Deadly Pursuit

by Michael Prescott

  “What’s to prevent me from blowing a hole in you right now? Then you can’t tell any of these lies.”

  Jack kept his voice calm. “No. But you’ll have to explain why you killed an unarmed man if you had nothing to hide.”

  “You attacked me. It was self-defense—”

  “You’re a bad liar, Steve-o. The FBI will break your story in twenty minutes. Then they’ll start to wonder what motive you had for shutting me up, and why I came to Pelican Key in the first place. Pretty soon they’ll draw the same conclusions I already sketched out for you.”

  Steve clutched the bag as if grasping a last hope. “Why didn’t you say all this in the beginning?”

  “I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to threaten you. I wanted us to be friends again. Friends and willing partners. Now I guess I’ll have to settle for our being reluctant allies.”

  “I ... I should kill you. Dammit, I really should.”

  “Go ahead. But if you do—you kill yourself.”

  Steve’s hand lingered a moment longer on the zipper of the vinyl bag, then slowly released it.

  “All right,” he whispered in the voice of a beaten man. “All right, God damn you. I’ll do it your way. I’ll go along.”

  As always upon the consummation of a sale, Jack took a deep, contented breath and found life good.

  Ahead, Kirstie steered the dinghy south, piloting it toward the dock. Steve swung to port and followed. The eastern shore of Pelican Key passed by, palm trees and casuarinas and the white beach where Jack remembered encountering Kirstie early this morning.

  Hell, he wished he’d killed her then. It would have been so good, having her on the coral sand, in the warm shallows, before the newly risen sun.

  Steve seemed to read his thoughts.

  “She can’t get hurt,” he said, not needing to identify whom he meant.

  The words were spoken with firmness; that much, at least, was not negotiable.

  “Of course not,” Jack answered easily.

  “I mean it. I’m serious.”

  “It’s not a problem. Don’t worry about it.”

  “If you even touch her—”

  “I won’t.”

  “If you do”—Steve tightened his hold on the throttle stick, squeezing it in a rigid death grip that bled his knuckles white—“I’ll use that gun. I swear to Christ I will.”

  “Look, chill out, as we used to say in the Big Orange. I’m not after your wife. Not anymore.” Jack managed an insouciant shrug. “Plenty more like her on the islands, anyway.”

  Steve winced. “No. No more like her.” He looked away, toward the turquoise water blurring past, catching and reflecting the light in a shifting scintillant display. “It’ll be hard ... giving her up. Never thought I’d ... have to do that.”

  “Sure it’ll be hard. But it would be harder still to face her from the wrong side of a visitor’s cubicle in a penitentiary for the next forty years.”

  Steve didn’t answer. He appeared to be realizing that his life—his safe, comfortable, respectably ordinary life—had ended today.

  “All right.” Jack spoke briskly, confidently; he was now in full and unquestioned command of the situation. “Here’s the plan. We’ll reveal nothing to your wife. Are there any sleeping pills in the house?”

  Steve shook free of his thoughts. “Yes. I’ve had some rough nights since I started worrying about all this. Kirstie doesn’t know I take them.”

  “Good. Very good. Tonight, after dinner, you’ll mix a few of those pills into her coffee. Once she’s asleep, she can be tied up. We’ll lock the dog in the guest bedroom. Then tomorrow we deal with Pice.”

  “Deal with him how?”

  “We won’t inflict any permanent injury. Just overpower the man and restrain him. By the time anyone arrives at the island looking for him, we’ll be in the Bahamas.”

  Steve lowered his head. “When Kirstie wakes up ... when she finds out what I’ve done ...”

  “She’ll cry. She’ll scream. But she’ll survive, buddy. People do. And so will we.”

  Some residue of Steve’s earlier contempt surfaced briefly in his features. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? Your own survival?”

  “Sure. And the same is true for you. Otherwise, why haven’t you shot us both?” He showed Steve a knowing, benevolent smile. “Don’t feel bad, Stevie. Nobody’s a hero, except in the movies. You should have learned that lesson by now.”

  Steve said nothing to that. He was staring past Jack, at the runabout now easing up to the dock, at Kirstie as she stopped the motor and reached for the ladder, her movements swift and unconsciously graceful, pleasing to watch.

  Jack enjoyed the sight for a moment, as he had enjoyed observing her stroll on the beach. Then he turned back to Steve, some smart and thoughtless remark riding on his lips.

  The comment died unspoken. Even Jack, not the most sensitive of men, knew enough to keep silent now.

  Behind the sunstruck lenses of his glasses, Steve’s eyes ran wet with tears.

  24

  Albert Dance, father of Jack, had died four years ago, at the age of sixty-six. Social Security records listed his last address as a retirement community in Fort Lauderdale.

  Briefly, Lovejoy had allowed himself to speculate that Jack had visited his father often. Being familiar with Fort Lauderdale, he’d gone to ground there.

  A phone conversation with the director of the retirement home killed that slight hope. Jack, she reported, had never come to see his father. Not once.

  “Do you happen to know who administered Mr. Dance’s estate?” Lovejoy asked. There was a chance Jack had inherited a house or condo, perhaps in Florida: another possible hideout.

  “As I recall, it was his lawyer. We’ve probably still got his address on file.”

  Lovejoy’s pen scribbled busily, recording a street and number in Pompano Beach, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

  Dennis Gibson, the attorney in question, answered his own phone on the third ring. Yes, he remembered Al Dance. Yes, he’d probated the estate. Lovejoy arranged to meet with him in a half hour.

  “Think this will pan out?” Moore asked from the passenger seat of their borrowed motor-pool sedan, speeding north on Interstate 95.

  “In all probability, no.” Lovejoy shrugged. “But it’s slightly more productive than chewing our nails.”

  “Jack could be anywhere by now. Could have boarded another plane and left the country.”

  “From what we understand, he doesn’t have a passport.”

  “You don’t need a passport to enter Mexico or Canada.”

  “I know.”

  “Or Bermuda, the Bahamas ...”

  “I know.”

  “Besides,” Moore said, “he might have a phony passport. The rest of his escape was planned well enough. He’s got connections. He could have bought whatever paper he might need.”

  “Well, what the fuck do you want me to do about it?”

  Moore puffed up her cheeks and let the air out in a hiss. She was silent.

  Lovejoy didn’t speak until they were rolling down Thirty-sixth Street in Pompano Beach. Then he said, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m overtired, that’s all.”

  “We both are.”

  “And I’m ...”

  “Worried.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course. This isn’t exactly going to put you on the fast track, is it?”

  He blinked at her. “What?”

  “Your career. Drury must have told you—”

  “Is that what you think I’m concerned about?”

  “Well ... yeah.”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t had time to even consider it.”

  “You haven’t?”

  Her startled tone amused him. “I see. You think that’s all I would ever have time for. Peter Lovejoy, the ladder climber, the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat.”

  “No. That’s not how I—”

/>   “Sure it is. And ordinarily it would be true, too. On any other case I’d be primarily engaged in my normal cover-your-ass mode of operation. Which has worked quite well for me so far, I might add. Why do you think they made me task force leader? It wasn’t just seniority. I know how to play the game.”

  “But not now?”

  “Not now. This is different. This is Mister Twister. This is someone who kills for pleasure. Even animals don’t do that.” He turned to her. “What worries me is that he’s still on the loose. And ...” He swallowed. “And it’s my fault.”

  “If I’d been supervising the raid,” she said with unaccustomed gentleness, “I would have handled it the same way.”

  “Possibly. But you weren’t. I was. The failure was my responsibility. And if he kills again, while he’s on the run—that will be my responsibility, too.”

  “You’re being way too hard on yourself.”

  Lovejoy chuckled, a dry sound, without humor. “I was raised that way. Catholic school. Those nuns ... they really drill it into you. The four R’s. Religion being the fourth. I thought I was a lapsed Catholic till yesterday, during the raid. Then I found myself praying.”

  “My knowledge of Catholicism is fairly limited,” Moore said. “But doesn’t it involve forgiveness?”

  “Yes. But also punishment.”

  “You’ve punished yourself enough.”

  “Have I? I doubt that’s what the nuns would have said. Not under these circumstances.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “Jack Dance is the devil. And I let him get away.”

  * * *

  The door to Dennis Gibson’s office was open, his secretary apparently out to lunch.

  “Come in, come in,” Gibson said, rising from behind a clutter of legal documents on his desk. His face was a study in monochrome: jet black hair, gray steel-rimmed glasses, white beard. “You must be the feds.”

  Morse smiled. “That’s us.”

  Lovejoy was all business. “We don’t want to take up too much of your time, Mr. Gibson.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time to talk about Jack Dance.”

  Lovejoy and Moore seated themselves in response to the lawyer’s gesture of invitation.

  “I take it you’ve heard the news,” Lovejoy said.

  “Yes, I heard. Wasn’t as surprised as you might think, either. I knew that guy had a screw loose.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Let me start at the beginning.”

  He told his story quickly and well, with the practiced conciseness of someone trained to summarize complicated material.

  A widower of many years, Albert Dance took early retirement in 1985, sold his split-level in New Jersey, and moved south to the Gold Coast. For six years Gibson handled his affairs and investments.

  “And in all that time,” Gibson said, “his son Jack—his only child, only close living relative—never visited him, never wrote or called. Albert didn’t even know Jack’s phone number or address after a certain point.”

  He paused to sip his coffee and, with a touch of embarrassment at his belated hospitality, offered his guests the same refreshment. They declined.

  “Well, anyway, a heart attack killed Al in ’91. Completely unexpected; he’d seemed to be in excellent health for his age. He died intestate, unfortunately. I’d pressed him to make out a will, but he never seemed to get around to it. The court appointed me administrator of his estate. Jack, as Al’s sole issue, was entitled to everything. I had to track down his address in L.A., then call to inform him that his father was dead. His reply: ‘So?’ That’s it. He was interested in the estate, though. His father didn’t matter to him, but money did.”

  “How large an inheritance are we talking about?” Moore asked.

  “Three hundred thousand dollars, most of it in mutual funds and tax-free bonds. Jack instructed me to convert everything to cash, sell the furniture and family heirlooms at auction, and transfer the funds to his bank account. His checking account. The assets of a lifetime, and he meant to spend it all. But that wasn’t the worst part.”

  Lovejoy leaned forward. “Then what was?”

  “In going through his father’s effects, I’d found scrapbooks, photo albums. Pictures of his father in the Army, of his mother as a small girl. His parents’ wedding portraits. Vacation snapshots. I told Jack I’d send the items to him. He said not to bother. ‘Just throw all that shit out’—those, I believe, were his exact words.” Gibson shook his head. “No human feelings whatsoever. A true sociopath. It’s not a long step from there to serial murder, is it?”

  “No,” Lovejoy said quietly. “Not necessarily a very long step at all. So you’re saying that all the assets you transferred were liquid? No house, no condo, not even a time-share?”

  “Nothing like that. Albert was only renting his apartment in the retirement complex. He owned no real estate.”

  Lovejoy moved to rise. “Very well, Mr. Gibson. Thank you for your time.”

  “Those scrapbooks and things,” Moore said without getting up. “Did you comply with Jack’s instructions?”

  Gibson smiled. “Couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought that would make me as bad as Jack.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “Kept them. Here, with my files.”

  “May we see them?”

  “I don’t see why not. Though I can’t imagine what you’d find in there to concern you.”

  “Vacation snapshots. We’re interested in places Jack would know about. Places he might go.”

  Gibson rummaged in a file cabinet and returned with four thick, leather-bound albums. Lovejoy and Moore took two apiece.

  Then there was silence, broken only by the flipping of cellophane sheets and stiff cardboard pages.

  “Here’s something.” Moore angled the scrapbook in her hands to show Lovejoy a collage of postcards. Mangrove islets, blue herons, hooked marlin: the Florida Keys.

  “Check the postmarks.”

  Moore peeled back the page’s acetate cover and removed the cards. “Islamorada. All of them. But the dates are different. The years, I mean. 1976, ’77, ’78 ...” She looked up. “August. Every time.”

  “It’s August now.” Lovejoy felt his fingertips tingle.

  Moore was reading the scribbled messages on the cards. “Jack went along on each trip. His father keeps referring to him. ‘Jack and Steve and I took the boat out yesterday ...’ Wonder who this Steve was.”

  “Personally, I’m more interested in the boat,” Lovejoy said.

  “Oh, I can tell you about that,” Gibson broke in. “Al owned it for years, then finally sold it shortly before his retirement. Had some good times on that boat. I can’t recall the name …”

  Lovejoy, studying the photo album in his hands, plucked a snapshot from its cellophane pocket and held it up. “Would this help?”

  A man in his late forties—an older, heftier version of Jack Dance—posed on the deck of a flybridge cruiser. On the hull, part of the name was readable: light fan.

  “Yes,” Gibson said. “I remember now. The Light Fantastic. But Al never mentioned any trips to the Keys. Guess he didn’t want to bring up anything that would remind him of Jack.”

  “Do you know who bought the boat? Where it’s berthed now?”

  “No, I didn’t handle that transaction. But I can give you the name of a tax attorney Al had retained in New Jersey prior to relocating. He might know.”

  Gibson went back to his file cabinet. Lovejoy and Moore continued to turn pages.

  “Look at this.” Lovejoy tossed a snapshot into Moore’s lap.

  At the end of a pier, near a disdainful pelican roosting on a post, stood a teenage Jack Dance: longhaired, muscular, shirtless, smiling a smile of easy confidence, eyes concealed behind mirrored sunglasses.

  “He could be any kid,” Moore whispered, then lifted her eyebrows, surprised at herself. “For some reason I wouldn’t have expected that.”

  St
anding at Jack’s side was another boy of the same age. He wore a New York Giants T-shirt, loose on his gangly frame, and prescription eyeglasses, the thick lenses shrinking his eyes. His hair was cut shorter than Jack’s, his smile less natural, suggesting the self-conscious embarrassment of someone nervous around cameras.

  “Steve?” Moore wondered.

  “Could be.”

  Gibson gave Lovejoy a slip of paper filled out in his neat hand. “This is the lawyer Al used. Wallace Hardy of Montclair, New Jersey. May have retired by now. Unfortunately, I have only his business address and phone number, so you may have trouble tracking him down.”

  Lovejoy smiled. “That’s what they pay us for.”

  Back in the sedan, rushing south on 95, Moore used the car phone to dial Hardy’s number. She got a video-rental store. New Jersey information listed no Wallace Hardy in Montclair.

  “Best option is to let the New Jersey field office handle it,” Lovejoy said. “They’ll find him if he’s still alive.”

  “Think Jack bought that boat from his father?”

  “Improbable, given the fact that the two of them were obviously estranged. Then again, Albert sold the boat before he ever met Gibson. There’s at least a small chance that he and Jack were still on friendly terms at that time.”

  “If he did get hold of the Light Fantastic, and had it berthed in south Florida—

  “It could explain why he came here. But all of this is strictly hypothetical. With luck, New Jersey will be able to give us some facts.”

  “I’ll call them.”

  “They can reach us at the car-phone number when they have to. I don’t plan on going back to the office.”

  Moore looked at him. “Islamorada?”

  Lovejoy nodded, eyes on the road. “Islamorada.”

  25

  Funny how it felt to have your world collapse.

  Steve lay in bed, fully clothed, stretched supine on the taut bedspread; he hadn’t bothered to climb under the covers. With empty eyes he gazed at the ceiling, whitewashed with afternoon sun rays, speckled with the gently waving shadows of palm fronds.

  Somewhere, either in the room or just beyond the open window, a solitary insect droned. It sounded like the hum of a distant lawn mower in his Connecticut neighborhood, a Saturday morning sound.