Distant thunder, lightning flaring inside the cell wall, a beach house, twilight.
Redding.
When the trace memory came flashing up out of the pool and filled her mind, her chest went tight and her breathing stopped and the skin on her back rippled with a slithering chill.
Redding.
But not Jack Redding.
Clete Redding.
* * *
Her lungs encased in ice, her heart hammering against her ribs, locked in denial, she went back to the computer and typed in that name. The answer came back in the form of an obituary column in the Florida Times-Union, dated September 23, 2008.
LEGENDARY JACKSONVILLE
HOMICIDE COP
DEAD AT 87
Cletus “Clete” Redding, the controversial homicide detective who was credited with single-handedly bringing down the Vizzini Crime Family in 1957, is dead of an apparent heart attack.
Redding was famous for a violent confrontation that took place on Saturday, August 31, 1957, in the Vizzini family compound outside St. Augustine, during what was later described as an investigative visit that was met with an unprovoked assault by several members of the Vizzini family. Redding had arrived there unaccompanied by any other officers, which was contrary to departmental policy.
By the end of the gun battle, several senior members of the family were dead and the family never regained its previous status in the criminal underworld of northern Florida.
Redding’s wife, Mary Alice (née Kearney), died in an unexplained single-car crash on old Highway One (now A1A) at Matanzas Inlet on Friday, August 30, 1957, a day before Redding’s confrontation with the Vizzini syndicate, an event which some have speculated may have been a factor in what was called at the time “The Saturday Night Massacre.”
Redding’s only child, Declan, was seven at the time and for safety reasons was sent to live with relatives for several years afterward.
Redding’s body was found by a family friend on his antique cruiser, the Siren, last Saturday evening. A decorated Korean War Veteran who served with the United States Marine Corps and fought at Inchon and the Chosin Reservoir, Redding was a Detective First Grade with the Jacksonville PD Robbery Homicide Division from 1954 to his resignation, under something of a cloud, in 1963, when details of his alleged connections to Organized Crime and the Batista regime in Cuba came out during a Florida State Legislature Inquiry into Mafia-related activities in Florida during the 1950s. While Clete Redding denied the charges, and fought to clear his name for decades, the shadow of corruption never quite departed.
The Commission accused him of provoking the gun battle at the compound to remove witnesses to his criminal association with the Vizzini syndicate.
This was never proven and was vigorously denied by Redding himself.
In spite of this cloud, Redding then transferred to the Florida State Highway Patrol, where he served with distinction as a staff sergeant in the FHP until his mandatory retirement in 1993 at the age of 65.
Cletus Redding is greatly mourned by son, Declan, 58, daughter-in-law, Rose, 56, and his grandson, Jack, 23. A private family service will be held at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine at a date to be determined, with commission of his ashes at sea to follow. Donations to the Florida Highway Patrol Fallen Officers Fund in lieu of flowers would be greatly appreciated by the Redding family.
* * *
“His grandson, Jack” didn’t have to mean what she was afraid it meant. If it were true... Well, it couldn’t be true. It would change...everything.
But the police connection was troubling. Police work was often an inherited calling.
She went to Florida Vital Records and started digging. It took her another hour, and when she confirmed it, she sat there for a very long time, staring at the birth certificate.
Born to Declan Michael Redding
and Rose Redding (née Carmody) at 3:56 a.m.
on Thursday, June 6, 1985, son Jack Christian, seven pounds nine ounces.
So Jack was Clete’s grandson. Which meant that Jack Redding’s wife and child were killed on a bridge over Matanzas Inlet, and his grandmother died at almost the same spot back in 1957.
She spent some time trying to work out how this could just be a strange coincidence, but something about it pinged again in that deep dark part of her memory.
She had eventually come to understand that losing pieces of the past the way she did was a side effect of the Shimmer; the memories would often come back, but only in a fragmentary way and only when something—some scent, some trick of the light—in this case the memory of a long-ago storm—triggered the return, the way thunder or the rolling boom of a cannon fired over a lake will often bring up the bodies of drowned men. Once again, she took this in: Jack Redding was Clete Redding’s grandson.
The birth notice sat there on her screen, quietly pulsing with threatening implications. She went away. She was still looking at it an hour later, but her mind was far away in the past, in the twilight on a deserted Atlantic beach, watching a giant disc of black cloud filled with lightning come wheeling in to the shore, eating up the stars, trailed by black night, the wild waves seething and the air filled with rumbling thunder.
When she came back, still deeply shaken, she knew what had to be done. But it was full dark by the time she knew how she was going to do it.
things get antediluvian
At midday, after they had both managed to get some sleep—not together—Jack and Pandora met at the Serious Crimes offices on the sixth floor of the Depot. The IT guys—actually three women and one guy—handed Jack a fat envelope filled with printed reports detailing where the trio had been, including the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans—there were digital copies of the hotel security camera footage that showed the Walker girls and “Diana Bowman” drinking at the Carousel Bar and swimming in the rooftop pool.
Jack liked that detail; the bluff he had run on Karen Walker turned out to be reasonably accurate.
One of the techs had worked on a screenshot of the three of them at the bar, isolating and enhancing a shot of the woman calling herself Diana Bowman. She had printed a full-color shot and included it in the packet.
Jack slipped it out and studied it for a while, then handed it to Pandora. She was looking at an attractive full-bodied, black-haired, green-eyed woman of no particular age—not young however—with high cheekbones, full red lips, her face caught in a sideways smile as she brought a glass of wine to her lips.
She was striking rather than beautiful, and the little black dress she was wearing looked to be made of raw silk. Studying her, Pandora thought, cold and sexy and sharp as shattered glass.
“This gone out yet? As a BOLO?”
Jack shook his head.
“No. Not yet. I think we should sit on it for a while.”
“You don’t want her to know we have a face shot.”
“No. I think she’s still close. I don’t want her to run, or change her look too much.”
She handed the shot back to Jack.
“If she’s been doing this for a while, she’ll change her look as a matter of tradecraft.”
“Maybe. But seeing her picture all over the media will sure as hell drive her deeper,” he said, looking at the photo, feeling again that sensation that he had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere in the past.
“What I don’t get,” said Pandora, “is where the hell is she right now? I mean, it’s like she just stepped off the planet.”
“Yeah. My guess, she’s gone into somebody’s house, maybe a deserted one, maybe she’s got hostages... Look, how about this?”
“I’m listening.”
“Thank you, Frasier Crane. She went dark just a few minutes after we chased her into the Intracoastal. Right there in that neighborhood—”
“Flagler County guys went door-to-door all over thos
e streets. Everybody checked out.”
“I know. But...somebody missed something. There has to be a ripple someplace, where she dove deep. Know what I think? In one of those houses around there, something’s not right. Mace is doing a press thing today.”
“One o’clock. If he shows up for it. He hates the media more than steamed broccoli.”
“Yeah, so, what if we get Mace to ask all the people in that neighborhood to get out there, phone, go knock on everybody else’s door, check up on each other? See if somebody doesn’t answer, somebody looks scared when they come to the door—”
“Sounds like a great way to get a civilian shot if they actually do turn this woman up. She does guns. She’s a psychopath. A neighbor stumbles on her, she’ll stick a gun between his eyes, walk him inside, close the door and kill everyone in the house. Then go back where the guy came from and kill everyone there too.”
“Then do phone checks. Text. Emails. All that social media stuff. Anybody who ought to answer and doesn’t. Anybody who sounds weird.”
“Long shot.”
“Worth taking. I’ll ask Mace to get it out there.”
Pandora, distracted, was looking at her iPhone.
“Okay. Got a message from Mullvahill.”
“The autopsy on Karen?”
“Yeah,” she said, reading it. “You were right. It was cyanide, in an aerosol form.”
“That doesn’t sound like an easy thing to do.”
“Not that hard. Mix it with water, or even a light olive oil, so the droplets will stick better. Add some CO2 from a cartridge. The puffer is already an atomizer. Aerosol just means a bunch of tiny droplets. Would get the job done.”
“And it did. You know a lot about this. Ever killed anyone? I mean, other than in the line of duty?” Pandora had shot two men dead during a mall robbery. She gave him a sideways smile.
“Not that way. I do remember almost killing you one night in the Casa Monica.”
“I was fine. I just faked the heart attack to get you to stop.”
“Bullshit. It was pure rodeo and you were never going to buck me off. Anything from the Feebs?”
The IT team had submitted the enhanced screenshot to the FBI’s NGI-IPS facial recognition database, which scanned over 500 million photos taken from criminal, military and driver’s license shots in all fifty states, plus, it was rumored, the NSA’s massive database of passport and security camera surveillance shots taken at airports and travel hubs over most of the civilized world, and a lot of the uncivilized parts, as well.
The Feds liked to say—privately—that if your face wasn’t in their database, you didn’t exist and should probably stop paying your taxes.
“So far nothing,” said Jack. “But they’re still scanning other databases, so we’ll see.”
“Millions and millions of faces on the FBI database—most of them not criminals—and she isn’t one of them? Seems to push the odds a little, no? How the hell do you stay off the grid that long?”
“I don’t know,” said Jack, putting the shot back in the file. “We’ll have to ask her, when we run her down.”
“Literally?”
“If she gives me an excuse. Let’s go see Mollie.”
* * *
Mollie Zeigler, the head of the Forensics team, a big-shouldered red-haired woman with an amiable nature and an eye for critical details, met them at the gates of the Motor Pool Forensics lab in the basement of the FHP Depot building. After asking about Julie Karras and hearing that she was doing okay and would be released the next day, Mollie walked them back into the garage area, which looked exactly the way you’d think it would. Big red metal toolboxes everywhere, three hoists and the comforting smell of spilled gasoline, motor oil and ozone.
Only thing missing was a lanky bald-headed guy in stained blue coveralls with a white oval name tag with Dwayne on it in black script. And maybe the Playboy calendar stuck on Miss May 1977.
The big black Suburban looked like it had been hit by an RPG. It was scattered all across the floor and over several tables along the garage wall and a crew of technicians had spent the night going over seat cushions, floor mats, visors, windows, wheels, and slip pockets looking for... Well, they had no idea. Anything that looked like a clue, basically.
Jack was primarily interested in the backpacks and duffel bag that had been in the rear of the truck when he and Julie Karras finally ran it down.
The Forensic unit people had laid the three backpacks and the tan canvas duffel bag down on a long table, with whatever had been inside spread them out neatly in front of each one.
Mollie Zeigler walked Jack and Pandora along the table, pointing out what she found to be interesting.
“Most of this is just girl crap,” she said, indicating the array of items—makeup and mirrors, various bits and pieces of clothing, tampons, rings, an iPad Mini with a cracked screen, candy wrappers, gas and hotel receipts. “The Suburban might as well have been a Dumpster. These were not tidy people. Nothing but beer cans and candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Got DNA for the Walker girls off the butts, but nothing on the runner. Now, the duffel bag here, this was more interesting.”
They had reached the end of the long table. The duffel lay flat, emptied out, but in front of it was a collection of very old jewelry—rings and cameos and bracelets, beaded handbags, antique watches, brooches, framed pictures, hatpins and scissors and various kinds of hand mirrors, and what looked like a collection of dark brown sticks and stones. Everything was coated in a fine gray powder. Zeigler pointed to the dark brown sticks and stones.
“These are mostly phalanges, and the lumpy bits are metacarpals—”
Pandora, who had been a corpsman in Iraq, said, “You mean bones? Human bones?”
Zeigler gave a her a wry smile.
“Hand bones, to be particular. These look to have belonged to an elderly woman, suffered from arthritis, Caucasian descent, light drinker, mainly white wine from the Alsace region, a good dancer—”
“Okay,” said Pandora, tumbling to it. “You’re heating me up.”
“Maybe a bit,” said Zeigler, winking at Jack.
“But why bones?”
“See this white ash stuff? It’s dried river mud, silt and sand and granular vegetable matter. Coats everything, all to the same extent. So my call?”
They waited. Mollie liked her dramatics.
“A grave that has at one time been underwater. Probably a flood that receded, leaving the silt. And so long ago that everything dried up. The mud tastes a bit salty.”
“Jeez,” said Jack. “You didn’t lick the damn bones, did you?”
“’Course not, you moron. I look like a zombie?”
“Then how do you—”
“I touched one of the lockets and tasted my fingertip—”
“Mollie! For Chrissakes it coulda been fucking poison!”
“Don’t go getting the vapors, okay? I had one of the guys try it first. When he didn’t keel over and go into convulsions, I gave it a go.”
“Which one?” said Pandora, looking around at the techs, all of them involved in things mechanical, none of them paying any attention.
“Yugo, over there in the corner. Not the swiftest starling in the murmuration, if you know what I mean. And he’s crazy for me. Anyway, since it’s salty mud, I’m thinking a grave near the ocean, or a tide pool, something like that.”
Jack was looking at the tumbled collection of antique jewelry. It looked like junk to him. Why the hell would anybody want to steal a duffel bag full of junk jewelry?
Mollie was watching them work through it.
“Want to know where I think it all came from?” she said, letting the drama build up again. She had their attention.
“How can you tell?” asked Pandora.
Mollie reached into her apron pocket, pulled out a littl
e gold locket, battered, and if there had been a picture inside it was long gone, but the locket glimmered in the work-light glow, standing out brightly from the rest of the muddy relics.
She held it out in the palm of her calloused hand, used a grease-stained finger to flip it over. The back was deeply engraved, a flowing script, done by a skilled hand. The engraving was still perfectly clear.
Mammaloi Marraine
Ma Cherie Minou
FWC
“It’s in French,” said Jack, which got him a look from the women.
“Wow,” said Mollie. “You should be a cop.”
“Yeah, yeah. Can you read it?”
“Yes. It says, ‘Mammaloi Marraine, my darling Minou,’ which means cat. And then the letters FWC.”
“FWC? The initials of the guy who gave her the locket?” asked Jack.
“Could be, but I don’t think so. I think this locket comes from Southern Louisiana. Probably New Orleans. I looked up the word mammaloi and it’s gris-gris for a witch, a priestess of gris-gris magic. And marraine means godmother in Creole patois.”
Pandora was considering the locket.
“Did you shine this up, Mollie?”
“No. It was like that. Good catch.”
“Yeah. It being the only thing shined up means that, out of all this stuff here, this locket was the only one to get some special attention.”
“From whom?”
“Can’t say,” said Mollie. “But my guess would be from the woman you’re looking for. Why? I have no idea. But the locket sure called to her. So maybe that’s something to work on?”
“I get the patois words,” said Jack. “But why aren’t the letters somebody’s initials?”
“They could be. But in that part of Louisiana the letters FWC usually mean Free Woman of Color. So taking all this in, and the bones, and the rest of the trinketry here, and the signs of flooding, and you get—”
“Katrina,” said Jack. “August 25, 2005. All the graveyards got flooded, didn’t they?”
Mollie was impressed, and showed it.
“Not all, but a lot. I’ll bet if you had the silt analyzed, you’d nail it down solid. But that’s my call.”
The Shimmer Page 10
