DEAD OR ALIVE a totally addictive thriller with a breathtaking twist

by T. J. Brearton

  “Yeah.”

  Finished putting herself together, she gave him a long look. “And maybe you need to talk to Jack, Tommy. I can see it in your face. It would be good to clear the air, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Otherwise it eats you up a little at a time.” She moved closer, bent over and kissed him. Then she gazed at him, her brown eyes probing. “He’s a good friend. He’ll understand.”

  “I know.”

  She smiled at him, grabbed her bag and opened the door.

  “Be careful out there,” he said.

  “I will.”

  And then she was gone.

  * * *

  After breakfast he tried Jack Vance and got a voice mail. “Hey, Jack,” Tom said. “You’re probably busy as hell after Hector . . . Ah, haven’t talked to you in a bit . . . Listen, I was hoping we could get together. Couple of things I’d like to talk to you about. Okay? Maybe we go over to Buffalo Chips or something — you can take a break from emptying the spoiled food from people’s fridges or whatever you’re doing. All right, man . . . hope to hear from you.”

  He tossed his phone on the couch. Still in his underwear, he bent and touched his toes and then rolled his neck around.

  Katie had bought one of those devices you could talk to and Tom always felt it a bit weird, especially when he was alone in the house. But he’d wired up a sound system and calling out the music you wanted to hear was pretty cool for a foster kid from Yonkers. Futuristic.

  “Alexa,” he said, “give me, um . . . give me Melvins.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the robotic feminine voice. “Could you please repeat that?”

  “Ah . . . Alexa, play Pandora.”

  “Okay. Which station?”

  “Melvins.”

  Hard-rock guitar sounds crashed through the room and Tom dropped to the floor, stretched a while, then went into a push-ups and sit-ups routine. The song ended before he was finished and he used the jump rope as The Beta Band played “Dry the Rain.” Beatnik music. He wasn’t sure how it linked up to Melvins, but it wasn’t terrible. He was working up a good sweat when his mobile rang.

  Alexa lowered the music volume and said, “Phone call from Lauren Blythe.”

  He grabbed his phone, noted the time — not yet 8 a.m. — and answered out of breath. “Hey. Everything okay? We still on?”

  “We are, but the meeting place has changed. Well, everything has changed.”

  She gave him an address on Gulf Shore Road. “Can you get here right away?”

  * * *

  He pulled up twenty minutes later in front of a big pastel-colored mansion with a high iron gate. Blythe was standing with a couple of guys from Naples PD and someone else he didn’t recognize. The whole issue was, he’d lied about having a juvenile record when he’d applied to the FDLE. That was why he’d been pushing papers and swinging in the breeze while they figured out what to do with him. He was two-for-two closing major cases so far, so maybe it was like Katie said and they wanted to keep him around. Either that or it was just the slow-ass bureaucratic process at work — somebody needing to respond to someone else’s email and return someone else’s phone call and half a year goes by.

  But arriving at the scene, Tom realized that wasn’t what today was about. This looked like something else entirely. Like a bomb had hit. Broken trees, scattered palm fronds and pieces of lawn furniture littered the whole area. But the main attraction seemed to be the fancy-looking Jaguar parked askew on the side of the road. Some of the metal had been flayed from the car.

  Tom checked his face in the rear-view mirror for any stray eye boogers or wild nose hairs and got out and walked over. There was an acrid stink in the air, like spent fireworks.

  “Agent Lange,” Blythe said, “Bill Reddy and Andreas Tudela with Naples PD.”

  They all shook hands.

  Blythe looked at the other man. “And this is Ed Skokie, from Tallahassee.”

  Skokie had a light, quick grip.

  Blythe said, “Everyone, this is Special Agent Tom Lange. He’s been with us for going on two years. Tom first worked the Carrie Anne Gallo case and then the Howard Declan case.”

  They all nodded and glanced at him and looked around. Reddy was chewing gum with special vigor. Tom’s cases had both been high profile and connected to organized crime.

  “The Jaguar is registered to Brian Hollister,” Blythe told Tom. “Hollister and his wife were headed to the airport for a flight out on the sixteenth.”

  “Three days ago,” Reddy said, chewing.

  Tom noticed other cops about three big houses further up the street. There was a van up there from the medical examiner’s office. He guessed the Hollisters were up there, dead, their car down here for some reason. He gazed through at the mansion in proximity, sitting high and mighty behind the formidable-looking iron gate.

  “And so whose place is this?” he asked.

  Blythe answered, “Belongs to David Balfour.”

  Tom looked at the guy from Tallahassee, starting to understand why he might be there. “As in Stephanie Balfour? The statewide attorney?”

  “Her husband,” Blythe said.

  Tom studied the mansion. A place like this was worth somewhere in the low millions at least. Surely it wasn’t something they floated on a prosecutor’s salary. Florida had one statewide prosecutor, appointed by the Attorney General. Stephanie Balfour was at the start of her four-year term in the Office of Statewide Prosecution. Her role was to prosecute crimes occurring in more than one judicial circuit. The main office was in Tallahassee, with several other OSP bureaus throughout the state, including one in Fort Myers. She made maybe seventy grand a year or thereabouts.

  “David Balfour is a hedge fund guy,” Blythe said. “A wealthy individual. They have a home in Tallahassee near the main office and then they have this place. David Balfour bought it when he first started coming down here, before their marriage. The house was burgled, items stolen from the safe.”

  “What items?”

  “Treasury bonds,” Skokie answered. “Plus some jewelry and about ten grand in cash.”

  Tom whistled at the haul, but then he didn’t know anything about Treasury bonds.

  “Same night as the Hollisters’ flight,” Blythe said.

  Skokie pointed up the street. “The Hollisters’ home is up there.”

  “Okay — you mean where the medical examiner is parked.”

  Blythe started up the street and everyone followed. “Actually, no,” she answered. “The Hollisters are up a ways further — can’t see it from here. That place, where the medical examiner is parked, belongs to the Ingrams.”

  Tom mentally tried to sort out the different families: the Balfours had the burgled home with the iron gate; the Hollisters owned the Jaguar and lived a little further away; the Ingrams were just two houses up the street. Their name rang a distant bell.

  Then he saw Jack Vance and lifted his sunglasses just to make sure it wasn’t a trick of the shadow. Vance had just stepped out of the wall of arbor vitae fronting the Ingram place and was talking to a uniformed Naples cop. He looked down the street, saw Tom, Blythe and the others, and headed toward them.

  Blythe raised her hand to Vance and continued leading Tom and the others up the hot, still-wet street. The sun beat down as they picked their way around tree branches and debris. The wind shifted and Tom could smell rotted fish. Bill Reddy said, “Jack Vance has a security business he calls Snow Bird Watch. He has a couple clients along this—”

  “I know him,” Tom said. “He’s a friend.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Reddy continued talking about Vance. Maybe it was for the benefit of the Tallahassee guy; Tom wasn’t sure. “Vance’s clients are more middle class, most of them over in Lely, but he’s got some connections with people and keeps his eye on a couple places round here. His business is simple, nothing high tech — he just goes around and checks on things for people. Makes sure the termites aren’t having their way and the AC units ar
e working.”

  They all met in the middle of the road halfway between houses.

  “Hey, Jack,” Tom said.

  “Hey, Tommy.” Vance shook Tom’s hand. He was in his early seventies with a full head of white hair brushed loosely to the side.

  Tom looked past his friend to the Ingram place. The medical team emerged, wheeling a body in a black bag on a backboard toward the van. Tom was confused. “So that’s not one of the Ingrams?”

  “Ingrams are in Connecticut,” Vance said. “I was checking on their place this morning.”

  This information started to sink in, but Tom had to look back at the Jaguar then over at the Ingram house a couple of times for it to fully make sense. There was about a hundred yards between the car and the house. “So you found who? Hollister? From the Jaguar?”

  Vance nodded. “Up on the roof.”

  “On the roof?”

  Blythe said, “We believe the storm carried the body of Brian Hollister, the owner of the Jaguar, to that point.”

  The medical team loaded the body into the van while Tom contemplated a storm strong enough to launch a man however many hundred feet up into the air and drop him a quarter of a mile away. On the way he’d seen an SUV twisted in half and wrapped around a tree, so he figured it was possible. Wind speeds for Hurricane Hector had reached 148 mph.

  “Entry and exit wounds in the cranium,” Blythe said. “Entry wound in the left arm and through to the sternum. Medical examiner will extract the projectile.” She didn’t remark on the condition of the body — she didn’t need to — but she added, “We have yet to locate the body of his wife.”

  Tom dragged his eyes from the van and looked around at Blythe. “What makes you think she’s out here?”

  “I’ll show you.” They trooped back to the Jaguar. “Careful where you step and don’t go up to the car.” Blythe bent down and pointed. “So, in here, looks like blood on the passenger seat. We’ve got Crime Scene coming but it’s going to take them a bit.” She stood up and said, “Mr. Vance arrived at the Ingram house at seven this morning. He found the body of Brian Hollister after about fifteen minutes and called Naples PD. Naples PD arrived and called the district medical examiner. Then they found the Jaguar here, found the passenger window down, and ran the plate.”

  “Okay.” Tom felt a chill despite the heat. Blythe was working up to something. He glanced around and thought that probably the only reason TV crews weren’t jamming up the scene was because there was too much other juicy news going on all over the place, too many blocked roads and, like Katie had said, bodies all over.

  “The Jaguar owners — the Hollisters — were set for their flight but there was an issue with their housekeeper,” Blythe said. “The housekeeper’s seven-year-old daughter was stranded at the house.”

  “Why?” Tom interrupted. “What was she doing there?”

  “The school was closed, but the parents were still at work and the girl was at a day care. A woman bringing several kids home from the day care thought the girl’s mother was working at the Hollisters’ that day. She wasn’t. Once they figured it out, the father, who also works for the Hollisters, tried to come pick her up and hit a washout in the road — took his truck and rolled it right over. So the Hollisters abandoned their flight and returned from the airport to pick up the girl.”

  “In the middle of the hurricane,” Tom said.

  “In the middle of the hurricane.” Blythe took a couple steps back and spread her arms, cueing the idea of a big picture. “The Hollisters were either on their way back to their home or they had already picked up the girl. We don’t know for sure, but there’s no obvious evidence of her in the Jaguar. We’ll have to see. Right now, the prevailing thought is that the Hollisters interrupted a break-in at the Balfours’ home. Maybe they were driving by, saw someone coming out and stopped, and that was a fatal mistake. Brian Hollister has two gunshot wounds, one in the left arm, one in the head. But what the vehicle tells us initially — you can see the blood spatter right there, passenger side . . . the broken window . . . and you can see the impact of the other projectiles — is that Ann Hollister was also shot. That’s why we’re expecting to find her body and be looking at a double homicide.”

  Bill Reddy chewed his gum, listening along. “But we’re hoping to God we don’t find that little girl around here, tossed somewhere by the storm like the husband was. At any rate, we’re not seeing visible evidence that she was harmed.”

  Tom looked between Blythe and Reddy. Then he glanced at Vance, who looked older this morning and less spry than usual. “What’s the alternative? The burglars kidnapped her?”

  No one said anything and that meant they were thinking it.

  “Or,” Reddy said, “the little girl took off before the Hollisters ever got to her, hiding out somewhere in the hurricane — never in the car to begin with. That’s a scenario we have to consider carefully. She could be trapped somewhere. We got crews looking. Mostly volunteers right now — they were through here already. Your friend Vance was with them when he found Brian Hollister on the roof. Whether she ran or they took her, she’s in the wind either way.”

  “You got a piece of gum?” Tom asked Reddy.

  Reddy patted his pockets, found the pack and handed it to Tom. “We got the girl into MEPIC and her picture is all over the state.”

  Tom took a stick of gum from the pack and looked at the Balfour place where the burglary had occurred. “So, these burglars take advantage of the storm. Maybe they know that most police are sequestered during a hurricane if winds get up to a certain velocity, so they think ‘easy pickings.’ The power is out, security is down, so they have no problem getting in . . .”

  “Far as we can tell,” Reddy said, “they went right in the front door there. Only problem for them would’ve been the gate, but that’s more for show — just for cars, really. You can get right around it on foot back there on the beach side.”

  “So, they’ve got a guy sitting out here, waiting, keeping an eye out,” Tom said. “And the Hollisters come rolling along in the Jaguar. They’re good people, they’ve come back for this girl. In fact, though, if they’re stopping to see what’s going on with the guy sitting here, to me that says they’ve already got the girl. They’re not going to stop and mess around with someone sitting here if she’s still back at the house — maybe terrified. They’re not going to stop if she’s missing.”

  “Unless they’re stopping to ask whoever’s sitting here if he’s seen a little girl,” Reddy countered. “They see his face or something, and he executes the witnesses, pop-pop-pop.”

  Blythe was looking on, not saying anything — unusual for her. She looked up at the house again.

  Tom asked, “What are they doing here? Just robbing the safe? Any other burglaries or just this one?”

  “Just this one,” Reddy answered. “Far as we know.”

  Tom looked at Blythe and recognized what he saw in her face because he’d gotten to know her a bit by now. Her eyes said: This next part of the conversation requires discretion.

  * * *

  Tom drove through downtown Naples, detouring around washouts and fallen trees. Hector hadn’t been kind. The flooding had only just receded, leaving pools and washouts in its wake and that foul odor of spent fireworks — a rotten eggs smell, probably from saturated groundwater. A news team had set up on the corner of 41 and Fifth Ave, the reporter wearing hip-waders as he sloshed out into the road. Bonita Springs, where Tom lived, had gotten most of its power back within ten hours of the storm, but Naples was predicted to be down for several more days.

  He parked behind the county courthouse that was next to the FDLE field office. The storm had ripped out baby palms that had been planted around the courthouse and no one had gotten around to replanting them. He didn’t see Blythe’s Crown Vic yet, so he dialed Katie and left her a message. He took the gum out, found a receipt to wrap it in then lit up a cigarette. He waited in the truck with the A/C going but the window cracked to let
out the smoke.

  With some hurricanes, in addition to people evacuating, area law enforcement was sequestered. With predictions of high winds and storm surges, anticipations of power outages and flooding, the idea was that you didn’t want law enforcement officers out on the streets, exposed to the elements and getting killed. Sequestration could last for up to five days. With Hector, Tom and Katie had spent three in a bunker. The previous night had been their first back home, and many uniformed cops and first responders were still holed up. During the downtime, emergency response was practically nonexistent, with no ambulances and no cops on call. Tom thought about how many people might know that, along with the kind of person who might be stupid, ballsy or desperate enough to attempt a burglary in the middle of 150-mph winds — winds that seemed to have launched Brian Hollister a hundred yards and landed him on a roof.

  He turned on the radio, listened to a little hard rock, then changed it to a religious station and waited some more. He thought about the dream he’d had of trying to find Nick in a swamp — or whatever it had been.

  For a brief time in their youth, shuffled from one foster family to the next, Tom and Nick had stayed with a pastor and his family, the Johnsons. That time, just shy of two years, was the only time he’d had any direct experience with religion. Since Nick died, he’d found himself asking the big questions.

  The pastor on the radio was working himself up into a righteous lather about hurricanes and eternal damnation, getting louder and more impassioned. “Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction —”

  Tom shut it off when he saw Blythe rolling in. She parked and got out of her dark blue Crown Vic and headed to the field office, the guy from Tallahassee trailing behind her.

  CHAPTER THREE: INTO THE BARGAIN

  They stood around in the middle of the small office. Skokie was older, maybe in his sixties, his curly hair mostly gray, squiggly pouches under his eyes, like deflated bubbles.

  “You’re not IAB,” Tom said.