Katie smiled. “I think you have the wrong girl, Mr. Jamison,” she said. “I was left at a fire station in Orlando.”
“No,” said Jamison, “you weren’t. I contacted a lawyer I knew in Bradenton, and he arranged a private adoption. Melanie and I took you to his office right after that photo was made. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, other than burying my wife and daughter.”
“My adoptive father told me I was left at a fire station.”
“I can see your skepticism, but if you’ll think about it, you’ll see that I could have no motive whatsoever to make up such a story. A simple DNA test will confirm that I’m your grandfather.”
“Who was my birth father?”
“His name was Brian Fox. Melanie met him at the university. He’d been in the Coast Guard before starting college and when Melanie brought him to Cortez, he was able to get a job as a captain on one of the boats.”
“Are his parents still alive?” Katie asked.
“No. They probably died years ago. They lived in Michigan, and I don’t think Melanie ever met them. There had been some friction between Brian and his parents, and he never even told them about Melanie being pregnant. I was never in touch with them.”
“So,” said Katie, “my mother’s name was Melanie Jamison Fox.”
“Yes,” said Jamison. “But even that was a lie.”
“I don’t understand,” said Katie.
“My name is not Jamison.”
“What, then?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if what he was telling Katie was true, but I couldn’t see any reason for him to lie, either. The fact that he had been living under an assumed name might shed some light on the whole mess.
Jamison laughed. “It’s a long story,” he said, “but my real name is Paulus Graf von Reicheldorf.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
“Reicheldorf was killed in Germany a few weeks ago,” I said. “What the hell are you selling?”
“The dead man in Germany,” said Reicheldorf, “was my cousin, the son of my father’s younger brother.”
“You didn’t tell me about this,” J.D. said to the old man.
“Sorry, Detective,” Jamison or Reicheldorf said. “I didn’t think it important. I wanted to go to my grave as Bud Jamison.”
“Tell me about this cousin,” I said.
“My cousin was known by his middle name Ernst. In our family the firstborn sons carried the first name of Paulus, the name of the first graf in our line, but, except for the heir to the title, each son was called by his middle name. If for some reason one of the other sons succeeded to the title, he was thereafter called Paulus. When I was lost at sea in 1942, my cousin inherited the title.”
“You were lost at sea?” J.D. asked.
“Yes. In 1942.”
“What’s a graf?” asked Katie.
“It’s the German equivalent of a count,” said Reicheldorf.
“I thought you grew up in the Washington, D.C. area,” J.D. said.
“I did. My father was an officer in the German Navy during World War I and later, during the Weimar Republic, became a diplomat assigned to the German Embassy in Washington. We came to the U.S. when I was about four years old and stayed for ten years. When the Nazis took over the German government, my father resigned and we returned to Germany. I had gone to American schools and spoke English with an American accent.”
“What happened when you returned to Germany?” asked Katie.
“My family was ostracized from the government, but we had varied business interests that my father and his brother oversaw. We weren’t poor. I finished school and enrolled at Heidelberg University.”
“Ah,” I said. “Thus the dueling scar.”
He touched his left cheek and laughed. “Yes, the foolishness of youth. I guess we were proving our manhood, but we were headed into a war that would test that with much more severity than a game of fencing.”
“How in the world did you end up in Cortez?” I asked.
“After Naval Officers School and a tour of sea duty, I was assigned to the Abwehr, the German Intelligence Agency. My parents were killed in an air raid on Hamburg right after I joined the navy and one of my father’s old comrades from World War I had become the head of Abwehr.”
“Admiral Canaris,” I said.
“Yes. He felt that it was his job to shield me from the horrors of war. I disagreed. I hated the Nazis, but I thought it my duty to fight for Germany. We were an old civilization and tyrants had come and gone. I didn’t think Hitler would last more than a few years, certainly not the thousand-year reign he envisioned for the Nazi party.
“I talked the admiral into sending me on a mission which turned out to be a fatal one. I was ordered to act as a courier for some documents that were going to a German spy ring in San Antonio, Texas. I boarded a U-boat that would drop me off the coast near Galveston. As it turned out, we were sunk by an American plane near St. George Island up in the panhandle. I was the only survivor. I rowed a lifeboat ashore and gave myself up to a lighthouse keeper on St. George.”
“You walk with a limp,” said J.D. “Is that a souvenir of the U-boat sinking?”
Reicheldorf smiled ruefully. “No,” he said, “that was inflicted on me by some Nazis in a prisoner-of-war camp at Camp Blanding up in north Florida near Jacksonville. There were two groups of prisoners, those like me who had no use for the Nazis and those who were rabid about the cause. There was a big riot one evening, with the groups fighting each other. I got hit in the knee by some kind of heavy bar. It caused a lot of damage, and the American doctors at the camp didn’t have the tools or knowledge to do much about fixing it.”
“How long were you in the POW camp?” J.D. asked.
“Only about three months. It became apparent that I was marked for death by the Nazis. An informer told one of the guards, an American military policeman, that I would be killed in another riot that was to take place soon. The MP came to me to discuss it. He spoke very little German and I had not revealed to anyone that I spoke English. Once I got the gist of what the MP was trying to tell me in German, I responded to him in English. He helped get me out of the camp. The records were a bit chaotic that early in the war, so I don’t think anyone ever really knew I had been there, much less that I was gone.”
“How did you survive with no identification and no money?” J.D. asked.
“The Abwehr had provided me with some very good forgeries, passport, driver’s license, birth certificate, all kind of documents to make me appear American.”
“You had them with you in the POW camp?” Jock asked.
“No. Before I turned myself in at the St. George lighthouse, I buried the documents. I went back and got them.”
“How did you get back to St. George?” J.D. asked.
“Hitchhiked. The MP had given me twenty dollars, which amounted to almost a month’s pay for him. It was enough to keep me going for a while. He’d also hidden some old clothes outside the camp’s wire, so once he got me out, I buried the prison uniform, put on the clothes, and started walking west. Nobody questioned me except one man in a small grocery store where I stopped to buy food. He was wondering why I wasn’t in the service. I showed him the scars on my knee and told him I’d crashed a motorcycle and wasn’t physically fit for the military.
“Once I retrieved my identity documents, I was home free. From that moment on, I was John Jamison, nicknamed Bud.”
“How did you find out about Cortez?” Katie asked.
“The MP who saved my life at Camp Blanding was born and raised in Cortez. His name was Ken Goodlow.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
The room was silent. I think we were starting to see the threads of two disparate mysteries come together. “Did anyone else in Cortez know who you really were?” I asked.
“Not at first. Ken knew, of course, but he was sent overseas right after he helped me escape. I got a job with old Captain Longstreet and fell in love with his daughter, Bess. Ken came home when the
war was over and we decided that we’d keep the whole thing secret. The only other person who knew the story was Bess Longstreet, and I didn’t tell her until just before we were married. If she’d backed out of the wedding, I would have left Cortez.”
“You must have told Rodney Vernon,” J.D. said. “Otherwise, how would he have been in contact with your cousin in Germany?”
“After the war, the Allies restored some of my family’s business holdings. Ernst was running them and beginning his rise in the new political atmosphere. He’d spent the war years in Sweden and had become friendly with Willy Brandt, who after the war, became mayor of Berlin and then chancellor of Germany. After Melanie was born, I began to think about how I was cutting her off from a family that she might someday want to know. I decided to make contact with Ernst, but I didn’t want him to know my assumed name or where I was living. I was perfectly happy with my new life and didn’t want to go back to Germany. I was also afraid that I’d probably violated a bunch of American laws by coming into the country the way I had and living under a false identity. I didn’t want to be prosecuted and deported.
“Rodney and I had become close friends and when he moved back to New Jersey, I asked him to mail a letter for me. I figured no one would be able to trace a New Jersey postmark back to Cortez. I wrote Ernst and told him I was fine and would stay in touch. I mentioned some things in the letter that only he and I would have known about so that he would know that I was really writing the letter. I gave him Rodney’s address and told him he could communicate with me through him. I told Rodney that it was very important that my name and whereabouts be kept secret, and he honored that. Ernst honored my request as well, and never tried to find me or to question Rodney about me. We corresponded once or twice a year, first by letter and much later by e-mail. I’d send an e-mail to Rodney, he’d copy and paste it and send it on to Ernst.”
“Whoever killed Vernon took his computer,” I said. “The killers were Porter King’s people, so that’s probably how King made the connection to you. The e-mail exchanges.”
“You’re probably right, Mr. Royal,” said Reicheldorf. “The only connection between Ernst and me was through Rodney.”
“And,” said J.D., “the Toms River detective told me that the only people Vernon emailed were his children, you, and your cousin. That had to be the connection. But why would they kill Ken Goodlow?”
“That was my fault,” said Reicheldorf. “Ken knew about my correspondence with Ernst and Rodney’s connection to it. I had no idea why Ernst and Rodney had been killed, but the only connection between them had to do with me. The only reason I’d be important to anybody would be my time in the Abwehr. When I began looking into it, I found an article on the Internet about U-166 being discovered a couple of years ago. The U.S. government took a look at it with a submersible and then left it alone as a gravesite.
“I was presumed dead, lost at sea. The German government would have made that decision when U-166 didn’t return from its patrol. But, if the killers thought Ernst was me, they might have come after him for some reason. Maybe they became convinced that Ernst was exactly who he said he was, but told them about our correspondence through Rodney. They then went to Rodney and found my name and made the connection that I was the one corresponding with Ernst and therefore must be the Abwehr agent.”
“Did you figure out why they might be looking for you?”
“Not at first. I read some of the German newspapers online and saw an article about Ernst’s death. I tried to call Rodney, but didn’t get an answer. I left a voice mail, but he didn’t call back. After a couple of days, I went to the online version of the Toms River Times and found an article about Rodney’s death. I figured that somebody was looking for me and would know where I was.
“A couple of days later, two days before Ken’s murder, a man came to my door and introduced himself as Porter King. He asked if I knew Rodney and Ernst. I told him I knew Rodney, but didn’t know Ernst. I didn’t have any idea what they might have told King when they were being tortured, but I knew neither one of them would have given me up if they could have helped it.
“King showed me a document that I recognized instantly. It was the first page of the documents that I was delivering to San Antonio when U-166 was sunk. I told him I had no idea what it was. He asked me if I knew anybody named Reicheldorf. I told him I didn’t. I don’t think he believed me.”
“What did you do after King showed up?” I asked.
“I called Ken and told him what had happened. We decided that King was looking for the key to the code. The key was a book and without knowing which book, the code is virtually unbreakable. King, or somebody, must have discovered the documents in the U-166’s safe. I had no idea what was in those documents, but it must have been important for somebody to torture and kill two old men.”
“Do you know why Mr. Goodlow was killed?” J.D. asked.
“I think it must have been because Ken was planning to talk to a lawyer. He thought that I should meet with one and see what we could do about the documents and my immigration status.”
“How would the killer have known that?” J.D. asked.
“I don’t know. Ken thought somebody was electronically eavesdropping on us. I didn’t put much credence in that, but maybe somebody was. After he died, I remembered that he had gotten the name of a lawyer from Nick Field over at the Seafood Shack. Maybe somebody overheard the conversation and didn’t want Ken talking.”
“I understand,” said Jock, “that a couple of your friends died during the last year or so. Ones you had coffee with every morning. Were they involved in this?”
“You’re talking about Mack Hollister and Bob Sanders. The answer is no. They had been my friends since the war, and I watched them wither and die.”
“You don’t think their deaths were suspicious?”
“No. Mack died of pancreatic cancer. Took him five agonizing months to die. Bob had a bad heart and it caught up with him. He dropped dead walking to the post office.”
“What made you run?” I asked.
“If they killed Ken, I assumed I’d probably be next. They’d torture me until I gave up the key and then kill me. I got in my car and went to the airport, parked it in long-term and took a taxi to downtown Sarasota, another one to the Manatee Memorial Hospital in Bradenton, and one more to a hotel at 1-75 and Highway 64. I’ve been hiding out there ever since.”
“Do you remember the name of the book that was the key?” Jock asked.
Reicheldorf nodded. “The instructions were in German, but the code was based on English. The book was part of the King James Version of the Bible. Fitting, as it turned out. The key was the Book of Job.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
“Why were you in front of my house that night?” Katie asked. She’d sat quietly during Jamison/Reicheldorf’s story. I had watched the hard edge of skepticism drain slowly from her body language. Her face, at first tight with a look of disbelief, had relaxed into some kind of partial acceptance. Was she beginning to believe that Reicheldorf was really her grandfather?
Reicheldorf smiled. “I stopped by there on a regular basis,” he said. “I could never stay long without attracting attention, but occasionally I’d see you walking the dog or driving out of your driveway. Just glimpses, really, but I sometimes caught flashes of your mother in the way you carried yourself or bent over to pet your dog or smiled at a neighbor.”
“Were you stalking me?” Katie asked.
Reicheldorf laughed. “Probably,” he said. “But I meant no harm. I was in the audience the day you graduated from Winter Park High School and again when you walked across the stage to get your diploma at Florida International University. I watched a number of your volleyball games when you were competing in high school. I couldn’t be part of your life, but I could stand on the edges and admire the young woman you’d become. Your mom and grandmother would have been so proud.”
“Were you ever going to tell me who you were?” K
atie asked.
“I don’t know. I assumed you knew you were adopted, but I didn’t know how you would feel about meeting me, or hearing the story of your biological mother.”
“My parents never told me I was adopted,” Katie said. “Not until my dad blew up and threw it in my face. If you really are my grandfather, how did you find me?”
“I never lost you. The lawyer in Bradenton who handled the adoption was a friend of mine and he told me from the beginning that you had been adopted by the Basses. He made me promise not to interfere in any way, and I kept that promise. Well, mostly.” He chuckled. “Aside from stalking you.”
“Why were you so interested in me?” asked Katie.
“Except for my cousin Ernst, you were the only family I had left. Ernst was gay, so he would never have children. You were it. And I’d loved my daughter so much and missed her so much. You were a link, a tenuous one to be sure, but still a link to that bright little girl I raised from birth and buried before her twenty-fifth birthday.”
“This is hard for me to get my head around,” Katie said.
“I’m sure it is,” said Reicheldorf. “When we get things cleared up around here, we can run DNA tests. If you’re not my granddaughter, you’ll never hear from me again. And if you are, you’ll set the parameters of our relationship.”
J.D.’s phone rang. She looked at the caller ID, excused herself, and walked out to the patio. I looked at my watch. Almost eleven. The morning was slipping by. When J.D. returned, she said, “That was Harry Robson, the Sarasota detective. He told me that Captain Doug McAllister was shot to death this morning at his home and the body of Wayne Evans was found in his home. They were shot by the same pistol. Robson found some documents in Evans’s house that were similar to the one we found on Ken Goodlow’s murderer. He wants me to take a look at them.”
“What about Evans’s family?” I asked.
“They weren’t home. They were visiting family over on the east coast. Vero Beach, I think Robson said.”
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