Jilliane Hoffman (21 page)

45

Walter ‘Wally’ Jackson was tired of getting the shit beat out of him. Having lived on the streets for so many years he’d lost count, he knew the dangers that came with resting your head under a bridge when the sun went down. It used to be that cops were your biggest worry – hassling you from place to place when the neighborhood started to complain, messing with your nest when you went out to rustle up a little change during the day. While sitting in a jail cell might fill the stomach and keep you out of the rain, a loitering arrest all but guaranteed that when you finally did get CTS – credit time served – all your shit would be long gone. Now, partying with the wrong person, getting jacked while you were high, pissing on someone else’s nest or fucking with someone’s lady – those were all things that any fool could tell you would bring trouble. Homeless or not, you can’t lose your common sense just cause you don’t have a crib and a job. But lately, living on the streets presented a whole new set of fucked-up dangers to look out for. The rules of fair play and survival had apparently changed, and twice in the past six months –
twice
– Wally had had his skull split open by punks with peach fuzz on their balls and too much time on their hands. Macho teenage faggots who took to beating up guys like him with baseball bats just for fun. ‘Bum bashing’ was what it was called, and it was apparently now some sort of fucked-up sport all over the world, someone at the hospital had told him the first time they’d put his brains back inside his head. It could be worse, that same someone had told him. In Miami, a guy had been lit up like a birthday candle with his own bottle of Popov vodka while he slept off a big one. But Wally hadn’t listened to all the dire warnings. He’d gone back to his nest in Birch State Park. This time, though, when he woke up with another sixty staples on the other side of his dented melon, he’d decided it was time to take the warnings a bit more seriously.

With a brown paper bag full of all the shit he owned in the world under one arm and a six-pack of Schlitz under the other, Wally had walked out of the hospital Monday afternoon, gotten on a bus, and tried to figure out where the hell he was gonna go now. Since his aching head was still wrapped in bandages, a shelter was what the discharge nurse had suggested. But Wally knew from previous encounters at the Homeless Assistance Center that there was more of a chance of getting into a fistfight there than under a bridge with an acne-faced bastard and his friend, Louisville Slugger. Besides, Wally liked his space. He liked doing as he pleased. He didn’t need no one telling him how to live just because they fronted you a pillow and a hot meal.

He remembered his old friend Bart, who he’d chummed with for a while before Bart dropped dead last summer. Bart used to have great ideas on where to crash when things were getting hot with the cops or you needed to stay dry. Fort Lauderdale beach was full of second and third homes, owned by old people who didn’t like to come down to Florida till it got real cold up north, like January and February. Great places to crash. Course, the penalty was a lot stiffer if you got caught in someone’s crib rather than in a park after hours – Bart had showed him the scar from the bullet that had hit his chest, courtesy of a trigger-happy cop who’d caught him sneaking in a window. You could be looking at prison time, too. Of course, Wally thought, as he stepped off the bus at Las Olas and Hendricks Isle, those were things you only had to worry about
if
you got caught.

Like a lot of older homes on the swanky isles off Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard, almost every other house on Hendricks seemed to be in some state of construction or deconstruction. Old houses were being torn down, new mansions were being built, and towering dockside condos were going up on both sides of the street. Mixed in with all the new construction were a few old houses further down the block that were shuttered like bomb shelters – at least until winter officially arrived in a couple of months. Homes that were too old for alarms.

With the sun almost down now, the construction sites were all abandoned. Even so, Wally knew that limping like a zombie down the middle of the road with a mummy-wrapped head and stitched-up face would definitely attract the attention of anyone who might be out for a jog or walking her dog, so he ducked inside the concrete bones of a half-built mansion and cracked open a cold one while he waited for it to get dark. When the lights came up on the houses and their matching yachts on the isle across the waterway, he slipped out through graveyards of landfill, broken concrete, and rusted rebar to the crumbling seawall, following it along till he found the house Bart had told him about: The flamingo pink ranch with the hurricane shutters on the back door and the extra key hidden in a magnetic hide-a-way box behind the dead flowerpot. In just a few minutes he’d be inside and out of sight, hopefully enjoying some AC if he could get the darn thing to work.

Except the hide-a-way box was gone.

Damn. The windows were all sealed with metal accordion shutters. Wally looked around. His head was killing him. Maybe he should just make camp here in the backyard and look for a new place in the morning. Then he spotted the old forty-foot sailboat docked behind the house. If the owners obviously weren’t here till at least next month, then they just as obviously would not be needing their boat, which didn’t look to Wally like it had seen much sea time lately anyway.
Crown Jewel
was the faded name gold-scripted on the back. With no intimidating shutters to worry about, Wally figured it would require a lot less effort to get inside the
Crown Jewel
than the Crummy Abode. He limped down to the sailboat and climbed aboard. It would be too much to hope for some food down below, but you never knew. Maybe there’d be a couple of cans and some bottled water. A few brews would be nice, too. That would hold him for a couple of days till he felt up to going back out on the street and raising some cash.

It was too easy. A quick jimmy with the pocket knife he kept in his sock and he was in. The wood door led down to a cabin below. As he climbed down the skinny stairway into pitch blackness, he hoped that Bart hadn’t blabbed to a few dozen other guys about this place. He didn’t need to get his ass kicked again.

It was the smell that had him thinking that perhaps his first hunch was right, that maybe someone else was living aboard the
Crown Jewel
. It was a rancid smell, like of really bad BO, or maybe of old, rotting garbage, but it was not overpowering. It was more like it had been really, really bad and was fading away. And it was mixed with the stink of mildew. The owners had probably left the freaking fridge open with food in it. Without electricity, the food had gone bad. He hoped there were no bugs. He hated flying roaches. Wally stuck a cigarette in his mouth and reached for his lighter. Time to see what tonight’s accommodations would look like.

He lit his butt, then held out the flame in front of him to see where he was going. He was standing in the middle of a living room, with chairs and a coffee table and a dining table, too. Off behind him was a galley kitchen. So far, so good – and no monster bugs. If he opened a couple of windows he could probably get rid of the stink. What a life. To have enough money to own a house you don’t use and a forty-foot boat you don’t sail. He walked a little further, down a few more steps and opened the door right in front of him. The one that led, presumably to the sleeping quarters. The flame went out and he shook the lighter and flicked it again, squinting in the darkness to see what was in front of him.

When he saw the two bodies sitting up in the middle of the round captain’s bed, their arms wrapped around each other, his first thought was that his hunch had been right – someone else had gotten this great idea long before him and he’d just walked in on two people doing the nasty. He mumbled ‘sorry’ and took a step back, but he stumbled, catching himself with the edge of the bedding and pulling it with him. The bodies tumbled forward on the bed. The flame went out. And no one said a word.

That’s when Wally realized that the bad, rotting smell was all around him and the two people he’d just walked in on in the inky darkness were very, very dead.

46

‘Larry, what’ve you got?’ Bobby started as he walked into the CAC squad bay Tuesday morning. ‘Anything on Lori No-Last-Name?’

‘No luck on the girl,’ Larry replied, looking up from his laptop. He picked up files, following Bobby into his office. ‘I did find the two losers Todd LaManna met up with the night of the twenty-sixth at the Side Pocket Pub: Jules Black and Alex Juarez. They work in CarMax service. Both say Todd hooked up with them about eight and left about eleven with a lady nobody knew. Some brunette. Best description is she had a rack on her and looked to be more than of age. They didn’t know her name. She just talked to him at the bar and they walked out together a few minutes later. It’s not the secretary, ’cause she’s a redhead and we checked, although he was banging her, too.’

‘Anyone know where he was from five to eight?’

‘Nope.’

‘That’s not so good for our boy.’

‘What about the lab?’ Ciro asked as he walked in, coffee cup in hand. ‘Anything back yet?’

‘The car was clean,’ Bobby replied. ‘No blood, but they did find three strands of Lainey’s hair in the trunk.’ He waved a piece of paper in the air. ‘Lab report – hot off the fax.’

‘In the trunk?’ Ciro asked.

‘They pulled hairs from the brush we seized in Lainey’s room and matched them. Is that fresh?’ Bobby asked, nodding at Ciro’s coffee.

‘Kiki just made some. It’s a little strong, but you know, she’s Cuban. So things are
really
not looking good for our boy.’ Ciro shook his head. ‘Scumbag. How do you think they got there?’

Bobby shrugged. ‘Could be he threw her in the trunk. Could be from the beachbag
she
threw in the trunk six months ago. Impossible to say where or when or how, and it’s potentially explainable. But there is more news: the manufacturer is a match on the paint. Winsor & Newton. We just can’t ID an actual color match, because both the Sampson and Boganes portrait paint was blended. The lab can’t differentiate pigment colors once they’re blended. Canvas is white stretched linen, no discernable weave. Untraceable.’ Bobby picked up his empty Mickey Mouse mug and fingered an oversized ear. It was a gift from Katy years ago for his birthday. ‘I think I’ll see if Kiki wants to share.’

‘So we got one sis saying Stepdad’s a fucking octopus and that the younger one, who’s now missing, was busy trying to fend him off. He ain’t got no alibi for the time his step goes AWOL, and her freaking hairs are in his trunk? Oh, and the paint’s a match,’ Larry said, scratching his head. ‘When can we move on him, Bobby? I mean, we can pop him for L & L on the older kid – at least get him off the street.’

‘I don’t want him off the street, Larry. We have at least one missing girl that we know for sure is still out there – his stepdaughter. If he’s working alone and he’s popped, who the hell’s gonna take care of her?’

The twisted facts of a case out of Kentucky a couple of years back that Bobby had verbally assisted on immediately came to mind. Chad Fogerty was a suspect in a series of disappearances of at least ten girls. Kentucky police figured Fogerty’s victims were long dead, so they trumped up some charges just to get him off the street while they tried to make a case, thinking they had potentially saved another parent a heartbreaking tragedy. When the trumped-up charges fell flat some three months later and Fogerty finally got out of jail, persistent detectives followed him to a remote farm outside of Bowling Green. A farm nobody ever knew he had. In the underground tornado shelter, shocked detectives found the caged bodies of all ten missing girls – girls who had slowly starved to death while Fogerty was sleeping peacefully on a cot in the county jail. No way was Bobby gonna let that happen in this case. He’d never forgive himself. Even though he still wasn’t completely convinced that LaManna was Picasso, he wasn’t taking any chances with a kid’s life.

‘If she’s still alive, Bobby,’ Larry tried.

Bobby shook his head. ‘I want to see where he’s going. Zo did some checking. Found relatives in Tennessee and LaManna’s mother in Port St Lucie.’ Port St Lucie was a small, super quiet city on the eastern shore of central Florida, about an hour and a half south of Orlando. It was a haven for retirees. ‘I’m gonna head up to see Mom tomorrow. I’ll have the Chattanooga police check on the other relatives. What about the boat angle, Larry? Anything?’

‘There are eighty-nine boats registered in Miami and Broward Counties that begin with the words “The Emp”. And the Coast Guard doesn’t track boats registered in other states that come to sail our blue waters – they only keep tabs on boats coming into the country.’

‘Shit,’ Bobby replied. ‘All right. Eighty-nine is doable. Let’s start with that. We’ll divide each county and each take twenty –’

Frank Veso stuck his head in the CAC squad bay. ‘Hey, Bobby,’ he called, obviously out of breath. ‘You need to turn on a TV. Looks like your case – our case – is on! Put on Six.’

Bobby could feel his chest tighten. He flicked on the portable behind him, just in time to see WTVJ’s Mark Felding standing in front of a pink house, the sails of a large sailboat rising over the roofline behind him. Blue and red lights from more than one police cruiser spun all around him, visible even in the bright sun. Uniforms crawled on the lawn, which was sectioned off with yellow crime-scene tape. Underneath Felding ran the bold-faced graphic:
BREAKING NEWS: TWO BODIES FOUND IN BOAT IN FORT LAUDERDALE BELIEVED TO BE MISSING MIAMI SISTERS
…

‘… no one knows more than that, or at least they’re not telling us, Andrea,’ Felding was saying, trying hard to control the tinge of mounting excitement in his voice. ‘But from speaking with sources who
have
interviewed Walter Jackson, I’d say this could well be the work of the very dangerous killer known so intimately, unfortunately, to both myself and the police as Picasso. And if, once again,
if
these are the missing Boganes sisters, which has yet to be confirmed – well, Andrea, all I can say is that law enforcement has previously classified these two girls as runaways, just like they have with missing thirteen-year-old Elaine Emerson, and that could very well mean that a serial killer is operating right here in South Florida. Right here, Andrea. Right in our own backyard …’