Murder Key

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “The pilot?”

  “No sign of him.”

  “How do we know it’s the senator?”

  “The Mexican police tracked the jet by its tail number, and Rufus Harris was notified. They faxed him a picture of the body. No doubt. It’s the senator.”

  “Bill, what are they going to do with the body?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not really in the loop. Rufus called me as a courtesy.”

  “Get somebody over there to get a DNA sample from that body.”

  “Matt, calm down. It’s the senator.”

  “I know, but that DNA may help us find the person behind the drug operation. Can you get it done without anybody on our side knowing what you’re doing?”

  “What’s going on, Matt?”

  “I’ll explain later. Try to get the DNA.”

  Just as we hung up, my phone rang again. It was Rufus Harris. “Matt,” he said, “We’ve found the senator.”

  “I heard. Bill Lester just called. What else do you know?”

  “Nothing. Just that the Mexican police found the jet and the senator’s body was in it. Looks like he was executed.”

  “Have you got somebody on the ground down there?” I asked.

  “Better than that,” he said. “Emilio Sanchez is on his way to Veracruz.”

  I called Jock in Houston. He confirmed that he could get in touch with Emilio on his satellite phone. I told him I’d get back in a few minutes, and I dialed Lester.

  “Bill,” I said, “Emilio is on his way to Veracruz. I think he can get the DNA sample without anybody here knowing about it.”

  “Good, because I sure as hell didn’t know how I was going to do it.”

  “Keep this close, Bill. I’ll be in your office in about two hours and I’ll fill you in on what I’ve found.”

  I called Jock again and explained the situation to him. He assured me he’d get in touch with Emilio. Jock was going to catch the next plane to Sarasota, and he’d be at my condo that evening.

  “That’s not necessary, Jock. We’re okay here.”

  “We’re closing in, podna, and I want to be there for the kill.”

  I drove west on autopilot, thinking, trying to make the connections that were bouncing around in my head. It was like that game children play where they try to connect the dots to draw the outline of an animal. I had a lot of dots, and the picture was starting to come into focus, but there were still a few dots missing.

  A plan was forming at the edges of my mind, but I couldn’t quite put it all together. I still wasn’t sure who I could or couldn’t trust. Bill Lester was solid, as was Jock, and by extension, Emilio. I thought Kyle Merryman was safe, but I wasn’t certain about the feds.

  Sure, we got the drug shipment, and we messed up the immigrant smuggling ring. With the senator dead, we had at least plugged that leak in our border security. But the drug honchos had gotten away. Had they had some advance warning, even with the tight lid we had put on the Princess Sarah operation?

  Maybe. If the ones in charge of the drug operation knew what was coming down on them, they’d have known that we wouldn’t stop them before they got to the labor camp. They had a helicopter standing by to take the drugs, and probably the leaders, to safety.

  When we stormed the chopper, we may have ruined their escape plan. Maybe they hadn’t left early, as McClintoc thought. They might have been in that car I saw leaving the labor camp as Logan was taking us out of range of the rifles firing at the aircraft.

  The more I thought about that, the more I became convinced that the leaders wouldn’t have left without the drugs. They’d probably stashed the coke in the helicopter to take with them when they left. They weren’t in a real big hurry, because they knew the swat team would take time to get into place.

  But if they’d known about the operation in advance, why not just change the plan and bring the drugs in somewhere else? Because, if they did that, some bright bulb in one of the agencies might guess that there was a leak, and with only a few people in on the planning for the raid, it’d be easier to narrow the field of suspects. No, they would have had to let it go ahead. The trawler and its crew would be easy enough to replace, and the drugs would be ready to sell on the streets the next day.

  I’d have to chat with Bill Lester about who was in on the plan before we executed it, and see if we could begin to see a person through the smoke and fog.

  I stopped in Lakeland for a quick lunch at a restaurant near the Interstate ramp, and continued on to Longboat Key. I left the Interstate and drove through downtown Bradenton on Manatee Avenue to 75th Street. I cut across to Cortez Road and over the bridge to Anna Maria Island.

  Even when I’m gone for only a short time, I love crossing that bridge. The waterway is always busy with boats, large and small, their occupants enjoying a day in the sun. I had the windows in the Explorer down to catch a whiff of the sea that rode the offshore breeze. Late luncheon diners were sitting at the patio tables at The Seafood Shack near the foot of the span. I was back in paradise.

  I drove directly to the Longboat Key Police station and chatted for a while with Bill Lester, both of us drinking black coffee. Jock called while I was with the chief, and we agreed to meet at Mar Vista for dinner. Bill begged off, and I drove south to the Village in the waning daylight of a late fall evening.

  * * * * *

  We sat on the patio overlooking the water, watching the lights across the bay wink on as full darkness descended. Jock was in a good mood, anticipating the end of our adventure. Cracker Dix stopped by to say hello and to tell me he hadn’t seen the Hispanic guy again. He also said that he was going to England or a month-long visit with his parents. People didn’t leave the island without letting someone know.

  Jock looked closely at me, as we sipped our beer. “What’s the problem, Matt? You look a little down.”

  “I’m tired, Jock. Tired of people trying to kill me. Tired of killing people. I thought all that was over when I left the war, but it’s come back to get me. I cut a man’s throat last week.”

  “He was going to drop you out of a helicopter, podna.”

  “I know, and he needed killing. But I keep thinking about the fact that somewhere there’s someone who loved him; a mom or dad or wife. Somebody’s going to grieve over him.”

  “You never get used to this, Matt. I’ve killed a lot of men, and I remember every one of them. They all left somebody.”

  “The North Vietnamese soldiers come to me in the night sometimes,” I said. “Men that I killed; boys, really, like I was. They tell me about their families, their children.

  “Once, my A team caught a ride on a C-130 that was re-supplying some Marines at a base camp that had a little airstrip. We came in at a sharp angle, a combat landing the pilot said, and set down between piles of burning debris. The smell was terrible, the odor drifting into the plane. Then I realized they were burning bodies in those piles.

  “Sometimes, in the night, that smell wakes me up. Only it’s not North Vietnamese bodies in the piles. It’s my men; the ones I lost.”

  “You’ve never talked to me about the war,” said Jock. “Have you tried to get some help with this?”

  “Yeah. When I first got back. But I think it’s just something I have to live with.

  “I ran into that C-130 pilot a few years back when I flew into Atlanta for a court appearance. He was a Delta Captain, and he’d come out of the cockpit to say goodbye to the passengers. He didn’t recognize me, but after the plane emptied, I went back and told him who I was. He remembered me and the team, and that god-awful day with the burning bodies.

  “He was through flying for the day, and we went out to a bar near the airport. He couldn’t drink in the terminal in his uniform, and I had a free night. I didn’t have to be in Court until the next morning.

  “We drank more than we should have, and talked more than either of us had in a long time, about things best forgotten. I think the fact that we were just strangers passing in the nigh
t opened each of us up in a way that might not have been possible between better friends.

  “He said that he thinks often about that day with the burning bodies, and sometimes, when he’s not expecting it, he’ll be landing at some modern airport, and he’ll smell that fleshy smoke and see, for an instant, the pyres on the side of the runway.”

  Jock leaned back in his chair. “Matt, this last few weeks has put a terrible strain on you. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine, Jock. The dreams haven’t been this bad in years. It’s just all this killing going on around me. And then, I slit a man’s throat.”

  “Look at it this way,” said Jock. “You both learned something in the service. The pilot learned to fly, and you learned to cut throats. That day in the shed at the labor camp, which of those learning experiences do you think was the most useful?”

  He was grinning, trying to joke me out of a somber moodiness that I hadn’t known I was still capable of.

  During the first few years after I got out of the Army, I would go off into my little corner of mental hell, and end up drunk and passed out somewhere that I shouldn’t have been. Those days were interspersed with weeks of activity, lawyering on a grand scale. But it was those bleak days that finally ended my marriage and my law career.

  “You’ve got a point,” I said. “What about you?”

  “I’m done. I told the agency I’m giving it up. That guy Diaz in Veracruz keeps popping up in my mind. He’s like one of those targets on the firing range. He jumps up out of nowhere, and I have to shoot him again. I’ll get over it, but I’ve lasted longer with the agency than most, and it’s time to retire. I guess a man’s only got so much killing in him.

  “I know about the dreams. I have them, too. I’ve tried to square my life with my own conscience, and sometimes I’m successful.

  “On an intellectual level, I know that I’ve only killed bad people, but somewhere down deep I know that my dead mother wouldn’t approve. That haunts me. She was the gold standard when it came to right and wrong.”

  I said, “We’re a long way from Seminole High School, Jock. Can we ever get back that sense of equanimity we had then?”

  Jock frowned, and was silent for a moment. “No,” he said. “Not in this life. We’ve crawled too far through the human sewer. Some of that ugliness rubbed off on us, and when we die, we’ll carry that stain to the grave.”

  I knew he was right.

  Jock’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, looked at the caller ID and said, “It’s Emilio.”

  They talked for a minute or two, and Jock hung up. “He’s in Veracruz,” he said. “He’s meeting with the local police in the morning. He’ll call when he’s through. You got another woman on the waiting list? Guy’s gotta have a woman, you know.”

  We were through being serious. Jock wanted to move on to a more enjoyable subject, and what is more enjoyable than pretty women?

  37

  Murder Key

  FORTY-ONE

  On Wednesday morning, Chief Bill Lester called. “I think I’m starting to get the run-around from Rufus Harris,” he said. “He’s not telling me anything, and Paul Reich hasn’t returned the calls I made to him yesterday and this morning.”

  “Did anybody tell you what was being done with the senator’s body?”

  “No. I asked Rufus what they were going to do about it, and he said he didn’t know. Said he was waiting for word from Washington.”

  “Maybe that’s true.”

  “And maybe not.” He hung up.

  It was close to noon, and I was antsy again. I’d read the paper, drank my two cups of coffee, showered, shaved, and couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  Jock came in from his run on the beach, wiping his face with a towel. He collapsed into a chair on the balcony, still breathing hard.

  I handed him a bottle of water from the refrigerator. “Want to go fishing?” I said.

  “That’s a fine idea.”

  I drove to The Market for some deli sandwiches while Jock recovered from his run and showered. We took the boat around to Cannon’s for bait and fuel, and then headed out Longboat Pass. We anchored over the Seven-Mile reef, and fished without purpose, eating our lunch. There were no other boats in sight. The water was flat and blue, turning to turquoise closer to shore. The beach shimmered in the distance, kissed lightly by the autumn sun. A small breeze kept us cool enough for light jackets. The only noise was the whirring of the spinning reels as we cast and reeled the line back in.

  The time passed quietly, both of us caught up in our own thoughts. We’d unloaded on each other the night before, and that was perhaps cathartic for both of us. Macho men did not lightly discuss their feelings, and I think we were both a little embarrassed by the outpouring.

  The jarring ring of Jock’s cell phone startled me. “Emilio,” he said. He listened for a minute, and then said, “I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  He closed his phone and looked at me. “Emilio’s flying in tonight. I’ll pick him up in Tampa. We’ve got a meeting at the federal building tomorrow morning, so I’ll grab a hotel room up there.”

  The sun was hanging low in the western sky when we headed in. I tied the boat to its dock and washed it down. Jock went up to get changed, and left for Tampa.

  * * * * *

  I later learned about Emilio’s trip. When the dust had settled, he told me this:

  On Tuesday, he flew into Mexico City on a flight from Houston. Emilio carried a passport identifying him as a Mexican national living in the capital. After he cleared customs, he went to the rental car counters and used a Mexican driver’s license identifying him as a resident of Veracruz. He rented a car for a one-way trip.

  He arrived in Veracruz and turned in the rental. He then went to another rental car company, and this time using the identification of a Mexican National Police officer from the city of Ensenada on the Pacific coast of Baja California, rented another vehicle. He found a hotel and called it a night.

  The next morning, Emilio presented himself to the desk officer in the reception area of the Veracruz main police station, showed his ID, and asked to speak to the officer in charge of the case involving the gringo jet with the dead man. He was told to take a seat, and in a few minutes a small man wearing a cheap suit and a clip-on tie came down the stairs.

  The man approached Emilio, and said, “I am the detective in charge of the case you are asking about.”

  Emilio held out his identification to the detective, and said, “I am Juan Gomez, attached to the police in Ensenada. We have been working a case involving what we think is the same airplane. I was here in Veracruz on vacation, and my superior called and asked me to look into this thing for him.”

  There really was an officer named Juan Gomez stationed in Ensenada and he really was on vacation near Veracruz, visiting relatives. If the detective checked out Emilio’s story, he would find it to be the truth. The person answering the phone at the Ensenada police station would, because of the large amount of money transferred that day into his checking account in San Diego, California, confirm the story. If the detective checked further, he would find that there was a Juan Gomez staying at a small hotel on the edge of the city of Veracruz. The agency was nothing, if not resourceful.

  Emilio was taken to the airfield to inspect the plane. It had been impounded by the police and would not be released until the investigation was completed.

  The small aircraft’s passenger cabin was configured with four plush seats, two on a side, facing each other and a sofa across the back. One of the chairs had blood smears on its seat and back rest.

  The detective pointed to the facing seat, and said, “Mr. Foster was sitting in this chair when he was shot through the back of the head. Blood and brain material splattered the facing seat. You can see where the bullet lodged in the seat back. It was a large caliber pistol, a forty-four.”

  “Where’s the pilot?” asked Emilio.

  “We don’t know. T
he aircraft had been parked here for a couple of days before we were notified.”

  “How did you identify Mr. Foster?”

  “He had his passport and Florida driver’s license in his pocket. I called the American embassy in Mexico City and notified them of the death. They ran the plane’s registration through their Federal Aviation Administration, and told us it belonged to Mr. Foster.”

  “Can I see the body?” asked Emilio.

  “Yes, but I’m not sure why you are so interested in this.”

  “We’ve had a problem with drug runners in northern Baja. A jet with these tail numbers has been seen twice in the area. When word got to Ensenada, through the National Police, that you’d found this plane, my boss asked me to take a look. That’s all I know.”

  “Maybe your boss is part of the drug cartel.”

  “Maybe,” said Emilio, “but he hasn’t offered to cut me in.”

  At the morgue in Veracruz, Emilio was shown the body of the senator. Unless Foster had a twin, this was his body.

  “Detective,” Emilio said, “would it be possible to get a DNA sample to take back to our lab in Baja?”

  “I guess,” said the detective, “but why would you want that?”

  “I don’t know. The boss asked me to get it. I have a kit in my pocket. All I need is a swab of the inside of his cheek.”

  “Ah, go ahead. The National Police are nuts. Not you, of course, but the bosses.”

  “I agree,” said Emilio, pulling the small kit from his coat pocket.

  37

  Murder Key

  FORTY-TWO

  Thursday dawned cold on Longboat Key. The first front of the year was pushing down from Canada, bringing winter with it. I decided to put off my jog on the beach and stay in. I just don’t like cold weather.

  Jock called at mid-morning to tell me that Emilio had arrived in Tampa and brought the DNA sample with him. They had taken it first thing that morning to a private lab that the agency used on occasion, and he was hoping to have some results by the end of the day. I relayed that information to Bill Lester.