Found

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Not much to tell. He grew up around here, went off to fight in World War II, came home, and worked for years for a boat builder down in Egg Harbor.”

  “Was he married?”

  “No. His wife died a couple of years before. He had one daughter and a son who live out of state, the son in Connecticut and the daughter in Atlanta.”

  “Any friends?”

  “Not really. All his buddies have died. We did turn up one strange coincidence, though. The old boy had come into the computer age. Had a laptop and used e-mail. The laptop was missing, so we figured the killers took it. His son told us about the computer, so we got access to the old boy’s e-mail service provider. He used it to keep up with his son and daughter and grandchildren. But he also had regular e-mail exchanges with a man in Germany. Every six months or so for the past several years. They all seemed to be about family things, but neither Vernon’s son nor daughter had ever heard of the man. Turns out he was a retired German government official named Paulus von Reicheldorf. Thing is, he’d been tortured and killed.”

  “When did that happen?” asked J.D.

  “That’s the oddity here. He died about a week before Vernon was murdered.”

  “You checked it out?”

  “Sure did. We could find absolutely no connection between Reicheldorf and Vernon. Except for the e-mails, of course. Reicheldorf had been well known and highly respected in German political circles. He apparently was one of those guys who works behind the scenes and let the elected officials be the show horses.”

  “Did the German cops come up with a motive for his murder?”

  “They think it was the work of some of Germany’s homegrown terrorists. He had been pretty outspoken about his opposition to allowing more Muslims into the country. He felt that the terrorists had infiltrated many of the mosques in Germany and were a danger to the future of the country.”

  “Why the torture? Why not just kill him?”

  “The German detective who was investigating the case told me that he’d seen that before in situations where the terrorists went after somebody they thought might be a danger to them. He thinks they torture people for the fun of it and to set an example for others who might get in the way of their jihad.”

  “That’s cold,” said J.D.

  “So was driving passenger planes into the Trade Towers in New York,” said Garner.

  “You’ve got a point. Still, it seems strange that a man in Germany who was corresponding with Vernon would be killed about the same time and both men were tortured.”

  “I agree, but neither my department nor the German police were able to find anything that connected the men, except a few e-mails.”

  “What about Vernon’s wife? Do you know where she was from originally?”

  “No. That didn’t seem like pertinent information.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t,” said J.D. “But I think I may know something about Mr. Vernon and I’m wondering if his wife was from Cortez, Florida.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Do you know where Longboat Key is?”

  “I’m guessing it’s somewhere near Key West.”

  “No,” said J.D. “We’re a barrier island off the coast of Sarasota, south of Tampa. Cortez is a fishing village on the mainland across Sarasota Bay from Longboat Key.”

  Garner laughed. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “It’s a common mistake,” J.D. said. “Would you mind giving me the names and phone numbers of Mr. Vernon’s children?”

  “Not at all, Detective. I’ll e-mail them to you as soon as I get back to the office. Can you keep me posted? We don’t have a lot of violent crime around here, and I’d sure like to close this file.”

  J.D. gave him her e-mail address and hung up.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  My phone rang as we were walking out of the restaurant. Logan.

  “Have you had lunch yet?” he asked.

  “Just finished.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Jock and I are just leaving the Old Salty Dog on City Island.”

  “Meet me at the Hilton for a drink.”

  “Isn’t it a little early for booze?” I asked.

  “It is after lunch.”

  “You’ve got a point. We’ll be there shortly.”

  When we arrived at the Hilton, Logan was sitting at the outside bar talking with Billy Brugger, the longtime bartender. He usually worked nights, and I guessed he must be covering a shift for somebody.

  “Little bright out for you, isn’t it, Billy?” I asked.

  He grinned. “Yeah, but the customers are a bit more sober this time of the day. Even Logan.”

  It was the kind of day that brought the islanders out, and many of them, with nothing else to do, came to sit on the deck of the Hilton and drink the afternoon away. I saw several familiar faces at the tables that sat under the ancient Banyan tree that shaded the area. We took our drinks to a table in the far corner of the deck, out of earshot of the other customers.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Logan. “The guy who shot old man Good-low had some papers on him that were in German and then some code. The German script went out of style after World War II, meaning that the documents were probably prepared before or during the war. The only reference I could find to U166 was a German submarine called the U-166 that was sunk in the northern Gulf of Mexico, up near the panhandle, in the summer of 1942. That was the only U-boat ever sunk in the Gulf. The wreck was found and noted by some federal agency several years ago. But suppose somebody had found it before and suppose there was something in the boat that was so valuable people could get killed over it.”

  “That seems a little far-fetched,” I said.

  “I agree,” said Logan. “But I did a pretty detailed search for U166 and the only thing that comes up is the submarine. Katie says she doesn’t know what it means, but her husband and the people he was dealing with mentioned U166 several times. Then we have Goodlow’s shooter in possession of some documents that probably date back to World War II and a caption that says they contain vital information and that the recipient should help get the courier out of the country. The rest of it is in code. It begins to sound like the documents were important and had maybe been sneaked into this county.”

  “What’s that got to do with a submarine?”

  “The Germans used their subs to bring spies into the country. They’d drop them off near the coast and head back to sea. Maybe the courier mentioned in the papers was aboard the U-166 when it was sunk.”

  I said, “But then we have to make the assumption that somebody found the sunken boat, retrieved the documents, and somehow knows that they’re valuable. It seems a little hard to swallow.”

  “How else can you tie the documents, the submarine, Katie’s disappearance, and her husband’s murder together?” asked Logan.

  “Maybe they’re not tied together,” I said. “Maybe U166 has nothing to do with that sub. Who knows why Goodlow’s murderer would have some of the documents with him or where he got them? Katie doesn’t know what U166 means, but she thought it might mean something to J.D.”

  “Why would Katie think that J.D. would know anything about an esoteric letter-number combination like U166?” asked Logan. “Maybe she wasn’t telling you the truth when she said she didn’t know what it meant.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” said Jock. “I think we all just assumed that Katie was being straight with us. Maybe she wasn’t.”

  “I think we should get J.D. in on this,” I said.

  Jock and Logan nodded in agreement. I looked at my watch. Almost two. I called her cell. “You had lunch yet?”

  “No,” she said, laughing, “I forgot about it.”

  “Why don’t you come down to the Hilton? Jock and Logan are here, and you can get a burger or something.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She hung up.

  Our conversation drif
ted into island gossip, the upcoming baseball season, and other useless talk. In a few minutes I saw my sweetie make her way from the parking lot to the bar. She stopped for a moment to speak to Billy. She placed her lunch order and then joined us.

  “You guys been here a while?” she asked.

  “Not long,” said Logan. “I’m still on my first drink.”

  She laughed. “Before we get into that, let me tell you about my conversation with Bert Hawkins this morning.”

  “The medical examiner?” asked Logan.

  “Yes. Turns out all that blood at Katie’s house the day she disappeared didn’t belong to her.”

  “How did he determine that?” asked Jock.

  “Some hunters found a bunch of human bones and a skull over in DeSoto County a couple of weeks back. Turns out, the DNA in the blood found at Katie’s matched the DNA in the bones the hunters found.”

  “We know Katie’s alive,” Logan said. “So the bones obviously don’t belong to her.”

  “Not a chance. Bert was able to determine the victim’s height by measuring a femur found with the rest of the bones. This victim was four or five inches shorter than Katie. Bert knew before he called me that the bones didn’t belong to her.”

  “I guess Sarasota P.D. will reopen its investigation,” I said.

  “Not until noon Thursday, at least. I traded information with Bert, told him we knew Katie was alive and where she was. In return, Bert agreed to hold off notifying the police for forty-eight hours. That’s how long we have to wrap all this up before McAllister takes over and I have to tell him where Katie is.”

  “We can’t do that,” I said. “We promised her confidentiality.”

  “I know,” she said, “but if I hadn’t told Bert what we know, he wouldn’t have agreed to give me time to solve this before McAllister gets involved.”

  “Are you sure that McAllister is a problem?” asked Logan.

  “No,” said J.D. “I just have a gut feeling that he knows more than he lets on.”

  “Why is that?” asked Logan.

  “His theory is that Katie is dead. All the evidence points to that. Yet, McAllister regularly calls Katie’s parents and asks if they’ve heard from her. It’s like he doesn’t believe his own evidence. If that’s the case, I wonder what he knows that nobody else knows. And, I’m beginning to wonder if Goodlow’s murder is somehow connected to Jim Fredrickson’s murder and Katie’s disappearance.”

  “Maybe he’s just concerned,” said Logan. “He and Jim Fredrickson were good friends.”

  “You may be right,” J.D. said. “I’ve had a busy morning on another front. IBIS came through on the bullet that killed Goodlow. It seems that the same pistol was used in a murder in Toms River, New Jersey, a couple of weeks ago. And get this, the victim was Rodney Vernon.”

  “Who’s Rodney Vernon?” I asked.

  “Do you remember that Bud Jamison told me that one of the men in Goodlow’s old photographs moved to New Jersey in the early ‘50s? That was Rodney Vernon.”

  “Are you sure it’s the same person?” Jock asked.

  “Yes. I called his daughter in Atlanta after I talked to the cops in Toms River. She told me that her dad was stationed at Sarasota Army Airfield for a couple of months in the summer of 1942.”

  “I didn’t know we ever had a military base here,” said Logan.

  “It’s now the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport,” J.D. said. “Vernon was a mechanic in a fighter squadron that was only at the base for a couple of months before moving on. He met his wife during the time he was here. The daughter wasn’t sure how they met, but thought it was at a USO event. They corresponded during the rest of the war and after Mr. Vernon was discharged, he came back to Cortez and married the girl. They lived in Cortez for several years and then decided to move back to Vernon’s hometown, Toms River.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “There’s more,” said J.D. “It seems that Vernon was tortured before he was shot in the head. He’d died of a heart attack before he was shot.”

  “There’s got to be a connection there,” said Jock, “but Goodlow wasn’t tortured.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” said J.D. “Whoever killed Vernon wanted some information from him. Maybe whatever it was, it led the shooter to Good-low.”

  “Do the Toms River cops have any leads?” I asked.

  “No. They can’t come up with a motive or anybody with a reason to kill him, much less torture him. He had some e-mail correspondence with a retired German politician who was tortured and killed just before Vernon was, but there was no connection between them except for several e-mails over a number of years.”

  “That’s too much of a coincidence,” I said. “There’s got to be a connection.”

  “I think so, too,” said J.D., “but I don’t see how the murder of man in Germany has anything to do with our problems here.”

  “The gun connects Vernon and Goodlow and the e-mails connect Vernon and the guy in Germany,” Logan said. “Do we know anything more about the German?”

  “I Googled him,” said J.D. “He was some sort of hereditary count named Reicheldorf who began working for the new German government right after the war. He was a real behind-the-scenes type, but he was well respected and ended up holding high positions in all the postwar governments, no matter which party was in power.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere with this,” I said. “If it turns out that the count was connected to Goodlow’s death or Jamison’s disappearance, we can follow up on it later. We’ve only got two days to figure some of this out or McAllister takes over and we lose what little bit of head start we have.”

  “Then the question is what did Goodlow know that caused somebody to kill him,” Logan said.

  “Logan, tell J.D. your theory on the U-166. If I remember my history, there was a lot more U-boat activity off the Atlantic coast than there was in the Gulf. Maybe there’s a connection there.”

  Logan told J.D. what he’d related to us. “Based on what J.D. found out today, maybe the documents weren’t found in the wreckage of U-166. Maybe the sub dropped the courier off near the New Jersey coast on its way to the Gulf, and the documents were delivered, or lost somehow, and Vernon came across them.”

  “If the ‘U166’ written on Katie’s arm in that photograph is a reference to the submarine, there’d have to be a connection,” said Logan. “It’s a bit tenuous, but it’s there. Goodlow was killed by a gun that killed Vernon in New Jersey. The man who killed Goodlow had German documents in his possession. If those documents came from the sub named U-166, and Katie’s husband and his buddies were talking about it, you have your connection. And now we find out that Vernon was connected to a German politician who was killed just before Vernon was.”

  “But your scenario falls apart if the documents didn’t come from the U-boat,” I said. “And even if they did, the only connection between Good-low’s murderer and Katie’s disappearance is that the murderer had one page of what had to be at least several pages of one or more documents and Katie had heard someone mention the sub.”

  J.D. laughed. “So all I have to do,” she said, “is find the documents, find out why they’re important, prove that they came from a German submarine that was sunk in the Gulf and didn’t leave a trace of wreckage that anybody has ever found, prove how Goodlow’s killer came across the documents, find out the killer’s name, find a motive for why he or someone else would torture and kill Vernon and kill Goodlow and Jim Fredrickson, find out who else might be involved, who Katie might be afraid of and why she dropped out of sight for a year, and why people are being killed more than a year after Fredrickson’s murder. Did I miss anything?”

  “Yeah,” said Jock. “Bonino has got to be involved in this. Caster was looking for Jamison and had some ties to DeLuca who worked for Bonino, or at least worked for Peters, who reports to Bonino. Since Porter King sent Caster to find or kill Jamison, we can be pretty sure King is tied into Bonino, w
ho may have ordered the hit on King and his girlfriend. The only reason anybody would be after Jamison is because of his relationship with Goodlow and maybe Vernon in New Jersey. Which maybe brings us back to the U-boat and the documents and the fact that the only reason DeLuca would have tried to beat the tar out of Matt is because Matt made contact with Katie’s parents.”

  “And,” I said, “we have no idea who the hell Bonino is. He’s a ghost.”

  J.D. sat back in her chair, a look of consternation on her face. “We’ll never untangle that ball of conjecture.”

  “Well, J.D.,” said Logan, “you do have two days to figure it out. And you’ve got us to help. I don’t see a problem.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  J.D. went back to work and Logan said he’d stay awhile and keep Billy company at the bar. Jock said he had some things to do and would see me later. I made my daily trek to the island post office, pulled my mail from the box, and, without looking at the stack of bills and other junk mail, drove home. Once inside, I shuffled through the mail and came to an envelope addressed to me in a feminine hand. It was marked “Personal” and had no return address. Probably somebody trying to sell me an annuity. I left it with the rest of the mail on the kitchen counter and found a beer in the refrigerator.

  I sat on my patio, taking the warm winter sun, sipping beer, and thinking. I got up, went into the kitchen and retrieved the letter with no return address. It had been postmarked in Tampa on Monday, yesterday. I opened it and found a letter addressed to me in the same handwriting as that on the envelope. I shuffled the pages and found the signature at the bottom. It said, “Fondly, Jed.”

  I went back to the patio and read the letter from Katie and sipped beer and thought some more. I called J.D. “Katie’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just got a letter from her. Postmarked yesterday in Tampa. She apparently wrote it on Sunday right after I left her.”

  “What did she have to say?”