Hot Schemes (3 page)

“Where the hell are you?” Hal DeWitt demanded. “I thought you were picking Brian up at eight o’clock. It’s the goddamned middle of the night.”

She almost laughed at the predictable response. Instead, she managed to sound dutifully contrite. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t get to a phone before now.”

“The woman who keeps a cellular phone attached to her eardrum?” he retorted with derision.

“Hal, is this really necessary?”

“I think it is.” When that was met with silence, he added, “Okay, okay. When are you getting here?”

“I’m not. I really need you to keep Brian another day or so.”

That was greeted with his most put-upon sigh. “Couldn’t you have called earlier? He could have been in bed by now. You haven’t gotten yourself mixed up in another goddamn murder, have you?” he inquired sarcastically.

The last three homicide cases in which Molly had inadvertently become entangled had irritated the daylights out of her ex-husband. He’d acted as if she personally had been responsible for the deaths. He also made it seem as if she’d done it only to aggravate him.

“No,” she said, refusing to accept the possibility that Tío Miguel might be dead or to be drawn into an argument. “But a friend of mine is in the middle of a family emergency. I’d like to be able to help out. It’ll be easier if Brian stays with you.”

Since leaving Brian with him more often was exactly what Hal had been pleading with Molly to do, she guessed he wouldn’t dare deny the request, though he’d do his best to make her feel guilty in the meantime.

“I suppose it’ll be okay,” he said grudgingly.

She bit back a sarcastic retort about his enthusiasm. Instead, her tone deliberately mild, she said only, “Thanks. Since he’s still up anyway, let me speak with him, please.”

To her amazement, Hal didn’t argue. Maybe he didn’t want to know what friend she was helping. He wasn’t fond of her best friend, Liza Hastings, and he was downright hostile about Michael. A few seconds later, Brian was on the line.

“Hey, Mom, what’s up?”

“I’ve asked your dad if you can stay with him another night or two. He’s agreed.”

“How come?”

She didn’t want to alarm him about Tío Miguel’s disappearance until they knew more. “It’s already late and Michael’s tied up for a while, so I can’t get home. You might as well get a decent night’s sleep.” “Oh.”

She picked up on his unenthusiastic tone of voice. “You okay with that? Is everything all right at your dad’s?”

“I suppose.”

It was an amazingly reticent answer for a kid who was never at a loss for words. “Brian? What’s going on?”

“He’s got this lady here,” he finally blurted. “She keeps looking at me like she wishes I’d get lost.”

Molly was surprised. Hal had always been careful not to have his dates around when Brian visited, perhaps to give the illusion that he was still pining away for Molly. For a time anyway, he had been, or so he’d claimed. However, they’d resolved all of that months ago. Apparently he’d finally accepted that they had no future and moved on with his life. Brian was normally just fine with that in theory, possibly because he adored Michael and hoped that something would develop between him and Molly. In fact, he’d done everything up to and including personally proposing marriage to Michael on Molly’s behalf. Molly had been horrified. Michael had taken it in stride. He’d had a man-to-man talk with Brian, taken his concerns seriously, and promised to keep the suggestion in mind.

Obviously, unlike Michael, this particular woman hadn’t done anything to ingratiate herself with Brian. Apparently she didn’t understand the value of having a precocious kid in her corner.

“Don’t worry about her,” Molly advised. “Your dad wants you there, and that’s all that matters. I’ll talk to you sometime tomorrow.”

“What about summer school? I’ll probably be really tired anyway, since it’s so late. Do I get to stay home?” he inquired hopefully.

“Not a chance. I know you stay awake playing video games until this hour, when you think I’m already asleep. You’ll get by.”

“But dad’s never taken me to school before.”

“Your dad knows the way. He’ll drop you off.”

“But my homework’s at home.”

Molly had to hold back a chuckle at this one last try. Homework was not something uppermost on Brian’s mind most of the time. “Tell your dad to stop off at the condo so you can pick it up,” she advised him.

“Okay,” he said, accepting defeat gracefully. “See you, Mom. Tell Michael hi for me. Has he asked you to marry him yet?”

“No, Brian, and he never will if you keep on pestering him about it.” She thought about the implications of her response and quickly amended, “Not that I want him to, anyway.”

“Yeah, right,” Brian teased.

“Bye, kiddo. Behave yourself.”

When she’d hung up, Molly walked back to the dock. She leaned against a piling, hoping that just watching the investigation going on on the boat might spark a few theories of her own about what might have happened to Tío Miguel.

As she waited, Raúl once again unloaded the cooler filled with his day’s catch. When he caught sight of her, he went back aboard and brought her a rusty lawn chair that had been stored in the cabin, apparently for family outings on the nearby beaches.

“Sit,” he instructed her.

Even though the chair had clearly been the victim of too much salt air, it was better than continuing to stand indefinitely. “Thank you.”

She studied the middle-aged Cuban, wondering how much English he spoke and understood. He and Michael had spoken only Spanish in her presence. “Raúl, do you speak English?”

“Sí
, I speak some English,” he said haltingly.

“Why do you believe someone harmed Miguel?”

Something that might have been fear darkened his eyes. He shook his head, muttering,
“No comprendo
, señorita.”

Molly’s knowledge of Spanish was too limited for explaining the complexities of her question. Besides, she had a feeling that Raúl understood her perfectly well. Something about Miguel’s disappearance, however, frightened him.

She tried again, hoping to take a more innocuous route to the same information. “Was he alone this morning?”

“No sé.”

“You don’t know?” she said disbelievingly. “I thought you saw him.” “S
í
.”

“But you saw no one else?”

He shrugged.

This was getting her nowhere fast. Either he had seen someone and that someone had terrified him into having a convenient memory lapse or he was implying that someone could have been hiding belowdecks on Miguel’s boat or on another boat that had followed Miguel to sea or … Hell, his vague response could have meant almost anything. Molly sighed.

Raúl regarded her worriedly. “The señorita would like something to drink?” he asked, suddenly finding his English vocabulary.

“No, thank you.”

“I have very good rum.”

“No.”

“Beer?”

Molly regarded him evenly. “Nothing.”

He backed away then and picked up his cooler and fishing gear. As he started down the dock, he hesitated. “I am sorry, señorita.”

“That’s okay, Raúl. You’ll call Señor O’Hara if you think of anything, right?”

He bobbed his head. “
Sí, sí
, I will call.”

Molly figured Michael shouldn’t hold his breath expecting evidence from this particular source, whether he was a friend of Miguel’s or not.

She glanced back at the
Niña Pilar
and wondered what was going on belowdecks. What could they find? Fingerprints? On a charter fishing boat wouldn’t that be like hoping to use prints to ID a killer in the crowd at Joe Robbie Stadium? Even though Tío Miguel was a fanatic about cleaning up his boat, who knew how many sets of prints could have been scattered around the cabin and on deck since the last time he’d polished everything. Maybe Michael was hoping to find some suspicious piece of evidence, a piece of cloth snagged from someone’s shirt, a button, traces of blood indicating a struggle.

The thought of the latter sent a shiver down Molly’s spine. Just as she’d anticipated, Michael wasn’t likely to ignore any possibility, no matter how absurd or terrifying he personally thought it to be. His success as a homicide detective was based on his gut instincts and his cool, meticulous attention to detail. He would bring that same skill to bear on an investigation of his uncle’s mysterious disappearance, no matter how difficult it might be for him to remain objective. If anything, he would be more relentless and thorough than usual.

He was still grim faced when he finally emerged nearly an hour later. He looked dismayed when he saw her, as if he’d completely forgotten her existence. It was an understandable reaction, but hardly flattering.

“Sorry,” he said. “We’ll be able to leave soon.”

“Don’t apologize. Have you found anything?”

He shook his head. “Not a damn thing. Oh, there are plenty of prints, but who knows how long they’ve been around.”

“Any signs that he might have struggled with someone?”

“Nothing.”

Molly had a sudden thought. “What about a gun?”

“If he owns one, he took it with him.”

“A map of Cuba?”

“He knows those waters and that shoreline like the back of his hand. He wouldn’t have needed one.” He muttered a curse in Spanish. “We couldn’t find one damned thing to indicate what he might have been up to out there besides fishing.”

“His gear was still aboard, then?”

“All of it, as far as I could tell.”

“Had he caught anything today?”

“What the hell difference …” Michael began, then grinned. He leaned down and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Molly, you’re a genius. If he caught anything, then this was just another fishing trip. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He jumped aboard the
Niña Pilar
and headed for the stern of the boat, which was apparently where Miguel kept ice-filled coolers for the day’s catch. When he came back, his expression was even more somber than before.

“Any fish?”

He shook his head. “But there is melting ice in one cooler as if he’d expected to fill it with fish. Another has ice and beer and a couple of sandwiches. I didn’t see any empty bottles. Whatever happened must have happened right after he got out there.”

“What do you think that means?”

“I think it means that Raúl could have been right,” he admitted with obvious reluctance. “Someone could have forced him off that boat. He wouldn’t have headed for Cuba in an inflatable raft without any provisions. Even from where we found his boat, he was hours from shore depending on the currents. Hell, from what I know about the water in the straits, he would have been a goddamned fool to abandon his boat there and head for Cuba on a raft. He’d have been fighting the currents all the way. The rafters leaving Cuba count on those currents to take them north to America, not south.”

“Will you tell your aunt that?”

For the first time in all the months she had known the extraordinarily confident detective, Molly saw genuine uncertainty in Michael’s eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what the hell to say to her. I don’t want to alarm her, but …”

“Michael, she’s already alarmed, I’m sure. She’d have to be. I think you have to concentrate on what’s being done to find him, rather than on all the things you don’t know.”

“Like what? I don’t even know where to start,” he said angrily. “I’m a cop and I don’t have the vaguest idea where to begin.”

Molly refused to believe that. “Nonsense. At the moment, you’re thinking like a grief-stricken nephew. As soon as you begin thinking like a policeman, you’ll know exactly what to do next, what you’d do if this were any other suspicious disappearance.”

He shot her a wry look. “I gather from that that you have an idea yourself that you’re assuming will come to me once I begin to think clearly. Feel free to share it. I’m coming up blank, and right this minute I will do almost anything, no matter how farfetched, to postpone going to my aunt’s house without answers.”

“Call
Hermanos al Rescate,”
she suggested, referring to a group of pilots whose name in English meant Brothers to the Rescue. The organization had been formed to try to save at least some of the desperate people who tried to flee Cuba on makeshift rafts. In one recent year over 2,500 people had made the attempt in everything from inner tubes to glued-together Styrofoam.
Hermanos al Rescate
found 103 of these foolhardy, courageous people in its first two years. Molly recalled that they had also found 44 empty rafts between the beaches of Varadero and Mariel and the Florida Keys. It was not an especially cheering statistic. She concentrated on emphasizing the positive.

“I know they usually conduct their searches looking for rafters heading from Cuba to Miami,” Molly added, “but I’m sure they’d help look for your uncle, and they’re used to flying over those waters looking for tiny specks on the sea. Combined with a Coast Guard search, wouldn’t that help to reassure your aunt, at least for now, that everything possible is being done to find Miguel?”

Michael sighed heavily, obviously every bit as aware of the statistics as she was. “At least I’ll be able to tell her that people will be looking for Tío Miguel in the morning,” he agreed finally. “I know one of the pilots. I’ll call him.”

Molly was determined to keep prodding him with ideas until his own instincts kicked in. “Shouldn’t you call the State Department and see if there have been any incidents along the Cuban beaches?”

He shook his head. “We’ll know soon enough if there have been. Castro just loves to carry on about these imperialist attacks on his sovereign shores. In the meantime, I don’t want to stir things up in Washington and have them breathing down my aunt’s neck for information about his illegal plotting to invade Cuba. It’s a violation of the Neutrality Act. Washington issues warnings periodically just to prevent the exile groups from acting on their wild ideas.”

“And when the commandos do it anyway, half the time Washington winks and looks the other way,” Molly pointed out.

“Only if no one raises a fuss about it. No, I’ll handle this myself.”

“What about work?”