DEAD GONE a gripping crime thriller full of twists

by T. J. Brearton

  “Yes.” He ended the call.

  He was about to phone Blythe when Detective Gomez’s number flashed on his screen.

  “Lange. You asked for video.”

  “I did.” Tom felt a rush.

  “Hush has no cameras, as you know. But, we pulled video from Gleason’s, the car dealership next door. It’s pretty bad, not much on it of use, I don’t think. But we also found there’s a camera just down the street, at a mattress warehouse. Haven’t pulled it yet. What do you want to do?”

  Tom opened the door to the terrace and looked out over the water. “I want to come in and see the video from Gleason’s. I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes? What’re you taking, a helicopter?”

  “I stayed in Tampa. I’ll come to you, then go to the warehouse myself.”

  “Alright. We’ll be here.”

  Gomez hung up and Tom gathered his things, strapping on his shoulder holster, checking the weapon.

  Down on the main floor he used the hotel’s wireless printer to print out Carrie Hobson’s bank records. The hotel offered a free continental breakfast in the main lounge and Tom scarfed up a bagel and grabbed a coffee on his way out.

  * * *

  Gomez was waiting for him at Tampa headquarters. He walked Tom through the main detectives’ room, a bullpen divided into cubicles, similar to the ROC. Plain-clothes detectives and uniformed officers milled about, chatting, phones ringing.

  Gomez led Tom down a corridor to a room filled with video screens and all manner of playback devices. A young woman sat at a screen, using a dial to scrub through fuzzy-looking footage. She had the AC cranked high and the place was like a refrigerator. Gomez made quick introductions and said he had somewhere to be.

  Tom called Blythe and could tell by the tone of her voice he was still on thin ice with her, thin as it got. One false move and he would plunge into the abyss.

  “How did it go last night?” she asked, and he could hear her getting in her car to head to the station. She had stayed overnight, too, elsewhere in the city.

  “Good. I lifted her prints. We can see if they match any latents found at Carrie’s apartment. Specifically the two sets on the baseboard. And we got the prints without needing a court order or arrest, so Coburn should be happy.”

  “Fine.”

  “So we’re keeping Bosco, or aren’t we? His prints are already in the system. They could show up on the baseboard.”

  “No. He was let go.” Blythe sounded annoyed.

  “Listen,” Tom said, “as far as the whole drug thing . . . just letting you know I asked Veronica Morley about the impending tox results. A preliminary analysis from the chem lab.”

  “And?”

  “She says it’s looking like a clean screen on Carrie.”

  Blythe was silent for a moment. “Proving?”

  “That she wasn’t a user.”

  “So what. Smart dealers don’t use. Oh, I see what it is — in your mind, not only is Carrie uninvolved in the drug operation, her blood’s clean, so she’s a good girl. A stripper with a heart of gold.”

  “She sent money home to her mother every month.” Tom felt provoked. The officer in the room glanced over her shoulder. Tom pulled out the material he’d printed at the hotel. “I got the banking info this morning. Carrie was sending thousands to Eileen Gallo to help her pay down the hospital bills leftover from her father. That’s not a character assessment, Agent Blythe. That’s a fact.”

  He thought she might explode at him at last, break this icy wall she’d built, but instead Blythe was calm. “I guess I can’t argue that.”

  “Good, because I don’t understand why you’re pushing back so hard against this.”

  “Am I pushing back so hard?”

  “Yeah, yeah you are.”

  “What did Sasha tell you about Bosco’s alibi?”

  “She didn’t give me an indication she was covering for him.”

  “And you believed her.”

  “Yes. I think I’m building something here, Blythe, based on the evidence.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  He excused himself and stepped into the hallway. He knew he was getting riled up, but hated the way Blythe was patronizing him. “Yes,” he said, keeping measured. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Because I thought maybe . . .” She kept her own voice even “. . . you might have gotten your dick stroked a little bit last night. I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

  * * *

  “You’re looking at Tuesday evening,” Tom said. “The end of Carrie’s last shift at Hush.”

  Blythe sat down in the cool, dark room. The Tampa officer had been relegated to a chair in the corner, Tom now in command of the playback.

  The video image showed a line-up of cars, pennants flapping in the breeze. Beyond the cars, the plaza across the street was partly visible. Hush was on the corner. The front door was out of view, but the side doors near the dumpsters were in frame.

  A time code ran on the bottom of the screen. Tom looked from the time code to the side doors. Everything was tiny, pixelated.

  “Okay,” Blythe said, “I’m watching.”

  “Hang on. Coming up at 19:13.”

  He waited patiently, watching the numbers, feeling his heart knock against his ribs. Then the door opened and a figure stepped out.

  “That’s Carrie,” he said. “Blue shorts, white top.”

  Carrie started for her car. The doors reopened and a man leaned out.

  Blythe bent closer to the screen. “Who is that?”

  “I think Bosco. But hold on. There’s someone else.”

  Carrie appeared to speak to the guy in the doorway. Then the guy made a gesture, like a wave, and retreated inside. Carrie started to get in her vehicle.

  “Here he comes,” Tom said.

  A second man walked into frame, from the direction of the parking lot. Carrie was in her Hyundai. The man took a few more steps and then halted.

  Tom’s mouth felt dry even though he’d already watched it through three times. This was the same way he’d met Sasha earlier in the week — around the side of the building, after her shift.

  “This is video from Carrie’s final shift?” Blythe asked to confirm.

  “Yes. And this man here, this could be someone who’d been at the club.”

  The man made a gesture and Carrie got out. She approached him, but kept a distance. Tom scrutinized the image but the man’s face was a small mass of shifting, colored pixels. He was in what looked like jeans and a white dress shirt. No ratty sweater. He could’ve been anybody.

  “This is no good,” Blythe said.

  “There’s other video,” Tom said in a quiet voice. “From a warehouse two blocks from the plaza.”

  “Did we pull it?”

  Tom glanced at her. “Not yet.”

  “Let’s pull it. Maybe they drive by.”

  Tom felt a wave of relief. The excitement was catching — Blythe was on board.

  They watched as Carrie and the stranger continued to converse. Then the man turned and walked out of the frame, and Carrie went back to her car. A moment later, she drove off.

  “Could be Steve Hobson,” Blythe said.

  Tom had wondered the same thing, but doubted it. “Steve Hobson is a bit on the heavy side. That guy was svelte.”

  “That guy was the size of a little plastic army man,” Blythe said. “You could tell that?”

  “I’m into fitness.” He knew it sounded stupid, but it was true. Even the micro-movements of the figure from the video, the posture, it wasn’t someone like Steve Hobson, who was short and stout. Still, Hobson could’ve visited Carrie after work, pledging to make amends, maybe even asked for her back. She might have agreed to meet him, and when he didn’t like what she had to say, bashed her head in, before driving her as far away as he dared, dumping her in Rookery Bay.

  “But, yes,” Tom said, “could be him. We need to have a good look at his house.
”

  “Agreed.”

  Tom sat back from the screen — his neck hurt from staring so intently. Blythe was watching as he picked up the phone and dialed a number.

  “Calling the warehouse?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “I’ll scramble the forensics team.”

  Their argument was over. They had a fresh lead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A young guy with very pale yellow hair fumbled through the DVDs in an attic office at the warehouse. While Tom was waiting, he looked through the windows at endless rows of mattresses stacked twenty high in the cavernous main room below. A forklift cruised along, its orange light twirling.

  “We record over the DVDs each month. You said this was last Tuesday, right?”

  “Not this past Tuesday,” Tom said. “The Tuesday before that. The seventeenth.”

  The guy went through the file box again. It wasn’t very well organized, the system outdated. Compared to the video room at Tampa headquarters, it was the dark ages. But Tom wanted to have a look right away.

  The display monitor was small, but at least it was color. The camera feeding it was mounted outside the front door. Right now it showed the entryway, part of the small parking lot, and the street.

  “I keep telling Neil we need to update the security system,” the warehouse worker complained, “record directly to hard drive. But he’s cheap as hell, and you’ve got to get one of those converter things . . . Okay, here, I got it.” The guy, who Tom thought must be albino, opened the DVD tray in the recorder. He popped in the disk he was holding and pressed play.

  “We’re looking at around 7:13 p.m. to 7:15 or 16,” Tom said.

  “7:13 p.m., got it.” The guy hit a button on the remote, which jumped ten minutes at a time. He stopped at 7:10 p.m. and slowly advanced to seven-thirteen. Tom crowded in and watched.

  For about ten seconds, nothing happened. Then a vehicle passed, a pickup truck, heading south. A few more vehicles went by. Tom wasn’t blinking. He didn’t want to miss it.

  Just after 7:16, a green Hyundai drove by in a southerly direction. Tom felt a twinge of excitement. He leaned closer, breathing shallowly, counting in his head, even though the time code kept track to the millisecond. Just a few of those milliseconds shy of 7:16, a second car passed.

  “Stop, stop it, right there.”

  The guy fumbled for a second, then hit pause. He was late reacting, and just the rear bumper of the vehicle was showing. The image jittered in pause-mode.

  “Can you back it up? I want to see that car.”

  The guy hit the button, and the image jumped back a few frames. Too far — the car disappeared.

  “Don’t you have a . . .? Here, let me see that.” Tom took the remote. He was sweating, it was hot as hell up here even though air blew from an overhead duct. He found the frame toggle on the remote and advanced the footage, one frame at a time, until he got the clearest picture the DVD could render.

  He stared at the car, at the human shape behind the wheel.

  It sucked that it was a white car. Half the cars in Florida were white. Even his own Jeep was white. People chose white because it reflected the sun.

  This was just a basic DVD image, and the camera had recorded a side view of the street. He toggled a few frames forward, then back, but there was no chance of getting the license plate number. And it was impossible to verify whether this was the person Carrie had been talking to outside the club.

  But he knew it was. He just did.

  Blythe had gone to see the Tampa judge about a warrant for Steve Hobson’s home, getting a full forensics team in there to search for signs of Carrie, or anything else. Tom wanted to know for sure what sort of car Steve Hobson drove, but he could check his notes in a minute. If memory served, it had been a white Honda CRV. This vehicle was different.

  Tom pointed at the screen. “What kind of car would you say that is?”

  “Um, that’s a Lexus.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “I know my cars. See those headlights? They’re angled, narrow, like cat’s eyes. There’s actually three little bulbs in each. And you can just sort of see it there, the black here in the front of the car. That’s the spindle grille. What it looks like to me, anyway. Lot of people hate the spindle grille.”

  Tom manipulated the footage back and forth again. Only eight frames of video included the car. The best frame was at the beginning as the Lexus entered from the right. “Yeah, okay, I guess I can see that.”

  Part of him felt like he was grasping at straws. The other part of him thought he was looking at Carrie Hobson’s killer, and the killer was driving a white Lexus with a spindle grille.

  “You know the model?”

  “Um, well, if it’s got the Triple-L headlights, which it looks like, and the spindle grille, then I’d say that’s an RC F Sport Coupe. That’s a high roller car, dawg.”

  Tom wasn’t a car guy. To him it looked like most other cars, though he could see that it was fancier. “I’m going to need to take that DVD, okay?”

  “Ah, yeah, okay . . . I got to clear it with the boss.” The young man looked up with his eerily pale eyes.

  “You’re already cleared. We talked to Neil.”

  “Alright then.” The guy ejected the disk and the screen reverted to the current image.

  Tom slipped the disk into his pocket, thinking. A little after seven on Tuesday evening, Carrie is in blue shorts and a white top. She finishes work, talks to the man in the Lexus. She leaves, he follows her.

  They go to her apartment so she can drop her car. Does she even go upstairs? Tom didn’t think so. She’s found dead in the same clothes. If she was going to pick up her wallet, she probably would have changed her outfit, too.

  Whoever was in the Lexus convinced her to leave with him. Drop her car, get in with him, and — what?

  Go down to Naples together. Do a little kayaking. Something. And he was in a hurry, too. No time for Carrie to shower, change, get her things. Let’s just go, baby.

  That could mean Carrie either knew him, or was extremely trusting. All Tom had was the CCTV, no discernible faces, and the make of a car he was taking on the word of a kid from a mattress warehouse.

  He stood there a moment, then moved toward the door. “Thanks for your help.”

  * * *

  Idling in his Jeep in front of the warehouse, he could just see the edge of the plaza and the used car lot beyond it. He rolled on until he pulled up outside the strip club. The alternate bouncer was at the door, looking sleepy.

  Jimmy perked up when he saw Tom coming, and glanced nervously around. Tom raised his hands in a gesture of peace.

  “Hey. Just a quick question. You sit out here all day, you see the customers come and go. How about a guy in a white Lexus RC F? You know what that is?”

  “That’s a sixty-thousand-dollar ride.”

  “Does anyone here drive a car like that?”

  Jimmy cracked a smile, revealing gold-capped teeth. “They wish.”

  “But have you ever see one here? Someone who works here?”

  “No, no one who works here.”

  “Not the owner, maybe, Palumbo?”

  “Nah man. He drives a Hummer.”

  “A customer’s car, maybe?”

  Jimmy licked his teeth. “What’s it to you?”

  “What’s it to me? The question is, what’s it to you? You get to maybe help solve a murder. Go to bed at night feeling like a hero.”

  The bouncer just stared, then he cracked another shiny smile. “Is that right?”

  Tom changed tactics. “Where you from? You don’t seem to me like a Florida native.”

  “Me? Jersey Shore. You?”

  “Yeah my brother and I are from New York. Yonkers.”

  “Sure, I know Yonkers.”

  “So, how ’bout it, man. You seen a car like that?”

  Jimmy looked into the distance, hawked and spat. “Yeah. Couple times.”

&nbs
p; “Get a look at the driver?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘not really’? You were at the door here when you saw the car? We’re talking about Tuesday, the seventeenth, around 7 p.m. Maybe earlier. Guy left around 7.15 p.m., he coulda gotten here, I dunno, an hour earlier, give or take.”

  Jimmy’s eyes flew open and he jerked his head back. “You for real? That’s like, two weeks ago? What do you think, I got one of those photographic memories or some shit?”

  “You were here, at the door, right? Around six p.m.?”

  “I don’t know man, shit. Bosco sometimes gets here early, late, whatever. I have no fuckin’ idea.”

  Tom felt exasperated, excited — he needed to calm down. “Alright. Okay. But you saw the guy in the Lexus. You’re not sure when, but you saw him. You were sitting here when he came in.”

  “Look man, I already talked to all y’all. Right? I gave them all my info, when I was here, all that.”

  “Fine forget the time. Just tell me what you remember. What he looked like.”

  Jimmy glanced at the sky, sighed loudly, like it was all a huge imposition. “Think it was a little guy, yo. Alright, I mean, skinny. Glasses on. Looked sorta . . . you know. Like a puff-tart.”

  “You mean effeminate.”

  “Right, right. Whatever. You know, we get all types.” He held up his hands. “Hey, I don’t judge.”

  “But you saw his face. Can you remember it?”

  “I don’t know man. All you white people look alike.”

  “How tall?”

  “Tall? Shit. Five eight? Five nine?” Jimmy spat again, annoyed.

  “What if I were to ask you to come down to the station and look at a photo array?” Tom had the picture of Steve Hobson with him, but things were getting dicey now. Jurisprudence mattered here, and eyewitness identification procedures were rigid. One false move and a good defense lawyer would tear up case evidence in court.

  Jimmy looked at Tom like he was insane. “You outta your mind, you think I’m gonna go shop photos with you?”

  “How about a sketch artist? You don’t have to look at anything, you just talk. Describe what you saw.”

  “I just did.”

  Tom held up his hands again. “I’m no artist.”