Orchid Beach (27 page)
“Yes?” Crisp said.
“Come now.”
“Right with you.”
Two minutes later Crisp walked into the police station, gave his name and asked for Holly.
Holly’s intercom rang. “Put Mr. Crisp into interview two,” she said. She hung up and watched as Harry was led down the hallway.
At eleven-thirty, her intercom rang again. “Yes?”
“A Mr. Mosely to see you.”
“Put him in interview one,” she said. Now she got her first look at Mosely. He was just as big as Jackson had said, and just as ugly. She let him wait ten minutes, then stood up. “Come on, Daisy,” she said, “let’s you and I interview Cracker Mosely.” She picked up a file folder, put the dog on a leash and walked down the hallway toward the interview rooms. She opened the door of number two. Harry Crisp
was sitting quietly at the two-way mirror, looking at Mosely. “The volume control is right there, Harry.”
“Got it,” Crisp replied. “He’s mean-looking, isn’t he?”
“You bet.”
“I’ll shoot him through the glass if he gives you a hard time.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Holly said. She opened the door to interview room one and was nearly dragged off her feet by Daisy, who had her front paws on the table, trying to reach Mosely. “Daisy! Back off! Back off!”
It was the first time that Daisy had not obeyed her instantly. It took her the better part of a minute to get the dog calmed down. When she was satisfied that the dog was completely under her control again, she unhooked the leash and took a seat.
Mosely was staring at the dog, fear on his face. “Put him back on the leash,” he said. “I don’t want to have to kill that dog.”
“Tell you the truth, Cracker, my money would be on the dog, and I’d give long odds.”
Daisy made a rumbling noise in her throat, imitating Holly’s tone.
“Stay, Daisy. Guard!”
Daisy moved from a prone to a sitting position, staring intently at Mosely.
Holly was intrigued by Daisy’s reaction to Mosely, but she didn’t make a point of it. “Let’s have the licenses,” she said, without further ado.
Mosely shoved an envelope across the table.
Holly opened it and examined the two pieces of paper; the gun license had been laminated. “Good,” she said, looking up at Mosely and smiling a little. “Now all I have to
decide is whether to send you back to prison.”
Mosely’s jaw dropped. “Barney said that wasn’t an issue.”
“Gee, I don’t know where Barney got that idea,” Holly said. “As far as I’m concerned you’re all mine, if I want you.”
“I don’t get it,” Mosely said. “I applied for the licenses, and they were issued.”
“Yeah,” Holly said, opening her file folder, “I have copies of your applications right here. Both of them ask the question, ‘Have you ever been convicted of any crime?’ And your answer, on both applications, was no.”
“That’s what I was told to put,” Mosely said.
“Told by whom?”
Mosely looked away. “A friend advised me.”
“Well, Cracker, when Barney advised you to lie on your application, he advised you to commit a felony.”
“What?”
Holly shoved the gun application across the desk. “Look right down at the bottom there. It says, ‘I swear, under penalty of perjury, that all the statements I have made in this application are true.’ Perjury is a serious crime, Cracker; it’ll get you five years, easy. And of course, when you perjured yourself, you violated your parole. And you’ve still got, what, ten, twelve years left on your sentence?”
Mosely’s mouth was working. “I want a lawyer,” he said.
“Nah, you don’t want a lawyer, Cracker. I haven’t read you your rights yet, and you were a cop long enough to know that until I read you your rights, whatever you tell me doesn’t count.”
“What do you want?” Cracker demanded.
“Ah,” Holly said. “Now you’re getting the picture.”
H
olly sat and waited, staring at Mosely. Daisy made the noise in her throat again, as if urging him to speak. Mosely looked back and forth between Holly and Daisy.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you want to know.”
“Everything,” Holly replied.
“Everything? What do you mean, everything?”
“Tell me what you do for a living, Cracker.”
“I’m a security guard. Well, I was, until today.”
“And what did you guard?”
“Palmetto Gardens. It wasn’t a big deal. I just kept out intruders, except we didn’t really have any.”
“How long you been doing this work, Cracker?” she asked.
“Nearly a year.”
“What kind of training did you have?”
“Not much. Barney just told me what to do.”
“And what did he tell you to do?”
“To guard the place—you know, gate duty, patrol duty.”
“When you were on patrol, what did you patrol?”
“The whole place.”
“Give me a rundown on your typical day patrolling,” she said.
“Well, I’d go on shift, say the morning shift. I’d drive around to each house, go up the driveway. Sometimes I’d get out of the car and walk the property. I’d drive to the clubhouse and take a walk around, checking out things.”
“What about the special buildings?”
“What do you mean, special?”
“How about the building with all the antennas?”
“Oh, we didn’t go out there. They have their own security.”
“What are they protecting?”
“What do you mean?”
“What goes on there that they need their own security?”
“I don’t know, really. The place is called the com center, so I assume it’s for communications.”
“Communications with whom?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. They don’t tell me that stuff.”
“Who is Barney’s boss?”
“The general manager, Mr. Diego, I guess.”
“What’s his first name?”
“I don’t know. Barney just calls him Diego.”
“What does he look like?”
“About forty-five, I’d guess; five-ten, a hundred and seventy-five, black hair going gray, has a mustache. He’s Mexican or something, has a light accent.”
“I want to know his first name, Cracker.”
“Wait a minute, let me think. That’s his first name, Diego. His last name is something like…Romeo.”
“A Spanish name?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, think.”
“I’m trying. It’s Ramos, or Ramero, or something like that. Ramirez! That’s it, Ramirez.”
“Diego Ramirez—good boy, Cracker. Now who else works for Ramirez?”
“Well, everybody—the club manager, the shop managers, the people in the accounting office, the maintenance manager, the airport manager—they all report to him.”
“Where is the accounting office located?”
“It’s in the village, next door to the security station.”
“And who runs that?”
“A woman named Miriam something…uh, like Talbot.”
“Is that it, Talbot?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Description?”
“Late thirties, early forties, five-six, a hundred and forty, mousy hair, not pretty.”
“What kind of vehicles are driven by the staff?”
“Security drives white Range Rovers, maintenance drives Ford vans and pickups, all white, with the green palmetto thing on the doors.”
“Where are they serviced?”
“In town. We take them to Westover Motors when they need something.”
“Any vehicles there now?”
“I’m taking Barney’s Range Rover in when I leave here.”
“What for?”
“Regular service. We get it back tomorrow. Barney’s a stickler for regular maintenance.”
“Where do you live, Cracker?”
“I have a room in the staff quarters.”
“How many of the staff live on the place?”
“All of them.”
“What do you do for entertainment?”
“They fly us to Miami. Everybody works seven days on and four off. Palmetto Gardens owns a refurbished DC-3 for flying staff back and forth.”
“Which airport in Miami do they fly into?”
“Opa Locka.”
“Tell me the names of some of the members of Palmetto Gardens.”
Cracker looked blank. “I don’t think I know any of them.”
“How do they refer to them among the security people?”
“By addresses. I’ve never heard any names used.”
“What do these people look like?”
“Rich. All kinds of nationalities. There’s some Europeans and some Hispanics and some Americans. There’s a couple of Arabs, too, I think. It’s not like I ever have a conversation with any of them.”
“Do they have wives and children?”
“Women, most of them. I’ve only seen a few kids—that’s less common.”
“How many members?”
“There’s two hundred and eight houses; I guess a member a house.”
“How many employees, total, on the place?”
“Something over six hundred, I think. Half of them are domestics.”
“Six hundred employees are living on the place?”
“No, the domestics are local.”
“How do they get in and out of the place?”
“They drive or take the bus to the service gate; there’s a parking lot for them there. Then they walk or are driven in vans to their work.”
“How do they hire the domestics?”
“I don’t know. I guess they run ads. The pay is good, so there’s not much turnover. There’s an employment office in Orchid.”
“What sort of arms do you have at the security station?”
“We all carry nine-millimeter automatics, then there’s a supply of AR fifteens.”
“Anything heavier than that?”
“Not at the station.”
“Elsewhere?”
Mosely suddenly looked uncomfortable.
“Come on, Cracker, or I’ll be talking to your parole officer.”
“There’s some stuff scattered around the place. I don’t know exactly what.”
“You’ve got to do better than that, Cracker.”
“I’ve never been close to it, but there are some…places around the property.”
“Are they camouflaged?”
Cracker looked surprised. “How did you know that?”
“We’re talking about what
you
know, Cracker.”
“Yeah, they’ve got netting over them.”
“Who mans them?”
“There are certain employees who’re trained for that, a couple of dozen, I think. If there’s an alarm, they go to their positions.”
“What kind of an alarm?”
“There’s a siren on a pole at the security office. If we get three blasts, we’re to go to our preassigned positions.”
“What’s your position?”
“Backup at the front gate, unless I’m already on service-gate duty.”
“What are they afraid of out there, Cracker?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but I know that they don’t want
anybody
from the outside there, unless they’re invited and escorted.”
“What kind of aircraft land at the airfield?”
“Corporate jets, mostly, and some support airplanes that bring in stuff.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Equipment, parts, special foods, whatever’s needed. The DC-3 and a Cessna Caravan do that work.”
“Is there any special security at the airfield?”
“Yeah, there’s a couple of those camouflaged places.”
Holly couldn’t think of anything else to ask him. “Stay here a minute,” she said. “Guard, Daisy.”
“You’re leaving me with that dog?” Cracker asked, worried.
“She won’t hurt you unless you move.” Holly left the room and went next door. Harry Crisp was gone. She went back to the other room. Cracker had not moved. “Okay, Cracker, I’m going to let you go. If Barney wants to know why you were here so long, tell him I kept you waiting. If you tell him about our conversation, I’ll know, and I’ll have you back in prison before nightfall, you understand?”
“I understand,” he said. “I’m not going to jail for Barney.”
“Good, now get going.” She followed him to the squad room and watched as he walked out.
Hurd Wallace approached. “Who was that guy?”
“Just an interview,” Holly said. “Nothing important.”
H
olly went straight to Jackson’s house after work. One of the two FBI vans was parked outside. Harry Crisp was on the phone, as usual, when she walked in, and Jackson was having a beer with Bill and Joe. Harry waved and covered up the phone. “Be with you in a minute.”
Holly fed Daisy and got herself a beer, returning to the living room as Harry finished his call. “What happened to you today?” she asked. “I came in there to see if you had any more questions, but you had gone.”
“Sorry, when I heard that Cracker was driving Barney’s Range Rover I went out there to see if I could bug it, but I didn’t have the right equipment.” Harry waved at the other people. “Let’s all sit down for a minute,” he said.
Everybody gathered at the dining table.
“I just want to tell you all where we are,” Harry said. “First of all, Holly did a brilliant job of interrogating Cracker
Mosely this morning. She got a hell of a lot of information that would have taken us a week to get. Thanks, Holly.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Let’s see.” Harry consulted a list. “I talked with a guy from the National Security Agency this morning. They were already aware of the transmissions coming out of Palmetto Dunes.”
“They’ve been listening in?” Holly asked.
“They did for a while, starting a couple of years ago, but they’d assigned it a lower priority for the past year.”
“Why? What was coming out of there?”
“Commodity trades.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They were dispatching sell and buy orders for futures on soybeans, wheat, pork bellies, everything you’d find at a commodities exchange, but they were doing it on a worldwide basis.”
“Well,” Holly said, “that doesn’t make any sense at all to me. I thought those things were handled through brokers.”
“What they’ve got there
is
a brokerage. There’s something odd about it, though.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re using a Chinese telecommunications satellite to move their information.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand that, either,” Holly said.
