Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (29 page)

“Katie was a good four inches taller than this woman,” said Bert.

“Yes. That means it isn’t Katie.”

“It does. But here’s the disturbing thing. The DNA matches Katie’s, or at least it matches the blood we thought was Katie’s.”

“Wow,” said J.D. “That kind of changes things. Have you talked to McAllister about this?”

“No. I wanted you to know first. I’ll call Doug when we hang up.”

“Bert, is there any way that lab report could get lost for a couple of days?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d like you to hold off on passing this information on to Sarasota P.D.”

“What’s going on?” Bert asked.

“I’m not sure, but I’d like a couple of days to dig into this thing a little further.”

“I need more than that, J.D.”

“Okay. I know Katie’s alive. I can’t tell you how I know that, but I can tell you that I just confirmed it yesterday.”

“Then what’s the problem with passing this on to McAllister?”

“Bert, do you ever have one of those feelings about a case? A hunch, intuition, educated guess, whatever you want to call it, and when it’s all said and done, you were exactly right? But at the time you made the leap there were absolutely no facts to base it on.”

Hawkins was quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been there. Can you tell me how you know that Katie is alive?”

“If you’ll agree to hold the DNA results for a couple of days and swear that what I tell you about Katie won’t go any further. That it’s our little secret.”

“Suppose I agree to hold the lab report for forty-eight hours. Can you do what you need to do in that time frame?”

“Yes, I think so. But if I can’t, I still need to protect Katie. You’ll have to agree not to tell anybody about Katie until I say it’s okay. And I may not ever be able to say that.”

“Agreed. I trust you to do the right thing.”

“Thanks, Bert. She contacted me last week. I wasn’t sure it was her until Matt met with her yesterday.”

“Did she tell Matt why she disappeared or what she knows about her husband’s murder?”

“No. She said she wasn’t sure she could trust me. I have to wait for her to contact me again. In the meantime, now that we know the blood wasn’t Katie’s, we have another murder to solve, and this one is surely tied to Jim Fredrickson’s death.”

“I agree. You’ve got forty-eight hours. I’ll touch base with you before I call McAllister.”

“Thanks, Bert. I’ll keep you posted.”

J.D. went back to the Goodlow file, bored but hopeful. Ten minutes later she spotted it in her typed notes. She didn’t think much of it at the time, but now that things were coming into a little better focus, it might have some importance. Barb at Moore’s had told Matt that she’d walked into Annie’s one afternoon and found Goodlow and Jamison at the little bar. Before they noticed she had come in, she heard Goodlow tell Jamison, “They’ll kill us all if you don’t give them what they want.” She remembered writing the quote exactly as Matt had told her.

But, what did they, whoever they were, want from two old men? Barb had overheard the conversation after the two men who were the coffee regulars at the café had died. Could Goodlow have been talking about their deaths? Were the four of them, Jamison and Goodlow and the other two old men, involved in something that was getting them killed? If so, that would be a reason for Jamison to disappear. He was the last one.

The Goodlow file didn’t contain the report she’d requested from IBIS, the Integrated Bullet Identification System, maintained by ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. She looked at her watch. The lunch hour. Well, maybe somebody in Washington was eating at his desk. She pulled up her computer’s Rolodex and found the number she was looking for and dialed it.

“AFT IBIS lab,” a feminine voice said. “This is Agent Weathering-ton.”

“This is Detective J. D. Duncan in Longboat Key, Florida. I sent you a request for a possible match on a bullet last week. I was wondering if you had anything on it.”

“Let me see, Detective.”

J.D. heard the tapping of fingers on a keyboard and then quiet. Weatherington sighed. “I’m sorry, Detective. I have it and it should have been e-mailed to you on Friday. We’re a little backed up on paperwork here. Give me your e-mail address, and you’ll have it in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you, Agent Weatherington.” J.D. gave her the e-mail address and sat back and waited for the report. The e-mail popped up on her screen within minutes and J.D. downloaded the attachment. There was one hit. A man named Rodney Vernon had been killed by the same gun two weeks before in Toms River, New Jersey.

The victim’s name rang a vague bell in J.D.’s mind. She started thumbing back through the file. She was pretty sure it had come up in an interview with Jamison. She reread his statements and there it was. Rodney Vernon was the man in one of the old pictures of the picnic taken shortly after the war. The one who had moved to New Jersey in the early fifties and who Jamison said he hadn’t heard from since he left Cortez. Jamison said he didn’t know if Vernon was dead or alive.

J.D. remembered that conversation. There had been something in Jamison’s demeanor that made her suspect he was lying. She remembered asking Jamison about that, telling him she had a vague feeling that he knew more about Goodlow’s murder than he was telling her. Jamison denied it.

J.D. went to her computer and pulled up the website for the Toms River Police Department. She called the number listed for the Criminal Investigation Bureau and dialed it. She identified herself and asked to speak to Captain Leonard Garner, the man who commanded the unit. He was out of the office, but the detective who answered asked if he could have the captain call her.

“Yes,” J.D. said. “Tell him I’m calling about the murder of Rodney Vernon. We have a murder here on Longboat Key that apparently was committed by someone using the same gun that killed Vernon.”

The detective said he’d get in touch with Captain Garner and have him call her immediately. No more than five minutes later, J.D.’s phone rang. “Thanks for calling me back, Captain,” J.D. said. “We had a murder here on Longboat Key a week ago. I just got the IBIS report. It seems that the same gun that killed my victim killed Mr. Vernon. I wonder if you could fill me in on what happened up there.”

“Did you get your shooter?” Garner asked.

“Yes. He drove off a bridge while fleeing the scene. He’s dead.”

“Who was he?”

“We don’t know. His prints aren’t in the system, and he didn’t carry any identification. The car he was driving was stolen a couple of days before the shooting.”

“Dead end. What can I tell you about our shooting up here?” asked Garner.

“First, was Mr. Vernon an elderly man?”

“Yes. Late eighties, I think. I don’t have the file in front of me.”

“What can you tell me about the murder?”

“That was very strange. One of his neighbors called us after she hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. We found his body tied to a chair in his dining room. It looks as if he’d been tortured before he was shot in the forehead.”

“How bad was the torture?”

“That’s one of the odd things about this case. It looks like the bad guys didn’t get too far with Vernon before he died of a heart attack. I guess the bullet to the head was just to make sure he was dead.”

“Do you have any thoughts on a motive?”

“No. The old man had been retired for more than twenty years. He puttered around in his garden and hung out some at the American Legion post. He didn’t seem to have much of a life but, according to everybody we talked to, he was happy.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Not much to tell. He grew up around here, went off to fight in World War II, came home, and worked for years for a boat builder down in Egg Harbor.”

“Was he married?”

“No. His wife died a couple of years before. He had one daughter and a son who live out of state, the son in Connecticut and the daughter in Atlanta.”

“Any friends?”

“Not really. All his buddies have died. We did turn up one strange coincidence, though. The old boy had come into the computer age. Had a
laptop and used e-mail. The laptop was missing, so we figured the killers took it. His son told us about the computer, so we got access to the old boy’s e-mail service provider. He used it to keep up with his son and daughter and grandchildren. But he also had regular e-mail exchanges with a man in Germany. Every six months or so for the past several years. They all seemed to be about family things, but neither Vernon’s son nor daughter had ever heard of the man. Turns out he was a retired German government official named Paulus von Reicheldorf. Thing is, he’d been tortured and killed.”

“When did that happen?” asked J.D.

“That’s the oddity here. He died about a week before Vernon was murdered.”

“You checked it out?”

“Sure did. We could find absolutely no connection between Reicheldorf and Vernon. Except for the e-mails, of course. Reicheldorf had been well known and highly respected in German political circles. He apparently was one of those guys who works behind the scenes and let the elected officials be the show horses.”

“Did the German cops come up with a motive for his murder?”

“They think it was the work of some of Germany’s homegrown terrorists. He had been pretty outspoken about his opposition to allowing more Muslims into the country. He felt that the terrorists had infiltrated many of the mosques in Germany and were a danger to the future of the country.”

“Why the torture? Why not just kill him?”

“The German detective who was investigating the case told me that he’d seen that before in situations where the terrorists went after somebody they thought might be a danger to them. He thinks they torture people for the fun of it and to set an example for others who might get in the way of their jihad.”

“That’s cold,” said J.D.

“So was driving passenger planes into the Trade Towers in New York,” said Garner.

“You’ve got a point. Still, it seems strange that a man in Germany who was corresponding with Vernon would be killed about the same time and both men were tortured.”

“I agree, but neither my department nor the German police were able to find anything that connected the men, except a few e-mails.”

“What about Vernon’s wife? Do you know where she was from originally?”

“No. That didn’t seem like pertinent information.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” said J.D. “But I think I may know something about Mr. Vernon and I’m wondering if his wife was from Cortez, Florida.”

“Where is that?”

“Do you know where Longboat Key is?”

“I’m guessing it’s somewhere near Key West.”

“No,” said J.D. “We’re a barrier island off the coast of Sarasota, south of Tampa. Cortez is a fishing village on the mainland across Sarasota Bay from Longboat Key.”

Garner laughed. “Could’ve fooled me.”

“It’s a common mistake,” J.D. said. “Would you mind giving me the names and phone numbers of Mr. Vernon’s children?”

“Not at all, Detective. I’ll e-mail them to you as soon as I get back to the office. Can you keep me posted? We don’t have a lot of violent crime around here, and I’d sure like to close this file.”

J.D. gave him her e-mail address and hung up.

My phone rang as we were walking out of the restaurant. Logan.

“Have you had lunch yet?” he asked.

“Just finished.”

“Where are you?”

“Jock and I are just leaving the Old Salty Dog on City Island.”

“Meet me at the Hilton for a drink.”

“Isn’t it a little early for booze?” I asked.

“It
is
after lunch.”

“You’ve got a point. We’ll be there shortly.”

When we arrived at the Hilton, Logan was sitting at the outside bar talking with Billy Brugger, the longtime bartender. He usually worked nights, and I guessed he must be covering a shift for somebody.

“Little bright out for you, isn’t it, Billy?” I asked.

He grinned. “Yeah, but the customers are a bit more sober this time of the day. Even Logan.”

It was the kind of day that brought the islanders out, and many of them, with nothing else to do, came to sit on the deck of the Hilton and drink the afternoon away. I saw several familiar faces at the tables that sat under the ancient Banyan tree that shaded the area. We took our drinks to a table in the far corner of the deck, out of earshot of the other customers.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Logan. “The guy who shot old man Good-low had some papers on him that were in German and then some code. The German script went out of style after World War II, meaning that the documents were probably prepared before or during the war. The only
reference I could find to U166 was a German submarine called the U-166 that was sunk in the northern Gulf of Mexico, up near the panhandle, in the summer of 1942. That was the only U-boat ever sunk in the Gulf. The wreck was found and noted by some federal agency several years ago. But suppose somebody had found it before and suppose there was something in the boat that was so valuable people could get killed over it.”

“That seems a little far-fetched,” I said.

“I agree,” said Logan. “But I did a pretty detailed search for U166 and the only thing that comes up is the submarine. Katie says she doesn’t know what it means, but her husband and the people he was dealing with mentioned U166 several times. Then we have Goodlow’s shooter in possession of some documents that probably date back to World War II and a caption that says they contain vital information and that the recipient should help get the courier out of the country. The rest of it is in code. It begins to sound like the documents were important and had maybe been sneaked into this county.”

“What’s that got to do with a submarine?”

“The Germans used their subs to bring spies into the country. They’d drop them off near the coast and head back to sea. Maybe the courier mentioned in the papers was aboard the U-166 when it was sunk.”

I said, “But then we have to make the assumption that somebody found the sunken boat, retrieved the documents, and somehow knows that they’re valuable. It seems a little hard to swallow.”