Twenty minutes later, Hansen arrived with a crime scene team and an EMS van. I gave him my report as the crime techs examined the house and the grounds. One of the techs, a woman in her thirties with short red hair and freckles, wearing white coveralls that said “Naples Crime Scene Team” on the back, used a piece of white blotter paper to collect a blood sample from the floor. I doubted that a pro like The 305 Man would have his DNA on file with any law enforcement agency, but maybe his fingerprints were.
When the EMS crew loaded the body onto a gurney and took it to the city morgue, Hansen left and I went upstairs to shower and change my clothes, getting rid of The 305 Man’s bits of blood, flesh, and bone that had splattered on me. I went into my duffel bag and put on Jack Starkey’s blue denim work shirt, jeans, and running shoes. The ghost of Frank Chance, the great Chicago Cubs first baseman, could return to Cooperstown.
I DROVE my Corvette to Everglades City, stopping at that Dunkin’ Donuts for takeout nourishment, and parked on the street in front of the one-story pink wooden building that looked like a schoolhouse but was, a large sign on the front lawn said, the Museum of the Everglades. I hadn’t noticed it before. What stories that building could tell. Now Vasily and I had added one more, but, with luck, ours would never be on display. I vowed to come back for a tour with Marisa, and maybe an airboat ride.
I walked a block down to the dock, where Elena was waiting for me in the airboat. She greeted me warmly, we were partners in crime now, and ferried me to Vasily’s island. I went inside to find him sitting in the living room with the three men who’d set all of this in motion. Serge and Stefan were elsewhere. Maybe it was their routine to clean the Dragunov and then go out for a cold beer after a kill.
“What happened?” Cox asked me as I took a chair and Elena made a fresh pot of coffee. There was one doughnut left on a plate on the kitchen table, but I’d eaten three on the way so I left it there. Now that the investigation had concluded, it was time to start a diet.
“Your man is dead,” I answered. “And you’re going home.”
Upon hearing that, the three who used to be men of privilege and influence, and who had morphed themselves into pond scum, looked like they were deciding whether to cry or faint.
Elena poured the coffee into a Thermos. We all walked down to the dock and got into the airboat.
43.
CAMP KNOWLAND
If you always want a happy ending, read a book or go to a movie. But in real life, sometimes the bad guys win, and all you can do is move on and get ready to fight the good fight another day.
I was back to my life in Fort Myers Beach. Marisa sold Ash’s house for $35 million to a couple from Dubai. She said that, with her commission, we were going to have dinner in Paris someday soon, and that she was relieved that my case had been completed without me being shot in the groin, or anywhere else. That’s two of us.
I was planning a trip to Chicago to see Claire and Jenny. I vowed that I would do that regularly. Claire was engaged to that orthopedic surgeon. A surgeon trumps a cop, every time.
Thanks to Jenny and Brad, I had a fine grandson with the excellent name of Jack James (after Brad’s father) Thornhill. I was waiting for him to be old enough to attend a Cubs game with me on Bill Stevens’s roof. Maybe by then the team would have a strong bullpen and some batters who could take it long, 400 feet over the ivy-covered brick center-field wall. While I’m dreaming, why not throw in a Golden Glover or two in the infield? Or why not three: the next Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance combo.
Wade Hansen had seen that my consulting fee and expenses were paid in full, with the approval of the lame-duck mayor.
Arthur Bradenton, Christopher Knowland, and Roland Cox were back to their old lives too—but not before a come-to-Jesus meeting with Wade Hansen at police headquarters. The men had lawyered up before that meeting and were represented by Phil Weingarden from Los Angeles, the most famous criminal defense attorney in America.
During the meeting, Hansen told them he knew they were all murderers. If there were any more unexplained deaths in his city, he’d come for them and personally “rip off their heads and shit down their necks.” No doubt quoting his Parris Island drill instructor. I think I had the same one. Hansen told me that Weingarden had said nothing at all during that session; he knew he’d already won. Clarence Darrow could not have done better by his clients. I’m guessing he remains on a large retainer.
With Knowland’s grudging approval, his $2 million from my real estate scam was donated to the Collier County Boys and Girls Club, which was Hansen’s idea. In announcing the generous gift, the club said that it would be used to purchase a summer camp for the kids named after their benefactor. Camp Knowland. That was the only positive thing to come out of the whole affair.
Boris Ivanovich of Brighton Beach, New York, was still making above-market returns for his Atocha Fund clients, including Charles Beaumont’s widow, his true identity remaining a secret. Holding to the deal he agreed to, Hansen, who announced that he was a candidate for mayor in the upcoming November election, did not alert the FBI or Securities and Exchange Commission about the impostor hedge fund manager.
And why shouldn’t Vasily get a pass? In our criminal justice system, all manner of dirty rotten scoundrels are granted clemency for helping government prosecutors, as was our plan for The 305 Man, if he’d survived. Vasily helped to stop the Naples serial killings and to take an assassin off the board.
The 305 Man was identified by his fingerprints as Carl Lewellyn, a former Army Delta Force operative who had gone rogue and worked as a mercenary out of Miami for whatever person or government wanted to pay his fee. There was no evidence in his Biscayne Boulevard penthouse condo linking him to any of his clients, including Bradenton, Knowland, and Cox.
Chief Hansen’s official report stated that an unknown person had shot Lewellyn as he was breaking into Ash’s house. I was not mentioned. It was a page-one story in the Naples Daily News, but by the next news cycle it was forgotten. After all, nobody in Naples cared how a burglar was brought down as long as he was.
Maybe some day Wade Hansen would give me permission to tell Bill Stevens he can use the Naples serial killings as the basis for a Jack Stoney novel, if he disguises the characters and locations.
That would be nice, because I’d like to see how Detective Jack Stoney would handle the case.
44.
UNDERCOVER IN PARADISE
Three A.M. The Witching Hour. Jack Stoney was sitting in an upholstered chair in the bedroom of a borrowed mansion on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts. A Mossberg double-action shotgun was propped on a wall within reach.
The lights in the house were off; Stoney was reading the Chicago Tribune sports section on his iPad. It was early September, and the Cubs had a lock on last place in their division. So what else was new?
Stoney thought about the Russian sniper team set up somewhere outside, scanning the terrain with a night-vision scope, under orders to wound only, not kill.
That was a fiction from old cowboy movies, however: “I just winged him, ma’am.” Whenever you sent a steel-jacketed projectile at 3,900 feet per second toward a human body, the distinction between shooting to kill or wound disappeared. A Dragunov didn’t have a “gentle” setting.
Stoney thought he heard something. He put down the iPad and listened. Maybe it was just the wind rustling the palm trees, or the creaking of the big old house. Could anyone sneak past the Russians?
As they’d been ordered, the men known as The Unholy Three, who were responsible for six murders on the island, had told their hit man that his target was a trust-fund fop and heavy drinker who would most likely not hear him even if he kicked in the front door.
An easy kill.
But it was a trap.
The three old men were prisoners in a fishing lodge on Nevis owned by the brother of Basseterre Police Chief Konris Soubis. Basseterre was the capital of the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Stoney wondered
why in the hell he’d agreed to become involved in this case. He was retired from the Chicago PD and was living a comfortable life in Key West. He could not care less what happened on Saint Kitts. He’d never even been to the island before. It had to be that, after a life of action on the mean streets of Chicago, “comfortable” translated to “boredom,” he concluded.
When his friend, the Key West police chief, approached him with a “consulting assignment” for his pal Konris Soubis—just look at some case files of possible murders, nothing more—the word “murders” translated as “adrenaline.”
An old firehorse, answering the bell one more time.
There it was again.
The sound.
Not the rustling of palm fronds.
Not the creaking of the old house.
It was definitely a man.
The man Stoney was expecting.
If Jack Stoney had wanted an adrenaline boost, he was getting it now. He picked up the Mossberg. At close quarters, you always let a shotgun, not a handgun, which was harder to aim under stress, do your talking.
He realized that the sound he heard was the turning of doorknobs. The hit man was checking each of the five second-floor bedrooms.
Stoney waited, saw the doorknob on his bedroom slowly turn, and then . . .
When the fat lady had completed her aria, taken off her horned helmet, put down her spear, and gone out for a brewski, the hit man was lying unconscious on the hallway floor, his wrists and ankles bound with plastic ties.
The hit man was tall and muscular, with a jagged knife scar running down his right cheek. He was wearing a black turtleneck shirt, black military pants, and combat boots.
He was bleeding heavily from the mouth where Stoney had delivered a ferocious blow with the stock end of the shotgun. Maybe he’d had nice teeth. Now there was no way to know.
Stoney went downstairs to the kitchen, made a cell phone call, and then put a pot of coffee on to brew as he waited for Chief Soubis and a crime scene team.
One month later Jack Stoney was back to his life in Key West. It was a good life, Stoney thought, but after retiring from the Chicago police force, he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the excitement of the hunt until getting involved in another murder case. Maybe he’d get his Florida PI license and take on a few cases, just to keep himself sharp, he mused. Or maybe he’d check in with his former Chicago colleagues to see how they were getting along without him.
But for now, Jack Stoney was making the Nirvana ready for a cruise to the Turks and Caicos with his main squeeze, Miranda, who decided she could take two weeks off from her real estate agency in pursuit of sugar-sand beaches and rum drinks with fruit and little paper parasols in them.
Sam, Stoney’s cat, would come on the voyage too, even though he didn’t love sailing. But he enjoyed the fish that Stoney caught and Miranda prepared in the galley. She was a wonderful cook.
When Stoney told Sam they were going on a cruise, Sam looked at him and meowed, which Stoney interpreted as, “Are the tuna biting?”
Stoney met Miranda Lopez when he saw her sitting alone in a booth at the Rusty Scupper. The prettiest girl in the room. She was drumming her long nails on the tabletop and looked annoyed.
He went behind the bar and made a Papa Doble, a rum drink favored by Ernest Hemingway during his Key West years. He carried the drink to her booth, put it on the table in front of her and asked, “Are you waiting for this?”
She looked at him and said, “I’m waiting for my boyfriend who . . .”
Stoney slid into the booth opposite her and finished her sentence: “. . . who just lost the best thing he ever had.”
The hit man, whose name was Alex Reyes, out of Miami, had a new set of dentures, compliments of the Saint Kitts government. He now sat in a cell in Her Majesty’s Prison, awaiting the trial for murder in Magistrate’s Court.
The Unholy Trinity, three wealthy, retired Brits, had hired him to murder four of the island nation’s citizens over the past year, just because the victims had annoyed the men in some way or other.
The Saint Kitts attorney general told Stoney he was confident that, on the testimony of Reyes who’d agreed to cooperate in return for a reduced sentence, all three men would be convicted of first-degree murder. Jack Stoney thought he just might sail to Saint Kitts for the hangings.
45.
DEAD SOLID PERFECT
I was aboard Phoenix early one Saturday morning, sitting at the table in the galley with a cup of coffee. Marisa and Joe were still asleep in the stateroom. I’d just finished reading the draft of Bill Stevens’s latest book, Jack Stoney: Undercover in Paradise. It was the semidisguised story of the Naples murders.
Marisa was delighted that Jack Stoney had a girlfriend based upon her, a real babe. And he did base another character upon Lady Ashley Howe, and made her younger. She would have been pleased. I told Joe that Stoney had acquired a cat named Sam. Hard to tell if anything impresses a cat.
Even though the outcome of my work with the City of Naples hadn’t been ideal, the murders had stopped. Marisa reported that residential property values there had increased by 25 percent. Life was back to normal—or as normal as it could be in a rarefied world like that.
I had help solving the case from Marisa, Vasily, and Jack Stoney, and I was glad to have had it, given that my detecting skills had been on the shelf since retirement. Only a fool and his ego turned down assistance. And I was alive only because a Russian sniper was able to make a world-class shot.
Naples Mayor Wade Hansen had given me permission to tell Bill Stevens about The Case Of The Old White Men on the condition that nothing in the book would link the story to Naples.
It didn’t. Jack Stoney was retired to Key West, not Fort Meyers Beach; The Old White Men were now three ex-pat Brits known as The Unholy Trinity; and the setting was Saint Kitts, an island in the West Indies, and not a city even resembling Naples, Florida.
Vasily was delighted to have been promoted from Russian gangster to oligarch in the story. All other main characters and settings were properly disguised.
True to form, Mother Nature continued to cull the human herd. The Old White Men’s club now had just two members. Recently Arthur Bradenton was riding his horse when one of South Florida’s few surviving panthers appeared out of the brush and spooked it, tossing Bradenton out of the saddle, breaking his neck.
If Brother Timothy was correct in his beliefs, Bradenton’s immortal soul flew upward for a reckoning with Saint Peter. I imagined that whatever arguments Bradenton might have used to try to justify his earthly behavior to Saint Pete didn’t cut it, and he was residing in a considerably warmer climate than we have in South Florida.
Maybe if, before their obituaries were published in the Naples Daily News, Christopher Knowland and Roland Cox donated all of their money to the Boys and Girls Club, or to the Humane Society, or another worthy cause, and volunteered to join aid workers in West Africa to help fight an Ebola outbreak, they’d have a better shot at forgiveness and redemption during their final accounting. Brother Timothy would have counseled them to give that a shot.
I’d checked to make certain that Bill Stevens had done his homework for the ending of the new book, and he had. Google confirmed that executions were indeed still done by hanging on Saint Kitts. No problem there with the shortage of the chemicals used for lethal injections like we were still having in Florida. You never ran out of rope. So I had no edits at all for that final chapter.
I got up to pour another cup of coffee and noticed Joe, standing in the doorway to the stateroom, staring at me. Time for breakfast. I opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk, poured some in a dish for him, and set it on the floor. He rubbed against my leg and began lapping it up and purring contentedly.
I was scheduled to meet a roofing contractor at The Drunken Parrot later that morning to get an estimate for damage caused by a tropical storm three days earlier—the Phoenix escaped harm—and then have lunch with Cubby Cullen
at Doc Ford’s. Cubby called with the invite the day before, saying he’d like my opinion about “an open investigation” in Fort Myers Beach, something involving alligator poaching and meth cooking, which were somehow related.
I agreed to read the case file and offer any thoughts I had in return for a California burger with onion rings, both of which Doc Ford’s did very well. No harm in just scanning the file and offering a few thoughts, right?
I was planning another trip to Chicago in three days. Jenny told me that my grandson, Jack, still wasn’t quite old enough to go to a Cubs game on Bill Stevens’s rooftop. I wondered how old a kid had to be to eat a Chicago dog. However old that was, I’d be the one to get it for him.
Joe finished his milk and strolled over to the table, milk dripping from his whiskers, ready for the next course. I decided to make pancakes. I always made one in the shape of a little J, just for him. My father did that for my brother, Joe, and me on Sunday mornings.
As I was whisking the pancake batter, I heard Marisa yawn. I poured a mug of coffee for her and took it to her. She yawned again, stretched, and said, “How about something sweet to go with your coffee, big guy?”
Which I took to mean exactly that. The pancakes could wait.
Bill was coming down in a few days for some fishing, so I’d give the annotated manuscript of Jack Stoney: Undercover in Paradise, to him then. As with all the Jack Stoney books, the bad guys were brought to justice in a most satisfying way, the hero got the girl, and the future looked bright for Detective Lieutenant Jack Stoney of the Chicago PD Homicide Division, retired to Key West, but, his fans would demand, not permanently.
It was all dead-solid perfect, as only fiction can be.
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