached down and stopped me. He stared at each face, first Vanessa’s, which was a copy of a copy of grainy newsprint. He picked up Arturo’s picture, squinting first, then holding it out at arm’s length until he seemed to have satisfied himself. Then he looked at Jimmy’s. He put the pictures down, put both palms flat on the table, and said something in Spanish that I thought I understood, but wasn’t sure I believed.

  Jack leaned forward and asked him to repeat his statement more slowly.

  I listened again. I had understood exactly what he’d said, and it was still hard for me to grasp. I turned to Jack. “I gather from the look on your face that he just said what I thought he said.”

  “He says the woman in the picture, the woman we know as Vanessa Cray, is Valentina Quevedo. Ottavio is her father.”

  “And Arturo,” I said, “is her brother.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  ​When we stepped outside of George’s offices the air had thickened considerably. The sun was going down, and when I pointed the car to the north and west, I saw the eerie orange glow that made the horizon look like a throbbing wound.

  Three and a half hours since Felix had disappeared and still no contact.

  We had one more idea we had gotten from Julio. He’d told us about an old abandoned airfield where it wa
s rumored that Ottavio used to bring in his drug shipments. On a C130. It was the same old airfield where Jimmy had stashed the Sentinel parts.

  “It makes sense,” Jack had reasoned. “If Ottavio brought the parts in for Jimmy, he would have used a place he knew.”

  Vanessa’s regular pilot had been accounted for and her plane confiscated, so she might have asked Daddy to send someone to bring her home. It was a ridiculously long shot, but we had no place else to go.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “I can’t believe she’s his daughter.” I’d been running everything I knew about Vanessa over in my mind, filtering it through the lens of Julio’s bombshell. “No wonder she changed her name.”

  “She changed her name after she was kidnapped.”

  “Who was kidnapped?”

  “Vanessa.”

  “Vanessa Cray was kidnapped? Recently?”

  He shook his head. “This was maybe twelve or fourteen years ago when I was working up in New York. She was taken from her private boarding school in Pennsylvania. She must have been about seventeen years old. It got interesting when Ottavio refused to pay the ransom.”

  “Refused to pay?”

  “Like I said before, he’s one of the more vicious strains of the disease. I should have remembered her. You don’t run across too many fathers who refuse to pay, especially if they have the means. Granted, he probably wasn’t doing as well back then, but even so, all they were asking was a million.”

  “What did Vanessa’s mother think about withholding the ransom?”

  “She was dead by then. Died of cancer, I think. Natural causes, anyway. She was an American.”

  Which probably explained where Vanessa got the blonde hair and green eyes. “Who kidnapped her? Was it for money, or was it some enterprising competitor?”

  “Definitely money. A couple of crack heads.”

  “You’d have to be to grab a Colombian kingpin’s daughter. Did Ottavio want her back?”

  “Put yourself in his shoes. If he submits to a ransom demand from a couple of punks, he would have told the world, at least his world, that to get to him all you had to do was snatch a member of his family.”

  “I can see how some of his lifestyle choices put him between a rock and a hard place. At least it put Vanessa there. How is it that she’s alive today if he didn’t pay?”

  “She killed her kidnappers.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Shot dead at close range. One twice in the head. The other four times in the chest. She got free and used one of their own guns.”

  Close range. She had asked me what it had felt like to kill a man. She herself had two kills from a range close enough to have their blood spatter on her. “I guess she didn’t like being a victim.”

  “But she was. They raped her. This damn thing dragged on and on. The more unhinged these idiots got, the more they took it out on her. They kept her chained in a closet and only took her out to rape her and beat her.”

  “I’m guessing things were never the same between Vanessa and Daddy.”

  “Can you blame her?” I had been changing lanes as I could, trying to pick the one that was moving. Every once in a while I had to turn on the wipers. They weren’t much help in the rain, but they were great for flicking ashes. We were close enough to one of the bigger fires that the traffic had slowed considerably. We passed some cars that were parked along the side of the road. Some people sat sealed inside with the windows rolled up. Some held handkerchiefs and towels to their noses and mouths. Some stood on the hoods gazing in the direction of the blaze, even though all anyone could see was smoke. All along the side of the highway, home owners patrolled their rooftops, moving like ghosts through the haze with garden hoses, the only protection they had available. Eventually, I was all the way over on the outside shoulder, moving faster than I should have past traffic that was mostly standing still. But just because I had an unobstructed lane didn’t mean the view was clear.

  “Jack, I can’t see anything. I don’t know how much farther we can go.”

  Just as I said it, a Florida highway patrolman materialized in front of the car with his hand up. I hit the brakes. Before the trooper had even raised a knuckle to knock on the glass, Jack’s door was open and he had one foot out on the road. “Stay in the car,” he said.

  I lowered the window and smiled at the trooper. “I can’t let you go any farther,” he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the chop of rotor blades overhead. “The road up ahead is closed. And,” he added with a weary sigh, “you shouldn’t be driving on the shoulder like that, ma’am.”

  “Officer.” Jack approached the trooper, wallet in hand. “I’m retired from the Miami office of the Bureau…” And that’s all I heard as Jack skillfully moved the officer away from the car and out of earshot. I saw him open his wallet and hand it over. When the trooper took off his glasses to read whatever it was, presumably Jack’s license, I could see even from a distance how the air had soiled his face and given him raccoon eyes.

  I sat in the car and thought about Vanessa, about how she must have felt locked in a closet waiting for her father to come through for her. Finally realizing he never would. I thought about how much she must hate him, and what kind of profit motive there must be to get her to go to work for him. How powerful her lust for money must be.

  And then I thought…

  I thought back over the conversation I’d had with Damon, the one at the batting cages. I pictured myself there, in the hot, humid night under the lights, listening to the sky rumble and watching Damon’s face. I tried to replay every word, and then I played it over again, looking at the whole conversation, the whole case from a different angle.

  Jack opened his door and slipped back into the car.

  “She’s the source, Jack.”

  “What?”

  “Vanessa is Damon’s informant. It wasn’t Jimmy. It was never Jimmy.”

  “I thought you said Damon told you it was.”

  “He never said Jimmy was his informant. I assumed he was. I had it in my mind that it was Jimmy from the start, and Damon gave me just enough facts to let me convince myself. Then Vanessa fed me the story that Jimmy murdered John. She was absolutely convincing. But you said it right from the start. Jimmy never had what Damon needed to put Ottavio away. All he knew about was parts. It’s Vanessa. She’s got the records. She’s got his money. And she has the motive.”

  “Which is?”

  “Revenge.”

  Jack had his head back against the headrest. He was staring straight ahead into the smoke, running the facts through his brain, looking for holes. He must not have found any, because he was smiling. “Work for him, steal from him, stab him in the back, and send him to jail for the rest of his life. Take his fifty million dollars and move to the South of France.” He turned to me, still smiling. “Revenge is a beautiful thing.”

  “And powerful. It’s a brilliant plan,” I said. “So diabolical. So… Shakespearean. It’s almost a shame to screw it up.”

  “I bet she thought so, too.”

  “Yeah.” The pieces were almost pulling themselves together now. “She killed John, Jack. Or more likely had that thuggy brother of hers do it and make it look like one of Ottavio’s drug hits.”

  A couple of helicopters flew overhead. They sounded low enough to scrape their skids across the top of my car. “What’s going on up there? What’s causing this?”

  “A real mess. It’s not the fire that’s closed the road. There are five tractor trailers piled up on each other about three miles down. They have fatalities and injuries. Those are medevac flights overhead. Along with news choppers, and Broward Fire and Rescue and the Division of Forestry bringing in more firefighters. They’re trying to keep the fire from jumping I-75 and moving south.”

  It sounded like a disaster area, someplace I shouldn’t want to go, but I was completely in my head trying to work through the details. To make it all make sense.

  “Here’s what
I think happened. John flew down here, met with Bobby and gave him the ultimatum.”

  “Turn yourself in,” Jack said, “or I’ll do it for you.”

  “John went over to the hotel to wait for Bobby to do the right thing. Bobby didn’t want to kill John, but he wanted John to be gone. So he called Jimmy and put the problem on him. ‘If I go down, you go down. And by the way, here’s the hotel where John is staying.’”

  “Jimmy’s sitting in his house. What is he thinking?” Jack was getting into the spirit. “He’s thinking ‘I stole an airplane and got caught and the only reason I’m not sitting on my ass in jail right now is because of this Damon Hollander.’”

  “Do you think he knew why? Do you think Damon told him why he was keeping him out on the street?”

  He thought about that. “I think that’s why Jimmy was out. Whether Damon told him or he figured it out for himself, I think he worked a deal. Something like ‘I know what you’re up to and I’ll keep my mouth shut until you bust Ottavio. But you’ve got to…’ Fill in the blank. Keep me out of jail. Get me a reduced sentence. Whatever. So when Bobby comes along with the news that John’s going to turn them all in, Jimmy calls Damon and gives him the problem. Now Damon’s thinking ‘Goddammit, who is this asshole who’s come to town and is threatening to screw up my operation right at the last minute?’ He goes over to the hotel, flips his badge out, and tells him to go home before the bad guys do something to his family.”

  “I don’t know what happened next,” I said. “Jimmy called Vanessa. Or Damon called Vanessa. Someone alerted Vanessa, maybe just to tell her to lay low until they figured out what to do.”

  “Or,” Jack said, “Damon called and told her what was happening, knowing exactly what she’d do.”

  “Whichever it was, Vanessa was not into waiting and she was not trusting her fate to the Junior G-man. She took matters into her own hands, and John ended up dead in the Dumpster. And as a bonus, one last dig at Daddy, she made it look as if he did the murder. It was her,” I said. “All the motives we attributed to Jimmy still work, but it’s Vanessa who did it. She had the most to lose. Think about how long she must have been working on this scheme. How long it took her to set the trap. She wasn’t going to let John screw it up. John had no idea what he was walking into. He never had a chance.”