by Jack Mars
“That look like the guy in the video to you?” Ed said.
Luke shook his head. “No. The guy in the video had a face. This one doesn’t.”
“Oh my,” someone said. “A bloodbath. I wish I could say I was surprised.”
Luke glanced up and Bowles was standing in the doorway to the outside. As Luke watched, Bowles stepped through the gaping hole, pushing some of the remaining wood shards away with his big shoulders. He looked down at the dead guy on the living room floor, then glanced at the other dead guy in the hallway.
He smiled. Carnage didn’t upset him, Luke noticed. Give him a few points for that. “Would you say it’s a little hard to question people when you kill everyone you meet?”
“You’re welcome,” Luke said.
Bowles raised an eyebrow, his smile fading into a smirk. “I’m welcome? For what?”
“If we’d done it your way, and you walked up here like a Mary Kay saleslady, you’d be dead now.”
Bowles shrugged. “You don’t know me very well.”
“Anyway, there’s still one left,” Ed said.
Bowles went into the kitchen and stared at the man on the floor. He nodded, more to himself than anyone else. “He looks about seventeen. I’m sure he’ll know all the secrets we want and have a lot to say about them.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
10:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
FBI Miami Division
Miramar, Florida
The man did have a lot to say.
They stood in an observation room, watching him through one-way glass. Speakers were mounted just above the glass. Four people were in the observation room—Luke, Ed, Bowles, and a young man who was a simultaneous translator from Spanish to English.
Through the window, the prisoner sat at a long wooden table. He wore the same T-shirt and jeans they had found him in. He took a long gulp of what appeared to be water. Then he leaned back, smoking a cigarette. There was a half-empty pack and a lighter on the table near his left hand. He seemed relaxed enough, maybe because he could smoke as much as he wanted.
“What’s his name?” Luke said.
“No confirmation on that,” the translator said. “He wasn’t carrying identification. He says his name is Daniel Cruz. They’re waiting for fingerprints to come back. Hopefully, he’s been arrested somewhere, for something.”
Two Hispanic men stood across the small room from the prisoner. They were sharp dressers, dark business suits, slicked back hair, expensive leather shoes. They looked more like young Wall Street types than FBI agents. They looked like they should have their own TV show.
One of the interrogators said something, too fast for Luke to understand. He heard the name Camilo Ortiz. He heard the phrase El Tigre. The prisoner started speaking.
“What do I get?” the translator said. From there, he began to translate both what the prisoner said, and what the questioners said.
“What do you want?”
“Freedom. I want to go home. I’m done in America.”
“I have a hunch,” Bowles said. “He isn’t going home any time soon.”
“Where is home?”
“El Salvador.”
“What is your hometown?”
The young guy shrugged. “Where else? San Salvador.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty years. My twenty-first is next month.”
“Have you done something we should know about? Something that makes it hard to give you your freedom?”
The man stared at them.
“You know what I did.”
“No. We don’t.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette, held it, and blew it out.
“They’re killers, okay? The Tiger is a killer. These other men. Dangerous people. What you are asking from me is a lot. If I tell you anything, I will be marked for death. This is not so terrible, I guess. I am not afraid of death. But I want something in return.”
“We will keep you safe,” one of the interrogators said. “I can promise you that. You can get a new life. Maybe you can go home. We’ll have to see.”
“What about my family?”
“In El Salvador?”
“No. Here. I have a girl and a baby.”
“If you cooperate, we can keep them with you. We have a program called Witness Protection. You will be safe. They will be safe.”
The promise of safety seemed to be enough.
“The Tiger was with us, yeah. He was staying at the house.”
“Well, at least now we know he exists,” Ed said. “That’s something.”
“He is a bad person. He and Cienfuegos took a job up north. They went away, flew I think, came back the next day.”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. North. Carolina, maybe. Virginia. They didn’t tell me. And your friends killed Cienfuegos. So now we will never know.”
“Where is the Tiger?”
“He left again. I don’t know where he went. He and I are not friends. We don’t talk that much.”
“You know very little, it seems. If you know so little, why do you say he and Cienfuegos went to Carolina together?”
The man tapped the side of his head. “I listen. I hear things. You have to be careful in this line of work. People who are not careful die too soon. Listen more than you speak. That’s my rule.”
“What is this line of work?”
The man shook his head, took another drag of his smoke. “I don’t know. If you don’t know, then I also don’t.”
“You say the Tiger took a job up north. Who was he working for?”
The prisoner sighed.
“The man from Jupiter. The island of Jupiter. A very rich man. Very connected. He has powerful friends. How do you say it? He is untouchable.”
“What is his name?”
“I don’t know. You will know better than me.”
“What were they doing for him? He was paying them to do something, so what was the job?”
The prisoner eyed the questioners very carefully. He seemed to be on a knife’s edge about what he said next. Falling on either side of it had consequences. Those consequences were unpredictable.
The situation was far out in front of him. A look, possibly resignation, came over his face. He wanted out. To buy his way out, he had to say things he didn’t want to say. He nodded. He had decided.
“The man likes girls. You know this, I am sure. Young. Teenage girls. He likes a certain kind. Special. Fresh. Clean. He brings them to his big house in Jupiter. Makes them his slaves.”
The man indicated his wrists, making a motion like he was slapping steel handcuffs on them. It was a pretty good pantomime. Luke got it right away.
“Bingo,” Ed said. He said it barely louder than a whisper.
“He gives them to his friends,” the prisoner said.
They were close now, and they both knew it. Jupiter Island was right up the highway from here. Call in a TAC squad. It was still early. They could have the girl back tonight.
“Wait,” Bowles said. “Stop the interview.”
* * *
“What’s the matter?” Luke said.
Bowles was walking down the hallway as if he was planning to leave.
Ed took several running steps and got in front of him.
“You don’t just walk out like that, friend.”
Bowles was big. Not as big as Ed. But not afraid of him, either. They stood toe to toe, face to face.
“You’re about to make a big mistake,” Bowles said. “If you think you can assault a fellow officer…”
Ed raised both hands, as if Bowles had pulled a gun on him.
“We just want to talk.”
Bowles shook his head. “There’s nothing to talk about. We’ve stumbled across an ongoing joint investigation between the FBI and other agencies and organizations, including, for starters, the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. I happen to know a little bit about it. First a
nd foremost, it’s classified. As such, our investigation has to stop here until we get guidance from above. Hopefully, we haven’t stepped on the existing investigation too badly.”
He shook his head. “We hit that house. I knew we shouldn’t have done that. Two guys are dead. And this guy…” He gestured back toward the interrogation room. He shook his head again and sighed. The air seemed to go out of his body, like a car tire that had just been sliced with a hunting knife.
“Who else is involved?” Luke said.
Bowles gave him the drop dead look. “That’s classified, too. This is a national security issue, if you haven’t guessed yet.”
He started to walk again. Luke grabbed him by the arm.
“Stone…”
“Who else is involved?”
Bowles smiled. “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Who is the man on Jupiter Island?”
“I’m sure you guys can figure that out on your own. You shouldn’t bother, but you probably will anyway.”
Bowles shook free of Luke’s arm, then walked briskly toward the doors. He stopped just before he reached them, and turned around.
“The case stops here, guys. You don’t have the clearance to move forward, and neither do I. You might as well just go back to whatever else you were doing before you came down.”
With that, he pushed the door open and went out into the night.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
10:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Cape Fear Memorial Bridge
Wilmington, North Carolina
“I knew it would come to this.”
Jeff Zorn didn’t even know he had spoken.
He had just pulled his beloved BMW Z3 to a stop in the right lane near the Wilmington side of the bridge. The top was down, so he put the hazard lights on, stood on his seat, and stepped out of the car across the passenger seat.
He climbed over the horizontal iron bars and onto a small walkway between the road and the vertical tower of the bridge. It was a vertical lift bridge, with a tower on either side that served as an elevator. The elevator lifted the roadway for large container ships to pass underneath.
It was also an old bridge, rusty from the salt in the sea air. He reached the base of the bridge tower, and found that he could easily climb the diagonal supports. He had spotted these diagonal supports weeks ago, and had been thinking of them ever since.
He moved along the iron rungs like a monkey. The rungs were more like mini-stairs, wide enough to accommodate a person’s feet. They were caked with rust, and the paint on the silo around them was peeling. Bird droppings were everywhere.
Below him and to his right, probably ten feet down now, a car pulled up behind his. The car was your typical unmarked cop sedan, no style at all, hard to tell what color in this light. Blue, black, green, could be anything. Suddenly, the car was flashing bright lights, in the back, in the front, on the dashboard. A black man in a sports jacket got out of the car and dashed toward the tower.
Of course he did. The man had been following him. They’d been following Jeff for at least the past hour. Could be they’d been following him for days, and he just picked up on it. Sure. They were probably watching him the whole time.
“Hey, man!” the guy shouted. “Hey, Jeff!”
Jeff started moving faster. He climbed lightly upward, racing, moving so fast he quickly became dizzy and out of breath. His pace slowed, and then it changed. He crawled up the rungs, hands gripping each new metal railing, pulling himself along. He was moving at a snail’s pace. The structure seemed to go on forever.
He looked down. The cop or whatever he was, agent, secret policeman, was following him.
“Don’t come up here!” Jeff shouted. “Leave me alone.”
“Jeff! Wait a minute! Let’s talk.”
Jeff reached the top of the support. He was on a small metal platform now. Above his head was a metal trapdoor, hanging down. Through that hole a ladder, bolted into the vertical support, went straight up to the top of the bridge.
The man climbed the diagonal supports behind him, zigzagging his way. He was coming along, moving slow. Why rush? They knew they had him. There was nowhere for Jeff to run.
He started up the ladder and climbed through the hole. It went up and up. The ladder was rusted and sharp, and ancient paint flaked from it. It was cocooned by a tunnel of sorts, which protected him from the wind. But he knew where it was going. All the way to the top of the bridge, high above the water… totally exposed.
He used to look at bridges and wonder who would ever do these jobs. He hated heights, and yet, tonight it didn’t bother him. It didn’t matter now. He had been out driving around, trying to think, trying to make sense of everything that had happened.
Joy was in shock over the loss of her daughter, practically catatonic. She had taken a leave of absence from work. She wasn’t eating. She could barely get out of bed. It was terrible, and to be expected. And yet, somehow he hadn’t expected it.
There was something wrong with him. He knew that. There had always been something wrong with him. It was like he had never become an adult. He couldn’t think things out ahead of time. He couldn’t imagine consequences for anything he did.
He’d had money problems. He came from a rich family, his dad was the Jeffrey Zorn, but Jeff wanted more. He wanted to add his own pile. And he liked risk, too much risk. He had an appetite for it.
Gambling. It didn’t matter what. Sports. Boxing, football, basketball. Penny stocks. Casinos. Business investments. He was a light touch for friends who were opening bars or restaurants. He had backed a friend’s independent rap music label. Those were his bigshot Manhattan days. What was wrong with him? He had squandered a fortune from his father’s side, then another, smaller one from his mother’s side. He was so deep in, it was unspeakable. He felt dirty all the time.
He was sick. He had a sickness.
Darwin King had carried him a long time. How had it started? A little bit here, a little bit there. The guy was a billionaire, or so people said. After a while, Jeff realized he didn’t have any money of his own. It was all gone. The only money he had was the money Darwin fronted him.
He owed a lot. He couldn’t keep track of it. The interest was high, much higher than a bank. He was afraid to ask how bad it had gotten. And he and Darwin weren’t even really friends. They knew each other on the Upper East Side. They were in the same social circle, the same party scene. It was superficial at best. At worst, Darwin had knowingly trapped him.
Anyway, all that was gone now. Darwin left New York for Florida, and Jeff came down here to North Carolina. Then Darwin didn’t even seem to live in the country anymore. Jeff thought maybe it was a new start. But Darwin’s people were still around. And Jeff was still caught, like a fish on a hook. Owing Darwin King money was like owing money to the mob. There was no escape.
One day a man met him on a bench in a local park. Just two guys sitting, chatting quietly, at either end of the bench. If you watched them from afar, you probably wouldn’t even notice they were together.
“You need to put up something of value,” the man said. “His patience is gone. It can’t go on like this anymore.”
Jeff couldn’t think of a single thing. The cars? Darwin wouldn’t care about that. He probably had a hundred cars. The 1948 Hudson, his pride and joy, wasn’t even all original. There were a bunch of modern replica parts in there which for any real collector would crater the value. Jeff didn’t like to admit that, not even to himself, but it was true.
“I don’t have anything,” he’d said. “I mean I am just tapped out.”
He fully expected the man to take his head right then and there, sitting on a bench in a public park in the middle of the day, and twist it off his shoulders. But it turned out the man already had something of value in mind.
“What about the girl?” he said.
It seemed crazy, like a joke. He had heard rumors about Darwin’s proclivities, but he had nev
er really taken them seriously. People talked, that was all.
“What girl?”
The man shook his head. He was a large man, and stern. His face was so blank, he almost didn’t seem to have a face. There was no intelligence behind his eyes. Nothing meant anything to him. He could have just as easily said, “What about the couch?”
“You know what girl.”
Jeff didn’t say anything. He didn’t even want to dignify it by responding. He remembered how he trembled slightly.
“He’s seen pictures. He likes her. Also, she’s connected. This will settle an old score that you don’t know about and don’t need to know about.”
“She’s not my girl,” Jeff said, as if that was an answer.
“No, but you can help get her. Just make it go smoothly. It’s not the easiest thing in the world sometimes.”
Nor should it be.
But it turned out it was easy, almost too easy. It was nothing to track what Charlotte was up to, her little secret meetings with friends, her undercover communications, the times she snuck out of the house to go to parties with her friends.
Charlotte thought she was the coolest kid on Earth. She thought she knew everything. She was a spoiled brat, really. There was a lot she didn’t know, about the world, about herself, and about others. For example, Jeff helped her get away with sneaking out a couple of times. She didn’t know that. She didn’t know he was watching her, and even worse, she didn’t know that they were watching her.
The truth was she didn’t know anything. She was oblivious, just a dizzy teenage kid.
To Jeff, it seemed like a strange dream. It couldn’t be real. This was how he was going to get off the hook? By giving Joy’s daughter away? When the big night came, he wasn’t sure if it was actually happening or if it was just practice.
Then she was gone. Just gone. He spoke to the police, of course, the concerned boyfriend. Suspicion naturally fell on him, but it wasn’t like he had attacked and beaten up the Hastings kid. He wasn’t at the party. And there were no communications between him and the real kidnappers.
