Act of Betrayal (29 page)

Reyes's survivor speech began to prey on my mind. No trace of the diary was found in the Range Rover. I despaired at my own weakness that had enabled him to wrench it from my grasp. It was in my hands at last, then I lost it. Nightmarish visions plagued me, my father's words caught in the maelstrom, torn from the book's spine page by page, spinning into the whirlwind, gone forever. Twice I put on my fire boots, went to the scene where the Range Rover was found, and slogged through the area in ever-widening circles, searching for a trace, a page, a scrap of paper. Nothing. Not so significant when freighters riding out the storm two miles at sea were hurled half a mile inland. But still, I began to wonder: could Reyes have survived?

Seth stayed on to assist his grandparents, at least until power was restored and repairs to the building done. Each time I saw him, sturdy, strong, and sunburned, eyes alight with enthusiasm, uncomplaining and eager, I imagined the others and what was lost forever.

Lottie had been so right when she talked about sex, power, and politics. Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were among the serial killers once considered politically promising, but their lust was for power, not politics. Reyes never loved Cuba; he loved power. Had I pieced it together sooner, Jorge Bravo would still be alive and Reyes would be bound for prison or the electric chair.

The President and Governor Fielding came, donned boots and hard hats, took tours, and declared that South Florida was indeed a disaster area. They promised aid and left. The media mob was such that I never had the chance to ask them about their former fund-raiser and compadre. They were both probably relieved that the storm coverage had eclipsed his story and that Juan Carlos Reyes was dead with no high-profile prosecution in the offing.

But was he dead? If not, where would he hide? His was too familiar a face to remain in Miami, even a Miami in chaos, confusion, and despair. He would have found it simple to vanish following the storm. He had said it himself as we held the door against the winds: “This is a perfect time for somebody to disappear.”

He would have to go into hiding until he could flee the country, lose himself, and create a new identity. But people who run away take themselves and their demons with them. I remembered Dr. Schlatter's comment the first time we discussed the case. The killer, she had said, “won't stop until somebody stops him.”

I called her again after sporadic phone service was restored. Rose Schlatter was busy applying for federal funds, to conduct a study of the storm's effect on the sex crime rate. Included in her proposal, of course, was funding for a sex offender treatment program that she would direct while conducting the study. The woman was persistent.

“His conscience function must have looked like Swiss cheese with big holes in it,” she said, as we discussed Juan Carlos Reyes. She seemed to be his sole mourner. “We could have learned so much,” she said. “It's too bad, his kind are usually survivors.”

The National Guard erected a tent city where at least eighty thousand people left homeless by the storm would live shoulder to shoulder for months. The military shipped in half a million plastic-wrapped Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) left over from the Gulf War.

Scam artists poured in from all over the country to file claims for loans and grants from disaster aid; strangers moved into abandoned houses and applied for federal assistance. Lawyers recruited clients to sue for shoddy construction and prosecutors pledged to investigate the building inspectors. Nearly a thousand looters and curfew violators were arrested. Legal fallout from the storm would surely grind on for years.

The bruise Juan Carlos Reyes left on my chin was fading fast, my cuts and scratches had healed, but my heart was an open wound. I worked for six days with little sleep and felt like a zombie. Must have looked like one, too. The desk ordered me to take a day off to rest. I neglected to say I might take two. Maybe Reyes was dead, but I felt no sense of resolution. If the man was alive, he should not be. If the diary still existed, I wanted it. It was mine.

First I needed a car. I cornered Lucas Taylor, one of the owners of Double Eagle Towing, behind the bulletproof glass in his well-fortified office. Hard-boiled and husky, he is in his mid-thirties, sun-bronzed, and as tough as the business he operates.

“I'm desperate, Lucas. I need something, anything with wheels.”

“What happened to the new T-Bird?” He hung a clipboard on the wall and grinned. People were waiting outside. “Lost another one, huh, Britt?”

Lottie and I have had some bad luck with cars but it was never our fault. Who knew our car would be hit as we covered a crash on the expressway? Or that a mob would demolish our car during a riot months later? Or that my last T-Bird would settle to the silty bottom of a deep Everglades canal, nearly taking me with it?

Lucas loves to rub it in.

“Only me and ninety thousand others,” I said, “which is why I can't find a rental. You've got to help me, Lucas,” I pleaded, “for old times' sake.”

He stopped in mid-stride and looked puzzled. “What old times?”

“You know,” I said lamely, “all the cars I've watched you haul out of the water, the swamp, airport parking lots, and the woods, sometimes with bodies in the trunk or still strapped behind the wheel.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding. “I thought I would've remembered.”

“You would have,” I said.

He came up with a dented 1987 Camaro, half coated with primer, the other half painted electric blue. I didn't want to know its story, didn't even ask about what looked like a bullet hole under the drivers-side window. I just wanted to drive it.

“The frame is a little bent and it pulls to the right, so watch it, Britt. You got to have it back here by Friday, in one piece.” He winked and handed me the keys. “Then we can talk old times.”

I drove it home, sat in my kitchen, and opened a room-temperature Coke that fizzed all over my last pair of clean jeans. I needed help but had no one to turn to. Reyes was the story of a lifetime, but nobody wanted to listen and there was no room in the newspaper. It was like trying to report a local story in the middle of Hiroshima after the bomb.

Too much was happening; we were in the middle of a national disaster. I was the only one who still considered Reyes more deadly than the hurricane. If he was out there, he had to be found. There was nobody else.

McDonald was working around-the-clock shifts and nursing his own wounds. The dead boys' parents were grieving and planning funerals. Hal was too gentle and too busy as well. His station had gone to twenty-four-hour-a-day emergency public service programming, broadcasting where food, water, medicine, ice, generators, and aid could be obtained, where facilities were being set up for the homeless, reuniting families. He, too, was working nonstop. Everybody else was either trying to cope, to heal, or was occupied with the relief effort. I tried to reach Simmons, but the Missing Boys Task Force had been disbanded and he had been appointed liaison between guardsmen and the local police. When I asked for the homicide captain, no one was there but an overwhelmed clerk who took my information and said somebody would get back to me in a few days.

I couldn't wait. I had to know. I checked my gun, took another box of ammunition from my dining room closet, and loaded it in my car, with some toiletries, in a nearly empty overnight bag.

I consulted my Florida map, made a few calls, stuffed some dirty clothes in a paper grocery sack, put on a pair of cutoffs, a T-shirt, and my Florida Marlins baseball cap, and left an upstate motel number with Seth in case of emergency. Then I took the two hundred dollars I got from the bank and a credit card, locked my apartment, and drove north.

Traffic was madness. Rush hour was all day, in every direction. Designated lanes were reserved for emergency vehicles and convoys of supplies, thousands of portable toilets, plastic sheeting to cover broken roofs, insect repellant, and troops.

The interstate looked like a giant demolition derby. The majority of cars on the road had blasted-out windows, missing windshields, or smashed roofs. Peppered and pockmarked by barrages of roof tiles, damaged by felling trees, signs, and poles, they looked as though they had been caught in a war-zone cross fire.

The landscape was barren, without trees, the sky even bigger than before. Would Miami ever be back to normal? I mourned.

As I drove farther north, into Broward County, the freakish misshapen cars began to disappear from the road, though Dade plates passed frequently, running scared at high speeds, headed due north, away from the chaos: carloads of hollow-eyed adults and grave children, the few possessions they had left, salvaged household goods, mattresses, and furniture, tied to the tops of their rolling wrecks.

Near the Palm Beach County line I took an exit, filled the gas tank, checked the oil and radiator, then stopped at a small coffee shop. I drank glass after glass of ice water while they filled my thermos with steaming coffee. Not as strong as I like it, but my first hot coffee in seven days tasted delicious.

I picked up the turnpike at Stuart, Florida's Treasure Coast, where Spain's ill-fated 1715 treasure fleet still lies scattered in submerged graves. Though exhausted, I did not worry about dozing off while driving through shallow wetlands surrounded by tall slash pines, saw palmettos, and wax myrtles. My adversarial relationship with the Camaro kept me awake, as I fought to keep it from veering off to the right. I yearned for my T-Bird and its excellent radio. This one emitted mostly static with occasional bursts of country and western.

I couldn't find any news at all.

My destination was located on the fringe of the Ocala National Forest near the small town of Mount Dora in central Florida orange country. A former labor camp for itinerant fruit pickers, it had gone from migrants to militants in the sixties when the CIA began trucking in busloads of would-be commandos for training. Property records showed it was in Reyes's name.

Four and a half hours after leaving home, I exited the turnpike north of Orlando. The next twenty-eight miles were the longest of the entire trip, on winding two-lane roads, as it grew dark in the kind of country you don't want to break down in, isolated and marked by small-town speed traps.

I stopped at the Golden Gem citrus packing house in Tangerine for directions. Twenty minutes later I checked into the Comfort Inn in Mount Dora, population 6,200. I locked the door behind me, turned up the air conditioning, reveled in a hot shower, and washed my hair with the tiny guest bottle of shampoo the management provided. Then I walked to the twelve-block downtown area carrying my grocery bag of dirty clothes. The streets were lantern lit and the homes quaint with New England-style tin roofs, cupolas, and gingerbread. Spanish moss dripped from live oaks and the somnolent setting seemed light-years away from Miami's madness. It felt good to stretch my legs. I found a laundromat, then searched for a meal while my jeans, nightgown, and underwear were washing. There were no fast-food restaurants but I found a small cafe and ate a light supper, then stopped in the Silver Oyster Gift Shop and bought a Mount Dora T-shirt.

As I watched my clothes spin in the dryer, I thought about closure for all of the victims. Distance did not dispel the strong sensation I had had in Miami, that Reyes was alive, out there somewhere, not far away.

This is my last chance, I thought, the last place I can think of to find him. If he is not here, I promised myself, I will go back to Miami and work dutifully on storm stories, but I will stay alert, keeping eyes and ears open for Reyes. He was out there somewhere in the world. I felt it and was too weary and numb to do more than trust my instincts.

I folded my clothes thinking about Jorge Bravo, who never stopped trying to liberate Cuba with his little ragtag group of misfits. He lived in a sweltering little pillbox, drove balky old cars, and appeared to be threatening, but he was a hero—while Reyes, the smooth, well-spoken patrician with his mansion and high-placed friends, looked heroic but was a monster.

Members of Reyes's organization had trained at this upstate camp for years, plotting secret commando operations. It shut down after federal agents raided the camp and seized the exiles' weapons. They had become an embarrassment. Several would-be warriors had shot themselves or each other in training mishaps, and during a mock invasion of Ocala National Forest, all the rifle-toting commandos had been captured by park rangers.

Reyes had turned to politics to accomplish his mission, but he still owned the property, supposedly a hunting camp. What better hideout? It was only a few miles from where Ma Barker and her boys shot it out with the FBI back in the thirties.

My plan was to drive to the camp at dawn, after a good night's sleep, taking the element of surprise with me. Back at the motel I engaged the dead bolt, propped a chair against the door, and slipped my gun beneath the pillow. This was not Miami, but the possibility of Reyes's presence in the vicinity made me queasy. My body ached with weariness. The room was cool, my bed comfortable and clean, so why couldn't I sleep? It had to be almost dawn, I thought, then sat up and stared at the dock. It had only been twenty minutes. Strangely energized, beyond exhaustion, I slipped out of bed and dressed quickly in the dark, in jeans and an oversize cotton sweatshirt. No way could I wait until morning. I had to know.

I stuck the gun in my belt, clipped to the inside of my jeans, pulled the sweatshirt down over it, took my flashlight and scribbled directions, and left the room. I walked to the car as though in a dream, the fragrant night soft and misty around me.

There was little traffic. In the center of town, a shadowy figure caught my eye, staring from the sidewalk. I tapped the brake and turned to look but he had disappeared. I could have sworn it was the bearded street preacher from South Beach. No way he could be here, I thought. My mind was playing tricks on me. My Aunt Odalys's words came back to me. “Beware
la mala hora.”
The bad hour of one's life. I shook off the thought.