By now, I was caught up in the story, and I think everybody in the room was as well. Jock had sat quietly through the whole thing, but I knew that prodigious brain of his was soaking it all up, dissecting it, trying to make sense out of the murders on Longboat Key that in some manner had their genesis in the tortured brain of a woman named Katie.
Perez took a deep breath. “While Katie was in the hospital in Ocala, she got pregnant. The father was a Mexican peasant who worked there as an orderly. He said the sex was consensual and she confirmed it, saying that she was in love with the man. The hospital fired the Mexican, but abortion was not an option. She was pretty far along when the pregnancy was discovered. Abortion was not legal in Florida in those days, and we are a Catholic family.”
“She had a little girl who was given to the father, a man we only knew as José. He disappeared with his daughter, but apparently stayed in contact with Katie. About a year after she gave birth, she disappeared too. Apparently she just walked out of the hospital one day when no one was looking. The family suspected that José had come for her.”
“What happened to them?” I asked. “Does anybody know?”
“Yes,” said Perez. “Caleb was ten when the little girl was born. When he was twelve, Katie’s body was found over near Naples, naked and tied to a tree beside a creek that emptied into the Gulf in the Ten Thousand Islands area. She’d been shot in the back of the head with a twenty-two caliber pistol.”
“Who killed her?” asked Parrish.
“Nobody knows. The killer was never found.”
“Katie’s death must have caused a stir in your family’s social circles,” said J.D.
“No. We never identified her as Katie. We wouldn’t have known about her death if José hadn’t told us.”
“Are you sure it was her?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Perez. “José had a crime-scene picture he’d somehow filched from the Collier County Sheriff’s office. He brought it to us, along with his daughter whom they’d named Mariah. The picture clearly showed Katie, naked and tied to a tree.”
“He brought his daughter?” asked J.D.
“Yes. The child was only about two years old, but the father wanted us to know that Katie was dead and that the child was fine. He left the picture and somehow Caleb found it. We didn’t see Mariah or her father again for another eight years.”
“Where did they go?” I asked, getting more and more caught up in this strange tale.
“They were migrants,” said Perez, “working the fields up and down the country, never staying in one place very long.”
“But they came back to see you,” I said.
“Yes. When Mariah was ten, she and her father showed up at James Picket’s doorstep. Caleb was twenty that year and a student at the University of Florida up in Gainesville. José told James that he was in trouble. Somehow, he’d gotten crosswise with some very bad people who were involved in smuggling drugs. He had to run, he said, and he couldn’t take Mariah with him. He was afraid that the smugglers would kill Mariah if they caught up with him. He asked James to take her in.”
“James was willing to do that?” I asked. “After everything Katie had put him through?”
“He was a good man,” Perez said, “and Mariah needed a home. Our family took her in and when Caleb graduated and came back to Miami, he and Mariah became inseparable. She was wild. She had very little education and Spanish was her first language. None of our family spoke it, so sometimes the communication was a little strained. But Mariah was a quick study. She’d had some schooling in the migrant camps and had a rudimentary understanding of English. She mastered it quickly and did well in school.”
“What happened to José?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” said Perez. “We never heard from him again.”
“Where is Mariah now?” J.D. asked.
“She got into some trouble in high school. Started hanging around with the wrong crowd. She hooked up with a Puerto Rican thug and pulled away from the family. Caleb was the only one who kept in touch. Then the thug got killed in a shoot-out with the police, and Mariah came back to the family. Well, actually, she came back to live with Caleb.”
“Don’t tell me there was a little incest going on there,” I said.
“No, not at all,” said Perez. “Caleb was gay.”
“So what happened with Mariah?” asked J.D.
Perez shrugged. “Her boyfriend came back from the dead,” he said. “A couple of years after she thought he’d been killed by the police, he showed back up. He had moved up in the world and now was running a fairly large drug operation. He got Caleb involved in laundering some of his money, and Caleb got greedy. He’d done well as a stockbroker and was building quite a clientele. Unfortunately, he had set up a giant Ponzi scheme using the drug dealers’ money as seed. He was careful never to short the drug lords, so he was doing well with them, but all the other people, the honest ones, who invested with him, lost their shirts.”
“And this is where I came in,” said J.D.
“Yes,” said Perez. “You busted him and he got twenty years. You also put a stop to the whale tail murders, although you didn’t know it.”
“Do you know what the whale tail earring was all about?” asked J.D.
Perez smiled ruefully. “The day Katie carved her initials in Caleb’s head, she was wearing sterling silver earrings fashioned like a whale tail. That was the last time Caleb ever saw his mother. Until, that is, he saw the picture of her dead and tied to a tree.”
“But what I don’t understand,” said J.D. “is who has been trying to kill me. And why replicate the whale tail murders?”
“Mariah is behind that,” Perez said.
“Mariah?” asked J.D.
“Yes. She’s as crazy as her mother was. Vicious and vindictive.”
“What’s your involvement?” I asked.
“When Caleb was arrested on the embezzlement charge, I was working in one of the large brokerage houses at its downtown Miami branch. I had a degree in finance from the University of Florida and was making a pretty good living. Caleb was out on bail and came to see me at my condo. He told me about the murders, the money laundering, and how he’d fleeced our friends. He wanted me to take over his job with Fuentes.”
“Who’s Fuentes?” Jock asked, speaking up for the first time.
“Arturo Fuentes is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and runs drugs into Florida. He was Caleb’s brother-in-law. He’d come back from the dead and married Mariah.”
“So you took over things from Caleb,” I said.
“Yes. Caleb had stashed away ten million dollars. It was money he’d made over and above what he was doing for the druggers. The proceeds from his Ponzi scheme. He wanted me to invest that money for him and hold it until he got out of prison. He didn’t expect to get twenty years. His lawyer was telling him that he’d probably have to do four or five. Nobody counted on the wrath of all the old money in Miami coming down on him. The judge gave him the full twenty with no chance of parole.”
There was a knock on the door and the deputy marshal we’d met when we arrived stuck his head in the door. “Sorry, Mr. Parrish, but we have to feed the prisoner.”
Parrish looked at his watch. “It’s almost one,” he said. “I didn’t realize the time was getting by. We’ll go get some lunch and be back in an hour.”
“That’ll work,” said the deputy marshal. “He’ll be here when you get back.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Parrish drove us to a small restaurant that sat on an outparcel of a tired shopping center a couple of miles from the safe house. Both establishments had seen better days, but the donuts had not held up and I was hungry. I thought nobody could really screw up a hot dog, but this place proved me wrong.
An elderly waitress brought us menus and then walked to a stool in the corner and sat down. We were the only diners in the place. The waitress was probably a retiree who couldn’t make it on her Social Security check and fou
nd herself living out her days in a trailer park and taking whatever job she could get to make ends meet.
There were a lot of people like that in Florida. I wondered if she had a husband, a family. I’d never know, but I always thought about those things when I saw the old people working at menial jobs. They seemed a little sad to me, the epitome of unrealized dreams of retirement in the sunshine. They come to Florida with high hopes and then something happens. They run out of money, or their spouses die, and their children don’t want to be bothered with them. They have no home to return to in the North where they’d lived their whole lives because they’d sold the house to finance their retirements. At their ages, they have no future, and hope disappears like an errant zephyr on a still day.
Reality hits them like a sledgehammer and one day they have to go back to work, waiting tables in dismal restaurants with bad food or greeting customers at Walmart. Their nights are spent in front of the TV, their sleep interrupted by dreams of happy times long gone. Maybe the melancholy that these sad oldsters induce in me is simply the fear that I’ll end up in the same place someday. No spouse, no family, no money, no future.
We nibbled at our food and talked about what we’d learned. “Perez is a strange fellow,” said Parrish.
“I wonder about a guy like him,” J.D. said. “It seemed important for him to establish his bona fides, give us a sense that he came from a good family, whatever that is.”
“I think he doesn’t want to look too closely at what he is,” I said. “He’s caused a lot of grief and the world would probably be a little better off if he’d never been born. Is he married?”
“He was,” said Parrish. “He never had any children and his wife packed it up years ago. Moved to Denver and remarried, cut all ties with the Perez family. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t heard from her in years.”
J.D. frowned. “I still don’t know why he came after me and why he revived the whale tail killings. None of that makes sense.”
“Maybe it will come together this afternoon,” I said. “Jock, are you seeing any connections to the agency here?”
“Maybe. Perez said that Fuentes was killed in a drug deal and then came back to life a couple of years later. That sounds similar to what we know about Escondido. If we can tie Fuentes and Escondido together, that print we found on the flap of one of the envelopes sent to Cantreras will be a pretty good indication that it was Fuentes who ordered the hit on Gene Alexander.”
“That seems like a mighty big coincidence,” I said. “Fuentes is involved in trying to kill J.D. and then just happens to get involved in the killing of a man on Longboat Key who is not related in any way to the whale tail murders or the grudge against J.D.”
Jock cocked his finger and pointed it at me. “Bingo, podna. That’s too neat a package. We’re missing something.”
“Is somebody setting this whole thing up?” I asked. “Pointing the agency at Fuentes, when all he’s guilty of is trying to murder J.D.”
“Did you say ‘all,’ Matt?” J.D. asked. “All he’s guilty of is trying to murder me? Nothing important or anything like that.” She was smiling.
“You know what I mean, precious.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I don’t want to break this up,” said Parrish, “but we’ve got a lot more to get out of Perez. You guys ready to start back?”
We finished our drinks and left the restaurant. I put a generous tip on the table for the waitress who probably needed the money and who was not responsible for the quality of the food.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
We were back in the windowless room. Perez stood and said, “How was your lunch?”
“Sit down and tell me why Mariah wanted me dead,” said J.D. She wasn’t interested in pleasantries.
“Mariah is of the opinion that you knew that Caleb was the so-called whale tail killer. She was afraid that you would eventually tell somebody and word would get back to Miami and ruin the family name.”
“Let’s see,” I said. “Your family includes one crazy woman who abused her son who became an embezzler and a serial killer. She had a daughter who married a drug lord and is crazy herself and you’re a money launderer for the cartels. How much of that good name can possibly be left?”
Perez smiled. “I admit there’s not much left of the family. Most of them have long since moved away from South Florida and those of us who are left are not exactly considered top drawer. But Mariah doesn’t understand that. She seems consumed with the idea that the family name has to be protected. And then there was the thirty million dollars.”
“What thirty million?” asked J.D.
“Well, it’s not exactly thirty million,” Perez said.
“Tell me about the money,” said J.D., steel in her voice.
“Just before his death, when he knew he only had a few days to live, Caleb told Mariah that he had given me ten million dollars for safekeeping. He also told her the ten million had grown to thirty million.”
“Had it?” J.D. asked.
“No. It was actually about five million, but I’d given Caleb reports over the years that showed the money was growing. I was afraid to tell him I’d lost a lot of it.”
“What were you planning to do when he got out of prison?” asked J.D.
“Run. I’ve got the five million in secret bank accounts placed around the world.”
“So Mariah wanted the money and you didn’t have it.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Why didn’t you just run when Caleb died?” I asked.
“Things weren’t in place yet. I thought I had twenty years, but he died years before he was supposed to be released. I had to scramble to get all the little pieces put together, get set up so that I could get the money out of the banks without any traces that would lead to me, set up my getaway house. There were just some things I hadn’t done. Caleb was diagnosed with a glioblastoma about a month before his death. No chance of survival. He chose to do nothing to prolong his life by a few months. I had to stall Mariah until my plans were ready.”
“How did you do that?” asked J.D.
“I knew Caleb planned to kill you when he got out of prison. He blamed you for the time he’d spent in custody. Mariah knew about his desire to take you out. She told Caleb when he was diagnosed that if he wanted you dead, he had to come up with a plan to have you killed after he died. The money was the key, so I convinced him to tell Mariah that she wouldn’t get the money until you were dead. I figured that’d give me time to get the hell out of here.”
“Weren’t you afraid that Mariah wouldn’t go along?” I asked. “That she’d just demand the money right away?”
“Sure,” Perez said, “but I had a plan for that, too. By the time Mariah got you killed, I’d be gone.”
“What if she decided she wanted the money without killing me?” J.D. asked.
“The only way Mariah could get the money was through me. I told her that I had it set up so that if something happened to me, the money would disappear. If I died of natural causes, the money could be retrieved by using bank codes that would be sent to her by a lawyer in another state ninety days after my death and after an autopsy had been completed by a pathologist of the lawyer’s choosing. I’d hoped that she would decide that the ninety-day window was too much even if she managed to kill me and make it look like a natural death.”
“She could have tortured you into telling,” I said.
“I convinced her that I had a weak heart. I told her that as part of the deception so that she didn’t have to worry that if I did die of natural causes the money would disappear. I thought it would also give her the idea that torture of any sort might kill me. I figured she would think she could get the money more quickly by killing Detective Duncan. I planned to be gone by the time that happened.”
“So,” J.D. said, “I was sort of the staked goat that would draw Mariah and give you time to get away.”
“That’s about it,” said Perez.
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“You’re some piece of work, Perez,” J.D. said. “I should have left you to the bastards in the jail. Tell me how you went about trying to kill me.”
“Caleb had a friend, a longtime cellmate named Jeff Worthington. Caleb said he was one of the smartest men he’d ever met. He made a deal with Worthington to follow up and kill you. He told Worthington all the details of the whale tail murders. Caleb said Worthington was a natural killer. He liked the power the kill gave him. I was to fund the operation with Caleb’s money and then give Worthington two million dollars when you were dead.”
“Who was working with him?” asked J.D.
“He had three of his buddies from prison.”
“What are their names?” J.D. asked.
“Qualman, Bagby, and Steiffel.”
“Qualman and Bagby are dead,” said J.D. “What happened to Steiffel?”
“He’s dead too,” said Perez. “Worthington killed him and dropped him in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“When?”
“Right after they tried to kill you on that island just north of Longboat Key.”
“Leffis Key on Anna Maria Island,” J.D. said, her tone flat.
“Yes. That’s it.”
“Where’s Worthington now?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Perez. “I was trying to reach him yesterday when the DEA showed up at my office.”
“He wasn’t much of a lawyer,” I said.
“No, but it worked for a few days. I thought we might have to use him to get to some of our idiots if they got caught. I was pretty sure at least two or three of them would be arrested before we concluded our operation. I was just trying to cover all the bases and it worked. If we hadn’t set him up as a lawyer, he wouldn’t have been able to get the drugs into the jail to kill Bagby.”
“What happened to the real Ben Flagler?” I asked.
“Worthington killed him. Gave the body to a gator hunter who needed some bait.”
“Why the whale tail copycat?” asked J.D.
“Mariah followed through with Caleb’s wishes and copied what he’d done to the women in Miami. Caleb wanted you to know that the whale tail killer was back in business and you were about to be a victim. He wanted you to live in fear for a time before you died.”
Fatal Decree Page 28