A Quarter for a Kiss

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Rig did as I asked. Sure enough, both times, as Dianne named the drop points, she reached up and blocked her mouth with her hand—once by fixing her sunglasses, the second time by smoothing the scarf over her hair. The FBI mikes were good, but they weren’t perfect. Dianne must’ve known she could block the sound by blocking her face.

  Tom stood and began pacing.

  “Callie’s right,” he said suddenly. “If this woman were all that smart, she would’ve held their meeting walking around between all of those rocks. We could’ve caught snippets of what they said, maybe, but for us to catch the entire conversation, we needed her to be on the beach and to be stationary. And that’s what she gave us.”

  Rig turned around in his chair and looked from Tom to me.

  “So what are you insinuating?” he asked. “That she had a death wish? That she wanted to be caught or killed?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “Fast-forward to the scene at the boat, where your people move in to make the arrest. This is after she went home and came back out again.”

  He did as I asked. Once we had video of her emerging from the truck and walking toward the Enigma, I had him put it on slow motion. I leaned forward and studied the screen.

  “Now look at her,” I said. “At the way she stands. At the way she walks. Do you see it?”

  The men were silent until Tom sucked in his breath and whispered, “You’re right.”

  “What is it?” Rig asked.

  “Keep watching,” I told him. “You’ll see.”

  In slow motion the agent appeared from behind the barrel, holding out his gun. Dianne started to surrender, but the goon practically tackled her and threw her on the boat. Once there, as it began speeding away, he stayed flat while she struggled to get up.

  “There!” I said. “Freeze.”

  Rig hit the button. On the screen in front of us was the image of a woman, taken from behind, trying to stand. Her skirt was askew, her legs bare.

  There was no scar on her thigh.

  “The woman killed in the boat explosion today,” I said, “was not Dianne Streep.”

  “So who was she?” Craig asked as we stared at the image on the screen.

  “I think her name was Sunshine,” I replied sadly. “Or Freebird. I don’t know if she had made up her mind by then or not.”

  “Oh, man,” Tom whispered. “How it all falls into place, huh?”

  Vividly, I could picture Larry at Miss Lucy’s the night before, romancing a woman who was old enough to be his mother. How excited he must have been when he first found her in the bar. The fact that she had no friends here yet and no real connections back home had made her the perfect choice.

  No doubt, he had carried out his mission well—first by getting the woman drunk and then probably by dragging her to his mother’s home. There, they must have played with the perfect “look”—floral scarf, big sunglasses—that would turn her into Dianne’s double. And whether the woman had gone to the Enigma willingly or by force, I felt certain she didn’t know she was walking into her death. Dianne’s goons must have also been unaware that they were expendable.

  My biggest question was whether Jodi had in some way been a participant in this masquerade or if she had also been held somewhere against her will. I felt sick at the thought that she might have been inside the house when it blew up.

  “Now show us the satellite feed from the house,” I said to Rig.

  We watched the distant shot of the entire estate, then the zoom on the men at the helicopter, then the tighter zoom as they ran toward the house.

  “Freeze it there,” I said, and he did, catching the scene just as the two men looked up at the sky.

  “Can you make the image larger, get us a better view?”

  Rig tried, typing instructions, enhancing the contrast, enlarging the picture.

  “That’s about as good as it’s gonna get,” he said finally.

  Tom and I leaned close. It sure looked like Larry and Earl to me.

  “Those aren’t doubles,” I said certainly. “Do you really think Dianne killed her husband and son?”

  Tom leaned back in his seat, nervously tapping his foot.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. Do you know what they’re doing there?”

  “What?” Rig and I both asked.

  “They’re looking right at us,” he said. “They’re giving us a good, clear picture of their faces. They know we’ve got them on satellite, and they want to make sure we know it’s them.”

  “But why?”

  “Hit play,” Tom instructed, and we watched as the two men went inside the house. “Now watch.”

  The two men ran back into the house. The counter ticked up an excruciating ten seconds. Then the house blew up.

  My head snapped back, jarred as if it were just happening again. I didn’t understand what we were seeing—but I knew it wasn’t real.

  Somehow, those two men had not died in that explosion.

  Forty-Five

  We raced across the island in two cars, Tom and I leading the way with Craig following behind. Rig had needed to stay behind and keep an eye on the command center, and as we left, he was attempting to contact Agent Holt to tell him our theory about Dianne and Sunshine.

  We didn’t have much of a theory yet about the other two—except that somehow they had escaped that fiery blast. They must have had a preplanned escape route, a quick way into the front door and back out some other exit. Because the satellite had been zoomed in on the men, we didn’t have a shot of the entire building. My guess was that they ran in the front door, ran out a back door, and somehow escaped from the top of the mountain unnoticed because of the distraction of the fire. They had either rapelled down the rock wall, or they somehow snuck around the perimeter of the property until they were able to run down the private road to the beach. They’d probably had a boat waiting for them there—and then they had sailed away unseen.

  I was determined to find proof they had left the building alive—and maybe find out if Jodi was still alive somewhere in the process.

  A St. John cop was stationed at the base of the driveway when we arrived there, lights flashing but siren off. He checked our ID and radioed it into Rig at the command center. Once we had the okay, he let us through. It had grown quite dark by this time, but Tom was a good driver, even with his bandaged hands, and he handled the myriad twists and turns of the driveway with ease.

  As we neared the top, we saw that two agents were there, still processing the scene, and they had mounted three big work lights from a generator. Craig had been in contact with them on the drive over, and they came and met our cars when we pulled to a stop behind their van, ready to examine this new possibility. The night air was chilly, and I pulled on my sweater before getting out of the car.

  While the men concentrated on the back side of the property, looking for evidence or footprints or other oddities, I decided to focus on how Earl and Larry could have gone all the way down to the beach without being seen. I started in the place where I thought they might have run from and then tracked it myself, pretending that I was trying to get away from my burning house in broad daylight as it was descended upon by law enforcement officers.

  I didn’t see any signs that they had been there, but I kept my eyes open as I went, trying to put myself in their shoes. How had they done it? I felt certain they had given the tennis court a wide berth, so I did the same, coming dangerously close to the rock wall before realizing it. I stepped quickly back in surprise and—whack!

  “Ow!”

  Just like Tom, I had crashed into the metal pipe that protruded from the ground. Unlike him, however, I fell all the way down, and I stayed there for a minute clutching my toe. Ouch! I wouldn’t be surprised if it were broken.

  “Callie? Are you okay?”

  Tom had heard me yelp and came running. Now he knelt next to me in the grass, ready to be my knight in shining armor.

  “Would you believe it, I hit the s
ame stupid pipe you did? Gosh, it hurts.”

  “Take your shoe off. Let’s have a look.”

  I did as he instructed, not surprised to see that the toe was swollen. It wasn’t, however, dislocated or cut, so I pulled my sock and shoe back on and then sat there for a moment, feeling it throb.

  “Shall I kiss it and make it better?” he asked softly.

  I put one hand to my mouth.

  “No, but ow! Ow! My lip!” I whispered. “It hurts, it hurts.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” he whispered back.

  We were well in the shadows, hidden by the greenery that surrounded the tennis court. And though a million and one things were vying for our attention, somehow it didn’t seem wrong to take a moment and simply reconnect.

  Tom kissed me lightly at first, and then more deeply before we slipped into an embrace, just sitting there on the grass in the dark, rocking back and forth, holding on to one another. I was overwhelmed with emotion as I thought of all the times I had done investigations by myself with no one around to help me with the bumps and the bruises. This investigation, conversely, had been done as a team. If Tom never investigated another case with me again, I would always be grateful for the time we had shared on this one.

  The sky grew suddenly a bit darker, and then we heard one of the agents, from across the lawn.

  “Hey, Craig, why’d you turn off the—”

  His voice stopped with a grunt and then a thud.

  Eyes wide, I looked at Tom, who also seemed to sense that something wasn’t right. We didn’t speak but instead slowly and silently pressed ourselves down into the grass, side by side. My heart pounded in my throat.

  What was going on?

  We listened to a sudden, familiar sound, trying to place it. Then I realized we were hearing duct tape being pulled from a roll. We couldn’t see anything from where we were, but eventually the noise stopped. Another work light went out.

  Carefully, I raised up on my elbows and inched forward, both to reach some better cover and to see if I could see anything. I got to the thicker brush and then waved at Tom to do the same, which he did.

  Silently, he motioned that he was going to crawl along to the far end and see what he could see. I nodded at him even as my mind screamed at him not to move. As he went I ran my hands along the ground searching for some sort of weapon. The best I could find was a small rock to hold in my fist.

  After an excruciating few minutes, Tom crawled back to me. He put two hands over my ear and whispered as quietly as was humanly possible.

  “The agent’s unconscious,” he said. “There’s duct tape around his hands and feet—and over his eyes and his mouth.”

  My own eyes widened in horror.

  “There’s someone here,” he added. “Doing something over in the rubble.”

  Together we inched our way along the shrubbery until we could see. We had to look through the branches of a bush, but at least there was one work light still on, behind the person, illuminating him as he worked. I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but it made a fair amount of noise.

  I grabbed Tom by the sleeve, pointing to his white shirt and the way it shone in the moonlight. Silently, he pulled it off, revealing a navy blue T-shirt underneath.

  He looked at me questioningly, but I shook my head, not knowing what we should do next. I thought about taking the chance of making a call on my cell phone, but then I realized I had left it in the car. I cupped my hands around Tom’s ear and whispered, “Just stay put for now.”

  We huddled there in the darkness, side by side, for at least ten minutes. Finally, I chanced sitting up a bit for a better viewpoint, and I realized what we were seeing: It was Zach, clearing away rubble to get to something underneath. With a final clink and then a groan, he seemed to be opening a door from the ground. As it creaked open, voices came spilling out.

  They were hushed but angry, and Tom and I watched in amazement as Larry, Earl, and then Dianne came walking up out of the very earth. We couldn’t understand every word of their angry whispers, but we heard enough to know that Zach had waited a bit too long to come and release them from wherever they had been trapped. They were coughing a lot, and I could tell they were having difficulty breathing.

  “You knew there would only be five or six hours of air in there because of the power-off dampers,” Dianne cried. “We could’ve asphyxiated!”

  “This place has been crawling with federal agents!” Zach snapped back, walking suddenly in our direction. “What was I supposed to do?”

  He kicked at the agent on the ground, who must have still been unconscious because he didn’t react.

  “Oh, no,” Dianne said, seeing the agent for the first time.

  “Hey, at least I got you a new boat like you said. It’s fast and powerful, with plenty of room for the stuff. You’ll be happy with it.”

  “You came here on it?” Dianne asked.

  “Yeah. It’s tied up at the beach.”

  They all stood around and looked down at the agent on the ground.

  “If they wake up and hear our voices, they’ll know we’re still alive,” Larry said. “We’ve got to kill them.”

  “No!” Dianne cried.

  I wasn’t sure if that was her conscience speaking or if she just knew that murdering FBI agents would be a very stupid move.

  “Why don’t we just lock ’em up in the back of their van,” Earl said. “Maybe when they wake up, they’ll think it was done by some looters.”

  They all seemed to agree, and so together they worked to put all three taped-up agents into the back of the FBI’s van. When they were finished, Zach walked back toward us, through the gate and onto the tennis court.

  “I thought you said I’d be able to take the helicopter from here,” he said, furious at the state of the machine that had been dismantled on the pavement. As he walked closer to it to inspect it, I held my breath. We were a mere 10 or 15 feet away, hidden only by the shadows and some shrubbery.

  “Let’s go people,” Earl whispered sharply. “We’ve got to get all the paintings down to the boat.”

  “I’m not helping you,” Zach said. “I have to put this bird back together again.”

  He went to work on the driver’s seat first, putting it into place and then cursing and muttering as he searched for the bolts that would hold it there. At least he seemed to know what he was doing, but my biggest fear was that he would drop a tool and it would roll in our direction.

  Behind him Larry, Earl, and Dianne seemed to start an almost assembly line procedure across the wide lawn. We couldn’t see everything that was happening, but it looked as though Dianne was bringing rectangular, handled cases up from the basement where they had been and Earl was taking them from her at the top of the stairs and running them out to Larry. Larry waited until he was completely loaded before starting down the private road to the beach. Zach had come here to get them by boat, and that was how they would leave.

  Larry was winded when he came back up, and he walked out to the tennis court to speak to Zach.

  “Jodi’s tied up on the boat!” Larry whispered sharply. “Why haven’t you killed her yet?”

  “She’s got something I need first. Then I’ll do it.”

  “You should’ve killed her when you were supposed to,” Larry snapped. “She’s nothing but a liability.”

  “Just bring her with you the next time you come up. We’ll throw her in that back car.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then when we’re done here, I’ll get the keys off of one those agents and take her home.”

  “Home? Are you crazy?”

  Zach spun around angrily.

  “Look, Larry, we still haven’t found those bearer bonds. I’ll get rid of her as soon as she hands them over.”

  “I already searched the house,” Larry said. “I told you, they’re not there!”

  “Don’t worry,” Zach replied, “I have ways of getting it out of her. When I’m finished with her, I’ll kno
w exactly where she hid them. I’ll kill her as soon as the bonds are in my hands.”

  The men laughed.

  “No,” Dianne whispered sharply, her hands on her hips. “There’s already been too much killing, too much death. First my two men, then that Sunshine woman—”

  “Don’t forget the old guy in Florida,” Zach added.

  Dianne gasped.

  “What old guy? Who?”

  “Eli Gold,” Larry replied. “That private investigator.”

  “You killed him?” she asked, sounding as if she could hardly catch her breath. “When?”

  “Last Friday,” Larry said. “Zach lifted a Bushmaster semiautomatic from a gun store so we could make a long-distance shot.”

  Listening to them, I realized they didn’t know Eli had survived their attempt at murder. Dianne’s hands flew to her chest, and I thought she might faint. She staggered and Larry stepped forward to support her.

  “Come on, Mom, get over it. You said he was digging around where he shouldn’t have been, that his digging might tip off Rushkin. It seemed the quickest way to solve the problem.”

  “No,” Dianne cried. “I brought you to Florida with me so you could search his house for any notes or photos of me that he might have. We never spoke of killing!”

  “So what’s the big deal?” Larry asked. “He was a nobody.”

  “You don’t understand,” Dianne sobbed, shaking her head from side to side. “He wasn’t a ‘nobody.’”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Larry,” Dianne said, putting a hand to her son’s cheek. “Eli was your father.”

  Forty-Six

  Eli had a son.

  Larry was Dianne and Eli’s son.

  Tom pulled at my sleeve and, reluctantly, I followed, crawling backward from the brush and toward the side of the cliff.

  “Eli has a son!” I whispered.

  “I heard. Focus, Callie. We’ve got to move now.”

  I nodded, trying to pay attention as Tom said that the only way one of us could leave without being seen was to go straight down the rock wall.

  “I’m going to climb down and swim around the point and go for help,” Tom whispered. “You’ve got to promise me, Callie, that you’ll stay where they won’t see you. You’re dead if they spot you.”