Blood of Cain (Sean O'Brien (Mystery/Thrillers))

by Lowe, Tom

  More questions peppered me from behind outstretched microphones and the glare of lights. One of the officers opened the rear door to the police cruiser and motioned for me to enter. We drove off into golden sunlight just breaking through the tall bamboo and coconut palms, and I was without my Jeep, my Glock, and the girl who might be my daughter. If she had been staying in that trailer, any DNA proof of her existence on earth was gone as a new day dawned over the planet.

  49

  I owed the lady in red a debt of gratitude. Two hours into answering the same questions from three detectives, a fourth came in from the field. He was pushing retirement, early sixties, jowls like a basset hound, and drowsy eyes with a touch of cataracts in one. He sat with me in the interrogation room and related her story. Gladys Johnston, the woman in the red bathrobe, had been shooting video on her mobile phone, video of the roaring fire near Bullfrog Creek.

  And it was video that happened to capture my arrival, after the fire, and after two men had appeared at least fifteen minutes before me.

  Gladys, a former trapeze artist who worked in circuses around the nation, told police that her world now was her close-knit community. As captain of her Neighborhood Watch, she knew everyone. She didn’t know the two men who got out of the black Escalade. Strangers in dark clothes. Years earlier, a trapeze accident had caused damage to Gladys’s back. At 5:00 a.m. today she was at the kitchen sink sipping water and taking aspirin for an old injury when she noticed a car quietly pull up to Show Time Fish Camp with its headlights off. It was hot and her window at the sink had been open, a breeze coming through the screen. Gladys told detectives that when she didn’t see the dome interior light come on as the men got out of the SUV, didn’t hear them slam the doors, her radar came on.

  And when they started picking the lock, she went to wake up her sleeping husband.

  I was glad for Gladys and me. I was getting my Glock back and Jeep returned, but I had no indication that Courtney Burke had been living in the trailer park. As I started to leave the sheriff’s department, the senior detective said, “I found out about your history with Miami-Dade PD. Did you ever know Gus Mansfield?”

  “I remember that he was a guy with great investigative instincts. I didn’t actually work with his division, but I knew of his talents.”

  “We worked together in Detroit until we got tired of the cold and corruption. Came south. Gus was a bird dog ‘til he got hit in a crossfire with the Colombian Cartel. Now he’s in a wheelchair.” His eyes drifted around the room for a few seconds. He blinked hard and stood from the chair. “We need to get you out the back entrance. Get your car from the compound and avoid all those damn reporters in the lobby and parking lot.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “When I came in, must have been more than two dozen news media hounds out there. All of ‘em got their sights set on you. C’mon, you’ve been here long enough.” He stopped on his way to the door. “Oh, by the way. Don’t know if anybody’s told you this, but the coroner pulled two bodies from that fire.”

  I felt my pulse quicken.

  He shook his head. “Burned beyond any sort of recognition. Don’t even know if they’ll be able to get dentals.”

  “Can they determine gender?”

  “Looks to be what’s left of two men. Probably the perps who broke into the Fish Camp office. I hope the poor bastards died in the explosion and didn’t burn to death. They’re crispy critters now.” He sighed and led me down the hallway to the rear exit.

  I shook his hand asked, “Did forensics find anything near the body of the dwarf?”

  “A damn big snake. Talk about weird blood trails—try tracking a snake that crawled through a bloody crime scene. The perps, though, left nothing. Vehicle they arrived in was wiped clean or they wore gloves. It was a rental—prepaid, cash. Non-traceable credit card number. Whoever they were, even if we could ID the bodies, we’d be hard-pressed to follow the bread trail to where the kill order came from.” He looked at me curiously for a second. “I know you said you were hunting for the girl. Looks like somebody wanted to find her as much as you do. How did the two dead guys know or believe she was there?”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about since you told me the two bodies were found.”

  “No one we questioned at the trailer park remembers seeing the girl.” He paused and undid his burgundy tie with a small coffee stain near the knot. “I hope you find her first. I got a bad feeling in these old bones that some ruthless sons-of-bitches are looking for her. Good luck to you. Here’s the keys to your Jeep. It’s parked in the row closest to the building.”

  ***

  I drove a perimeter road around the sheriff’s office and the adjacent county courthouse. I looked to my right before getting on the highway and almost did a double-take. I counted more than eight satellite news trucks anchored in front of the building, open dishes aimed to the sky, supposition aimed at the masses.

  My plan was to drive back to Ponce Inlet, pick up Max and head to our river cabin and try to assess what to do next. There, at least, I could be somewhat isolated from the news media, let calm return to Ponce Marina, and have a more secure fortress to lie low in the event I was still being followed. I had no idea where Courtney was, where she’d been, or where she was going. I thought I was close to finding her before all hell broke loose, before a man was shot between the eyes, and one of his trailers became scorched earth with the charred remains of two bodies under the rubble.

  The one thing I was certain of was that the two dead guys didn’t follow me to the Fish Camp. They knew about it probably very close to the time that I figured out that Courtney might be hiding there. And this meant one thing: my phone was tapped. That’s a good and bad thing. Bad because privacy is lost. Good because I can set a trap.

  ***

  A half hour later, I parked in front of the trailer where I’d seen the woman in the red bathrobe standing when I first arrived at the Fish Camp. Her small yard was cast in deep shade, red and white impatiens planted in a circle around the base of a live oak tree. I heard her talking loudly before I actually saw her. Gladys Johnston sat on a rattan couch inside a screened-in porch, fanning her face with a Japanese hand fan. I said, “I just wanted to personally thank you. My name’s Sean O’Brien. Thank you for talking with police.”

  “Come in.” I heard her say a fast goodbye to whomever was on the phone. She stood and smiled as I entered the porch. Her aged face was still attractive. Her eyes were robust and the color of blue swimming pool water. I could tell she would have been a striking woman in her prime. She said, “I’ve seen you on TV. Was the senator’s wife really your old girlfriend?”

  “That was more than twenty years ago.”

  “And now they’re saying you two might have a daughter.” She fanned and dipped her head slightly. “That’s who you’re hunting for, right?”

  “Did you see a girl staying at the Fish Camp?”

  “Most folks who rent Boots’ trailers are repeats. Snowbirds who’d come down from up north every winter. They usually stay through tax time, middle of April. Mostly fishermen and their families rent here in the summer. But Boots, I can’t believe what happened to him; he was such a nice man. He only had six rental units on that three-acre property. The one that blew up and burned to the ground was the most isolated.”

  “Do you think the girl may have been staying there?”

  “Maybe. Boots, sweet as he was, was a little weird. And I don’t mean in some kind of sexual deviant type of way. I come from a circus background, okay, so when I say weird, I know what I’m talking about. He was always on, as in on stage. He sort of kept to himself, though.” She glanced across the street to the Fish Camp, a piece of ripped yellow crime-scene tape flapping in the breeze. Her eyes narrowed a notch. She touched her lips with two bent and swollen arthritic fingers. “Something’s different and for the life of me I don’t know what it is.”

  “Since you shot video of those men arriving, maybe I could ta
ke a look, okay?”

  She cocked her head and lifted one manicured eyebrow. “I can do that.” She set the hand fan down on the coffee table and picked up her iPhone. “Here it is. I’ll play it for you.”

  I moved over and sat beside her on the couch. She tapped the stationary image and video filled the screen. Although the images were grainy, shot under the light of one street lamp, I watched as two men appeared from the shadows, one quickly picking the lock and both entering the building. The video ended at that point.

  “Here’s where I started again,” she said, tapping a second frozen image, the video began to play.

  I watched myself enter the building, the fire raging beyond the office. I saw something in the second video, something missing. “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “See what?”

  “There’s something gone from the second video.”

  “What’s gone?”

  “A pickup truck. In the first video, I noticed one very small portion of the tailgate. It was to the far left of the screen, which means it was parked to the left of the circular drive. It was gone in the second video, which you shot only a few minutes later, correct?”

  She looked up from the phone screen to across the street. Her mouth opened, eyes unsure. “Yes. Boots always kept an old red Toyota truck parked under the live oak to the left of the front door. It’s gone.”

  “When did you last see it parked there?”

  “Before I went to bed. Didn’t notice it during all the commotion. The cops hauled that SUV away. They left Boots’ Ford, and I’m pretty sure they left the truck, too.” She turned her head towards the open door to the mobile home and shouted, “Ike, when’s the last time you saw Boots’ truck?”

  I heard a man clear his throat and yell, “Yesterday I think. Can’t be a hundred percent sure anymore.”

  She turned back to me and folded the Japanese fan, putting it on a glass coffee table next to a vase with plastic blue flowers. “If the girl was there, maybe she stole the truck.”

  “Maybe Boots let her borrow it.” I smiled.

  “That’s a possibility. But whoever took the truck must have done it when I went to get my husband out of bed. I showed this video to police, they made a copy, but I don’t think they noticed the small section of the truck that you saw. You’re observant.”

  I smiled and stood up to leave. “If you don’t mention it to them, they’ll never know it’s gone.”

  She reached for the fan and opened it like a peacock spreading its feathers. She fanned her face and said, “I hope you find her.”

  50

  I was leaving Gladys Johnston’s driveway when a propane gas delivery truck rolled to a stop in front of the Fish Camp. The side of the red truck with the large white propane tank read: Paul’s Propane Service. I watched a twenty-something service tech get out of the truck, clipboard in hand, toting a small camera. He looked at the crime scene tape flapping in the breeze and made a decision to enter the property. I parked and followed him.

  He was about halfway down the property line when he stopped, almost like he had paused to pay his respects to those in a funeral procession. He stared at what was left of the trailer. I walked up behind him and said, “I don’t think they’ll be needing gas for the immediate future.”

  He jumped like he’d been touch with a cattle prod. “Man! You scared the crap outta me.”

  “Sheriff’s deputies will scare you more if they see you traipsing through a crime scene.”

  “I thought that yellow tape was just hanging all over the ground, like they’re pretty much done.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll be quick, I’m just taking a couple of pictures. It’s for insurance. I can see it wasn’t our tanks that exploded. They’re still in one piece, pretty black from the fire, but they didn’t blow. Man, I just filled ‘em, too. Couple of days ago. So if somebody left the gas on, they got lots of gas to ignite.”

  “When you filled the tanks did you see the girl living in the trailer?”

  “She was feeding some ducks down there in the creek.” He turned and looked closer at the remains of the trailer. “She wasn’t hurt … was she? The news said two guys were killed in the fire.”

  “She apparently wasn’t home when it happened.”

  He inhaled deeply, reassured, nodding. “That’s good. She was real nice. This explosion and fire’s bad enough, but when you know somebody involved it sort of makes it personal.”

  “Yes, it does. What’d she look like?”

  “The girl?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked back down to the creek as if she was standing on the bank. “She was really pretty. About five-five, I’d say. She had dark brown hair … and her eyes.” He glanced back at me. “Her eyes were the prettiest I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to describe them.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Well, I best take the picture and be on my route.”

  ***

  I caught I-75 north and headed across the state of Florida back to Ponce Inlet. I watched the traffic behind me, looking for a tail. I pushed the Jeep to near one-hundred miles an hour for a minute, then pulled off the interstate at a rest stop, parking on the side of the building farther from the highway. I watched for cars pulling into the rest stop, those passing in the event a driver might hit his brakes. Three cars entered the parking lot. One had a family of five, including a grandmother. The second car had two teenagers in it. The third was pulling a small boat. Two fishermen shuffled out, faces red from the sun, and walked to the restroom. I started my Jeep, placed the Glock on the passenger seat, and made my way back to the highway.

  As I drove north, I now knew that Courtney Burke had been hiding in the trailer before it exploded, she was driving a red Toyota pick-up truck, and she was probably long gone from Gibsonton. On one hand, I wanted to call Detective Dan Grant and tell him what I knew. On the other hand, not so much. If my phone was tapped, my calling Dan would alert killers hunting Courtney. Dan and state police would issue a BOLO and set up a dragnet on major roads leading out of Tampa and Florida.

  Since two men hunting Courtney had just died, and because one man giving her a safe haven was murdered, I knew that Courtney could easily be shot to death during a road-side stop. Subject resisting arrest, the report would read. Armed and dangerous. As long as the elimination was not in the immediate scope of the dashboard cameras, cross-fire shootings can be beyond accusation and reprimand.

  The presidential election was coming up quickly. Somehow I had to keep Courtney safe until then, and that’s if Senator Logan’s opponent won. What would it mean if Logan won? Would Courtney always be a political liability? If she was found innocent of the charges, would that lessen her embarrassment factor? Andrea Logan would no longer be labeled the possible mother of a serial killer. But that would mean finding Courtney and getting a DNA sample first. That alone would clear the landscape for Logan or destroy it. Were they willing to roll the dice? The two dead guys in the fire spoke volumes. And now, under the circumstances, there was no safe jail or prison to hold her in some kind of protective custody.

  I needed to buy a couple of disposable mobile phones, and then make a call to Dave or Dan Grant that would set in motion a trap that would catch hired guns and maybe free Courtney from what I now knew was a death sentence.

  51

  When Courtney Burke reached New Orleans, the rain that seemed to have followed her since Florida, ended. She’d driven straight through, stopping once to put gas in the truck and to use the restroom. There had been very little news on the radio stations that constantly faded in and out as she drove through the night.

  She didn’t know if her face was still plastered everywhere, of if she could move about with relative anonymity. She remembered what Boots had told her: ‘There will be a lot of people trying to locate you. Isaac and I both believe this could be very dangerous for you. Your face is on all the news stations and online. You must be very careful.’

 
She turned onto Decatur Street, saw the sign for Café Du Monde, and then entered the parking lot. Tourists roamed the streets, hopping horse-drawn carriages, watching street performers and snapping pictures. With so many people about, Courtney thought she’d blend in better in a city like New Orleans.

  She parked, slipped on a pair of dark glasses, and a baseball cap Boots had given her. She fixed her hair in a ponytail, and pulled it through the open spot in the back of the hat. She unfolded the piece of paper and read Boot’s writing: Mariah Danford, 41 Dumaine. Courtney got out of the truck and walked towards Café Du Monde.

  She could see the three towers of the old St. Louis Cathedral across the park-like setting of Jackson Square, church bells ringing in the distance, the oaks alive with birdsong. Portrait artists were setting up shop on the tree-lined street, opening beach-sized umbrellas, propping up easels. She watched a man wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and black derby twist balloons into animal caricatures. Another performer was dressed in Civil War uniform. His entire body was spray-painted in shades of Confederate gray. He stood motionless, a human statue in the park, only moving his head or arms when an unsuspecting tourist approached to take a picture.

  The morning air was filled with the smell of chicory coffee, blooming camellias, and fresh-cut grass. Courtney watched the Mississippi River roll quietly by as horse-drawn carriages traveled down Decatur. She heard the trot of hooves on the pavement and carriage drivers telling riders about the history of the square, the cathedral, and Jax Brewery.

  She ordered two beignets and a large café au lait at Café Du Monde. After Courtney paid for them at the counter, she asked the middle-aged woman running the cash register if she knew how to get to Dumaine Street.

  “You’re not far, honey,” she said, counting back change. “Five blocks down Decatur and then take a right onto Dumaine.”

  Courtney found an empty park bench close to Jackson Square under the shade of old live oaks draped in tousled cloaks of Spanish moss. The beignets, warm and covered in powdered sugar, tasted delicious to her. The hot coffee seemed to flow into her through all her pores, warming her. For the first time since Boots’ murder, she could breathe easier without her lungs feeling as empty as her heart.