by Mark Stone
"Eh, it's okay," the man said, seemingly missing the point of my remark. "But you should have seen the other one." He shook his head. "A cherry red convertible with leather seats and a rigged out sound system."
"Sounds prime," I admitted. "What happened to it?"
"Destroyed by an incognito group of millennial pirates looking to purge their gold of some ridiculous fake curse." He shrugged. "You know, the usual."
"This- this isn't an ordinary town, is it?" I asked, narrowing my eyes at the man as he glared at me through the rearview.
"Where is though?" He answered. "Sure, the people around here are so hyped up on the idea of treasure that sometimes it drives them crazy, but it's home. And the seafood is unparalleled."
"I'd have to issue with that," I said. "Until you've tasted Gulf snapper, you don't know what fresh fish really is."
"Gulf snapper," Anchor scoffed. "Don't be ridiculous. I'm going to get some ocean fish, bud. Just like a real man."
"Enough of this," Cross sighed, turning to her partner, but not to me. "We've got work to do here and that work has nothing to do with which city produces the best fresh fish." She muttered. "Even if the answer is stupidly obvious." Blustering, she continued. "Gulf snapper. Get real. The point is—”
"You want to focus on the task at hand," I said, interrupting her. "I get it. That's commendable."
"It's boring is what it is," Anchor chimed in.
"Boring gets the job done," Cross shot back.
"Yeah, but no one's there to see it," Anchor said.
"Is that all that matters to you, Anchor?" She asked. "Making sure that the cameras are rolling anytime you do something of value?"
"You know it isn't," he responded, unaffected. "But there's nothing wrong with being camera ready, Cross. It's a skillset, just like any other. And you never know when your skillsets are going to come in handy."
"It's the black of morning, Anchor. I'm pretty sure knowing how to apply stage makeup isn't going to come in handy," she murmured.
"That was one time," he said. "And you swore we'd never speak of it again."
"How much further?" I asked, working my way into the conversation and sabotaging their back and forth. Like Cross said, there was work to do, and I doubted this bickering would do anything to help our cause.
"Another mile," Cross said, surprising me when she actually answered my question. There was no warmth in her voice whatsoever, but it was a start.
Cross was right about the time of day. Morning was coming quickly to Vero Beach. You could smell the impending sun in the air through Anchor's open moonroof. Soon enough, light would flood the streets, as would people bustling about to their jobs and bouncing around on their vacations.
For now though, the dark kept the streets relatively clear. The same could not be said for the piers though. Like over in Naples, fisherman did their best work before the sun came up. And, it just so happened, we were on our way to see one.
"Here we are," Anchor said as he pulled off the road and into the parking lot of the Main Street Fishing Pier. "Good luck out there."
"You're not coming?" I asked, opening the door of the car.
"Here's the thing," Anchor said, throwing his arm around the seat and looking back at me. "I used to hire a lot of these people to work for me when my show was on the air. These fishermen known their way around a boat, obviously. So, I figured I'd throw some extra money their way and, you know, bypass Union laws."
"How generous of you," I answered.
"The job was cake. Drive a boat, sometimes hold a camera. It wasn't rocket science," he said. "Most of them were happy to have the extra money." He shook his head. "This guy was not one of them. Daniel Walker is a certain type of man."
"What do you mean by that?" I asked.
"It means that at least one person in this city is immune to Russell Anchorage's charms," Cross added. "Well," she said, shaking her head. "At least two, I guess."
"I'm wearing you down," Anchor said, grinning and shaking his head. "Like the tide and the mountain."
"Sounds about right. Check back in a thousand years," she said. Finally looking at me, she added, "Come on. Unless you'd rather I do this by myself."
"Not at all," I answered, motioning for her to take the lead.
"David claims to have seen Tanya here a few hours ago," Cross said, walking in front of me. "As far as we know, he doesn't have any sort of relationship with her. So, there's no real reason for him to be familiar with the way she looks. Still, it's the best lead we have at the present moment, and I don't see any reason for him to lie."
"It could just be an honest mistake," I answered. "He might have her confused with someone else."
"That's my thought too; … fishermen and pretty girls walking around in the middle of the night. I don't have to connect the dots for you in terms of that, do I?"
"I wasn't born yesterday, Detective Cross," I said. "Even if I might act like it sometimes."
"I don't think I know you well enough to know how you act," she answered.
"Well, no offense to you, ma'am, but that's not my fault, is it?" I asked, speeding up and keeping pace with her. "I offered my help to you before. If you would have taken it—”
"You don't know me well either, Detective Storm. So, let me educate you," she cut me off. "I'm not the type of person who entertains 'what if's’. Doing my job is simple, sir. I go by the book. I do what's proven to work, proven to be right. You had no business working on this case, none at all, and you know it. Interjecting yourself into it changed it in any number of ways. There's no way for us to know what would have happened if you didn't." She stopped for a beat. "My father used to tell me that the best stone is an unturned one, because it still holds all the possibility in the world. Once you turn it over though, all that possibility is gone. This case is a stone you turned, Detective Storm. You're involved in it now. That's the reason you're with us right now. Nothing else."
"Your father sounds a lot like my grandfather," I answered, smarting from her verbal assault. "I bet he's got a saying for every occasion."
"He did," she answered. "He was good like that."
"I'm sorry," I said, deciphering her words and understanding it likely meant her father was no longer with us. "How long has it been?"
"Too long, not long enough. Depends on when you ask me, I guess," she said.
"I totally understand that," I admitted as we walked toward one of the boats at the end of the pier.
"Your father's dead too?" she asked.
"Yeah," I answered softly, images of a father I barely knew flashing through my mind. "But I didn't know him. He didn't want anything to do with me. I'm talking about my mother. She died of cancer while I was finishing school. Still seems like yesterday sometimes."
She looked over at me and, for the first time, I saw something other than disdain in her eyes. "My mother had cancer too," she said, nodding firmly.
"I guess we're just a couple of orphans then," I answered, pursing my lips at her.
"Guess so," she answered. Looking forward, we saw a figure walking across the hull of the boat we were headed toward. "Let's go to work."
Chapter 17
“Daniel,” Cross said, stepping onto the man’s boat without even asking. Because I was with her, and because Daniel didn’t seem to care too much, I followed suit.
The man, old enough to have a dusting of gray in his dark hair and more than a few lines around his eyes, was hard at work preparing his boat for another day. I had known my share of fishermen back in Naples and, if they all had one thing in common, it was that they weren’t afraid of the hard (oftentimes brutal) work that came with the job.
He was pulling at the landing net as he looked up at us.
“Getting a late start, aren’t we?” Cross asked, as the man stood to meet us.
“I could say the same thing to you,” the man answered, his voice gruff and worn. “I would have been out there an hour ago if I wasn’t waiting on your slowpoke asses.” H
e nodded. “Excuse my language.”
That was a first for me; a fisherman who minded his tongue, even in retrospect. It was far from the first time I had heard a fisherman lament the loss of working time. It was a hard business, and there was lots of competition. The fact that he was willing (if not exactly thrilled) to lose a few of those hours, meant that he was serious about this.
“Had to get the new guy up to speed,” Cross said, pointing to me. While I was hardly new when it came to investigating, it was close enough to true for me to smile, nod, and let it go.
“New guy?” he asked, looking over at me with a scowl on his face. “You from here, new guy?”
“From Naples,” I answered flatly, blinking at the man.
“Welcome to hell,” he lamented, finishing with his net and walking toward us.
“Hell is brighter than I thought it would be,” I mused, looking around. “Lots more gold than I expected too.”
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “This place is all well and good if you’re some snowbird from Colorado, looking for buried treasure.”
“Sunken treasure,” Cross corrected.
“Whatever,” the man said, glaring at her. “The point is, everything is all well and good if you’re visiting or if you’re important. But, if you’re like me, if you’re like the people who are like me, this place is hardcore. It doesn’t care, and neither do the people.” He shook his head. “The fact that you’re even here talking to me in the first place proves that.”
“The fact that we’re here, investigating the case of a missing girl, proves we don’t care about the people?” Cross asked. “You’re going to have to explain that to me, I’m afraid.”
I had to admit that I was more than a little confused about it myself.
“And who is the missing person, Cross?” Daniel asked. “She’s the daughter of a the chief of damned police. Look, I don’t expect you to understand, not with who your father was. The thing is, there are different sets of rules for people like you and people like me, for people like Tanya Harris and the rest of the girls who go missing in this damned city.”
“The rest of the girls?” I asked but, before Daniel could answer me, Cross lit into him with questions of her own.
“That’s not true, Daniel,” Cross said. “You know that isn’t true. The fact that Tanya is Marcus’s daughter certainly does put a fine point on this, but it doesn’t make her any more important than anyone else whose been hurt or victimized in Vero Beach. To say otherwise is ridiculous.”
“Is it, Kate?” The man asked, using the woman’s given name, something I had seen was rare in the time I’d known her. “You know how many news reports I’ve seen about Tanya in the last couple of days, Kate? I mean, she’s a good girl and all, but she’s hardly the only woman whose went missing here lately.”
“You keep saying that,” I butted in. “Are there other women, Daniel? Are more people going missing like this?”
“Not that they’d tell you,” Daniel sneered, looking at Cross with more than a little disdain. “When they’re runaways or prostitutes, or homeless people nobody cares, but when one of their own goes missing, it’s all media all the time.”
“We treat everyone the same, Daniel,” Cross said. “Every person who goes missing in this city gets the same treatment.”
“Well, maybe they shouldn’t” he roared. “Maybe the homeless victims who get snatched up in cars shouldn’t get the same treatment as some spoiled girl who runs away and decides not to tell her daddy about it.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, stepping forward. “What do you mean, run away? What makes you think Tanya ran away?”
I looked from Daniel to Cross and back again.
“You know a lot of kidnap victims who are allowed to just walk around of their own accord?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
“I just did!” he shouted. “I saw Tanya Harris walking around on this pier two hours ago. No chains, no shackles, no nothing.”
“Are you sure it was her?” Cross asked, swallowing hard. “Because, Tanya is my friend, Daniel. I know her, and the woman I know wouldn’t disappear without telling her father she was okay. Not to mention the fact that he was on the phone when she was taken. He heard the struggle. He heard her pleading for mercy, and now you expect me to believe she just ran away, that Marcus was lying or confused about the whole thing?”
“I don’t care what you believe,” Daniel answered. “I’m just telling you what I saw.” He huffed. “Like I said, I saw that woman’s face plastered across my television screen a thousand times in the last day and a half. I know what she looks like and, whether you want to believe me or not, it was her. She was right there, talking to that gray-haired woman.”
“Wait,” I said, my heart skipping a beat as I remembered something Mikey said to me that night in the bar, the night I took him home, the night Tanya was taken. “What did you just say about another woman?”
“She was standing right there!” Daniel said, motioning to a part of the pier off in the distance. “Tanya Harris was right there. She was talking to a young woman with gray hair. I tried to yell to them, and then they both ran away.”
“Cross,” I said, looking over at the woman. “Get some people out here to comb the area for clues. We’re not going to have time.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked, looking back at me with curiously arched brows.
“We’re going to need to take a closer look at that security tape from the Thirsty Seagull. I think we missed something very important.”
Chapter 18
"Is it true, what Daniel said," I asked as Cross pulled back into the parking lot of the police department and slid out of her car in one liquid movement.
"About us not giving a damn about missing girls in Vero Beach unless they're directly related to one of us?" she asked, scoffing as she walked toward the building. "You're a cop, Storm. Do I really need to answer that question?"
"That's the reason I'm asking it actually," I said, noticing she had dropped the much more formal “detective” from the moniker she usually gave me. "I've seen enough cases, first in Chicago and then back home in Naples, to know that Daniel isn't wrong when he says things aren't exactly the same for all people."
I thought about the obvious class differences in Naples. I thought about the people I loved; the service crowd, as we're called by the wealthy. I thought about my half-brother Peter, and how he had every resource in the world sitting there at the tips of his fingers. It couldn't be so different in Vero Beach, and the idea of that broke my heart. How many people back home in Naples wanted to say to me exactly what Daniel had just had to Katherine Cross? And wouldn't they be right to? I mean, we had it better than most. Ethan Sands, our district attorney, was a good man with a good heart that beat for all the people under his jurisdiction. Was that true for Vero Beach? It certainly didn't sound that way.
"Every case is different, Storm. You know that," she answered as we pushed into the building and headed right for the evidence room. She didn't bother going to see Marcus. Obviously, she was comfortable enough to deal with all of this the way she saw fit and, given the interactions I had seen between them, I had to imagine she was right.
"Of course, I do," I said, keeping step with her as she grabbed the DVD and headed into the interrogation room to give this tape another view. "But there are always patterns. I've seen it in Naples, and I know it's here too. Is he wrong to imagine you'd give less time and energy to runaways or drug addicts?"
"I do what I'm told," she said, spinning around and closing the door I'd left open. "And I don't apologize for that. If we see a case that's more open and shut than another, then of course we're forced to put more time into it. I'm sorry, Storm, but that's the way the system works."
"Maybe," I answered. "But it doesn't make it right, especially if girls are going missing here at a high rate."
"They're not," she answered
. "I'm on the front lines down here. I know what happens in my town. Besides, Tanya Harris isn't a runaway, and she's not a drug addict who, God bless them, probably have a higher rate of leaving home unannounced. I know this woman. I know the kind of person she is. So, do me a favor, help with this case, if you have to. Don't come in here for three days and form an opinion about my home based on the huffing and puffing of a fisherman with an eternal chip on his shoulder. She blinked at me. "Look, Daniel's daughter was killed in a hit and run seven years ago. We never found out who was responsible. So, the person who killed her was never brought to justice." She shook her head. "Since then, he doesn't have much faith in the police or use for us." She looked down. "I have to admit that I understand why he feels that way. It took years for the person who killed my father to pay for his crimes, but it doesn't change anything, Storm. We're cops. We do the right thing when we can and, when we can't, we never stop trying."
"I'm sorry," I said, processing all the information I had just been given. It seemed the conversation I'd just heard at the pier was even more charged than I'd understood.
"What?" She asked, her eyes narrowing.
"For your father," I answered. "I knew he died, but I didn't know he was murdered." I shrugged, sitting beside her on the table. "I guess that makes us exactly the same kind of orphans."
"Seriously?" she asked. "Your father too?"
"Probably," I admitted. "He died of natural causes, or so we thought. Turns out his stepdaughter had been killing the whole bloodline off to ensure she got a hefty inheritance. After we figured that out, it shed a whole new light on his death."
"That's pretty messed up," she said, looking over at me. "My father found out his best friend had been stealing from him in the middle of a hunt. So, the son of a bitch threw him off a boat."
"I'm not sure which of those stories is more insane," I admitted.
"That's a contest with no winners," she answered. Then, standing up, cleared her throat and said, "I guess we should watch this now. Tell em what it is we're looking for exactly?"