Fatal Decree (34 page)

“My first instincts were to let you die, you cretin,” she said. “Don’t make me regret not going with my gut. Why were you trying to kill me?”

“I wasn’t. I was just the messenger.”

“For whom?” she asked.

“First,” Perez said, “some ground rules.”

“You don’t make the rules,” said Parrish, his voice low, threatening. “The rules are that you answer our questions. If not, you go back to see the judge and will probably be looking at a cell on death row.”

“Okay,” said Perez, “then how about some background. I’d like to put this whole thing in perspective so that Ms. Duncan doesn’t think me an ogre.”

“Too late,” J.D. said.

Perez smiled again. “Fair enough. But I’m not a bad person.”

“Mr. Perez,” I said, “you’ve been instrumental in the killing of at least two innocent women and several attempts on Detective Duncan’s life.”

“That’s true, Mr. Royal,” he said, “but I was under duress.”

I laughed. “And how about the money laundering? Were you under duress there as well?”

“Point taken,” he said, “but that didn’t result in any harm. The harm had already been done. I just moved money around.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You made it possible for some of the world’s worst thugs to ruin the lives of a lot of people, not to mention the murders your buddies commit in order to keep the money flowing.”

“That’s a theory, sir,” he said, “but not one to which I subscribe.”

I shut up then. This guy was either full of more crap than anybody I’d ever met or he was living in a dream world. Probably the latter. If any of the people involved in the drug trade had even an iota of decency, they had to manufacture a shield against their own perfidy, a safe place where they could retreat from the horrors that their actions visited upon the innocents who were destroyed by the product they pushed.

“I want to know who tried to kill me and why,” said J.D. “I don’t really give a damn what you think of yourself.”

“In good time, Ms. Duncan,” Perez said, “but first you need to know who I am.”

“It’s
Detective
Duncan, Perez,” she said, “and I already know who you are. You’re something the sewer rats dragged out of the slime.”

“When I tell you my story,” he said, “perhaps you’ll have a higher opinion of me.”

She gave it up then, sighed, and sat back in her chair. “I doubt it, but go ahead. Give us your version.”

“I come from a proud family,” he said. “I’m a fourth-generation Floridian.”

I almost laughed. There is a conceit among many native Floridians that their peninsula pedigree means something to other people. The more generations their families have lived in Florida, the more important that seems to be. I suspect it is because there are so few natives living in the state anymore. Most of the residents are transplants from somewhere else. I never thought that one’s place of birth had much importance in the grand scheme of things. Especially, if one is about to spend the rest of his life in a prison far removed from the place where he was born.

“Congratulations,” said J.D., sarcastically.

It was lost on Perez. “Thank you. I tell you this because I don’t want you to think I’m some Mexican here illegally. My great-grandfather emigrated from Spain where his family was part of the nobility. He came to Key West in the late 1880s and used his family money to buy a cigar factory from the Cubans who ran the industry there. There had been a strike by the workers and he got it fairly cheaply. He ran it for a few years and, seeing the handwriting on the wall, sold it within ten years for a large profit.
He came to Miami before the turn of the century and married a local girl, Mildred Hightower, from a family of cattle ranchers. They had two sons and a daughter.”

Parrish interrupted. “Mr. Perez, this is very interesting, but we want to know about the murders on Longboat Key.”

“I understand,” said Perez. “You need to know the history so that you can understand the present. I think somebody important said that.”

Parrish shook his head and signaled Perez to continue.

“One of those sons was my grandfather,” said Perez, “and one of his sisters married a man named Jules Koerner. They had one daughter, Katherine Karen, who married a Miami lawyer named James Picket.”

“Picket?” asked J.D., sitting up in her chair.

“You’re beginning to see it, aren’t you, Detective Duncan?” asked Perez.

J.D. nodded. “The Pickets had a son they named Caleb.”

“Bingo,” said Perez, pointing his finger at J.D. “Caleb Picket, a man you put away for twenty years for embezzlement. Only for him it was a life sentence because of the cancer.”

“So Picket was what?” I asked. “Your second cousin?”

“Exactly,” said Perez.

“There’s more to this,” said J.D.

“Much more,” said Perez. “Katherine Karen, or Katie as she was known to the family, was crazy. Caleb was born when she was in her twenties. Nobody recognized the symptoms of creeping insanity. The family just thought she was a bit quirky. But after Caleb was born, she got worse. She was sneaky, and neither her husband nor anyone else in the family knew what was going on.”

“What happened to her?” J.D. asked. I thought she was getting interested in this in spite of herself.

“She was torturing Caleb,” Perez said. “Doing terrible things to him. When he was about eight, she tied him down, shaved his head, and cut her initials on the back of it, just above the nape of his neck.”

“K.K.K.,” said J.D. “Katherine Karen Koerner. I’ll be damned. The same initials carved into the back of the whale tail victims.”

“Yes,” Perez said simply.

“How did you know about the initials?” J.D. asked. “That was pretty closely held police information.”

“Caleb told me. The family knew he was the killer. But we only found out after he was charged with embezzlement and was facing a prison sentence.”

“Why didn’t your family say something?” asked Parrish.

“We have a reputation in Miami that we have to uphold. Four generations of successful men and women, the cream of society. We took a huge beating when Caleb was arrested for stealing all those people’s money. Many of them were our friends. But the embezzlement, while bad, was just about theft. If word had ever gotten out that Caleb had killed those poor women, it would have been assumed that we have a family gene that produces crazy people.”

“So, it was known that Katie had done terrible things to Caleb,” I said.

“No. The family had her admitted to a hospital in Ocala under lock-down. There were some rumors about her being mentally unstable, but the family paid a couple of doctors to let slip at cocktail parties that poor Katie had developed an inoperable and fatal brain tumor and that explained some of her eccentricities. They assured everyone who asked that she was in a treatment center in Chicago and would never come home. She would die there from the tumor. If it became known that Caleb was a serial killer, all the dirt on Katie would come out.”

“But Caleb’s dead,” said J.D. “He couldn’t be the one responsible for the murders on Longboat.”

“There’s more to the history, Detective,” said Perez. “Hear me out.”

By now, I was caught up in the story, and I think everybody in the room was as well. Jock had sat quietly through the whole thing, but I knew that prodigious brain of his was soaking it all up, dissecting it, trying to make sense out of the murders on Longboat Key that in some manner had their genesis in the tortured brain of a woman named Katie.

Perez took a deep breath. “While Katie was in the hospital in Ocala, she got pregnant. The father was a Mexican peasant who worked there as an orderly. He said the sex was consensual and she confirmed it, saying that she was in love with the man. The hospital fired the Mexican, but abortion was not an option. She was pretty far along when the pregnancy
was discovered. Abortion was not legal in Florida in those days, and we are a Catholic family.”

“She had a little girl who was given to the father, a man we only knew as José. He disappeared with his daughter, but apparently stayed in contact with Katie. About a year after she gave birth, she disappeared too. Apparently she just walked out of the hospital one day when no one was looking. The family suspected that José had come for her.”

“What happened to them?” I asked. “Does anybody know?”

“Yes,” said Perez. “Caleb was ten when the little girl was born. When he was twelve, Katie’s body was found over near Naples, naked and tied to a tree beside a creek that emptied into the Gulf in the Ten Thousand Islands area. She’d been shot in the back of the head with a twenty-two caliber pistol.”

“Who killed her?” asked Parrish.

“Nobody knows. The killer was never found.”

“Katie’s death must have caused a stir in your family’s social circles,” said J.D.

“No. We never identified her as Katie. We wouldn’t have known about her death if José hadn’t told us.”

“Are you sure it was her?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Perez. “José had a crime-scene picture he’d somehow filched from the Collier County Sheriff’s office. He brought it to us, along with his daughter whom they’d named Mariah. The picture clearly showed Katie, naked and tied to a tree.”

“He brought his daughter?” asked J.D.

“Yes. The child was only about two years old, but the father wanted us to know that Katie was dead and that the child was fine. He left the picture and somehow Caleb found it. We didn’t see Mariah or her father again for another eight years.”

“Where did they go?” I asked, getting more and more caught up in this strange tale.

“They were migrants,” said Perez, “working the fields up and down the country, never staying in one place very long.”

“But they came back to see you,” I said.

“Yes. When Mariah was ten, she and her father showed up at James
Picket’s doorstep. Caleb was twenty that year and a student at the University of Florida up in Gainesville. José told James that he was in trouble. Somehow, he’d gotten crosswise with some very bad people who were involved in smuggling drugs. He had to run, he said, and he couldn’t take Mariah with him. He was afraid that the smugglers would kill Mariah if they caught up with him. He asked James to take her in.”

“James was willing to do that?” I asked. “After everything Katie had put him through?”

“He was a good man,” Perez said, “and Mariah needed a home. Our family took her in and when Caleb graduated and came back to Miami, he and Mariah became inseparable. She was wild. She had very little education and Spanish was her first language. None of our family spoke it, so sometimes the communication was a little strained. But Mariah was a quick study. She’d had some schooling in the migrant camps and had a rudimentary understanding of English. She mastered it quickly and did well in school.”

“What happened to José?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” said Perez. “We never heard from him again.”

“Where is Mariah now?” J.D. asked.

“She got into some trouble in high school. Started hanging around with the wrong crowd. She hooked up with a Puerto Rican thug and pulled away from the family. Caleb was the only one who kept in touch. Then the thug got killed in a shoot-out with the police, and Mariah came back to the family. Well, actually, she came back to live with Caleb.”

“Don’t tell me there was a little incest going on there,” I said.

“No, not at all,” said Perez. “Caleb was gay.”

“So what happened with Mariah?” asked J.D.

Perez shrugged. “Her boyfriend came back from the dead,” he said. “A couple of years after she thought he’d been killed by the police, he showed back up. He had moved up in the world and now was running a fairly large drug operation. He got Caleb involved in laundering some of his money, and Caleb got greedy. He’d done well as a stockbroker and was building quite a clientele. Unfortunately, he had set up a giant Ponzi scheme using the drug dealers’ money as seed. He was careful never to short the drug lords, so he was doing well with them, but all the other people, the honest
ones, who invested with him, lost their shirts.”

“And this is where I came in,” said J.D.

“Yes,” said Perez. “You busted him and he got twenty years. You also put a stop to the whale tail murders, although you didn’t know it.”

“Do you know what the whale tail earring was all about?” asked J.D.

Perez smiled ruefully. “The day Katie carved her initials in Caleb’s head, she was wearing sterling silver earrings fashioned like a whale tail. That was the last time Caleb ever saw his mother. Until, that is, he saw the picture of her dead and tied to a tree.”

“But what I don’t understand,” said J.D. “is who has been trying to kill me. And why replicate the whale tail murders?”

“Mariah is behind that,” Perez said.

“Mariah?” asked J.D.

“Yes. She’s as crazy as her mother was. Vicious and vindictive.”

“What’s your involvement?” I asked.

“When Caleb was arrested on the embezzlement charge, I was working in one of the large brokerage houses at its downtown Miami branch. I had a degree in finance from the University of Florida and was making a pretty good living. Caleb was out on bail and came to see me at my condo. He told me about the murders, the money laundering, and how he’d fleeced our friends. He wanted me to take over his job with Fuentes.”

“Who’s Fuentes?” Jock asked, speaking up for the first time.

“Arturo Fuentes is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and runs drugs into Florida. He was Caleb’s brother-in-law. He’d come back from the dead and married Mariah.”

“So you took over things from Caleb,” I said.

“Yes. Caleb had stashed away ten million dollars. It was money he’d made over and above what he was doing for the druggers. The proceeds from his Ponzi scheme. He wanted me to invest that money for him and hold it until he got out of prison. He didn’t expect to get twenty years. His lawyer was telling him that he’d probably have to do four or five. Nobody counted on the wrath of all the old money in Miami coming down on him. The judge gave him the full twenty with no chance of parole.”

There was a knock on the door and the deputy marshal we’d met when we arrived stuck his head in the door. “Sorry, Mr. Parrish, but we
have to feed the prisoner.”