Harmless as Doves (18 page)

“OK, OK. I just thought maybe you could work on something for me. But maybe it can wait.”

“What is it?” Rachel asked, calmer. “Maybe I can fit it in.”

“Are you sure?”

“Just tell me, Dad. I’ll help if I can.”

“OK, well, I need travel itineraries. For Jacob Miller, going down to Pinecraft on the Pioneer Trails buses. We need to know about all of his trips, going back maybe a year.”

“How would I go about doing that, Dad?”

“I thought maybe you could ‘hack into’ something. Maybe hack the bus company records. Airlines, too.”

“I can’t just ‘hack into’ stuff, Dad.”

“I thought that was the type of thing you could do.”

“Oh, it is. But, it might get us both into more trouble than it would be worth. Especially with the DEA watching every move I make.”

“Oh.”

“Why don’t you just call the bus company? Ask them straight up?”

“Well, I need to check on Darba, right now,” Cal said. “Then I need to go see Vesta.”

“This for the sheriff’s office?”

“Well, yes. Ricky Niell and Mike Branden need to know. They’re down in Florida.”

After a pause, Rachel said, “Let me see what I can do.”

“Maybe I’ll just ask Bruce Robertson,” Cal said.

“What’s he gonna do, Dad? With Ricky down in Florida, he’s got to be stretched pretty thin on deputies.”

“Well, that’s sort of my problem, really.”

“I’ll ask him,” Rachel said. “He’s coming here for a lunchtime lesson, anyway, and if what you need is really the sheriff’s business, maybe he can clear it for me to do the search.”

Smiling, Cal said, “Maybe while you’ve got him there, you could teach him how to hack into something.”

“That’s not what I do, Dad.”

27

Friday, October 9

12:00 noon

RICKY DROVE the professor south out of Bradenton Beach on Gulf Coast Drive, skirting the beaches to their right, falling in with the slow tourist traffic, as drivers watched for the rare parking spot to open up along the sandy berm. After they passed the tall trees lining the picnic grounds at Coquina Beach, traffic sped up, and they soon had crossed the drawbridge over Longboat Pass, with sailboats on the luminous green waters of the Gulf to their right, white sails bright against a sky so blue that it seemed improbable to men from the gray north of Ohio.

On Longboat Key, they passed fenced properties where sprawling coastal mansions anchored the sand, with front-facing views of the Gulf waters. Farther south, they could see taller condominium buildings and towering hotels fronted by wide expanses of lawn and stands of palms, many of the distant buildings done in pastel colors, most sporting bright orange, quarter-round ceramic roofing tiles. Once they had driven over New Pass, with water so green that it seemed to be lit for effect from below, they entered the traffic circle in St. Armands and curved around counterclockwise, passing elegant shops painted in bright, tropical colors. The streets were thick with pedestrian shoppers in summer attire, strolling among shops accented with flowering shrubs and clusters of classical white statues, most of them copies of originals from Italy or France.

They had driven three-fourths of the way around the circle before realizing they had missed the turnoff for Lido Beach,
so they continued around the circle and angled off toward the west once they had gotten back to the right spot. After two city blocks lined with expensive homes, they reached the sand dunes at the Gulf Coast and followed the street as it curved toward the south, skirting Lido Beach to their right.

Tall condominiums and hotels stood on the beach properties ahead, but before they reached them, a parking lot appeared on the right, and Niell pulled in and found a rare free spot at the back of the lot. The two men got out of the car. Branden laid his sport coat on the seat and Niell locked up. They crossed the sandy parking lot to wooden steps and an arched boardwalk that led over the dunes toward the water.

The white sand of Lido Beach stretched for fifty yards down to green water. It extended both to their left and to their right along an arching coastline of several miles, dotted with bright beach umbrellas in a variety of colors stuck in the sand, like a strand of jewels strung along the water’s edge. To the north, the coastline eventually turned in at New Pass, at the top of Lido Key, and to the south, the arch of white sand and green surf led the eyes into the distance, where tall hotels on Siesta Key shimmered behind a hazy spray of wind-blown surf and sand, like a border of white marble monuments separating emerald water from ultramarine sky.

On the beach in front of the men, there were easily a thousand vacationers lying out either in the sun or in the shade of their umbrellas. Nearly as many swimmers played in a light surf as a gentle rhythm of low waves broke slowly as soft foam on the sand. Niell and Branden stood at the end of the wooden walkway, both somewhat taken aback by the colorful spectacle of sun-bleached ease displayed before them, their northern Ohio biorhythms—braced for the oncoming winter back home—clashing with the scene before them.

Eventually, Branden asked, “Should we walk along the water and see if we spot any Amish kids?” but as he spoke, a young Amish woman in a long gray dress and black bonnet came over the boardwalk behind them and started across
the sand toward the water, carrying a basket and a small red and white cooler with the Pepsi logo. When she had threaded her way between the sun umbrellas and the many people stretched out on the sand, she spread a towel from her basket beside two other beach towels at the high-tide line and sat down facing the water. Soon two younger Amish girls in two-piece bathing suits came out of the water and joined the Amish woman at the towels, where they dried themselves and sat down to put on their own bonnets, over hair that was wrapped in buns at the backs of their heads. Niell pointed beyond the surf, and there in chest-high water stood three boys with pale white shoulders and black Dutch haircuts, waving back at the girls on the beach.

Branden shaded his eyes and gazed along the stretch of white sand toward the north, and soon he was able to point Niell’s attention to a young Amish couple about forty yards up the beach, standing at water’s edge in traditional attire, the woman’s long forest-green dress snapping in the ocean breeze, the man holding his straw hat on his head as he watched sailboats on the horizon. Taking his hat off, the man said something to his partner, and she laid her head back and laughed as if he had spun her at a dance. He spoke again, and she studied his face for a moment, and then smiling as if she shouldn’t trust him, she started moving tentatively into the water, where the small waves cresting near shore stirred the hem of her dress at her ankles. The Amish man waved her farther out, and she hesitated. Again he waved her forward, and again she laughed and waded deeper into the water, until the skirt of her long green dress was swimming in the waves at her hips. Laughing as if something were tickling her, she called for him to join her, and he sat immediately to take off his boots and socks. Soon he was out with her, his denim trousers hip-deep in the ocean water, the two splashing each other like young children when the waves crested around their waists.

Branden looked at Niell, and Niell laughed, saying, “Professor, did you ever expect to see anything like that?”

Branden had no answer for the sergeant. He just scratched at his beard, shook his head, and started back toward their car. As they were opening the car doors, a SCAT bus pulled to a stop along the sidewalk bordering the parking lot, and four more Amish kids climbed down from the bus carrying towels, baskets, and coolers of their own. Branden pulled his sport coat out of the car and got in with it laid across his lap, but Niell stood beside the car to watch as the kids made their way across the parking lot to the wooden steps at the edge of the sand. Once they had disappeared over the dune, Niell said, “This Pinecraft has got to be something to see,” and he got in shaking his head, waited for the professor to buckle up, and drove out of the lot.

Back in traffic at St. Armands Circle, Niell drove halfway around the circle and headed east over the high-arching John Ringling Causeway, into the stone and glass architecture of downtown Sarasota. Then they drove around the bay, south on State Route 41, passing the parade of boats at the Bayfront Marina and the modern sculptures lining the waterfront walkways. At Bahia Vista, they turned east again and followed the wide boulevard for a mile, crossing over a narrow channel past the little hand-lettered sign for Pinecraft Park. There, they entered an Amish community of summer cottages, small houses, and trailers bearing familiar Holmes County names: Helmuth, Wengerd, Yoder, Weaver, Keim, Gingerich, and Miller.

Some of the houses mixed into the closely packed neighborhood were old and relatively stately, but most seemed to be afterthoughts on the original property. Next to an old Florida bungalow with a shaded front porch, there was a twenty-by-twenty brick hut with a tired aluminum overhang and an old air conditioner propped into a small window on two-by-four posts anchored on cinder blocks in the sand.

Ricky turned at a corner with a tidy pink stucco cottage under bushy cranberry trees, and then they saw a single-wide trailer of fifties vintage, with a broad, green-roofed carport over a patch of concrete only half long enough for
a car to park. Under the roof, there sat an electric-motored wheelchair with the battery connected to a charger plugged into an outlet at the side of the house. The bicycle parked on the sun-withered lawn had a wicker basket fixed over the back fender, and next to it sat a three-wheeled cart with an electric battery and motor mounted underneath the frame.

Next came a weathered wood shanty that was improbably small, and then a cottage big enough to sleep only two or three people, with three tall solitaire palms waving overhead. On the next lot, there stood an old house painted a faded lilac, with a newer cottage built close against its side, tall jacarandas sweeping their wispy leaves against the blue sky overhead. Beyond the jacarandas, three trailers were lined up side by side, and on a larger lot further into the neighborhood, five more trailers fanned out to guard a semicircle lined with saw palmettos, with a broken sidewalk leading out to the lane. Other houses in the community were newer, but they were all uniformly small. Their windows were tiny, often shaded with canvas or wood awnings, and where there were carports beside the houses, adult-sized tricycles were parked in the shade of the covers.

At the address provided by Sergeant Orton, Ricky found Mrs. Laver’s single-wide trailer, three blocks south of the Pinecraft Post Office shed, on the street with the Mennonite Tourist Church. When they knocked on the door, it was answered by a silver-haired woman, wearing a plain gray dress that reached her ankles. Her hair was up in a bun, and instead of a prayer cap, she had tied a simple white cloth over her head. She wore neither jewelry nor makeup, and she greeted the two men with a simple, “Yes,” studying Niell’s uniform with intelligent eyes set off by a deep Florida tan.

Niell explained briefly their interest in Jacob Miller, and Mrs. Laver nodded and stepped aside to admit them into her small trailer home. She turned them left, into a living area with two soft chairs, and once they were seated, she excused herself, stepped into the kitchen area, and pulled a pitcher of iced tea out of her little refrigerator. Without asking, she
poured tea into two green plastic tumblers, and brought the drinks to the men. Once they had each tasted it, she pulled a dining chair into the living area and asked, “Sugar?”

Branden answered, “No, thank you,” but Ricky handed his glass back, saying, “If you don’t mind.”

Back in the kitchen, Mrs. Laver stirred sugar into Ricky’s glass, and she carried it back to him, saying, “Jacob Miller came here nearly half a dozen times, I think. Anyway, it was something like six times, beginning September, a year ago.”

Ricky sipped tea and waited. Once Mrs. Laver was seated, he asked, “Did he just sleep here, or did he take his meals here, too?”

“Oh, he just used my spare room. It’s my sewing room, but he put a mattress on the floor and just slept here.”

Thinking about that, she added, “The only reason he stayed here, I suppose, is that he used to know my William, and since they were friends, I let him sleep here. He said he didn’t have a lot of money, but then, he did hire a private driver.”

Branden asked, “Do you know what he was doing, when he came down here?”

“He was out chasing around,” Mrs. Laver frowned. “Like I said, he hired a driver. He could have gone anywhere, for all I knew. Sometimes, he came back late, after I had retired.”

“You gave him a key?” Ricky asked.

“Oh, we don’t lock our doors, here, Deputy.”

“Was he just a tourist, do you think?” Ricky led.

“Right at first, I would guess so. Yes. But the last few times he was here, he was definitely looking for someone.”

“Do you know who?” Branden asked.

“The mother of a friend, was all he told me. But I gather she had died. Then, that last time, he was looking for someone else. But the only reason I know that is because he had an argument with his driver. Something about running all over Cortez and Bradenton Beach. The driver wanted better pay. Said it was going to take all day, and he had other things he could be doing.”

Ricky thought. “Was he here yesterday? Or maybe the day before?”

“No.”

“When was his last visit?” Branden asked.

“It was summer, this year,” Mrs. Laver said. She held up a finger, rose, consulted a wall calendar, and sat back down, saying, “August tenth and eleventh.”

Branden looked over to Niell. “Maybe he moved into a hotel.”

“I think he did,” Mrs. Laver offered. “That August eleventh, he packed his bag and told his driver to run him up to a motel in Bradenton Beach.”

“Do you know how long he stayed that time?” Ricky asked.

“No, and after that time, he didn’t come back here anymore.”

Ricky stroked a finger over his mustache. “Up in Ohio, Mrs. Laver, Jacob Miller was not known as a very generous man.”