Cut and Run (29 page)

Dettweiler snorted. “Is that all? Sounds like it's my word against his. I'll take my chances in front of a jury—I have a way with people, you know? Leroy, on the other hand, is both dumb and ugly.”

Natalia nodded. “You're right, Gord. Leroy isn't that bright, or that tough. We brought him in for questioning and told him we knew all about the tournament con, and he cracked like an egg. I guess that's what you get for picking a sidekick you can push around, huh? Turns out it's just as easy for them to be pushed around by someone else. You, on the other hand, are a master manipulator—as proven by your two prior convictions. Which one of you do you think the jury is going to believe planned an elaborate scam like this?”

Dettweiler's smile only got wider. “I guess we'll see.”

“Yes, we will,” said Tripp. He pulled out his handcuffs and advanced. “And Natalia and I will be sitting in the front row when it happens. This'll be your third strike, Dettweiler—but now, it's a whole different ball game.”

 

“I've got a print,” said Calleigh. She looked up from pieces of the binoculars she'd meticulously disassembled. “On the inside of the lens, on the doctored side.”

Horatio nodded. “Which means it must belong to our killer. Do we have a match?”

“Running it through AFIS now.”

The system found a match quickly. Horatio studied the screen with narrowed eyes. “Randilyn Breakwash. Well, now we know…”

“But that doesn't make sense,” said Calleigh.

“Sometimes
people
don't make sense,” said Horatio. “But the evidence always does. We just have to look at it in the right way.”

“Maybe Randilyn can shed some light on the subject.”

“I'm sure she can—but first we have to find her. She apparently found the coordinates to the treasure hidden in the balloon and is no doubt on her way there now. We're going to have difficulty intercepting her…unless Mister Wolfe was able to complete his assignment.”

 

“Who the hell are you?” Garrett McCulver snapped.

“I'm CSI Ryan Wolfe,” Wolfe said. “Can I show you my badge?”

“Take it out slowly.”

Wolfe did so, then handed it over. McCulver glanced at it, then lowered his gun. “You work with Caine, right?”

“Yeah. He's got me following up some leads. One of them led here.”

McCulver motioned to the sofa. “Have a seat.” He sank into a lounger himself, and put the gun down on a table beside it—still within easy reach, Wolfe noted. “This about Rodriguo again?”

“That's right. You post on floridacrimehistory.com as swamphunter, right?”

“You're pretty sharp. Yeah, that's me—why?”

“Because our vic in the case was someone you knew as skyhigh88.”

McCulver looked intrigued. “Really? I should have guessed—he was the only one in the forums more interested in Rodriguo than me. And he hasn't posted anything in the last few days.”

“That's because someone shot him in the eye with a pair of rigged binoculars. We think the same person is headed for the site of Rodriguo's treasure right now—but we don't know where that is.”

“That's why you're here, huh?” McCulver shook his head. “I've been looking for Rodriguo's stash for over twenty years. You think I can just pull it out of thin air now?”

“Not thin air. Research. I've gone through all Breakwash's notes. If you and I put our heads together, maybe we can arrive at the same conclusions he did.”

McCulver considered it for all of two seconds, then grinned. “Hell, yes.”

“Great. Uh, you wouldn't mind putting the gun away now, would you?”

 

Wolfe took McCulver and all his material to the lab; Horatio met them at the door. “Good to see you again, Mister McCulver.”

“You too, Horatio. Or should I call you H?”

Horatio smiled. “If you're on my team, H is fine.”

They spread everything they had on the layout table: maps, books, old newspaper clippings, and magazine articles. Wolfe sifted through data at a workstation at one end, while McCulver tapped away at a laptop at the other. Calleigh and Horatio went through the paperwork, looking for the clue that had led Timothy Breakwash to his break-through—and ultimately, his death. Delko, his own case wrapped up, pitched in as well.

“All right,” said McCulver. “Before we dive into this, there's a little something I'd like to read out loud. Skyhigh88—that is, Timothy Breakwash—sent it to me shortly after we started corresponding. Horatio and Wolfe have already read it, but you two haven't.” He indicated Calleigh and Delko with a nod. “Listen up. A lot of this is speculation, but it's based on the best facts anyone's been able to un-earth, and it's the closest thing to a recreation we're going to get concerning Rodriguo and what happened to him and his treasure.”

McCulver cleared his throat, then began.

“November 23, 1988. Midnight. The hurricane season in Florida officially ended over three weeks ago, but a tropical wave in the Caribbean has just generated the eleventh storm of the year, a cyclone named Keith. Keith is an anomaly; the last time a tropical storm made landfall in the continental U.S. this late in the season was in 1925. On a small private landing strip near Pahokee, a plane is being loaded with a very special cargo.

“The plane is almost certainly a Cessna Skyhawk 172, one of the most popular light aircraft ever produced. With over forty thousand of them being made since 1956, the disappearance of a single plane during an unregistered flight is easy to cover up. The year before, a student named Mathias Rust flew one into Soviet airspace, landing near Red Square without being intercepted by the Russian military; the pilot of this Cessna hopes to do the same thing in Cuba, though he's more concerned about Coast Guard planes than Soviet Migs. His name—the only name known by his friends, his lovers, his business associates—is Rodriguo.

“By the few descriptions that exist, he is a handsome man. Tall, well-built, clean-shaven. More importantly, he is a dangerous man in a dangerous business, and his risks have paid off; he is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. Approximately one-fifth of that wealth is now aboard the plane he is about to fly to his new home, in the form of paintings and pearls that once belonged to Spanish royalty. He is the only one at the airstrip—he will enter this new life alone.

“Rodriguo is a brave man, but he is not foolhardy. He is a careful planner and has been preparing for this voyage for the past several years. No one but several high-level officials in the Cuban government and Castro himself knows he is coming; none of his closest associates even know he's been investing heavily in art. Tonight, Rodriguo dies—and is reborn as someone else.

“But Fate has its own designs for Rodriguo's last flight.

“Tropical storm Keith makes landfall near Sarasota, on the east coast of Florida. It crosses the center of the state, producing winds up to seventy miles an hour—not hurricane force, but more than enough to cause a small aircraft problems. Rodriguo must have known about the storm as it developed, but decided to fly anyway. He's planned for too long, and one last risk is hardly enough to stop him.

“No flight plan was filed. No crash was recorded. Officially, tropical storm Keith was responsible for no deaths. But for one man in a small aircraft, flying low over the Everglades to evade radar, it was more than deadly enough.

“Cyclones can produce many kinds of weather: thunderstorms, hail, vertical wind shear. Which factor knocked Rodriguo out of the sky is unknown, but he almost certainly went down in the Everglades or the Atlantic. I believe his final resting place is the 'Glades, if for no other reason than no aircraft wreckage washed up on Florida's shores in the next few weeks. That, and the fact that if he'd managed to reach the ocean, Rodriguo would have been past the worst of the storm.

“What were his final moments like? Did he laugh, acknowledging that he'd met the one opponent he couldn't beat, Mother Nature herself? Or did he curse, fighting the controls and his own destiny as the plane hurtled toward the swamp?

“Those details can never be known. What can be known is where that plane went down—and what it carried. Somewhere in the shadowy depths of the Everglades lies the remains of a Cessna and her pilot, their corpses standing guard over one of the greatest undiscovered treasures in the Sunshine State. Waiting for someone to figure out their secret…waiting for someone to finally write an ending to the saga of Rodriguo.”

McCulver finished and looked up. There was silence for a moment, and then Horatio said, “Those words were written by a man with a dream—a dream he was killed for. Let's get to work.”

 

Wolfe compared emails from Breakwash's files and McCulver's records. Sure enough, a number of exchanges had been deleted from the balloonist's email but not from the ex-cop's.

“He must have been trying to get rid of anything that might give the location away,” said Wolfe.

Horatio studied the screen over Wolfe's shoulder. “Which means that at this point he must have already found the plane.”

McCulver stood on Wolfe's other side, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. “Not much in the message as far as clues go. He just wonders if Rodriguo had a lucky number.”

“That's not all, though,” Calleigh pointed out. McCulver stepped aside to give her a better view of the monitor. “He also wonders about Rodriguo's sense of irony.”

Delko was at the light table with a large, detailed map of the Everglades. “Too bad the FAA doesn't require a flight plan with every balloon launch,” he said. “We could track his movements a lot more closely.”

Calleigh nodded. “Maybe we can, anyway.” She took out her cell phone.

“Who are you calling?” asked Delko.

“Someone I know in Customs. I think what we need is a helping hand from Fat Albert—hello?”

“Fat Albert?” said Wolfe. “We're asking a cartoon for assistance?”

Delko grinned. “Fat Albert is the nickname given the aerostat that broadcasts Radio Marti into Cuba. The Cuban government jams the transmissions, but that hasn't stopped the U.S. from trying; they broadcast a television signal, too. The blimp they use is twice the size of Goodyear's and on the end of a fifteen-thousand-foot cable tethered at Cudjoe Key.”

“Yes,” said Horatio. “But more importantly, it's also a radar platform specifically tasked with detecting low-altitude, slow-moving aircraft. It's meant to observe potential drug smugglers, but it should work just as well for us.”

McCulver chuckled. “Use a balloon to track a balloon. Perfect.”

Calleigh hung up. “They're sending the data to our server. If we're right about the date Breakwash found the plane, it has to be somewhere on his flight path.”

“I've got it,” said Wolfe. He put the data up on the monitor.

“There,” said Horatio, tapping the monitor. “Breakwash mentioned a lucky number and irony. Meaning Rodriguo had the bad luck to crash somewhere near Seven Palm Lake.”

“You really think that's it?” asked McCulver.

“I do,” said Horatio, already heading for the door. “Eric, bring your gear. Mister Wolfe, get us a chopper. Calleigh, I need you to follow up in the lab.”

“On what?”

“Randilyn Breakwash,” said Horatio. “She's our prime suspect for her husband's murder, but the evidence contradicts that. We've overlooked something—find out what.”

“I'm on it,” she said.

 

Wolfe contacted the special patrol bureau and got them on one of MDPD's Bell 206 L-4 helicopters. Even though McCulver was now a civilian, Horatio invited him along—he couldn't deny the man the chance to finally lay Rodriguo's ghost to rest.

Seven Palm Lake was an area filled with mangroves, islands of vegetation separated by intricate channels of water. The closest town was Flamingo, a tiny settlement that had once boasted a marina, lodge, campground, and housing for park rangers—until Hurricane Wilma had passed through and knocked most of the buildings flat. Only the marina and a small store were in operation now, and Horatio had the helicopter land on the only road into town. Flamingo was its southernmost tip, with Florida City at the other end of its thirty-eight-mile length.

There were several vehicles parked beside the small marina, and one at the store. Horatio noted that one of them—a large truck with rental plates—had an empty boat trailer hitched to it. “Mister Wolfe,” Horatio said as they got out of the chopper, “talk to the store's proprietor and ask if anyone of Randilyn's description has been through here. Eric, see what you can do about renting that airboat at the marina; we don't have time to get one through official channels.”

“Can I help?” McCulver asked.

“Can you drive an airboat?”

McCulver grinned. “Practically grew up on one.”

“Go with Eric.”