Florida Heat

by Rainy Kirkland

  “He was arrested for battery?”

  “Yep, got into it with his then girlfriend at one of the neighborhood bars. Bartender called the police and the girlfriend was pissed enough to press charges.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Whoa is right. I pulled his sheet and he shouldn’t have been drinking at all, let alone being drunk. He violated numbers four and five of the standard conditions of probation and violated special condition number twelve, so I initiated a warrant and walked it through. That should help keep his ass in jail when he gets out of the hospital.”

  “Good catch, Jo. That’s going to make a difference.”

  “Well, actually, Cheryl caught it when she pulled the police log.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kate said. “An arrest is still going to add weight when he goes before the judge. Look, let me jump in the shower and get rid of these clothes. Any chance you’ve got food? I missed lunch again.”

  “And everyone wonders how you keep that model figure of yours. Go grab your shower. I already started a salad big enough to share. It’ll be ready when you are. And I want to know what happened today,” she called as Kate walked away. “And by the way, when you movin’ out?”

  “The answer is when you learn to keep your ass out of trouble!” Kate called back.

  When Kate finally came into the kitchen she was wearing black pleated short shorts and a pink tube top. She grabbed the glass of tea and downed half the contents in one long gulp.

  “You’re going to get a brain-freeze headache if you do that again,” Jo cautioned.

  Kate shook her head. “I took a cold shower so this tastes great.” She dropped into a chair and pulled the salad bowl toward her plate. “Ah, mixed greens with leftovers, my favorite dish.”

  “So are you going to tell me what happened today or just sit there stuffing your face with salad?”

  “Hard to know where to start,” she said, taking another long drink of tea. “I think I already told you that when I saw Richard aka Ricky in the hospital yesterday, he claimed he didn’t know Sherry. Said he’d just picked her up on the corner to give her a ride. Well when Isaac and I were at the high school today talking to the students nobody was willing to say much. But after school I got a call from one of the girls.” Kate pulled her notebook from her bag. “A girl named Julie Finch.”

  “Hey, I know her. If it’s the kid I’m thinking of. Pretty girl, ah. . . , senior this year. She volunteered at the animal shelter the same Saturday I did. Nice kid.”

  “Well, Julie tells me that Sherry showed her a picture of her new boyfriend. The one she met on the Internet. And guess whose picture she picks out?”

  “That would be Ricky?”

  “And you win the trip to Maui. She said that Sherry told her and some of the other girls that she’d been dating him for a few weeks and he took her to special places.”

  “And would those special places be where they serve alcohol to underage teens?”

  “Probably, but yet to be proven. That’s on the to-do list.”

  “Okay, so far the day seems pretty successful.”

  “Well, next on the agenda, I get a text from Worm.”

  “Oh, ick.”

  “I swear if that man wasn’t so good at his job I’d campaign to have him fired. He can be so obnoxious.”

  “I know, but he really is brilliant. So what earth-shattering news did obnoxious Worm have today?”

  “It seems that Diana Harkins, the teacher from Christian’s school, was not killed in the car crash.”

  “What?” Jo almost came out of her chair.

  “Yeah, that’s just what I said. It turns out that Diana was dead before the crash.”

  “What? How? I don’t understand. Did she have a heart attack or stroke or something?”

  “Nope. She was poisoned. Somebody put ricin in her eye drops. When I talked with her earlier in the day she’d complained of eye allergies and I actually watched her put drops in her eyes twice.”

  “So she was slowly poisoning herself and didn’t know it?”

  Kate shook her head and took another bite of salad. “No, Worm said you couldn’t build a tolerance to ricin. The first time she used the drops with the poison was the last. So someone either switched her eye drop bottle or put the poison in the one she was using.”

  “Damn.” Jo sat back in her chair. “Just when you think you know what’s going on, all the pieces of the puzzle change.”

  “No kidding. And there’s more. After I get this info from Worm, I stop by the lab to see if they’ve been able to get anything from Danny’s computer.”

  “And did they figure out his password?”

  “Yep, ‘onlymine.’ That got a big laugh until they actually got inside. Your dear Danny Boy was supplementing his income by selling kiddy porn over the Internet.”

  “What a sleaze!” Jo stood and took her plate to the sink and dumped the rest of her dinner. “I swear if he wasn’t already dead I’d be tempted to shoot him myself.”

  “Don’t say that when there’s a police officer present,” Kate said.

  “Yeah, well it’s true.” Jo brought the pitcher of tea back to the table. “What kind of sick moron does that kind of stuff?”

  “Ah, that would be the sick morons we deal with every day.”

  Jo heaved a sigh. “Yea, and now you win the cruise to Jamaica. I hate to even ask this but were they able to identify any of the people in the pictures?”

  Kate nodded. “Danny himself was in some and it looks like little Christian might have been in others.”

  Jo’s face crumpled and she rubbed her hands over her eyes. “Goddamn it! Do you think that could have been what pushed Christian over the edge? Could he have been the one to poison his father?”

  “I actually don’t think so,” Kate said quietly. “It wouldn’t fit his profile. It’s rare for the victim to feel enough power to be able to pull off something like that. I’m still thinking he saw his mother do something. He wouldn’t want to say anything because he’d be protective of Aggie.”

  “Well, I said it before -- Danny wouldn’t have taken the responsibility for a child unless there was something in it for him. I just never thought it would be something like this. So what’s going to happen now?”

  “Since we suspect Christian has been taken out of state, the FBI is going to join in the hunt. They’re sending an agent down tomorrow.”

  “Is that good news or bad? I know you hate it when they swoop in and try to take over.”

  “I’ll call this good news. We just don’t have the resources to search for him out of state. Best I can do is stay in touch with the Amber Alert Coordinator, and that’s really not enough. Jo, we’ve got over 30,000 children reported missing just from last year.”

  “Here? In this country?” Jo gasped.

  “No, in this state. The numbers are staggering. I’d say we need all the help we can get on this one.”

  “Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Hey, maybe they’ll send somebody tall dark and handsome.”

  Kate laughed. “Yeah, right.”

  “And what about all those newspaper clippings from the strong box? Any luck there?”

  “Not on those. I had the tech make me copies and I brought them home. Thought later tonight I’d go through them again and see if I can make any sense out of why Danny would have kept something like that.”

  “I can help if you want.”

  Kate smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that but.…”

  “But what?”

  “Well, how would you like to go for a little ride first?”

  “Only if we can stop somewhere and get ice cream.” At the word ice cream Blitz jumped up from his spot on the floor and rushed over to put his paws on Kate’s lap.

  “Hey you,” Jo said. “I’m the one who fed you tonight.” Bella stood and gave herself a shake.

  “Want to take the whole family for a ride?” Jo laughed.

  “Not this time.” Kate’s voice was qui
et. “I’ve been mulling this over all day and I just can’t get my mind wrapped around what happened at the accident. I want to go to the lot and look at the cars again.”

  “I see, definitely not a family time moment. Okay you guys,” she said standing. “Not this time, but Mama will bring you a treat when she gets home.” She turned to Kate. “You want to go now before it gets dark?”

  “Thanks, you drive so we can have the top down. Then there will at least be something positive about this trip.”

  * * *

  Daylight was starting to fade by the time they reached the car lot. The sky blazed with brilliant shades of amber streaked with red. The overhead lights blinked on and Jo swatted at a gnat the size of a horsefly.

  “What a mess,” Jo said. “Are these the cars from that accident?”

  Kate walked slowly around the twisted metal of Diana’s black minivan. The front was accordion folded in on itself clear to the windshield, but miraculously the body of the car was mostly intact.

  “You know,” Kate said peering into the interior of the car, “I don’t think she’d have died in this crash. Her airbag deployed and there actually isn’t all that much damage to the interior. Sure she would have been banged up pretty good, but I think she might have made it.”

  Jo looked in from the other side of the car. “I think you’re right. The car would have been totaled, but the inside’s not that bad.” Straightening she looked over at the car Ricky had been driving.

  “And this Impala’s not that bad either,” she said, walking over to the second wreck.

  “My witnesses said they weren’t speeding. They just both veered into the middle of the intersection at the same time and smack.”

  “But Ricky shouldn’t have been drinking,” Jo said walking around to the passenger’s side. “I mean damn, the guy was already on probation.” She looked at Kate over the top of Ricky’s car. “You said that his injuries were not life threatening?”

  Kate peered inside from the driver’s side. “Broken arm, messed up shoulder. Got a broken nose and some facial scrapes, but that was probably from the airbag.”

  Jo poked her hand through the broken windshield on the passenger’s side. “So why wasn’t the kid wearing a seatbelt?”

  “Her name was Sherry,” Kate said quietly, reliving the scene. Sherry’s broken body had been completely ejected from the car.

  “But even if she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt,” Jo continued. “Wouldn’t the airbag have kept her from going through the windshield?”

  “It should have,” Kate refocused on the passenger’s side of the car. “What would make the air bag not deploy?” She looked at Jo.

  Carefully brushing glass pellets off the seat, Jo slipped into the car. With her fingers she pried at the edges of the airbag compartment. “Hey, get a screwdriver out of my trunk okay?”

  “Jo, be careful. If that thing springs open I don’t want you to end up with a broken nose.”

  Jo took the screwdriver and began to pry at the edges of the compartment. It popped open easily. She looked at the empty interior, then at Kate. “When does an airbag not deploy?”

  Kate looked at the opened compartment. “That would be when there isn’t an airbag? What the hell?” She watched Jo reach into the space and pull out a black leather-bound book the size of a diary. “I repeat, what the hell?”

  Jo handed the book to Kate then slowly eased herself out of the car. “Sherry didn’t die because the airbag didn’t deploy. She died because someone removed the airbag to hide that book. That sucks!”

  “Sherry got bad breaks all the way around.” Kate said slowly flipping through the book.

  “I don’t understand,” Jo said. “Now if that was a bag of marijuana I wouldn’t be so surprised. But a book?”

  “Maybe this is worth more than marijuana,” Kate looked up from the book. “This is some sort of contact book. It has dates and initials listed in it. There’s a column for drop offs and dollar amounts listed on the side.” At Jo’s puzzled stare Kate continued, “I think this has something to do with some sort of human trafficking.”

  “Damn,” Jo gasped, looking at Kate. “What did you just stumble into?”

  Kate turned to the last entry. “It has “SR” then Friday’s date. The column for the dollar amount hasn’t been filled in.”

  “SR for Sherry Roberts? My god, Kate what do you think Ricky was up to? Was he going to sell her?”

  Kate’s eyes went cop cold. “That, my friend, is the $64,000 question. I’ve got to get this to the station and get it logged in as evidence.”

  “Let’s go,” Jo said. “Maybe together we can reduce it to a 64 cent question.”

  * * *

  Kate spent the next hour at her desk with her computer and Ricky’s book. She listed initials and dates then searched for local runaways and missing children. She knew she was on the right track when she found three easy matches from the last six months.

  “Jo, this is making me sick. I think Ricky was into sex trafficking. Look, I can match these initials with the names of these girls and the timing is within a day or two of when they were reported missing.”

  “Ricky’s gonna have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, Lucy.”

  Kate chuckled. “This isn’t a laughing matter.”

  “I know that. But what the hell, Kate. I think you just uncovered a major sex trafficking ring right here in our own backyard. Look,” she spun her own laptop around. “I was doing some general research while you were working on the book. Did you know that central Florida has the second highest number of child trafficking cases in the United States? Or depending on the source you use maybe the third highest. Any way you look at it, it’s bad.”

  Kate sighed. “I knew the numbers were up there but I had no idea we were striving for the top of the garbage heap.”

  “Hey, Caz, Kate.” Mitch walked in. “You switching departments?” he looked at Jo.

  “Nah, I’m just hanging around with Miss Solve-It here.”

  “Yeah? What’s this I hear that you’ve called the FBI twice in one day? You going for a record?”

  “Two different cases, two different calls,” Kate responded rubbing her eyes. “We think Christian has been taken out of state therefore the first call. Now we find out that Ricky is possibly into sex trafficking, so call number two. They’re sending an agent down tomorrow but I don’t know if we’ll end up with more of them or not.”

  “How’s the chief taking this? He gets pretty territorial with those guys.”

  “I’m just hoping they’re not complete jerks ‘cause, Mitch, we really need some help. Just going through the book we found tonight I’ve already discovered three possible matches from this area.”

  Mitch shook his head. “Leave it to you.”

  Kate put the book back in its plastic evidence bag. “Well, Jo gets the credit. She was the one who noticed the airbag hadn’t deployed and she’s the one who actually found the book.”

  “I stand corrected,” Mitch grinned at them both. “And if Caz is the reason for the new uniform then I’m all for the change. We could call it the Diva Detective Unit.”

  Jo looked down at her stained tee and ragged cut-offs, then at Kate, who looked like she stepped off a runway. “Is that because we look so much alike?” she asked, closing her laptop.

  “Let’s go home before this gets any deeper,” Kate said. “Mitch, keep the streets safe for us tonight.”

  “At your service, Chief.” he saluted.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kate entered the office of the elementary school and found the atmosphere completely subdued. Gone was the lively chatter from the week before. Sunny smiles had been replaced with solemn faces and sad eyes. The secretary rose from her desk when she saw Kate.

  “Detective Snow, isn’t it?”

  Kate nodded and placed her identification on the counter. “I need to speak with Phyllis Perry.”

  “She’s our kindergarten teacher. I can call her for you. I guess
you heard the news about Diana?”

  “Yes, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do around here without her.”

  “Is someone going to cover her classes?”

  “Oh yes. Mr. Phelps called the substitute list personally when we heard. It’s just so sad.”

  “Traffic accidents always are,” Kate replied and turned as Phyllis walked into the office.

  “Detective Snow,” she said extending a hand. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  Kate offered a smile. “Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

  “You could use the principal’s office,” the secretary offered. “I’m sure Mr. Phelps wouldn’t mind.”

  Kate watched Phyllis shake her head. “Thanks, Jean, but I’ll take Detective Snow back to my classroom. We have a good half hour before the kids get in.”

  “That would be fine,” Kate agreed and together they started down the hall. When they were at the doorway of the kindergarten room she paused. “Was there a reason why you didn’t want to use the principal’s office?”

  Phyllis gave a sigh. “Jean means well, but she likes to listen in on the intercom. And the only way she could keep a secret would be to Crazy-Glue her lips together. Heck, even then I think she’d find a way to spread the news.”

  “I see.” Kate looked around at the cheerful animal alphabet that danced its way across the back wall. The bulletin board sported a garden of flowers with photos of individual students in the center of each bloom. The title read, “Together we grow, together we bloom.” Doll-like tables and chairs were pushed together in groups of four similar to that of the third grade classroom. But where that classroom had appeared cold and austere with posters that admonished good study habits and responsibility, this room spoke of cheer and happiness. Amazing, Kate thought, what a difference a teacher can make.

  “We can sit over here,” Phyllis said, pulling two adult size chairs around to the front of her desk. “Now what can I do for you? I assume it has to do with Diana and the accident.”

  Kate nodded and took out her notebook. “I understand she was at your party Friday night.”

  “She gave me the party,” Phyllis corrected. “Diana threw me the best surprise birthday party a girl ever had. And she wasn’t drinking,” Phyllis added quickly. At Kate’s silence she rushed on. “I read in the Sunday paper that alcohol was involved. And if that’s true, it wasn’t Diana. She might have had a glass of wine with dinner, but we saw her at the very end of the party and she wasn’t drunk.”