Blood of Cain (Sean O'Brien (Mystery/Thrillers)) (26 page)

The wail of sirens and horns filled the night air now pulsating with the flash of blue and white emergency lights, radios crackling with staccato bursts, handguns drawn. They were followed by firefighters. I tucked the Glock behind my back and under my shirt as they rolled hoses from the tankers, through the side yard, down to the inferno. I looked back to the office and could see police, detectives, and paramedics working the scene. A few minutes later, a young police officer approached me. He held a long flashlight and a short pistol, a .38. “Who are you, sir?” he asked. “And what is your business standing here in these orange trees?”

“My name’s Sean O’Brien. I arrived twenty minutes ago looking for a friend of mine I had reason to believe might be staying here. When I arrived, the fire was burning down there, front door open, and a man’s body on the floor. I called nine-one-one.”

“I need to see some ID … slowly use one hand.”

I complied and used one hand to lift my wallet from my pocket. Two more officers approached, each positioning themselves strategically on opposite sides of me.

“Okay, Mr. O’Brien,” the first officer said. “This person you knew, why would you be trying to find her at five a.m.?”

“Because she needed help. She’s asthmatic.
”

“Did you find her?” He glanced at the burning trailer for a moment.

“No, and when I got here that trailer was fully involved.”

A tall man dressed in a tweed sports coat and blue jeans approached. He wore no tie, badge clipped to his belt, eyes red and puffy, morning stubble on his thin face. “I’m Detective Lawrence.” He glanced over my shoulder to the fire. “What’d you see?”

“As I told your officers, not a lot. A dead man in the office. A snake crawling across the floor, and that trailer engulfed in flames.”

“Are you armed?”

“Yes.”

All three the officers pulled guns out of their holsters and pointed them at my chest.

Detective Lawrence said, “Interlock your fingers and put your hands behind your head.” I did so and he motioned to one of the officers. “Search and disarm him.”

The officer nodded, pulled on white cotton gloves and carefully removed the Glock from under my shirt and then patted me down. The detective said, “Why didn’t you bother to let anyone know you were carrying?”

“No one asked. I have a permit to carry that gun.”

“Not at an apparent homicide scene you don’t.”

“I’m the one who called in the shooting and the fire. And I waited for you to arrive. If I shot that vic, why would I do that?”

“Vic? Were you in law enforcement?”

“A long time ago. Homicide. Miami-Dade PD. Look, that entrance wound on the vic’s forehead was caused by a much smaller caliber gun than the Glock, especially at close range. You can check my gun. It hasn’t been fired, at least not today. Fully loaded.”

He said nothing for a few seconds, his green eyes reflecting the orange flames. “Doesn’t take but a few seconds to reload. Are you now a private investigator?”

“Nope. I’m a fisherman. I was here because a friend of the deceased thought a young woman I’m searching for might be here.”

“What’s her name?”

“Courtney Burke.”

His jaw muscles tightened. “Courtney Burke. Is she the same person suspected in the multiple deaths near Daytona?”

“She’s a person of interest.”

Then he made a disdainful grin out of one side of his mouth. “Now it’s coming into focus. You’re the Sean O’Brien who’s all over the news. The old boyfriend of Senator Logan’s wife … and Courtney Burke just might be your daughter.”

“In your business, you should know you can’t believe everything you see on cable TV.”

“Tell you what I do believe, I believe she’s wanted for serial murders.”

“She’s presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not a court of public opinion.”

He shook his head. “We’ll be taking you to the sheriff’s office to talk more about all of this. Swab him for gunshot residue, too, Wally.”

“You might want to talk with the drivers or owners of that black SUV out front. Since it’s still here, odds are the occupants could be in what’s left of that trailer. Or maybe my alleged daughter’s in there.”

He motioned with his head and two officers escorted me across the lawn, around the side of the office, and over two fire hoses, water leaking from their connections. We rounded the building and stepped into a blaze of TV news lights and reporters behind yellow crime scene tape. I heard one reporter shout, “It’s the guy who’s mixed up in the affair with Andrea Logan.”

More questions peppered me from behind outstretched microphones and the glare of lights. One of the officers opened the rear door to the police cruiser and motioned for me to enter. We drove off into golden sunlight just breaking through the tall bamboo and coconut palms, and I was without my Jeep, my Glock, and the girl who might be my daughter. If she had been staying in that trailer, any DNA proof of her existence on earth was gone as a new day dawned over the planet.

I owed the lady in red a debt of gratitude. Two hours into answering the same questions from three detectives, a fourth came in from the field. He was pushing retirement, early sixties, jowls like a basset hound, and drowsy eyes with a touch of cataracts in one. He sat with me in the interrogation room and related her story. Gladys Johnston, the woman in the red bathrobe, had been shooting video on her mobile phone, video of the roaring fire near Bullfrog Creek.

And it was video that happened to capture my arrival, after the fire, and after two men had appeared at least fifteen minutes before me.

Gladys, a former trapeze artist who worked in circuses around the nation, told police that her world now was her close-knit community. As captain of her Neighborhood Watch, she knew everyone. She didn’t know the two men who got out of the black Escalade. Strangers in dark clothes. Years earlier, a trapeze accident had caused damage to Gladys’s back. At 5:00 a.m. today she was at the kitchen sink sipping water and taking aspirin for an old injury when she noticed a car quietly pull up to Show Time Fish Camp with its headlights off. It was hot and her window at the sink had been open, a breeze coming through the screen. Gladys told detectives that when she didn’t see the dome interior light come on as the men got out of the SUV, didn’t hear them slam the doors, her radar came on.

And when they started picking the lock, she went to wake up her sleeping husband.

I was glad for Gladys and me. I was getting my Glock back and Jeep returned, but I had no indication that Courtney Burke had been living in the trailer park. As I started to leave the sheriff’s department, the senior detective said, “I found out about your history with Miami-Dade PD. Did you ever know Gus Mansfield?”

“I remember that he was a guy with great investigative instincts. I didn’t actually work with his division, but I knew of his talents.”

“We worked together in Detroit until we got tired of the cold and corruption. Came south. Gus was a bird dog ‘til he got hit in a crossfire with the Colombian Cartel. Now he’s in a wheelchair.” His eyes drifted around the room for a few seconds. He blinked hard and stood from the chair. “We need to get you out the back entrance. Get your car from the compound and avoid all those damn reporters in the lobby and parking lot.”

“I appreciate it.”

“When I came in, must have been more than two dozen news media hounds out there. All of ‘em got their sights set on you. C’mon, you’ve been here long enough.” He stopped on his way to the door. “Oh, by the way. Don’t know if anybody’s told you this, but the coroner pulled two bodies from that fire.”

I felt my pulse quicken.

He shook his head. “Burned beyond any sort of recognition. Don’t even know if they’ll be able to get dentals.”

“Can they determine gender?”

“Looks to be what’s left of two men. Probably the perps who broke into the Fish Camp office. I hope the poor bastards died in the explosion and didn’t burn to death. They’re crispy critters now.” He sighed and led me down the hallway to the rear exit.

I shook his hand asked, “Did forensics find anything near the body of the dwarf?”

“A damn big snake. Talk about weird blood trails—try tracking a snake that crawled through a bloody crime scene. The perps, though, left nothing. Vehicle they arrived in was wiped clean or they wore gloves. It was a rental—prepaid, cash. Non-traceable credit card number. Whoever they were, even if we could ID the bodies, we’d be hard-pressed to follow the bread trail to where the kill order came from.” He looked at me curiously for a second. “I know you said you were hunting for the girl. Looks like somebody wanted to find her as much as you do. How did the two dead guys know or believe she was there?”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about since you told me the two bodies were found.”

“No one we questioned at the trailer park remembers seeing the girl.” He paused and undid his burgundy tie with a small coffee stain near the knot. “I hope you find her first. I got a bad feeling in these old bones that some ruthless sons-of-bitches are looking for her. Good luck to you. Here’s the keys to your Jeep. It’s parked in the row closest to the building.”

***

I drove a perimeter road around the sheriff’s office and the adjacent county courthouse. I looked to my right before getting on the highway and almost did a double-take. I counted more than eight satellite news trucks anchored in front of the building, open dishes aimed to the sky, supposition aimed at the masses.

My plan was to drive back to Ponce Inlet, pick up Max and head to our river cabin and try to assess what to do next. There, at least, I could be somewhat isolated from the news media, let calm return to Ponce Marina, and have a more secure fortress to lie low in the event I was still being followed. I had no idea where Courtney was, where she’d been, or where she was going. I thought I was close to finding her before all hell broke loose, before a man was shot between the eyes, and one of his trailers became scorched earth with the charred remains of two bodies under the rubble.

The one thing I was certain of was that the two dead guys didn’t follow me to the Fish Camp. They knew about it probably very close to the time that I figured out that Courtney might be hiding there. And this meant one thing: my phone was tapped. That’s a good and bad thing. Bad because privacy is lost. Good because I can set a trap.

***

A half hour later, I parked in front of the trailer where I’d seen the woman in the red bathrobe standing when I first arrived at the Fish Camp. Her small yard was cast in deep shade, red and white impatiens planted in a circle around the base of a live oak tree. I heard her talking loudly before I actually saw her. Gladys Johnston sat on a rattan couch inside a screened-in porch, fanning her face with a Japanese hand fan. I said, “I just wanted to personally thank you. My name’s Sean O’Brien. Thank you for talking with police.”

“Come in.” I heard her say a fast goodbye to whomever was on the phone. She stood and smiled as I entered the porch. Her aged face was still attractive. Her eyes were robust and the color of blue swimming pool water. I could tell she would have been a striking woman in her prime. She said, “I’ve seen you on TV. Was the senator’s wife really your old girlfriend?”

“That was more than twenty years ago.”

“And now they’re saying you two might have a daughter.” She fanned and dipped her head slightly. “That’s who you’re hunting for, right?”

“Did you see a girl staying at the Fish Camp?”

“Most folks who rent Boots’ trailers are repeats. Snowbirds who’d come down from up north every winter. They usually stay through tax time, middle of April. Mostly fishermen and their families rent here in the summer. But Boots, I can’t believe what happened to him; he was such a nice man. He only had six rental units on that three-acre property. The one that blew up and burned to the ground was the most isolated.”

“Do you think the girl may have been staying there?”

“Maybe. Boots, sweet as he was, was a little weird. And I don’t mean in some kind of sexual deviant type of way. I come from a circus background, okay, so when I say weird, I know what I’m talking about. He was always on, as in on stage. He sort of kept to himself, though.” She glanced across the street to the Fish Camp, a piece of ripped yellow crime-scene tape flapping in the breeze. Her eyes narrowed a notch. She touched her lips with two bent and swollen arthritic fingers. “Something’s different and for the life of me I don’t know what it is.”

“Since you shot video of those men arriving, maybe I could take a look, okay?”

She cocked her head and lifted one manicured eyebrow. “I can do that.” She set the hand fan down on the coffee table and picked up her iPhone. “Here it is. I’ll play it for you.”

I moved over and sat beside her on the couch. She tapped the stationary image and video filled the screen. Although the images were grainy, shot under the light of one street lamp, I watched as two men appeared from the shadows, one quickly picking the lock and both entering the building. The video ended at that point.

“Here’s where I started again,” she said, tapping a second frozen image, the video began to play.

I watched myself enter the building, the fire raging beyond the office. I saw something in the second video, something missing. “Did you see that?” I asked.

“See what?”

“There’s something gone from the second video.”

“What’s gone?”

“A pickup truck. In the first video, I noticed one very small portion of the tailgate. It was to the far left of the screen, which means it was parked to the left of the circular drive. It was gone in the second video, which you shot only a few minutes later, correct?”

She looked up from the phone screen to across the street. Her mouth opened, eyes unsure. “Yes. Boots always kept an old red Toyota truck parked under the live oak to the left of the front door. It’s gone.”

“When did you last see it parked there?”

“Before I went to bed. Didn’t notice it during all the commotion. The cops hauled that SUV away. They left Boots’ Ford, and I’m pretty sure they left the truck, too.” She turned her head towards the open door to the mobile home and shouted, “Ike, when’s the last time you saw Boots’ truck?”