Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (25 page)

“Thanks, David. Call me when Peters is in custody and isolated.”

“Is this number good? The one you’re calling from?”

“It’ll be good until I hear from you.”

“Where are you?”

“Out doing the Lord’s work, David. Talk to you soon.”

Jock hung up and sat and waited to hear that Peters was a resident of the county jail.

In the real world, Monday is the day when people trudge off to work trading the ennui of the weekend for the rush of earning a living. For retired people, Monday is just another Saturday. You can sleep in, take your time reading the paper and drinking coffee, hit the golf course or the fishing grounds or just do nothing. My Mondays were usually spent doing mostly nothing. This wasn’t going to be a normal day.

J.D. and I were up early. We ran on the beach, took a long shower together, and ate a leisurely breakfast. The morning air was cool, the sun bright, the Gulf calm. “JAPDIP,” as we islanders smugly say; “Just Another Perfect Day In Paradise.”

The
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
headline was large and black. “FOUR MEN SLAIN IN LAKEWOOD RANCH.” The story told of a restaurant patron walking toward his car when he found the body of a man shot through the head in the driveway of the restaurant. He alerted the hostess on duty in the restaurant and she called the sheriff’s department. Deputies arrived and found three more bodies, all men, all wearing suits, all shot in the chest. A nine-millimeter pistol with a silencer attached was found at the corner of the building where deputies speculated the killer had stood when he shot the men. The kitchen staff reported seeing a man come through the kitchen, but nobody paid any attention to him. Some said he wore a ball cap, others said he was bareheaded and had dark hair, some said clean shaven, others saw a beard. There were no suspects and no motive. The dead men had been identified, but their names weren’t being released until the next of kin were notified.

J.D. left for work shortly after seven, and I booted up my computer and tried the Highlands County property appraiser’s website. It was up,
the maintenance finished. I looked up the Avon Park property using the street address that Frank Cartwright, the grove keeper, had given us. The property had been sold by the estate of James Fredrickson to a corporation named APL Property, LLC for ten thousand dollars. I assumed the APL stood for Avon Park Lake. Not very original. The transaction had taken place about six months after Jim’s death.

I logged off the site and went to the Florida Secretary of State’s website and found the Corporations Division’s site. APL Property, LLC had been organized about a month before it bought the property from the Fredrickson estate. It had one manager/member, a man named Robert Hammond with an address in Orlando. The agent for service of process was Wayne Evans whose address was in Sarasota.

That name rang a bell. I went to the website of the Fredrickson’s old law firm. Evans was a partner in the firm’s Probate and Estate Planning section. A quick search of the Sarasota County Clerk of Court’s website brought me to the case file in Fredrickson’s estate. Bingo. Evans was the personal representative, the administrator, of the estate.

I Googled Robert Hammond. I found a man by that name who was a developer with offices in Orlando. His website consisted of one page that had a few graphics, a picture of Hammond, and some verbiage that said his company developed subdivisions and built houses. That was it. No descriptions of projects or available properties; not even an address or phone number. I wondered why he even had a website.

My phone rang. “Matt, this is David Sims.”

“Good morning, Detective.”

“Is Jock with you?”

“No. He’s staying here, but he’s out right now.”

“I need to talk to him. Will you have him call me as soon as he shows up?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, Matt. Have a good day.”

That was a puzzling call. Why would Sims be looking for Jock? I guess I’d find out as soon as Jock showed up and returned the call.

Jock walked in the door ten minutes later. He looked haggard, as if he hadn’t slept well. “Logan keep you up all night?” I asked.

“No. I had a long night, but the good news is that you won’t have to worry about Bonino anymore.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“I don’t think he was the one who put the thugs on you.”

“Uh-oh. What did you do?”

“I had a little conversation with the man.”

“Come on, Jock. Talk to me.”

“I killed four of his goons.”

“I’m guessing this little conversation took place in Lakewood Ranch.”

“You’ve read the paper.”

“Yes. Was it necessary?”

“I’m not sure ‘necessary’ is the word I’d use. All four of those guys were murderers. They’ve killed lot of people and they’d kill again. I also wanted to send a message. At the time I shot them, I was pretty sure Bonino had sicced the thugs on you, but he pretty much convinced me he wasn’t the one. Says he’s never heard of you, and I think he was under enough pressure that he’d have told me the truth about anything.”

“Where is he now?”

“David Sims has him.”

“How did you find him when the cops can’t come up with anything?”

“I had a little conversation with DeLuca and he gave me the name of one of Peters’s men, a guy named Norwood. I made a call, threatened him and his boss, and followed him to a meeting with Bonino. And Bonino is actually a man named Dwight Peters who lives in Lakewood Ranch. He has a pretty wife and at least a couple of small children.”

“That’s not good.”

“No. They’re going to suffer a lot because of Peters. I wish I could do something about that.”

“You can’t, Jock. I’m sure there’re a number of families out there suffering because of what Peters did.”

“That’s for sure, but the Peters kids didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You can’t cure all the world’s ills, my friend. I’m still a little puzzled about the reason for killing the guys in the parking lot.”

“I needed to make a point with Peters. He seemed to think he was bulletproof.
I made the point and took out some bad guys that needed killing. And Peters is in jail and will stay there for the rest of his life.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Sims called about fifteen minutes ago. Wants you to call him as soon as you can.”

“I’ll get back to him.”

“What time do you tee off?”

“Ten. We’ve got a couple of hours.”

Jock and Logan were playing in a foursome with Mike Nink and Randy LaFlamme. Their chances of winning the tournament ranked right up there with whatever patsy football teams the Florida Gators played in their first two games of every season. In other words, it’d take a miracle.

My job as the beer cart driver required that I bring two coolers full of beer and ice and cheer my team on at the appropriate moments. We hoped the beer would last for the first nine holes and I could replenish the supply at the clubhouse. I didn’t expect to have to do a lot of cheering, but I’d get to drink some beer and enjoy the weather. A great Monday on our island. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

J. D. Duncan sat in her office looking at Josie Tyler’s phone records; the one sent to her by Captain Doug McAllister. It was identical to the one Jock’s people had sent her the day before. She put the printout aside and called the Tampa Police Department and asked to speak to the patrol commander. He was in a meeting and would call her back. She hung up and called Captain McAllister.

“Doug, it’s J.D. Thanks for sending Josie Tyler’s phone records over. Do you know who made the incoming call to Josie Friday afternoon?”

“No. It’s a burner phone. A dead end.”

“I’m thinking that call is probably what spooked her into calling me and leaving that message.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. You’re probably right, but I doubt we’ll ever find out who made the call.”

“Did forensics turn up anything else?”

“No. The crime scene was clean as a whistle.”

“Any better idea on how the elevator security camera got screwed up?”

“No. Somehow the router became unplugged. Nobody can figure out how that happened unless the cleaning people did it.”

“Okay. Thanks. Will you keep me in the loop?”

“I will. And listen, J.D., I’m sorry about the way I acted on Friday.”

“Water under the bridge, Doug. Don’t worry about it.”

“Are we okay?”

“We are. Talk to you later.”

She hung up and walked across the hall to Chief Bill Lester’s office. “Got a minute, Bill?”

“Sure.”

“How well do you know Doug McAllister?”

“Pretty well,” the chief said. “I’ve known him for a long time. Why?”

“I don’t know, exactly.” She told him about McAllister’s actions on Saturday evening at the murder scene. “He’s been very apologetic about it, but I was surprised at the way he blew up.”

“Doug’s a complicated guy. He’s a good detective, but sometimes I think he steps over the line. There have always been rumors about him using excessive force on some of the perps he’s arrested. Once, some years ago, when he was working undercover, he supposedly got involved with a woman who was closely connected to the drug trade. She disappeared before they took down the gang, and everybody thought she was dead. A year later she was arrested in Jacksonville and claimed that she was a confidential informant for McAllister.”

“That sounds odd,” J.D. said.

“On a couple of levels. How did she even know that McAllister was a cop? He was working undercover and his life would have been in danger if anybody had found out he was the police. And how did the woman manage to avoid getting arrested with the rest of the druggies? Advance information?”

“What came of that?”

“Nothing. The girl was written off as a flake and ended up in prison on the charges out of Jacksonville.”

“Wasn’t anybody interested in how she knew McAllister was a cop?”

“She had a story, of course. Said they were lovers, but McAllister denied it. His story was that she disappeared before the bust, and he thought she was dead. Apparently the gang wasn’t above killing its own members if they stepped out of line.”

“I still don’t understand how she knew he was a cop.”

“Nobody ever figured that out. I think most of it just got swept under the rug. McAllister was a hero for taking down that drug operation. It was a big one, and he got a lot of career mileage out of it.”

“Do you know anything about those four dead guys in Lakewood Ranch?”

“Only what I read in the paper. That’s Manatee Sheriff’s bailiwick. Glad it’s not our problem.”

“Me, too. Thanks for the insight on McAllister, Bill.”

“J.D.,” the chief said, “you’ve got to work with him, but you don’t have to trust him.”

My phone rang at nine. J.D. “I talked to the patrol commander at Tampa P.D., and he put me in touch with the cop assigned to the car in the picture. I had our geek blot out Katie’s image, but otherwise keep the picture intact. I texted it to the cop, and he recognized the building. He just called back with an address. Can you go up there this morning and look around?”

“I’ve got beer cart duty.”

“You think those guys can’t play without beer?”

“Well, they won’t play as well without beer.”

“Will it make much difference in their score?”

“No, but they’ll be happy with whatever they get. Without the beer, it’s going to be pretty depressing.”

“Listen, Matt. This is important, and those guys are used to losing.”

“You’ve got a point. I’ll get right back to you.”

I discussed the problem with Jock, and we decided that we should ask Les Fulcher to fill in for me. I called Les and he agreed to do it, but warned that he would expect a beer allowance for himself. I told him I had an extra cooler, and he said that’d probably hold him for the first nine holes.

I drove to Tampa and followed my GPS to the address the Tampa cop had given J.D. I found the building from the picture in one of those neighborhoods that had deteriorated over the years, but seemed to be coming back. Gentrification, it was called. Houses had been rehabbed and new stores were moving in. There was a grocery store, a couple of restaurants, a bar, all in recently renovated buildings. A Kmart store took up most of one
block fronting the main street, but it looked as if it’d been there a while. A new McDonald’s restaurant stood in a corner of the Kmart parking lot.

The building I was looking for was abandoned and apparently forgotten. It sat on a corner of the major street that ran through the area and a secondary street that meandered through the adjoining neighborhood. The graffiti I’d seen in the picture Katie had sent was sprayed over a large portion of the wall facing the larger street, standing in sharp contrast to the neat facades of its reconstructed neighbors. Perhaps whoever owned the building was waiting for the urban renewal efforts to catch up with his corner.

I drove around the area looking for anything that might give me a lead to Katie. Most of the rehabs seemed to be on the north side of the main street. The south side looked as if gentrification hadn’t yet reached it. I doubted that someone on the run, as Katie presumably was, could afford the north side.

I drove into the southern part of the neighborhood and found a small apartment complex about two blocks from the building with the graffiti. It looked better built than its neighbors and held ten units on two floors. Four cars were parked in the lot in front of the building. I wrote down the tag numbers and called them to J.D. She said she’d run them and call me back.

Katie had grown up in an affluent family, in a home situated in one of the most desirable areas of Greater Orlando. She’d lived lavishly on the bayfront in Sarasota, married to a prominent lawyer who had ten million dollars in cash in the bank. It’d be hard for her to settle for living in a dump, but with the exception of the apartment complex, that’s about all there was south of the main street.

I drove back to the McDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac, fries, and a Diet Coke and returned to the apartment complex. I parked on the street in front of the house that was next door to the apartments, ate my lunch, and waited.