Fatal Decree (33 page)

“Mr. Perez’s life is in danger, Your Honor,” said Parrish. “We’re afraid that even one night in general lockup could lead to his death. We already know through an informant, that there is a one-million-dollar price on Mr. Perez’s head. We also think there are other murders planned by Mr. Perez’s associates. We may be able to stop them from happening if we get the information we need from Mr. Perez.”

“What’s your proposal?” asked the judge.

“Our joint proposal is that we reach a plea bargain that would require Mr. Perez to testify in any trial or grand jury investigation on matters of which he has knowledge. In return, you would sentence him tonight to life imprisonment under a new name. All paperwork would be under the new name and the charges would be completely different than those that bring us here today, but they would carry an equal sentence. Mr. Perez
would serve his imprisonment in an institution far removed from Florida. In other words, Perez would disappear and he would serve his sentence under an alias. Nobody would know who he really is, except a few people in the Department of Justice.”

The judge looked at Deanna. “Do you agree to these terms, Ms. Bichler?”

Deanna rose from her seat at counsel table. “Yes, Your Honor. My client has instructed me to accept the deal if the court authorizes it.”

“This is highly unusual, but I don’t think there is anything illegal about it. I do have a question, Mr. Parrish.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How do you guarantee that Mr. Perez will cooperate in the coming months and years?”

“He has agreed to take lie detector tests whenever the government wants. If he is caught lying, or if he refuses to testify, then the life sentence will stand, but he will be reassigned his real name and be sent to a prison in Florida.”

“In other words, you’ll hold a death sentence over his head. One outside the legal system, an execution by some inmate thug with a homemade knife.”

“That’s about the size of it, Your Honor,” said Parrish.

“I won’t be a part of that,” said the judge. “Besides, how do you know some prisoner wherever Mr. Perez is sent won’t recognize him?”

“Mr. Perez has only dealt with about three people in the organization,” said Parrish. “Nobody else knows him by sight. The odds are infinitesimal that he’ll be recognized.”

The judge sat silently for a minute, then stood and said, “We’ll be in recess for ten minutes. I have to think about this one.”

The judge was back. “Mr. Parrish,” he said, “does the government think Mr. Perez is a big enough fish for us to go to all this trouble?”

“Yes, sir. We think he can help us put away some major drug lords, interrupt the flow of narcotics into the country, and disrupt the money supply. We also think he may be able to give us information that will forestall at least a couple of planned murders. And we believe Mr. Perez can
provide us the help we need to arrest and convict those responsible for the murder earlier this evening of the U.S. Attorney for this district.”

“Very well,” said the judge. “Here’s what I’m willing to do. I won’t sanction murder, no matter how good the cause. Therefore, I cannot agree with part of your bargain. I’m willing to go along with the name change, the new prison, all of that. Part of the deal will be that if Mr. Perez ever reneges on his part of the agreement, he will agree that the life sentence will be revoked and he will be back before this court with a plea of guilty to murder and be subject to the death sentence. The decision on whether Mr. Perez has failed to live up to his part of the agreement and whether the death sentence is warranted will be left to a judge of this court. There will be no extrajudicial punishment.”

“May I confer with Ms. Bichler?” asked Parrish.

“Certainly.”

Parrish and Bichler huddled in the back of the courtroom, talking in whispers. When they broke, Deanna went to her client and after a whispered conversation with him, rose and said, “The defendant will accept the plea bargain as outlined by the court.”

“Mr. Parrish?” asked Judge Plowden.

Parrish rose and said, “The government will accept the plea as outlined by the court.”

“Okay,” said the judge. “I assume you two have worked out a plan to implement this.”

Parrish was still standing. “I’ve talked with the head of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshal for this district. It’s going to be a bit complicated, but we think we can get it done within the next couple of days. We’ve arranged for Mr. Perez to be held in isolation tonight, but we’d like to get him moved first thing tomorrow. The paperwork will follow, but the marshal has assured me that they can transport him under the new name even if the paperwork isn’t completed. The Bureau of Prisons will accept him from the marshal under the alias.”

“Is this agreeable to your client, Ms. Bichler?”

Deanna stood. “It is, Your Honor.”

“Then it is so ordered,” said the judge. “Hand me the charging pleading, Mr. Parrish, and get me the other paperwork by the end of business
on Thursday. You’ll need to draft an order getting Mr. Perez transported tomorrow morning.” He looked at his watch. “This morning now, I guess. Can you get it to me by nine a.m.?”

“Yes, sir,” said Parrish. “Ms. Bichler and I will get it done tonight. Well, this morning. Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Court is adjourned,” said Judge Plowden. He stood, surveyed the courtroom, shook his head, and left the bench.

I was in a deep sleep, dreaming of fire alarms. They didn’t stop and finally began to bring me back into the world. My phone. I looked at the clock on my bedside table. Four o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Who the hell was calling at this time of the day? It couldn’t be good news. Nobody calls in the middle of the night with any news that isn’t bad.

But I was wrong this time. I rolled over and answered. It was David Parrish. “You awake, Matt?”

“Barely. This better be good.”

“It is. We made a deal with Perez.”

“What kind of deal?”

“I’ll fill you in later, but suffice it to say, he’s ready to sing like the proverbial bird. Can you and Jock get down here to Miami?”

“Sure. When?”

“There’ll be an FBI jet at Dolphin Aviation at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport at eight a.m. It’ll bring you down and take you back.”

“What about J.D.?”

“I just talked to her. She’ll be at the airport.”

“Okay.” I closed the phone and called J.D.

She sounded wide-awake when she answered. “You going to Miami?” she asked.

“I am,” I said. “You want us to pick you up?”

“Sure. What time?”

“We’ll pick you up at seven. Grab some donuts at Publix, get coffee at Starbucks on the Circle, and start off our day with a wholesome breakfast.”

“You’re a sick person, Royal. Go back to sleep.”

Not seeing any reason to disturb Jock, I set the alarm for six o’clock, and rolled over for another two hours of sleep. I’d learned the lesson in the army that you sleep when and where you can because you never know when you’ll get a chance to sleep again. I could drop off in an instant and sleep as long as I’d allotted myself. I usually woke up just before the alarm went off.

I rolled Jock out at six and told him about my four a.m. conversations. He headed for his shower and I went to mine. At seven on the dot, we were parked in front of J.D.’s condo complex. She came down the elevator, got into the backseat, and we were off to the Publix Market at mid-key. I asked how many donuts we needed. Jock said he’d eat three and J.D. asked for a fruit salad. I figured a dozen donuts and the fruit would take care of us until we got to Miami. I’m a sucker for donuts.

We picked up coffee at Starbucks, and drove to the airport. The plane, a small, nondescript business jet lacking any markings that would identify it as government owned, was waiting on the ramp at Dolphin. We identified ourselves to the pilot and loaded onto the plane. We took off over the bay with a minimum of fuss and then flew southeast toward Miami.

As we reached cruising altitude, Jock’s phone dinged, indicating that he had received a text message. He looked at the display for a moment and said, “The twenty-two we found at Flagler’s apartment was the same one used to kill all the whale tail victims.”

Uh-oh
, I thought. I hadn’t mentioned the pistol to J.D.

She had just taken a sip of her coffee. She put the cup on the table and looked at Jock, her face hard. “You found the gun?”

“Yes,” Jock said. “Didn’t Matt tell you?”

“No, he didn’t. That gun was the best piece of evidence we’ve got and you’ve ruined it. No court will ever admit it into evidence.”

“No judge will ever have to make that decision,” said Jock, his voice low and cold as ice. He locked eyes with J.D., staring her down.

She finally looked away, picked up her coffee, and moved to a seat at the back of the plane.

Jock and I sat, our conversation limited, each of us munching on our breakfast and staring out the windows. I was worried that we were pushing J.D. farther and farther away, showing her a side of Jock’s profession
that she didn’t want to know about. I was afraid that she would let her disdain for Jock’s methods bleed into whatever relationship we may have had. I could feel her slipping away, and all I could do was watch it happen.

My thoughts turned to Perez and what he had to tell us. This could be a big break, an answer to our questions, perhaps a completion of the puzzle that had eluded us as we sought the killers and tried to discern the patterns that may or may not tie the new whale tail murders to the old and to the killing of the agents from Jock’s organization. As it turned out, we got a lot of the information we wanted, but not all of it. We wouldn’t know about the holes in the pattern for several days, and in the end, that lack of knowledge proved fatal.

David Parrish met our plane at the Opa-Locka airport. It was near mid-morning and the sun was already heating up the tarmac. A stiff wind was blowing from the south, bringing more warmth to the day. We drove out of the airport property as David explained what had transpired in court in the early hours of the morning. As soon as the locals were finished with him, Perez would be transferred to a federal prison.

“I wanted to give you guys a shot at him,” said David. “I think he can help sort out who was trying to kill J.D. Jock, you can squeeze him as much as you want, but I’ve already been advised that your agency will be spending some time with him as well.”

“Why is he so willing to talk?” I asked. “All you’ve got is his phone connection to Worthington.”

Parrish shrugged. “The DEA folks may have suggested that they had Worthington in custody and he had implicated Perez in the murders.”

“He bought that?”

“The DEA scared the hell out of him, and then they told him that a contract had been put out on him. He figured his life was over if he didn’t get some protection.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Jock.

“Yeah,” said Parrish, and then swore us to secrecy about Perez’s location. He drove us to a house in western Miami-Dade County, out near the Everglades, a U.S. Marshal’s Service safe house, a place to hold prisoners when for some reason they could not be in jail. We were in a neighborhood of small ranch-style houses, probably built in the 1960s or ‘70s. The houses all seemed to be much the same, little deviation in the floor plans
or the elevations. These neighborhoods had sprouted and multiplied during the boom years, and many had gone to seed in the lean years that always follow. This subdivision had only two streets that ran parallel to each other, the pavement cracked and blistered by the sun. We stopped in front of the last house on one of the streets. The houses next door and directly across the street appeared to have been abandoned. The house we were about to enter had been kept up to some degree. It would need a roof in the next couple of years and the aluminum siding needed painting, but the yard was clean and grassy and well kept. There were two small Ford automobiles parked in the driveway.

A narrow yard extended from the west side of the house to a tangled thicket of palmetto scrub that ran to the west as far as I could see. The back of the house faced north and beyond the hundred yards or so of scrub there was another neighborhood that looked as raw as the one we were standing in. The dry weather that comes to Florida in the fall had turned the palmetto bushes into fuel waiting for a fire.

We were met at the door by a young man whom David introduced as Deputy United States Marshal Bert Cheshire. “Do you have any weap-ons?” he asked.

Jock, J.D., and I nodded. “Please leave them with me,” the young marshal said. “It’s just a precaution. If somehow the prisoner were to overpower you, we wouldn’t want him to have access to guns.”

He led us to the back of the house and opened a door for us to enter. We found ourselves in a windowless room devoid of furniture except for several straight-back chairs arranged haphazardly. It was mid-morning and the donuts had given me a sugar high. I couldn’t wait to start the questions.

A tall, slender man with a head of dark hair going to gray at the temples stood as we entered the room. I thought he looked like the actor, Ricardo Montalban. “My name is George Perez,” he said. He was wearing a pair of gray pinstripe slacks, a white dress shirt open at the collar, and a pair of dress loafers that probably cost more than my car. The clothes he was wearing when he was arrested.

No one offered to shake hands. Parrish told Perez who we were and
why we were there. I watched him closely as David mentioned J.D.’s name, but I didn’t detect any sign of recognition.

J.D. stared hard at Perez who wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why are you trying to kill me, Perez?” she asked, her voice flat, emotionless. It was the first words that had escaped her mouth since she’d heard about Jock’s people finding the pistol.

“It wasn’t personal,” he said, and sat in one of the chairs.

“It was personal to me,” she said.

Perez smiled. “I understand from my lawyer that it was you who pulled some strings last night to keep me out of general population at the jail. Thank you for your kindness.”