Blood Money

by James Grippando

“And that would be . . . what?”

  “Tell the locals to stay out of my way,” said Crenshaw.

  She knew he was only half-serious—maybe a little more than half. “Roger that,” said Andie.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Midnight came. Jack was driving across the Rickenbacker Causeway to Key Biscayne, halfway home and flanked on both sides by the dark waters of Biscayne Bay. With a slight turn of his head to the left, he could admire downtown Miami and the sparkling skyline that stretched along the shore of the mainland. The view was beautiful—deceptively so, as the city seemed oblivious to Merselus and his plans for the night. Rene, her necklace, and Sydney were heavy on Jack’s mind when the phone call came from Andie.

  “Are you okay?” asked Andie.

  “Yeah. Where are you?”

  “You won’t see me tonight.”

  He got that answer a lot in response to “Where are you?”

  “Do you want me to notify Sydney’s parents?” Jack asked.

  “It’s covered.”

  “Good. Not exactly two of my favorite people.”

  “Which reminds me. Don’t lie awake tonight mulling over your long-shot theory about Celeste Laramore’s biological parents. It went nowhere. DNA tests showed no possible biological connection between Celeste and anyone in the Bennett family—Sydney, her parents, Emma. No one.”

  Andie had told him from the get-go that he was getting carried away with the physical resemblance between Celeste and Sydney. “Still don’t understand why she visited Sydney, why she started looking more and more like her.”

  “My bet is that Celeste thought she could be related to Sydney, or maybe even wanted it to be true. I hate to speak badly of a young woman in a coma, but frankly I think it was some kind of weird celebrity worship. Granted, Sydney was the worst kind of celebrity, but she was still a celebrity.”

  “Maybe,” said Jack.

  “I gotta go. I’ll call you.”

  “Stay safe,” he said, and the call ended. Jack checked his speed. He was on the downward slope of Miami’s highest bridge, the end of the causeway and the beginning of the island of Key Biscayne and its notorious speed traps. He brought it down to thirty-five m.p.h. and dialed Theo at his bar. Music and crowd noise were in the background.

  “How’s Abuela?” Jack asked. Jack hadn’t told his grandmother what he and Andie were up to, but she had still felt uncomfortable staying at the house alone, so Theo told her it was national Take an Abuela to Work Night.

  “She’s awesome,” said Theo. “She’s sharing a booth with Uncle Cy and on her third Cosmo-Not.”

  Cosmo-Not was Theo’s version of a nonalcoholic Cosmopolitan. Uncle Cy was Theo’s great-uncle, an eighty-year-old relic of Miami’s Overtown and its jazz heyday of the mid-twentieth century. Cy was still quite the saxophone player, with emphasis on player.

  “Tell Cy to keep his hands to himself,” said Jack.

  “Will do. How did it go tonight?”

  “Don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m almost home, and I’m embarrassed to say that I forgot all about picking up Abuela. Too damn much on my mind.”

  “No problem. I’ll drop her off.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Unless she hooks up with Cy.”

  “Don’t push it,” said Jack.

  Jack ended the call, tucked his cell away, and just drove. The monotonous hum of tires on asphalt was the backdrop for his thoughts. He passed the Seaquarium, home to Flipper the dolphin and Lolita the killer whale. He wondered if they were asleep; and if they were asleep, he wondered if they were dreaming; and if they were dreaming, he wondered if these highly intelligent legless mammals ever dreamed about walking like the trainers who fed them. Then he shook off the silliness and accepted the fact that the old games he played to trick himself were futile. Never in his life—not even as a high-school boy obsessed with the hair and lips of Julia Roberts—had he managed to conjure up a successful diversion from worries and concerns that were certain to keep him wide awake and staring at the ceiling till dawn.

  Jack steered into the driveway and killed the engine. The headlights remained on for a few moments, then blinked off. The house was dark, and the porch light was off. The narrow driveway was the only opening in a thick ficus hedge that extended like a castle wall across the front and along both sides of his smallish yard. It was great for privacy, but at ten feet it had grown way too tall, and it made the night seem even darker. He was glad Abuela had decided not to stay behind by herself.

  Jack opened the car door, stepped out, and then froze. A man was sitting on his front doorstep. He rose slowly—not a threatening motion, but Jack proceeded with caution as he walked around the front of his car and started up the sidewalk. The man waited, and Jack soon recognized the face.

  “Mr. Bennett?”

  Sydney’s father answered in a low voice, his tone and body language conveying not so much reluctance, but resignation. “We should talk,” he said.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Merselus killed the lights. His one-room apartment on the Miami River went dark, save for the glow from the LCD of his laptop on the dresser. He closed the laptop and, in the darkness, slid it into his backpack. It fit nicely in the slim and padded pocket—safely separated from the fully loaded Glock 9-millimeter pistol, four extra clips of duty ammunition, and a nine-inch diving knife with a serrated blade. He took the knife, slipped on the backpack, and pressed the serrated blade to Sydney’s throat.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” he said in rapid-fire delivery.

  Sydney’s wrists were bound behind her waist with plastic handcuffs. A gray strip of duct tape covered her mouth. Her legs were free, which allowed her to walk, but she wasn’t moving fast enough. Merselus grabbed her by the hair and pushed her toward the door.

  “I said come on.”

  Sydney fell to the floor. Merselus unlocked the door, pulled Sydney to her feet, and spoke right into her face, eye to eye.

  “Do what I tell you to do, and nothing else,” he said. He put the knife back to her throat, pressing hard enough this time to draw a drop of blood. “It’s that simple. Nod if you understand.”

  It was a shaky nod, but she managed.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Now I’m going to take the tape off your mouth, and when we walk out of this apartment, I want you to lean into me. If we pass anyone on the way to the car, you’re just a little drunk and I’m holding you up. You got it?”

  She nodded again.

  He pulled off the tape, which drew a whimper of pain but not another sound from her. Then she breathed deep, mouth open, as if gobbling up air. He grabbed a windbreaker from the closet, draped it over his hand with the knife, and put his arm around her waist. The windbreaker hid the plastic cuffs on her wrists as well as the knife at her spine. Then he pulled her closer and opened the door.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  The three-story complex was a converted motel, thirty years overdue for a makeover and a developer’s whim away from being razed for a new high-rise. Each apartment had just one door, which opened to the outdoors, and a single window with a noisy air-conditioning unit that faced the parking lot. Residents rented month to month, or in Merselus’ case, week to week. His apartment was on the second floor, and he guided Sydney toward the external stairwell. They were halfway down the stairs when Merselus spotted a Miami-Dade Police squad car cruising slowly through the parking lot. Just the sight of it confirmed his fears. Somehow he’d taken longer than eight seconds to send the Check the bench text to Swyteck. The cell had emitted not one but two electronic pulses, double the information he had been willing to release to cell towers in the area, just enough data for law enforcement to work with. Some tech agent had done the computations and triangulated Sydney’s iPhone. They had a bead on his location. A degree from MIT, six years in Silicon Valley, twenty-seven patented algorithms for M-rated video games that had allowed him to retire at ag
e thirty-one and never think twice about a hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to one of Sydney’s jurors—and he slipped on triangulation.

  Son of a bitch!

  He pulled Sydney behind the wall of yellow-painted cinder block at the stairwell’s midlevel landing. The pungent odor of a homeless guy’s fresh urine hung in the air, but they stayed put, out of sight from the passing patrol car. Merselus gave the police a minute to go by. When the squad car reached the far end of the parking lot, he forced Sydney down the stairs toward apartment 102 on the ground floor. Merselus wasn’t friendly with any of his neighbors, but he’d made a point of studying the makeup of the entire complex. He knew that apartment 102 was occupied by a seventy-year-old man who lived alone.

  The patrol car rounded the turn at the end of the parking lot and headed toward a block-long stretch of identical apartments in the west complex. Merselus knocked on the hollow metal door to apartment 102 and positioned Sydney so that anyone who peered out through the peephole would see only the face of a frightened young woman. There was no answer, but a light inside set the closed draperies aglow in the window. Merselus banged harder on the door, and he kept pounding until a sleepy and shirtless old man wearing only pajama bottoms opened it.

  “Girl, what the hell are you—”

  The old man choked on the rest of his words as Merselus whipped himself around the door frame. In a blur of motion, the knife pierced his skin, and the serrated blade tore a two-inch opening between his ribs. His mouth was agape in a futile effort to cry out in pain as the blade twisted and ripped an even bigger hole in his punctured heart.

  Merselus pulled out the knife and let his victim drop to the floor—first to his knees, then onto his side. He lay motionless, the gray hairs on his chest awash in so much crimson. Sydney stood frozen and wide-eyed with fear. Merselus shoved her through the open doorway, dragged the old man farther inside the apartment, and shut the door. The blood-soaked carpeting squished beneath Merselus’ feet as he stepped around the lifeless body.

  “Tough luck, old man,” said Merselus. “Already got all the hostages I need.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  The SWAT leader’s voice was in Andie’s ear, and he wasn’t happy.

  “Henning,” he said via microphone, “tell Miami-Dade to stop patrolling the parking lot before they get my men killed!”

  Andie was standing outside the communications van in a dimly lit parking lot behind a vacant warehouse. The black FBI SWAT van was parked beside the van. The chosen location was strategic: two buildings downriver from the apartment complex. The way the Miami River bent to the north, Andie actually had an unobstructed view from the parking lot behind the warehouse to the waterfront apartment units. It was the FBI’s makeshift command post—close, but not too close, to Merselus’ apartment. Andie was in constant communication with the SWAT leader in the field, in position and ready to begin negotiations if a hostage situation developed.

  “Are the officers on foot or in vehicles?” asked Andie.

  “I’ve seen two squad cars. Don’t know if there’s a foot patrol. But I’ve got four team members in stealth on a yellow-light site sweep. If MDPD officers in uniform start knocking on doors, it’ll be a disaster.”

  A yellow-light sweep meant no busting down doors, no gunfire—just a pass through the area to collect information and assess the situation.

  “I’ll shut it down right now,” said Andie.

  Merselus switched on the TV. The television media’s obsession with breaking news could be his friend in a situation like this. Nothing quite like the local Action News chopper to reveal police positions and give the bad guy a bird’s-eye view of law enforcement strategy. As yet, none of the stations had jumped on the story. He kept the television on but muted the sound, just to stay alert to any noises in the parking lot.

  “I can’t breathe,” said Sydney.

  She was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, her wrists still fastened behind her. The problem was the double pillowcase Merselus had put over her head. He wasn’t trying to suffocate her—not yet, anyway. He just couldn’t take it anymore, the way she cried and carried on every time she caught an eyeful of the dead old man on the floor. He’d known women to find a way to peek out from behind blindfolds before. A couple of pillowcases, one on top of the other, were infallible. And he’d found it amazing how long a young woman in good health could go that way without actually suffocating.

  “Just be still,” he said.

  Merselus looked for a place to sit, but there was none. He’d turned the room into a makeshift fortress. Anyone trying to force his way into the apartment would have to pass through a mountain of furniture. The entire room had been cleaned out, except for the television. There was a crack of light at the edge of the wall and along the top of the window. The drapes were so old and worn that, in spots, the lining had lost its blackout quality. Merselus considered that a positive, since the room would brighten with the swirl of police lights in the parking lot—if and when they came.

  “Quiet,” he said. He could have sworn he’d heard something. He had to move the mini-refrigerator to get to the door and put his ear to the hollow metal. He heard nothing, but he waited. Then he heard it again.

  Pounding.

  What the hell?

  No, it was knocking. Distant knocking. They were knocking on apartment doors. From the sound of it, they were still several doors away. But no doubt about it: The police were actually going door to door.

  Idiots!

  Merselus switched off the television, and the room went black. Then he positioned himself at the doorjamb, held his pistol at the ready, and waited.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Jack listened, trying not to interrupt, as Geoffrey Bennett talked. They were alone in Jack’s living room, Bennett seated on the couch and Jack in an armchair. Bennett would occasionally look Jack in the eye, but for the most part, his gaze was cast downward at the coffee table.

  “There’s another side to Ellen,” he said of his wife. “A dark side.”

  The pause seemed to invite inquiry from Jack. “How dark?” he asked.

  “Dark enough to get mixed up with a monster like this guy Merselus.”

  Jack caught his breath. “When you say mixed up . . .”

  “I mean,” he started to say, then stopped, as if it were unspeakable.

  “They were lovers?” asked Jack.

  “Love had nothing to do with it.”

  Jack moved to the edge of his seat, leaning forward. “Look, if you know something, you need to just come right out and say it. The FBI is working right now, trying to find Merselus and stop him from hurting your daughter.”

  Bennett breathed in and out, then continued. “Ellen and this guy linked up on the Internet. I’m not exactly sure when, but it was definitely before Sydney got arrested.”

  “Before or after Emma’s death?”

  “Before,” Bennett said, swallowing hard. “Definitely before.”

  “You say ‘definitely’ before. Why do you say that?”

  He looked Jack in the eye and said, “Because he killed her.”

  It was hard to comprehend, as many times as Jack had heard the world say his client was guilty. But something in Bennett’s voice almost made Jack believe it. “How?” Jack asked.

  “Threw her in the swimming pool. Emma could swim as well as any two-year-old. You teach the little ones to go right to the side of the pool, grab onto the ledge, and do the hand-over-hand choo-choo train to the shallow end, where they can climb out. But every time she grabbed the ledge,” he said, his voice quaking, “Merselus would pry her fingers loose. She kept swimming back, and he’d pry her loose again. After a while, she got too tired to swim back.”

  It was making Jack ill just to hear it, the thought of a two-year-old girl fighting to hang on, no match for an adult who knew she couldn’t fight forever. He thought of Emma’s little legs churning, too, and her feet scraping the bottom of the pool—exactly the way Jack’s f
orensic expert had described it.

  “Why would he do that to Emma?”

  “Because he’s one very sick bastard.”

  “Yeah, he is,” said Jack. “But that doesn’t answer my question. There are lots of ways for sick bastards to get their thrills. Why Emma?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jack could tell that he was holding back. “I think you do,” he said, his gaze tightening.

  Bennett looked away, then back. “About a month before Emma died, Ellen hired a babysitter so the two of us could go out. When we came home, the babysitter was all upset. She said that Emma asked her to touch her privates. So, like I say, I don’t know for a fact. But I think Merselus killed Emma because she was getting old enough to, you know . . .”

  “To talk about who was abusing her?” said Jack.

  Bennett nodded.

  The sick feeling inside Jack was getting worse. But there was anger, too. “Why in the hell did you wait all this time to say something?”

  “Ellen said they could pin it on me. You heard those rumors of me being an abuser, some people even saying I was the father of Sydney’s child. Where do you think that shit got started? Ellen and her sick son-of-a-bitch boyfriend could have sunk me.”

  “So you let them pin it on your daughter instead?”

  “I knew that would never stick.”

  “I’m not sure how you could have known that. I was her lawyer, and until I heard Judge Matthews’ clerk say ‘not guilty,’ I thought we were looking at the death penalty.”

  “Trust me. I knew Sydney was not going to be convicted.”

  “Are you saying it was you who bought off juror number five?”

  “No, no. They did. Ellen and Merselus. They let me in on it so I wouldn’t feel the need to save Sydney from the death penalty. The fix was in, so to speak. So I just . . . went along. Kept my mouth shut. I shouldn’t have, I know. What Sydney went through is beyond horrible.”