One of the officers told me, “Go on,” and they turned their attention to the next arriving guests. I had passed through the pedestrian gate and was inside the property wall. It occurred to me that I could have beaten their minimal search with a small pistol in an ankle holster, but I had no way to know that beforehand. I joined the stream of new arrivals walking along a winding path of paving stones toward the side of the main house. The path was lit every few yards with a glowing luminaria, a candle in a white paper bag.
The first floor of the Marcello mansion was ten or twelve feet above the street level. They must have trucked in a stadium load of dirt to build the foundation. But it only made sense: during a hurricane storm surge the first floor wouldn’t get wet. The house was three stories of whitewashed stucco, pillars and balconies, topped with red barrel tiles. At least six or seven thousand square feet, spread among the levels. I never studied architecture, but from the front and side it looked like an Arabian oil sheikh’s fantasy dream house. It screamed nouveau riche, but was no less beautiful or impressive for that.
I walked a few steps behind the couples who had entered just ahead of me. Not close enough to disturb them, but close enough that any watchers would assume we were together. The path led around the north side of the house until the twilight skyline of Miami was visible across Biscayne Bay. The several-acre backyard was constructed on different levels, beginning at the house with a stone terrace, then descending to an infinity pool, and finally a broad lawn reaching down to the water. Paths lit by foot lights led from level to level.
The terrace was partly covered by a second-floor balcony across much of the width of the house. The buffet line was under this balcony, I supposed to give it easy kitchen access and also to protect it from rain in the event of a sudden shower. A big wedding-size white tent, open on the sides, covered much of the terrace over to the high whitewashed wall bordering the property on the south side. It protected a stage, the dance floor and a few dozen cloth-covered tables. A six-piece Latin jazz combo was playing on the stage.
****
Now that I was inside the perimeter, I wanted a weapon. I strolled over to the end of the buffet line, where a Haitian chef was slicing rare roast beef off a steamship round while making cheerful asides to each momentary client. His black face was round and rolling with sweat above his white linen uniform, complete with poofy chef’s hat. He must have considered his new station in life miraculous indeed after escaping the famine-wracked Caribbean hell of his birth. I diverted his attention by requesting the large end cut he had set to the side. With a plate in my left hand for cover, I palmed one of his extra carving knives from a silver utensil tray. The eight-inch stainless steel blade had been narrowed from many years of professional hand-sharpening. I accepted his beef, added some salad, and wandered off to find a table for one.
Beneath the white tablecloth I wrapped a napkin around the blade as a field-expedient scabbard. The knife fit under my belted pants, handle toward my belly button, blade tip toward my left hip. It was an awkward and uncomfortable carry position when seated, but I didn’t plan to spend the night sitting down. I ate a few bites and left the rest for the wait staff. When I stood, the knife was securely concealed in a crossdraw position beneath the untucked tail of my shirt.
It was time to recon the property. The four Sunset Isles are arranged like fingers pointing westward across Biscayne Bay toward Miami. Tony Marcello owned the entire end of the northernmost finger, a property that included about four hundred feet of landscaped waterfront in an outward-curving fan. On the south side of the lawn were a tennis court and a small boathouse down by the water. On the north side was a guesthouse larger than the Delaneys’ home in Wilton Manors. I walked from the upper terrace down the steps on the left side, the south side, of the pool to the lawn. Near the water’s edge, towering royal palms were spaced about twenty feet apart. The sea breeze set their dry fronds to clattering high above. The effect was quite charming, I have to admit.
Toward the south a wooden dock on pilings ran along the seawall for about fifty feet. No boat was tied up, and nobody was around to object to my walking the length of the dock. There were a few more stout pilings in the water thirty feet from Marcello’s dock, to catch the outer lines of large yachts. A cormorant perched atop one of these pilings, drying its raised wings in the last of the sun.
It was an evening made to order for a dinner party at the westward-facing waterfront property. The sky would gradually transform from a blazing magenta sunset to silver moonlight across the dark waters. Very nice to contemplate, but not the reason I was there. I looked back up toward the house, analyzing the terrain and sight lines. The far end of the dock was out of view of the mansion, blocked by the boathouse and the tennis court’s high fabric-shaded fence.
Beyond the dock a ten-foot-high whitewashed stucco wall marked the edge of Marcello’s property. He didn’t own the entire end of the island, just the choicest center cut, the fattest slice of the pie. Number 35 North Sunset would be on the other side of the wall. I walked to the end of the wooden dock and continued along the seawall to the edge of the property.
I leaned outward from the property wall’s terminus at the water’s edge, for a look around it. Number 35 North Sunset Isle had its own dock running parallel to its seawall. A big cruising catamaran was tied alongside the dock, its twin bows a few dozen feet from me. I hazarded a glance further around the end of the wall and back up at the home of Marcello’s neighbor. Quick looks and detailed visual memory are a sniper’s stock in trade. I saw an expansive lawn interspersed with trees and shrubs. The beige-and-coral house was fifty yards from the water. Aluminum hurricane shutters were pulled down across the windows. The lawn and shrubs were trimmed but there was no sign of current human activity.
I turned around and studied the boathouse and the tennis court. If I could get a private moment with Richard Prechter tonight, I would bring him here for a little chat and maybe a moonlight dip. The half-moon was still high in the western sky, with us for a few more hours. Moon over Miami. Now I just had to find Prechter, come up with a ruse to cut him out of the herd, and lure him here in the dark. I was confident that shortly after meeting him one-on-one, I’d be able to convince him to release Cori and Brooke. Beneath the neighbor’s dock would be an ideal place to give him breath-holding lessons. Maybe with his hands tied behind a barnacled piling, my belt cinching his neck to it, and his weasel nose only rarely breaking the waterline. A similar method had worked wonders on Archy Mildenhall back on Castigo Cay.
I walked back up to the house and rejoined the party, swollen with reinforcements as more guests continued to arrive. My own little team was as ready as it could be. I had Nick on the water and Kelly on land, and a phone to communicate with them. Now I only awaited the appearance of a face with close-set green eyes and black hair brushed back.
The band had been joined by a female salsa singer, a pretty Latina wearing a red-and-gold-sequined jumpsuit, skin-tight over a sleek body. A few couples were dancing near the foot of the stage. Plenty of trophy wives and girlfriends were on prominent display, some of them with the look of magazine cover girls and runway models. One tall brunette I spotted from behind looked so much like Cori she had to turn toward me to break the spell.
I wondered if Tony Marcello himself would climb onto the stage and take the microphone at some point. He was a famous singer, both in English and Spanish, and he’d had some popular hits but not recently. So how did he fit into the picture? What would induce him to offer his house for the use of the GORP people tonight? Maybe he owed some political favors. Maybe he was invested in one of the GORP companies. Or maybe he was a rabid greenie who believed the hype.
At least two hundred guests were present and more were arriving. I was glad to see growing excitement around the band and the dance floor. That meant less attention would be paid to a certain dark corner of the lawn, down behind the boathouse where the property wall met the bay. I moved from group to group, laughing or sm
iling or even throwing in a witty comment when appropriate, waiting for my enemy to make his appearance. The drink in my hand could have been a Cuba Libre, but it was just a plain Coke. No alcohol to dull my senses or slow my reaction time.
I explored the upper limits of the grounds open to the party guests. Past the buffet line on the upper terrace, behind the stage and the tent poles and guy lines, the south property wall angled in close to the side of the mansion. This side had no path for arriving guests, but instead appeared to be dedicated to service access and utilities. Beyond the end of the catering tables, past where the band had stacked their instrument boxes and unused equipment was a high fence of vertical white boards. It ran about twenty feet between the side of the house and the property wall. The Marcello property was cone shaped, widest at the water and narrowing along the sides of the house. I watched a busboy carry a garbage bag toward the fence and open half of a double gate. He returned empty handed. It was dark back there, and secluded. No lights to bring visual attention to the dumpsters past the stage.
I moved from location to location; I nibbled from the buffet. Sat here, stood there. I engaged in short conversations but always moved on before getting to names. Every fifteen minutes I checked the phone as planned. At nine o’clock I put the battery into my phone one more time and left it turned on for the duration. I sealed it inside a small ziplock baggie I’d brought in anticipation of getting wet. If I didn’t spot Richard Prechter soon, I’d have to call Nick and have him pick me up in the Zodiac. Then we’d head for Topaz and go straight into swimmer-attack mode. It was almost fully dark, with just a glimmer of gray sky fading behind the skyline of downtown Miami across the bay. The half-moon would provide enough light until it set after midnight.
****
The upper terrace grew more crowded. Most of the new guests were arriving by the same pathway I had followed in, but some were filtering out of the mansion or down the exterior stairs from the main upper balcony. Far too many people were present to try to keep track of their coming and going. When I finally noticed Senator Pete Sanchez, he might have already been at the party for a while. Within a few minutes I had identified his admin assistant and two probable bodyguards. All of them wore suits and ties.
Anywhere else, the presence of a well-known United States senator would create a ripple of excitement in a crowd, but not at Tony Marcello’s private house party, where movie stars, recording artists, supermodels, corporate CEOs and trust-fund millionaires mingled. At this elite gathering of the Beautiful People, the senator was just one more familiar television talking head—and far less beautiful than most. I kept an eye on him while moving about the terrace and trying to blend in with the revelers. Then I saw him look up toward the balcony and wave to someone.
Richard Prechter came down the exterior stairway. I had seen no one from the party on the terrace go up the stairs to the upper deck. Apparently it worked in one direction: down. It made sense that the boss of Tidal Power Solutions would be inside the mansion, at the party-within-a-party along with the other GORP big shots hosting the night’s entertainment.
Prechter waded through the mob of glitterati beneath the big tent, around couples dancing to the salsa beat at the foot of the stage. He was heading directly toward the senator. The amplified music and many chattering voices were too loud to permit any intimate conversation, but the two spent a few minutes working the crowd, shaking hands and slapping backs. Then they detached themselves, left the tented area and headed away from the terrace. They descended the wide steps on the near side of the swimming pool, closely trailed by the senator’s entourage.
The five men walked beyond the pool and down the lawn toward the seawall. Away from the upper terrace and past the line of tiki torches the property was darker. Perhaps Prechter wanted to have a private conversation with Sanchez away from the band and the festive crowd. The senator’s bodyguards presented a major obstacle to my ambushing Richard Prechter and prodding him into Biscayne Bay at knifepoint. They were in position to protect their boss against any unknown threat—such as a trained killer with a hidden carving knife and a lot of very ugly ideas in his head.
The group walked along the seawall, down near the boathouse. I was backlit by the party lights, so I couldn’t leave the pool area and cross the lawn behind them without making it obvious that I was following them. Then I heard an outboard motor, a big one, and I saw a white inflatable curving in toward the dock, its widening fan of silver wake visible in the moonlight. I scurried over to the tennis court while their attention was fastened on the approaching boat. I moved between the fenced and shrouded tennis court and the property wall, down toward the water as far as I dared, staying in the shadows.
A light atop the bay side of the boathouse illuminated the dock. The white inflatable was immediately familiar to me. The last time I’d seen Cori she had been aboard it, leaving for Topaz. I recognized the hulking fellow standing behind the controls just by his buffalo silhouette: Trevor Ridley, now in dark clothing. Another man jumped onto the dock with the inflatable’s lines and held the boat in place. I flattened myself against the side of the boathouse and overheard voices raised in heated discussion. Angry charges bordering on physical threats were exchanged.
Senator Sanchez had the final say; I recognized his voice from the RASE Conference. Then the boat surged forward, past my side of the boathouse, and I saw that Prechter and the senator were both aboard, sitting on the small bench seat in front of the center console. Just where Cori had been primly seated when I’d last laid eyes on her.
I slid around to the uphill side of the boathouse and heard more angry words from the men who had been left ashore. I gathered that the senator was going off the reservation and had ditched his aide and his bodyguards. Obviously he had arranged his unexpected exit with Richard Prechter. I wondered what enticements would have been offered to make him want to be so completely off the radar screen for a weekend. Brooke had said that Prechter had promised him a weekend with “no paparazzis, no reporters, and no wives.” And now I knew the enticements included no aides and no bodyguards along to witness the goings-on.
So, what was the senator’s secret vice, which he hoped to fulfill aboard Topaz? From his attitude toward Brooke at the convention, it was an easy guess that he was a frustrated skirt chaser. Maybe he had an old battle-ax of a wife waiting for him at home and Prechter had promised him a liaison with an attractive and willing college-age girl. Maybe Prechter had told him that there would be young female “research assistants” or “interns” aboard Topaz.
A United States senator would certainly understand that Kennedy-esque arrangement. It seemed unlikely that the senator would go along for the trip if he knew that Prechter acquired his females by trickery or outright kidnapping. But that was only a guess. Hell, for all I knew, the senator brought his own date-rape drugs along with him when he expected to be in the private company of young ladies.
By water, the white inflatable was less than two miles from Topaz—assuming the megayacht was still at Hibiscus Isle. The senator had just given his underlings the slip, so it seemed reasonable that the megayacht was getting under way that very night. My own plan had been to surprise Prechter and take him away by water in our newly purchased much-smaller Zodiac. Instead, he had beaten me to the punch with his own water extraction.
If I called Nick and he arrived quickly, we might make it to Topaz before she headed for the Atlantic; preparing a docked megayacht for the ocean is no trivial matter. The senator’s aide and bodyguards continued their heated discussion under the dock light on the far side of the boathouse. Too much noise was coming from the band and the guests at the party to make out their exact words, but I could tell that there was substantial confusion among them. Across the lawn a roar went up from the crowd, and a new amplified male voice addressed them speaking rapidly in Spanglish. Tony Marcello in the flesh, I presumed from the audience reaction.
As long as the senator’s men were there on the dock, it would not be pos
sible to have Nick pick me up. The bodyguards were excited and agitated, on high alert. If they walked around to my side of the boathouse, it would be difficult to avoid being spotted.
****
I decided to return to the anonymity of the party to regroup and make my phone calls. The bodyguards would quickly see the futility of staring across the empty water like abandoned brides, so I backtracked toward the house before I could be discovered. Once past the tennis court, I angled over toward the swimming pool and back up to the party on the upper terrace. Tony Marcello, dressed all in white, was belting out one of his hits as the crowd clapped in cadence.
Walking up the steps along the side of the pool, I noticed that I wasn’t alone. The floodlit stage ahead of me had momentarily seized my attention, a mistake. On the other side of the pool I saw the Eurasian from the convention, Trevor Ridley’s sidekick. He must have been the man who’d stepped off the white inflatable with the dock lines. On the opposite side of the boathouse from the senator’s men, I’d lost track of the head count on the boat and ashore. And who had gone where, and when.
My first guess was that instead of following me, the Eurasian had tried to circle around and get in front to cut me off. Getting cute. A tactical mistake on his part, if that was his intention. When had he first made me, and picked up my trail? I thrust into the crowd beneath the big tent, saying “sorry” and sliding between revelers who were all either wildly dancing or watching the stage show, or both. A young gringo in a hurry was of no mind to them. I crossed the dance floor and plunged back into the crowd on the other side and then left the tent, went past the caterers’ tables, past the band’s roadie gear stacked in the fallow space between the mansion and the property wall.
Castigo Cay Page 37