Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (38 page)

“Did he give up a name?”

“No. He died. Apparently, a heart attack. He just keeled over dead, and King didn’t get a name.”

“How did Goodlow come into the picture?”

“There were only two old men in Cortez who were still alive and were around right after World War II. Goodlow and an old guy named Jamison. King put a couple of his men on them, surveillance, you know, and they followed them around. The day before the shooting on Longboat, the guy following Goodlow overheard him talking to a bartender about finding a lawyer. By then, he knew that the old man in Jersey had been killed. I guess he and Jamison were getting worried. Goodlow planned to see the lawyer the next day, so King had his button man follow him that day and make sure that he didn’t get to the lawyer. He found the old man and shot him and then died when he went off the bridge.”

“Who was the killer?”

“Somebody King knew from New Jersey.”

“Was he Arabic?”

“Might have been. I heard King refer to him as Youssef.”

“Any terrorist connections?”

“I doubt it. This guy was as American as I am. King said the guy was gay. Had a boyfriend in New Jersey.”

“Did you ever see the documents from the sub?”

“I saw copies.”

“A lot of pages?”

“No. Five, maybe.”

“Did you know that Youssef had a copy of the first page of the coded message with him when he went off the bridge?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you think of any reason he would have that with him?”

“I think King had cut Youssef and his boyfriend into the deal. They’d get a small piece of the action from the documents instead of cash.”

“That seems a little odd, doesn’t it?”

“Not if you knew King. He was a cheap bastard.”

“I still don’t understand why King was willing to kill Goodlow,” said Jock. “If he was one of the men who might have the key to the code, wouldn’t killing him destroy any chance of finding out what was in the document?”

“King was sure that Jamison was the one with the key. He thought killing Goodlow not only would keep him from talking, but send a strong message to Jamison. But he got caught short. King didn’t expect Youssef to end up dead, so he had to import another hood to kidnap Jamison. Once he was in King’s control, Jamison would give up the key.”

“How was Jamison supposed to know the name of the book that was the key to the code?”

“We think he knew Reicheldorf some way. They may have gotten to know each other after the war. We weren’t sure Jamison had the key, but he was the most likely suspect. He was also our last chance to figure out the documents.”

Jock was quiet for a moment and then looked at me. “You got anything else?” he asked.

“No.”

“I’ll be right back,” said Jock, and stepped out onto the front porch, pulling his phone from his jeans pocket.

He was back a couple of minutes later. “Captain,” he said. “I’m going to give you a bottle of water from your refrigerator. I’ll hold it to your mouth so you can drink as much as you want. If your hood comes off, you’re dead. I’m going to cover you with a blanket and leave. In a couple
of hours some men will be here to take you someplace where you can cool your heels until we figure out which law enforcement agency to turn you over to. Understand?”

“Yes,” McAllister said just above a whisper. I was listening to a man whose life was over.

We packed up our things, including the documents from the safe and the thumb drive with the pictures and left. I knew Jock had called some men from his agency who would come down from Tampa and keep McAllister incommunicado until we were ready to put him in jail.

The ride into town was quiet, each of us lost in his own thoughts. We had a lot of the answers, but they had come at a cost to Jock and me, not to mention McAllister. I wasn’t going to waste any time on sympathy for McAllister. He was a cretin, a dirty cop who sold his soul to the drug dealers. I would have been perfectly happy killing him for what he did to Katie, but I knew it was better to let the law handle this one. McAllister would spend the rest of his life in prison.

We needed to talk some more to Evans. I was sure that the pictures on McAllister’s thumb drive would include some of Evans raping Katie, and I thought he hadn’t told Jock everything he knew about the drug operation.

I was a bit puzzled by the situation with Bud Jamison. Who was he running from? On the other hand, he might have been taken by some of King’s cronies. In that case, if Jamison knew the key to the code and had given it to the bad guys, he’d probably be buried in an orange grove in Avon Park.

“Jock,” I said, “we need to talk to Evans again.”

“That we do, podna. I’m thinking that it might be easy to meet him in his office. Maybe you ought to go see him. I don’t think he’ll try to bullshit you if he has an inkling as to how much you already know.”

“It’s worth a try.” I looked at my watch. It was nearing six o’clock. “You want some breakfast?” I asked.

We pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s on Tamiami Trail and went inside. We were just finishing a breakfast that had a lot of grease and other things bad for the circulatory system when Jock’s phone rang. He answered and then listened silently for a few moments.

“You’re kidding me,” he said, finally.

More quiet, then Jock said, “Okay. Make sure you don’t leave any traces of your visit and get out of there. Use a secure phone to call the Sarasota Sheriff’s office and give them some story that’ll get deputies headed that way.”

There was a little more conversation and Jock clicked the off button on the phone. “Bad news, podna,” he said. “Somebody killed Captain McAllister.”

“How?”

“Gunshot to the forehead. He still had the hood on. He never saw it coming.”

“He got what he deserved,” I said. “Do you think the killer knew we were there?”

“I don’t think he was there when we were. He would have put a stop to our interrogation if he’d known about it. Finding McAllister trussed up like a Christmas turkey would have given the shooter good reason to think the captain had talked to somebody. The only reason to kill McAllister is to shut him up.”

“Bonino, you think?” I asked.

“Bet on it.”

“I’d better call Harry Robson and get some protection on Evans. He may be next on the list.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Jock. “We’re not supposed to know about McAllister’s death and, without that, we’d have no reason to suspect that Evans is in danger.”

He was right, of course, but I felt impotent, sitting there over the remains of breakfast while Evans might be about to be murdered. “Maybe we ought to go sit on him,” I said.

Jock agreed. We paid our check and drove to Evans’s house. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky when we turned onto Evans’s street. Lights were on in all the neighboring houses. Two police cruisers were parked in front of Evans’s house. An unmarked police car sat in the driveway behind a coroner’s van. Uniformed cops were milling about in the front yard, bored, waiting for orders. “We’re too late,” Jock said, and kept driving.

“Somebody’s cleaning up loose ends,” I said. “Either we’ve got two killers or the one stopped here before going after McAllister.”

“The cops look like they’ve been here a while. The killer probably took Evans out and then went for McAllister. If he’d done it the other way around he’d have found us with the captain. We got lucky.”

“I wonder if he killed Evans’s family.”

“Let’s get back to the key and get J.D. working on this. We need to know what happened.”

I’d hardly gotten that out of my mouth when my phone rang. J.D. wanting to know where the hell we were. I told her that both McAllister and Evans were dead and asked if she could follow up and find out what the cops knew.

“Later,” she said. “I need you back here to babysit Katie. I’ve got to go to a meeting. I just got a call from Bud Jamison.”

J.D. was waiting impatiently on the sofa, drinking coffee, when we walked into the house. She got up, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “See you later.”

“Wait,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Jamison called me an hour ago. He wants to meet me at seven in the Cracker Barrel Restaurant out on I-75. It’ll take me forty-five minutes to get there and I’m already late. I’ll fill you in when I get back.”

“Take me with you,” I said. “I can fill you in on the way about our meeting with McAllister.”

“He said to come alone, and I’m not going to take the chance of spooking him. I’ll call you when I get to the mainland. My duty phone is secure. I’ll call you on Jock’s phone, and you can tell me about McAllister. I’ve got to go.”

Ten minutes later, J.D. called. She told me that Jamison had called about six o’clock, waking her up. He said he had to meet with her, but he wanted the meeting to be somewhere public, far enough away from Cortez that nobody would recognize him. They’d agreed on the Cracker Barrel.

I told her what McAllister had told us and about the photographs and documents I had. She agreed that we needed to find out about the bank accounts. She was particularly interested about the part dealing with Jamison and the submarine and the coded documents. I also told her that someone had killed McAllister after we left him and that something was going on at the Evans house.

“He fooled a lot of people for a long time,” J.D. said. “I wish we could have brought him into a courtroom and put him in jail forever.”

“Jock and I think Evans is probably dead, too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll call Harry Robson at Sarasota P.D. later and see what he can tell me.”

J.D. said she’d call me again after she talked to Jamison. She was planning to come straight home after meeting with him.

Jock’s phone rang again thirty minutes later. He handed it to me. “J.D.,” he said.

“Matt, I’m on Highway 64 almost to the Cracker Barrel. Jamison called and when I told him where I was, he told me to get on I-75 and drive south at exactly seventy miles per hour. He said he would time me and would call again when I should be nearing the exit that he wanted me to take. He’s changing things up.”

“It sounds like he’s just being cautious,” I said. “Call me as soon as you know where you’re going.”

I heard Katie stirring in the guest room and in a few minutes she walked into the living room. “Good morning,” she said. “Is J.D. up yet?”

“She had to leave,” I said. “What can I fix you for breakfast?”

“If you’ve got cereal and milk, that would be fine. And some coffee, please.”

J.D. called back while I was getting another pot of coffee going. “He just called. Told me to exit at University Parkway and drive west. He’s going to call again. I’m pulling off the ramp now.”

“Do you have your gun?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Be careful. Stay in public view.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll call you when I get new instructions.” She clicked off.

“He’s running her all over the east county,” I said to Jock.

“He’s a careful man. He’s thinking J.D. may be bringing the cops, or worse, with her.”

“What’s going on?” asked Katie.

I told her about the meeting with Jamison and how careful he was being.

“Who’s Jamison?” she asked.

“An old man who was a friend of another old man murdered on the key last week. He disappeared a couple of days after the murder. We were afraid he was dead.”

“So, he doesn’t have anything to do with the drugs and Captain McAllister.”

“Only tangentially,” I said. “King and McAllister and the others had a side deal going. They were trying to find a key to decode some documents King found on a sunken World War II submarine. It was kind of a crazy scheme, but King apparently thought that Goodlow, the man murdered on the key, and Jamison were involved somehow. We think King was after Jamison, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the drugs.”

“If Mr. Jamison was involved with either McAllister or King,” Katie said, “he’s probably in trouble.”

“Katie,” I said, “I need to tell you something. We don’t know the details yet, but we’ll find out when J.D. gets back.”

“This sounds bad,” said Katie.

“Actually, I think it’s a good thing. McAllister is dead and we think Evans is, too.”

She sat back in the chair. “Tell me what you know,” she said.

“Jock and I met with McAllister early this morning. He confirmed everything you had to say, by the way.”

“Did you kill the bastard?”

“No. When we left, he was alive. But somebody put a bullet in his head shortly after we left him. We think Evans may have been killed by the same person, but we don’t really know that. When we drove by his house an hour or so ago, there were cop cars all over the place. Something happened there. We’ll know when J.D. can check in with the Sarasota cops and the sheriff’s office.”

Katie breathed out a long breath. “I guess that is good news,” she said. “In a way. I’d like to have killed the bastards myself.”

“It means you won’t have to worry about them anymore.”

“I guess,” she said.

“Or face them in a courtroom.”

“That would’ve been hard, but I planned on doing it. I was mostly
afraid that McAllister, being a cop and all, would get away with everything. That nobody would believe me.”

Jock’s phone rang again. He answered and held it out to me. J.D. said, “He directed me to the short-term parking at the airport. I just got here, but don’t see him. It’s full daylight, so I’ll just wait.”

I heard the ding of the alarm signaling that one of the car doors in J.D.’s Camry had opened. “Never mind, he’s here. Hang on for a minute.”

A male voice came on the line. “Good morning, Mr. Royal. This is Bud Jamison. I assure you my intentions are benign. I need to talk to Detective Duncan. This won’t take long and she’s safe. She’s got a gun and I don’t.”

“Tell her,” I said, “to call me in fifteen minutes. If not, I’ll call the cops.”

“Not to worry,” he said and hung up.

But I did worry. Calling the cops would be useless. In fifteen minutes, J.D. could be dead or so lost in the tangle of roads near the airport that we’d never find her. But then, she had her gun and she was a good cop. Tough and resilient. And she was in a very public place with cars and people coming and going.