Key Death (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 4)

by Jude Hardin

  “How long?”

  “Just wait there.”

  I hung up. It wasn’t unusual for party boys like Jim Ballard to close down the after-hours clubs and then sleep until two or three in the afternoon. Maybe he’d driven up to Miami’s South Beach last night. Maybe he’d tried to wash the murder of Nicholas Colt out of his system with alcohol. Maybe he’d tried to cleanse himself of that particular layer of filth. And if so, maybe he really had forgotten about the meeting with Cale. It was a distinct possibility.

  I’d dealt with plenty of drunks over the years, as a musician and as a private investigator, and Jim Ballard was one of the worst I’d ever seen. The way he’d been tapping that bottle of Cuervo on his boat, it was a wonder he could even stand up. Much less remember scheduling a meeting.

  So maybe he’d forgotten.

  I was counting on it being something like that. Hoping it was, anyway. I was hoping Jim would show up eventually, sometime before Cale got tired of waiting. Before Cale started the Porsche and drove away.

  Cale had mentioned getting rid of the Beemer. I assumed he meant the BMW Jim had sold to the guy up in Lauderdale. Apparently Jim wanted it to disappear for some reason, and apparently Cale with the 2FAST4U Porsche was in a position to drive up there and make it happen.

  For a price.

  There must have been something incriminating in that car, something Jim was determined to keep hidden.

  I opened my netbook and lucked into finding an unsecured Wi-Fi signal. I looked up the BMW dealership in Fort Lauderdale, and then the number for the new owner of Jim’s car. Drake Upton. I remembered seeing it before. What I didn’t remember seeing was his age. Drake Upton was eighty-seven years old.

  I called Lauderdale BMW first. It was the closest dealership to Drake’s house, and I was hoping he took it there for service and maintenance. And, with a car that valuable, I was hoping an alarm system had been installed.

  I got lucky on both counts. I talked to a guy named Phil in the service department. I pretended to be Drake Upton, and Phil gave me the information I needed.

  I punched in Drake’s number next. It rang five or six times, and he finally picked up. He sounded as though he might have recently swallowed a handful of gravel.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “May I speak to Mr. Upton, please?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Bill, at the service department over at Lauderdale BMW. How are you today, sir?”

  “I already filled out your satisfaction survey,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I know you did, Mr. Upton, and we appreciate your business, sir. What I wanted to talk to you about is the recall on your antitheft system.”

  “There’s a recall?”

  “I’m afraid so. You’ll be getting a notice in the mail soon, and of course your new alarm system will be installed at absolutely no cost to you. In the meantime, we’re offering to come to your house and adjust the sensitivity on your current system.”

  “You want to come to my house?”

  “Yes. The service team here is determined to rectify this problem with as little inconvenience to the customer as possible. And of course the house call will also be free of charge.”

  “What’s the problem with the alarm system?”

  “Some of them have a faulty computer chip,” I said. “Particularly on your model. And there have been several cars stolen recently in and around the Fort Lauderdale area. We just want to help you protect your property best you can until the recall parts come in.”

  “Well, I appreciate that,” Drake said. “But the car’s in the garage most of the time anyway. My eyesight’s not so great anymore, you know, and—”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “And I’m assuming there’s a burglar alarm wired to your garage.”

  “Well, no, I never really saw any need for one.”

  “I see. Well, that tells me your car is more vulnerable to theft than what we’re comfortable with. Would it be OK for me to drop by this evening and adjust your system for you? It won’t take long.”

  “I guess that’ll be all right. What time?”

  “Is seven OK?”

  “OK.”

  We said good-bye and disconnected.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I checked the distance from Key West to Fort Lauderdale on my computer. 189 miles. I figured I could make it in three hours, and then it would probably take me another thirty minutes to find Drake Upton’s house. So I needed to leave Key West no later than three-thirty. That gave me a little over an hour and a half to wait and see if Jim came home. If Jim came home, money would change hands and the deal would be on.

  One more feather in my cap when I made the anonymous call to the police.

  I wanted that feather, but I also wanted to get to the BMW before Cale Meade got to it. I wanted to look it over, try to see why Jim wanted it back so badly. Try to see what he was so worried about. If Cale Meade got to it first, it would probably end up flattened by a crusher and stacked with a bunch of other similarly fated cars in a scrapyard somewhere. The steel would be shredded and sold as raw stock to a Chinese refrigerator factory or something, and whatever Jim was trying to hide would be gone forever. I wanted to get to it before that happened.

  I thought about calling Drake Upton back and changing our appointment to an earlier time and leaving for Fort Lauderdale now. That way I would be sure to get to the car before Cale Meade did. I thought about it, decided against it. Cale wouldn’t do the job today. Today would be for collecting the money, and for talking out a plan. Professional thieves don’t just wander in on short notice and start grabbing things. Professional thieves thoroughly analyze the situation and make detailed plans. All that takes time. Cale was a professional. He wouldn’t do the job today. I stopped worrying about it.

  I killed a little time by calling a music store in Jacksonville and asking how much they charged for guitar lessons. Just out of curiosity. The cost was astonishing. Apparently you could make some decent money teaching an instrument. Not that I would ever seriously consider doing it for a living.

  Another fifteen minutes went by. The Porsche was still parked in Jim’s driveway, and Jim still wasn’t home. Cale’s windows were up, so I assumed the car was running. I figured he was keeping the air conditioner on, trying to stay cool and comfy while he waited. Probably not terribly concerned about his carbon footprint.

  Instead of just twiddling my thumbs, I decided to do a little research on The Zombie. I didn’t think Jim Ballard was the serial killer; but, if my hunch about his killing Alison was correct, then Jim had studied enough about The Zombie to do a respectable job of copying him, and a good detective always tries to get inside the mind of his suspect. Most of the time it doesn’t help, but it never hurts. I wanted to know at least as much as Jim knew.

  The information was sketchy, but twelve murders had been attributed to The Zombie so far, the most recent being Alison Palmer. Hers was the fourth in Key West. The other three Key West slayings were also women, and all of them had been between the ages of Twenty-four and thirty-five at the time of their deaths. The eight remaining murders had occurred in eight different locations, all in southern states along the East Coast.

  The first victim had been found nearly six years ago, in an abandoned warehouse near Greenville, South Carolina. Her name was Rebecca Groyo, and she was Twenty-six years old.

  The second was a thirty-one-year-old convenience-store clerk named Shelby Wilcox in Savannah, Georgia, found dead and brainless in the store’s walk-in refrigerator.

  The Zombie’s third victim was the first man of the bunch, a retired high-school science teacher in Durham, North Carolina. His name was Lou Robinson. He was found dead in a La-Z-Boy recliner, with ten empty beer bottles on the table beside him. I wondered if the police had interviewed any of his former students as potential suspects. There must have been thousands of them.

  The next murder was also in North Carolina, this one in Wilmington. A Twen
ty-nine-year-old army captain had been home on leave, and had been out drinking with some friends. They found her car at one of the local taverns, and they found her body in the woods.

  The next victim, the fifth, was the one farthest north. It happened in Lynchburg, Virginia. An obstetrician named Kari Elm had been called to the hospital at three o’clock in the morning to deliver a baby. The mother and the newborn made it. Kari Elm didn’t.

  The sixth murder occurred in Key West, but then The Zombie went back north to Brunswick, Georgia for the seventh. The body was found in a creek bed under a railroad bridge. The victim actually lived and worked in St. Augustine, Florida. It was the second male of the group, a registered nurse named Roger Englehart.

  The eighth slaying occurred in the seaside community of Jupiter, Florida. A thirty-three-year-old accountant from Cocoa Beach had checked into the Holiday Inn for a tax seminar. One of the maids found her resting peacefully in bed the next afternoon. A little too peacefully.

  The ninth murder, the last of the eight that hadn’t occurred in Key West, was particularly gruesome. It happened in Cape Fear, North Carolina. The victim, a Twenty-eight-year-old bank teller who moonlighted as a bartender on the weekends, had a flat tire on her way to work one morning. They found her in a ditch near the overpass where her car broke down. Not only was her brain missing, her tongue had been cut out and all her teeth had been pulled.

  The four murders in Key West were spread out over three years. The one before Alison’s, the one I heard about on the radio on my way to see John Fogerty at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre, had also been augmented by additional mutilations. In that one they had found the woman’s heart where her brain should have been.

  At 3:03 Cale Meade backed out of Jim’s driveway, drove to the end of the street, and took a right at the stop sign. I decided to follow him. I didn’t know if he had given up on Jim coming home, or if he had talked to Jim on the phone and arranged to meet elsewhere. I wasn’t very worried about him mentioning the earlier phone call from me. He had no reason to be suspicious. He was just a thief looking to make a buck, and moving forward with the job would be first on his mind.

  And if he did mention the call, that would be OK too. It might plant a seed of fear in Jim’s alcohol-soaked brain, and a fearful man tends to make irrational decisions and stupid mistakes. A little fear in Jim’s heart might actually work to my advantage.

  On my way to the intersection, a blue SUV with a Watson Realty sign passed me on the other side of the road. I guessed it was the agent I’d talked to on the phone, coming to show me the house. I felt bad about wasting her time, but not bad enough to turn around.

  I followed Cale for ten minutes, and finally he pulled to the curb and parked at a meter and walked into a coffee joint called Perk-U-Now. I found a spot across the street where I could watch the shop. I didn’t see Jim’s Audi anywhere. A few minutes later, Cale walked out with a woman. It was the same woman who had dropped him off at Jake’s Key West Saloon yesterday. Same white visor, same big sunglasses. Cale and his companion climbed into the Porsche and drove away. I followed them to a motel. It was playtime. I figured one or the other of them must have been married. Maybe both of them were.

  I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was that Cale had given up on meeting with Jim. At least for the time being. So that was that. I drove past the motel, made a U-turn at the next light, and headed for Fort Lauderdale.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I stopped at a Kmart in Miami and bought some khaki work clothes, a pair of sturdy black shoes with rubber soles, and a can of motor oil. I changed in the restroom, scuffed the shoes in the parking lot, worked a little of the motor oil and some grit from the pavement together in my hands, and wiped it on my new shirt and pants. I capped the oil, tied it into the plastic bag I’d carried it out in, and put it in the trunk along with the clothes I’d been wearing before I changed.

  Tools. I needed tools.

  I went back in and bought a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers. They came in a little plastic case that fit in my shirt pocket. While I was at it, I bought a prepaid cell phone and a roll of duct tape. I used to own some fairly sophisticated surveillance equipment, but I ended up selling it during my love affair with heroin. I pawned it all and bought dope with the money. I thought the prepaid phone might come in handy as a poor man’s audio bug.

  I wanted to look as though I’d been working in the service department at Lauderdale BMW all day. The only thing missing from my costume was a patch on the shirt that said BILL, but I was counting on eighty-seven-year-old Drake Upton with bad eyes not noticing.

  I got to his house at 7:07. It was dark already, but Drake’s place had plenty of exterior lighting. He came walking out of the front door as I pulled into the driveway. He must have been watching for me. He was short and thin and bald, and he wore Bermuda shorts and a loud polyester shirt and leather sandals. Thick bifocals. He seemed to get around pretty well. No cane, no walker.

  We met on the sidewalk in front of his house.

  “Drake Upton,” he said.

  “Bill Johnson,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  We shook hands.

  “You new at the shop? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you there before.”

  “I’ve been there almost a year,” I said. “Just part-time, though. I’m sure you know Phil, right?”

  He nodded. “Well, you want to take a look at the car?”

  “Sure. Is it in the garage?”

  “Yeah. You got tools?”

  I pulled the little plastic case out of my shirt pocket. “This is all I’ll need today,” I said.

  “Can I see that?”

  “Sure.”

  I handed him the case. I didn’t know anything about the alarm system on Drake’s BMW, or any other kind of alarm system for that matter, but the jeweler’s screwdrivers looked like something a technician might adjust one with. Drake examined the box, handed it back.

  “Come on in the house,” he said. “We can get to the garage from in there.”

  Apparently Drake didn’t know anything about car alarms either. I followed him inside.

  We walked through the living room and into the kitchen. There was a breakfast nook with a bistro table and two stools next to a door that opened into the garage. Drake opened the door and motioned for me to enter.

  “Watch your step,” he said.

  The garage floor was about eight inches lower than the rest of the house. It was covered with black-and-white vinyl tiles arranged in the pattern of a checkerboard. It reminded me of the tables at Kenny’s Organic Grocery. Metal signs and advertising displays and other memorabilia from filling stations and tire stores adorned the walls. There was a yellowed Texaco calendar opened to June 1962, back when you could trust your car to the man who wore the star.

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” I said.

  “Petroliana, they call it. Kind of a hobby, I guess. I was quite the collector back in the day.”

  I pointed to a set of shelves lined with oil cans, dozens of them, each one a different brand.

  “Are all those full?” I said.

  “They’re empty. Just for decoration.”

  I wondered if he might like the plastic Pennzoil container I’d bought at Kmart. I didn’t ask.

  “She’s a beauty,” I said, gesturing toward the shiny little BMW coupe. It was white with a medium-blue interior. All stock, all original, right down to the hubcaps.

  “Thanks,” Drake said. “Maybe we’ll take it for a spin when you get done.”

  “Are the keys in it?”

  He reached into his pocket. “Here you go.”

  He handed me a ring with at least twenty jingling hunks of metal on it. All shapes and sizes. I thought about asking him if he was also a janitor back in the day.

  “I’ll just be a few minutes,” I said.

  I wanted him to leave. I wanted to plant the audio bug, and I didn’t want him to stand there watching me while I c
ombed the car for evidence. He must have read my mind. He didn’t stand there watching me. He pulled up a stool so he could be more comfortable.

  I opened the driver’s side door, found the lever and popped the hood, all the while checking for anything that looked unusual. So far there was nothing.

  Drake had left the door leading from the garage to the house open, but it wasn’t helping cool the garage much. It was hot and stuffy out there, the air heavy with the smells of baked floor tiles and tire rubber.

  Sweat trickled down my back as I leaned into the engine compartment and pretended to tweak something with one of the screwdrivers. The motor was clean. The valve cover looked as though someone might have scrubbed it with a toothbrush. No corrosion on the battery terminals, no grease on the spark plug wires. Nothing. The whole thing was immaculate. Like it was built yesterday. I fiddled in there for a few minutes, and then opened the passenger’s side door.

  “Do you have a flashlight I can borrow?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  He got up and walked into the house. While he was gone, I took a quick look under the seats and floor mats, front and back. I didn’t find anything, not even a stray dust particle. Everything had been swept and vacuumed and polished and waxed. Everything looked showroom new.

  “Here you go,” Drake said.

  He handed me the flashlight, sat back down on his stool.

  I pulled a different screwdriver out of the plastic case, knelt on the garage floor and looked under the dash. I reached in with my tool and adjusted an invisible potentiometer.

  “I think that should do the trick,” I said. “It might be a little more sensitive than you’re used to, but you won’t have to deal with it for long. The recall parts should be in by next week.”

  The phone in the house rang. It sounded like the bell at a firehouse.

  “I better get that,” Drake said, moving toward the door. “It might be my grandson.”

  When he was out of sight, I walked around and opened the trunk. It was fairly large, and at first glance it appeared to be as clean as the rest of the car. I shined the flashlight into all the little recesses and crevices, and I was about to give up when something caught my eye. There was a tiny dark spot where the covering for the left rear wheel well met the trunk floor. I pressed the seam with my fingers, saw that the spot went deeper. I scraped it lightly with the blade of my screwdriver. It might have been something else, but it looked and acted like dried blood. I tapped some of the flakes from the tip of the screwdriver into the plastic case. I slid the tool into its slot, snapped the case shut and put it back in my shirt pocket. If it was blood, and if it was evidence from a crime, I had at least secured enough for a lab to perform a DNA test. The car, and any evidence it might contain, wouldn’t exist for long once Cale Meade got his hands on it.