Rising Tide (Coastal Fury Book 5)

by Matt Lincoln

  “I know we have to talk about the Dragon Tide’s collapse, but I want to know if you’ve figured out how to keep me safe in my own home,” Alice said in a weary voice. “I want to say I trust my parents’ bodyguards, but I don’t know if that’s true anymore. Until you folks find out who that man was after at the botanic garden, I’m going to assume he was after me.”

  Diane leaned against the edge of her desk and crossed her arms. “It’s a sensible assumption. Ethan has his share of enemies, but they aren’t stupid enough to pull a stunt like that on him.”

  “That’s for damn sure. I wish that our bystander had shot that bastard in the leg or something,” I grumbled. “Now, we’re going to need a DNA test or dentals.”

  “Clyde texted me about the fingertips.” Diane frowned. “You didn’t hear about the teeth?”

  I had a bad feeling I didn’t want to know about the teeth. “I have not.”

  “Dentures. Our suspect-slash-victim had dentures.” Creases appeared in the space between Diane’s brows. “There are no marks for us to trace where they originated. We can guess the brand by design, but tracking it to any given dental practice will take time, and that’s if we can do it at all.”

  That bad feeling deepened. “They’ve gone to some lengths to make him unidentifiable.” I thought back to Baldy’s fingers. “They burned his fingertips, so what good did cutting off his index fingers and reattaching them do?”

  “What?” Alice cut me a sharp glance. “I didn’t hear about that.”

  Since she’d been on the scene, I thought she’d caught a little of everything said around her. Then again, I hadn’t kept an eye on her every second we were there.

  “Our forensics people don’t go out of their way to tell everyone their observations.” I watched her for a moment, and she met my eye. “Alice, have you heard of this before?”

  She swallowed. “Yes.” She looked down and away. “My grandfather used to use that technique to make examples of men who failed him.” She looked back up. “He stopped doing that years ago. This man must have been one of the last who had this happen.”

  “So he’s part of your family’s operation?”

  “I can’t say.” Alice hugged herself. “Some of those men were allowed to leave. It seems that mutilating hands makes it difficult for hired grunts to do their jobs.”

  “Who would have guessed?” Diane’s sarcastic tone matched my feelings on it. “We need to identify him and find out who he was working for.” She softened her tone. “It’s important to see if it was anyone close to you.”

  Alice lowered her eyes and nodded. “Yeah, I get that.” She sucked in her lips for a moment and then looked up. “I’m going to the collapse site,” she informed us. “Maybe I can see something, maybe not, but I want to take a firsthand look.”

  Holm frowned at her. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Ethan’s right that your knowledge of architecture is a reason to put you in the spotlight of the investigation. It doesn’t help that your grandfather asked you to take over in his place. Do you know yet whether anyone else is aware of this?”

  Alice shook her head. “My parents haven’t said anything, and I haven’t seen Pete since the hospital.” She sighed. “I have to assume my parents, at the very least, suspect.” She slouched in her seat and leaned her head against the chair’s left wing. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Do you have any friends you want to stay with?” I asked her. Even though she was surrounded by people, Alice seemed all sorts of lonely. “Or anyone you can vent to, confide in, that kind of thing?”

  “Not anyone I’m willing to put into danger.” She shrugged. “I’ve never had many friends because of my family. You never know who’ll get stupid and try to go after me or my friends to get even with my family.”

  “That sounds like an unfulfilling way to live,” I observed.

  She sat up and put her elbows on her knees. “My work fulfills me. I’m making a difference. That’s hard to see right now, but it’ll be more apparent as the climate changes.”

  “You’re a green architect, right?” Diane asked, and Alice nodded. “That seems like it should be a booming business.”

  “It’s growing,” Alice said in agreement. “The more we do, the more impact we can have on the environment. Climate change can’t be totally reversed, but it can be curbed.”

  “Projects like Zhu’s could get in the way of what you’re trying to accomplish,” Holm suggested with a glance at me. The implication rankled even though I knew it had to be explored.

  Alice narrowed her eyes. “When did this turn into an interrogation?”

  “Agent Holm is making an observation that many people will have.” Diane went around to her desk chair and had a seat. “Understand that providing you with security doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear.”

  Alice’s eyes simmered, and she gave a curt nod. “Take note that I’ve cooperated from the beginning. If I hear anything useful, I swear to call you.” She stood. “For what it’s worth, I hate this. I’ve run from it since I graduated high school.”

  “What if you have to betray your parents?” Holm asked with a softer edge to his voice.

  Alice cut him a glance. “I told them a long time ago that if they ever got me involved, I’d go to the authorities. It wouldn’t be betrayal if you warned someone.” Her hands were still fisted, and she lightly punched her thigh. “I love my parents and a few cousins, but I refuse to be like them.”

  With that, she left Diane’s office and went in the direction of my desk.

  “I’m sorry, Ethan…” Holm began, but I waved him off.

  “Don’t apologize. We have to explore all the angles.” My errant brain added “and curves,” but I kept that part to myself. “I want to believe her, but we all know some people are good at manipulating everyone around them. My instincts are screaming that she’s not a murderer, but I see the need to treat her like any other witness who could be a suspect.”

  “Which head are your instincts coming from?” Diane asked with a frown. “Be sure you know what you’re doing because if you let your hormones override your common sense, you could blow this case apart.”

  “I’m thinking with my gut,” I informed Diane and Holm in a sharp tone. “We are going to find out who did this, and when we do, it won’t be Alice.”

  CHAPTER 17

  We took my department vehicle, a red Dodge Charger with black hubcaps and accents, to the collapsed Dragon Tide hotel. My last Charger was silver, and it died in the line of duty when a chase ended in flooded streets. The new car was the same except for the color and trim, and I liked it.

  Alice rode in front while Holm sat in the back in uncharacteristic silence. I couldn’t get a read on what he thought about Alice. At times, he was reserved around her, and at other times, he was friendly. Given our history, I suspected he was trying to trust me despite valid reasons to add her to the list of suspects. Hell, I had a hard enough time with it, too.

  Alice gasped as we turned onto the causeway that would take us to the hotel site. Holm made a sound when the rubble came into view. The site was a few blocks off the other end of the causeway, but the building’s remains were clearly visible. Light dust clouds floated over the water and above the broken concrete and bent steel.

  “Damn,” Holm whispered.

  “That’s a lot of dust,” I said as we drove through a bit of the particulate. “How much you wanna bet people are freaking out about breathing it?”

  “I don’t know.” Alice stared at the mess with knitted brows. “There isn’t asbestos, and the larger particles shouldn’t stay in the air that long. As long as people stay inside, they should be fine.”

  “There’s a rainstorm coming in.” Holm held up his phone to show off a local weather map. I didn’t get a good look because I was driving, but I glimpsed a mass of green and yellow. “That should help wash a lot of the dust into the sewers.”

  Alice groaned. “No, that’s not good. It’
ll wash contaminants into the bay.”

  The bay was already dying thanks to the sheer amount of raw sewage from aging infrastructure and failing septic systems, not to mention all the ships and boats passing through. In the scheme of things, the hotel’s collapse wouldn’t do much to add to the bay’s woes, but it sure as hell wouldn’t help.

  Dragon Tide’s parking lot was, in large part, remarkably untouched other than a thick layer of dust. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars filled the space, and news vans lined the street next to the property.

  None of us spoke as we pulled into the parking lot. Up close, the twenty-nine-story building’s remains were taller than most mid-rises. Although it wasn’t as jarring as when I went to Ground Zero months after 9/11, it was the kind of sight that humbled a body. Humanity was capable of creating great feats, but every one of those feats had the potential to come undone in two blinks of an eye.

  “Was anyone in there?” Alice asked in a whisper.

  “I hope not,” I answered as we got out of the car. “It’s hard to imagine anyone surviving it.”

  “Hey, there’s Muñoz and Birn.” Holm pointed between a fire truck and police car, where the partners spoke with someone on a gurney. “Looks like there’s at least one survivor.”

  “Hey, weren’t they here to interview people who worked on the site?” I asked Holm.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Muñoz looked in our direction and waved us over. Birn nodded at something the injured patient said as we went to meet our fellow agents.

  “What do you have?” I asked as we walked up.

  “This is Felix,” Birn told us. “Felix, these are Special Agents Marston and Holm. They’d like to hear what you said.”

  Felix coughed and then sipped at a bottle of Gatorade someone had given him. Gray dust caked the man so thoroughly that he looked like he was sculpted of ash. Soiled towels lay at his feet, and I saw streaked from where he or someone else had attempted to clean him up a little.

  “I’m on security until they figure out what to do with the place,” he told us. “I got to my shift a few minutes early this morning and started rounds before the overnight guy clocked out.” He looked over to the southern side of the property. “I found two divers getting out of the water over by where the accident happened.” Felix shook his head. “I’m sorry, I should’ve stopped them, but they seemed like dumb sightseers.”

  Holm stepped closer to Felix. “Why didn’t you stop them or call someone?”

  “Like I said, I thought they were sightseers. They said they just wanted to see what it looked like underneath.” Felix stared at his lap. “Besides, the bald guy was coughing so bad I couldn’t imagine him doing any harm. I don’t know how he managed to go diving like that.”

  I cut a sharp glance at Holm. Yeah, we were on the same page.

  “What did the other guy look like?” Holm whipped out his phone to record the description.

  Felix shook his head. “Oh, she wasn’t a guy. She looked young, maybe a teenager or early twenties. Long, brown hair in a braid, and she wasn’t very tall, at least not like her friend.”

  “Thanks, Felix.” I looked something up on my phone and then turned to Muñoz and Birn. “I think Robbie and I know who he’s talking about. I need you two to keep Miss Liu here safe while we go check this out.”

  Alice held out her hands as if telling me to hold up. “I don’t know these people,” she complained.

  “They’re special agents like Holm and me,” I told her. “Stick with them until we’re back or Director Ramsey finds someone else who can stand in. We can’t bring you for this.”

  Alice pursed her lips and glowered as if she were about to deliver a retort, but she backed off. “Fine. I was the one who wanted to see the wreckage, anyway.” She turned away, but I had a feeling that the conversation was far from over.

  Holm and I ran back to my car. I flipped the switches for my siren and front-window light and tore off down the street.

  “Who do you think the girl was?” Holm asked as we flew across the causeway and back onto the mainland. “A student or a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know, maybe both,” I growled. “Whatever he’s playing at could get more people killed.”

  Holm gripped the handle above his door as I took a hard turn toward the university. If Michael James wasn’t the man Felix described, I didn’t know who it could’ve been. Baldy was tall but looked anything but ill until he was shot in the head, and he couldn’t have been two places at once.

  I killed the light and siren before driving onto campus. There was no sense in spooking James and his female accomplice, assuming they stuck to his schedule. I had taken a photo of the schedule he’d posted on his door while on the way out from meeting with him the first time. With luck, that unplanned shot would pan out.

  “He should be lecturing about now,” I said as we got out of the car. “Let’s try to do this low key. There’s no point in making a commotion here.”

  “Too late for that.”

  Holm nodded toward the doors to the class building. Several students ran out to the curb as I heard an approaching siren. Holm and I ran over to the agitated college kids.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  “Our professor collapsed,” one of the students cried. “He turned blue, and… Oh, there’s the ambulance!”

  Holm and I bolted toward the lecture hall. With all the students gathered in the hall, it was easy to find. James was down on the floor with a handful of young adults crowded around him. In the middle was a young woman with a long, brown braid. She was rescue breathing, but as the other woman said, James had turned blue. The man wasn’t getting oxygen, and his friend was getting exhausted.

  Another student took over, and the first grabbed James’s hand and sobbed. One of the others looked at me and saw the badge on my belt.

  “Can you help? His heart is still beating, but he can’t breathe.”

  “The paramedics are right behind us.” I knelt next to James and felt his wrist for a pulse. It was there, but barely. “Keep up what you’re doing.”

  Heavy, fast footsteps and jangling metal came from the hall. Two paramedics burst through the door and hurried down the stadium-style steps. One of the medics got a bag valve mask going while the other checked for pulses.

  “Tell us what happened,” the medic with the air mask instructed.

  I pointed to the woman with the braid. “You were in the water with him. How long and how deep?”

  She looked up and blinked. “H-how did you know?”

  “How long and how deep?” I repeated.

  What little color remained in her face now drained away. “Maybe fifteen feet. We weren’t in there that long. Ten minutes?” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “He kept coughing but wouldn’t let me take him up.”

  “Barotrauma?” the first medic asked me. At my nod, he shook his head. “That would’ve hit him right away.”

  “He has lung cancer,” I told them. “I’m thinking the dive weakened something, and then it probably got worse when he got back.”

  The paramedic looked skeptical, but he rolled with it. He listened to James’s chest wall and frowned.

  “Decreased breath sounds on the right,” he reported to his partner, “but he’s breathing on his own now. Call ahead.”

  The young woman tried to go with James in the ambulance, but we held her back. Once the rig was gone, she sagged to the floor and cried. I had Holm get the other students out of the auditorium so we could have a little chat with our mystery diver.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “I’m not talking to you,” she managed through her sobs. “I… I want a lawyer.”

  “If we have to wait for a lawyer, it’ll be at our field office,” Holm informed her. “Think real careful here. I’m sure MJ would like to see a familiar face when he wakes up.”

  She looked up. “You think he’ll make it?”

  “We aren’t doctors.”
I crouched next to her. “He should never have gone on that dive, and you should’ve known better.”

  “He would have gone without me.” She sniffed and got to her feet. “My name is Terry, and I swear I only went to keep him from drowning. I’m not even that experienced with diving. I just didn’t want him to get stuck alone under there.”

  “Why did he go in?” I asked.

  “He wanted to see something but wouldn’t say what.” Terry rubbed her eyes. “All I know is that we didn’t get as far as he wanted. There was a hole in the wall next to the elevator shaft. By the time we got there, he was already in trouble.”

  “One last question,” I told her. “Why were you the one to go with him?”

  Her chin trembled, and she looked around the empty room before back at us.

  “We’re engaged,” she answered. “MJ found out he only has a few months to live, so we’re getting married as soon as we can.” She took a deep breath. “Please don’t tell the university. If they fire him, he’ll lose his benefits.”

  “I can’t guarantee anything,” I said with a sigh. “We’ll take you to the hospital, but you’re in our custody now. If you try to run or do anything stupid, you will go straight to jail. Do you understand?”

  Terry nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  As we walked her out to the car, I couldn’t help thinking about how love and lust drove people to make strange decisions. The question was whether the same thing was happening to me.

  CHAPTER 18

  Diane and one Detective JJ Rucker met us at the hospital. It’d been a while since I ran into Rucker, and I couldn’t say as I was pleased. Metro Police apparently decided they’d had enough of MBLIS keeping the Dragon Tide situation under our control.

  “This one is trespassing, minimum,” Rucker sniped as soon as I walked in with Holm and Terry. “I’m arresting her right now, and that James character next.”

  “Hold up, Detective.” Diane stepped between Rucker and me. “We don’t know that trespassing is all they did. Until we have more information to act on, we’re keeping her here, in our custody.”