I asked if he thought J.D. should come with us.
“She’s a little shaky this morning for some reason. I’ve got her doing paperwork. I told her I want her to work with Sharkey on those boat thefts for the next few days.”
“That’s probably for the best, Bill.”
A woman came to the door, opened it, and stared at us questioningly. The first thing I noticed was that she was an albino. This had to be the nurse that Robin had mentioned to me. Such people are very rare, and I’d only seen a few in my entire life. Her white hair was done up in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a smock that appeared to be a uniform of some kind and white nurse’s shoes, the kind with rubber soles that are supposed to make your feet less tired at the end of the day. Her face was lined with the indicia of late middle age. It was a pleasant face, one made more appealing by the smile that she displayed. “May I help you, gentlemen?”
Bill pulled out his badge, showed it to her. “I’m Chief Lester of the Longboat Key police. This is Matt Royal. We’d like to talk to Mr. Driggers.”
I saw a momentary tightening of her eyes, a sharpening of her concentration as she glanced at me, a slight wavering of the smile. It lasted only a fleeting moment and her face returned to the smiling visage that had greeted our arrival.
“I’m afraid that is impossible, Chief,” she said, her voice draped in apology.
“Why is that impossible?” asked Lester.
“Mr. Driggers died during the night.”
“Died?”
“Yes. I found him this morning. The funeral home came an hour ago for his body.”
“Which funeral home?” the chief asked.
She gave him the name and address of the undertakers and we left.
As we were driving out of the residence, Lester said, “So much for your theory. If Driggers was the one after you, I’d think you’re safe now.”
“We have to make sure he’s dead.”
“I know,” said the chief. “I’ll make a call when I get back to the station.”
“I think the woman recognized my name.”
“Why do you think that?”
“More a feeling than anything. But her face changed briefly when you mentioned my name.”
“You might be imagining things, Matt.”
“I might be, but I don’t think so.”
We drove back to the station and the chief called the funeral home. Yes, they had the body of Walter Driggers.
“For reasons that I can’t discuss, I need to verify that,” said the chief into the phone. “I’d like to send one of my men over to get fingerprints from the body.”
When he hung up, Bill turned to me. “I’ll have something for you this afternoon.”
I left the station and drove south on Gulf of Mexico Drive. I was going to meet Jock and Logan for lunch. The chief had begged off, saying he had a ton of paperwork to attend to. I looked at my watch. A little after eleven. I still had an hour before we were to meet.
I decided it was late enough to risk a call to Debbie. I woke her up.
“Anything on that Web site?” I asked.
“What time is it?”
“After eleven.”
She groaned. “I was up until daybreak trying to crack that Web site you gave me.”
“Any luck?”
“It’s encrypted, Matt. The best one I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t crack it.”
“Okay. I appreciate the effort. We may not need it. Things are starting to shape up.”
“Good. Can I go back to sleep?”
“Sweet dreams, baby doll,” I said.
“Whatever.” The phone clicked off.
I pulled into one of the beach access parking areas, took a blanket from the back of the Explorer, and walked down to the beach. I was wearing my usual island attire, T-shirt, cargo shorts, and boat shoes. I lay the blanket on the sand and stretched out on it, kicked off my shoes, and dozed in the gentle sun.
When I arrived at the restaurant, Jock and Logan were already seated. I joined them just as my cell phone rang. Caller ID told me the number was blocked. I assumed it was the chief calling, since most government numbers seemed to be blocked. I was wrong.
“Mr. Royal?”
“Speaking.”
“You’re a dead man.”
“Ah,” I said. “Nice to hear from you. Am I speaking with Mr. Morton?”
There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the line. Then a burst of laughter. “You are a resourceful man, Mr. Royal. But you’re a dead man.” He hung up.
If I’d told him I was pretty sure his real name was Gus Hawthorne, he’d have known just how resourceful I was. But that would have screwed an investigation, and for now, I thought the law enforcement types were right in keeping surveillance on him. If he knew he was the target, we’d lose whatever connections he had to the others of his cabal.
We were having lunch on the deck at the Dry Dock Restaurant near the south end of the key. The bay sparkled in the spring sun in hues of greens and blues and white where the sandbars poked above the surface, a panoply of iridescence. Far out, in the deep channel that bisected the bay on a north-south axis, a center-console fishing boat was cruising on plane, its wake rolling behind, providing a counterpoint to the flatness of the water on a windless day. A great white egret stood on the seawall waiting for whatever handouts the diners would offer. The servers bustled about, taking care of their customers. A quiet time of beauty and friends sharing a meal, and of an ugly threat flying on unseen radio waves from Valrico to Longboat Key.
I told them about the phone call.
“It didn’t sound like an imminent threat,” Jock said, “so let’s eat. I’ve got some interesting news.”
My phone rang again. Another blocked number on the caller ID. I answered. It was Lester.
“Matt, the body at the funeral home is Walter Driggers. One of my lab boys went down there, got prints from the corpse, and ran them. No question. It’s Driggers.”
I thanked him and hung up. I told Jock and Logan what he’d said and then filled them in on my visit to Driggers’s house. “What do you have, Jock?”
A waitress appeared at the table before Jock could speak. She told us about the specials, took our orders, and left. Jock said, “The DEA techies are monitoring Hawthorne’s number. About ten this morning he got a call from a throwaway that bounced off the tower that covers the south end of the key.”
“That connects the dots,” said Logan. “We’ve got Morton or Hawthorne, if that’s his name, calling Baggett. Baggett calls the East County tower, that tower calls our tower, and our tower calls Morton.”
I shook my head. “But we still don’t know for sure the identity of the caller who’s using our tower. Since Driggers was on his way to the funeral home at the time the call was made to Morton, we can be pretty sure it wasn’t him.”
“And,” said Jock, “we haven’t identified anyone using the East County tower. We can write off Driggers, I think.”
“What about the woman at Driggers house?” I asked. “The albino.” I told them of my suspicions that she recognized my name that morning on her doorstep.
“She’s some kind of servant, isn’t she?” asked Logan. “It doesn’t make sense that she’d be the one making the calls.”
Jock took a sip of his diet cola. “Even if she were just calling to tell Morton that Driggers had died, she has to have some knowledge about what was going on. Otherwise, how would she know how to get in touch with Morton? If the call came from there.”
“We need to get into that house,” I said. “My gut is telling me that it is the center of whatever is going on.”
“Break and enter?” asked Jock.
“Does that bother you?”
“Nope. Let’s do it.”
And that’s what we did.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
I eased Recess over the shallows, her outboards raised so that the props were near the surface. I was at idle speed, watching the depth sounder
closely, fearful of running aground. The GPS receiver glowed in the darkness, guiding us to a point directly behind Driggers home. I brought the boat to a stop, released the anchor, and backed off, making sure it bit securely into the bay bottom.
We were about three hundred yards off the seawall that separated the mansion’s grounds from the bay. The only illumination came from my anchor light and the faint stars visible in their velvet carpet. There was no moon.
Jock unstrapped the black two-man kayak from the bow and eased it into the water. He held onto the painter and brought it to the stern, tied it to one of the cleats. We’d borrowed it from Logan. A couple of years before, he’d decided he needed some regular exercise and bought the kayak. It’d never been used, but rested on a rack affixed to the wall of a storage room at his condo, hanging like a forlorn sea beast relegated to eternity on dry land.
Jock and I were wearing black—jeans, sweatshirts, shoes, and watch caps. We’d painted our faces with a camouflage stick and wore latex gloves. We were armed with pistols and K-bar knives, two small digital cameras, a handheld GPS receiver, and my cell phone. I’d used an Internet mapping service to find the house and made note of the coordinates. Those had been pumped into the receiver Jock carried. We didn’t want to invade the wrong mansion.
We were pretty sure that the nurse preferred darkness for her forays out of the house. We had no way of knowing if she would be leaving that evening, so we’d concocted a subterfuge that Bill Lester had reluctantly agreed to. He’d called her late in the afternoon and told her that she needed to come by his office to finish some paperwork. Since Mr. Driggers had died on Longboat Key, and although his death was not suspicious, given his age, there was still some police administrative stuff to do. He said he’d have everything finished in a couple of hours, and asked that she meet him at eight o’clock that evening in his office. He would have been happy to bring them by her house, but because of other duties, he was stuck in the station for the entire evening. The documentation had to be to the medical examiner’s office by nine o’clock the next morning.
Logan was parked on Gulf of Mexico Drive near the entrance to the Driggers home. He’d call me on my cell as soon as she left. He’d follow her to the police station and call me again when she headed home. The chief was adamant that he could keep her no longer than thirty minutes and he was going to have to manufacture some paperwork in the bargain.
Jock and I clambered down into the kayak and paddled toward shore, stopping twice to study the GPS receiver. We knew the house would have a security system, but Longboaters were notoriously lax about engaging them. There was normally so little crime on the island, that people didn’t bother with their security devices unless they were leaving for at least a few days. If the system was engaged, we’d have about five minutes to get in and out before the cops were beating down the doors.
We stopped paddling and sat quietly. It was a few minutes before eight when my cell phone vibrated in my jeans pocket. Logan. “She just left, heading toward the police station.”
We eased the kayak up to the seawall and climbed out. Jock looped the painter around a bush that hung a bit over the concrete. We moved quickly toward the rear door of the house. Jock had a small packet with him that held all the tools he’d need to pick just about any lock in the world. We skirted the infinity pool and came to the sliding glass doors that fronted it. Jock made quick work of the lock and we entered into a foyer with bathrooms opening to either side. I turned my small flashlight on, keeping the beam pointed at the floor. An elevator stood at the end of the foyer, flanked by a staircase. We took the stairs and came out onto the main floor of the house. We were in a large living room with windows overlooking the bay. Expensive furniture was scattered about on hardwood floors that probably cost a fortune. The main foyer led from the room to the front door. I moved into the foyer and found the keypad for the alarm system. It had not been engaged. We had maybe thirty minutes to find what we were looking for.
I went into the kitchen while Jock climbed another flight of stairs to the rooms above. The kitchen was large, a place for chefs to prepare feasts for large crowds of guests. I wondered if Driggers had ever invited anybody into his home. At the back of the kitchen was a door, open. I walked toward it, shone the flashlight into the room and saw an office. I entered, shut the door and turned on the lights.
There was a desk with a computer monitor, a three-drawer file cabinet, a couple of chairs, and a cork board with bills pinned to it. This was obviously the office of the person who ran the household. I wondered if this might be the command center of their operation to wipe out my friends and me. I needed information, but I couldn’t fool with the computer because I wasn’t sure what kind of security she might have on it. I didn’t want her to know that anybody had been here.
I moved to the file cabinets, opened one, looked at the files. Each one had a tab on it with labels describing its contents. I pulled two at random, but they all seemed to have to do with running the household. I thumbed through the first drawer and moved to the second. The third file in was marked as “Donna.” I pulled it out, opened it, and hit pay dirt.
I read through all the documents in the file, pulled the pertinent ones out and laid them on the desktop. I used my little digital camera to photograph each one. Then I put them back into the file and replaced it in the drawer.
I was about to leave when I noticed a cardboard box in the corner of the room. There were four cell phones in it. Curious, I picked up one of them and turned it on. The battery was full of juice. I copied the number off the phone onto a notepad I had in my pocket, turned it off, and replaced it in the box. I repeated the exercise with the other three phones, turned off the lights, and left the office.
Jock was coming down the stairs. “Nothing,” he said. “There’s another big room up there that looks as if it might have been where the old man lived. There’s a small kitchen with lots of pill bottles on the counter. They all have Driggers’s name on them.”
“I think I found what we need,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.” We’d been in the house less than fifteen minutes.
We went out the way we’d come in and made it back to Recess without any trouble.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
“One day you guys are going to make me lose my badge.” The chief was sitting at his desk, shaking his head. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this stuff.”
Jock grinned. “Look at it this way. We’re cleaning up your island. If we get this sorted out, your homicide rate is going to drop drastically.”
“Okay. What do you make of these?”
Lester was pointing to the documents spread out on his desk. I’d uploaded the pictures from my digital camera to his computer and he’d printed them out. Jock, Logan, and I were sitting in chairs in front of the chief’s desk, sipping fresh coffee. It was a little after nine in the evening.
I picked up the documents. “This is Donna’s birth certificate, showing Walter as her father.” I waved another page in the air. “This is a will, obviously drawn by the lawyer whose name is printed on the pages, and witnessed by people who probably work in the lawyer’s office. It leaves everything to Donna.” I picked up another document. “This seems to be insurance. It’s a printout of Driggers’s DNA and a certification from the lab that it is in fact his.” I pulled another document from the stack. “This is a physician’s affidavit attesting to the fact that the DNA result attached is that of Walter Driggers. It looks like the old man was making sure there’d be no chance of contest of his will being successful. I’ll bet there’s a videotape in the lawyer’s office, made the same day the will was executed, that’ll show Driggers completely in control of all his mental faculties. It’s pretty airtight.”
Logan shifted in his chair. “I take it nobody knew Driggers had a daughter. If he’s leaving an empire to her, he’d want to make darn sure nobody beat her out of it. The DNA would prove that he is her father.”
“Right,” I said. �
�And Jock’s contact verified that the cell phone numbers I got out of the cardboard box were all used on different days. The one used today was the number that called Morton.”
“So,” said Logan, “another piece of the puzzle falls into place. Those numbers bouncing off the cell tower that covers the south end of the key were coming from Driggers’s house.”
“Yes,” said Jock, “and the call made this morning came after Driggers was dead. So Donna has to be part of this thing.”
The chief rocked back in his chair. “How do we prove it?”
I sat quietly for a moment, deciding whether to tell the chief what I had in mind. I decided to hedge a little. “Maybe we won’t have to prove anything, Bill. Maybe the problem will just go away.”
The chief covered his ears with his hands and made a “lalala” sound. I didn’t think he wanted to hear anymore.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
It was almost ten o’clock when we left the police station. Jock and Logan were going to stop by Tiny’s for a beer. I told them I’d join them as soon as I secured Recess. We’d been in a hurry to meet with Lester after our break-in at Driggers’s house, so we’d taken the boat back to its slip and tied up. I wanted to get the kayak off the bow and make sure the lines were secure and everything was locked up.
They dropped me off at my house and left for Tiny’s. I went in the front door, hit the switch to turn on the dock lights, and slipped out the back. I walked down the dock and was checking the lines when I heard movement behind me. I turned and saw a man coming out of the shadows walking toward me. He was average height and was wearing dark clothes and a ball cap pulled low on his forehead. His hand held a large pistol, a forty-five-caliber semiautomatic, I thought.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” he said. He continued walking toward me.
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