Season of Fear

by Brain Freeman

  ‘Okay, so Drew and Birch didn’t get along. That’s not exactly news when it comes to stepsons and stepdads.’

  ‘Oh, this was more than not getting along. Believe me. Look, I didn’t go searching for this. I was a reporter, and I was convinced that Ham Brock and the Alliance had gone off the deep end. I was hunting for proof to put the bastards away. This gal I talked to, she didn’t want to tell me anything. It kinda spilled out. I don’t think she told the police either.’

  ‘Told them what?’ Cab asked.

  ‘A couple weeks before the murders, there was a problem at Birch’s estate.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say. Or maybe she didn’t exactly know, but it sounded mean. What she did know is that Drew was so wild about it that he got dropped into rehab. Know when he got out? Right before Labor Day. Interesting, huh?’

  ‘But you don’t know what happened,’ Cab said.

  ‘I don’t. I looked for dirt, but nobody would talk. Even my original source got cold feet. She told me she didn’t hear what she said she heard. Well, it ain’t the kind of thing you’re likely to make a mistake about.’

  ‘What did she hear?’

  Twill leaned closer to Cab. The beer and pot were on his breath. ‘She told me she heard Drew screaming about how he was going to kill Birch Fairmont. This was right before he got shipped off to rehab. Quote unquote, he was going to blow his fucking head off.’

  *

  Rufus Twill waited until the tall detective disappeared around the front of his house. He stayed in the boat, which bobbed gently in the waves beside the dock. He took off his baseball cap and rubbed his sweaty hands through his hair. When he was sure that he was alone, he popped another beer and dug a phone out of his pocket. He dialed a number with one hand.

  ‘It’s Rufus,’ he said.

  ‘You shouldn’t be calling me,’ Ogden Bush replied.

  ‘Yeah? Well, I thought you’d want to know. Somebody else is poking into the old shit. A detective named Bolton. He says he’s working for Common Way. Just wondering if you’d heard about that.’

  There was a long silence from the political operative. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘So they’re keeping things from you, huh? Sounds like they don’t necessarily trust you over there, Ogden.’

  ‘Shut up, Rufus.’

  ‘Hey, I didn’t need to call. I’m doing you a favor.’

  ‘I know. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Yeah, well, appreciation don’t come free. I like my new boat, but I was thinking, my truck’s getting kind of old, too. Thought you might be able to do something about that.’

  He could almost hear Bush grinding his teeth. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Now what did you tell the detective?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about that,’ Twill replied. ‘I told him exactly what I told that kid Justin. Guess we’ll see if Bolton winds up dead, too.’

  14

  ‘You okay, hun?’

  Peach looked up from her plate of fried shrimp, which she hadn’t touched. She sat at a long table in a corner of the Crab Shack restaurant, next to a lovey-dovey couple feeding each other bites of crab across the table. The Sunday afternoon crowd was noisy, and Peach had a headache.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Just wanted to make sure you’re all right,’ the waitress repeated. ‘You’re not eating.’

  Peach nibbled half-heartedly on a French fry. ‘Oh, yeah, thanks. I don’t have much of an appetite. Could you package this to go?’

  ‘Sure, hun.’ She added: ‘Where’s your friend?’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘You came in here once before with a real nice guy. Had one of those old-fashioned mustaches. You guys looked so cute together.’

  Peach tried to muster a smile. ‘He’s busy.’

  The waitress put her hand on Peach’s shoulder and gave her a just-us-girls look of sympathy, as if she’d blundered into the middle of a bad break-up. ‘I understand, hun. I’m real sorry.’

  Peach didn’t say anything. All she could think about was that Justin wasn’t here anymore. She could picture his face and hear his voice, but soon the memories would begin to fade. Like Lyle. Like her parents. She was holding on to a fraying lifeline, and eventually it would give way.

  Justin on memory. Everybody forgets everybody else. Fame doesn’t buy you anything but a few years.

  When she’d paid her bill, Peach picked her way through the crowded tables and made her way outside. She stood near the entrance with the busy traffic on Gandy Road roaring in both directions behind her. This was where she’d been standing in the photograph that Justin had tried to send her. She could picture herself with the silly grin on her face, her thumb jerking toward the door as if she were hitchhiking. It was nothing special, just one moment in the history of all of their moments.

  Why would he want to send it to her again? Why on that night?

  Justin always had a plan. She dug out her phone and opened the attachment she’d forwarded to herself. With the screen in front of her, she flicked her eyes back and forth between the photo and the funky décor of the Crab Shack. Everything was the same. The neon in the windows. The giant plastic blue crab. The ship’s rope tied between old driftwood. The yellow surfboard. Nothing had changed.

  Except – no. That wasn’t true.

  The street number of the restaurant was hung on a little sign above the windows: 11400. However, the photo on her phone showed a completely different number: 10761. Justin had edited the photo. It was a skillful job; no one would notice the alteration if they weren’t standing in front of the building. He was sending her a message, but what was he trying to tell her?

  Looking at the restaurant, she spotted another tiny change in the photo. Between the words CRAB and SHACK on the roof sign was a little white house that was shaped like an arrow. The house was tilted to the left as she stared at it, but in the picture on her phone, the house – the arrow – pointed right. The actual sign was angled toward an open, empty field beside the restaurant, but the sign in the photo pointed in the opposite direction, toward a side street leading away from Gandy Road.

  Suddenly, she could feel Justin guiding her. He wanted her to follow the arrow.

  Peach jogged to the side street, which was San Fernando Drive. It was a nothing street, lined with telephone wires and crowded by palms and pines, but she stared at it now as if it were keeping secrets. She wandered down the middle of the street and found herself near a deserted industrial lot on the left. Everything was quiet, except for the shriek of birds. A quarter-mile down the road, she passed two run-down bungalows on large, unkempt lots. Cars and boats were strewn across weedy lawns. Evergreens towered over the houses and threw needles across the gravel. She passed another intersection. More remote houses. More trees. Badly fenced yards with children’s toys. Gardens growing nothing. It was a typical old Florida neighborhood, where progress had stopped in 1955.

  Ahead of her, the road ended at a concrete barricade. She walked all the way to the fence and saw only an abandoned road overgrown with brush. There was nothing here and nowhere else to go. Frustrated, she turned around, and that was when she spotted the mailbox on the last house on the road.

  The number on the box was 10761.

  Peach felt herself breathing faster.

  It was a tiny white house, no more than a few hundred square feet, behind a four-foot chainlink fence surrounding a big lot. The lawn was scrub and dandelions. The house had a matchbox screened porch on the right, which enclosed the front door. Six identical windows faced the street; all the blinds were closed. Flowering bushes had been planted underneath the windows, but the vines were shriveled and dead. A bushy oak tree loomed over the entire house.

  She was alone. The road was deserted, and the house was isolated among the empty lots. If you wanted to hide where no one would see you or find you, this was the perfect place. She checked the mailbox, but it was empty. Even so, she knew she was where Justin wanted
her to be.

  Peach climbed the low fence. The driveway was cracked and furry with weeds. At the porch, she opened the swinging door, disturbing the web of a large spider. There was no furniture on the concrete slab. Despite the shade, the porch was stifling. She knocked on the door to the house, but she didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one. When she turned the knob, she found that the door was open. She stepped cautiously into a small living room.

  This was Justin’s house. His safe house. She saw all of his antiques, all of his quirky collectibles. She’d been with him when he bought many of them. This was where he kept his personal life, where no one could find his secrets. Or so he’d believed.

  He was wrong. Peach was too late.

  Someone had found the place before her. Someone had beaten her to it. The house had been searched. Antiques that may have hidden anything lay in shards on the floors. Books had been ripped apart; so had the chairs and sofas. There were holes punched in the walls. If there had been anything to find, it was gone. She wanted to cry. It was almost worse, finding this corner of Justin’s life that she had never seen before and realizing that a stranger had already violated it. Her breath came raggedly. Her eyes felt full. The house smelled like him, but he was gone.

  Peach crossed from the living room to the house’s single bedroom. It was dark even in the daylight. The wooden floor groaned under her feet. There was a twin bed, with a mattress that had been slashed, and a state-of-the-art desktop computer that had been disassembled to remove its hard drive, leaving a hole. The monitor was smashed, exposing its interior components. A file cabinet was pushed against the wall, its drawers open and empty. He’d had pictures on the wall, but they’d been ripped apart, exposing the rear of the frames.

  Nothing. They’d left her nothing.

  She saw a table near the bedroom’s only window, which looked out on the sorry lawn. Outside, she saw the mature oak tree with a canvas chair beneath it. A ladder in the dirt. A push lawnmower that had long since rusted into disuse. Inside, there was a coffee mug on the table. She could imagine Justin here, sipping tea, staring at the lonely brush, working on – what?

  A photo frame lay on the floor near the table, its glass broken. The photo was still inside the frame. It was her. It was the same photo of Peach standing outside the Crab Shack restaurant.

  Another message?

  If so, she didn’t understand it, because this photograph didn’t contain the edits she’d seen on her phone. Maybe the picture was simply a reminder that he’d been in love with her. He’d kept it in his bedroom. He’d stared at her when he was here.

  She felt like crying all over again.

  Peach took a long, deep breath of hot, dusty air. There was no evidence to find here, nothing that would help her. She’d reached another dead end. However, as she took a last look around the bedroom, she spotted a tiny triangle of paper peeking out from under the file cabinet. When she pushed the empty cabinet aside, she jumped as a three-inch lizard made a frantic escape. She bent down and retrieved the paper.

  Someone – Justin? – had taken a close-up picture of a newspaper article that been pinned to a cork bulletin board. It was impossible to tell where the photo had been taken. The article itself appeared to be nearly a decade old, copied from a Tampa newspaper.

  FRANK MACY GETS EIGHT YEARS ON MANSLAUGHTER PLEA.

  Only the opening paragraphs were legible in the photo:

  Despite claims that the police had planted evidence against him, Tampa resident Frank Macy, 27, pled no contest to second-degree manslaughter charges today in the death of bartender Arnold White last February. Macy, who was already on probation for unrelated drug charges, was sentenced to eight years in prison.

  White was assaulted in an alley behind the Spotted Dolphin, a bar in the Gulfside town of Pass-a-Grille on February 12. He later died of his injuries. One witness alleged that White had made sexual advances toward Macy on the night of the assault.

  ‘This plea is a recognition of the fact that a jury trial would likely have resulted in Mr Macy’s conviction of first-degree manslaughter, resulting in a significantly longer sentence,’ said Ramona Cortes, Macy’s defense attorney. ‘We continue to believe that much of the evidence in this case was manufactured by authorities in an attempt to …

  Peach read the fragment of the article six times, but she didn’t understand it. She didn’t know the name Frank Macy; she had never heard of him or the victim. The only name she knew was Ramona Cortes, who had been a high-profile defense attorney in Tampa before winning her first statewide election for Attorney General five years earlier. Everyone at the Common Way Foundation knew Ramona, because she and her Orlando firm had defended Hamilton Brock, too. Now she was the Republican candidate for governor.

  Why did Justin think this article was important?

  She studied the police photograph of Frank Macy. He was a stranger to her, not familiar at all, but he had an unusually soft, sensitive face. His dark hair was wavy and fell below his ears. He didn’t look like a thug. He didn’t have a tattooed face and square chin, a flat nose like a roadkill mouse, or mean dark eyes. Instead, he looked like a refugee from a boy band. His bedroom brown eyes said: Look at me, little girl. His skin just made you want to touch it. He looked lost.

  Peach did some quick math in her head. Based on the date of the article, and the sentence he received, Macy would have been released from prison earlier this year. He was free.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something. She didn’t know who Frank Macy was, or what Justin wanted with him, but she was going to find out.

  15

  The jungle-like garden in Diane Fairmont’s Tampa estate was a mass of shadows. It was nine o’clock at night, but the summer days were long. Cab stood on the lawn, with the bone-white estate behind him. The air was ripe with dampness. A rabbit fed on the grass nearby, and gnats hovered in a cloud over the lily pond. He was procrastinating by not going inside. He felt nervous, like a twenty-something kid again. He’d avoided Diane for ten years, but he couldn’t avoid her anymore.

  What would they say to each other?

  When the front door opened behind him, he shoved his hands in the pockets of his suit pants with unease. He expected to hear her voice, but instead, the voice was male and loud, breaking the silence like an earth-mover on a weekend morning.

  ‘Hey, Detective!’

  It was Garth Oakes. Fitness guru, masseur, would-be confidant and advisor for Diane. The man hopped down the steps and headed for Cab with an open-toed walk, his black ponytail swinging. He was dressed in pastels, as if Miami Vice had never gone off the air. White sport coat, collarless lavender shirt. The dusk made his skin as dark as a leather boot.

  Garth thrust out his hand, and Cab shook it again.

  ‘We met at the party on Friday,’ Oakes said. ‘Remember me?’

  ‘Beat the Girth … With Garth,’ Cab commented.

  ‘You remember! Yeah, I don’t care how many times I see myself on TV at three in the morning, it’s still a kick. You here to see Diane?’

  Cab nodded.

  ‘She’s running late,’ Garth told him. ‘We just wrapped up a massage, and she wanted to take a shower.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Hey, I hear you’re looking into some of these threats against her, huh? Way to go. Can’t be too careful. Me, I’m always prepared.’ Garth pulled aside the flap of his sport coat to reveal a ridiculously large automatic weapon holstered near his shoulder. ‘People figure I’m like the Hulk, you know? Beat ’em off with my bare hands. Except a fist isn’t much good if the other guy is packing. Nobody messes with Garth, baby. You try, you eat some lead sushi.’

  Cab wasn’t really listening, but he was pretty sure that Garth did say ‘lead sushi.’

  ‘I better get inside,’ Cab said.

  ‘Oh, sure. Hey, the campaign’s going well, huh? You see the latest poll numbers? Some folks are saying the Governor may pack it in and get out of the race, but I don’t think so. He pro
bably figures the storm will give him a bump. Voters rally ’round the incumbent over that kind of thing.’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘He’s going down, though.’ Garth pointed at the ‘Governor Diane’ button pinned to his shirt. Or maybe it was pinned directly to the muscles on his chest. ‘She’s a shoo-in. Unless they find some nasty dirt, I say she wins by seven or eight points.’

  ‘Dirt?’ Cab asked.

  ‘Well, politics ain’t beanbag, right? You know they’re out there looking.’

  ‘Is there anything to find?’

  Garth shrugged. ‘There’s always something to find. No saints and virgins in this business. I could tell you stories. Not that anyone could unzip my lips. You have to know how to keep secrets in my world.’

  ‘What happens on the massage table stays on the massage table?’ Cab asked.

  ‘Ha, that’s funny! Right! Believe me, once somebody lets you run your hands over their naked body, they figure they can tell you just about anything.’

  ‘It’s a good thing you’re discreet.’

  Garth crossed his fingers and thumped his heart. ‘Believe it. People have tried to get crap out of me. Political people. Reporters, too. People know me and Diane are tight.’

  ‘That’s right. You said you were at her place in Lake Wales a lot, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m still in Lake Wales all the time. Got a lot of clients there.’

  ‘What was it like at Birch’s house back then?’

  ‘Huh? Oh, ugly days. Ugly days.’

  ‘Because of the murders?’

  Garth flinched. ‘Sure, of course. Because of the murders.’

  ‘And then with Drew’s suicide,’ Cab added.

  ‘Oh, yeah, even worse.’

  ‘It must have been difficult,’ Cab said, ‘with Drew going in and out of rehab all the time. An emotional roller-coaster.’

  ‘You know it. That was super-hard on Diane.’

  ‘My mother said that Drew spent time in rehab right before the murders,’ Cab went on.