Even on a bad day, the freeway was a faster ride to the malls. I zoomed north and noted that Camille and Ronzoni were right behind. They knew the area, too.
“You okay?” I asked Emil.
“You always get into stuff like this?” he asked with a grin.
“More often than I should.”
“You got a fun job.”
“Don’t tell Sally that. Are we good?”
“Need a mug shot.”
I nodded. “We can do that. You know what to do?”
“I do. Do you?”
I shrugged. It was a good question, and one I wasn’t really sure I had an answer for.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I banked around the off-ramp at PGA Boulevard like I was Dale Earnhardt Jr., tires screeching and senior citizens cursing my existence. We were well short of the mall when my eyes saw the smoke and my heart sank. My foot pressed the pedal to the floor, and we screamed into the lot laying serious rubber, my hand hard on the horn to inform shoppers that they best get out of my way. I got a lot of dirty looks and middle fingers. I didn’t stop. We careened around the perimeter of the lot and in behind the mall. I almost hit a guy in a Captain America T-shirt as he threw something into one of the industrial dumpsters, and he ran away in my rearview as I screeched to a stop outside the back of the restaurant.
I didn’t need an instructional video to know that the restaurant was on fire. Smoke poured out from under the back door, which was closed. The plastic chair that had held it open on my last visit lay discarded nearby.
Then I heard Tania scream.
“Miami!”
I looked up and saw Tania hanging out of the solitary window in Draymond’s second-floor
office.
“I can’t get down—the stairs are on fire!”
“We’re calling the fire department!” I yelled back up to her.
“I did that.”
Emil and I both jumped out of the car, and I told him to stay back.
I tried the door and burned my hand on the hot handle. As I turned away, Ronzoni pulled to a stop in the loading bay.
“You’re a menace on the road,” he said, before looking up at Tania and then noticing the smoke. He went for the door and I pushed him away.
“It’s hot,” I said. “Fire’s right behind the door.”
Ronzoni stepped back and yelled up to Tania, “Where’s your dad?”
“He went to the kitchen to get sodas. Detective, Captain America was inside!”
Neither Ronzoni nor I needed an explanation. We both ran for our cars. I got going first, pulling a wide, fast turn around the loading area. Captain America had chosen to stay in the alley behind the mall, so I could see him all the way down at the other end, and I drove fast, zooming past the rear doors of the line of stores situated around the fountain, across the entry road that led out to the parking lot, and on along behind the next group of stores.
It wasn’t the way I would have gone if I were running from the scene of a crime. The inside of the mall was better. Lots of people, lots of cover. Of course, also plenty of video cameras. Maybe the guy in the Captain America T-shirt was afraid of getting caught on camera. I could see he was tiring, his head lolling, his cadence dropping.
I noticed Ronzoni closing in behind me, so I pulled out to go around Captain America, and then as I passed him, I pushed my door open. There was a heavy thump and the door slammed shut, but I didn’t stop. Technically, I suppose it was a hit and run, but stopping was Ronzoni’s job.
I sped to the end of the alley and looped around the building and for the second time in minutes I sped along the front of the mall with my hand on the horn. There was a whole new selection of fingers and assorted gestures. I got to the open area at the front of the mall and stopped hard.
My preference was to drive right into the open-air mall, but some bright spark had seen me coming and erected bollards to prevent just such an event. I jumped out and sprinted inside, past the chain stores and around the fountain to the front doors of the soon-to-be-opened Low and Slow restaurant.
The doors were locked. I ran into the French patisserie and up to the counter. Some well-dressed people were standing in line carrying well-dressed cakes and pastries, and I barged past, expecting more gestures, but the level of my lack of decorum had evidently stunned the patrons into silence.
“Fire extinguisher,” I said to the cashier.
“What?”
“Fire extinguisher, now!”
She recoiled and I got the sense she was about to tell me there was no need to yell, but instead she reached under the counter and pulled out a red fire extinguisher.
I ran back to the restaurant. All eyes in the court around the fountain were now on me. I recalled that a water fire extinguisher could make some grease and gasoline fires worse, and I wasn’t sure what sort of fire was in the back of the restaurant, but at that moment it didn’t matter, because all fire extinguishers are the same when you’re using them to bash open a glass door into a restaurant.
I smashed the glass and then used the end of the extinguisher to chip the hole so I could scramble through. Having created an exit hole, the smoke was drawn to me like the exhaust on a fireplace, and I dropped low and hurried through the dining room toward the kitchen.
Draymond was lying near the fridge he had been stocking when I visited the day before. There was another fire extinguisher lying on the floor beside him, and I saw blood on it where someone had hit him. I put my fingers to his neck and felt a pulse. He was alive and below the smoke, so I left him where he was and jogged back into the corridor. The smoke here was clearing some. I reached the storage area near the stairs. The fire had burned all the boxes of napkins and other equipment leaned against the door and moved halfway up the stairs, so I opened up the extinguisher and sprayed the flames. A misty foam squirted out, and the fire was doused almost immediately, and I started waving the thing around the storage area.
It wasn’t completely out when I dropped the extinguisher and ran up the stairs. I hit the landing and pushed open the office door. It looked just like it had before. A chair, a desk, another chair. Piles of other stuff, the flotsam and jetsam of the restaurant business.
But no Tania.
I ran to the window and stuck out my head. Camille’s car was parked directly below the window, and Camille and Tania were embracing beside it, with Kressic waiting next to them. Clearly Tania had dropped down onto the roof of Camille’s car. Sometimes there were advantages to being a tall basketball player.
I felt surplus to requirements until Tania saw me.
“Dad?”
“He’s in the dining room.”
I didn’t elaborate. Instead, I ran down the stairs and jumped over the still-burning paper products and back to Draymond. I didn’t move him. I checked that his passageways were clear and let him be.
The boys from the local fire department arrived just before Tania and Camille reached the front of the restaurant. One of them looked after Draymond while two others ran to the rear and put out what was left of the fire. The guy with Draymond did what I didn’t want to do and turned him over, careful of the gash on the back of his head. Draymond stirred.
“Dad!” called Tania as she rushed in. Another fireman grabbed her and directed her back outside.
“Let us do our job,” he said, his voice compassionate but not offering promises he couldn’t know if he could keep. They rushed a gurney in just as Ronzoni arrived on scene.
“Captain America?” I asked.
“Relaxing in my car.”
“You gonna call Crozier?”
“Not this time. I’ve called a couple deputies I know.”
Draymond was fully awake by the time they wheeled him out on the gurney.
“Dad,” Tania said, leaning over her father as he zoomed by.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Call Rochelle.”
“I will, Dad. I love you.”
/> “Love you, too,” he said as the gurney was whisked away.
A paramedic asked Tania if she was really okay, and she said she was fine. He didn’t wait for a second opinion, but headed away to his next call.
I noticed that the mall had been cleared of shoppers, and it was just a couple of firemen, Ronzoni, Tania, Camille, Kressic, and me. I looked at the fountain and considered jumping in. I really needed a shower.
Kressic moved to Tania.
“What are you doing here?”
She shrugged. “My dad wanted to talk.”
“You weren’t supposed to be here.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I was supposed to be at Miami’s thing at the gym.”
Then someone bumped into Kressic. He turned to look at whoever it was.
“Smile,” said Emil, and he held up a phone to Kressic’s face.
“What the hell are you doing?” spat Kressic.
Emil glanced at the screen.
“Perfect,” he said, and tossed the phone to me.
I caught it and looked at the screen as Emil walked away from Kressic’s glare.
“What’s going on?” asked Tania.
“You got another threat, didn’t you?” I said.
“How did you know?”
“You should have paid. Is that what it says?”
“Yes. How do you know that?”
I held up the phone. “Because it’s right here. On the phone that sent it.”
Tania looked at Emil.
“Not him,” I said. “Him.” I pointed at Kressic.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Some days, but not right now. You overplayed your hand, Kressic. You needed Tania to sign with the Chinese team today or you would lose the deal. And I told you that she was wavering but still wasn’t there. She needed—what did you call it? Motivation? So you sent one last threat, and to cap it off, you set a little fire in her daddy’s restaurant.”
“You are completely crazy! That’s libel, what you just said.”
“Actually it’s not, partly because libel is written defamation and I’m talking, so technically it would be slander. But it’s not that either, because it’s true.”
“The message is on your phone,” he spat.
“Miami?” asked Tania.
“Sorry, pal, wrong again. This is your phone.”
“No, I have my . . .” He patted his pockets and came up empty. “You can’t get into my phone. It’s locked.”
“It was,” I said, looking at Emil.
“Facial recognition, dude. Just needed your mugshot.”
“And now that we have it, we see a SneakyChat message from this phone to Tania’s, telling her that she should have paid up. But, like I said, you overplayed it. She got spooked, and her dad wanted to speak to her about some things, so they met early. Right when you were creating your alibi at the high school.”
I looked at Ronzoni. “Detective, perhaps you want to take pictures of these two phones.”
“I do.”
“And I’m sure once we check the servers at Bannerman Associates, and we check the printers there, we’ll find out that you wrote the letter that Camille intercepted.”
“You don’t have the authority to do that.”
“Detective Ronzoni already has a team on it.”
“I do?” said Ronzoni.
“You do.”
“I do,” he said, confidently.
“That’s illegal,” said Kressic. “That’s private property.”
“Yes, it is, but it’s not your property. It’s Bannerman property, and I think they’ll be very cooperative when they find out the kind of malpractice one of their agents has been undertaking. Threats, fraud, arson.”
“Arson? You really are crazy.”
“You keep saying that, but, detective?”
Ronzoni wandered over to his Taurus, and dragged out the guy in the Captain America t-shirt. He hauled him over to the fountain.
“Captain America,” said Ronzoni, “if you don’t want to rot in superhero hell, or the county lockup, you’ll be truthful now. Did someone put you up to this arson?”
“What arson?” he said with a smile.
“The arson you just committed, the one where this young lady,” he nodded at Tania, “just saw you running from inside the burning restaurant.”
“She says.”
“And,” I added, “the one where you tossed a can of gasoline into the dumpsters out back. I bet your fingerprints are all over it.”
I raised an eyebrow at the guy at the exact same time as Ronzoni did the exact same thing, and that sent a little shiver down my spine. The guy looked at us both and saw the corner he’d been painted into.
“That guy,” he said, pointing at Kressic.
“He’s lying,” returned Kressic.
“Why would this guy lie?” I asked. “And why would he point at you when he’s been in the detective’s car and hasn’t heard a single thing we’ve said?”
“Why would he lie? Why would I? You’re talking about threats to my client. You forget that. She’s my client. Her interests are my interests.”
“Only when it comes to money. Beyond that, they are not one and the same. And let’s remember that your client wasn’t actually threatened. The threats were against her parents, particularly her father. Because you thought you knew the button you needed to push to get Tania to sign. You thought her father was a soft spot. And then we all fell into that assumption. But as fearful as she was over the threats, it was never her dad holding her back, so your threats didn’t work.”
“You’re saying I threw a rock at Camille’s car?” spat Kressic. “I was in Huntsville. I have plenty of people to vouch for me.”
“I know you were, but we’ve already been over that one. That was completely separate from what you were up to, and for a moment it muddied the waters, until I realized I had been staring at the answer the whole time. I thought there were things I didn’t understand, and it turns out I was right—it was those things I didn’t understand that gave me the answer. I spoke to anyone related to the case, friends and relatives and schoolmates and coaches, and half the time I didn’t know what they were saying to me. It was like they were using a different language, which, of course, they were. Every generation does. And in our digital age, it has become even more pronounced, because I read text messages from Tania, and I read them from other suspects, and the thing that kept sticking out was that I couldn’t read them at all. It was like they were written in code. So many emojis and so few vowels. Which made me think about the threat letters. The English was perfect, even down to referring to the ransom as $100,000, all spelled out like my middle school teacher would have liked.”
“So what?” said Kressic.
“So in all of the interviews I conducted, only you ever called the money a hundred thousand dollars. Everyone else used an abbreviation. A hundred kay, a hundred grand, and so on. Not you.”
“Doesn’t prove I did anything.”
“Doesn’t prove you did it, but it told me who didn’t. Not a friend, not a cousin, not a schoolmate. None of them used language that way. It was habitual for them. The SneakyChat part threw me, I have to admit, but now we have you using it for the final threat.”
“But I was really thinking about signing in China,” said Tania.
“I know,” I said. “But not because you wanted to, but to save your dad. And the rest is on me. I told Kressic here that you were wavering against signing, and he said you needed motivation. I suspected another threat, which is why I set up the meeting at the school this afternoon. I wanted to catch him at it. But I underestimated his desperation. I didn’t think he’d step up to something that would actually get Draymond assaulted.”
I glanced at Captain America.
“That’s not my fault.” He pointed at Kressic again. “He said nobody would be here. But the big guy came downstairs and I panicked.”
“Well, now you’re going to have some tim
e to consider better life choices,” said Ronzoni.
“Tania!”
We all turned toward the parking lot and saw the tall girl bursting through the line of gawkers that security was trying to hold back.
“Jemma?” said Tania. Tania ran to her, and the two women embraced.
“What are you doing here?” asked Tania.
“Coach Parkinson called me.”
“Coach Parkinson?”
Jemma looked at me. “Miami Jones called her. He said right now was one of those times for a friend who would do anything.”
Tania frowned at me. “What does that mean?”
Jemma answered for me. “It means you needed me, so I came.”
They hugged and then Jemma noticed the firemen clearing up outside the restaurant.
“I just came from the school. The guy there said you had gone to your dad’s restaurant. What happened?”
“A fire,” said Tania. “Dad was inside.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s gone to hospital, but he’s okay.”
“Tania was inside, too,” I said.
Jemma put her hands on Tania’s cheeks. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m fine now.”
They hugged again, and then Emil spoke.
“Um, Mr. Jones?”
“Yes, Emil.”
“That guy whose phone I took?”
“Yes?”
“He’s running away.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
We turned as one like a bunch of meerkats. Kressic had clearly decided that a hasty retreat was the best offense, and he ran through the smashed front doors of Draymond’s restaurant, around the firefighters, and into the dark interior.
“Where do you think he’s going?” I asked. “There’s nothing back there.”
“His car?” said Emil.
“Good call.”
I heard the BMW rev up and its tires screech as Kressic hustled out of the loading bay. Then we saw a flash of metal as the BMW sped along the back alley, past the opening where Ronzoni had parked his car.
I knew where Kressic was going because I had just been there. Along the alley right to the end of the mall, and then out into the lot, where he could make a getaway onto PGA Boulevard and then either the turnpike or the freeway. I burst through the onlookers and ran to my SUV, and noted that Captain America had made a decent dent in my driver’s side door. I wasn’t worried. It gave the damned car a bit of character.
Half Court Press Page 24
