Tropical Freeze (17 page)

Now it was Emmylou Harris. Thorn couldn’t make out the words, but it was something sad. No amount of wind could distort that. Palm fronds batted against a nearby streetlamp, the light fluttering.

“So, I called a guy I used to date. He’s with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They collaborate with the FBI sometimes, corruption cases, some drug cases. He’s got regular access to the FBI computer files. Well, I had to lie like hell to him, but he called up Gaeton’s employment records for me.”

She turned to look at Thorn then. He hadn’t realized what this was costing her. But there, in the ragged light, he could see how pinched her eyes had become, the strain in her mouth. Those soft lips, rigid now.

“Yeah?”

She was staring at Thorn as if she were just discovering who it was she was confessing to. Maybe a little amused, surprised. Her face softening slightly. She took his hand and gave it a fierce squeeze.

She said, “There was no record of his quitting.”

“Well …”

‘Hold on,” she said. “There was no record of him at all. Nothing. He’d been expunged. No such person as Gaeton Richards. Blink, he’s gone.”

Thorn was quiet. He felt her grip slacken.

“It’s what the bureau does when they’re investigating the Mafia.”

“The Mafia? Down here?”

“Or investigating themselves,” she said.

Darcy said, “weekends I’d wait till Gaeton went out and I’d drive down to Islamorada, rent a skiff, and camp out on the flats just off Benny’s place, pretending to fish.”

She was pointing her toes down to the water that sloshed against the seawall, stretching them as if to make contact. Thorn held her hand, feeling the current, the blood magnetism growing between them.

“I bought the longest telephoto lens I could find. And I sat out there with the camera mounted on the fishing platform, hiding it under a fishing hat, and I took shots of people coming and going at Benny’s. Most of them were fuzzy, blurred. It’s hard on the water, bobbing even a little, long distance like that. But a few of them were OK.”

She stopped and faced Thorn.

“Do you think I’m crazy? Doing something like that?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Somewhat crazy.”

“Well, good,” she said. “One of us should be sane.”

“Let it be me.” Thorn said. They were joking, kind of. But Thorn wondered now about Darcy’s grip, how tight it was.

She said, “Well, the few prints that were clear, that showed people’s faces, I took them around and showed them to people I know in the news business. On the QT, of course. I pretended I was helping somebody at the station do some background checking on a story. But that didn’t get much. I found out that a couple of the guys were ex-cops from Miami or Fort Lauderdale. Guys that worked with Benny, hanging around the pool.

“I’ve met some of those,” Thorn said.

“And then there were one or two guys I recognized. Miami business people, bankers, a district manager for Merrill Lynch, people Benny does security work for. Business entertainment stuff. He was just having his big accounts down for a crab salad and a water panorama, a look at some nude girls. Keys fun and games. But then I got something. It came out of far left field.

“The man that develops my prints is Haitian, lives in Little Haiti, runs a small lab. I go there ’cause it’s cheap and near work. Anyway, his name is Jules, and Jules says to me, when I go in two weeks ago to pick up some prints, that I’m hanging around some not so nice people. I go, what? And he says, this mulatto with the blond Afro stepping into the hot tub with the two white ladies. He is Claude Hespier. This Hespier guy, he’s the most recent one. Like all the rest of them, near as I can tell he stays at Benny’s two weekends, and he’s gone.

“So Jules is there looking at me funny. He says Claude lived in the mountains on some kind of plantation. Jules’s sister-in-law, Lorraine, worked for the man, cleaning house. So Jules heard what this guy was up to, knew who came for lunch at his house, lots of stuff. Hespier was some kind of enforcer for the Haitian drug connection. He did a lot of local work around the islands, murdering snitches, do-gooders. Anybody that might have had any moral fiber left.”

She was staring at Thorn. He could tell his expression must not be what she wanted to see.

“Yeah? I’m listening,” he said. “It’s a hell of a coincidence, though. This guy does your photos knows a guy in them.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“So what’re you saying?”

Thorn wasn’t sure what he was saying. He just shrugged. Darcy dropped his hand.

“Never mind,” she said.

“What?”

“Never mind any of this. I’ll just do this alone. It’s too weird. Even you, Thorn, you think I’m making this up. You think I’m on some kind of wacko trip.”

“No, I don’t. I just think it’s strange. A coincidence, that’s all.”

“Well, it
is
a coincidence. Of course it is. But I checked it out. I went to Haiti.”

“You went to Haiti?”

“Last weekend. I flew down there, and I met Lorraine. She’s got five children, a pig, and no job anymore. Lives down the mountain from Pétionville where Hespier was. His house is closed up, and all the furniture’s gone, the cars. The place is stripped bare. Weeds in the swimming pool.

“Then I was at the airport about to fly back to Miami, Lorraine showed up. She signaled me to come over to the women’s bathroom. She was panicky, looking around for eavesdroppers. All in a rush she tells me that Hespier had been a very evil man. She had never told anyone this. The things she knew about him. It would be a great relief to her to tell anyone.”

“What?” Thorn said.

“Well, for one thing, he was a cannibal. He ate pieces of his hits. He made Lorraine cook stews for him.”

Thorn took her hand from her lap. The wind was stirring her hair. Light from the parking lot was giving her skin a golden gleam. Off in the mangroves to the south a nighthawk was bleating. It should have been a romantic moment. It should have made his heart lift, his throat clench.

“And there’s more.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Well, she said Hespier was a computer nut. He talked over the phone with it all the time. And that he had a deep longing to come to America. He loved to watch American movies. Especially Tracy Seagrave movies. He watched one of them almost every day.”

“Name rings a bell.”

She rolled her eyes, shook her head.

“She died ten, eleven years ago. Before she died, she split her time between Palm Beach and Palm Springs.”

“You’ve done a lot of homework.”

“Thorn, most people know Tracy Seagrave,” she said.

She gazed at the marker light. Thorn watching her profile.

“Why didn’t you just put all this in Gaeton’s lap?”

“I was scared he was in it somehow. Either undercover or gone over to the other side. Either way he would’ve blown up if he’d known I was snooping.”

“What other side? You don’t know anything’s wrong with Benny. He’s a schmuck and sleaze, but that’s not illegal. All you know is there’s a guy named Hespier that somebody says is a killer and a cannibal who shows up at Benny’s place for a couple of days. I don’t see anything there, any conspiracy.”

“OK, OK, what I think is,” Darcy said, forcing the words out one at a time, “I think Benny’s laundering people. I think he’s taking some very bad people and giving them some very good ID. He’s setting them up in places around America. Running a kind of immigration service for desperadoes.”

“That’s quite a damn leap,” Thorn said.

“Not really.” She looked off at the water, at a narrow trail of yellow light thrown out across the choppy water by a marina light. She said, “I pulled out some bio on Benny at the
Miami Herald
’s library. There was a snippet from a few years back as his Florida Secure Systems was getting off the ground. One of the last things Benny did for the DEA was act as liaison with the Federal Witness Protection Program. Hiding people who’d testified against the drug cartel, like that. He did that for almost a year. And that fits with Hespier. Hespier wants to come, but he can’t immigrate. Benny fixes things so he can.”

Thorn was quiet for a moment, letting all this settle.

He said, “So it’s, give me your rich, your cannibals, your killers, yearning to shop at Neiman-Marcus.”

“Exactly,” she said. “But it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

“And the house in Islamorada is a way station. They probably bring the guys in by boat, no sweat, and Benny’s house is the first place they stay while all the records are getting set up. It takes two weeks apparently, and then off they go, coming into your own neighborhood, shopping at your local grocery.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Thorn said.

“Why?”

“There’s just too many people looking for the top bad guys. Their faces are on the walls of too many post offices, in too many mug books. And there have to be people, agents out there watching these guys’ moves. Somebody’d catch on to this.”

“Don’t count on it,” she said. “Benny’s not stupid. He wouldn’t take on somebody with a big reputation. What I think is, he’s very selective, he waits till the right guy comes along, somebody with enough quick cash to buy the package he’s selling and with a low enough profile that setting him up somewhere in a new identity wouldn’t be too risky. I’m betting he’s very conservative, not really pushing this angle hard. Why should he? He’s rich. He might not even be doing it for the money. He might think it’s patriotic somehow. Converting the bad guys to the good life, or something.”

“The guy with the alligator Friday, one I told you about …”

“Yeah,” she said.

“He had a blond Afro, green eyes. Looked like somebody poured too much milk in his genetic coffee. That was Claude.”

She nodded her head. “And today, if the pattern holds, he’s off somewhere. Moved to Palm Springs, hanging out with the stars.”

“So if Gaeton’s still with the bureau,” Thorn said, “and he’s posing as Benny’s sidekick, and Benny finds him out …”

Darcy said, “Then poof, he’s gone.”

A pickup truck passed by on the road behind them; a country music song, sorrowful and slow, played loud from its windows. The truck squeaked as it bounced down the rutted street. How simple the world could be. How basic and true. Slug it out in the parking lot. Drink beer, love a woman, lose a woman. Hurt in your heart. And how far it could swing away from that.

“But ransoming Gaeton for three thousand dollars?” Thorn said. “What in the hell would Benny do something like that for? If he wanted Gaeton out of things, he’d be neater than this. I mean, this is dopey. This is lowlife.”

“It’s probably meant to throw us off, or the police if we went to the police. Nothing else figures.”

She let go of his hand and swallowed hard. She swiveled and faced him.

“I should have told Gaeton what I found out. Maybe it was just the info he was missing.” Her voice was remote, shadowy. “I wanted to be such a hotshot.”

He helped her stand up and they walked around the perimeter of the trailer park. Everything quiet now. The TVs tucked in for the night. Only the wind still awake.

She seemed dazed. Her step heavy.

“You were trying to help. You were doing good.”

“I screwed up, Thorn. I screwed up bad. I underestimated all of this. I was playing at it, like a goddamn weatherlady.”

She stopped and her body began to shake. He held her and she pressed her mouth into his shoulder, stifling her sobs. He patted her back and looked up at a fleet of small clouds brightened by moonlight. They were sailing very high, very fast to the south. A few gallons of Georgia pond water on a voyage to the Amazon. He wished he were going.

She shivered in his arms. In a few moments she grew still. Then gently forced her way out of his embrace. She sniffed a couple of times and began to walk.

Thorn said, “So, the Islamorada house is Ellis Island. That’s how you see it.”

“Yeah,” she said. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and let it out. “He’s using witness protection as his model. People who saw crimes committed and testified and are in danger.” She took his hand as they rounded a corner, headed down a dark lane. “Except these guys Benny’s hiding, the only crimes they witnessed are the ones they did.”

“Where do we start?” Thorn said.

“I need to get three thousand dollars out of my checking account first,” she said. “At least go through the motions of paying the ransom and see what happens.”

Thorn was silent. The Australian pines were turning the wind to a ghostly moan. Two-hundred-foot harps, playing their harmonic tones.

“I know you’re Mr. Realism,” she said. “You don’t think much of psychic phenomena. But I know Gaeton’s dead. I’ve been sensing it. He’s in the ocean, a lake, in water. I don’t know. But he’s not swimming, he’s not breathing.” Her voice was shaking again. “I know he’s gone. You probably won’t believe me. But he’s not in the world anymore.”

He’d seen Darcy guide them so many times across a flat and empty stretch of ocean, right to the hole where the big grouper were hiding. He’d been out with her on many cloudless noons when she’d predicted a violent squall by three, and it always came, rolling dark and ferocious from the Everglades. Thorn, who normally trusted only in what he could heft in his hand, believed in this, this mystical thing she could do.

He nodded his head yes, let her see his faith in her.

He said, “Isn’t there anybody at the FBI you know, any of Gaeton’s old friends, you could go to, tell them about this?”

“There’s a woman he used to be involved with,” she said. “She was an agent. Myra Rostovitch. I met her a couple of times, but hell, I’m not sure anymore who’s who. If he
was
investigating the bureau itself, something I did might tip somebody off. Blow the whole thing open, might put us in danger.

“Well, what then?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” she said. She halted and dropped his hand. “What I could do is make contact. Pretend to be a bad guy. Buy my ticket, take my ride. Get run through the process and see how the whole thing works.”

Thorn asked her how in hell she’d do that, and she said, “I’ve got some ideas.”