by P J Parrish
He had regretted burying the gun almost immediately. But then things got complicated. Time went by. The trial started. Susan had been involved with the case, and he knew she would never forgive him if he told her that he had tampered with evidence and obstructed justice in a case that involved her. She had told him once she knew there were lines he would not cross. He knew she’d be disappointed in him to find out she was wrong.
But as job openings came and went in the Fort Myers police department and Lee County sheriff’s office, he found that it wasn’t Susan’s possible disappointment in him that was the problem. It was his own.
He needed to make it right again before he even considered an interview with Major Anderson.
He looked back up at the prison. But he didn’t have the faintest idea how.
The red needle on the speedometer was pushing eighty-five as they sped south on I-75. They were heading to East Naples, to an efficiency apartment that the prison records had shown as Vargas’s address after his release. The warden had also given them a thin copy of Vargas’s life story, according to the Florida Department of Corrections. Joe read it to Louis during the drive.
Adam Pernell Vargas had entered prison at eighteen, after robbing a store off Alligator Alley. The Alley cut through the Miccosukee Indian reservation, and it was the tribe’s small store that Vargas had chosen to hold up with his plastic gun. He had been sentenced to two years, but served only eighteen months. His uncle, Leo Ryker, had offered Vargas a job at his sugar cane processing plant near Clewiston to secure the parole.
The armed robbery was Vargas’s first and only charged offense up to now. It struck Louis odd that Vargas had turned so violent after his release, and even chalking it up to Byron Ellis’s influence didn’t explain it. Ellis’s own manslaughter charge had been a personal beef that ended in a gunshot. Nothing in his background suggested he was capable of the damage they had seen this week. But together, these two losers had gone on a bloody rampage. What had set it off?
Louis had a hunch Vargas was the key and he hoped to find something at Vargas’s old apartment. After that, they had an appointment to go see Leo Ryker. Joe had called Ryker’s office from the prison, and he had agreed to wait for them at the plant in Clewiston.
“Louis, you okay?” Joe asked.
He nodded, his eyes trained on the road.
“You haven’t said much for the last two hours.”
“I’m thinking,” he said.
She closed the file. “About Vargas?”
“About everything,” he said.
“I’m sorry I have to take off tomorrow,” she said.
“Can’t be helped,” Louis said.
Before they left Raiford, Joe had called her department to check in. She had been told she needed to return to Miami tomorrow for an unexpected court appearance on another case. She would be gone only a day, she had told Louis. She had been oddly quiet most of the day and he wondered now if she was glad to have an excuse to put some distance between them.
He glanced over at her. She was looking out the window. Neither of them had mentioned last night, yet the unspoken questions had seemed to hover in the air all day. Questions about him and Susan. Questions about whether their own lovemaking last night was a beginning of something or just a sudden explosion of need fueled by the tension of a missing child and her killing of Ellis. He knew relationships started by cops in the midst of a high-stress case were seldom more than a series of quickies, fading rapidly when the case was over.
He knew she wouldn’t ask any of those questions. But then he realized that she wasn’t the one who wanted the answers.
He heard Mel’s voice in his ear, bugging him again about being more open, but all he could think about was this morning.
You sound happy, Mel had said. Joe’s hand on his arm. The strangeness in Mel’s voice.
Lots of nice things in Miami.
“Joe,” he said finally.
She looked over at him, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she did.
“We haven’t talked,” she said. She shifted in the seat so she was facing him. “I guess you want to know about Mel, why I called him. I thought maybe he could help you work things through about Ben, about --”
“It’s okay,” Louis said. That wasn’t what he wanted to know. But he realized he had no business asking her the real question on his mind, whether the past she shared with Mel had gone beyond work.
She was quiet for a moment. “Plus, I guess I wanted to talk to him,” she added.
“Mel’s a good guy to talk to when things get shitty.”
“That’s not why I wanted to talk to him.”
Louis stayed quiet.
“About ten years ago,” she said. “Mel and I had a relationship.”
Louis’s eyes never wavered from the road.
“I was twenty-five, he was thirty-five,” she said. “I was a uniform, he was a detective.” She drew in a deep breath. “One night, after three years, he just ended it. Said it’s over and walked out my door.”
“Joe...”
“For the next few years, I was so angry and so hurt I couldn’t even look at him. Then I got promoted, and Major Anderson assigned us a case together.”
“Joe, if you’re trying to tell me that you still --”
“Shut up and listen,” she said. “A few days into the case, I could tell there was something wrong with him. A couple weeks later, he told me about his eyes.”
Louis rubbed his face, not wanting to look at her.
“He told me he broke it off with me for two reasons. One was that he said he couldn’t be a burden to any woman.” After a long pause, she went on. “The other reason was that he knew I wanted to get married back then. And he told me I was too good a cop and I loved it too much to be saddled with kids, a house and an old asshole like him.”
She smiled slightly. “It turned out he was right. Not about him being an asshole. But that the timing was all wrong for me.”
Louis finally looked at her. Her head was down, her hand flat on Adam Vargas’s folder.
“I still love Mel,” she said. “But not like you probably are thinking. I asked him over this morning so I could tell him something in person that I didn’t want him to hear from you.”
Her gray eyes were steady on his. He slowed the Bronco, pulling over to the shoulder. He turned to face her.
“Things are pretty charged right now,” she said. “And maybe that is a big part of what happened between us last night. But I don’t want to get in the middle of something.”
“Are you asking about Susan?” Louis said.
“Yes.”
He was trying to figure out how to answer. Whatever he and Susan could have been together started to crack the moment Austin walked in. It fell apart when Ben was kidnapped, and it disintegrated last night when Susan’s door slammed shut behind him.
“We were never more than a possibility,” Louis said.
She nodded. They were silent for a moment. A semi sped past, making the Bronco sway in its wake.
“Look,” Louis said, “I’m not a very good dancer.”
“Neither am I,” she said.
“Okay, you staying at my place again tonight?”
“You want me to?”
“Yes, I do.”
Her hand slid across the seat to cover his, holding it for a moment. Finally, he put the Bronco in gear and pulled back onto the road.
CHAPTER 39
They pulled up outside Vargas’s apartment to a blur of squad cars and blue lights swirling in the falling darkness. Louis took note of the cruisers: mostly Collier County, two Lee County, and a few from Naples. Lee County Sheriff Lance Mobley was standing in the doorway to Vargas’s efficiency when Louis and Joe hit the yellow tape. Mobley saw them coming and came across the scraggly lawn to meet them, collar up, cheeks red, his blond hair whipping around his head.
“The boy’s not here,” Mobley said. “Neither is Vargas.”
“Can I look i
nside?” Louis asked.
“What for?”
“I might see something I recognize. I know the kid. He’s been leaving things, clues.”
Mobley put his hands on his hips and looked toward the apartment. “I want this guy bad, Kincaid. He killed one of mine. I don’t need your interference right now.”
“Damn it, Lance, what can it hurt?”
Mobley hesitated then looked at Joe, his eyes dropping to her badge hanging around her neck.
“You must be Detective Frye from Miami.”
She stuck out her hand. “Sheriff. Louis tells me good things about you.”
Mobley slipped Louis a look as he took her hand. “I don’t believe a word of that but nice try. C’mon. Make it quick.”
Mobley lifted the tape and they dipped under it, following him to the door.
The efficiency was tiny. One room with a chipped linoleum floor, faded yellow walls, a patio door smeared with years of grime, a table lamp with a bare bulb, and an open sleeper sofa. The card table was littered with orange soda and Pepsi cans, paper plates, and an empty pizza box.
A couple of Collier County detectives gave Louis the once over, but he ignored them, hoping neither of them remembered who he was. He still owed them a statement on the shooting of Byron Ellis.
He walked to the sleeper sofa. The sheets were tangled, pulled from the edges. They were pale blue, thread-bare, dotted with light stains. His gaze moved over the walls. The picture above the sofa was a western landscape with a setting sun, the corners frayed and dried, curling away from the frame. The television was an older model, a layer of dust across the screen. Balanced on top of the TV was a video-cassette recorder, the $399 price tag still stuck to the top. Both the TV and VCR sat on a small wooden stand with a broken door.
Louis motioned to the Collier sheriff, who came forward.
“Have you looked inside this?” Louis asked.
“Not yet.”
“You mind?”
The sheriff opened the broken door to the TV stand with the tip of his pen. Louis squatted down to get a better look. VHS videotapes. Someone had meticulously labeled them with the strips supplied in the box. The writing was small and childlike:
They Dide with there Boots on
Two Road Together
Butch Casidy and the Sundance Kid
Rio Bravo
Stagecoach
Back in the saddel
The Last Roundup
“There must be fifty or sixty of these,” Louis said
“Think these belong to Vargas or this other guy, Ellis?”
Louis stood up. “They belong to Vargas. The guy’s a wannabe cowboy. I bet we find music, too.”
“A cowboy?”
Louis nodded and moved to a small cardboard box in the corner. It was full of cassette tapes, most without covers. Behind the box was a stack of old record albums. Louis used his pen to flip through them. Gene Autry, Marty Robbins, Tex Ritter, and a few Louis had never heard of. Most of the covers were tattered and had PROPERTY OF ZELDA VARGAS written on them with black marker. Louis knew from the information Joe had read about Vargas on the way home that Zelda was Vargas’s mother’s name.
There was a small piece of paper sticking out of the Gene Autry album and Louis pulled it loose by the corner. It was faded, heavily creased from plenty of handling.
GENE AUTRY’S 10 RULES FOR COWBOYS
1. A cowboy must never shoot first
2. A cowboy must never go back on his word
3. A cowboy always tells the truth
4. A cowboy is kind to children...
“So you find any clues from the kid?”
Louis looked up at Mobley then shook his head, dropping the paper back between the albums.
“Maybe they stowed the kid at Ellis’s place, wherever that is,” Mobley said.
“Ellis lived here with Vargas, Lance,” Louis said.
“This place is smaller than a dog house. Where’d he sleep?”
Louis looked at the bed. Mobley followed his gaze then his eyes snapped back to Louis. “Jesus, they were homos?” he asked.
Louis nodded.
As Mobley looked back at the tangled sheets, Louis could almost see his brain working to conjure up the images.
“You sure?” Mobley asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“You could’ve told me.”
“I’m telling you now. Has Ellis’s death hit the papers yet?”
“This morning.”
Louis looked over at Joe, who was talking to a Collier County investigator. “Vargas is going to react somehow.” Again, Mobley followed his gaze. “Frye’s name was all over the papers and her face was on TV. You thinking he’ll go after her?”
“I think he might if he knows where to find her.”
“Where’s she staying?”
“My place, out on Captiva.”
Mobley smiled. “Good move, Kincaid. Security wise, I mean.”
Louis gave the efficiency one last look around. “Do me a favor. Save anything weird, anything that looks like a kid might have left it.”
“The kid was never here, and you know it.”
“Look anyway,” Louis said. “We’ve got to get going.”
Louis motioned to Joe and was at the Bronco by the time Mobley caught up with him.
“Where you going?” Mobley asked.
Louis debated telling him. But he didn’t want to find himself back behind the yellow tape, unable to ask questions again.
Mobley put a hand on the driver’s side door. “Tell me where you’re going or I’ll find some reason to lock your ass up.”
“We’re going to talk to Vargas’s uncle,” Louis said. “He gave Vargas his first job when he got out of prison.”
Mobley looked around the yard. He didn’t have many officers here. This was Collier County, and Louis knew Mobley was here only as a courtesy since Vargas’s crimes had now touched three counties.
“Where’d you get your information?” Mobley asked.
“Raiford.”
“What were you...?” Mobley held up a hand. “Never mind. I don’t even want to know. But I want you to take a detective with you.”
“I got one with me.”
Mobley glanced at Joe as she came up next to them. “This is not her jurisdiction.”
“It’s not yours either, Sheriff,” Joe said.
Mobley faced her. “Look, Detective, Collier County has been more than cooperative and professional. I’d expect no less from Miami-Dade.”
Joe reached for the Bronco door and Mobley had to step out of the way to let her open it. She leaned in and grabbed her file on Adam Vargas. She handed it to Mobley.
“Knock yourself out,” she said. She climbed in the Bronco, but before she closed the door, she looked back at Mobley. “One more thing, Sheriff,” she said.
“What?”
“See if you can start keeping up with the rest of us, okay?”
Louis went around to the passenger side and got in. Joe watched Mobley slap the folder against his thigh and walk away.
She started the Bronco. “I need to go back to your place and start packing if I’m going to make that court appearance tomorrow morning,” she said. “Can you handle old Uncle Leo alone?”
“No problem,” Louis said. “I won’t be back till ten or eleven, though. Why don’t you walk over to Timmy’s Nook and grab dinner.”
“Sounds good,” she said.
“I’ll wake you when I get in.”
“That sounds good, too.”
CHAPTER 40
Vargas dipped the pin again and leaned in close to the mirror. It hurt and his fingers were stained blue but he kept going.
He wasn’t sure if Byron would want him doing this, marking his body, but it was for him. He would understand.
Behind him, from somewhere in the shadows of the cabin came the drone of a man’s voice on TV. He didn’t turn to watch because he had seen it all earlier through the snowstorm of stat
ic. He had seen the pictures filmed from a chopper in the air, and he had been able to pick out the green and white trailer and cops swarming around it like cockroaches. He had seen the swamp buggy overturned in the water, and the gurney with the black body bag.
And he had seen her, seen the woman with the gold badge, and heard the guy on TV say, “The suspect was shot and killed by Miami-Dade Detective Joe Frye.”
Talking about Byron dying like it was nothing.
At least Byron had gone out kicking, gunning that old buggy down the road, making them chase him. It must’ve been something to see.
The newscast was ending and he knew it was almost seven. It was dark now, too, but he hadn’t turned on any lights. He wasn’t that far away from the trailer. And he knew there were still cops there, probably looking for him now. But they would never find him out here in the cabin, unless they knew where to come or asked Uncle Leo. But Uncle Leo wouldn’t tell them.
Unless Uncle Leo was mad at him now.
He felt his hand tremble as he carefully pricked his skin. He was tired. It had been over twenty-four hours since he had left Byron in the trailer and gone to see Uncle Leo. He was supposed to have brought Byron back to the airport, back to the plane and the money last night.
But he had kind of lost track of things since yesterday. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten or slept. He didn’t even know where he had gotten the pens and the pins. Everything after the stop at the convenience store had been a blur.
Vargas stepped back from the mirror and picked up the candle, holding it close to his face. The teardrop on his cheek was finished.
He carefully dabbed the little dots of blood away with a piece of toilet paper then went to the TV, shutting it off. He set the candle on the wood plank floor near the bed and picked up the small cassette player and the tapes he had brought in from the Camaro.
He had some time to kill.
He sat down on the floor, stuck in one of the tapes, and leaned back against the bed. The dark cabin began to fill with the sadness of singing cowboys. He didn’t fast-forward it, like he usually did, to get to his favorites. He pulled out his knife and started sharpening the blade with slow, smooth strokes.