Fatal Decree (22 page)

“No. I’m a lawyer from Longboat Key.”

I heard the screen door open and felt the presence of Jenny behind me. Before I could turn around she pushed me in the back, hard. I felt myself falling forward and put my foot out to catch myself. My momentum took me down two steps and into the yard. I caught myself before I fell and stood upright my feet planted on the dirt.

Jenny was screaming, crying, words cascading like so much water over
a dam. I finally made out what she was saying. “He killed Pete, the bastard. He killed Pete.”

I knew she was pointing at me, but I couldn’t turn around to see. I was in a staring contest with the big man holding the sugarcane cutter. I knew Logan was also on the porch and I was sure he was on high alert.

“Did you kill him?” asked the man with the cutter.

“No,” I said.

“Yes he did,” screeched Jenny. “The television said it was him.”

The two men had now closed ranks and were standing a foot or so apart. The second man pulled a large knife from a scabbard at his side, holding it by the hilt, bouncing it slowly in his hand, his eyes hard on me. The first man raised the cane cutter and took a step toward me. We were close, five or six feet. I took a step backward, felt my heel bounce against the first step. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Logan standing stock-still on the porch, trying to decide what to do. I saw with some relief that he had a pistol in his hand, holding it down by his side. It was the small one he often carried in an ankle holster. I’d seen him take it off when we started into the jail that morning, but I hadn’t seen him put it back on. He must have done it while I was in the McDonald’s in Clewiston ordering coffee.

The man was raising the cane cutter and making a quick move toward me when I heard the shot. I watched him stagger as blood began to stain the front of his white shirt. He crumpled to the ground, dropping his weapon. I dove for it, thinking I’d get to it before the other man and maybe this mess would be over.

As I hit the ground, I heard a cry of pain from the porch. I grabbed the cane cutter and rolled to a sitting position. The man who’d held the knife had turned and was running away from us. I looked back to the porch and saw Logan moving toward Jenny. She had fallen back against the side of the house and was sinking slowly into a sitting position. The knife the second man had been holding was sticking out of her chest.

No more than a second or two had elapsed since the man came at me with the cane cutter. I picked myself up and ran for the porch. Jenny was in big trouble. The blade had sunk to the hilt into her chest. I didn’t think she’d survive that kind of wound.

I pulled my phone out of a pocket and dialed 911. “I’ve got one man down from a gunshot, probably dead, and a woman with a large knife in her chest, critical. Can you get a location on me from the GPS on my phone?”

“I’ve got it. Who is calling, please?”

“Get somebody out here now.”

“I need your name, sir.”

“Matt Royal. We need help.”

“It’s on the way, Mr. Royal. Please stay on the line.”

“Did you capture my phone number?”

“Yes, sir.” She read it back to me.

“That’s it.”

“I’ll need to ask you some questions, sir.”

“Call me back if it’s important.” I hung up. I’ve never figured out why the 911 operators bother you with a lot of useless questions when you have a life-threatening emergency.

I looked down at Jenny. Logan was holding her hand, talking quietly to her. He looked up at me. “She’s gone,” he said. “Goddamnit. I just wasn’t quick enough.”

“You saved my life, buddy.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t save hers. Just as I shot the guy with the cane cutter, the other one threw the knife at you. When you hit the ground it went right over you and got Jenny in the chest.”

“Nothing you could do, Logan. If you hadn’t shot the guy trying to kill me, I’d be dead. Jenny called them because she thought I’d killed her boyfriend. I guess she wanted a bit of revenge, and turns out, it bit her in the ass. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Why the meltdown?” asked Logan. “She didn’t seem to care much whether Pete was dead or alive.”

“I think she was just buying time until the men she’d called got here. Didn’t want us to know she cared about Pete. I guess she really did care.”

“Who’s going to tell her kids?”

“That’ll probably fall to her father. It stinks, but what can you do.”

We stood there in the stillness of the cane field, the quiet broken only by the stalks ruffling in the breeze. The sun was warm now, and bright,
moving higher in the sky. It would have been a pleasant place to spend an hour or so if there weren’t two dead people lying about. We’d left the bodies where they fell and were leaning against the rear quarter panel of my Explorer, waiting for the law. Logan had put his pistol on the hood of the vehicle, as far from us as possible. Unless we wanted to give up our leaning post. Which we didn’t. But we didn’t want to excite the officers, either.

In less time than I would have thought, I heard sirens and in a few minutes saw an ambulance and a sheriff’s car bouncing down the track that led to the house. The cruiser pulled into the yard, and a deputy got out and walked toward us. The ambulance came to a stop, and the paramedics went to take a look at the bodies.

“You Matt Royal?” he asked.

“I am, Deputy.”

“Could I see some ID?”

I handed him my driver’s license. He looked at it carefully and handed it back to me.

“Then I guess this is Mr. Hamilton.”

“Right,” said Logan, handing over his driver’s license.

“The sheriff told me you were okay. Part of some sort of drug task force.”

“Not exactly,” I said, “but the sheriff can explain it to you.”

“The sheriff overheard the 911 operator calling the dispatcher. She had your name. He radioed me. He’ll be along soon. He has to come all the way from LaBelle.”

“Thanks, deputy,” I said.

“We got forensics coming,” said the deputy. “I might as well get a statement from you two while we wait for them. Is that Jenny Talbot up there on the porch?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What happened?”

I gave him the short version. I knew the statement would be very detailed. When I got to the part about the man throwing the knife into Jenny’s chest, the deputy looked down, as if he’d just heard a sad story. I guess he had. The people in these parts tended to stay here their whole lives. They
knew each other and knew the families. It was a close-knit society of blue collar people. The smartest ones found a way out of the cane business. I suspected this deputy was one of the smart ones.

“That’s a shame. She wasn’t a bad kid. Worked up at Kelly’s Diner for a couple of years, but he had to let her go when she got into some kind of drugs.”

“Doesn’t look like she ever had much of a chance,” said Logan.

“Can’t disagree with you there,” said the deputy. “Her old man’s full of piss and vinegar, but he loved that girl and took good care of her after her ma ran off. I’ve known him since first grade. He never made it out of high school. Dropped out in about the ninth grade and went to work in the cane.”

“I take it he still works in the cane industry,” I said.

“Yeah. He’s worked himself up to some kind of supervisor over at the refinery.”

“What about Jenny’s kids?” asked Logan.

“Oh, boy. They’re one and three. Nobody seems to know who the daddy is. Whoever he is, he’s pretty much gone. Hell, it might have been two different fathers. Jenny was a pretty wild little gal. She kind of spread it around, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. I knew what he meant.

“What’ll happen to the kids?” asked Logan.

“Don’t know. Probably the state’ll take ’em. They’ll end up in the foster care system. Jenny’s daddy sure can’t take care of ’em. But Lord, he does love those kids. It’s gonna be tough. Lose his only child and both his grandkids.”

“Any chance of catching the guy with the knife?”

“Who knows? I hope so. He killed somebody’s mom. He shouldn’t get away with that.”

He pulled out a tape recorder and set it on the hood of the patrol car. He turned it on and started the interview. We told him everything we knew and how we came to be at that sad little house in the vast cane fields.

We spent a couple of hours at the house, giving our statements, meeting the sheriff, and telling our story again. The forensics team came, did whatever they do, and left. The ambulance had taken the bodies to the morgue to await the medical examiner. I wanted to get away from the house before Jenny’s dad showed up. The sheriff would have to tell him that his daughter was dead. I didn’t want to see that kind of grief, the kind that would take a strong man to his knees.

Logan and I started back to Longboat Key, stopping for take-out at a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through. We ate as we drove.

“I hate shit like that,” said Logan.

“You talking about the food?”

“Jenny.”

“I know.”

“If she hadn’t called those goons.”

“But she did,” I said. “She wasn’t the sharpest arrow in the quiver.”

He gave me that look I always get when I say something he thinks is stupid. “Did the name she gave you mean anything?” he asked.

“No. I’ve never heard of anybody connected to these cases named Jeff. But he might be buried in that stack of papers J.D. got from Miami. If we can put somebody with that name in Glades Correctional, we may have found the first thread that’ll unravel this. He may be somebody J.D. arrested.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” he said. “It never is.”

I called J.D., using the hands-free function so that Logan could listen in. I brought her up to date on what we had been doing, including the fact that we’d left two people dead in the cane field. She was quiet on the other end of the line, or whatever cell phones use to connect us.

“That’s too bad, Matt,” she finally said. “Poor girl. But I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks. How’re you coming along?”

“Buried in all this paper from Miami. Trying to find some kind of connection.”

“Anything going on with Gene’s case?”

“No. The fingerprints the forensics people found on the gun used to kill Gene aren’t in the system, so we have no idea who they belong to. If we arrest somebody, we’ll at least have the prints for comparison.”

“Are you seeing any connection between his murder and the others?”

“Not yet. There might not be any.”

“Did you check out the yard crew that was in the neighborhood?”

“Yeah. It was legit. A local company that does a lot of work on the key. They don’t have any Guatemalans on the payroll.”

“Did you talk to the crew members? See if they saw anybody that looked like them that didn’t belong on their crew?”

“I talked to every one of them. Took me most of the evening and part of this morning. Nothing suspicious.”

“You think they’re telling the truth?”

“Hard to tell,” she said. “None of them speaks English, so I had to use an interpreter. That makes it a bit more dicey.”

“If there’s a gang connection in this, the guys on the crew might be too scared to talk about it.”

“Yeah. I thought of that. Not much we can do about it, though.”

“Has the name Jeff popped up in all that Miami paperwork?”

“Not yet,” she said. “I’m still going through it. Why?”

“Jenny, the girl who was killed, said Qualman told her he was working in Sarasota for somebody named Jeff. They met in prison at Glades Correctional.”

“No last name?”

“No. Sorry.”

She sighed. “I’ll look for Jeff. If we can find him, we may be able to start putting these people together somehow.”

“Check the sheet the super at Glades sent on Qualman. That’s probably your best bet to find Jeff’s last name.”

“I know. I’ll let you know if I find out anything. Is Jock with you?”

“No. He went to Washington yesterday. Be back tomorrow evening.”

“He called me this morning. Didn’t say he was out of town.”

“What did he want?”

“Asked if we’d found a laptop at Gene Alexander’s. He said it could be important to something he was working on.”

“Was there a laptop?” I asked.

“Not that we found. I checked with the forensics folks, too. Nobody saw a laptop.”

“Did he say why it was important?”

“No. And I haven’t had time to call him back to let him know we didn’t find anything.”

“I’ll call him. I need to talk to him anyway.”

“Tell him I’d like to sit down with him tomorrow evening.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She hung up.

“She’s back in full cop mode,” said Logan.

“I’m glad. She needed the stimulation.”

“I worry about her getting bored here on the island.”

“I do too. She said as much at lunch yesterday,” I said.

“This has got to be a big comedown for a Miami-Dade homicide commander.”

“Assistant commander,” I said.

“Well, you get my meaning.”

“I do. But there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

“I wonder why that laptop seems important to Jock,” Logan said.

“I’ll call him when we get home. Probably not a big deal.”

“I’ll be off island for a week or so,” Logan said.

“Where’re you going? You just got back from the keys.”

“Marie’s got a business trip to New York City, so I thought I’d go along, and we can catch some shows, maybe run up to Nahant to see some of my family for a couple of days.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“If we decide to go to Boston, we’ll probably be gone the better part of two weeks,” Logan said.

“The key is always a little quieter when you’re out of town. Some of
the bartenders who depend on you might go broke if you’re gone too long.”

“You’ll just have to drink more. Take one for the team.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

We drove on in silence, Logan fiddling with the radio, trying to find some decent music among the Saturday afternoon infomercials. I thought about the cases, the victims, J.D.’s thoughts about leaving the key, Jock’s concerns about Gene Alexander’s death being connected to his agency. But mostly, I thought about a pretty girl growing up in the cane fields with no hope of anything better and of her children who would never know their mom. And I thought about her father, a hard-working man who had done his best and lost everything.