“Your daughter’s birthday?” Ellie asked, trying a hunch.
Dennis Stratton shook his head. “My first IPO.”
Chapter 20
JUNIOR AGENT. Ellie seethed as the butler closed the front door behind her and she stepped onto the long pebbled drive.
She’d seen a lot of big-time houses over the years. Problem was, they were usually filled with big-time assholes. Just like this rich clown. She was reminded that this was what made her want to leave Sotheby’s in the first place. Rich prima donnas and jerks like Dennis Stratton.
Ellie climbed into her office Crown Vic and called in to Special Agent in Charge Moretti, her superior at C-6, the Theft and Fraud division. She left word that she was headed to check out some homicides. As Lawson had said, five people were dead. And 60 million in art had disappeared the same night. Or at least 40 . . .
It was only a short drive from Stratton’s over to the Brazilian Court. Ellie had actually been there once when she had first moved down, for brunch at the Café Boulud, with her eighty-year-old aunt, Ruthie.
At the hotel, she badged her way past the police and the press vans gathered outside and made her way to room 121 on the first floor. The Bogart Suite. It reminded Ellie that Bogart and Bacall, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Garbo had all stayed at this hotel.
A Palm Beach cop was guarding the door. She flashed her FBI ID to the usual look—a long, scrutinizing stare at the photo and then her again—as if the cop were some skeptical bouncer checking fake IDs.
“It’s real.” Ellie let her eyes linger on him, slightly annoyed. “I’m real, too.”
Inside, there was a large living room decorated smartly in a sort of a tropical Bombay theme: British Colonial antique furniture, reproduction amaryllis prints, palm trees waving outside every window. A Crime Scene tech was spraying the coffee table, trying to dig up prints.
Ellie’s stomach shifted. She hadn’t done many homicides. Actually, she hadn’t done any—only tagged along as part of her training at Quantico.
She stepped into the bedroom. It didn’t matter that her badge said FBI, there was something really creepy about this: the room, completely undisturbed, precisely as it had been at the time of a grisly murder last night. C’mon, Ellie, you’re FBI.
She panned the room and didn’t have even the slightest idea what she was looking for. A sexy backless evening gown was draped across the rumpled bed. Dolce & Gabbana. A pair of expensive heels on the floor. Manolos. The gal had some money—and taste!
Something else caught her eye. Some loose change in a plastic evidence bag, already tagged. Something else—a golf tee. A black one, with gold lettering.
Ellie held the evidence Baggie close. She could make out lettering on the golf tee: Trump International.
“The FBI training tour isn’t scheduled for another forty minutes,” came a voice from behind, startling her.
Ellie spun around and saw a tan, good-looking guy in a sport jacket with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the bedroom door.
“Carl Breen,” the jacket said. “Palm Beach PD. Violent Crimes. Relax,” he went on, smiling, “it’s a compliment. Most of the feds who come through here look like they were stamped out of officers training school.”
“Thanks,” Ellie said, smoothing out her pants, adjusting her holster, which was digging into her waist.
“So what brings the FBI to our little playpen? Homicide’s still a local statute, isn’t it?”
“Actually, I’m looking into a robbery. An art theft, from one of the big estates down the road. Up the road, I guess.”
“Art detail, huh?” Breen nodded with a kind of a grin. “Just checking up that the local drones are holding up our end?”
“Actually, I was looking to see if any of these murders tied in, in any way,” Ellie answered.
Breen took his hands out of his pockets. “Tied in to the art theft. Let’s see. . . .” He glanced around. “There’s a print over there on the wall. That the kind of thing you’re looking for?”
Ellie felt a slap of blood rush to her cheeks. “Not quite, but it’s good to know you have an eye for quality, Detective.”
The detective grinned to let her know he was just kidding. He had a nice smile, actually. “Now if you said Sex Crimes, we’d be humming. Some Palm Beach social whirl. She’s been camped here for a couple of months. People going in and out every day. I’m sure when we find out who’s footing the bill, it’ll be some trust fund or something.”
He led Ellie down the corridor to the bathroom. “You may want to hold your breath. I’m pretty sure van Gogh never painted anything like this.”
There was a series of crime-scene photos taped to the tile walls. Horrific ones. The deceased. The poor girl’s eyes wide and her cheeks inflated out like tires. Naked. Ellie tried not to wince. She was very pretty, she thought. Exceptional. “She was raped?”
“Jury’s still out,” the Palm Beach cop said, “but see those sheets over there? Those stains don’t look like applesauce. And the preliminary on the scene indicates she was dilated like she’d had sex minutes before. Call it a guess, but I’m figuring whoever did this was on some terms with her.”
“Yeah.” Ellie swallowed. Clearly Breen was right. She was probably wasting her time there.
“The tech on the scene pegged it between five and seven o’clock last night. What time your robbery take place?”
“Eight-fifteen,” Ellie said.
“Eight-fifteen, huh?” Breen smiled and elbowed her, friendly, not condescending. “Can’t say I’m much of an art expert, Special Agent, but I’m thinking, this tie-in of yours might just be a bit of a reach. What about you?”
Chapter 21
SHE FELT A LITTLE BIT like a jerk. Angry at herself, embarrassed. The Palm Beach detective had actually tried to be helpful.
As Ellie climbed back in her car, her cheeks flushed and grew hot again. Art detail. Did it have to be so totally obvious that she was out of her element?
Next was the run-down house in Lake Worth, just off the Interstate, where four people in their twenties and early thirties had been killed, execution-style. This one was a totally different scene. Much worse. A quadruple homicide always got national attention. Press vans and police vehicles still blocked off a two-block radius around the house. It seemed that every cop and Crime Scene tech in south Florida was buzzing inside.
As soon as she stepped inside the yellow shingled house, Ellie had trouble breathing. This was really bad. The outlines of three of the victims were chalked out on the floor of the sparsely furnished bedroom and kitchen. Blotches of blood and stuff Ellie knew was even worse were still sprayed all over the floors and thinly painted walls. A wave of nausea rolled in her stomach. She swallowed. This is one hell of a long way from an MFA.
Across the room, she spotted Ralph Woodward from the local office. Ellie went over, glad to find a familiar face.
He seemed surprised to see her. “What’re you thinking, Special Agent,” he asked, rolling his eyes around the stark room, “slap a few pictures on the walls, a plant here and there, and you’d never know the place, right?”
Ellie was getting tired of hearing this crap. Ralph wasn’t such a bad guy really, but jeez.
“Thinking drugs, myself.” Ralph Woodward shrugged. “Who else kills like this?”
A review of their IDs pegged the victims from the Boston area. They all had sheets—petty crimes and B-class felonies. Break-ins, auto thefts. One of them had worked part-time at the bar at Bradley’s, a hangout near the Intracoastal in West Palm. Another parked cars at one of the local country clubs. Another, Ellie winced when she read the report, was female.
She spotted Palm Beach’s head of detectives, Vern Lawson, coming into the house. He chatted for a second with a few officers, then caught her eye. “A bit out of your field, Special Agent Shurtleff?”
He sidled up to Woodward as if they were old chums. “Got a minute, Ralphie?”
Ellie watched as the two men huddl
ed near the kitchen. It occurred to her that maybe they were talking about her. Fuck ’em, if they are. This was her case. No one was bouncing her. Sixty million in stolen art, or whatever the hell it was, wasn’t exactly petty theft.
Ellie went up to a series of crime photos. If staring at Tess McAuliffe in the tub had made her stomach turn, this almost brought up breakfast. One victim had been dropped right at the front door, shot through the head. The guy with the red hair was shot at the kitchen table. Shotgun. Two were killed in the bedroom, the heavyset one through the back, maybe trying to flee; and the girl, huddled in the corner, probably begging for her life, a straight-on blast. Bullet and shotgun marks were numbered all over the walls.
Drugs? Ellie took a breath. Who else kills like this?
Feeling a little useless, she started to make her way to the door. They were right. This wasn’t her terrain. She also felt a need to get some air.
Then she saw something on the kitchen counter that made her stop.
Tools.
A hammer. A straight-edge file. A box cutter.
Not just tools. They wouldn’t have meant a thing to someone else, but to Ellie, they were standard utensils for a task she’d seen performed a hundred times. For opening a frame.
Jesus, Ellie started thinking.
She headed back to the crime photos again. Something clicked. Three male victims. Three male thieves at Stratton’s. She looked more closely at the photos. Something she was just seeing. If she hadn’t been at both crime scenes, she wouldn’t have noticed.
Each of the male victims had been wearing the same black laced shoes.
Ellie forced her mind back to the black-and-white security film at Casa Del Océano. Then she glanced around the room.
A dozen or so cops, guarding the scene. She looked more closely. Her heart started to race.
Police shoes.
Chapter 22
THE ROBBERS HAD BEEN dressed as cops, right? Score one for the fine-arts grad.
Ellie glanced around the crowded room. She saw Woodward over by the kitchen, still huddled with Lawson. She pushed her way through. “Ralph, I think I found something. . . .”
Ralph Woodward had that easygoing southern way of brushing you off with a smile. “Ellie, just give me a second. . . .” Ellie knew he didn’t take her seriously.
All right, if they wanted her to go it alone, she would.
Ellie dropped a badge on one of the local homicide detectives who was identified as primary on the scene. “I was wondering if you guys found anything interesting? In the closets, or the car? Police uniforms, maybe a Maglite flashlight?”
“Crime lab took the car,” the detective said. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Of course, Ellie said to herself. They weren’t really looking. Or maybe the perps ditched them. But this feeling she had was building.
There were chalk outlines and flags identifying each victim. And evidence bags containing whatever they had on them.
Ellie started in the bedroom. Victim number three: Robert O’ Reilly. Shot in the back. She held up the evidence bag. Just a few dollars. A wallet. Nothing more. Next, the girl. Diane Lynch. The same wedding ring as Robert O’Reilly. She emptied out her purse. Just some keys, a receipt from Publix. Nothing much.
Shit.
Something urged her to go on, even though she had no idea what she was looking for. The male at the kitchen table. Michael Kelly. Blown back against the wall, but still sitting in his chair. She picked up the plastic evidence bag next to him. Car keys, money clip with about fifty bucks.
There was also a tiny piece of paper, folded up. She moved it in the bag. Looked like numbers.
She stretched on a pair of latex gloves and took the piece of paper out of the bag. She let the scrap unfold.
A surge of validation rushed through her.
10-02-85.
More than just numbers. Dennis Stratton’s alarm code.
Chapter 23
I DROVE NORTH, straight through the night, pushing my old Bonneville at a steady seventy-five on I-95. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between me and Palm Beach. I’m not sure I even blinked until I hit the Georgia-
South Carolina line.
I pulled off the highway at a place called Hardeeville, a truck stop with a huge billboard sign that advertised YOU’RE PASSING THE BEST SHORT STACK IN THE SOUTH.
Exhausted, I filled up the car and took an empty booth in the restaurant. I looked around, seeing only a few bleary-eyed truckers gulping coffee or reading the paper. A jolt of fear. I didn’t know if I was a wanted man or not.
A red-haired waitress with DOLLY on her nametag came up and poured me a sorely needed cup of coffee. “Goin’ far?” she asked in an amiable southern drawl.
“I sure hope so,” I replied. I didn’t know if my picture was on the news or if someone meeting my eye would recognize me. But the smell of maple and biscuits got to me. “Far enough that those pancakes sure sound good.”
I ordered a coffee to go with them and went into the men’s room. A heavyset trucker squeezed past me on his way out. Alone, I stared in the mirror and was stunned by the face looking back at me: haggard, bloodshot eyes, scared. I realized I was still in the pitted-out T-shirt and jeans I’d been wearing when I tripped the alarms the night before. I splashed cold water over my face.
My stomach groaned, making an ugly noise. It dawned on me that I hadn’t eaten since lunch with Tess the previous day.
Tess . . . Tears started in my eyes again. Mickey and Bobby and Barney and Dee. God, I wished I could just turn back the clock and have every one of them alive. In one horrifying night, everything had changed.
I grabbed a USA Today at the counter and sat back in the booth. As I spread the paper on the table, I noticed that my hands were shaking. Reality was starting to hit. The people I trusted most in my life were dead. I had relived the nightmare of the previous night a hundred times in the past six hours—and each time it got worse.
I started to leaf through the paper. I wasn’t sure if I was hoping I would find something or not. Mostly, a lot of articles on the situation in Iraq and the economy. The new interest-rate cut.
I turned the page and my eyes nearly popped out of my head.
DARING ART THEFT AND MURDER SPREE IN PALM BEACH
I folded back the page.
The posh and stately resort town of Palm Beach was shattered last night by a string of violent crimes, beginning with the drowning of an attractive woman in her hotel suite, followed by a brazen break-in and the theft of several priceless paintings from one of the town’s most venerable mansions, and culminating hours later in the execution-style murder of four people in a nearby town.
Police say they have no direct leads in the brutal series of crimes, and at this point do not know if they are related.
I didn’t understand. Theft of priceless paintings . . . Dee said the job had been a bust.
I read on. The names of the people killed. Normally, it’s just abstract, names and faces. But this was so horribly real. Mickey, Bobby, Barney, Dee . . . and, of course, Tess.
This is no dream, Ned. This is really happening.
The article went on to describe how three valuable works of art were stolen from the forty-room mansion, Casa Del Océano, owned by businessman Dennis Stratton. Valued at a possible $60 million, the theft of the unnamed paintings was one of the largest art heists in U.S. history.
I couldn’t believe it.
Stolen? We had been set up. We’d been set up royally.
My pancakes came, and they did look great, as advertised. But I was no longer hungry.
The waitress filled my coffee and asked, “Everything all right, hon?”
I tried my best to smile and nod, but I couldn’t answer. A new fear was invading my brain.
They’ll make the connection to me.
Everything was going to come out. I wasn’t reasoning very well, but one thing was clear: Once the police went to Sollie, they would make my car.
Chapter 24
FIRST THING, I had to get rid of my car.
I paid the check and drove the Bonneville down the road into a strip mall, where I tossed the plates into the woods and cleaned out anything that could be traced to me. I walked back into town and stood in front of a tiny Quonset hut that was the town’s bus depot. Man, paranoia was now my middle name.
An hour later, I was on a bus to Fayetteville, North Carolina—headed north.
I guess I knew where I was going all along. At a lunch counter at the Fayetteville station, I chomped down a desperately needed burger and fries, avoiding the eyes of everyone I saw, as if people were taking a mental inventory of my face.
Then I hopped a late-night Greyhound heading to all points north: Washington, New York.
And Boston. Where the hell else would I go?
That’s where the score started, right?
Mostly I just slept and tried to figure out what I was going to do when I got there. I hadn’t been home in four years now. Since my Big Fall from Grace. I knew my father was sick now, and even before, when he wasn’t, he wasn’t exactly the Rock of Gibraltar. Not if you count convictions of everything from receiving stolen goods to bookmaking, and three stints up at the Souz in Shirley.
And Mom . . . Let’s just say she was always there. My biggest fan. At least, after my older brother, John Michael, was killed robbing a liquor store. That left just me and my younger brother, Dave. You won’t be following in anybody’s footsteps, Ned, she made me promise early on. You don’t have to be like your father—or your big brother. She bailed me out of trouble half a dozen times. She picked me up from the Catholic Youth Organization hockey practices at midnight.
That was the real problem now. I didn’t look forward to seeing her face when I sneaked my way home. I was going to break her heart.
I changed buses twice. In Washington and New York. At every sudden stop my heart would clutch, freeze. This is it, I figured. There was a roadblock, and they were going to pull me off! But there never were any roadblocks. Towns and states passed by, and none too fast for me.
Lifeguard Page 5