Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (33 page)

“Any idea on the other two?”

“Can’t tell much about them. The one I shot is facedown, and I didn’t want to move him until the medical examiner’s people get here. The other guy lost part of his face to the shotgun.”

“J.D. looks a little ragged,” Steve said. “Take her home. I’ll come by in the morning and get your statements.”

“I’m all right,” J.D. said. “Let’s get the statements out of the way while it’s all fresh.”

“One of these guys was shot in the back,” said Steve. “Y’all go home and think about your statements. I’ll get J.D.’s squad car back to the station and come by in the morning for the statements.”

We were only two blocks from my house. I gathered J.D. up, put my arm around her, and we walked through the dark and cold and were glad to be alive. When we got into the house, she said she was going to take a shower and disappeared into the master bedroom. I fished a beer out of the refrigerator and poured some white wine into a plastic cup. I took the wine to the bathroom, opened the glass shower door, and handed it to her. She mumbled her thanks and I left.

In a few minutes she came back into the living room wearing a robe, her hair wrapped in a towel. “That’s better. I’m sorry I blew apart out there.”

“Come here. I want to just hold you for a bit.”

She sat on the sofa and cuddled up to me. “I’ve never shot anyone with a shotgun. I don’t know what I expected, but seeing that guy sort of explode got to me. I know he was trying to kill us and that shooting him was necessary. But still, the reality of it. I don’t know. I’m glad there weren’t any other cops out there to see me turn into a girl.”

I laughed. “You
are
a girl. You’re my girl and you’re tough and strong and very good at what you do. And if you hadn’t shot that bastard, he’d have shot us and never missed a wink of sleep over it. You did good and I’m proud of you.”

She reached up and kissed me on the cheek. “Let’s go to bed. Maybe a good night’s sleep will make things better.”

The night was long and neither J.D. nor I slept well. I felt her fidgeting in the bed, dropping off to sleep with a slight snoring sound, and then waking with a start. She moved close and put her arm around me and relaxed for a while before jerking awake again. I wasn’t any better and got very little sleep. I heard Jock come in at some point, his shower running, and then quiet. Finally, at four o’clock on a cold Wednesday morning I got out of bed and in the dark slipped into sweatpants and an old, soft sweatshirt. I put on boat shoes and listened for a moment to the steady breathing that indicated that J.D. was finally asleep.

I walked out into the living room and jerked to a stop. Somebody was reclining on the chaise longue on my patio. He was wrapped in a heavy jacket with a hood obscuring his face. He wore jeans and tennis shoes. He appeared to be asleep, with his knees drawn up in a fetal position. For a moment, I wondered if he was dead. Then I saw movement. He was stretching, as if just waking. I walked back into my bedroom and retrieved a pistol from the closet shelf. I returned to the living room, walked softly to the sliding glass doors that led to the patio, and jerked one open and switched on the overhead floods that turned the patio into daylight.

The person on the chaise sat up quickly, took one look at me, and said in a feminine voice, “Don’t shoot. I come in peace.” And then Katie Fredrickson pulled the hood off her head and smiled.

“Come in,” I said. “You must be freezing. How long have you been out here?”

“A couple of hours.” She picked up a backpack that I hadn’t seen in the shadows and walked into the house.

“Why didn’t you knock? Wake us up. Or call. You have my numbers.”

She smiled again. “I wasn’t sure what kind of welcome I’d get. I was actually hoping J.D. would be the first one up.”

I laughed. “She usually is. You want some coffee?”

“I’d kill for a cup.”

“Have a seat. I’ll put the coffee on and get J.D. up.”

I didn’t have to bother. J.D. came padding out of the bedroom, barefoot and wrapped in an old robe I kept in the closet. “I thought I heard you,” she said as she rushed to Katie, “but I thought I was dreaming.”

“No, Jed. It’s me. In the flesh.”

They hugged for a long time and when J.D. pulled away she was smiling. “You’ve changed, little sister,” she said.

Katie laughed. “I guess I have. More than you can see.”

“Bad times, huh?”

“Terrible times, but I’m ready to put it behind me.”

“We just got your letter yesterday,” I said. “I thought you’d decided to move on. I was afraid I’d said or done something to spook you.”

“No. Reading about Porter King’s murder is what spooked me. I was planning to disappear, but I decided I was going to have to face this sooner or later so I took a Greyhound from Tampa to Bradenton then got a city bus out to the beach on the other side of the bridge. I think I got the last one of the day. I walked from the bus stop here. I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t followed, but I think that was my paranoia kicking in.”

“How did you know where I live?” I asked. The business card I had given her listed only my post office box.

She chuckled. “You can find out almost anything with computers.”

“You want to talk about it?” J.D. asked.

“That’s why I’m here, J.D. It’s a long story and I think you might find some of it unbelievable, but I want you to hear it. You make the decision if I’m nuts or lying and I’ll live with it. If you want me to disappear again, I’ll do it. But I’m tired of running and hiding and looking over my shoulder all the time.”

“Do you mind if Matt sits in?”

“He’s your guy?”

“He’s my guy. He’s
the
guy, the one I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

I went to the kitchen, feeling quite smug, and brought them coffee in
two mugs and went back for my own. They had settled onto the sofa and I took the chair across from them. “Katie,” I said, “if you’d rather talk to J.D. alone, I’ll understand.”

“Sounds like you’re family now, Matt. That means you have to put up with the crazy little sister.”

“There’s one more member of my and J.D.’s family asleep in his room. He’s the one I told you about, the one to call if you needed anything. I don’t know of anybody who is better situated to help you get out of whatever you’re in. I’d like for him to sit in on this if you don’t mind.”

Katie looked at J.D who nodded. “I agree, Katie. Jock has resources that a mere cop can’t touch.”

Katie nodded. “Okay. Wake him up.”

J.D. laughed. “Oh, he’s awake. He sleeps like a cat.” She got up and went to Jock’s door, knocked and said, “Jock, come meet Katie Fredrickson.”

Jock opened the door and followed J.D. back to the living room. She introduced him to Katie. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Katie. I’m sorry you’ve had a bad time, but I think we can fix it. Let me get a cup of coffee.”

“Start at the beginning, Katie,” said J.D. “Tell us about Jim’s death. I’m guessing that whoever killed him was somebody pretty powerful or you wouldn’t have run, cut yourself off from your friends and family. Who killed Jim?”

Katie looked at J.D. for a couple of beats, as if mulling over something in her mind. She seemed to snap out of whatever reverie she had escaped to and said simply, “I killed Jim.”

“Do you think you caused his death in some way?” J.D. asked.

“Yes,” said Katie. “I pulled the trigger and sent a bullet into his worthless head.”

J.D. sat back in her chair. “Katie,” she said, “I’m a cop. I’m also your friend, but I’m a cop first. Maybe you shouldn’t tell me anything more.”

“No. I’ve got to tell the whole story. It’s sordid and you’re going to think a lot less of me when I’m finished, but it’s time everything came out. When I’ve finished, if you have to arrest me, I’ll understand.”

“What happened?” J.D. asked, her voice soft, as if she were speaking to a child. “Whatever it is, we’ll work through it. I promise.”

“It all started about a year before Jim’s death,” Katie said. “He had gotten mixed up with some bad people. They were dealing in drugs in a pretty big way.”

“Why would Jim do something like that?” J.D. asked. “He had a good law practice.”

“He did. But he also had developed some expensive tastes. We were having trouble making the mortgage payments on that big house he insisted on buying. His Mercedes was about to be repossessed, and he was going to be deeply embarrassed in front of his friends and colleagues.”

“How did he get involved in the drug trade?” I asked. “That’s not the kind of thing you just decide to do one day. You’ve got to have a source and customers.”

“Jim had represented some underworld types on criminal matters and got to know them pretty well. Most of their money came from drugs, and Jim and one of his law partners, who was also in financial trouble, indicated that they would like to get into the business. One day Jim got a call from one
of the bigwigs in the drug business and offered to cut him in if he would do all their legal work, including a lot of transactional stuff about buying and selling businesses and real estate. He agreed and they were off to the races.”

“Sal Bonino offered him the deal,” Jock said.

Katie looked shocked. “Yes. How did you know?”

“And the lawyer partner who joined the deal was Wayne Evans,” Jock said.

“Right again,” Katie said. “It sounds like you know as much as I do.”

“Not really,” said J.D. “But when I got your first text message, I knew that either you were in big trouble or it was some kind of hoax. The reference to ‘Jed’ made me think it wasn’t a hoax. We’ve been trying to put some of the pieces together. One of Sal Bonino’s thugs tried to beat up Matt the day after he went to Winter Park to see your parents.”

She looked at me and something moved across her face. Fear, shock, regret? I couldn’t tell. “You went to see my parents?” she asked.

“I did, but I didn’t tell them we’d heard from you. I was trying to figure out if they knew anything. If they’d heard from you.”

Katie breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks for that.”

“So what happened after Jim got involved with Bonino?” I asked.

“They began to sell drugs. They’d pick them up from Bonino and store them in the Avon Park house where Jim grew up until they could get them to the street dealers. They had a big safe out there where they kept cocaine and money.”

“Did you ever meet Bonino?” Jock asked.

“No. I don’t think Jim did either. There were always go-betweens.”

“Who did Jim sell the drugs to?” J.D. asked.

“Bonino had a ring of dealers in Sarasota and Bradenton. Jim thought the main reason Bonino brought him and Evans in was that Bonino needed help with the distribution to the street dealers.”

“So, you knew Jim was dealing drugs,” J.D. said.

“Not at first. But I began to suspect it when Jim took me to the Avon Park house and tried to sell me to one of the bosses.”

“Sell you?” J.D. asked.

“Yes. The boss offered to pay Jim ten thousand dollars to sleep with me.”

“Tell me how that happened,” J.D. said.

“Jim took me to Avon Park to what he called a party at his old house. I hadn’t been there in years and was surprised to see that Jim had done a lot of remodeling and fixing up. There were five men there that night, including Jim. There were also four women, probably prostitutes. They were drinking and snorting cocaine. I was pretty upset that Jim would bring me into such a situation, but he said they were businessmen that he was working with on some projects that would make us a lot of money.”

“Tell me about him trying to sell you,” J.D. said.

“One of the men held up ten one thousand dollar bills and said he would pay them to Jim if I’d sleep with him. I was standing right there when he made the offer. I expected Jim to slug him, but Jim said it was all right with him as long as I agreed. I told him to go to hell. I said it was time for us to leave. The man said, ‘Look, honey. Just go in the room at the end of the hall and get naked. I’ll be right there and do you.’ Jim laughed and I started for the door. Jim stopped me and asked what I was doing. I told him that either he took me home, or I was going to start walking.”

She sat quietly for a moment, probably thinking about her humiliation that night in Avon Park. “What happened?” asked J.D.

“He took me home. I was crying, almost hysterical. He kept telling me it was a joke and that he was sorry. I slept in the guest room that night and the next. But then I started to feel better, even euphoric. Every day was brighter than the day before. Sex with Jim was better than ever. A couple of weeks went by, three maybe, or four. I don’t really remember. The days all ran together. I didn’t care. Life was grand. And then the bottom fell out. I found myself dropping off a cliff, hitting bottom, and not bouncing back. I craved the euphoria of the weeks before. I stayed in my room curled up in the bed, crying, hurting. I told Jim I needed to see a doctor. He told me to ride it out. I was like that for two days, and then Jim gave me some medicine that turned me completely around. The euphoria came back, not as exquisite, but still so much better than the two days in bed.

“The next day, I began to drop again. The cliff was back, and I was falling into the abyss. Jim gave me more medicine, and I almost immediately soared back to the top, or almost the top. I couldn’t seem to get all the way back, but still, it was good.”

“He was drugging you,” said J.D. “Do you know what he was using?”

“No. Later the doctors I saw figured it was some sort of cocaine-based substance, but by the time I got to them, there wasn’t enough in my system to measure or to identify.”

“What happened with the drugs Jim was giving you?” J.D. asked.

“Jim finally told me that he had drugged my food. I never did know whether he was telling me the truth or if the drug got into my system some other way. It didn’t matter. I was hooked. Without the drugs, I’d crash and want to die. He told me he’d continue to supply me with the ‘medicine’ but I had to do exactly what he told me to do. I agreed. Hell, at that point I’d have agreed to anything.”

“What did he want you to do?” J.D. asked.