A Hard Death

by Jonathan Hayes

  Jenner froze.

  He picked up the white box, looked at the Craine Brothers Medical logo and pale blue globe, the “No. 1 in Cold Medicine” slogan. Turned the box to read the ingredient list.

  And in an instant he understood. All of it.

  Cold medicine. The white van with the blue globe—CBM logo. The farmhouse, the well-paid field workers—it all fell into place.

  It was all about the box van entering as they left Craine’s farm, the van with the Craine Brothers Medical logo on its side. It wasn’t stocked with shampoo and baby powder—there were twenty men, tops, working there, they’d just buy locally in bulk.

  No, that Craine Brothers van was bringing something more specialized: cold medicine. Tens of thousands of tablets filled with phenylpropanolamine or pseudoephedrine. In the farmhouse or the bunkhouses, there’d be men breaking down the capsules and tablets and then, through the magic of modern chemistry, converting those active ingredients into pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine.

  The packet Jenner had taken from Marty’s car was approaching 100 percent purity. How did Marty come to have their product?

  The original packet in Marty’s car had been tied with the waxed twine they used to suture the bodies in the autopsy room—Jenner had assumed that’s where Marty had got it. But funeral directors used identical twine to sew up their bodies, and Marty had been at Jones Brothers the day he went missing.

  It had already occurred to Jenner that Jones, who shipped coffins all over the country, might be moving contraband; now the supply part of the puzzle was slipping into place. With meth convictions on his sheet, maybe Reggie had connections to someone at the farm, maybe even Brodie.

  Moving factory volumes of meth would be a challenge—the DEA, local police, Highway Patrol, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement over the state combed the highways and the back roads for meth and cocaine smugglers. But probably wouldn’t stop a hearse. Jones could even ship the bodies by air—did they even check baggage on domestic flights with drug-sniffer dogs? These days, it was all about bombs. And even if they checked baggage, Jenner doubted they’d open the coffins to check a cadaver.

  Jenner realized he was pacing. He sat back down at the desk, and stared blankly toward the ocean.

  Chip Craine wouldn’t be the mastermind—he was hungry, he was corrupt, he was a risk-taker, but Mexican cartels ran the speed trade across the country with an iron fist. Craine would be the perfect silent partner, even more for his pharmaceutical connections than for his farm. And if the “allowance” his brother gave him was as miserly as Maggie had said, he’d welcome a steady flow of cash.

  Jesus. He must be making a fortune. Hundreds of thousands, no, millions every month.

  Head buzzing, Jenner got up and started pulling his things together. What should he do about this? He couldn’t trust anyone in Douglas County. He needed to get back to New York, then speak to the DEA.

  Packing didn’t take long—all Jenner had to do was fold his few remaining shirts, a pair of pants, and some underclothes into the big black plastic garbage bags. In the bathroom, he brushed his teeth, then carefully packed the complimentary toothbrush and mini toothpaste. He helped himself to the wrapped soaps and unused bottles of Crab-tree & Evelyn shampoo and conditioner; he’d need them at the fleapits where he’d be staying on his drive home.

  There was a tap at the door. Jenner peered through the peephole, then opened the door wide.

  Jenner said, “Good morning, Mister Craine.”

  CHAPTER 95

  Chip Craine looked well-rested, tanned, and healthy in sunglasses, open-necked white shirt, and a cream linen suit. At his feet was a brown leather Ghurka overnight bag.

  He set the sunglasses on the table and glanced around the room, unimpressed.

  “The Ritz is better—you should’ve stayed there.”

  “I like this place. Besides, it’s half the price.”

  Craine shrugged.

  “So, doctor, I hear you’ve reached a crossroads in your time here.”

  “By which you mean…”

  “By which I mean I hear they’re throwing you out, bringing in some hotshot from Miami to clean up your mess.”

  “Ah. Is that what you hear?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t really blame you.”

  Craine looked at Jenner’s garbage-bag luggage.

  “You’ll be leaving soon, I imagine.”

  Jenner nodded.

  “I had breakfast with my daughter this morning, and she told me something curious: she says you think I’m somehow mixed up in everything that’s happened here. Is that true?”

  Jenner grinned; now he was getting somewhere. “Yes, that’s what I think. I think you’re in it up to your neck. I know exactly what you’re doing. I know how you’re doing it, I think I even know why you’re doing it.”

  Craine’s expression darkened briefly, and his lips tightened. Then he relaxed and smiled warmly.

  “Doctor, what you ‘know’ is one thing, what you can prove is even less.”

  “Perhaps. But in an hour or so, I’ll be sitting down in a Major Crimes interrogation room, and explaining to them why I think you killed a cop, and why you tried to kill me. How your men killed Marty and Bobbie Roburn. And the hanging men. And that kid from New York. And I’ll lay the facts—sorry, the ‘facts’—out very neatly, and at the end they’ll be itching to string you up themselves. Trust me—I can be quite persuasive.”

  “I’m sure you can, doctor! I’m sure you can…” Craine laughed. “But again, you can prove nothing. And if you tried, I’ve got enough influence here to make your evidence disappear and you disappear along with it. Come at me with anything and I’ll destroy it, destroy you. It really is that simple.” He was still smiling.

  Jenner nodded. “Oh, it won’t be about me—I’ll be long gone. But the cops around here—the ones you haven’t bought off—and the DEA will dig, and they’ll dig, and little by little everything will fall into place…”

  Craine watched impassively as Jenner picked up a cold piece of toast, twisted open the little pot of Seville orange marmalade, and scooped some onto the bread.

  Craine relaxed a little. He held his hands up, palms open, with an expression of genial helplessness. “Doctor, we’re getting off on the wrong foot here. I have no personal vendetta against you—you’re a helluva lot better than some of the jerks my daughter has dragged home.

  “May I sit? I think it’s cards-on-the-table time.” He sat without waiting for a reply. He smiled widely.

  “Please understand: my associates are not the live-and-let-live types. You screw them, they wipe every trace of your DNA from the surface of the planet. And they do it in a very public way, so others will learn from your example.”

  Jenner took a bite of toast, then said, “So, tell me—does your brother know what you’re up to? I’m guessing no. He’s doing quite nicely with his huge corporation, and I doubt he’d want any splatter from your little side business.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised at just how protective of me Gabriel can be.” Craine raised a hand impatiently. “But wait, doctor, please! This conversation really is going in completely the wrong direction—this needn’t be so…confrontational.”

  Jenner was silent.

  “I’ve come to make you a proposition—and I think it’s more than generous. I’ve made some inquiries into your…situation, and it seems that you’re not quite as comfortable as one might expect a well-qualified, experienced physician to be.” He glanced at the three garbage bags holding Jenner’s clothes.

  Jenner’s eyes strayed to Craine’s overnight bag.

  Craine nodded. “Ah, yes, doctor—a bribe. You know that if you tell the police about your theories, some of them will not believe you, because they are sympathetic to my cause. And even if you persuade someone to act on your speculation, they’d have to go in front of a judge—and I think you know by now that they’ll have a very hard time persuading any judge in this county to issue a
search warrant for my property. And I assure you that when and if they finally got a warrant, the police who search the property would find nothing but pigs and feed and fertilizer.”

  He picked up the bag and put it on the bed.

  “Now have a look, doctor.”

  Jenner shook his head, so Craine unzipped the bag and turned it upside down. Cash bucketed out, tightly wrapped packets of used hundreds and fifties, Craine shaking until no more money fell. There was a heap of bricks of cash on the bed nearly a foot in height.

  “I brought this for you, doctor. I’m not sure exactly how much is left in this one, but it’s well over $800,000. That’s almost a million dollars in cash, laundered and untraceable, for you to do whatever you want.”

  Jenner looked at the money.

  There was a lot of it. Even as a loose pile, the cash had the compact density of stacked cement blocks. Jenner wanted to touch it, to muss it up even more, to send a $5,000 packet of fifties flying across the bedspread with the flick of his wrist. To see what money felt like as a material rather than as a token for something else.

  “You brought this for me…”

  “Yes. I thought it might smooth things over between us, help you to leave Port Fontaine with at least some pleasant memories.” Craine’s eyebrows were raised expectantly, his teeth immaculately white in the tan of his face.

  “And in exchange…”

  Craine sat at the table and gestured to the money. “Here’s my offer: take this little farewell present from me. You tuck it away in the trunk of your car, hide it under those garbage bags there. You talk to the detectives. You tell them whatever you want about yesterday, about your visit to my farm; you just avoid any speculation as to what might or might not have happened later as a result of your visit, and you stress that there was really nothing out of the ordinary at La Grulla Blanca as compared to any of the other farms you visited.”

  He raised a finger. “Now, in your discussion with the police, there would also be no need for you to spin yarns about what Mr. Jones does at his funeral home. Your speculation could cause tremendous suffering and grief for the relatives of the deceased. If you decide to have bodies exhumed, they’ll only have to dig up a couple of empty husks—none of which will contain anything the least bit illicit—before public outcry destroys the career of any law enforcement officer involved in your witch hunt. Your investigation would be dropped faster than a dirty Band-Aid picked up off the floor of an Ebola ward.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, actually, that’s about the size of it.” He folded his hands across his lap.

  “That’s not enough. People died here, people I cared about. You just can’t go on doing this.”

  “I told them you might be this way.” Craine sighed. “Very well. We are prepared to go further: if you can be discreet, I’ll stop any questionable activity at my estate and get back to just raising pigs and strawberries again. Maybe tomatoes, just to piss off Bob Gonzalez at UFL Tomato.” The twinkle again; he was smooth, Jenner had to give him that.

  “I’ve done very well with this project, but it’s also been very stressful for me, particularly recently. I was told everything would be run smoothly and efficiently, and lately it’s been anything but.”

  Jenner said, “Well, I’m sorry if this has caused you some angst. But I lost friends, people I loved.”

  “I was coming to that. So, if you’ll work with us, the people whose actions resulted in the loss of your friends will be dealt with. Severely.”

  “What do you mean, ‘severely’?”

  A dismissive wave of the hand. “Neither you nor I want to think about that, I assure you. Let’s just say: very severely.” He said it as casually as if discussing an aphid problem with his gardener.

  Jenner said, “If your associates are such bastards, what guarantee of safety would I have? Why would they just give me money and let me walk?”

  Craine’s brow furrowed. “Well, doctor, you’re a celebrity now, on TV day and night. If we’d lost you last night—and by the way, I had nothing to do with that; indeed, I think it was a disastrous miscalculation, a grave tactical error. But if we’d lost you, your part of the story would be over, and things would settle down. But you survived an attempt on your life, and now are even more newsworthy.

  “My associates feel this situation would be much better handled if the authorities question you but nothing untoward comes to light. You placate them, you reassure them. Then you disappear, go back to New York. The authorities will eventually discover the bodies of the men responsible for the violence—case closed. Then life gets back to normal for everyone.

  “As far as the cash goes, well, that’s the price of doing business.” Craine winked.

  He leaned back and studied Jenner.

  “This whole affair will be wrapped up quietly and quickly. I’m leaving town this afternoon, to spend a month or two in France with my daughter.”

  He waved toward the stack of money. “I’d suggest that, once you’ve spoken with the authorities, you do something similar.”

  Jenner was silent.

  Craine was right: even if the cops took his theories seriously, there’d be nothing at the farm by the time they could get in. And if they found something, it would be almost impossible to implicate Craine. The workers were all illegals; they’d disappear at the slightest hint of trouble. And even if they were caught, the code of silence enforced by the cartels meant no one would cooperate, no one would rat out Marty’s killers.

  Jenner looked at Craine. “I want to know why Marty and Bobbie Roburn were murdered.”

  “I wasn’t involved in that.” Craine shook his head. “But my understanding is that Dr. Roburn was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and saw something he shouldn’t have seen. If it’s any consolation, I’m told that the two men responsible for what happened to Dr. and Mrs. Roburn were…severely punished. And the punishment was administered in a public way as a warning about what happens to those who interfere with civilians in this county.”

  “The hangings.”

  Craine inclined his head very slightly.

  “What about the other two hanged men?”

  Craine looked weary. “I really don’t know, Dr. Jenner. They did something—most likely took drugs, or blabbed about what happened on the farm. And they were punished. I don’t know what that university student did—I own the farm, I don’t run it—but he probably said the wrong thing to the wrong person. He was perceived as a threat, with minimal visible downside to his elimination.”

  Craine grinned weakly. “But I’ve had enough. I’m out. I want to close up shop. I just want to take my daughter and go, spend some time in Cannes, or in Cap Ferrat, put this behind me. Get a tan, drink too much red wine, get fat on foie gras…”

  “How will you know if I live up to my end of the bargain? How do you know I won’t just walk into Major Crimes and lay it all out for them?”

  Craine feigned disappointment. “Doctor Jenner, I’ll know what your statement says before you walk out of the interrogation room. Trust me on that.”

  He stood and put on his sunglasses. “I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but it’s an easy choice, doctor: walk away rich, or die poor.”

  Jenner looked at the heap of money on the bed.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake—just say yes!” Craine leaned against the back of the door, grinning. “I don’t want to pack that fucking bag again!”

  Jenner turned to him.

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 96

  A faint, coppery smell of sweat and paper and coin rose from the money. Jenner selected packets of bills, riffled them to see they were all real, not just real hundreds disguising stacks of white paper. He pulled bills out at random, squinted at them, looking for forgeries; he didn’t really know how to spot a good forgery, but these looked real, and when he held them to the bedside lamp, a ghostly gray watermark appeared in every one.

  They were real.

  He grabbed the overnight b
ag and scrutinized it. How large were electronic trackers? On TV they were tiny, but what about in real life?

  Jenner opened his jackknife and cut open the lining of the bag, tearing it up with a coarse rip as the blade sawed along the thick green satin. It took several cuts to free the lining completely; underneath, Jenner saw nothing that wasn’t leather or some structural element from the world of luxury luggage.

  He shoveled the cash back into the bag, zipped it, then carried it into the bathroom. He was surprised at the weight—a good fifty pounds, he figured. He wedged the bag under the vanity, then draped a towel over the part that stuck out. He slid the stool in front for additional cover, then reached into the shower stall and turned the tap.

  With the water roaring, he went back into the main room, pulling the bathroom door shut behind him. He grabbed his car keys and sunglasses and stepped out into the hallway, turning to drape the do not disturb sign over the doorknob.

  CHAPTER 97

  Twenty minutes later, Jenner returned to his room carrying two Winn-Dixie shopping bags. The sign was still on the doorknob, the roar of rushing water still coming from the shower. Under the vanity, the bag was untouched. And he was sure no one had followed him.

  He tossed a bag of rubber bands onto the bed, then a box of contractor-weight, heavy-duty garbage bags. He set one of the empty Winn-Dixie paper bags on the floor between his feet, and went through the packets one by one. Some were professionally wrapped with paper binding ribbon while others were held together by rubber bands; Jenner tore off the wrappers and the rubber bands, discarding them into the paper bag at his feet and replacing them with fresh rubber bands.

  The packets were mostly in hundreds, the bills nonconsecutively numbered. Some of the notes were pristine, and a smaller number were ready for shredding, but generally the cash was in fair-to-good condition.