by Stuart Woods
“I think he killed Hank Doherty, maybe Chet Marley, too. Or, at least, he was one of the killers.”
“The dog?” Harry asked.
“Daisy.”
“She went nuts, didn’t she?”
“She sure did. Whoever killed Hank got him to lock Daisy in the kitchen first, but Daisy sure remembered him.”
CHAPTER
47
T he next morning, Holly was back at her desk. She and Harry Crisp had agreed that she should keep something like regular office hours so that, if anyone were keeping tabs on her, she would appear to be doing nothing out of the ordinary. She was working her way through the stack of personnel files when Hurd Wallace rapped at her door.
“Morning, Hurd,” Holly said. “Come in and have a seat.”
“Morning,” he said, sitting down.
“What’s up?”
“I feel sort of out of the loop,” Wallace said.
“What loop is that?”
“Well, I’m beginning to get the impression that you know something about Chet Marley’s murder that I don’t.”
“What makes you think that?”
“You seem to be doing a lot of investigative work these days that I’m cut out of,” Wallace said.
“Such as?”
“You’re making trips to the county planning office and looking up documents there; you’ve had Barney Noble in here, and he didn’t look happy; and then you interrogated that guy yesterday, the one whose picture you had up on the bulletin board a while back.”
“All that is true, I guess.”
“What’s it all about, Holly?”
“Well, it’s no big thing, Hurd. I found out that this guy, who is one of Barney’s security guards, has a criminal record and shouldn’t be licensed for security work or to carry a gun.”
“And what did you do about it?”
“Barney promised me he’d take him off security work, so I haven’t done anything, except talk to him.”
“Why’d you sic the dog on him?”
“How’d you know about the dog?”
“She made a lot of noise.”
“I didn’t sic her onto the guy. She just didn’t like him, I guess. I don’t know why.”
Hurd nodded.
“What’s the problem, Hurd? What’s on your mind?”
“Tell you the truth, I get the very strong impression that you don’t trust me to do my job. Ever since you got here, we’ve hardly talked about anything, and I guess we didn’t have to, until I got the deputy chief’s job. But now I figure I ought to know everything that’s going on.”
Holly felt cornered. Wallace was right; she didn’t trust him, but she hadn’t meant for him to know that. “I’m sorry I’ve given you that impression,” she said.
“You know, if Chet had confided in me about what he was working on, we would probably have already made an arrest in his killing. And now you’re working on something you’re keeping from me. What happens if you end up dead? Where is the department then?”
“Hurd, you have a very good point there.”
“It doesn’t seem to be doing me very much good, Holly. Are you going to bring me in on this or shut me out?”
“There isn’t anything to shut you out of, Hurd. Ask me questions, and I’ll give you answers.”
“Do you have some particular interest in Palmetto Gardens?”
“What do you know about that place, Hurd?”
“Just what everybody else knows: practically nothing. What do you know about it?”
“Just about what you know,” she lied. “You think we ought to know more about it?”
“I certainly do.”
“Why?”
“I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to you that we have what amounts to a city-state, right here in our jurisdiction—that they don’t allow us to patrol out there, that we can’t even enter the place unless we’re escorted. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“It did until I visited the place,” Holly said.
Wallace came close to changing his expression. “You visited the place?”
“I’ve been out there a couple of times. Barney Noble gave me the five-cent tour, and he invited my father and me to play golf out there once. He and my dad served in the army together.”
“What’s it like out there?”
Holly told him about her two visits.
“I don’t like the idea of the security people having automatic weapons,” he said.
“Neither do I, much,” Holly replied, “but there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Wallace shrugged. “We could make a stink at the state level about the licenses being issued.”
“The automatic weapons licenses?”
“Couldn’t hurt.”
“You think we could get the licenses pulled?”
“Maybe. I know some people.”
“We’d need more than personal contacts, Hurd. If the licenses were canceled, Barney would request a hearing and get it. He’d be able to say that none of his people had ever fired one in anger.”
“And we’d be able to say that they’ve no need for more firepower than we have in our department.”
“I don’t know what that would get us, except to alert Barney Noble that we have more than a passing interest in what he’s doing out there.”
“Would that be a bad thing?” Wallace asked. “It might rattle him a little.”
“What’s the purpose of rattling him?”
“To let him know that we take an interest in what goes on on our turf.”
“I think I’ve already let him know that, with this Cracker Mosely thing.”
“What’s Cracker Mosely?”
“The man I interrogated yesterday.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s an ex-cop out of Miami. He killed a drug dealer with his baton and did time for it.” Holly wanted to see where Wallace would go with that information.
He wrinkled his brow, a major use of facial expression for him. “And yet he got licensed for security work?”
“And to carry a gun.”
“How’d that happen?”
“A computer check showed no criminal record.”
“Well, that’s a major lapse, isn’t it?”
“I thought so.”
“Have you called anybody at state records to find out why?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
Holly shrugged. “I just want to let it ride for a while and see what happens.”
“While you’re letting it ride, I’d like to run records checks on all the security people out there.”
“How? We don’t even have their names,” Holly said.
“I could run a check on security-guard licenses issued in Orchid and cross-check that against the Palmetto Gardens addresses.”
Now Holly was stuck. So far she hadn’t told him anything that Barney Noble didn’t already know, but this was new territory. She took a deep breath. “I’ve already done that, Hurd.”
“So you have a list of the security people?”
“Yep.”
Wallace shook his head. “You might have told me that a few minutes ago and saved me all these questions.”
“I wanted to see what questions you’d ask, Hurd.”
“Well, my next question is, does anybody else with a criminal record belong to the Palmetto Gardens security department?”
Wallace was now only a step from where Holly’s curiosity had taken her, and she saw that it would cost her nothing to make it easier for him.
“Well, yes and no,” she said.
There was a tiny ripple of anger across Wallace’s placid face.
Holly held up a hand. “There are a hundred and two people at Palmetto Gardens who are licensed to carry weapons.”
“A hundred and two?”
“That’s right. Only fifteen of them are security guards, in the formal sense.”
“Have you checked to see if any of them has a criminal rec
ord, like Mosely?”
“None of them shows a criminal record in the state computer system.”
“Yeah, but neither did Mosely.”
Holly took a deep breath and let it all out. “Seventy-one of them show up in the national crime computer as having criminal records.”
Wallace stared blankly at her for a moment while he digested that information.
“What do you think I ought to do, Hurd?” Holly asked.
“I think you ought to call the fucking FBI,” he said. “Right now,” he said, pointing. “There’s the phone.”
Holly laughed. She would have thought Wallace incapable of such an outburst.
“Let me tell you my problem, Hurd,” she said. There was no point in holding this back any longer. “Chet Marley thought there was someone in this department who was working with…somebody outside this department.”
Wallace’s mouth dropped open. “And you thought it was me?”
“I thought it was a possibility,” Holly said. “The same possibility applies to everybody else in the department.” Then Wallace did something Holly thought she would never see. He burst out laughing.
CHAPTER
48
A fter work, Holly drove out to Jackson’s house, with Hurd Wallace following in his own car. She looked in her rearview mirror from time to time, wondering if she were doing the right thing. Hurd, she admitted to herself, had been her prime suspect, and she had not gotten used to the idea that he might be on her side of this thing. She had made the decision, late in the afternoon, to bring him inside the investigation, and she had made it on little more than some newly informed intuition.
She turned into Jackson’s driveway, drove down the narrow lane and parked next to one of the FBI vans. It appeared that the whole team would be present. She waved Hurd inside and came upon a scene that was, by now, all too familiar. Harry Crisp was on the phone, the agents were drinking beer and watching sports on television and Jackson was out back, grilling something. She stuck her head outside and told him there’d be one more for dinner.
Harry hung up the phone. “Who’s this?” he asked, clearly uncomfortable with the new face.
“Harry,” Holly said, “this is my deputy chief, Hurd Wallace.” She introduced all the other team members.
“Forgive me, Holly,” Harry said, “but I’m a little confused at this turn of events. Isn’t this the guy…”
“Yeah, he is, or rather, he was. I’m satisfied that he’s not my mole, and I want him brought fully into this.”
“I understand your suspicions,” Wallace said, “but I assure you, I’ve never given any departmental information to anyone on the outside. I just want to help.”
“Okay,” Harry said, waving him to a chair. “Have a seat. Looks like dinner is ready.”
Jackson came in with a huge platter of grilled fish and set it on the table. Nobody said grace.
When the food had been consumed and the dishes stacked, Harry got down to business.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s start with our black bag job. Bill and Jim went over the fence at Westover Motors last night and nearly got eaten by a very large German shepherd.”
There was laughter around the table.
“We tranquilized the thing,” Bill said. “I expect he felt a little woozy this morning, but we removed the dart, so nobody will be the wiser, except the dog, and he’s too hung over to talk.”
“Then they got the bug installed, and it was a good job,” Harry said. “We’ve got a recorder on the frequency, and we check it every few hours. Same with the walkie-talkie frequencies that Palmetto Gardens is using.” The driveway chime rang, and Harry stopped. “That’ll be Rita,” he said.
“Who’s Rita?” Jackson asked.
“You’re about to find out.” Harry stood up and walked to the door in time to meet a young woman at the door. She was no more than five-two, slim but shapely, with big, curly hair, dressed in tight jeans and a sweater.
“Jackson, Holly, Hurd, this is Rita Morales, from our office.”
Everybody waved, and so did Rita. They made room for her at the table.
“You eat?” Harry asked.
“McDonald’s,” she replied. “Smells better here.”
“No more McDonald’s,” Jackson said. “The best grub in town is at my house.”
“How’d it go today?” Harry asked.
“I’m hired. I start tomorrow morning. I have to be at the service gate at seven.”
“Do you know where you’ll be working?”
She shook her head, making her curly hair shake. “They wouldn’t say. Said I’d be assigned somewhere tomorrow morning, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the same assignment every day. They put me through a kind of indoctrination this afternoon at the employment office, along with three other women.”
“What kind of indoctrination?”
“Everything is strict: we wear a uniform, we don’t speak unless spoken to, we don’t hobnob with any other employees. We can’t make or receive phone calls, and no cellulars are allowed; they said we’d be searched.”
“Don’t take a badge or a gun in there,” Harry said.
“No kidding, Harry? I thought I’d wear an FBI jacket and body armor.”
“All right, all right, I just don’t want you to get your—”
“Tit in a wringer?” She turned to Holly. “You see what a woman has to put up with in the Bureau?” she said. “They’re all Neanderthals.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Rita,” Harry said. “What else?”
“That’s about it. You’ve finally turned me into a domestic servant, Harry. What’s next? Turning tricks?”
Harry turned red. “Rita, I wouldn’t send you in there if anybody else could do it.”
“Well, that’s a ringing endorsement of my abilities,” she replied.
“Jesus, I just can’t win with you, can I, Rita?”
“No, Harry, you can’t.” She turned to Holly again. “The director himself assigned me to keep Harry as humble as possible. It isn’t easy.”
“All right, I’ve got some news,” Harry said, anxious to change the subject. “I heard from my guy at the NSA again today. They’re monitoring Palmetto Gardens again, and guess what?”
“Okay, what, Harry?” Rita asked.
“The last time they monitored the place all they got was commodity trades. This time, they got exactly the same thing.”
“This is news?” Bill asked.
“No, you don’t understand,” Harry said. “They got exactly the same thing—the same trades.”
“Why would they make the same trades over and over?” Bill asked.
“The trades are on a loop. They’re playing a tape over and over.”
“Sorry,” Bill said, “I still don’t get it. You’re saying that they’ve got this satellite station set up just to play a tape on a loop?”
“That’s what it sounds like, but that’s not all that’s happening,” Harry said. “The NSA processed the transmissions, and they’re getting microbursts between the trades.”
“What’s a microburst?” Jackson asked.
“You know what a microdot is?”
“You mean, when they photograph a page and reduce it to the size of a dot?”
“Exactly. A microburst is the audio equivalent of a microdot. You take a string of words or a message, and you speed it up, I don’t know, a thousand times, or something, and what you get is a microburst of sound. It’s received…wherever it’s received, and it’s slowed down again so the message can be heard.”
“So what are the microbursts saying?”
“We don’t know. They’re encoded.”
“Isn’t that what the NSA does? Break codes?”
“Yeah, but it’s a lot more complex than it used to be. Now that everybody has got computers, codes can be constructed that are much, much more sophisticated than, say, the Enigma codes the Germans used in World War Two. And, of course, they can be changed daily, with a few key
board entries on the computer. The government is trying to limit the development of codes, or to make the encoders include a key that guys like us can use to break them.”
“But Palmetto Gardens isn’t giving us any keys, are they?” Bill asked.
“Right. So it’s going to take time to break down these microbursts and see what they mean. All we’ve got right now is meaningless strings of numbers.”
Holly spoke up. “What are you getting from the bug in Barney’s car?”
“Chitchat, mostly. One good piece of news: Cracker Mosely seems to be scared enough of you not to tell Barney everything you asked him yesterday. Barney questioned him closely, and all he said was that you threatened to call his parole officer if he continued to do security work. Barney has made him a radio operator.”
“That puts Cracker right in the middle of the security office, instead of out in a patrol car, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“That’s right, Holly.”
“So the next step is to pick up Cracker again the first chance we get and really turn him.”
“Good thinking.”
“I can’t have my people pick him up, though. We’ve still got our mole.”
“We’re surveilling both gates,” Harry said. “Anybody sees Cracker—and we’ll give you a photograph—call me, and we’ll get him alone for a few minutes and threaten him beyond his wildest nightmares.”
“Good,” Holly said.
“Yeah,” Jackson echoed, “real good. And at some point, I hope to get an opportunity to tell him that I was the one who put you onto him.”
“I’ll see if I can arrange that,” Harry said.
CHAPTER
49
R ita Morales showed up at the service gate to Palmetto Gardens at six forty-five the following morning in the rusting 1978 Impala the Bureau had furnished her. She was wearing old, baggy khakis and a South Beach sweatshirt, faded and full of holes. She parked her car, walked up to the security shack and rapped sharply on the glass. The guard, who had been dozing, nearly had a heart attack.
“Hey,” she said in a pronounced Cuban-American accent, “I’m here for the cleaning work.”
The guard got hold of himself and picked up a clipboard. “Name?”