Fatal Decree

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “Yes, sir. We think he can help us put away some major drug lords, interrupt the flow of narcotics into the country, and disrupt the money supply. We also think he may be able to give us information that will forestall at least a couple of planned murders. And we believe Mr. Perez can provide us the help we need to arrest and convict those responsible for the murder earlier this evening of the U.S. Attorney for this district.”

  “Very well,” said the judge. “Here’s what I’m willing to do. I won’t sanction murder, no matter how good the cause. Therefore, I cannot agree with part of your bargain. I’m willing to go along with the name change, the new prison, all of that. Part of the deal will be that if Mr. Perez ever reneges on his part of the agreement, he will agree that the life sentence will be revoked and he will be back before this court with a plea of guilty to murder and be subject to the death sentence. The decision on whether Mr. Perez has failed to live up to his part of the agreement and whether the death sentence is warranted will be left to a judge of this court. There will be no extrajudicial punishment.”

  “May I confer with Ms. Bichler?” asked Parrish.

  “Certainly.”

  Parrish and Bichler huddled in the back of the courtroom, talking in whispers. When they broke, Deanna went to her client and after a whispered conversation with him, rose and said, “The defendant will accept the plea bargain as outlined by the court.”

  “Mr. Parrish?” asked Judge Plowden.

  Parrish rose and said, “The government will accept the plea as outlined by the court.”

  “Okay,” said the judge. “I assume you two have worked out a plan to implement this.”

  Parrish was still standing. “I’ve talked with the head of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshal for this district. It’s going to be a bit complicated, but we think we can get it done within the next couple of days. We’ve arranged for Mr. Perez to be held in isolation tonight, but we’d like to get him moved first thing tomorrow. The paperwork will follow, but the marshal has assured me that they can transport him under the new name even if the paperwork isn’t completed. The Bureau of Prisons will accept him from the marshal under the alias.”

  “Is this agreeable to your client, Ms. Bichler?”

  Deanna stood. “It is, Your Honor.”

  “Then it is so ordered,” said the judge. “Hand me the charging pleading, Mr. Parrish, and get me the other paperwork by the end of business on Thursday. You’ll need to draft an order getting Mr. Perez transported tomorrow morning.” He looked at his watch. “This morning now, I guess. Can you get it to me by nine a.m.?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Parrish. “Ms. Bichler and I will get it done tonight. Well, this morning. Thank you, Your Honor.”

  “Court is adjourned,” said Judge Plowden. He stood, surveyed the courtroom, shook his head, and left the bench.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  I was in a deep sleep, dreaming of fire alarms. They didn’t stop and finally began to bring me back into the world. My phone. I looked at the clock on my bedside table. Four o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Who the hell was calling at this time of the day? It couldn’t be good news. Nobody calls in the middle of the night with any news that isn’t bad.

  But I was wrong this time. I rolled over and answered. It was David Parrish. “You awake, Matt?”

  “Barely. This better be good.”

  “It is. We made a deal with Perez.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “I’ll fill you in later, but suffice it to say, he’s ready to sing like the proverbial bird. Can you and Jock get down here to Miami?”

  “Sure. When?”

  “There’ll be an FBI jet at Dolphin Aviation at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport at eight a.m. It’ll bring you down and take you back.”

  “What about J.D.?”

  “I just talked to her. She’ll be at the airport.”

  “Okay.” I closed the phone and called J.D.

  She sounded wide-awake when she answered. “You going to Miami?” she asked.

  “I am,” I said. “You want us to pick you up?”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “We’ll pick you up at seven. Grab some donuts at Publix, get coffee at Starbucks on the Circle, and start off our day with a wholesome breakfast.”

  “You’re a sick person, Royal. Go back to sleep.”

  Not seeing any reason to disturb Jock, I set the alarm for six o’clock, and rolled over for another two hours of sleep. I’d learned the lesson in the army that you sleep when and where you can because you never know when you’ll get a chance to sleep again. I could drop off in an instant and sleep as long as I’d allotted myself. I usually woke up just before the alarm went off.

  I rolled Jock out at six and told him about my four a.m. conversations. He headed for his shower and I went to mine. At seven on the dot, we were parked in front of J.D.’s condo complex. She came down the elevator, got into the backseat, and we were off to the Publix Market at mid-key. I asked how many donuts we needed. Jock said he’d eat three and J.D. asked for a fruit salad. I figured a dozen donuts and the fruit would take care of us until we got to Miami. I’m a sucker for donuts.

  We picked up coffee at Starbucks, and drove to the airport. The plane, a small, nondescript business jet lacking any markings that would identify it as government owned, was waiting on the ramp at Dolphin. We identified ourselves to the pilot and loaded onto the plane. We took off over the bay with a minimum of fuss and then flew southeast toward Miami.

  As we reached cruising altitude, Jock’s phone dinged, indicating that he had received a text message. He looked at the display for a moment and said, “The twenty-two we found at Flagler’s apartment was the same one used to kill all the whale tail victims.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. I hadn’t mentioned the pistol to J.D.

  She had just taken a sip of her coffee. She put the cup on the table and looked at Jock, her face hard. “You found the gun?”

  “Yes,” Jock said. “Didn’t Matt tell you?”

  “No, he didn’t. That gun was the best piece of evidence we’ve got and you’ve ruined it. No court will ever admit it into evidence.”

  “No judge will ever have to make that decision,” said Jock, his voice low and cold as ice. He locked eyes with J.D., staring her down.

  She finally looked away, picked up her coffee, and moved to a seat at the back of the plane.

  Jock and I sat, our conversation limited, each of us munching on our breakfast and staring out the windows. I was worried that we were pushing J.D. farther and farther away, showing her a side of Jock’s profession that she didn’t want to know about. I was afraid that she would let her disdain for Jock’s methods bleed into whatever relationship we may have had. I could feel her slipping away, and all I could do was watch it happen.

  My thoughts turned to Perez and what he had to tell us. This could be a big break, an answer to our questions, perhaps a completion of the puzzle that had eluded us as we sought the killers and tried to discern the patterns that may or may not tie the new whale tail murders to the old and to the killing of the agents from Jock’s organization. As it turned out, we got a lot of the information we wanted, but not all of it. We wouldn’t know about the holes in the pattern for several days, and in the end, that lack of knowledge proved fatal.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  David Parrish met our plane at the Opa-Locka airport. It was near mid-morning and the sun was already heating up the tarmac. A stiff wind was blowing from the south, bringing more warmth to the day. We drove out of the airport property as David explained what had transpired in court in the early hours of the morning. As soon as the locals were finished with him, Perez would be transferred to a federal prison.

  “I wanted to give you guys a shot at him,” said David. “I think he can help sort out who was trying to kill J.D. Jock, you can squeeze him as much as you want, but I’ve already been advised that your agency will be spending some time with him as well.”


  “Why is he so willing to talk?” I asked. “All you’ve got is his phone connection to Worthington.”

  Parrish shrugged. “The DEA folks may have suggested that they had Worthington in custody and he had implicated Perez in the murders.”

  “He bought that?”

  “The DEA scared the hell out of him, and then they told him that a contract had been put out on him. He figured his life was over if he didn’t get some protection.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Jock.

  “Yeah,” said Parrish, and then swore us to secrecy about Perez’s location. He drove us to a house in western Miami-Dade County, out near the Everglades, a U.S. Marshal’s Service safe house, a place to hold prisoners when for some reason they could not be in jail. We were in a neighborhood of small ranch-style houses, probably built in the 1960s or ‘70s. The houses all seemed to be much the same, little deviation in the floor plans or the elevations. These neighborhoods had sprouted and multiplied during the boom years, and many had gone to seed in the lean years that always follow. This subdivision had only two streets that ran parallel to each other, the pavement cracked and blistered by the sun. We stopped in front of the last house on one of the streets. The houses next door and directly across the street appeared to have been abandoned. The house we were about to enter had been kept up to some degree. It would need a roof in the next couple of years and the aluminum siding needed painting, but the yard was clean and grassy and well kept. There were two small Ford automobiles parked in the driveway.

  A narrow yard extended from the west side of the house to a tangled thicket of palmetto scrub that ran to the west as far as I could see. The back of the house faced north and beyond the hundred yards or so of scrub there was another neighborhood that looked as raw as the one we were standing in. The dry weather that comes to Florida in the fall had turned the palmetto bushes into fuel waiting for a fire.

  We were met at the door by a young man whom David introduced as Deputy United States Marshal Bert Cheshire. “Do you have any weap-ons?” he asked.

  Jock, J.D., and I nodded. “Please leave them with me,” the young marshal said. “It’s just a precaution. If somehow the prisoner were to overpower you, we wouldn’t want him to have access to guns.”

  He led us to the back of the house and opened a door for us to enter. We found ourselves in a windowless room devoid of furniture except for several straight-back chairs arranged haphazardly. It was mid-morning and the donuts had given me a sugar high. I couldn’t wait to start the questions.

  A tall, slender man with a head of dark hair going to gray at the temples stood as we entered the room. I thought he looked like the actor, Ricardo Montalban. “My name is George Perez,” he said. He was wearing a pair of gray pinstripe slacks, a white dress shirt open at the collar, and a pair of dress loafers that probably cost more than my car. The clothes he was wearing when he was arrested.

  No one offered to shake hands. Parrish told Perez who we were and why we were there. I watched him closely as David mentioned J.D.’s name, but I didn’t detect any sign of recognition.

  J.D. stared hard at Perez who wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why are you trying to kill me, Perez?” she asked, her voice flat, emotionless. It was the first words that had escaped her mouth since she’d heard about Jock’s people finding the pistol.

  “It wasn’t personal,” he said, and sat in one of the chairs.

  “It was personal to me,” she said.

  Perez smiled. “I understand from my lawyer that it was you who pulled some strings last night to keep me out of general population at the jail. Thank you for your kindness.”

  “My first instincts were to let you die, you cretin,” she said. “Don’t make me regret not going with my gut. Why were you trying to kill me?”

  “I wasn’t. I was just the messenger.”

  “For whom?” she asked.

  “First,” Perez said, “some ground rules.”

  “You don’t make the rules,” said Parrish, his voice low, threatening. “The rules are that you answer our questions. If not, you go back to see the judge and will probably be looking at a cell on death row.”

  “Okay,” said Perez, “then how about some background. I’d like to put this whole thing in perspective so that Ms. Duncan doesn’t think me an ogre.”

  “Too late,” J.D. said.

  Perez smiled again. “Fair enough. But I’m not a bad person.”

  “Mr. Perez,” I said, “you’ve been instrumental in the killing of at least two innocent women and several attempts on Detective Duncan’s life.”

  “That’s true, Mr. Royal,” he said, “but I was under duress.”

  I laughed. “And how about the money laundering? Were you under duress there as well?”

  “Point taken,” he said, “but that didn’t result in any harm. The harm had already been done. I just moved money around.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You made it possible for some of the world’s worst thugs to ruin the lives of a lot of people, not to mention the murders your buddies commit in order to keep the money flowing.”

  “That’s a theory, sir,” he said, “but not one to which I subscribe.”

  I shut up then. This guy was either full of more crap than anybody I’d ever met or he was living in a dream world. Probably the latter. If any of the people involved in the drug trade had even an iota of decency, they had to manufacture a shield against their own perfidy, a safe place where they could retreat from the horrors that their actions visited upon the innocents who were destroyed by the product they pushed.

  “I want to know who tried to kill me and why,” said J.D. “I don’t really give a damn what you think of yourself.”

  “In good time, Ms. Duncan,” Perez said, “but first you need to know who I am.”

  “It’s Detective Duncan, Perez,” she said, “and I already know who you are. You’re something the sewer rats dragged out of the slime.”

  “When I tell you my story,” he said, “perhaps you’ll have a higher opinion of me.”

  She gave it up then, sighed, and sat back in her chair. “I doubt it, but go ahead. Give us your version.”

  “I come from a proud family,” he said. “I’m a fourth-generation Floridian.”

  I almost laughed. There is a conceit among many native Floridians that their peninsula pedigree means something to other people. The more generations their families have lived in Florida, the more important that seems to be. I suspect it is because there are so few natives living in the state anymore. Most of the residents are transplants from somewhere else. I never thought that one’s place of birth had much importance in the grand scheme of things. Especially, if one is about to spend the rest of his life in a prison far removed from the place where he was born.

  “Congratulations,” said J.D., sarcastically.

  It was lost on Perez. “Thank you. I tell you this because I don’t want you to think I’m some Mexican here illegally. My great-grandfather emigrated from Spain where his family was part of the nobility. He came to Key West in the late 1880s and used his family money to buy a cigar factory from the Cubans who ran the industry there. There had been a strike by the workers and he got it fairly cheaply. He ran it for a few years and, seeing the handwriting on the wall, sold it within ten years for a large profit. He came to Miami before the turn of the century and married a local girl, Mildred Hightower, from a family of cattle ranchers. They had two sons and a daughter.”

  Parrish interrupted. “Mr. Perez, this is very interesting, but we want to know about the murders on Longboat Key.”

  “I understand,” said Perez. “You need to know the history so that you can understand the present. I think somebody important said that.”

  Parrish shook his head and signaled Perez to continue.

  “One of those sons was my grandfather,” said Perez, “and one of his sisters married a man named Jules Koerner. They had one daughter, Katherine Karen, who married a Miami lawyer named James Picket.”
>
  “Picket?” asked J.D., sitting up in her chair.

  “You’re beginning to see it, aren’t you, Detective Duncan?” asked Perez.

  J.D. nodded. “The Pickets had a son they named Caleb.”

  “Bingo,” said Perez, pointing his finger at J.D. “Caleb Picket, a man you put away for twenty years for embezzlement. Only for him it was a life sentence because of the cancer.”

  “So Picket was what?” I asked. “Your second cousin?”

  “Exactly,” said Perez.

  “There’s more to this,” said J.D.

  “Much more,” said Perez. “Katherine Karen, or Katie as she was known to the family, was crazy. Caleb was born when she was in her twenties. Nobody recognized the symptoms of creeping insanity. The family just thought she was a bit quirky. But after Caleb was born, she got worse. She was sneaky, and neither her husband nor anyone else in the family knew what was going on.”

  “What happened to her?” J.D. asked. I thought she was getting interested in this in spite of herself.

  “She was torturing Caleb,” Perez said. “Doing terrible things to him. When he was about eight, she tied him down, shaved his head, and cut her initials on the back of it, just above the nape of his neck.”

  “K.K.K.,” said J.D. “Katherine Karen Koerner. I’ll be damned. The same initials carved into the back of the whale tail victims.”

  “Yes,” Perez said simply.

  “How did you know about the initials?” J.D. asked. “That was pretty closely held police information.”

  “Caleb told me. The family knew he was the killer. But we only found out after he was charged with embezzlement and was facing a prison sentence.”

  “Why didn’t your family say something?” asked Parrish.

  “We have a reputation in Miami that we have to uphold. Four generations of successful men and women, the cream of society. We took a huge beating when Caleb was arrested for stealing all those people’s money. Many of them were our friends. But the embezzlement, while bad, was just about theft. If word had ever gotten out that Caleb had killed those poor women, it would have been assumed that we have a family gene that produces crazy people.”