Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (30 page)

“How else can you tie the documents, the submarine, Katie’s disappearance, and her husband’s murder together?” asked Logan.

“Maybe they’re not tied together,” I said. “Maybe U166 has nothing to do with that sub. Who knows why Goodlow’s murderer would have some of the documents with him or where he got them? Katie doesn’t know what U166 means, but she thought it might mean something to J.D.”

“Why would Katie think that J.D. would know anything about an esoteric letter-number combination like U166?” asked Logan. “Maybe she wasn’t telling you the truth when she said she didn’t know what it meant.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” said Jock. “I think we all just assumed that Katie was being straight with us. Maybe she wasn’t.”

“I think we should get J.D. in on this,” I said.

Jock and Logan nodded in agreement. I looked at my watch. Almost two. I called her cell. “You had lunch yet?”

“No,” she said, laughing, “I forgot about it.”

“Why don’t you come down to the Hilton? Jock and Logan are here, and you can get a burger or something.”

“Okay. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She hung up.

Our conversation drifted into island gossip, the upcoming baseball season, and other useless talk. In a few minutes I saw my sweetie make her way from the parking lot to the bar. She stopped for a moment to speak to Billy. She placed her lunch order and then joined us.

“You guys been here a while?” she asked.

“Not long,” said Logan. “I’m still on my first drink.”

She laughed. “Before we get into that, let me tell you about my conversation with Bert Hawkins this morning.”

“The medical examiner?” asked Logan.

“Yes. Turns out all that blood at Katie’s house the day she disappeared didn’t belong to her.”

“How did he determine that?” asked Jock.

“Some hunters found a bunch of human bones and a skull over in DeSoto County a couple of weeks back. Turns out, the DNA in the blood found at Katie’s matched the DNA in the bones the hunters found.”

“We know Katie’s alive,” Logan said. “So the bones obviously don’t belong to her.”

“Not a chance. Bert was able to determine the victim’s height by measuring a femur found with the rest of the bones. This victim was four or five inches shorter than Katie. Bert knew before he called me that the bones didn’t belong to her.”

“I guess Sarasota P.D. will reopen its investigation,” I said.

“Not until noon Thursday, at least. I traded information with Bert, told him we knew Katie was alive and where she was. In return, Bert agreed to hold off notifying the police for forty-eight hours. That’s how long we have to wrap all this up before McAllister takes over and I have to tell him where Katie is.”

“We can’t do that,” I said. “We promised her confidentiality.”

“I know,” she said, “but if I hadn’t told Bert what we know, he wouldn’t have agreed to give me time to solve this before McAllister gets involved.”

“Are you sure that McAllister is a problem?” asked Logan.

“No,” said J.D. “I just have a gut feeling that he knows more than he lets on.”

“Why is that?” asked Logan.

“His theory is that Katie is dead. All the evidence points to that. Yet, McAllister regularly calls Katie’s parents and asks if they’ve heard from her. It’s like he doesn’t believe his own evidence. If that’s the case, I wonder what he knows that nobody else knows. And, I’m beginning to wonder if Goodlow’s murder is somehow connected to Jim Fredrickson’s murder and Katie’s disappearance.”

“Maybe he’s just concerned,” said Logan. “He and Jim Fredrickson were good friends.”

“You may be right,” J.D. said. “I’ve had a busy morning on another front. IBIS came through on the bullet that killed Goodlow. It seems that the same pistol was used in a murder in Toms River, New Jersey, a couple of weeks ago. And get this, the victim was Rodney Vernon.”

“Who’s Rodney Vernon?” I asked.

“Do you remember that Bud Jamison told me that one of the men in Goodlow’s old photographs moved to New Jersey in the early ‘50s? That was Rodney Vernon.”

“Are you sure it’s the same person?” Jock asked.

“Yes. I called his daughter in Atlanta after I talked to the cops in Toms River. She told me that her dad was stationed at Sarasota Army Airfield for a couple of months in the summer of 1942.”

“I didn’t know we ever had a military base here,” said Logan.

“It’s now the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport,” J.D. said. “Vernon was a mechanic in a fighter squadron that was only at the base for a couple of months before moving on. He met his wife during the time he was here. The daughter wasn’t sure how they met, but thought it was at a USO event. They corresponded during the rest of the war and after Mr. Vernon
was discharged, he came back to Cortez and married the girl. They lived in Cortez for several years and then decided to move back to Vernon’s hometown, Toms River.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“There’s more,” said J.D. “It seems that Vernon was tortured before he was shot in the head. He’d died of a heart attack before he was shot.”

“There’s got to be a connection there,” said Jock, “but Goodlow wasn’t tortured.”

“No, he wasn’t,” said J.D. “Whoever killed Vernon wanted some information from him. Maybe whatever it was, it led the shooter to Good-low.”

“Do the Toms River cops have any leads?” I asked.

“No. They can’t come up with a motive or anybody with a reason to kill him, much less torture him. He had some e-mail correspondence with a retired German politician who was tortured and killed just before Vernon was, but there was no connection between them except for several e-mails over a number of years.”

“That’s too much of a coincidence,” I said. “There’s got to be a connection.”

“I think so, too,” said J.D., “but I don’t see how the murder of man in Germany has anything to do with our problems here.”

“The gun connects Vernon and Goodlow and the e-mails connect Vernon and the guy in Germany,” Logan said. “Do we know anything more about the German?”

“I Googled him,” said J.D. “He was some sort of hereditary count named Reicheldorf who began working for the new German government right after the war. He was a real behind-the-scenes type, but he was well respected and ended up holding high positions in all the postwar governments, no matter which party was in power.”

“I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere with this,” I said. “If it turns out that the count was connected to Goodlow’s death or Jamison’s disappearance, we can follow up on it later. We’ve only got two days to figure some of this out or McAllister takes over and we lose what little bit of head start we have.”

“Then the question is what did Goodlow know that caused somebody to kill him,” Logan said.

“Logan, tell J.D. your theory on the U-166. If I remember my history, there was a lot more U-boat activity off the Atlantic coast than there was in the Gulf. Maybe there’s a connection there.”

Logan told J.D. what he’d related to us. “Based on what J.D. found out today, maybe the documents weren’t found in the wreckage of U-166. Maybe the sub dropped the courier off near the New Jersey coast on its way to the Gulf, and the documents were delivered, or lost somehow, and Vernon came across them.”

“If the ‘U166’ written on Katie’s arm in that photograph is a reference to the submarine, there’d have to be a connection,” said Logan. “It’s a bit tenuous, but it’s there. Goodlow was killed by a gun that killed Vernon in New Jersey. The man who killed Goodlow had German documents in his possession. If those documents came from the sub named U-166, and Katie’s husband and his buddies were talking about it, you have your connection. And now we find out that Vernon was connected to a German politician who was killed just before Vernon was.”

“But your scenario falls apart if the documents didn’t come from the U-boat,” I said. “And even if they did, the only connection between Good-low’s murderer and Katie’s disappearance is that the murderer had one page of what had to be at least several pages of one or more documents and Katie had heard someone mention the sub.”

J.D. laughed. “So all I have to do,” she said, “is find the documents, find out why they’re important, prove that they came from a German submarine that was sunk in the Gulf and didn’t leave a trace of wreckage that anybody has ever found, prove how Goodlow’s killer came across the documents, find out the killer’s name, find a motive for why he or someone else would torture and kill Vernon and kill Goodlow and Jim Fredrickson, find out who else might be involved, who Katie might be afraid of and why she dropped out of sight for a year, and why people are being killed more than a year after Fredrickson’s murder. Did I miss anything?”

“Yeah,” said Jock. “Bonino has got to be involved in this. Caster was looking for Jamison and had some ties to DeLuca who worked for Bonino,
or at least worked for Peters, who reports to Bonino. Since Porter King sent Caster to find or kill Jamison, we can be pretty sure King is tied into Bonino, who may have ordered the hit on King and his girlfriend. The only reason anybody would be after Jamison is because of his relationship with Goodlow and maybe Vernon in New Jersey. Which maybe brings us back to the U-boat and the documents and the fact that the only reason DeLuca would have tried to beat the tar out of Matt is because Matt made contact with Katie’s parents.”

“And,” I said, “we have no idea who the hell Bonino is. He’s a ghost.”

J.D. sat back in her chair, a look of consternation on her face. “We’ll never untangle that ball of conjecture.”

“Well, J.D.,” said Logan, “you
do
have two days to figure it out. And you’ve got us to help. I don’t see a problem.”

J.D. went back to work and Logan said he’d stay awhile and keep Billy company at the bar. Jock said he had some things to do and would see me later. I made my daily trek to the island post office, pulled my mail from the box, and, without looking at the stack of bills and other junk mail, drove home. Once inside, I shuffled through the mail and came to an envelope addressed to me in a feminine hand. It was marked “Personal” and had no return address. Probably somebody trying to sell me an annuity. I left it with the rest of the mail on the kitchen counter and found a beer in the refrigerator.

I sat on my patio, taking the warm winter sun, sipping beer, and thinking. I got up, went into the kitchen and retrieved the letter with no return address. It had been postmarked in Tampa on Monday, yesterday. I opened it and found a letter addressed to me in the same handwriting as that on the envelope. I shuffled the pages and found the signature at the bottom. It said, “Fondly, Jed.”

I went back to the patio and read the letter from Katie and sipped beer and thought some more. I called J.D. “Katie’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just got a letter from her. Postmarked yesterday in Tampa. She apparently wrote it on Sunday right after I left her.”

“What did she have to say?”

“She said that after I left, she read the morning newspaper and saw that Porter King had been murdered the day before. She knew him, and under the circumstances, she didn’t feel safe having anyone know where she was. She would be moving so there was no reason for us to look for her at the house she’d been living in. She said she’d be in touch.”

“That’s a shocker. She knew King. I wonder what that connection is.”

“I don’t know, but his murder spooked her. Maybe King was connected to her disappearance somehow.”

“We know he was connected to the attempt on old Mr. Jamison,” she said, “and that was probably Jamison’s reason for disappearing.”

“Either that, or he’s dead.”

“That might be the case if somebody else was after him, but King sent Caster, so he would have thought that Jamison was alive. I think the old man somehow figured out that people were after him and went into hiding.”

“Maybe he heard about the murder in New Jersey.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s a possibility. But how would he have known? Jamison said they hadn’t been in contact in years.”

“Yes, but you thought Jamison was lying,” I said.

“Suppose he was in touch with Vernon in New Jersey. Vernon was killed two weeks ago. Why would Jamison just now be running?”

“Maybe he just found out about the murder.”

“I guess that’s possible. Still, I’d like to know what connection Katie had to Porter King. And is she connected to Jamison in some way?”

“Lots of good questions.”

“Did Katie say anything else in the letter?”

“She said she loved you and asked that you trust her. She’ll get back to you. Soon.”

“That’s it?”

“Just that she thought you were lucky to have a stud like me.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“No, but I think it was implied.”

“And what led you to that conclusion?”

“Truth will out.”

“Geez,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I went back to the patio and sat and sipped beer and thought some more. Was the murder of Ken Goodlow connected in some way to Jim Fredrickson’s murder and Katie’s disappearance? The murders happened more than a year apart. And then there was the torture and murder of Rodney Vernon in New Jersey. There was a definite connection between
Goodlow and Vernon. They had known each other a lot of years ago, and they were killed recently by the same gun. But why would somebody be killing harmless old men? And who was after Bud Jamison? Probably the same people who’d caused the murders of Goodlow and Vernon. How did Porter King fit into that? And why?

I decided it was time to jog the beach. See if a little oxygen would clear the mental cobwebs. I changed into shorts, a sweatshirt, and running shoes and began to jog toward the North Shore Road beach access. I was on Broadway, less than a block from its intersection with Gulf of Mexico Drive when I saw J.D.’s car turn the corner. She pulled up beside me and said, “Get in.”

“I just got started on my jog.”

“We’ve got to talk. Get in.”

I got in. Never argue with a woman when she wants to “talk.” It’s been my experience that nothing good ever comes from the “talk.” “What’s up?” I asked.

“Wait until we get home.”