She’s a pleasant woman with a nice smile, but there is a toughness in her face that comes through. She’s also no more than five foot two and would weigh a hundred pounds if she were holding barbells in both hands.
She looks like a person who does what is necessary and is not afraid of hard work. Which must be the case, because she’s cleaning up to sixty rooms a day. I find that hard to identify with; when Laurie is out of town, I would rather set fire to our bed than make it.
Pete does the introductions and shows the picture to Peg. “That’s him,” she says.
“You’re sure he was here?”
“Oh, yeah. He creeped me out. There was an air about him like he was dangerous. If he stayed overnight, I was going to ask Pete to make up his room.”
“Did he say anything to you?” I ask.
“No, he kept the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door. That was fine with me. And the other guy was even creepier.”
“What other guy?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know his name or anything, but there was something off about him. He was only here for about twenty minutes.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“I was making up the rooms in that section. He was looking around like he didn’t know where he was going, so I asked if I could help him. He didn’t say anything; it was like he looked through me, like I wasn’t there. It gives me a chill just to think about that guy.”
“What did he look like?”
“I’d say about six foot, maybe a little bigger, black hair, like, these full eyebrows, and his mouth was a little bent, like on a very slight tilt.”
“You have a good memory,” I say.
“The guy was scary; it was just the way he carried himself.”
“If we had a sketch artist come, do you think you could describe him well enough for a picture to be drawn?”
“I don’t know … I doubt it. I’ve never tried something like that, and I only saw him briefly.”
“Anything else you can tell us?”
She thinks for a moment, then says, “No, he showed up and wasn’t here long. I remember telling Pete that they couldn’t have been up to any good, and … but I did hear him say something when he left.”
“What was it?”
“He said, ‘Just do what you’re told.’ It sounded like a threat; I even expected him to add ‘or else,’ but he didn’t. I think the guy in the room answered him, but I couldn’t hear what he said. I’m sorry I can’t remember any more.”
“Peg, you’re actually amazing.”
As a general rule, law enforcement investigations move slowly.
There are exceptions, of course, but that is usually when the answers being sought are obvious and the clues readily apparent.
I feel like we are surrounded by slow-moving—and, in some cases, stalled—investigations. To my knowledge, the Philly cops are getting nowhere on the Denise Adams killing, while our local cops are having a similar lack of success on both the Christopher Tolbert and George Adams homicides.
I also haven’t heard a word in more than a week from Cindy Spodek, who is trying to discover whether there is a link between the homeless murders that Sam discovered across the country. I have to admit that I’m getting pissed off at her unresponsiveness; I either have given her a monster case or a sack of nothing, and it shouldn’t take her that long to figure out which it is.
And of course hovering over all of this is the fact that our own investigation, the one that we’re conducting in defense of our client, is getting nowhere fast.
So this morning I am doing what I like to do when I am under stress but have some free time during a trial: I’m at the Tara Foundation hanging out with the dogs. Dogs relax me; they help me think. They don’t argue with me, they don’t object when I say something in court, and they don’t pound their gavel when I’m being obnoxious.
I bring Tara with me; she loves hanging out with new friends, and there is fortunately a lot of turnover at the Foundation. Whenever we place a dog in a home, it opens up a spot to bring a new one in. Tara hasn’t been here in a couple of weeks, so there are a whole bunch of dogs she hasn’t met yet.
Sebastian didn’t come with us. He doesn’t like to socialize much; it interferes with his sleep. Pretty much the only thing Sebastian allows to keep him awake is food; if he could find a way to eat in his sleep, he’d be in heaven.
Willie is out getting supplies, which in this case means hundreds of pounds of kibble, dog toys, and Pill Pockets, a tasty treat that masks the pills we put inside. A lot of dogs that we rescue, who almost by definition didn’t have great treatment and medical care before they were abandoned, have ailments that we have to deal with. Willie and Sondra give out more medicine than Walgreens.
Sondra is completely capable of handling things on her own, but Willie will make sure to be back by ten o’clock. That’s when potential adopters start showing up, by appointment, and no one leaves here with a dog without Willie signing off on it. These dogs are his children, and he makes sure that any home they go to is a damn good one.
“How’s Truman?” I ask.
Sondra smiles. “Doing great now, but he was a handful at first. He follows Willie everywhere. We’ve been taking him home at night and he’s sleeping on our bed. It just takes him a while to trust people.” She laughs. “He and Willie are a lot alike in that way.”
Then she says, “Check this out.” She takes out her phone and shows me a picture of Willie asleep in their bed. Truman is on the bed as well, sleeping with his head on Willie’s chest.
Once Sondra has her phone out, she feels the need to show me what seems like hundreds of pictures of other dogs, many of whom are here at the foundation now. I’m looking at them live, so I’m not sure why I need to see photos.
But I don’t complain, because taking pictures is Sondra’s thing; I just have no idea why she wants them all, whether she looks at them, or where she keeps them.
“Where do you keep all these pictures? Does your phone have enough room?”
“I usually keep them for a month or two,” she says, “and then I store them on the Cloud. I also ask people who adopt the dogs to send me pictures of them in their new homes. So the pictures add up.”
The whole idea of the Cloud bewilders me. Like with most tech things, I don’t have a current need to know. My fear is that there will come a point where life is not possible without learning this stuff. “Must be nice having your own Cloud,” I say.
She smiles. “It belongs to everyone, Andy. Including you.”
She’s right; the Cloud belongs to everyone. Why didn’t I think of that before? I call Sam and ask, “When you looked at Adams’s phone, did you check to see if he had anything stored on the Cloud? Is it even possible to do that?”
“Holy shit, Andy. I’m an idiot. It never entered my mind.”
“Can you do it?”
“Of course. The tough part was getting into the phone. Where are you?”
“At the foundation.”
“I’ll get back to you. Damn, I’m stupid.”
Clearly Sam is stunned by my coming up with a possible tech solution he hadn’t; I don’t think I’ll mention the fact that it was Sondra who was behind it, and that I wouldn’t recognize the Cloud if I were flying through it. “Sam, don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re not stupid; you’re just not as technologically savvy as I am. Very few people are.”
Willie gets back and I help him carry the supplies into the foundation building. The first potential adopters show up, a couple in their thirties. They’re here to meet and potentially adopt a shepherd mix named Roger, and they all go into the adoption room with Willie.
I don’t go in with them. I have full confidence that if they want Roger, Willie will make the correct decision on whether they will treat him in the way he deserves. Also, on the chance he turns them down, I don’t want to be a part of that conversation. Willie can be blunt; confrontation avoidance, one of my specialties as long as I’m outside t
he courtroom, is not on his list of personality traits.
They come out about a half hour later, and it’s clear that it didn’t work out. I can tell that from their body language: the husband seems defeated and the wife seems angry. Also, the fact that Roger is not with them is a significant hint.
“No good?” I ask Willie after they leave.
“Not even close. They have a doghouse in the backyard, but if the weather is bad, then Roger could come in and stay in the basement.”
“Oh.”
“But the asshole husband said Roger would be a member of the family. Do they keep their kids in the backyard or the basement? I should have taken the guy apart.”
“I think you showed admirable restraint,” I say.
“Yeah. But I still should have messed him up.”
I’d better leave before Willie messes the next guy up. But as I’m about to, Sam shows up, carrying his briefcase. “You were right,” he says. “It was on the Cloud.”
“What was?”
“Take a look; I printed it out.” The first paper he takes out of his briefcase is a photograph of a man who sort of reminds me of Peggy Ambler’s description of the man who visited George Adams at the motel. He’s a big guy with dark hair and thick eyebrows, though if his mouth has a tilt, I don’t see it. He also has a closely cropped beard, which Peggy did not mention.
Sam takes more pages out; they are newspaper stories about the guy, who is named Frank Silvio. He appears to be a mobster out of Florida, based in Miami, and there are stories of his violence written in a way that makes him seem legendary.
“Can you find out more about this guy? He could be the one Peggy Ambler described,” I say.
“I will, but it can’t be him,” Sam says.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s been dead for six months.”
I ask Sam to go home, scan Silvio’s photograph, and send it to Peggy Ambler.
Obviously I want to know if she identifies him as the man who visited George Adams at the motel. It will be puzzling if that’s the case, since he was dead at the time.
But I guess stranger things have happened.
Sam calls me fifteen minutes after he sends her the photo, while I’m on my way home. “She’s not sure. She says it could be him, but the beard is throwing her.”
I ask him to email the photo and the newspaper clippings to Cindy Spodek and then I call Laurie. I quickly tell her what is going on and ask her to call Cindy and tell her the photo is coming.
I instinctively feel that this is very important, and not just because he may have met with Adams. Adams could have met with a lot of people having nothing to do with our case. But here the meeting was shortly before Adams killed James Haley; our view is that he was literally on his way north to do just that.
Maybe even more significant is the fact that Adams apparently took pains to learn about the mysterious visitor; he downloaded his photo and newspaper stories about him. And then, in the most revealing action of all, he erased it all from his phone and hid it in the Cloud.
When I get home, I call Cindy and ask if she received the material.
“Just did,” she says. “I don’t know anything about him, other than what the news stories say.”
“That’s disappointing,” I say.
“Sorry, I am not familiar with every bad guy in the country; but I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Great. Still nothing on that other matter? You know, the one where people are dying all over the country?” I’m not great at hiding my annoyance, a trait that some people find annoying.
“Relax, Andy. Nothing definitive, but we’re getting there,” she says.
“Let me know when you’re all the way there. That was our deal.”
“I’m aware of our deal, Andy. Keep in mind that I’m just the number two person in the Boston FBI office. I’m not the director, or the attorney general. There are decisions that I don’t make, and there is information that I am not given.”
“This has made its way to the director and attorney general?”
“I don’t know where it has made its way, Andy. I was making a point about my place on the Justice Department totem pole.”
She promises to find out what she can about Silvio, which doesn’t exactly make me euphoric. Dealing with the government, even when that government is a friend, can be slow and ponderous. With the trial close to starting, slow and ponderous really doesn’t work for me.
Sam Willis, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. He brings over an entire dossier on Silvio, built from online sources and official documents, including some from various courts. I don’t ask Sam how he got the court documents because I don’t want to know the answer.
All of it paints a picture of Silvio as a career criminal, though not one successfully dealt with by the justice system. He seems to have been based in Florida, more specifically in Tampa. But while he has been arrested four times for violent crimes, none of the charges have gone to trial, and two of those arrests took place in other states. Silvio got around and spread the violent wealth.
He died in a boating accident almost seven months ago off the west coast of Florida north of Tampa. He was alone on the boat as a storm came in. He sent out an SOS, but by the time the local maritime people got to his boat, he’d gone overboard, and his body was never found.
I don’t know how they determined he was dead, and I’m suspicious of it. When it comes to bad guys, I don’t believe they’re dead until I’ve watched their body lowered into the ground, and even then I have my doubts. Missing bodies just don’t cut it, especially when it’s entirely possible that this missing body recently spent twenty minutes in an East Brunswick motel with George Adams.
“You need to go to Florida,” Laurie says.
“I’ll send Hike,” I say, feeling guilty for doing that to Florida.
“It should be you,” Laurie says. When I frown, she adds, “You know I’m right.”
“Ricky is coming home from camp this weekend.”
She nods. “That’s why I’m not going with you. But it is very likely that Silvio has something to do with this case, whether or not that was him meeting with Adams at the motel. The point is that Adams was researching him and hiding it in the Cloud.”
“I don’t want to let Ricky down,” I say, starting to grasp at straws.
“He’ll understand. And besides, he probably hates you because of the foul-shooting contest.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Let me get you someone to meet with down there.”
“What does that mean?”
She doesn’t answer and instead just goes to the phone. What follows is a remarkable demonstration of the game of “law enforcement telephone,” one in which my role is strictly that of admiring observer.
Laurie calls Sergeant Ben Ammons, an ex-colleague of hers on the force who was the union rep and attended various conventions with other officers from around the country.
He does not know anyone in the area of Florida where Silvio died, but thinks that Lieutenant Gary Aguilar in Atlanta might, because he thinks Aguilar was originally from Miami.
Aguilar sends Laurie on to Sergeant Terry Burgess in Miami, who knows a cop in Tarpon Springs, Florida, named Lieutenant John Hunnicutt. Tarpon Springs is within a few miles of the area in question.
Laurie then calls Hunnicutt, tells him that Terry Burgess suggested she call, and fills him in on our story. He says he’s happy to help, so Laurie says that I will be in his office tomorrow afternoon.
It’s an amazing performance; if I ever tried to play the attorney version of that game, it would take three weeks and I’d have to keep signing a bunch of release forms. And I’d wind up with an ambulance chaser two hundred miles from where I wanted to be.
After all of that, there is no way I can get out of going. “I’ll book the flights.”
“For two,” she says. “Marcus is going with you.”
“Oh, no.”
“Andy, you
have already been threatened and almost attacked.”
“That was by Chico Simmons. He’s local.”
“We don’t know who is who, or where is where. But we do know that we are dealing with dangerous people. Marcus is going with you, so book the flights for two.”
“Yes, ma’am. Should I order him a kosher meal?”
The flight isn’t as awful as I expected.
Marcus has his headphones on the whole way, listening to classical music. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Marcus Clark’s feet tapping to the strains of Vivaldi.
All in all, it could have been much worse: the plane wasn’t delayed, it didn’t crash, and I’m not traveling with Hike.
We land at the Tampa airport and I rent a car for the twenty-seven-mile drive to Tarpon Springs, where Lieutenant Hunnicutt is supposed to be available to us. It is oppressively hot, close to a hundred degrees, and makes New Jersey feel like Juneau.
Marcus rents his own car; Laurie told me that was what he was going to do. I assume not being with me, but rather being able to watch from a distance, makes it easier to protect me. That’s fine with me; I have a number of goals for this trip, but living through it is at the top of the list.
The drive to Tarpon Springs takes about forty-five minutes. It is a small seaside town that seems to exist because of its proximity to the water. Everything seems to be huddled toward the coast, and if there is ever a national boat shortage, it won’t be because of Tarpon Springs.
I go straight to the hotel where Laurie made reservations. It’s a Hampton Inn, which is fine. I prefer modern hotels with elevators, flat-screen televisions, room service, and wireless to inns with quaintness and character. And since I’m traveling with Marcus, romantic isn’t that important either.
I check in to both rooms, and when I go back out to my car, there is Marcus, parked next to me. I give him the key to his room and then drive off; I assume he’ll follow me, but I don’t know that for sure. At this point I’m not feeling in any particular danger.
Bark of Night Page 13