The office smelled like Ogden Bush, which meant it smelled like heavy, expensive cologne. She cast her light around the room. Even in the short time he’d worked here, he’d filled the office with personal memorabilia. Photos of himself with Democratic politicians and Miami hip-hop celebs. Headlines from winning campaigns and from scandals that had engulfed his opponents. Plaques from Florida charities. College trophies for tennis. He carried his huge ego and his high-powered connections with him wherever he went.
Peach spotted the filing cabinet behind his desk. Using her flashlight, she quickly opened and shuffled through his desk drawers. She figured he kept a backup key in the office, and she was right. When she yanked open the bottom-most cubbyhole drawer, she found a silver key taped underneath it.
She opened the filing cabinet. The top drawer was stuffed with folders, seemingly in no order. She shuffled through them, but they were mostly historical, dealing with political maneuverings dating back for years. One of the folders was labeled with the name Chuck Warren. Another, immediately behind it, bore the name of Birch Fairmont. She was tempted to look, but for the time being she ignored them and moved to the second drawer.
The folder she wanted was at the front, as if it had been recently reviewed. The name on the tab said Justin Kiel. Peach pushed the tight folders apart and tried to squeeze the file on Justin out of the drawer, but before she could get it, she heard a muffled noise breaking the dead silence of the office. It was the street door opening and closing on the other side of the building.
Someone was coming inside.
Peach slammed the drawer shut. She switched off the flashlight and stumbled to Bush’s office door. She pulled it closed behind her and crab-walked to the first open cubicle, where she threw herself inside, hugging the wall. Overhead, the fluorescent lights flickered to life, bathing the entire room in a bright, noon-time glow. She heard footsteps and whistling. Someone walked down the corridor, passing immediately next to the cubicle where she was hiding, and she recognized an aroma that she’d smelled only moments earlier.
Cologne.
Ogden Bush. He was here in the middle of the night.
She heard the man continue to his office door. His keys jangled in his hand. He pushed the key into the lock, but then she heard something that made her hold her breath. The door shoved open under his hand. It wasn’t locked. She hadn’t closed it completely when she made her escape.
The jangling stopped. The whistling stopped.
Bush retraced his steps. She could sense his closeness. He was so near her that she could hear the measured in-and-out noise of his breathing.
‘Hello?’ he called, his voice smooth and suspicious.
Peach waited. She kept as still as one of her mannequins.
‘Is anyone there?’ Bush demanded.
He waited, listening, as a full minute passed. Then another. Peach squirmed, uncomfortable in the tight space beside the cubicle wall. An overwhelming desire to pee made her squeeze her knees together. Finally, Bush turned back, and she heard him go into the office and close the door behind him. She decided to press her luck and get away, but as she unfolded her legs and crawled to the cubicle doorway, she heard his door open again. She didn’t have time to hide. If he stopped, if he glanced inside the cubicle, he would see her.
Bush walked right by her. Short, suave, confident. He swung his briefcase in his hand, and he marched down the corridor without a sideways glance. He was whistling again. She saw his head bobbing in time to the tune on his lips. His suit looked as lush as silk, and his shoes had a mirror shine. Moments later, the office lights went off again, and she was alone, hugging her knees and staring into nothingness.
She gave him ten minutes to make sure he was gone. She knew she should leave quickly, but before she did, she checked Bush’s office one last time. She unlocked the door. Unlocked the filing cabinet. Opened the drawer.
The file on Justin was gone.
Bush had taken it.
13
Cab parked his Corvette in a gravel driveway outside a white bungalow on the shore of Lake Hamilton, which was a long, slow drive from the Gulf in the center of the state. He climbed from the cold sports car into the afternoon heat. The temperature was in the nineties, and the sky over the lake was cloudless and baby blue. It was Sunday, July 1, and if the weather forecasters were right, Chayla would reach central Florida by Independence Day and surge ashore with sixty-mile-an-hour winds. Right now, the rotating storm, which looked like the Milky Way inching through the Caribbean, felt a long way off.
He wore a dark navy suit and burgundy-framed Gucci sunglasses. He’d polished his leather shoes that morning, and though the shine never lasted more than a day, Cab liked to keep them that way. Standing in the hot sun, with his hands in his pockets, he felt sweat gathering on his skin like a glaze brushed on St Louis ribs.
The house where Rufus Twill lived was old and unkempt. Spanish moss dripped from the trees and made decaying brown piles on the roof. The aluminum siding was crusted with dirt. Dead flowers drooped from clay pots dangling from the gutters. Twill, who’d spent twenty years as a reporter for an Orlando newspaper, was living on Social Security disability income now. He lived alone. Never married.
Cab rang the doorbell, and when no one answered he removed his sunglasses and peered through the oval window in the house’s red front door. He could see through the small living room to the patio windows looking out on the lake, but he didn’t see anyone inside. He wandered to the rear of the house, where a wide lawn, with overgrown grass and weeds, sloped toward the water. He saw a rickety dock with a new, brightly painted airboat tied to one of the posts. Twill lived on the southeast shore of the kidney-shaped lake, and Cab could see trees and thick marshes lining the far banks. He walked out to the dock and picked his way to the platform over the dirty, shallow water. Overhead, a bald eagle floated on the air in graceful circles.
His phone whistled in his pocket. Two voicemail messages had arrived during the drive inland. The first message was a familiar voice.
‘Cab, it’s Caprice. I enjoyed last night. We should do it again. I set up a private meeting for you with Diane tonight at 9 p.m. Call me after if you want a late drink.’
He thought about Lala’s very specific suggestion not to have sex with Caprice. A late drink at her place would likely lead to bed. As appealing as that idea sounded, he decided he wouldn’t call her. He hoped his willpower lasted through the evening.
The second voicemail message was a complete surprise.
‘Cab, this is Ramona Cortes. I believe we met briefly at a family wedding over the winter. I’d like to talk to you at lunch tomorrow. Let’s say the Pilot House at the Tampa Yacht Club at 1 p.m. Call my aide if there’s a problem.’
Ramona had a slight hint of a Hispanic accent in her prosecutorial voice. Cab knew her enough to know that there was steel at the heart of her personality. Lunch with the Attorney General wasn’t a request. It was an expectation. Drop everything, and be there.
Things were getting interesting.
Cab slid his phone into his pocket, but he didn’t have time to think about what Ramona might want with him. Instead, a voice called to him from the end of the dock: ‘Get those long arms in the air, friend.’
Cab turned around slowly. A small black man in his fifties stood in the overgrown grass. In one hand, he cradled a foot-long baby alligator. In the other, he held a grimy revolver with a wooden grip and eight-inch barrel that looked as if it hadn’t been fired since the 1970s. Cab spread his fingers wide and cocked his forearms.
‘I’m Detective Bolton, Mr Twill. We spoke on the phone.’
‘Yeah, I talked to somebody. Let me see a badge and a photo ID, so I can see who you really are.’
Cab kept his hands up as he walked back along the dock, which shifted under his feet, almost throwing him into the lake. ‘I hope I don’t look like a member of the Liberty Empire Alliance,’ he said.
‘You’d be surprised.’
&nbs
p; At the end of the dock, Cab peeled back the lapel of his coat and reached inside with two fingers to extract his wallet and badge. Twill leaned forward to study his credentials, and when he was satisfied, he shoved the big gun into his paint-streaked cargo pants.
‘Can’t be too careful,’ Twill added.
‘I understand. You should probably clean that gun. It’s just as likely to blow up in your face as it is to shoot somebody else.’
Twill shrugged. ‘It’s not loaded. I hate guns.’
‘I’m not a big fan either,’ Cab admitted. ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘This is Boots.’ He used one finger to stroke the head of the alligator, which watched Cab with beady eyes and snapped its jaws.
‘Alligator Boots,’ Cab said. ‘That’s funny.’
‘Boots could take your finger off if he were so inclined.’
‘Well, one of my guiding principles in life is never to stick my fingers in an alligator’s mouth,’ Cab said.
Twill allowed a smile to crease his face. His skin was a light oak color, with mottled darker spots on his forehead. He wasn’t tall, and he was skinny, with bony arms left bare by a loose gray tank top. He wore a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. One of his chocolate-brown eyes stared at Cab, and the other was fixed, like glass. A milky scar ran along the line of his misshapen chin.
‘So what is it you want, Detective?’
‘Are we off the record?’ Cab asked.
‘You don’t have to worry about that. Since the beating, I don’t write anymore. It scrambled my brain.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It is what it is. Like they say, the Lord closes a door, he opens a window somewhere else. I can’t put two words together now, but I can play piano like some kind of Art Tatum. Or at least it feels that way to me. Stop by Cherry Pocket for dinner some Friday. You can judge for yourself.’
‘I may do that.’ Cab added: ‘I suppose you can guess what I’d like to talk to you about.’
‘Sure. Ham Brock, Chuck Warren, Birch Fairmont, all that ugly stuff back then. You realize about a thousand cops have gone down this road before you.’
‘Well, do you mind going for a thousand and one?’
‘I don’t mind, but if it means giving up a source, even from a decade ago, I won’t do that.’
‘Understood.’
Twill pursed his lips. He glanced at his house and the surrounding woods, whose branches hung limply as if they were wilting in the humid air. ‘How about we go out on the boat? My new toy. Let me just put Boots in his cage.’
‘Do you think your house is bugged?’ Cab asked, with a small smile.
Twill didn’t smile back. ‘You never know.’
The former reporter turned on his heel and headed up the lawn toward his back door. He walked with a pronounced limp. He wasn’t gone five minutes before he returned to the dock, with a six-pack of Bud Light dangling from one hand. He and Cab boarded the airboat. Twill took the seat beside the rudder stick, and Cab sat next to him. Twill fired up the caged propeller, which howled like a Boeing jet, and smoothly guided the flat-bottom boat onto the lake.
As they reached open water, Twill accelerated. A cooling wind blew back Cab’s styled hair, and spray dampened his suit. Twill secured his Cubs cap low on his forehead. He raced all the way to the far shore, where a large field of grassy marshes grew out of the water. Twill slowed and turned the boat directly into the tall grass, and the airboat easily slipped inside the wetland, obscured from view. Cab could see the muddy bottom; the lake was only six inches deep here. Lilypads and green algae dotted the surface. Black flies buzzed the boat. He saw a full-size alligator – at least seven feet – sunning itself on a sandbar among the reeds.
Twill cut the motor and popped open a beer. He offered one to Cab, who shook his head.
‘I do this every day. Not so bad, huh? I used to live in Orlando and work for a living. Who needs that? Guess there has to be a fringe benefit to nine weeks in a coma.’ He waved at the alligator. ‘How’s it going today, Rex? Swallow up any tourists?’ Twill chuckled and took a slug of beer. ‘So what kind of a name is Cab?’ he asked.
‘My mother was a big fan of the movie Cabaret,’ Cab said.
‘With Liza?’
‘Right.’
‘Hmm.’ Twill drank more beer, and then he pulled a joint out of his pocket. ‘You going to turn me in? It’s medicinal. For the pain.’
‘Do what you have to do,’ Cab said.
Twill lit the joint and stretched out his legs. The marshland around them was a secluded nature preserve, walled off from the rest of the lake. Cab saw the walnut-sized head of a turtle poking out of the water. Nearby, a white heron darted its long neck into the ripples and emerged with a squirming fish.
‘So when did it happen?’ Cab asked.
Twill knew what he meant. ‘Nine years ago this Wednesday.’
‘The Fourth of July?’
‘That’s it. That also happens to be the day that Ham Brock and some of his buddies started serving their sentences for tax fraud, money laundering, and weapons violations. I guess their friends wanted to thank me for all the articles I’d done about the Alliance over the years. About six of them in hoods grabbed me out back of my apartment in Maitland. Took me in the trunk to a deserted section of the Ocala. I woke up in the hospital in September.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Cab didn’t like that the Fourth of July – in three days – was an anniversary that had special meaning to Hamilton Brock and the members of the Liberty Empire Alliance.
‘And here I am,’ Twill went on.
‘Do you still keep an eye on the Alliance?’ Cab asked.
‘One eye is all I’ve got.’
Cab winced. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Never mind,’ Twill replied, grinning. ‘Sure I do. I never know when they might decide to come back and finish the job. I’ve got sources that keep me in the loop.’
‘I was wondering if you’d heard any rumors about the Alliance targeting Diane Fairmont,’ Cab said. He swatted away a particularly voracious fly. The heat was concentrated inside the grassy marsh, and he felt the sun cooking his long nose.
‘Can’t say as I have,’ Twill told him.
‘Nothing at all?’ Cab asked.
‘You sound like you were expecting a different answer.’
‘I was.’
‘Well, something like that would be kept way under wraps. Just because it hasn’t hit my ears doesn’t mean it’s not happening. What are you thinking? The Alliance got rid of Birch, so now that Diane is in the race, why not get rid of her, too? Kind of a revenge thing?’
‘Something like that.’
Twill rubbed the scar on his chin. He sucked on the joint, looking relaxed. ‘What makes you so sure they got rid of Birch?’
Cab was surprised. ‘You don’t think the Alliance was involved? That’s not what you said back then.’
‘Oh, I was on a rampage about hate groups in those days. Still am. People don’t take these domestic terrorists seriously, but they’re plenty dangerous. The Islamists don’t have a monopoly on crazy. Ten years ago, you had politicians like Chuck Warren coddling these boys and calling them patriots. I held his feet to the fire over that, and it cost him the election.’
‘So what am I missing?’ Cab asked. ‘The Alliance had a major grudge against Birch over his political policies. They came after you for writing about them. Why do you now think Hamilton Brock may be innocent?’
‘I never said innocent. Him and his crowd, they’re bad, bad boys. Did one of them also put on a hood and shoot up the Bok? The FBI says yes. Me, well, I’m not so sure anymore.’
‘What changed?’
Twill sighed and flicked the joint in the water. ‘Let’s say I know there’s a difference between assassination and murder,’ he replied.
Cab listened to the insects chattering. He began to understand why Twill preferred to talk in a place that was sheltered from electronic spies. ‘Are you saying that you think the motiv
e wasn’t political?’
‘I’m saying that whoever pulled the trigger knew the hammer was going to fall on the Alliance. Maybe it was those boys, maybe it wasn’t. Honestly, I don’t really care either way. You won’t find me shedding any tears over Ham Brock taking the fall.’
‘Except something must have put the idea in your head.’
Twill yanked his tank top over his baseball cap. ‘Shit, it’s hot. Ain’t you roasting in that suit? Why do you wear something like that in Florida?’
‘That’s who I am,’ Cab said.
Twill called to the alligator. ‘It’s who he is, Rex. You believe that? An idiot is who he is.’
Cab couldn’t decide if Twill was drunk or stoned or simply ducking the subject. ‘Somebody obviously told you something.’
‘Hey, why tell stories about the dead? Birch is gone, right? That’s probably for the best. A lot of people knew he was a son of a bitch. He would have gone down in flames sooner or later. Even his insiders were on to him. Lyle Piper called me the Saturday before Labor Day. Said we needed to have a talk.’
‘About what?’
‘I don’t know. I was in the Keys that weekend. No phone. But I heard things after the murders that made me put two and two together.’
‘So help me do the math,’ Cab said.
Twill took a second beer can and rubbed the cool, damp aluminum over his chest. ‘Okay, look, I’m not saying it means anything. People get mad, they blow off steam. You don’t ruin somebody’s life over that. That’s why I never printed anything.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
Twill sighed. ‘You know that Diane had a son, right?’
‘Drew,’ Cab said.
‘Right. Drew. He had big problems, okay? Heavy into drugs. Hanging out with some really bad people. He killed himself not too long after the murders. Thing is, Drew hated Birch Fairmont. I mean, hated him.’
‘Who told you that?’
Twill put a finger on the side of his nose. ‘Sources. I can’t name names.’
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