by Tom Corcoran
If Monroe County’s residents knew that Sheriff Fred Liska had tucked a mini-paradise into his secluded yard, his image would be shot to hell. The money he had saved out front had been well spent on accent lighting, a narrow lap pool, a guest cottage and a cabana. The yard smelled of freshly watered plants, damp earth and a night bloom I couldn’t identify. I heard vintage West Coast jazz turned low, a Henry Mancini melody off “Music from Peter Gunn.”
The luxury was not enough to worry me about ill-gotten cash. I knew Liska to be a rule-bender but never had questioned his basic honesty. Still, none of it matched the former Key West detective who, before his election to sheriff, was famous for eccentricities, including his habit of wearing vintage, and garish, disco attire.
I found him in a teak armchair on a softly lighted patio studying pages spread atop a square glass-top table. He looked up at me, unsurprised.
“Your dutiful servant,” I said. “You needed me now?”
“Among others. I also called this guy.” Liska jacked his thumb toward a sliding glass door. Sam Wheeler stepped outside with a beer in his hand. I hadn’t noticed his borrowed Mustang parked in the street, but I’d been distracted by Bobbi’s awkward plea for reconciliation or forgiveness, I wasn’t sure which.
“You knew his number, Sheriff. That was more than I had.”
“It was my phone,” said Liska. “A personal line I’ve kept active but haven’t used since the county gave me a freebie. We’ve been in touch for three days.”
“I followed your example, Alex,” said Sam. “If you’re going to have a friend on the good side of the fence, why not the top guy?”
“Does he know?” I said.
“All four trips.”
“I figured two at the most,” I said.
Sam reached to slap Liska’s forearm. “I fooled Rutledge. I told you I was good.” He handed me the beer and went to get another for himself.
“Sam brought along two assistants,” said Liska. He stood, led me inside to a small room off the kitchen. We found Duffy Lee Hall working with an Apple laptop and Marnie Dunwoody in front of a corkboard thumbtacking lists and grainy photographs printed from web pages. She gave me a wry, harried smile that bordered on grimace.
“You were on to something, Alex,” said Duffy Lee. “Most of what they asked me to do were the same things you asked about, so a lot of it was already done. I filled them in on Cormier’s travels to the various countries. I printed out everything I found, but I was touching on web sites that locked everyone out if they detected a snoop. If the authorities want to, I suppose, they can track me down.”
“From here on out,” Liska said, “let me worry about that. You’re all special deputies working on my orders.” He tapped my arm and pointed to a second corkboard on an adjacent wall. It held a small nautical chart surrounded by three-by-five cards, each with names and arrows in red or blue Sharpie ink. Like a loose storyboard for a three-act play.
I sipped my beer, looked back at Duffy Lee, turned my head to watch Marnie, then gazed into the kitchen where Sam stood, his butt against a counter, tapping the neck of his beer bottle against his chin, deep in thought. I didn’t say a word. I drank another slug of beer and considered their homemade Command Center, their assigned tasks with bulletin boards, print-outs, the computer. The room remained quiet until Marnie looked at me and lost it. When she laughed the other three joined her.
I didn’t get it.
“Okay,” said Liska. “That’s our last chuckle of the evening.” He faced me. “Marnie predicted you’d be pissed that we started this and got this far without you.”
I shrugged, a silent agreement.
“We’ve been at it less than two hours,” he said. “When I heard you’d found Lisa Cormier in your motorbike box, I made the calls. After an extended prep time, the other side is moving fast.”
“Like hounds are on their trail,” said Sam.
“The ones that caught Lisa,” said Marnie.
Sam caught my eye to confirm the fact: “And Cliff Brock and Sally Catherman five days ago.”
“I assume they were found at that house at Bay Point,” I said. “Were they killed somewhere else?”
Liska nodded. “Each shot twice by someone they probably knew, probably on open water fairly close to shore. They were naked with sun oil all over them. Sally still had her iPod earbud wires strung around her neck. The feds never found their clothing, and the killer tried but failed to sink Cliff’s boat.”
“With Sam’s hull numbers on it?”
“We can’t figure out why they did that,” said Sam, “except for the sake of confusion, which worked.”
“I spoke with Alyssa Navarro this afternoon,” I said. “She works at Colding’s Grocery, where Sally worked, and she went on several of Cliff and Sally’s skinny-dip excursions, on double-dates with a friend of Cliff.”
“Dates as in group mambo?” said Marnie.
I nodded. “More like voyeur stuff than clusters. The guy gave her a fake name which didn’t bother her. She knew that Cliff and her party partner worked at the Mansion.”
“My deputies have been getting rich on overtime guarding that driveway dusk-to-dawn for months,” said Liska. “And lately during the day… but you know that, Rutledge. You drove by this afternoon and did a piss poor job of concealing your camera.”
Our side is good, too, I thought. “Can you take a half-minute to explain the Mansion’s mission?”
“It’s pure, broad-reach surveillance,” said Liska. “It’s run from the top of the intelligence mountain but manned by a civilian outfit that employs contract workers. That gives them two degrees of deniability, perhaps more in a legal sense. Cuba, for sure, is the main target. They’ve never confirmed it, but I think they track GPS transmitters on vehicles down there. They track every boat in the Florida Straits. They monitor underwater listening devices and match surface data, radar, with satellite info. I have no idea how much they pull off Fat Albert. They may even watch people in the Keys, but I would be the last person they’d admit that to.”
“What about all those rafts that come ashore with half-starved refugees?”
“My take is, they target security threats and felons, not families.”
“If Alyssa can identify her party man and she’s still alive,” said Sam, “he may not be the shooter.”
“But that gets to the core of our problem,” said Liska. “We don’t know shit. We don’t know whether they planned all this to happen right now or they’re panicking. We’re looking at histories, stolen boats and smuggling. We’re looking at outbound pharmaceuticals as pure distraction. If we figure out their hurry, create a plausible scenario, we might get an idea of what they’re really doing.”
“Isn’t all this Homeland’s job?” I said.
“First off,” said the sheriff, “they’re agents from Customs, the DEA, Immigration and Transportation. Mostly Customs, but they just don’t have the teamwork that any of those groups had before they got thrown in the blender. They’re ninety-nine percent straight, but they depend too much on contract workers. There’s too much room for lone rangers and renegades… and assholes. Second, they specialize in the one-way street. I’m supposed to hand over every shred of background and evidence, and they won’t give my office the time of day. I don’t like working with them.”
“How can I help?”
“Start looking at all of this,” said Liska, “reading it and piecing it together. Keep an open mind. And don’t be misled by appearances right here at this moment, the beer and all. We’re in a state of total panic. I don’t want more people to die in my county.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Connections,” he said. “That page right there is a timeline. Our target names are Cliff and Sally and the Cormiers, and the father, Bob Catherman.”
“Let me ask first,” I said to Sam. “Was Cliff your inside man at the Mansion?”
Sam nodded. “We timed our runs so he’d be on watch when I ran south. He’
d pocket outbound notifications sent by the Cubans, and give me all-clear signals for my return runs. Your next question is how Cormier recruited him.”
“Yes, but go ahead.”
“They met a few years ago in Nicaragua. Copeland found out that Brock was going to be transferred up to the Keys, and he knew that Cliff’s employer had won the contract to monitor north-south surface traffic on the Straits. He told Cliff about his desire to move legit drugs into Cuba. He recruited him to help with the altruistic end.”
“I found two photos of Copeland Cormier on the web,” said Duffy Lee. “In Baghdad and in Nicaragua, both times posing with regional hospital honchos. While he was offshore, Lisa Cormier was misbehaving. She got three DUIs in the Atlanta area, plus resisting arrest without violence and providing a false name to law enforcement. I got good hits on Bob Catherman, too. He was in the printing business in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then Kingsport, Tennessee, and for a while up in Clearwater. Then he showed in a court case in Fort Myers. It looks like he was a nautical repo man with a company called Aquatic Liquidators.”
I pulled my camera out of my pocket. “I have a couple of photos that might tie into that, except I don’t have my wire to run from the camera to the computer.”
“You’re an ace photographer, I know,” said Liska, “but maybe you can tell us in words.”
“I saw two boats today parked in the canal behind Catherman’s place on Cudjoe. I saw him an hour later. He claimed they belong to a neighbor, which could be true…”
Duffy Lee pointed at the laptop’s monitor. “Was one of them this ride, stolen last month out of Naples?”
It was the Fountain that Beth and I had scoped from the other side of the canal.
Liska read my reaction. “Progress with teamwork,” he said. “Let’s go sit outside and talk this through.”
“One more thing for the bulletin board,” I said. I went back into my pocket, removed the picture that Carmen had printed. “It’s a photo of Ricky Stinson that might come in handy.”
No one reacted. Sam finally said, “Who?”
“I met him with Copeland Cormier last night at the Pier House. He made sure to let me know he was your good friend and part of the deal. He knew all about your Army training and the boat you outran last weekend.”
Sam shook his head. “Never heard of him.”
“They wanted to know if I’d heard from you.”
Duffy Lee held out his hand. “I’ll stay here and search for Mr. Stinson. And whatever else…”
I gave him the photo.
We moved to the patio and used cook’s tools from Liska’s gas grill to keep papers from blowing off the glass-top table. Sam Wheeler remained standing but stuck close, a determined, pensive look on his face.
My first question was for him. “At what point did you know that your last trip was screwed?”
“I got my radio ‘all-clear,’” he said, “but it wasn’t like the three I received from Cliff before that. Someone had the right code but the wrong format. I wasn’t a hundred yards off the Cuban beach when I started running a random zigzag toward Marathon. Two-thirds of the way home, I cut northwest toward Big Pine. I’d checked the Lower Keys tides so I knew from that point I could haul ass down Hawk Channel and beat a chase through one of the creeks.”
“The cargo was strictly one-way?” I said. “You never brought anything back?”
Sam looked at Chicken Neck and Marnie, cracked a smile. “The boy’s a thinker,” he said.
“He’ll love this,” said Liska.
“Two things came back on every trip,” said Sam. “Letters for me to stamp and mail from here. They had Keys return addresses, and were going to people who had made it out of Cuba. I also brought back the snap-shut boxes used to transport their heat-sensitive drugs. They have some kind of space age insulation and a rubber seal around their edges Like that waterproof suitcase you used to carry for your cameras. They cost like crazy, and the Cubans had no use for them, so I’d deliver one or two full ones and bring back one or two empties, whatever they handed me.”
“Who would you give them to?” I said.
“I’d put them in a funky Styrofoam cooler in my Bronco, park in the Half Shell lot right after I returned, and go have breakfast at Harpoon Harry’s. I’d come back after eating and drive home. They told me if the container was still there, I should have breakfast the next day, but it was gone all three times.”
“You didn’t connect the fourth time?”
“I waited for someone to arrive, to find out what they knew about my being chased. They never showed up, so I kept it.” He leaned over to a shelf of potted plants and lifted an oblong, hard plastic box. It was maybe sixteen inches long, four inches wide, not even two inches deep.
“It’s empty?”
“Unless you tear it apart, which the sheriff, here, made me do back there.” Sam pointed to a far side of the yard. “He was afraid it might explode, so he wouldn’t stand near me.”
“Okay, drama champ, you survived,” I said. “Was it empty?”
“Once I peeled back the lining, sure as hell.”
“Empty.”
“No,” said Sam. “Sixty thousand dollars.”
I took a moment to digest the news. “You think every box you brought back…”
“My best guess is that I unknowingly smuggled in three hundred grand, minimum.”
“Could those airtight boxes have held more than charity drugs on the trips south?” I said.
Sam shrugged. “I made them show me the pills and vials, just like I made them introduce me to Cliff Brock. I wanted to see my lifeline face-to-face. I have no idea whether they put anything in the linings on my southbound trips.”
“Surely the government wouldn’t kill someone for letting a boat slide through. That’s a bit severe, even for the old administration. Any idea who gave you the phony ‘all-clear?’
“The last thing Cliff said to me was, ‘Something’s funky in the Mansion. Be careful.’ Turned out we both needed to be careful. I had the double-whammy on me. If I survived the chase, I was the perfect murder suspect. If the cops didn’t catch me, the bad boys would shut me up ugly. Triple-whammy.”
No one spoke for a minute or so. The light jazz had ended. We listened to burbles from the pool.
“Had to be a rat in there,” said Marnie.
“I think Cliff suspected one or two of them were doing a similar dodge,” said Sam,” but not for the good of mankind.”
“Speaking of not for good,” I said to Liska, “your ex-employee, Marv Fixler, paid me a visit this morning.”
“Was this in regard to another of my employees whose name, Lewis, shall not be mentioned? Can this wait?”
“He claimed not. He talked about a government go-fast boat that was stolen in Belize. He said it was an ocean-going equivalent of a Stealth bomber.”
“I’ve received a stack of urgent situation reports on that one,” said Liska.
“Fixler said that my snooping and meddling could jeopardize the government’s recovery efforts.”
Liska shook his head. “Hell, you should be proud. That’s what they say to entire civilian law enforcement agencies.”
“He also suggested that Sam might be involved in the boat theft. Or he offered the possibility to see if I’d agree.”
“Okay, let’s work with this,” said Liska. “He left the sheriff’s office before I won the election. I barely knew him, never learned much about him, except social rumors. After he left we received background and reference requests. I heard maybe a year later that he became a security professional. At some point he went to Panama, then to the Middle East. Now he’s back, supposedly working for the government, but there’s no way to verify that. He could be Homeland or Defense Intelligence or a contractor. I happen to know that one day last week he wore a T-shirt that read DAD MADE ME CRAZY. Sam tells me that these days, among warriors, ‘Dad’ means ‘Baghdad.’”
We hadn’t seen Duffy Lee Hall poke his head out the
sliding glass door. “Speaking of which, Sheriff,” he said, “I’ve put Ricky Stinson in Baghdad at the same time as Copeland Cormier.”
“Tell us more,” said Liska.
“Richard M. Stinson ran a construction company called Rampant Eagle, LLC, licensed out of Fall River, Massachusetts. Near as I can tell, he had a state department contract to build latrines and chapels.”
“Poetic,” said Sam. “That’s the military I learned to love.”
“Duffy Lee, run another search for me,” said Liska. “See if Belize has a Coast Guard or the equivalent. Look for mention of a high-tech boat missing or stolen from that country.”
“We’ve sifted the shit down to basics,” I said. “Boats, bucks and Iraq. Whatever they’re doing, they’ve invested a lot of time and money, a lot of forethought.”
“And they’ve killed people to cover it up,” said Sam.
Liska nodded. “Killed them on my turf. Keep going with this, Rutledge.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where’s the easiest money these days? You run cocaine, you have to work with the Mexican Mafia, whichever family hasn’t been decapitated this month. You run heroin, you have to be cousin to someone in the Middle East or the Far East. Why screw around with something you have to resell? Why not bring in dirty money and spend it clean?”
Marnie leaned forward. “I thought crime gangs were desperate to get cash offshore.”
“The risks are different these days,” I said. “When Noriega tumbled, the dope profits in his banks went up in smoke, so to say. The ultra-secret banks in Europe and the usual offshore havens have succumbed to pressure from Interpol and the banking system. They’re giving up names to stay afloat.”
“Let’s go back inside,” said Liska. “Let’s shuffle three-by-fives and draw more arrows.”
“Could I ask one question before we move?” I said. “What are we going to do with all this speculation? What if we come up with a credible scenario? We’re not a bunch of swashbucklers or snoops with next-generation tech toys. And you said yourself, Sheriff, you don’t like working with the feds. We’re going to be like the dog that caught the car it was chasing. How will we act on it?”