Hothouse Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  There was. Less than a foot from the pavement, in the dirt, was a little scattering of cigarette butts: somebody had emptied his car’s ashtray here. She went back to her own car, found an old evidence bag in the glove compartment, went back to the pile and, using a piece of nearby palm frond, raked the butts into the bag and zipped it shut.

  She looked at them closely. Marlboros, all of them, smoked nearly down to the filter: probably a man, probably a chain smoker.

  She looked around for other leavings and found none, so she went back to her car, put the evidence bag in the glove compartment and drove out to Ham’s island.

  Daisy jumped out the window before the car had stopped and ran through the open front door. Holly followed her and walked through the house to the back porch, where Ham was sitting in the swing with the New York Times and a glass of iced tea.

  “You still reading that liberal rag?” Holly asked.

  “Liberal it may be, a rag it may be, but it’s still the best damned newspaper in the whole world,” Ham said. “You want some tea? You know where it is.”

  “I want some lunch,” Holly said. “Why else do you think I would drive all the way out here?”

  “Ginny’s gone to the store. She’ll be back in a little while.”

  Holly went into the kitchen, got some ice and poured a glass of sweet tea from the jug in the fridge. Something in the oven smelled good. She gave Daisy a cookie from her own special jar, then walked back outside and joined Ham on the swing. “I remembered something,” she said.

  “Yeah? Seems like I’m remembering less and less these days.”

  “I mean from the night I had to go to the hospital.”

  Ham put down his paper and looked at her. “What do you remember?”

  “When I left your house, there was a car parked by the side of the road, just before you turn onto the bridge.”

  “Was it like an unmarked police car? Maybe a Crown Vic or something?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I saw it there,” Ham said. “In the late evening, when we were coming back from the movies.”

  “Did you get a look at the driver?”

  “No, I couldn’t see inside. The car might have had dark-tinted windows.”

  “The driver emptied his ashtray there, I think,” Holly said. “I collected the butts. Marlboros, sucked dry. Hurd might get some DNA from them.”

  “You think he might be the guy?”

  “Maybe. He’s still out there.”

  “Yeah, I heard about the one on the beach, up from your house.”

  “They found her car this morning. There was a severed hand in the trunk.”

  “He cut off her hand?”

  “Not the body Daisy found; she still had both hands. This is a new one-taller, slimmer.”

  “Spooky,” Ham drawled.

  “Yeah.”

  “This guy has graduated from assault and rape to murder and now to dismemberment in hardly any time at all.”

  “You’re the cop; tell me what it means.”

  “It means he’s liking it more and more. No telling what he’ll do to the next one.”

  “Was the hand cut off before or after the girl died?”

  “I don’t know, but the ME will. God, I hope it was after.”

  They heard a car pull up, and a moment later, Ginny’s voice. “I could use some help with these groceries!” she called.

  Ham and Holly got up, emptied her car and put everything in the kitchen.

  “Tuna casserole in ten minutes,” Ginny said.

  They had a leisurely lunch with a bottle of white wine. Holly helped Ginny clear the dishes, then they sat on the back porch for a while and talked.

  Holly’s cell phone rang, and she answered it. “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Hurd. Thanks for helping Lauren this morning,” he said.

  “She’s smart; she would have covered it without my help. Has the ME had a look at that hand yet?”

  “Yep. You were right: she’s taller and slimmer than the last one; older, too-probably late thirties.”

  “Did he offer an opinion on whether the hand was severed before or after death?”

  “After, he says. He agrees with you about the bolt cutters, too.”

  “Hurd, I remembered something about the night this guy went after me.” She told him about seeing the car parked near Ham’s turnoff. “Ham saw it there once, too.” She told him about the cigarette butts.

  “You preserved them?”

  “Yes, they’re in my glove compartment.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “At Ham’s, but I’m going home in a minute.”

  “I’ll stop by your place later this afternoon and pick up the evidence, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure. If I don’t answer the bell, I’m on the beach. You can get the bag from my glove compartment.”

  “See you later.” He hung up.

  “Is Hurd excited about your cigarette butts?” Ham asked.

  “What’s this about cigarette butts?” Ginny asked.

  Holly got to her feet. “Ham will explain it to you. I’m going to head home; drinking wine at lunch always makes me want a nap.”

  “We still going flying?” Ginny asked.

  “How about tomorrow afternoon, say four o’clock?”

  “I’m good then. See ya.”

  Holly kissed them both and drove toward home. Once, she looked into the glove compartment just to be sure the bag was still there.

  15

  As Holly approached her front gate she saw a car parked on the side of the road a few yards from the gate-a blue Chevrolet, she thought. As she pulled up to the gate, Jimmy Weathers stuck his head outside the window and waved. She beckoned him to follow.

  They both got out of their cars at the front door, and Daisy ran to greet Jimmy. “Hey, Jimmy,” Holly said.

  “Hey, Holly, can I come in a minute?”

  “Sure.” Holly unlocked the front door, and they entered. “That your car?” she asked.

  “No, it’s an unmarked police car. Bruno promoted me to detective, so I’m working in a plain car and civvies now.”

  “Congratulations, Jimmy. You want something to drink?”

  “Something soft would be good; I’m working.”

  Holly got a Diet Coke out of the fridge and handed it to him. “How’s your investigation going?”

  “Well, Hurd and Lauren have kind of started to get in my way. I just spent a couple of hours with Lauren at the marina.”

  “I guess that’s partly my fault,” Holly said. “I called Hurd when Daisy found the body on the beach. I don’t think you’re going to be able to do much about Hurd and his new unit, except develop your own leads, and even then you’ll have to keep him updated on what you turn up.”

  “I talked to him a few minutes ago,” Jimmy said. “He told me about the cigarette butts. Do you think you could give them to me?”

  “Hurd’s coming by to pick them up later,” Holly said. “Anyway, you’d just have to send them to the state lab for testing, which is what Hurd will do, too.”

  “I guess I just wanted to impress Bruno with them,” Jimmy said.

  “Catch the perp,” Holly said. “That’ll impress him. Tell me, does Bruno smoke?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He was quitting when I knew him,” Holly said. “I just wondered if he’s started again.”

  “I’ve never seen him smoke. Is Bruno a suspect in your mind?”

  “I don’t have any reason to suspect him,” Holly replied, “but I don’t have any reason not to, either.”

  “He has a boat at the Indian River Marina,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh?”

  “But so do I.”

  “What kind of a boat do you have?”

  “It’s a twenty-two-foot sloop. I bought it cheap and did a lot of work on it. My girlfriend and I take it out on weekends. I got Bruno’s berth for him; he bought a power boat, a fisherman.”

 
“Jimmy, you know the Boston Whaler that the marina uses as a work boat?”

  “Yeah, it’s always around.”

  “Have you ever noticed whether the keys are left in it?”

  “No, I never took that much interest; it’s just like a hundred other Whalers up and down the river. Lauren’s talking to the night manager about it.”

  “Well, at least you don’t have to duplicate your efforts,” Holly said. “And they’ll keep you posted on what they know, just as you should keep them posted.”

  “Holly, can I ask you something personal?”

  “How personal?”

  “It’s about when Bruno tried to… you know.”

  “Tried to rape me? What do you want to know?”

  “How’d you stop him?”

  “I broke his nose,” Holly said.

  “How?”

  “With a straight left. He wasn’t expecting it. I’ll give you a tip, Jimmy, if you don’t already know it: men, even bullies like Bruno-maybe especially bullies like Bruno-don’t like the sight of their own blood, especially when it’s covering the whole front of a starched and pressed colonel’s uniform.”

  “What did Bruno do after you hit him?”

  “He backed off; in fact, he backed right out of the building. Bruno is not stupid,” Holly said. “He got into his car, went down a stretch of country road and smashed it into a tree pretty good. Then he took off his seat belt, called nine-one-one, asked for an ambulance and went to the hospital to have his nose set and taped. That way, he had an excuse for looking like somebody who’d lost a street fight when he came back to the base.”

  “I guess that was pretty smart. How do you know he did that?”

  “Because I saw his car later. At Bruno’s trial, the prosecutor talked me out of testifying about breaking his nose, because he thought the humiliation might make his jury of other officers more sympathetic to him.”

  “It wouldn’t make me sympathetic,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, but imagine if you were a brother officer, inclined to protect another officer, especially a full colonel.”

  “Were there any women on the jury?”

  “One. She looked miserable when the verdict was read; I expect she was browbeaten into going along.” Holly thought of mentioning Bruno’s attack on Lauren, but she didn’t know if Jimmy knew about that, and it was better for Lauren if he didn’t.

  The phone rang, and Holly pressed the gate button. “That will be Hurd,” she said. She walked Jimmy outside.

  “Hello Holly, Jimmy,” Hurd said. “Congratulations, Jimmy. I hear you made detective.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy replied. “Thanks, Hurd.”

  Holly got the bag of cigarette butts from her car and handed them to Hurd. “Here you go,” she said.

  Hurd accepted the bag. “We found the other body,” he said. “The one with the right hand missing.”

  “Where?” Holly asked.

  “A quarter of a mile down the road from where the rented Ford was found,” Hurd replied. “A search dog found it for us. We found her handbag, too.”

  “Who was she?”

  “A friend of the other woman’s. They came down from Atlanta together on vacation. You were right about her: she was five-nine, a hundred and twenty pounds, forty-five years old.”

  “Any further evidence found with the body?”

  Hurd shook his head. “She was taken down a well-worn footpath off the road, then dumped in a thick bunch of palmetto. We might not have found her without the dog.”

  “What does it tell us,” Holly said, “that the murderer dumped one body down the road but took the other out to sea?”

  “The question occurred to me,” Hurd said, “and I don’t have an answer.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Jimmy said.

  “Maybe after he had taken one body down to the boat, he thought it was too risky to take the other, so he drove it down the road,” Holly suggested.

  “And how did he control the two of them?” Hurd asked.

  “What was the cause of death?” Holly asked.

  “I just heard from the ME,” Hurd said. “A twenty-two slug to the back of the head.”

  “Was the body naked, like the other one?”

  “Yes, but there was no evidence of rape.”

  “He liked the other one better,” Holly said, “and he managed them with the gun.”

  “Why did he take her hand?”

  “As a souvenir,” she replied. “He tossed it in the trunk, then apparently forgot about it.”

  Hurd winced. “How could anybody forget a thing like that?”

  16

  Holly waved goodbye to the two men and went back inside her house. She stood at the sliding glass doors, looking out at the ocean, thinking. Then she went to her newly constructed office, tapped in the code to unlock the door and sat down at the Agency computer.

  She entered her passwords through three levels of security, and then she logged on to the National Criminal Database, which combined the FBI and a network of local law enforcement, and typed in “James Morris Bruno, Jr.” The computer thought about it, then reported the messages, “No criminal convictions as an adult. No arrests as an adult.”

  Holly thought about that. As an adult? She hadn’t seen that before. Bruno might have a juvenile record, but if so, it wouldn’t be part of a national database; in fact, it probably would be sealed. Where did Bruno grow up? She racked her brain. She had known all sorts of things about him when she had worked for him, but that had been years ago, and anyway she had worked at forgetting everything about him.

  New Jersey, she finally remembered, but what city? She couldn’t remember. She went to the state of New Jersey website and, after working her way through multiple levels, she found it: Juvenile Criminal Records. She typed in Bruno’s name again, and the message came up: “Record sealed by the court.”

  So, he did have a juvenile record. She wrote down the URL, then minimized the website and returned to the Agency site. Giving her password again, she entered a subsite called Unlocksmith, which demanded her authority for entry. The system had already identified her by her password, but it wanted a higher authority. She knew Lance Cabot’s entry code, even though she was not supposed to, and she entered that, followed by the URL of the juvenile case files.

  After a few seconds, she was greeted with the message: “This site is available only to authorized personnel. Any attempt to enter without proper authority is punishable by up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.” There would be a record that somebody had visited the site, but the New Jersey authorities would never be able to trace it back to the Agency, because Unlocksmith entries were self-obscuring. Any attempt to backtrack would be met with gobbledygook.

  She typed in Bruno’s name once more, and there was his record in all its glory: two assault-on-minor charges, one male, one female, and one conviction for statutory rape. She examined all three case files. The assault-on-minor charges consisted of one incident of schoolyard bullying that had put a younger boy in the hospital for two days and one incident of sexual assault on a twelve-year-old girl when Bruno had been fourteen-a harbinger of things to come.

  The statutory rape charge had come when Bruno was sixteen and the girl thirteen. The initial charge was rape, but the girl had testified that her participation had been consensual, and, with the agreement of her parents, the charge had been reduced to one count of statutory rape and the sentence was one year in prison, suspended on condition of good behavior, record to be expunged after that, except it hadn’t been expunged. All three incidents had occurred in Morristown, New Jersey.

  Surely, these cases would have been of interest to an investigator or a prosecutor, but, since the file was sealed, they would be inadmissible in court. And Bruno had had a clean record since the age of sixteen. Or maybe he had just stopped getting caught.

  She Googled New Jersey newspapers and went to the Star-Ledger website, where she searched various topics, from sexual assault on
a minor to rape and rape-murders. She began calling up the news reports and reading them. Finally, she found what she had been looking for: the body of a fifteen-year-old Morristown girl had been found in a local river after she had been missing for eleven days. She had been raped and strangled. Holly found a dozen other articles on the case, the last one three years after the incident. The case had never been solved.

  She dug through the local police department records but could find no mention of any suspects being questioned. All right, she thought, assume the worst: all this had happened thirty-five years earlier, before DNA testing; Bruno would never be connected with the crime, even if he had been guilty of it. She logged off the various sites, but before she could log off the Agency system, a message appeared on her screen:

  CALL ME ON A SECURE LINE. CABOT.

  She picked up the Agency phone and dialed Lance’s direct line.

  “Cabot,” he said.

  “It’s Holly. You left me a message.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re visiting sealed court records, somewhere in darkest New Jersey, using my authority. What are you doing?”

  “Oh, that,” she said.

  “Yes, that.”

  “There’s been a series of rapes and murders locally.”

  “Locally where?”

  “In or around Orchid Beach.”

  “You are supposed to be down there, clearing your brain and resting up to reenter the fray, and you’re messing with a serial rapist?”

  “And murderer. He’s killed two of them.”

  “The city and state still maintain police forces, do they not?”

  “They do.”

  “Then why are you involved?”

  “I was one of the victims.”

  Lance was silent for a moment. “You were raped?”