Orchid Beach hb-1

by Stuart Woods

  “Security,” a man’s voice said.

  “Barney Noble,” Holly said.

  A moment later, Barney came on the line.

  “Barney, it’s Holly Barker. How are you?”

  “Pretty good, Holly. What’s up? I was just on my way home to dinner.”

  “Barney, we just had a call from a Mrs. Garcia, whose daughter works out there as a domestic. The girl didn’t come home after work, and she’s worried. You folks heard anything about her?”

  “Hang on, I’ll check,” Barney said. He didn’t cover the phone. “One of you guys hand me the checkout roster for the service gate,” he said. There was a shuffling of paper. “Here we go,” he said. “Is she Rita Garcia?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “She checked out at the service gate with the other cleaning women just after three o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Do you check them out one by one?”

  “Yeah, we do a body search to be sure they haven’t lifted anything from one of the houses, and then they’re checked off the list. She left, all right—no doubt about it.”

  “Okay, Barney. Would you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would you call me if she doesn’t show up for work tomorrow morning?”

  “Be glad to. I’ll alert the man on the gate to look for her.”

  “Thanks. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Holly hung up. “He says she checked out just after three this afternoon.”

  “Sure, she did,” Harry said. “I’ve got another reason for a search warrant now. Jackson, can I use your office phone? I want to call a judge of my acquaintance.”

  “Sure, help yourself.”

  Harry disappeared into Jackson’s office and closed the door behind him.

  “Ham,” Holly said, “what the fuck do you mean going into that place?”

  Ham shrugged and grinned.

  “Those guys could have you right now.”

  “No, they couldn’t,” Ham replied. “They don’t have anybody could take me.”

  Holly rolled her eyes and sighed.

  Harry came back. “The judge is thinking about it,” he said. “He’ll call me back later.”

  “If we’re going in there, we’re going to need a lot more help,” Holly pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I can’t request the manpower until I’ve got a search warrant.”

  “Jesus, Harry, if Rita is missing and presumed in there, what more does the judge need?”

  “I think he just wants to see if she turns up on her own. He knows what a big effort this would be, and he wants to be sure his warrant stands up on appeal.”

  “So what do we do now?” Holly asked.

  “We wait,” Harry replied.

  CHAPTER

  54

  H olly was wakened from a deep sleep by the telephone. She reached over Jackson’s inert form and picked it up. “Hello?” She listened for a moment. “Where?” she asked. “Have you ordered any equipment?” She listened. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Holly got out of bed and looked at the clock: just after one A.M.

  “What?” Jackson mumbled.

  “Go back to sleep, baby,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. She got into a robe and padded down the hall to the guest room where Harry Crisp was sleeping.

  Harry’s light was on, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes. “Was that call what I hope it wasn’t?”

  “I’m afraid so. Some mullet fishermen found the car up next to the north bridge. They’re trying to get it out now.”

  “Give me five minutes,” Harry said, heading for the bathroom.

  Holly got dressed quickly and met Harry downstairs. On the way, Harry was quiet. At the north end of the island Holly headed for the bridge, but turned off the road before reaching it, into a roadside park with a few picnic tables and a boat ramp. Two police cars were parked beside the ramp, their headlights illuminating the area, and a large wrecker had backed down it to the water’s edge. A man in a diving suit emerged from the water.

  “Okay!” he yelled. “It’s hooked on.” He came and stood next to Holly while the wrecker winched the car up the ramp. “Looks like somebody just drove it right down the ramp,” he said. “It was only a couple of feet underwater.”

  The car came backing out of the river. When it was securely on the ramp, the wrecker drove forward a few yards until the car rested on dry ground. There seemed to be nothing wrong with it, except that it was wet.

  Holly and Harry looked inside the car, opened the doors, checked the backseat. Holly took the keys from the ignition. “Let’s have a look at the trunk,” she said. She walked to the rear of the car, found the right key, and unlocked the trunk. “Oh, Jesus,” she said.

  Harry stood next to her. “The bastards!” he said.

  Rita’s naked body lay on top of the spare tire. Her gun, her ID and her cell phone were scattered around her.

  Harry took out his phone and punched in a number. “This is Crisp,” he said. “Who’s the duty officer? Put me through to him…. Warren, it’s Harry Crisp,” he said. “I’ve got a dead agent in Orchid Beach. It’s Rita Morales. I want you to get hold of the best pathologist in the Miami area and fly him up here immediately. He’ll be met at Orchid Beach Airport and brought to the local hospital. I want the most thorough possible postmortem.” He broke the connection.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” Holly said.

  Harry began talking on the trip back, his voice low and sad. “She came over from Cuba on a raft when she was eight years old,” he said. “She nearly died of thirst before they were picked up by a pleasure boat and brought to Miami. Her mother did die, but her father made it. He’d been a lawyer in Havana before Castro. She got a law degree from the University of Virginia and joined the Bureau right out of school. She was first in her class at the academy. She was only twenty-six, but she was as smart an investigator as I’ve ever worked with. She had a real future with us. She was ambitious, and she wasn’t afraid to take chances. That could be what got her killed.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Harry,” Holly said quietly.

  “I know it wasn’t, in my head,” he said, “but in my gut, I know it was.”

  “She was qualified for the job. You trusted her judgment. In the circumstances, it was the right call.”

  “I know it was,” Harry said. “But sometimes the right call can rise up and bite you on the ass. And it hurts like hell.”

  Back at the house, Jackson scrambled them some eggs, and they ate disconsolately. It was just after nine when the call came for Harry. He took it in Jackson’s office and left the door open. He listened, nodding. “Thank you for coming up here, Doctor,” he said finally, then hung up. He came back to the table and sat down heavily. “Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, probably from fists. Ligature marks on both wrists and ankles. All her ribs were broken, massive internal injuries. First, they raped her…every orifice.”

  “Was the doctor able to collect any sperm samples?” Holly asked.

  Harry nodded. “The samples will be in Washington by noon. The lab will pull out all the stops—we don’t lose an agent all that often.”

  They were quiet for a while.

  “Maybe you’d better call the judge,” Holly said.

  Harry nodded and stood up. “I’ve got to call Rita’s father first,” he said. He went to Jackson’s office and closed the door behind him.

  Holly and Jackson drank coffee, saying nothing.

  Half an hour passed, and Harry came out of the office and sat down. “Jackson,” he said, “I need a place to marshal my people. A big place—warehouse, theater, something.”

  “What time of day?”

  “After dark, until morning.”

  “The community college has a gymnasium that’s also used as an auditorium. It’s separated from the rest of the school by a stand of woods, and there’s a big parking lot.”

&nb
sp; “You know anybody there?”

  Jackson wrote down a name and handed it to Harry. “That’s the president,” he said.

  Harry went back into Jackson’s office and closed the door.

  The phone rang, and Holly picked it up.

  “Chief, it’s the dispatcher. You had a call from a Barney Noble.”

  Holly dialed the number and asked for Barney.

  “Hi, Holly. You asked me to call if Rita Garcia didn’t show up for work this morning. She didn’t. We called her home number, but there was no answer.”

  She wanted to scream at him, but instead, she said, “Thanks, Barney.”

  “Has her mother heard anything?” Noble asked.

  “No.”

  “Let me know if you hear anything. Maintenance will want to find a substitute if she’s not coming back.”

  “I’ll let you know, Barney.” She hung up. “I wish I could just go out there and shoot him right now.”

  “I’d help,” Jackson said.

  Harry finally came out of the office. “Okay,” he said, “we’re set. I’ve got over three hundred men coming—FBI, DEA, ATF—every federal agent we could muster. They’ll be arriving at the community college after dark in vans and cars, and they’ll be heavily equipped.” He sat down. “Holly, there’s not going to be a lot in this for you—not even Barney Noble.”

  “I had a feeling,” Holly said.

  “Killing an FBI agent is a federal crime. I want him for that. If we can’t put together the evidence to support the charge, then you can have him on the falsification-of-records business, and you can have whoever did the work for him at the capitol, if the state doesn’t take it away from you.”

  “What I want most is the murderers of Chet Marley and Hank Doherty,” Holly said. “Can I have that, if you take Barney?”

  “Sure, you can. I’ll talk to the federal prosecutor for you.”

  “I’m going to have to get a confession, or somebody to finger them, so I’ll need interrogation time.”

  “You’ll have it, I promise. In the meantime, I think you’d better go to work, keep everything as normal as you possibly can. You and Jackson can come out to the gym tonight around nine. I’ll leave word with the sentries that you’re to be admitted. I want your input on how we go about this. Ham’s, too, of course. He’s the only one with any hard information about what we’re up against.”

  “Sure,” Holly replied.

  Harry looked out over the sea, and he seemed far away. “This is not going to be an easy one,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  55

  H olly went into the office like a good girl, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was sad and angry and having a hard time with both emotions. Finally, for something to keep her busy, she picked up the personnel files and began to plow through them, concentrating as hard as she could.

  There was a rap at the door, and she looked up. Bob Hurst, the homicide detective, was standing in her doorway. “Morning, Bob,” she said.

  Hurst looked red-faced, angry. “Why didn’t you call me on the homicide last night?” he demanded.

  “Sorry, Bob,” she said. “I had it covered.”

  “Don’t you think that when an FBI agent gets killed in this jurisdiction that I ought to be in on it?” he demanded.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “nobody from this department is in on it. It’s a federal matter, and the FBI are handling it.”

  “Even when it’s on our turf?”

  “The United States of America is their turf, Bob, and when an FBI agent gets killed, the FBI investigates.”

  “What was the FBI doing up here, anyway?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me—some sort of investigation, I guess. They asked me to put out an APB for their missing agent yesterday, and I did. Apparently, she was working out at Palmetto Gardens on something. She checked out of there at three yesterday afternoon and disappeared. A fisherman found her car early this morning, and I called the agent in charge and went out there with him, as a courtesy.”

  “How was she killed?”

  “The FBI handled the autopsy; they didn’t share the results with me.”

  Hurst looked at the floor.

  “Bob, if it had been my call, I would have involved you, but it wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry if I got huffy. You think this has anything to do with Marley and Doherty?”

  Holly wrinkled her brow. “That hadn’t occurred to me. Why do you connect the two incidents?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You think anybody at Palmetto Gardens had anything to do with the woman?”

  He’s fishing, Holly thought. “I talked to Barney Noble. He checked his lists and said she left work around three P.M. with all the other domestic help. I’ve no reason to doubt him. If you want my take on this, she went for a drink somewhere after work and met the wrong guy.”

  “You don’t think it was connected with what she was investigating?”

  “I don’t know what she was investigating, so I can’t make that judgment.”

  “Thanks, Chief,” he said, and went back to his desk.

  Holly sat, wondering why Hurst had done that. He’d surely heard from the two patrolmen last night that the corpse was that of an FBI agent, and he’d known that another agent had been present and had ordered the autopsy. She dug Hurst’s personnel file out of the pile and opened it. She’d been through it a few days before, but she wanted a closer look now.

  There was a new document in the file, one that hadn’t been there the last time Holly had seen it. Bob Hurst had gotten married, and he had filled out a form requesting that his new wife be added to his health insurance. The box requiring her name before the marriage read LINDA TOMKINS WALLACE and her address before the marriage had been on Egret Island, where Hurst also lived. Nobody had mentioned it to Holly, but Bob Hurst had married Hurd Wallace’s ex-wife. She thought about that for a moment. Something was gnawing at her memory, but she was tired, and she couldn’t bring it into her frontal lobe. Never mind, it would come to her.

  She put down the file, picked up the next one and began reading. Then she stopped. There, staring at her from the file, was something so obvious that she was dazed. She went to the ladies’ room and splashed cold water on her face, staring at herself in the mirror, realizing how naive she had been.

  Holly told Jane Grey that she was going to do some patrolling and left the station, taking Daisy with her. The dog sat in the front seat of the Jeep and stuck her nose into the wind through the partly open window. She was so enthusiastic about the experience that Holly was afraid to open the window more than three or four inches for fear Daisy would lean out too far and fall out of the car. Holly drove north aimlessly, thinking about what she had discovered and what it could mean and wondering why she hadn’t read those personnel files sooner. At the north end of the island, wanting to remain alone with her thoughts, she turned onto Jungle Trail and drove slowly along its deserted length, coming to a halt a few yards from the back gate to Palmetto Gardens.

  “Stay, Daisy,” she said and got out of the car, leaving the motor running to keep the interior cool. She paced up and down beside the car, taking deep breaths and trying to calm herself, while Daisy poked her nose through the partly opened car window and watched her. This wasn’t what Holly had expected at all. She leaned against a tree. First, Hurd Wallace had seemed like the bad guy, then had turned out not to be—or was he? And now…She jumped as she realized somebody was standing only a few feet away from her.

  “Well,” he said, “good afternoon, Chief.”

  Holly looked at the gun in Cracker Mosely’s hand; it was pointed at her chest. “Why are you pointing a weapon at me, Mosely?” she asked. Her heart was pounding.

  “Why, you’re trespassing, don’t you know that? You’re on Palmetto Gardens property.”

  “No, I’m not. Point that gun somewhere else.” Holly realized that she was alone in a secluded spot with Mosely, and that Daisy couldn’t ge
t to her. A trickle of cold fear ran down her bowels.

  Mosely walked quickly toward her and pressed his pistol up under her chin. He removed her own weapon from its holster and threw it away. Behind him, Daisy was going crazy, trying to get out of the car. “Shut the dog up,” Mosely said.

  “Daisy! Quiet!” she said. Daisy stopped growling, but she was jumping back and forth from the front seat to the rear, trying to find a way out of the closed car.

  “Good,” Mosely said. He drew back his empty hand and backhanded her, knocking her to the ground, then he put his knee in her back and cuffed her hands behind her with her own handcuffs. He turned her over and sat astride her. “Well, now, it’s just you and me, isn’t it?” he said, grinning. “I’ve been waiting for the chance to be alone with you, baby.”

  “Cracker, do you want to go back to prison?” she asked, trying to control her fear. “I can arrange that, you know.”

  “You’re all through arranging things for me,” Mosely said, starting to unbutton her uniform shirt.

  “Don’t do this, Cracker. You can still stay a free man.”

  “You bet your ass I can,” he said, yanking her shirt open. He moved down, unbuckling her gun belt and unzipping her pants. Soon he had them off. Holly was now exposed, except for her underwear. He stood up and started taking off his own clothes. He holstered his gun and tossed the gun belt a few feet away. “I’m going to give you some of what I gave little Rita,” he said. “She loved every minute of it, believe me. She enjoyed Barney, too. We gave her a real ride.”

  Holly started trying to get to her feet, but Mosely kicked her in the chest with his bare foot, and she went down. Daisy went nuts again, but this time Mosely didn’t seem to notice. He was fondling his penis, which was responding. He came back toward Holly.

  Holly waited until he was at the right distance and kicked at his genitals, but instead, her heel caught him on his muscular thigh.

  He jumped on top of her, pinning her bare legs under his body, then sat astride of her again. “You’re going to pay for that one,” he said, beginning to fondle his penis again. He reached down with his other hand, took hold of her bra and yanked it off her, then he did the same with her panties.