“How did your trip go?” she asked.
“Not perfect, but not bad. I had to settle for half the fee.”
“We’ve got some ripe bills, you know.”
“Don’t worry, I have a new job, and our man will deliver some cash tonight.”
“Are you coming home?”
“I have to leave as soon as it’s dark, so it will be a couple of days.”
“Oh, all right. I guess we need the money.”
“I love you. Take care of yourself.”
“I love you, too.” They both hung up.
HE WAITED UNTIL dusk, then started the airplane’s engine and taxied to the end of the short runway while he could still see without lights. Shortly, he was winging his way to the Northeast.
40
STONE, DINO, TOMMY and Annika sat in the nearly empty Key West Yacht Club. “Okay,” Tommy said, closing his cell phone,
“we’ve called every airport south of Palm Beach, and the state police are wiring the tail number all over the country.”
“I don’t think you’re going to catch him,” Stone said. “This guy is a pro. He knows you’re looking for that airplane.”
“What’s he going to do, throw it away?” Tommy asked.
“Paint it, change the tail number. There are thousands of Cessna 182s in the country.”
“Maybe we should notify paint shops, too.”
“I wouldn’t bother; you’re not going to catch him. Look what he did today: we didn’t expect him to hotfoot it out of there, and we certainly didn’t expect him to double back to the airport and take off. He’s good.”
“Everybody gets caught,” Tommy said.
“Except the ones that never get caught,” Dino added.
“I’ll bet the ballistics on that rifle would have matched the bullet that passed through, ah, Charley Boggs,” Tommy said.
“Did you recover the bullet?”
“Yeah, but the report hasn’t come back yet.”
“I’d be willing to bet that the rifle you found was just to throw you off the track,” Stone said. “The one in his duffel did the work.”
“This guy will be back at work soon,” Dino said.
“How does a man like this find his work?” Annika asked.
“He has an agent, just like an actor or writer,” Stone replied. “My guess is it’s Manny White.”
“Then why would Manny alert us about a hit man?” Dino asked.
“He didn’t, really. I mean, we weren’t very alert, were we?” Stone said. “He didn’t tell us enough to stop the guy.”
“You think Manny is capable of that?” Dino asked.
“I think Manny is capable of arranging a hit on his mother,” Stone replied, “if he still has one. Seems like Manny is the go-to guy for just about anything—skip tracing, murder, you name it.”
“Of course, you can’t prove that,” Tommy said.
“I guess if you could convince the Miami or state cops to tap his phone and his cell phone, you might nail him,” Stone said,
“but you don’t have enough on him to get a warrant for that, do you?”
“I guess not,” Tommy said. “Well, the good news is, he’s out of our hair. He’ll never come back to Key West.”
THE MAN NOW known as Thomas Sutherland refueled his airplane at a small airport in South Carolina, then continued northeast. Shortly after two in the morning, he checked his GPS, picked up his microphone and pressed the talk button rapidly fi ve times. Dead ahead, the runway lights at Johnnycake Airport came on. He landed and taxied to the fueling area. As his airport reference book had told him, there was a self-operated fueling station. He inserted a credit card into the slot, just as at a gas station, and fi lled his wing tanks, then he taxied to a remote area of the airport, shut down the engine and went to sleep, curled up in the rear seat.
HE SLEPT UNTIL nearly noon, then he walked up to the highway and found a diner, where he had a large breakfast. Back at the airfield, he found it pretty much deserted. An occasional airplane would take off or land, but there was no tower, not even an offi ce, just a bunch of airplanes tied down, waiting for the weekend and their owners.
As he stood there a Mercedes station wagon drove up, and a man and a woman got out.
“Good morning,” the man said, “or is it afternoon?”
“Barely,” Sutherland said. “You off to somewhere?”
“Yeah, we’re visiting some family in Maine for a couple of days.”
He opened the trunk to reveal four suitcases.
“Let me give you a hand,” Sutherland said, taking one of the bags out of the trunk. “Which airplane?”
“The Bonanza over there,” the man said, nodding. “Thanks.”
Sutherland followed him to the airplane and watched him unlock the right-side front door. “Give me your keys, and I’ll unlock back here,” Sutherland said.
The man tossed him a heavy bunch of keys. As Sutherland opened the door, he managed to free the car’s ignition key from the bunch, then he set the suitcase in the luggage compartment, leaving the keys in the lock.
After a preflight inspection, the man and his wife got into the Bonanza, and ten minutes later they were rolling down the runway. Sutherland waited until the airplane had disappeared to the north, then he got his duffel and a tool kit out of his airplane, put them into the rear of the Mercedes, started the car and drove away.
He had his printed maps, and it took him less than half an hour to find the home of his target. He cruised past the house, and as he did, he saw a woman leave by the front door, get into a pickup truck in the driveway and back out. She looked like the cleaning lady, and there was no other car visible at the house. He drove a little farther down the street and saw a dirt track leading into some woods. He turned into it and drove to a clearing, where the land had been scraped clean. There was a sign advertising a construction company planted on the lot. Looked like someone was going to build there.
He got out of the car, taking his tool kit, and made his way through the woods back toward the house. When he arrived at where the trees met the lawn he stopped and watched the place for signs of life for a while, then he approached the house and began looking into windows. Plantings at the front of the property shielded him from the street.
At a rear corner of the house he found the dining room and the kitchen. At a breakfast nook beside the kitchen window, a place had been set for one person, and a bottle of wine left on the table. Apparently, his subject did not use the dining room when eating alone.
Sutherland stood with his back to the window and looked at the woods, some thirty feet away, as he pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He checked angles and heights and picked out a spot with a good line marked by the center of a row of azaleas planted at the edge of the woods. Perfect.
He removed a glass cutter and a set of suction cups, affi xed the cups to the selected windowpane, then cut the edges of the glass repeatedly. Finally, he banged on the bracket of the cups with his fist, and the glass snapped out. It would have fallen into the dinette, but he was holding on to the suction cup bracket. Gingerly, he freed the glass from the suction cups, then turned the glass and drew it outside through the new opening. He put the suction cups and the glass cutter back into his tool kit and walked to the spot in the row of azaleas. He stood behind them, then sighted, then knelt and did the same. The kneeling position would be just right. He tossed the glass pane as far as he could into the woods, then shucked off the latex gloves and walked back to the car.
He drove downtown and found a movie theater with a double feature playing and bought a ticket. He saw both movies twice. He didn’t want to be walking around town and risk being noticed by someone who could identify him later.
WHEN SUTHERL AND LEFT the movie theater it was twilight, and he had forty minutes until he went to work. He drove back to the vacant lot, switching off his headlights before he turned down the dirt track. There had been lights on in the house when he passed and a car in the driveway.<
br />
He took a small flashlight from his tool kit, slipped it into his pocket, then opened the duffel and assembled the rifle, screwed in the silencer and loaded a magazine, though he expected to fi re only once. You never knew.
He found his way to his firing position behind the azaleas and sat down cross-legged behind the row of bushes. He checked the rifl e again, shoved in the magazine and racked the slide. He checked his watch: ten minutes to eight.
At five minutes to eight, the kitchen light went on, and a man walked to the refrigerator, took out a covered dish, put it into the microwave and pressed some buttons. He stood for two minutes while the dish warmed. Sutherland could have shot him then, but he would have had to break glass, which might distort the trajectory and even alert a neighbor.
Finally, the man removed the dish from the microwave, set it on the table, picked up a corkscrew and opened the bottle of wine left for him.
Sutherland rose to one knee, rested his elbow on the other knee and sighted through the space with the missing pane. It was a shot of only a little more than thirty feet.
His subject sat down at the table, lifted his glass, took a sip and set the glass down.
Sutherland thumbed down the safety and squeezed off the round.
His subject took the bullet in his left temple, spraying blood and gore, and went down. Not even his wineglass was disturbed. Sutherland put the rifle on safety and made his way back to the car, where he unloaded and disassembled the rifl e and returned it to the duffel.
Half an hour later he drove into the darkened airport and parked the car where he had found it. He took a bottle of Windex and a cloth from his tool bag and wiped down every surface he might have touched, then shook out the fl oor mat to remove any dirt he might have tracked into the car. He took his tools and duffel and walked back to his own airplane.
EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning, in the soft, green light of the predawn, Sutherland set down his airplane on the Everglades strip, taxied to the ramada, refueled the airplane, then got into the Jeep Wrangler he kept at the little house and drove home to Jupiter and his wife.
Later that day, an unmarked envelope containing a large sum of cash was left inside the front screen door of his house.
41
STONE WA S PACKING his bags after a late breakfast when his cell phone buzzed. “Hello?”
“It’s Eggers.”
“Morning, Bill. I’m just packing for the return trip.”
“Unpack,” Eggers said. “You’re back on my dime.”
“What’s up?”
“Warren Keating’s attorney just called me. Early this morning, his housekeeper arrived and found him dead in his kitchen, shot in the head.”
“Suicide?”
“The lawyer didn’t have any other details.”
“This just gets weirder and weirder,” Stone said.
“Yes, it does. I want to know what’s going on, and I want you to find out for me. Take another week if you need to.”
“At my usual hourly rate?”
“I’ll spring for a generous flat rate. We’ll talk it over when you get home.”
“Okay, Bill. I’ll be in touch.” Stone hung up and walked out onto the front porch, where Dino was drinking a second cup of coffee.
“Ready for the latest?” Stone asked.
“Always.”
“Warren Keating has died from a gunshot to the head.”
“His own or somebody else’s?”
“That’s what I want you to find out. Call your buddy on the Connecticut State Police.”
Dino dialed the number and pressed the speaker phone button.
“Robbery Homicide, Lieutenant Dan Hotchkiss.”
“Dan, it’s Dino.”
“You again?”
“Me again. I heard about Warren Keating.”
“Are you still in Key West?”
“Yes. News travels fast in this modern age.”
“I want to know how you heard about it. The media don’t know yet.”
“Keating’s lawyer called a lawyer I know, who called the lawyer I’m down here with. I am not a suspect.”
“You are until I say you aren’t.”
“All I know is that he was shot in the head. Was it a suicide?”
“If it was, he managed to hide the gun after he was dead. Oh, and he removed a pane from the kitchen window so he could shoot himself through it without scattering glass everywhere and making a lot of noise. A very neat fellow, Mr. Keating. Quick on his feet, too.”
“So the shooter removed the window and popped him from outside?”
“From the azalea bed behind the house. We found some impressions, but nothing so good as to give us a usable footprint. He cleaned up his brass, too, though it was only one shell. Clean shot to the left temple.”
“Anybody hear a gunshot?”
“No, and it was dinnertime, so somebody in the neighborhood should have noticed. My guess is a silencer was used.”
“Any other evidence?”
“Some tire tracks at a lot next door that was otherwise pretty clean, since a bulldozer had scraped it for a building site. Pirelli 210 snow tires that can be driven year round—expensive. The nearest Mercedes dealer is the only place anywhere around here who stocks them.”
“Dan, this is a little off the wall, but we had a shooter like that in Key West who took a shot at somebody who was pretending to be Warren Keating’s son. Didn’t kill him, though; that’s another story. The shooter left town in a bright red Cessna 182, headed north. You might check the local airports for an airplane like that.” Dino gave him the tail number.
“Okay, I’ll get it on the radio.”
Dino gave him his cell number. “I’d appreciate hearing about anything else you come up with,” he said. “Did you ever know Tommy Sculley, from the NYPD?”
“Yeah, I talked to him a couple of times.”
“He’s the lead detective on the investigation down here, so you might coordinate with him.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Oh, by the way, did you find a slug?”
“We did, embedded in the drywall behind where Keating was sitting. It’s in Hartford for ballistics tests.”
“I’m sure Tommy would appreciate it if you faxed him the report for comparison.”
“Will do.”
“Thanks, Dan.” Dino hung up.
“It’s going to be from the same rifle,” Stone said. “The one in Vernon’s duffel.”
“You know what this sounds like?” Dino asked.
“What?”
“Sounds like the grandfather, Eli, hired somebody to off his son and his grandson, leaving him with all of the eight hundred million from the sale of the business.”
“That’s nice and symmetrical, but what would a guy in his eighties do with eight hundred million?”
“Maybe he just hated his son and grandson enough to want them not to get any of it. It would be interesting to know who the money goes to if Eli kicks off soon.”
“I’ll ask Eggers next time we talk. Call Tommy and tell him about this.”
Dino made the call while Stone listened in.
“That’s an interesting turn of events,” Tommy said.
“Tommy,” Stone broke in, “were there autopsy photographs taken of the corpse you thought was Charley Boggs?”
“Yeah, I’ve got ’em in my desk drawer.”
“See if there’s a knife wound to the left rib cage.”
Tommy took a moment. “No, nothing visible. Why do you ask?”
“The guy we thought was Evan Keating had a knife wound treated at Key West Hospital. Annika was his doctor, and she said he was clean-shaven.”
“So the real Charley Boggs had been knifed, as well as shot?”
“Something else: he paid his hospital bill with a black American Express card.”
“I’ve never seen one of those,” Tommy said.
“It’s their most elite card, limited to subscribers who spend a lot on their
Amex cards.”
“So?”
“The card was in Evan Keating’s name. Do you think Evan Keating, during his identity swap with Charley Boggs, would loan Charley his credit card, one with no limit?”
“Well, let me put it this way,” Tommy said. “If you and I swapped identities and I had one of those black cards, I think I’d hang on to it.”
“So would I,” Dino said.
“So I take it you’re thinking that Charley Boggs might be Evan Keating instead of Charley Boggs?”
“It crossed my mind,” Stone said.
“Then why would he come in and confess to killing the real Charley Boggs, but say it was himself?”
“Because I told him that somebody might have put out a contract on him, and he apparently thought it was his father. Maybe he fi gured that if he was dead, his old man might save the money on the hit man.”
“That makes sense. Where is this guy now, do you know?”
“I do not. He checked out of this hotel three days ago.”
“So he had time to visit Connecticut?”
“I guess he did at that.”
Dino broke in and told Tommy about Dan Hotchkiss, and gave him his phone number. “Maybe you should consult with Dan,” Dino said.
“Consult I will,” Tommy said.
42
STONE AND DINO were about to leave the hotel when a call came in.
“Hello?” Stone said.
“Stone, it’s Chuck Chandler, at the tennis club.”
“Hey, Chuck.”
“I ran across something yesterday that might interest you.”
“What’s that?”
“My old boat, which now has no name.”
“Where did you see it?”
“Out at Fort Jefferson.”
“Where’s Fort Jefferson?”
“It’s at the very end of the Keys.”
“I thought Key West was the very end of the Keys.”
“No, they run out to the west from Key West for about sixty miles—small, uninhabited islands with no fresh water at all. There was a fort built out on the last one during the nineteenth century—that’s Fort Jefferson. It was used as a prison during and after the Civil War, and Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was imprisoned for sheltering John Wilkes Booth and setting his broken leg, was sent there, where he performed heroically during a yellow fever epidemic.”
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