A convenience-store clerk thought Sheridan stopped at his station the night of his escape. The address was on Highway 58.
There were convenience stores along the highway at either end of the natural area. He typed in the address and the Wallaby Foods store popped up on the natural area’s south side. Weissbard’s heart skipped a beat.
But this tip was days old, and had already been dismissed as ‘suspect did not match Sheridan’ and signed off by Francisco himself. Of course he would personally latch on to a lead that looked this promising. He had to have been pissed when it didn’t pan out.
Weissbard’s gut wouldn’t let him scroll past that entry. It wasn’t just because he thought Francisco did sloppy police work, but that certainly opened the door of doubt. The location and timing were too perfect to ignore. With all the little puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit, this one fit perfectly.
It was a longshot, but maybe Francisco was wrong. Maybe Sheridan and whoever gave him a ride out of the woods stopped for gas. Or coffee. Or a piss. Anything that might get their faces on a surveillance video.
He could only hope. He headed out to his car.
Chapter Forty-Two
“I’m Detective Weissbard, Tampa PD.” Weissbard flashed his badge at the man behind the counter at the Wallaby Foods convenience store. “You’re Armand Kramer?”
“Now I get two cops,” said the old man behind the counter. Bare wisps of white hair did little to cover the splotches of brown that peppered his scalp. His oversized glasses gave him a look like something out of a sci-fi movie. He wore a ratty brown cardigan against the store’s over-amped air conditioning, despite the swelter going on outside. His voice carried the accent and world-weary tone of a displaced New Yorker. “But when criminals are loitering outside, what do I get? Bubkes.”
Weissbard had long ago armored his ego enough to let damn near every citizen barb bounce off without impact. “You called about seeing a homicide suspect here four nights ago?”
“Yeah, and some detective already came by and told me I was wrong. Even got mad that I called it in. Didn’t he do a report?”
“I like to do my own investigations,” Weissbard said. “Tell me about that night.”
“The night-shift kid, Ricardo What’s-His-Name,” Armand said. “He thought he saw the kid on the news, that Playing Card Killer you people set free.”
Barb #2. Weissbard was about to lay the blame for Sheridan’s freedom at Judge Enger’s feet, but instead opted to keep the conversation on track. “Do you have security footage?”
“Yeah, right over here. The other detective said it ‘wasn’t worth two shits’, his exact words.”
Weissbard prepped himself for disappointment. Unlike on television, where security footage was always crystal clear and the perp center screen and full-faced, real-world video was usually grainy, incomplete and frequently useless. Armand opened the door behind the counter to reveal a room barely big enough for the desk inside it. A laptop sat amid piles of papers with a bouncing Wallaby Stores logo as a screen saver. Armand tapped a security code into the computer and up popped a desktop screen just as cluttered as its real-life counterpart. He tapped on an icon of a masked cartoon bandit with a red Ghostbusters’ slashed circle over its face.
The screen switched over to a live feed of the empty gas pump island. A time scale at the bottom of the screen displayed the current time on the right and five days ago on the left.
The front door chime rang in the store. Armand sighed and stepped back to the doorway. He eyed with suspicion two teenagers who’d entered.
“Back it up to that night,” he said to Weissbard. “You’ll see him.”
Armand stepped out. Weissbard dropped into the uncomfortable high-backed desk chair. He grabbed the mouse, clicked on the time scale, and slid it back four days.
The screen went black for a second, and then a night view of the island appeared. The background was completely dark, and the harsh floodlights gave the chrome edges on the vacant pumps a fuzzy glow.
A few seconds later, a car pulled up past the pumps at the edge of the camera’s range. Only the passenger side stopped within the glow of the floodlights. Weissbard dared nurture a sprig of hope. A silver Toyota Camry. Ubiquitous, yes, but coincidentally the same car from Sheridan’s description. He bit his lip as the plate details showed as nothing but lens flare at this distance.
On the darker driver’s side, the front door opened. A figure got out and dashed around the hood of the car. His right foot dragged a bit, as if he’d injured it. He knelt by the fender well and scooped out a muddy wad of vegetation impaled with an oak branch. He tossed it aside in frustration and it splattered against the asphalt. He looked at his filthy hands, shook them, then uttered some curse the silent footage could not record. He spied the island’s hand towel dispenser, sent a clearing glance toward the convenience store, then rose and dashed into the brighter lights under the pumps.
Weissbard’s heart jumped and he hit the pause button. Right height, right race, most importantly, right face. No question in his mind. That guy in the video was Sheridan. It looked like he’d put on an oversized shirt, probably one stolen from his father’s closet, and he’d dyed his hair blond and spiked it, but even at the camera’s downward angle, the face was unmistakably Sheridan’s.
But that was to Weissbard, who’d spent a lot of time talking to Sheridan live. If all someone had seen was the kid’s 2D, straight-on mug shot, like Francisco had, the harsh lighting, oblique angle, and the radically different hair could easily make an identification impossible.
Weissbard hit Play. Sheridan pulled two paper towels from the dispenser, wiped his hands and dropped the dirty towels in the trash can by the pumps. Then he jogged back to the Toyota and drove off.
Weissbard backed it up and played it one more time for the sake of certainty. Sheridan. No question about it. Admissible in court? Only if Sheridan still had the dye-job when Weissbard finally caught him. He’d need a little DNA to go with the video.
He ran out of the room, past Armand at the counter and straight across the lot to the trash can Sheridan had used. He looked inside. Empty. He jogged to the dumpster beside the store and lifted the heavy plastic lid. Also empty.
Damn it, he thought. Of all the days for trash removal to be efficient.
As he walked back to the store, he pulled out his phone and called Washburn to come out and download the security footage. He entered the store and noticed that Armand had his eyes locked on the two teenaged customers. The two boys were meth-head skinny and ungodly pale for residents of the Sunshine State. They both had the furtive look of stupid people about to commit a stupid act. A glance over his shoulder revealed the sun-scorched blue Ford beater they’d arrived in. Even if he hadn’t been a cop, Weissbard could tell that this situation was headed someplace bad.
He walked down the aisle like he owned the place, and stopped a few feet short of the two teens. They managed an unconvincing look of defiance. He pulled his badge from his back pocket and flipped it open. Their mouths dropped open.
“You two are going to leave before this becomes your worst day ever, right?”
The two beat a hasty, silent retreat out the door. A grinding starter forced the aging Ford back to life and it wheezed out of the parking lot. Weissbard turned to Armand. Armand’s face displayed what, for him, probably passed for a smile.
“I got a guy who’ll be here within the hour,” Weissbard said. “Don’t mess with that surveillance recording.”
“You got it!”
Weissbard exited the store and walked over to where Sheridan had thrown the debris from his fender well. A number of cars had already compressed it into a pancake. But the oak branch was still intact. Sprigs of fern and moss dotted the mud.
He returned to his car. A pickup pulled in from the south with a trailered wave runner behind it. Sand sprayed the sides of the
truck.
The truck’s sandy coating came from the boat ramp to the bay, where the beach always blew over the ramp in places. The mud in Sheridan’s wheel well had come from a freshwater swamp, like the one behind his house. There was the chance for one more clue after all.
He piloted his Charger down Route 58 between the sections of wildlife preserve. A narrow strip of grass was all that separated the road from the untouched reserve. He slowed when the GPS map indicated he was at the closest point to the Sheridans’ backyard. He pulled over on the western side of the road, got out, and walked across to the strip of grass. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for, a long tire rut pulling out of the swamp. A car had struggled to make it back to the highway after pulling over. His educated guess was that the car was a Camry.
He called Washburn back and told him he had a stop before getting to the convenience store, and to bring his tire-casting kit.
* * *
After showing Washburn the tire track to preserve, Weissbard went to the Sheridans’ house. He had to nail down a few more points.
Camilla answered the door. Weissbard gave the dark roots in the part of her blonde hair a long look. With an unnerved look on her face, she reached up and flicked at her hair as if something might be there. Weissbard smiled.
“Ms. Sheridan, I have a few more questions. May I come in?”
She gave her hair one more brush with her fingertips. “Yes, certainly.”
He began as soon as she shut the door behind him. “The evening Brian escaped, had you noticed that he’d done anything to alter his appearance?”
“No. Don’t you think we’d have mentioned that?”
“You’d be surprised what people forget to mention. Is any of your hair-coloring dye missing?”
“Hair coloring?”
She assumed a haughty air of being horribly offended. She stared down Weissbard to extract an apology. Weissbard just stared back. Her upper lip quivered. She looked away.
“I have a stylist.”
“So there aren’t any dyes in the house.”
“Certainly not.”
Unfortunately, Weissbard believed her. She’d think that covering her own gray to pass for blonde was well beneath her station in life since she could pay for someone else to do it.
“Mind if I check a few things out?” he said.
She stepped out of the way, as if granting permission for the indignity of a search was beneath her as well. Weissbard went upstairs. She didn’t follow.
He went to the master bathroom first. A quick search of the cabinets turned up nothing from Clairol or any of its rivals. Brian Sheridan’s room didn’t have its own bathroom, so he went to the guest bathroom down the hall. The bath towel on the rack had been used, and a toilet paper core sat in the trash can, so it didn’t look like the Sheridans had let the maid loose in here since Brian’s escape.
But there wasn’t any evidence Brian had done any midnight dye job in here. Weissbard bent and smelled the sink drain. Hair dye stank to high heaven, and all this smelled like was the same coconut-scented soap that sat in the dispenser on the counter.
While failing to find confirming evidence wasn’t the same thing as finding contradicting evidence, Weissbard still had the sickening feeling of drilling a dry well. But there were a dozen other ways to explain Sheridan’s hair color shift, and there was no denying the video of him at the convenience store.
These little riddles could go unsolved for now. The important question to answer was where had Sheridan holed up after his drive south on Highway 58.
Chapter Forty-Three
Tyler skipped the chemical sleep aid he’d doused Brian with on the trip back from scouting Candy at the dollar store. Instead he just tied a T-shirt around Brian’s head to keep the route secret. It worked just as well. The blasting stereo masked any outside noises and until the air conditioning finally made its way into the open trunk area, Brian was too worried about suffocating on his sweat-drenched gag to pay attention to anything else.
He did pick up one clue. Before they returned to the garage, Tyler slowed and then stopped the car. A metallic creak moaned from the direction of the hood, and then Tyler accelerated. Brian recognized that kind of sound, a security gate, like the one in his parents’ neighborhood. Tyler had stopped so a scanner could read a barcode decal, probably on a side window, and then the scanner sent a signal to open the gate. Most communities had one manned gate for deliveries and visitors, and the rest were automated. Brian knew Tyler wouldn’t be taking chances dragging Brian through a manned gate where some security guard might ask questions about a guy blindfolded, gagged, and hog-tied in the open trunk space.
That gave Brian an idea. He’d spent way too many hours in the backseat of his parents’ car, where the security pass decal partially blocked the side window view. The barcode was printed on the outside, but the name of the development had been printed on the inside. He stared at Sewanee Lakes, the name of his parents’ subdivision, for hours on end, the way convicts read Department of Corrections on their work detail bus. There was a chance this decal was printed the same way.
The car passed into shade and stopped. A garage door ground and clunked closed and Brian knew they were back. He bit the edge of his lip.
The driver’s door opened and closed, then the passenger door opened. Brian managed a muffled kind of whine and shook his head back and forth like a dog trying to dry itself.
“What’s the matter, bro?” Tyler whipped the rag off Brian’s head and pulled his gag down.
Brian spit to the side and flashed several exaggerated blinks. “Uh, thanks! The sweat, it was just stinging my eyes.” He squinted as if the sunlight hurt, then turned his head toward the side window.
A white decal covered the window’s lower left corner. He trained his eyes on it.
Tyler reached in and grabbed Brian by the shirt front and pulled him up. Brian let his head loll just enough to look a bit loopy, but his eyes never left the decal. A string of tiny words flashed by as Tyler pulled him out the door. But they passed just slow enough to register.
They read Palm Bay Preserve.
The name didn’t ring a bell, but he doubted it would. There were probably hundreds of gated subdivisions all over the Tampa Bay area, and new ones popped up every year. It didn’t matter that the name didn’t help him know where he was. It mattered that it might help someone else find out where he was. If he ever got the chance to tell someone.
Tyler flicked out the cherrywood knife and cut the zip tie that bound Brian’s hands to his feet. He left the other two ties that bound his hands and feet together, though. Tyler pulled him out of the car, onto his feet, and hopped him into the bathroom prison. With two savage cuts he sent the zip ties at Brian’s feet and wrist sailing. He dropped Brian’s pants to his ankles and shoved him down in the chair. Before Brian could even think of leveraging the escape opportunity, Tyler pulled four of the ever-present zip ties from a pants pocket and bound his wrists and calves to the chair.
“Now sit tight.” Tyler’s face was alight with genuine enthusiasm. “This idea is, like, a total winner. I don’t know why I didn’t do this from the start.”
Tyler rushed out. His absence left a vacuum, but not a bad one. With the insanity in another room Brian could finally exhale, finally take a moment to steel himself against whatever Tyler was about to unleash on him.
Pots and pans banged in the kitchen. There was a silent pause, then a clang in the hall. The door opened and Tyler stepped in. He had a pair of rough, brown leather work boots in his hands. He started to speak without even looking Brian in the eye.
“See, I figured it out, brother. You don’t understand the release. The rush of the kill is the release of the pain. It’s like a dam breaks and it all flows out, at least for a while. See, you got no water behind that dam. You missed out on so much that I didn’t in my lif
e. All drugged up and shit. Dude, I really feel for you.”
He knelt down between Brian’s knees. He continued speaking as he pulled the sock off Brian’s right foot.
“So you asked me about my foot, right? And I got all pissed. Sorry. I mean, that’s not me at all, right? I was just stressed with our reunion plan and all. So here’s the real story.”
He tossed Brian’s right sock aside.
“The Dunhams were really big on everyone doing their fair share on the farm. Kids gotta learn responsibility, they said. Yeah, well, it was more like work on the shitty patch of dust they owned to grow the food they sold. Slavery is outlawed, just not family slavery. So we all had chores.”
He yanked off Brian’s left sock.
“So Old Man Dunham is with me in the barn, and we’re trying to get this DOA tractor running. I’m like six years old so all I can do is hand him tools and shit. So he asks for the sledgehammer. Now it’s a small, handheld one, but, dude, I’m six and the thing weighs like a ton to me.”
He threw Brian’s left sock across the bathroom and against the wall. The air conditioning chilled Brian’s sweat-soaked feet. Tyler took a deep breath before he continued.
“The hammer slips out of my hand and of course, it lands on the toe of the stupid cowboy boots he always wore. I mean, right on the pointy tip, where there’s no foot or toes. I practically pissed myself I got so scared. I knew what was coming. He totally lost it.”
Tyler put a work boot on Brian’s right foot and snugged it up. He smiled. “Well look at that, surprise, a perfect fit. And I already broke it in for you.”
His face went dark again as if the thundercloud of a memory returned. “So Old Man Dunham scoops the hammer up off the floor. He points the thing in my face, screaming about how I thought dropping it on him was funny. Shit, funny was the last thing I thought it was. Then he screams, ‘Let’s see if this makes you laugh!’”
The Playing Card Killer Page 19
