CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
“Do come in, Mr. Stanley,” I said, opening the door wider.
He stood there, stunned, not sure what to do.
“If you run,” I said, my voice hard, “I’ll shoot you in the back. Get your ass in here. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
He walked in, his hands in front, palms turned outward. He saw Nigella. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“What’s going on?”
“You left in a hurry up in Macon,” I said. “We weren’t finished with our visit. Sit down.”
He sat at one end of the sofa, Nigella at the other. Jock had a nine-millimeter pistol trained on him. “Where’s J. D. Duncan?” asked Jock.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know she was missing.”
“Look, dickhead,” said Jock, “I don’t have time to fool around. If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I’m going to shoot you. First in the foot, then the other foot, then the knee and so on until you decide to talk to me.”
Stanley blanched. “Look,” he said, “if I knew where she was, I’d tell you.”
“You know who she is,” Jock said, a statement, not a question.
“Yes. She’s the Longboat Key cop who was investigating the Desmond killing.”
“Tell me about the money going into her account,” I said.
“What money?”
“Shoot him, Jock,” I said.
“No. Wait. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I stared at him for a moment. “You sent three payments of ten grand each to a bank account in Sarasota in the name of Nigella Morrissey but with J.D.’s Social Security number. It shows up in your records as payroll.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Believe me, asshole, it’s in the records.”
“I swear to you, I had nothing to do with that.”
“Who besides you had access to the Otto Foundation bank accounts?” I asked.
“Nobody other than Maude Lane.”
“Tell me about your connection to Souphanouvong Phomvihana.”
“I told you in the office that day. I don’t have a connection with him.”
“You and your dad worked with Soupy’s dad.”
“Yes, but I gave that up when I got out of prison.”
“You’re still dealing drugs,” I said.
He was quiet for a beat, then exhaled, and said, “Yes.”
“Where do they come from?”
“From the same area of Laos. But not from Soupy.”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not really interested in the drugs. I’ll let the Drug Enforcement Administration deal with that. Right now I want to find J. D. Duncan. That’s my only interest.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I’d tell you if I did.”
In the end, we didn’t get any more information. I tended to believe Stanley when he said he didn’t know anything about J.D.’s disappearance. He and Nigella were too scared not to tell us the truth.
I called the DEA office in Tampa. It was late now, after ten, so I got a duty officer. “This is Matt Royal,” I said. “I need to talk to Special Agent Dan Delgado.”
“He’s gone for the day, sir.”
“Can you reach him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell him to call me on an urgent matter. He knows who I am.” I gave him my cell number.
“I’ll call him, sir.”
Dan Delgado had worked with Jock and me on another problem we’d run into a few months back. He was the special agent in charge of the Tampa office of the DEA.
My cell phone rang. “Matt, you running drugs or something?”
“Not exactly, Dan. Jock Algren and I are holding some people at gun-point who I think you’d love to talk to.”
“If Jock’s there, we probably have a huge mess. Where are you?”
I gave him the address.
Twenty minutes later Delgado showed up with two other agents. They were wearing windbreakers with police printed across the back in block yellow letters. Below that was the agency name. Dan shook hands with Jock and me and we explained who we had and what kind of evidence we’d accumulated. We asked him to hold them separately and incommunicado until we were able to dig further into J.D.’s disappearance. Dan knew J.D. and was most willing to help out. Nigella and Stanley were carted off in handcuffs.
“What now?” asked Jock as we got back into the car.
“I don’t think there’s anything else we can do tonight. I need sleep. We’ll start fresh in the morning.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
I woke feeling like a regiment of infantry had walked across my head during the night. Tired as I was, I hadn’t slept well. Images of J.D. flashed through my sleep, vivid dreams of her in a dark place from which she could not escape. Still, I’d stayed in bed long past my usual time. It was almost nine when I rolled out.
I showered, shaved, and stumbled into the kitchen. Jock was there drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. He looked as if he’d slept through the night without any worries. I thought it must be a habit he’d learned during all those years of clandestine operations.
“Got a question,” I said. “Were you really going to strip the clothes off Nigella last night if she hadn’t started talking?”
“You’re a pervert.”
“I’m just asking.”
“No. I wouldn’t have touched her. I just wanted to scare the hell out of her. I think I succeeded. Why?”
I grinned at him. “Just wondering.”
“Right. You were thinking about her naked.”
The man had a point. He went back to his paper. I grabbed a couple of packaged pastries and popped them into the microwave. Such was breakfast when I didn’t have time for the Blue Dolphin. I got a cup of coffee and joined Jock at the table.
“The director got a lot done on Thanatos,” he said. “It was waiting for me this morning when I opened my e-mail.”
“What’ve you got?”
He went to the living room and returned with a sheaf of printouts. “The most interesting part of this is the makeup of the teams. There were twelve men in each and there were only three teams. They were dubbed, Team Alpha, Team Beta, and Team Charlie. Desmond was part of Team Charlie. Look at the roster.”
“Damn,” I said. “Desmond, Brewster, and Fleming were all part of the same team. This isn’t a coincidence. But there are only seven names here. What about the others?”
“Five of them are dead.”
“Any information on the living members?”
Jock handed me another sheet of paper. “Names and current addresses.”
I looked at the list. “Are you sure the other five are dead?”
“Yeah. I checked. Two were killed in Vietnam before the end of the war, one died in a car wreck a year after he came home, and two died of cancer.”
“Why are the team members kids being killed?”
“Don’t know, but I’d like to find out if any of the others have had deaths in their families.”
“I’ll get Bill Lester onto this. He can query the police departments in the towns where they live. Maybe something will turn up.”
“We need to warn these guys. Somebody is targeting them.”
I called Bill Lester and gave him the names and addresses of the men who’d served on Charlie Team in Operation Thanatos. “It can’t be a coincidence that the children of three men who served on the same team are now dead,” I said.
“I’ll get right on this and get back to you,” said the chief. “And before you ask, the answer is no. We haven’t made any progress in finding J.D.”
I hung up and my phone rang again. Debbie.
“Good morning, sunshine,” I said. “You’re up early.”
“I spent most of the night on Marsh LLC. I thought you’d want it first thing this morning.”
“What’d you find?”
“It’s a tangled mess. Marsh LLC is owned by a co
mpany incorporated in Ohio called BriteSun, Inc. That corporation has only one officer, the president whose name is Victor Chaffin. The office address is a post office box in Columbus.”
I interrupted. “What about the registered agent for service of process?”
“Both Marsh and BriteSun use one of those companies that serve as registered agents for lots of corporations all over the country.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“BriteSun does not seem to have any business operations, and other than the listing on the Ohio Secretary of State’s website, there’s nothing on it anywhere.”
“Then why the hell was somebody trying to get me to look into Marsh?”
“There is one thing I found that may have some bearing on this mess.”
“What?”
“Marsh LLC is shown as the owner of a piece of property in the Bahamas.”
“How did you ferret that out?”
“BriteSun was incorporated in Ohio about twenty years ago. The check that was written for this year’s annual corporate fee was drawn on a bank in Columbus. The signature on the check was illegible and there was no printed name on it. I hacked into the bank’s computers and found the account. It was set up by the same person who is shown as the president of BriteSun, Victor Chaffin.”
“That’s interesting.”
“There’s more. That checking account is only used once a year to keep BriteSun active. That is until recently when somebody put a million dollars into the account. It’s listed as ‘capital infusion.’ Marsh was formed a couple of days later, the million dollars was transferred by check to Marsh. I got the routing numbers off the endorsements on the back of the check and traced that to a bank in Atlanta.”
“And you hacked their computer.”
“Damn right. Marsh wrote a check to the trust account of a law firm in West Palm Beach for guess how much.”
“One million dollars.”
“Bingo.”
“And you found out what it was for.”
“Law firm computers have notoriously bad security. This one closed on the Bahamian property for Marsh LLC.”
“Where is the property?”
“It’s a house in Marsh Harbour. In the Abacos.” She gave me the street address.
“Damn, you’re good,” I said.
“That’s not all I got. Victor Chaffin died five years ago. He’s listed in the Social Security death index, and I found his obituary in the Columbus Dispatch. He was the founder of Chaffin Consultants, an engineering firm that was one of the first bought by Desmond Engineering Consultants when it started expanding.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Bye.” She hung up, and I related the conversation to Jock.
“If she’s able to hack into bank computers, she’s better than I thought,” he said. “The agency’s hackers are the best in the world and they have trouble with bank computer security. Does she have any particular training in this stuff ?”
“No. It’s just something she got into and developed a real talent. She’s usually too wired to sleep when she gets home from work, so she stays up and trolls the Internet. I think she’s made some friends who spend their entire lives breaking into other people’s computers. It’s like a big game. Get in and get out. As long as they do no damage, they figure it’s all in fun.”
“But they can find a lot of private information on people. That could be dangerous if they mess with the wrong folks.”
“I agree, but she doesn’t listen to reason sometimes.”
“Maybe because you’re the enabler,” he said. “You seem to ask her for help on a regular basis.”
I got another cup of coffee, sipped it. “You may be right. I’ll be more careful about what I ask her to do in the future. But for now, what the hell is the connection between a house in the Bahamas and what we’re looking into?”
I went to my computer and put the Bahamian address into Google maps. I found the place, but it wasn’t in Marsh Harbour proper. The house sat alone on a small island off the northern tip of the peninsula that held the town. The only access to the island would be by boat. It was isolated and secure. A good place for people who didn’t want to be bothered.
My computer pinged, letting me know that an e-mail had arrived. I opened it. The message was: “I’m OK. Your buddy Tripp would love this place. Trust me.”
“Jock,” I said. “Look at this.”
“Damn. At least she’s okay or says she is. Who’s this buddy of yours, Tripp?”
“Tripp Harrison. He’s an artist. I’ve never met the man, but I love his paintings.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’ve got three of his works, two limited-edition prints and one original oil. They’re all here in the house. J.D. likes them as much as I do.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“All three of the paintings are of scenes in the Abacos.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
“She’s in that house,” said Jock. “If we knew who sent you the e-mail about Marsh LLC we’d know a whole lot more.”
“None of this makes sense. Why would J.D. be in the Abacos and who the hell is she with?”
“And there’s also customs to worry about,” said Jock. “If she landed in the Bahamas, she had to clear customs. There’ll be a record.”
“Can you run that down?”
“Real quick,” he said as he opened his cell phone.
When he finished his conversation, he said, “Apparently they’re real slow about getting information into computers at Bahamian customs. We might not get the information for several days.”
“If somebody took her there against her will, I doubt they’re going to want to be anywhere near a customs officer.”
“What about going by boat? You’ve made that trip several times.”
“It’d be a pretty easy trip. You’re supposed to stop at the first port of entry and clear Bahamian customs, but boats go there all the time without stopping. There’re so many American boats in Bahamian waters during the summer that the Defense Force can’t keep up with them.”
“It’d be a pretty long trip, wouldn’t it?”
“Not that bad. If I were taking a big go-fast boat over, I’d leave from Lauderdale, stay north of Bimini into the Northwest Providence Channel, skirt the southern tip of Abaco, and come into the Abaco Sound at Pelican Harbour. That’s only about fifteen miles from Marsh Harbour.”
“How long would the trip take?”
“It would depend on the seas. The distance is only about a hundred seventy-five miles. If you average forty miles an hour, which those big cigarette-type boats can do without breaking a sweat, you’d make it in less than five hours with fuel to spare.”
“So, the cell call from J.D. came in at three fifteen from Fort Lauderdale. If they were leaving then, on good seas they’d be in Marsh Harbour before dark. Can you check to see what the weather was like on Sunday?”
“Sure,” I said.
I logged onto the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website and looked at the weather conditions for the last couple of days. “Weather was good,” I said. “West winds five to ten miles per hour, seas less than two feet. It would probably have meant flat seas, and even if there was a little chop, with the west wind it would have been a following sea. Nothing for a big go-fast with a captain who knows what he’s doing.”
The doorbell rang and I heard the front door open. “I smell coffee,” said Logan as he walked into the living room.
“In the kitchen,” I said. “Help yourself.”
“You know I never drink that noxious brew.”
“There’s tomato juice in the fridge.”
He kept talking as he walked into the kitchen, poured a glass, and returned. “Did you guys miss me?”
“You been gone?” asked Jock.
“Docked in Tampa early this morning.”
“You got some sun,” Jock said.
“Yeah. All over, too. We had a balcony and j
ust hung out there in the nude.”
“That is not an image I want to contemplate this early in the day,” I said.
“Eat your heart out,” said Logan. “I went to the Dolphin for breakfast and heard that J.D.’s missing. What’s going on?”
Jock and I spent thirty minutes filling Logan in on everything that had happened since he left for his cruise. “You got any ideas?” I asked.
“Why don’t we look at this as two or three different issues? The first is that Doc and J.D. disappear at about the same time on Monday. A pilot who flew occasionally for Doc is seen buying a cell phone in Sarasota early that morning. Later you get a call from the same cell phone and it’s J.D. And the pilot is nowhere to be found. You get an e-mail message from J.D. on Tuesday telling you to trust her. The same day you get an e-mail from an unknown someone in the Atlanta area telling you to look into Marsh LLC. It turns out that Marsh owns a house on an island in the Abacos. And the guy who is president of the corporation that owns Marsh LLC is dead, but it was a subsidiary of an engineering firm that Desmond now owns. Then you get another e-mail from J.D. that cryptically tells you she’s somewhere in the Abacos. They probably didn’t fly there because that would alert customs. But a fast boat could have taken them there without a lot of hassle. It sounds like J.D. and Doc may both be in Marsh Harbour.”
“Where’s Telson, the pilot?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter. He may have flown Doc here to pick up J.D. and then on to the east coast. They took a boat from there. He’s probably home in Atlanta.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s makes sense except for one thing.”
“What?” asked Logan.
“Why would Doc kidnap J.D.?”
“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe she went willingly.”
“But why?”
“We’ll just have to find that out.”
“Another thing bothering me,” said Jock, “is why J.D. went to the bank to cash that check.”
“Well,” said Logan, “we could assume she’s dirty and that she’s shacked up with Doc. But we all know that’s not the case.”
“Alternative?” I asked.
“Maybe they just wanted to put some pressure on whoever set up the account in J.D.’s name. Let them know that J.D. was on to them.”
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