Bluewater Ice: The Fourth Novel in the Caribbean Mystery and Adventure Series (Bluewater Thrillers Book 4)

by Charles Dougherty

"Not from Toby. He had his wallet in his pocket; face matched the driver's license, but the Doc's waiting on dental records to confirm his identity."

  "No, Luke. I meant from the killer."

  "Maybe. We got a shit-load of prints off the instrument panel; only the back end of the boat sunk. Front seat and the body were bone-dry."

  "Okay. Let me make a couple of calls, and I'll come by your office in an hour, give or take."

  "Right. See you then. I may know more by the time you get here."

  Paul jotted the details of Luke's report in his notebook and then returned Mac McKenna's call from yesterday afternoon.

  "Hey, Mac. Sorry I missed you yesterday. You got something for me on that Velasquez woman?"

  "Yes and no. Nothing in the records; she's clean. Local, state, and federal. Nada."

  "But?" Paul prompted.

  "But somebody else is askin'. Got a call late yesterday from a P.I. up in Savannah, Georgia."

  "He say why?"

  "She. Mona Helmer. But no, they never tell you shit. If they do, you know it's a lie."

  "Did you tell her anything?"

  "You're kiddin', right? You can tell her if you want." Mac rattled off a phone number with a south-Georgia area code as Paul scribbled in his notebook.

  "Thanks, Mac. Dozen chocolate cake donuts, chocolate icing, coming up."

  "You're a gentleman and a scholar, Lieutenant," Mac said.

  "Hey, Mac?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I got another favor to ask."

  "Shoot, Lieutenant."

  Paul gave Mac the information he had on Connie Barrera and told him he'd drop off the donuts after he finished giving Luke his statement.

  ****

  Two hours later, Paul walked into Mac's cubicle and presented him with a box of warm donuts. Mac made a show of inhaling deeply, his nose close to the box.

  "Hey, Paul, thanks," the rotund cop said. "That Barrera woman you asked about?"

  "Yeah? You found something?"

  "Remember when the uniforms driving the Broncos up and down the beach were gettin' distracted by the babes and running over civilians a few years ago?"

  "Yeah. There was a rash of those accidents. I remember. What about it?"

  "They ran over your Connie Barrera; cost 'em a cool million dollars to settle."

  Paul chuckled. "Okay."

  "But that ain't all. Turns out there was a warrant out for her. She was a material witness in some murder investigation in, guess where…"

  "I give up. Where?"

  "Savannah, Georgia. Here. Call this guy over in South Beach. He's got all the details." Mac passed a pink message slip across his cluttered desk.

  Paul thanked him and left as Mac was opening the box of donuts.

  ****

  Paul settled into the gray-upholstered steel chair in the cluttered office. Across the desk was a heavy-set, rumpled looking detective sergeant named Luis Gonzalez. "Thanks for squeezing me in, Sergeant," Paul said.

  "No problem. Any friend of Mac's is a friend of mine. I owe that guy big time," Gonzalez said, with an incongruous cracker accent. Seeing the look on Paul's face, he laughed. "Valdosta, Georgia," he said.

  "What?" Paul asked, "I don't…"

  "My accent. I was born in Havana, but I grew up in Valdosta. Just thought I'd get it out of the way before you asked. People always wonder."

  "Isn't Valdosta near Savannah?"

  "Closer than Miami. Why? What's in Savannah."

  Paul explained that he was looking for information on Connie Barrera. Gonzalez recalled the case clearly. "Sunbathing, and two uniforms on beach patrol ran over her damn foot. Million dollars."

  "That's the one," Paul said.

  "She was from Savannah, wasn't she?" Gonzalez remembered.

  "Right. Mac said she was a person of interest in a murder investigation up there."

  "Yep, she was. And I've just told you about all I know. What did you need?"

  "Anything I can get. Information on the murder might be useful."

  "Hang on just a sec." Gonzalez opened his top right hand desk drawer and pulled out a thick stack of business cards with a rubber band around them. He took off the rubber band and began thumbing through the cards. "She apparently just had some information they needed; a guy came down and interviewed her, and that was about it. Maybe there was some kind of immunity agreement…. Here it is. Detective Sergeant Joe Denardo, Savannah P.D. Nice guy, he was. He's the one you want to talk with."

  Paul scribbled in his notebook as Gonzalez read off the telephone number and extension.

  "Tell him I said hello," Gonzalez said.

  "Will do, Luis. Thanks.

  ****

  As Paul drove back across the MacArthur Causeway toward Coconut Grove, he thought about all the random pieces of information he had gleaned today. He and Luke had been passing the time this morning while they waited for someone to finish typing up Paul's statement describing his interview with Lena. As they were reminiscing, an excited detective had interrupted to tell Luke that they had a match on some of the fingerprints from the boat that had carried Toby Rodriguez on his final journey.

  "Pietro Jovanovich," the young woman had read from a facsimile page. "He's wanted for war crimes; butchered a bunch of people in that conflict between Serbia and Croatia. Some of that 'ethnic cleansing' stuff. The U.N. had him, but he escaped before they got him to trial. Sounds like a sick bastard." She passed the page to Luke and excused herself.

  "Pietro," Paul had said. "That's something like Peter."

  "Yep. Says here they'll email us a mug shot. We'll see if Lena Mele recognizes him. She said she got a good look at both of them when they rousted Toby. She sounds like a real piece of work," Luke remarked.

  "I figure she must have worked in one of his strip-joints before she moved in with him; she's a looker, and likes to show it off.".

  "Yeah, so I hear. And you're right. She was a dancer in one of his clubs before she got promoted to his full-time squeeze," Luke said.

  ****

  "If they cleared in yesterday, why are you calling me now? That's 18 hours ago," Wallace said. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Sam. "The gal in customs in St. Barth's," he explained. He took his hand off of the mouthpiece. "I understand you don't work every day, but I pay you to keep me informed. Day-old information is worthless. Don't let it happen again." He hung up the phone and swiveled to face Sam.

  Sam nodded, and Wallace pressed a button on the intercom on his desktop. "Get Pietro on the line," he said, when his secretary answered.

  Chapter 24

  Pietro and Davey tossed their luggage into the trunk of the rental car. "How we gonna find 'em?" Davey asked. "Rolle have any idea?"

  "No. He just found out that they cleared in here the day before yesterday."

  They had spent the previous afternoon driving around St. Martin, scouring the coastline in hopes of spotting Vengeance in some out-of-the-way cove. Pietro's cell phone battery had died in mid-afternoon, and when they got back to their hotel room after dinner, the phone was ringing. Answering, Pietro had ground his teeth as a furious Wallace berated him for his stupidity. Finally, Wallace had gotten to the reason for his call, but it was too late to catch a ferry for the short trip to St. Barth's. It was mid-morning by the time they had disembarked in Gustavia and rented a car.

  "We gotta rent another boat," Davey said. "Let's try to get something bigger."

  "Yeah, okay," Pietro agreed. "First, let's check out the inner harbor here; we might get lucky."

  "Maybe, but did you see all the boats anchored outside? Take us a day to check 'em all out," Davey said.

  "Yeah. There're a couple of other spots, too. Just around the point from here there's Anse Colombier, but no way to get there except by boat, unless we spend the time to hike it. Then there's a spot or two along the south coast, but I think we can get a look at them by car."

  "If they're still here," Davey added. "Probably gone by now. Bitches."

&n
bsp; "We won't know until we look," Pietro said. "Don't be so whiney; think about when we catch them."

  Davey grinned at that. "Maybe I'll do the Latina first."

  "Whatever. I'll need to question all three of them; we'll just see how it works out. You can have two of them to play with while I work on the first one, but they need to be alive and able to talk until I find out what they know. No accidents, or it'll cost you your fingertips." Pietro smirked as he saw Davey's involuntary shudder.

  "Once they spend a few minutes with me, they'll probably want to give me the diamonds for a second round," Davey blustered, but he couldn't keep the tremor from his voice.

  "Let's walk around and check out the docks," Pietro said, laughing at Davey's sudden change in demeanor.

  ****

  "Yes, of course I remember Luis Gonzalez. Looks like a Cuban, sounds like a cracker. How could I forget him? Miami was amazing; I've never seen the like, not even in New York. You guys still got uniformed patrolmen with green hair down there?" Joe Denardo asked.

  "Oh, probably," Paul said, smiling. "That all happened after I retired. They hired some consultant to teach 'em about 'community policing,' I guess. Just as well I'm out."

  "You miss it?" Joe asked.

  "Sometimes at first I did, but I'm staying busy."

  "Is it pretty different, being a P.I.?"

  "I never got around to that; just got involved in a bunch of stuff with some friends. Civilians. They're guys I knew when I was on the job, but I never had time to be part of the crowd, you know."

  "Yeah. I thought about pulling the plug myself, up until I got promoted. Figure a few more years as a Lieutenant won't hurt the pension any, and I mostly like it. So what brings you to Savannah?"

  "Well, a couple of things. First one's pretty simple, I think. I just discovered a P.I. up here is checking up on a friend of a friend, and I was asked to check up on the P.I. You know a woman named Mona Helmer?"

  "Oh, yeah. Your friend got a gambling problem, by any chance?" Joe asked.

  "I don't know; it's possible. Like I said, she's a friend of a friend. Why do you ask?"

  "Mona does a lot of skip tracing for a couple of bookies, we think. Your friend would probably be better off if Mona didn't find him."

  "Her," Paul corrected. "So is Mona Helmer connected, then?"

  "Probably. Notice I said, 'we think' she does work for the bookies. If we could prove half of what we suspect about her, old Mona would be behind bars."

  "Any idea who she's working for?"

  "Not really. Couple of years ago, we had a pretty good idea who was running the other team, but he got himself jammed up and left town in a hurry. Things haven't settled back down yet. We think a couple of guys from outside are fighting over the scraps. Mona's probably working for one of them -- or both of them. She's pretty slippery." Denardo paused for a moment. "You said there was something else?"

  "Yes. Some of the guys are into a little venture with a gal named Connie Barrera…" Paul hesitated, searching for the right word.

  "Connie Barrera," Joe interrupted. He laughed. "I was looking all over for her, and a couple of Miami Beach's finest ran over her foot while she was sunbathing. That's gotta be one of my favorite stories about catching a fugitive. How's she doing? I kind of liked her," Joe added, smiling.

  "She seems to be all right. She chartered a sailboat that some friends of mine run."

  "In the Bahamas?" Joe asked.

  "They picked her up there, but they're farther south, now."

  "Good for her; sounds like life's working out for her. So what did you want to know about her?"

  "Luis Gonzalez told me she was a person of interest in a murder you were investigating," Paul said.

  Joe leaned back in his swivel chair and stroked his chin. After a moment, he said, "That's roughly correct. There's a little more to it than that, but I can't tell you everything. She lawyered up. She gave us what we needed, but we entered into an agreement that keeps us from discussing her part in what was going on."

  Paul took a few seconds to digest that and then asked, "Can you tell me if part of the agreement with her involved giving her a new identity?"

  "Yes I can, and no it didn't. Given the situation before we found her, I wouldn't be surprised if she had acquired a new identity on her own, though. She wouldn't need it now; she came clean with us. She's one of the good guys, and the bad guys are all out of action," Joe said. "Except for one, and he's on the run. Clean disappeared," he added as an afterthought.

  "Can you tell me generally about the case that she helped you with? Nothing that breaches your agreement," Paul added.

  "Sure. She basically gave us an inside track on a drug smuggling and money laundering operation. A couple of people got killed in the confusion; that's the murder aspect. I can tell you that she was completely innocent of all that; we had no doubt about her, or the agreement wouldn't have happened. Like I said, we put those guys away, all except for one. Unfortunately, he was the boss -- a local mobster named Sam Alfano. He ran, and we've still got a warrant for his arrest, if we can find him. We think he left the country at the helm of one of his shrimp boats; that's how the drugs were moving."

  "Thanks, Joe. I need to see if I can make sense out of all this, but I think I'll probably be back in touch. I may even have a lead on Alfano's whereabouts, but let me do a quick check before I get everybody wound up, okay?"

  Joe locked eyes with Paul for a long moment. "Yeah, okay. I'll give you some slack. We could obviously use the help on Alfano. I'm not going to insult you with a lot of bullshit about needing to come forward if you've got information, but don't keep me in the dark."

  "I hear you. I'll be back in touch in a day or two. For now, I don't mind telling you that there's a guy in Nassau, an expat American who calls himself Sam Alfieri. He's mixed up in a money laundering scheme, and he's pissed off some good friends of mine. I'm pretty sure Sam Alfieri is an alias; I can't find anybody with that name that's a match for this guy."

  "Jesus!" Joe said. "That's almost gotta be him. In the damned Bahamas. We'll never get him out of there if he's paying the right people."

  "Like I said, Alfieri has pissed off my friends. Once we're sure what's happening, we might be able to help you get him out of the Bahamas, if he's your guy."

  "How does Connie figure in this?" Joe asked. "I can't believe she's mixed up with him, if it's Alfano. She didn't even know his name -- just a few of his underlings. She uncovered the tracks on some of the money by accident."

  "I don't know how she fits in. That's one of the things I need to find out. If you think she doesn't know Alfano, that makes me feel a lot better about her already."

  "Damn," Joe said, shaking his head, a frown on his face. "When are you heading back to Miami?"

  "I've got a ticket with an open return, but there's not a flight I can catch until tomorrow. Why?"

  "I'm not much of a drinker, but I need one. Let me close out a couple of things here. I'll buy, and then I'll treat you to some fresh, local seafood. Where you stayin'?"

  "A B&B about a block from here, I think."

  "The Waving Girl?"

  "That's the place."

  "Forty-five minutes okay?" Joe asked.

  Paul nodded.

  "I'll pick you up," Joe said, reaching for the phone as Paul got to his feet.

  Chapter 25

  "What did he say, Pietro?" Davey asked. They were seated in a waterfront café in Gustavia. Davey was finishing a $35 hamburger while Pietro checked in with their employer.

  "To find a place to stay for a day or two. They are reconsidering how to deal with this Velasquez woman, I think. Sam Alfieri has some people checking her out; he's hoping they can figure out where she plans to go with the diamonds. He also thinks that she may be involved with some other 'organization,' as Mr. Rolle put it."

  "Well shit, I guess I can find someone to amuse me this evening. I got needs, you know; I been ready for those women for days. You're even starting to look good
, you kinky bastard."

  "Watch yourself, Davey. You know what happens when I get excited; you would not enjoy the way I make love, I think." Pietro smirked. "But if you're sure, I could make you feel things you never imagined," he said, reaching across the table and picking up one of Davey's ham-like hands. He began to softly stroke the hairy fingers, one at a time.

  Davey jerked his hand away, wiping his fingers reflexively with his ketchup-stained napkin. "Freakin' pervert," he said. "Don't ever touch me again."

  Pietro convulsed, giggling gleefully. "You should stick to girls, Davey. You aren't man enough for me."

  "I want separate rooms if we gotta stay here tonight," Davey said, frowning.

  Pietro giggled again. "Relax, Davey. You're not my type."

  "Freakin' right, I'm not," Davey blustered.

  "Too hairy, by far. But if you shaved all over first…" Pietro licked his lips, reveling in Davey's discomfort. "Too bad. There's some nice meat around those knuckles, I believe."

  Their exchange was interrupted by the arrival of the check. Pietro examined it, reaching for his wallet.

  "Separate rooms," Davey said again as they walked back to the car.

  ****

  Vengeance was anchored to the south of the Jolly Harbour entrance channel in Antigua. They had tied up to the customs dock late yesterday afternoon so that Dani could handle the arrival paperwork. Once cleared, they had come back outside seeking a cooling breeze, having found conditions in the harbor stifling.

  While Liz stocked up at the gourmet market this morning, Connie had explored the souvenir shops and the art gallery. Dani had remained on board, spending some 'quality time' tinkering with the diesel engine, as she put it. It was midday, and they were finishing lunch in the shade of the cockpit awning, enjoying the gentle breeze.

  "Any preference as to where we spend the night?" Dani asked Connie.

  "Barbuda is too far, right?" Connie asked.

  "For this afternoon, yes. It's not too far to sail, but we need to get there when the sun's high in the sky so that we'll have good light to pick our way through the reefs. North Sound or English Harbour would be okay, starting this late. I'd recommend North Sound. There's a lot of good snorkeling there. We can have a quiet evening and spend the day tomorrow snorkeling on the reefs and exploring some of the little islands. If you still want to head up to Barbuda, that's a pretty good place to leave from."