Cut and Run (26 page)

“Sounds like a fan,” Wolfe murmured. “Or maybe somebody a little closer…”

 

Calleigh was the one who found it.

It was in one of the areas they hadn't searched the first two times, half buried in a patch of mud. Calleigh called out for everyone to stop, knelt, and carefully pulled it out of the muck.

The binoculars were pretty much exactly as she'd predicted: shattered glass in one eyepiece and what looked like the end of a metal pipe in the interior. There was a piece of fishing line wound around the focus knob, leading to a tiny hole drilled in the doctored side.

“You called it,” said Delko. He was dressed in his wetsuit, flippers slung over his back; he'd had to dive so often he'd given up changing between times, just had one of the cadets haul his tanks between pools. “Just like what you came up with in the lab.”

Calleigh slipped the muddy binoculars into an evidence pouch. “With one major difference—this pair killed a man.”

“Think we can pull anything useful off it?”

“Won't know until I get it back to the lab.”

“The sooner, the better,” Delko said with a grin.

Calleigh called Horatio on her way back to her Hummer. “Horatio? We've got it. We were right.”

“Good work. I'm at the hospital.”

“You speak with Randilyn Breakwash?”

“That was my intention…but she's no longer here. It seems that she checked herself out, against the advice of her doctors. Joel Greer must have spoken to her.”

“You think she's running?”

“I don't know. I'm on my way to her residence—if she's not there, we have to assume she's in the wind. Get those binoculars into the lab and make them talk.”

“I'm on my way.”

“Cooper, you got a minute?” asked Wolfe from the doorway.

Cooper didn't answer, studying the screen in front of him intently. Wolfe walked into the AV lab, noticed the earplugs in the tech's ears, and tugged on one, pulling it free and spilling tinny music into the air. Cooper looked up, startled, and swiveled in his chair. “Oh, hey, Wolfe. What's up?”

“I hate to take you away from—is that Beyoncé?”

Cooper tapped a key and the image vanished, replaced by a graph. “Music video. Helps me relax between projects.”

Wolfe folded his arms. “Relax? Or goof off?”

“You say tomato, I say potato. Or rutabaga, or some other appropriate vegetable. I never really got the hang of that saying.”

“I need to know who Timothy Breakwash was corresponding with on the Internet before he was killed.” He gave Cooper the information he had on swamphunter. “Think you can track it down?”

“You're in luck. The IP address is local—which makes sense for something named floridacrimehistory.com—so it's not like I'm trying to trace a website out of the Netherlands.” Cooper tapped away at his keyboard. “Okay, here's the address of the company that owns the domain name. Ask them nice and maybe they'll cough up swamphunter's info—if not, you'll have to get a warrant.”

“I'll try the polite way, first. Considering the topic of the website, they might be friendly to law enforcement.”

“Or lawbreakers.” Cooper shrugged. “Apples and oranges. Or maybe pomegranates and pineapples.”

Wolfe shook his head. “Do me a favor—stay away from the produce section, okay?”

Wolfe's instincts proved correct. The owner of the website—a portly, ginger-haired man wearing an NYPD T-shirt and baseball cap—was more than happy to help, giving Wolfe swamphunter's real name, address, and phone number.

It wasn't who Wolfe expected.

 

Horatio pulled his Hummer into the Breakwash driveway. The garage door was wide open, revealing not only Timothy Breakwash's home lab, but another kind of vehicle entirely: the balloon that had carried its owner's body back to Earth.

“Hello? Mrs. Breakwash?” Horatio approached the garage cautiously, but there didn't seem to be anyone around. He stood at the threshold for a moment, hands on hips, then moved to the front door and knocked. No answer.

He returned to the garage and walked inside. The balloon had apparently arrived as a neatly wrapped bundle of fabric, but it had been pulled apart since then. Folds of brightly colored polyester spilled across the floor and draped over the basket.

Horatio pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. “Yes, Mister Pinlon, please…hello, this is Lieutenant Horatio Caine. I have a question about the balloon investigation you're conducting. It's my understanding you were to turn the balloon itself over to the Miami-Dade crime lab once you were finished with it. Uh-huh. Well, I'm looking at it right now, and it's not in my lab. It's been returned to the next of kin of its former owner…yes, I understand that's the normal protocol, but not when a crime has been committed.” Horatio listened, then sighed. “Yes, of course. Bureaucratic oversight. Unfortunately, your mistake may have just cost me my prime suspect.”

Horatio disconnected, then took a closer look at the balloon. A ragged chunk of the envelope was missing, apparently cut out.
Of course. He concealed the coordinates of the downed plane in the balloon, probably written on the nylon itself. Whoever cut this scrap out is no doubt headed there right now.

They had the murder weapon; the killer had the location of the treasure. But there was still one piece missing—Timothy Breakwash's flight log. Joel Greer didn't have it, and it hadn't been found at the scene or in the balloon. Where would Breakwash have hidden it?

There was only one place Horatio could think of: at the site of the treasure itself. After all, Breakwash wouldn't need the coordinates—those were with the balloon. But the flight log would still be valuable to him, too valuable to destroy; it was, after all, a chronicle of his success after years of failure. It was the document he could hold up later and say,
This is how it happened. This is where I was and what I was doing when all my dreams came true.

Horatio eyed the cut fabric draped over the edge of the basket. “That was the high point of your life, wasn't it?” he said softly. “But what goes up…must come down.”

 

Wolfe had been sure swamphunter would turn out to be Fredo Bolivar, but he'd been wrong. Swamphunter was a retired DEA agent named Garrett McCulver—the same one Horatio had gone to as a source.

It made sense, Wolfe had to admit. These days, everyone turned to the Internet for research, and it was only natural that two people obsessed with the same subject would meet online. Neither one would know anything about the other; an ex-cop and an ex-con could become friends without ever meeting face-to-face or even knowing the other's real name. But…

But the online name McCulver had chosen bothered Wolfe.

He thought about it as he drove out to McCulver's place. Swamphunter. Maybe McCulver liked to shoot ducks in the 'Glades, or even bag himself some venison every season.

Or maybe he was more interested in hunting something else.

McCulver had quit the DEA out of disgust with how they operated, or so Wolfe had heard; Calleigh had mentioned some of the details of the case in the break room. Wolfe had no love for drugs—being an obsessive-compulsive gave his brain enough problems, thank you—but he had to admit he had his own reservations about the drug war and how it was being conducted. Confiscating a dealer's expensive toys made sense on the surface, but combining that with a zero-tolerance policy meant someone could lose his house or business if so much as a single joint were found, and Wolfe had seen exactly that happen. But the thing that bothered Wolfe the most was what happened to all the houses and cars and boats confiscated by the DEA: They were sold at auction…and the profits went directly into the DEA's budget. It was a self-reinforcing system that had reminded Wolfe of the case he and Delko were working.

“Of course it does,” Calleigh had said. “You guys are dealing with pirates, and the DEA are privateers: pirates with a government license to operate. Countries used to provide what was known as a letter of marque to pirates, who were then authorized to plunder ships from other countries—or at least those nations they weren't on friendly terms with. The privateers kept the proceeds, just like the DEA does today—but instead of being at war with Spain or France, we've declared hostilities against the drug cartels.”

“Or anyone with a package of rolling papers,” Wolfe had pointed out.

“Well, that's the problem with employing pirates—sorry, privateers. Once you give them the authority and incentive to take what they want, it's kind of hard to rein them in. A lot of privateers acted exactly the same as pirates, attacking any ship that came along. Eventually it was agreed to be a bad idea all around and countries stopped employing them.”

McCulver had seen that process firsthand, and according to Calleigh it hadn't sat well with him. Wolfe had read all the emails swamphunter and Breakwash had exchanged, and it was obvious the ex-cop had a great deal of respect for the smuggler he had pursued but never caught. It was as if, over the years, McCulver had gradually lost faith in those he worked with, and come to admire the criminal he was supposed to bring down.

Wolfe shook his head. If the DEA were pirates, what did that make Rodriguo in McCulver's eyes? A victim? Or an antihero trading drug profits for art, risking everything for a chance at a new life in his homeland?

Wolfe didn't know. He also didn't know exactly how deeply McCulver was involved—there were gaps in the emails that suggested some of them had been deleted, though that was just guesswork. What he did know was that McCulver wasn't answering his phone, so he was going out to see him in person.

He parked the Hummer in front of McCulver's small place and got out. A beat-up Jeep was pulled into the driveway, but Wolfe didn't know if it was McCulver's or not.

He knocked on the front door and waited. No answer. Wolfe listened intently, trying to judge if there was nobody at home or if McCulver was just avoiding company. He thought he heard music, but it was so faint it might have been coming from somewhere else—McCulver's place was right on the shore, and sound sometimes carried in funny ways over the water.

He tried the door. Locked.

The windows on the front of the house were blocked with blinds. Wolfe made his way around the side of the house and was rewarded with a window looking into an empty bathroom. He kept moving, reached the corner, and took a cautious look around it. There was a small deck looking out on the shore, with a gull perched on a Styrofoam cooler. It noticed him and cocked its head in an inquisitive way, as if it had more of a right to be there than he did. Two empty lawn chairs were the only other thing on the deck, but the patio door was ajar.

Wolfe stepped onto the deck, prompting the gull to take wing with a loud, piercing cry. “Hello?” Wolfe called out. “Mister McCulver? Anyone home?”

Still no answer, but now he could tell the music was definitely coming from inside. The Rolling Stones' “Satisfaction,” sounding like it was being funneled through a very small speaker.