The Apostle
Page 28
Belafonte said, “Hallelujah’s accountant is Cecil, Hayes Johnson’s brother. Somehow Johnson discovered the intrepid Menendez suspected skimming, which turns out to have been exactly right: three tax-free million a year, one-point six mil a year to Johnson – who probably set it all up – eight hundred G’s a year to Cecil, six to Doctor Uttleman. Roberta Menendez knew a member of the park’s board and approached her. It probably got back to Johnson that way.”
My head was topsy-turvy. “How do you have exact figures?”
Roy’s turn. “Three hours ago Jacksonville agents raided Cecil Johnson’s office with two FCLE forensic accountants in tow. They found a set of duplicate books in a safe you could have opened with a penknife. They also recovered emails between the three men saying something had to be done about Menendez before, as one poignantly put it, ‘this bitch destroys our retirement fund’.”
“What about Schrum?” I asked, recalling that he’d created the park.
“Clean. No payouts in his direction,” Roy said. “I think Johnson saw a chance to turn HJ into a personal profit center.”
“Machado,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “Bring me back to him.”
“Machado has a thirty-five-year-old sister with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Machado’s dirt-ass poor, had to put his sister in the cheapest care he could find, a dump. Johnson made Machado an offer. Care to guess what?”
It took me five seconds. “Eliminate Menendez and the sister gets upgraded.”
Roy nodded. “The sister’s now in a high-class place in Orlando, with the bills paid by Hector, who went from a salary of thirty-five grand a year to eighty-five. Oddly enough, the care in the new facility is about fifty G’s a year.”
“Where from here, Roy?” I said, pretty much knowing the answer.
“I think we can find a way Machado’s sister stays in decent care.” He winked. “Contingent on Hector’s spilling everything he knows. As far as the FCLE breaking the Menendez case, well …”
“Miami-Dade was instrumental in solving the case,” I finished, knowing how the script would be written. “The FCLE was happy to assist in any small way possible.”
“Menendez was theirs. Officer Roberts was theirs. They need it.”
“When the reports are written on this one,” I said, “I want it noted that key findings in the Menendez case were—”
“—the result of splendid police work by Officer Holly Belafonte,” Roy said. “Already handled.” He smiled at Belafonte. “I expect a gold shield is in your future, Officer Belafonte. Congratulations.”
She reddened as we gave her a round of applause. Roy thanked us for our hard work, then started back to the hall, now streaming with incoming sunlight. He stopped in the threshold, head cocked, like a sudden thought had arrived. He turned and looked at Harry.
“Can I see you in my office for a few minutes, Detective Nautilus?”
“Sure …” Harry said, following Roy into the hall. “But it’s no longer Detective.”
“I guess that depends on how much you’re enjoying retirement,” Roy said, clapping his hand on Harry’s shoulder and angling him down the hall, voice diminishing as the pair trod the carpet to his office. “I’ve got a couple odd ideas I’d like to bend your ear with …”
61
The pink Adidas cross-trainers of Sissy Carol Sparks padded down the sidewalk of Little Havana, past a used clothing store and a bodega. When she’d pushed her feet into the Ferragamo slings this morning the things had hurt. Maybe it was because the six-hundred-dollar shoes had been bought from a Chevy parked in an alley off of Flagler Street for a hundred-twenty bucks, stolen, or maybe the damn things were fakes. It didn’t matter: she’d dropped them in the trash as she’d left the apartment. She’d jammed her three cocktail gowns in after them, and was now dressed in loose slacks and a nondescript yellow blouse. Her hair was pulled back and held in place with a red rubber band.
Sissy had been thinking about her life. All the way from sprinting from her drunken uncle in Hicksville to a crazy-eyed looney chucking rocks at her head and yelling about sin.
Damn, but those shoes had hurt.
Sissy had a small suitcase in her hand: a couple pairs of underwear, some blouses, jeans, T-shirts. Her cosmetic case slimmed down to basics.
“Get over here, girl,” her uncle called from the back of her mind, unshaven for four days, staggering on squishy legs, a bottle of Jim Beam in his hand. “I wanna give your pretty face a kiss.” Her uncle’s voice was replaced by the voice of a music teacher in high school, the pair sitting on his shabby couch in his apartment at the edge of a corn field. “You’re so much older than you are, Sissy …” a tongue licking her neck as fingers crawled up her thigh. “You wanna know what I mean by that?”
Then to the great big guy at Hallelujah Jubilee, Mister Johnson, called in to meet Sissy on her second interview at the park and staring at her like she was a big, juicy steak.
“We could use someone like you, Miss Sparks – may I call you Sissy? Someone to help us find and help special girls like yourself. To be their leader, so to speak. A mentor. Do you know what that means?”
She’d never left Hicksville. It was stuck inside her wherever she went, whatever she did, carried around like a disease in her heart. No matter how high she thought she was flying, she was still a worm crawling in the dirt.
Until everything changed, nothing changed.
The pink Adidases of Sissy Carol Sparks stopped on the pavement, the sun blazing like a golden torch in the sky. Sissy took a deep breath, tightened her grip on the suitcase, and turned to a walkway leading to a large and brightly colored two-story house set back into palmettos and blooming jacarandas. There was a small sign on the front of the house, a cross framed in a pair of sun-yellow wings.
Below the image were the words Butterfly Haven.
Acknowledgements
Thunderous accolades as always to the splendid folks at HarperCollins UK, with special shout-outs to Sarah Hodgson, Anne O’Brien and the graphics staff. Thanks also to Lucy Childs of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. And special “high-five” gratitude for technical input goes to Officer Kyle Shipps of the Prairie Village, Kansas, Police Department.
If you liked THE APOSTLE, try:
A series of brutal assaults in Miami leaves Detective Carson Ryder, specialist in bizarre crimes, mystified. None of the victims can recall their ordeal, but evidence reveals the predator’s name, height, age and colouring. Carson knows exactly who he’s after – so why can’t he find him?
With each abduction the violence is escalating, and it’s only a matter of time before torture becomes murder …
Click here to buy The Memory Killer
About the Author
J.A. Kerley spent years as an advertising agency writer and producer before his wife demanded he quit work and write a novel, which he thought a fine idea. The result was The Hundredth Man, the first in the Carson Ryder series. An avid angler, canoeist and hiker, Kerley has traveled extensively throughout the South, especially coastal regions such as Mobile, Alabama, the setting for many of his novels, and the Florida Keys. He has a cabin in the Kentucky mountains, which appeared as a setting in Buried Alive. He lives in Newport, Kentucky, where he enjoys sitting on the levee and watching the barges rumble up and down the Ohio River.
Also by J.A. Kerley
The Hundredth Man
The Death Collectors
The Broken Souls
Blood Brother
In the Blood
Little Girls Lost
Buried Alive
Her Last Scream
The Killing Game
The Death Box
The Memory Killer
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