Legally Dead (17 page)

“Ditto.”

Venturi took Scout for a walk, came back, and checked his watch. They'd been alone for an hour and a half. They all had a big day ahead of them. He felt like the frustrated father of a lust-crazed teenager, worrying and watching the clock. He wished he could have flashed porch lights.

Finally he knocked on the door to the war room.

“Danny, it's late. We have work to do tonight.”

No response.

He rapped louder. “Danny!”

“Give us five minutes, bro.”

“See you in five.” How had he let this happen?

He knocked after ten minutes, then tried the door. Locked from the inside. Danny opened it after several moments, flushed and breathing hard.

Solange was curled up in an oversized armchair near the conference table. She did not look at him.

Both were disheveled but clothed.

“Man,” Danny muttered under his breath. “Cut me a break. It's the last time we'll see each other.”

“No. Are you crazy? You know what you're risking?”

They glared at each other, then Victoria interrupted. Ignoring the hot glances and supercharged atmosphere, she marched in cheerfully carrying a tray of sandwiches and coffee.

Solange refused to meet their eyes, but she was clearheaded, detail oriented, and alert as they pored over charts, maps, and schedules again and again.

Danny left after the briefing. He turned at the door. Their eyes locked. Solange sighed. She was ready to die.

The day Solange Dupree died was beautiful and breezy, a perfect day for sailing.

Danny and Mike took to the water early, to take her off the sailboat.

“Hello, beauty,” Danny greeted her. When he helped her into their boat they clung to each other longer than necessary.

“Break it up, you two,” Mike said, glad this would all be over soon. “We have serious work to do.”

They let the small sailboat dash against the rocks until it was badly damaged, then removed several pints of blood from the cooler on Danny's boat.

“Be careful now. Let's focus,” Mike said. “It can't look poured. Blood obeys the laws of physics. The first blow brings it to the surface. The second spatters it. Remember, these bloodstains will be studied, analyzed, and debated by the foremost experts in the field.”

They set the crippled boat adrift with enough blood on deck to convince any pathologist that the person who lost it could not possibly have survived.

“Hey, babe, I need your suit,” Danny said, as Mike took the helm.

Her eyes on Danny, Solange began to slowly strip off her red swimsuit, right there on deck.

“Get below!” Mike said, exasperated. “You can't be seen! Look up, for God's sake.”

A small plane towing a banner had made a pass over the Miami Beach shoreline and was circling for another.

Solange ducked below, then returned in white jeans and a T-shirt, her shiny black hair tucked up under a baseball cap. She tossed her red swimsuit to Danny, who caught it and crumpled it in his hand like a flower.

Mike feared he was about to lift it to his nose, but Danny saw him watching and shoved it under his shirt instead.

They docked near downtown and Mike drove Solange back to his place.

Several hours later, he drove alone to the marina and took the boat out again, his destination an empty waterfront mansion on Miami Beach's North Bay Road. Danny knew the developer who had it slated for demolition.

Mike arrived first. Shortly after, Danny drove a van up the wide circular driveway that branched off to one side leading down to the boathouse and dock, where Mike waited.

“We could have found another way,” he said doubtfully.

Danny shot him a dark look. “You're the one who said we needed a body, bro.” He opened the back of the van and pulled back a pale pink blanket.

The dead girl had raven hair like Solange. She appeared to be in her late twenties, early thirties. Venturi's heart skipped several beats when he saw the tattoo on her ankle.

“Who the hell did you get to do that? And how?”

“It's not really a tattoo,” Danny admitted. “It's permanent Magic Marker.”

“Sure it's waterproof?”

“We're about to find out.”

The dead girl wore the red bathing suit Solange had worn to go sailing that morning. Solange had bought the distinctive suit with a daring cutout design at Macy's in the Aventura Mall. She paid for it with her own credit card after trying on a dozen suits, all while chatting up and joking with several sales associates. They'd remember her well.

Venturi stared at the dead girl.

“How did you find somebody who fits her description so well? Danny, if I thought for a minute that you—”

“Christ, what do you think I am? Grab her feet. Help me get her onto the boat.”

“She's so cold.”

“I kept the temperature in the cooler as low as possible.”

“Hold it. Is that a bullet hole in her stomach?”

“It's where the trocar, an embalming tool, was inserted. She's been embalmed,” Danny said impatiently.

“Where'd you get her?”

Danny sighed. “Funeral homes take turns handling unclaimed, indigent corpses for the county. I've been stopping by the medical examiner's office early every day to see who was up for grabs. When I saw her, I volunteered. Happened to be my turn anyway.”

“How old is she? Who is she?” Venturi persisted.

“Twenty-seven. A hooker who worked the Boulevard south of Seventy-ninth Street. She checked into a hot-sheet motel with an unidentified john last week. They were snorting some shit. Her name was on the Big Blackboard in the Sky. She OD'd and he took off and left her. Swell guy. Stole her purse, too. Guess he figured she didn't need it anymore. She was a Jane Doe until they identified her fingerprints. Had a couple of arrests for DUI, soliciting, lewd and lascivious, and one for trespassing naked in the fountain outside the Justice Building. Had family in Ohio. They declined to claim her body.”

“Geez,” Venturi said.

“Don't feel bad. Think of it as her last chance to do something noble for somebody else.”

“What's supposed to happen to her?”

“Every ten days or so a work crew, prisoners from the County Jail, is sent to Potter's Field with a backhoe. They dig a long trench, then stack the cheap wooden coffins in side by side. A sad and sorry way to go, bro. But that's life. Like I said, she's helping somebody who needs it.”

They checked the time then headed out to sea, toward the Gulf Stream. What they watched for appeared promptly on the horizon. “There she is,” Danny said, watching through binoculars, “right on time.”

The Lucky Star,
a South Beach–based casino boat, offers five dinner cruises a week. The main course is blackjack and roulette. She was packed, as usual, with tourists and gamblers.

Keeping their distance, Danny pulled on his scuba gear and maneuvered the underwater scooter over the side.

“If you're spotted we're dead,” Venturi warned.

“Quit your complaining and stop worrying,” Danny said. “You're turning into an old lady, bro.” He grinned, took the cold dead girl into his arms, and slid into the water.

Once they were submerged, he adjusted the weights on her body, tied a clear cord into a makeshift harness under her arms, then towed her toward
The Lucky Star
with the underwater scooter.

He descended deeper, then began to release some of the weights.

She slowly rose to the surface, floating gently, facedown, long hair streaming.

Mike used the two-way radio as he watched through high-powered binoculars from a distance.

“Danny, they're cruising right by. Everybody's focused on roulette. Damn. That red suit should be easy to spot. Whoops! Here we go. They see her. Got people crowding to the port side. Good deal, good deal. I see three, no, four cameras and lots of cell phones. Try to maneuver her a little more to the east so they get good looks and clear shots of her ankle. The captain's circling. Careful. He may try to throw a line on her. They're already on the radio to the Coast Guard. I'm monitoring their transmission.

“Reel her in! Reel her in and bring her back.”

As
The Lucky Star
came about, the dead girl, arms outstretched, sank beneath the surface and disappeared into the deep.

Danny towed her back to the boat, secured her and the weights in a shrimp fishing net below the waterline, then clambered aboard.

“Let's rock-and-roll, 'fore the Coast Guard gets here.”

A cutter had already appeared on the horizon.

Mike started the engine, then cut it off.

“What are you doing?” Danny demanded.

“What the hell is that?”

Danny turned to look. A flash of red in the water about forty yards off the stern.

“Holy shit! She slipped out of the net.”

“We have to get out of here,” Venturi said tersely, as the Coast Guard cutter approached
The Lucky Star.

“No way,” Danny said.

“Tell me about it!” Mike said. “She can't be found.”

“I'd have some 'splaining to do. She's supposed to go in the ground tomorrow.”

“Go get her, Danny.” He was talking to a splash and a trail of bubbles.

Shortly after Danny submerged, as the Coast Guard boat approached them, lights flashing, the red suit in the water suddenly sank out of sight.

A Coast Guardsman on deck hailed Mike to ask if anyone aboard had seen a woman's body in the water.

Mike replied that he hadn't but he'd be on the lookout.

The cutter headed back toward
The Lucky Star.

Danny surfaced as the prelude to a savage sunset painted the water blood red and gold all around them.

“Got her?”

He nodded grimly. “Don't want to do that again soon. Spooky as hell. Had to grapple across half the ocean bottom with that woman to wrestle her back into the net. Some of the grommets had come loose and she slid right the hell out like she had a mind of her own.”

“They always do,” Mike said.

“Think about it,” Danny said, at dusk, as they dried her with towels and wrapped her in a blanket behind the empty mansion on North Bay Road. “This girl lived a pretty wild life. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Brief, but never boring. And unlike most of us, her story didn't end when she did. If she was watching us today, she must have laughed her ass off.”

The surgery took place at Dr. Howard's Boca Raton office late that night.

Keri scrubbed in to assist.

Venturi was present. Both he and Solange insisted that Danny stay away. She didn't want him to see her exposed and vulnerable. Mike had reasons of his own.

The patient was sedated, with an endotracheal tube and an intravenous line. The surgeon made incisions inside her mouth and cut away soft tissue, creating pockets to accommodate the surgical-grade silicone implants that would change the shape of her face—and her appearance—permanently.

“Fillers and fat are resorbed and have to be reinjected,” the doctor said, in cheerful running commentary, as classical music played softly in the background. “But these midface implants sit on the bony skeleton and stay in place forever.”

The incisions were sutured with self-dissolving stitches.

Several hours later, Micheline Lacroix was rolled out to the van in a wheelchair. She wore a compression bandage to reduce swelling and held the ice packs in place herself, despite feeling groggy.

They made her as comfortable as possible in what was now considered the client guest room. Victoria looked in several times during the night to administer pain pills and cold packs.

Venturi let Danny know that the procedure had gone well and that Micheline was doing fine.

The next day, Micheline sipped soup through a plastic straw as Victoria read aloud to her from the morning paper:

“How'd it go at Potter's Field today?” Venturi asked, when Danny called again to check on the patient.

“It didn't,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I've had a helluva day, bro. The goddamn family had a change of heart. Decided to bury her up there. They want the body shipped to goddamn Cleveland.”

“Christ. You can't ship her anywhere with that thing on her ankle,” Venturi said, alarmed.

“Thank you. Tell me about it. The goddamn marker won't come off. I tried paint remover, even Brillo. I'm thinking about painting something over it.”

“Like what?”

“A snake. A big black serpent coiled around her ankle, it could go up to her thigh. And the red heart could be enlarged, into an apple. You know, like in the garden of Eden.”

“Don't,” Venturi said. “Families always request a copy of the ME report. The line for identifying characteristics won't mention her tattoo. You have to get that thing off her. No two ways about it.”

“Goddammit,” Danny said. “Son of a bitch. You're right. She has to be on a flight tomorrow.” He sighed. “I guess the ME report would mention a missing foot, too.”

“Don't even think about that,” Venturi warned. “Call the marker manufacturer for info on what will take it off. You were right, buddy.”

“About what?”

“That dead girl. She's somewhere laughing her ass off again today.”

A news story days later reported that the FBI was attempting to digitally enhance the photos taken by passengers and crew members aboard
The Lucky Star
and that U.S. Navy sonar was being used in efforts to recover the woman's body.

The Navy? The FBI? When does the military or a federal agency become involved in a search for a lost boater or accident victim? Alert reporters began to ask questions.

A savvy police reporter coaxed the missing woman's name from an employee of the boat rental firm, but could find no trace of a Marilyn Moya from Louisiana. She didn't exist.

It took more than a week for the FBI to announce the victim's real identity: Solange Dupree, the Louisiana federal court judge who had lost her entire family to killers who had made repeated death threats against her.

The FBI lab had studied the enhanced photos and determined through certain identifying marks that the woman in the water was indeed Judge Dupree.

Her damaged sailboat, confiscated by the FBI, showed signs of an accident. Her DNA was found on board. No foul play suspected.

Members of the press found that conclusion—that she died in a freak accident shortly after escaping a second murder attempt—hard to swallow. Reporters clearly suspected that federal investigators had failed the courageous judge and that their ineptitude resulted in her murder.

FBI spokesmen protested that although Judge Dupree was an avid sailor, she was unfamiliar with South Florida waters.

Federal officials in Louisiana noted that Judge Dupree “was a very strong-minded and independent member of the judiciary, who had refused security during her Florida stay. However, bodyguards would have made little difference since she persisted in sailing a small boat alone. Therefore, the accident and her death most likely could not have been prevented.”

Louisiana's legal community lamented its loss at a well-attended memorial service for Judge Dupree, then indulged in rampant speculation about her possible successor.

After four laser treatments, Micheline Lacroix's ankle, now temporarily red and swollen, showed no trace of a tattoo.

Days later, she was ready to return home to her native France. Her hair was now platinum blond in a sleek, swingy, shoulder-length cut. Her cheekbones were classic, her eyes sultry.

Her papers were ready, a morning flight booked.

One obstacle remained. She wanted to see Danny again. Venturi said no. Tensions ran high.

Victoria met him at the door when he returned home from arranging a cash deposit to a bank in Tours, France.

“Danny's here,” she said softly, her eyes grave. “He's with her, in her room. I couldn't stop them.”

Venturi knocked. No answer. He used the key.

They were naked. The room reeked of sex. Lips swollen, their eyes and skin glistened, their expressions were sated.

“Get the hell out!” he told Danny, then turned to Micheline. “Do you know the risks we've taken for you?”

Danny objected, hopping on one foot as he pulled on his pants. “You don't get it, bro.”

“Don't ‘bro' me, you son of a bitch.”

His fist connected with Danny's chin in a powerful punch that knocked him down. He sprang to his feet, his lower lip bleeding.

“Stop it!” Micheline screamed. “You don't understand! Danny's going with me!”

“I'm not gonna fight you, bro.” Danny held up his palm. “I won't hurt you, Mike. You're my brother.”

“You couldn't hurt me if you tried. You dumb son of a bitch. You want to try?”

“You don't understand.”

“Yeah. That's what your girlfriend just said.”

“It's not like that.”

“What you mean, it's not like that?” Micheline demanded.

Danny ignored her and focused on his friend.

“She was needy, nervous, and scared, Mike. I said and did whatever it took to save her.”

“What are you saying?” She clutched a sheet around her with one hand, gesturing wildly with the other. “Are you saying we're not going to be together?”

He sighed and turned to her. “Maybe we will,” he said. “Sometime. We never know what the future will bring. But I have to raise my kids first. Things may be different by the time they're all twenty-one.”

She blinked in disbelief. “And how many years will that be?”

He paused. “The youngest is due next year. When he's twenty-one, maybe…”

She slapped him, hard.

“I deserve that.” He caught her hand, raised for a second blow. “But don't do it again.”

She burst into tears.

He reached to comfort her but she resisted, then turned her back on him.

He touched her shoulder. “I want to walk you through all the minefields but I can't. You're smart enough and strong enough to navigate them on your own. Look at you.” He spun her around so that they both faced the full-length mirror. “This woman will live a long and wonderful life.” He stroked her hair.

She was weeping.

Both were getting dressed as Venturi left the room.

“Don't share with Danny exactly where she's going,” he told Victoria, rubbing his bruised knuckles. “Although I'm sure she's already told him.”

“I agree.”

Danny emerged, still fastening his belt. “Sorry, man.” He pressed a handkerchief to his still-bleeding lip. “See you in the morning.”

“Want some ice for that?” Victoria said.

“Nah.” He winked. “It was a sucker punch. That's the only way he landed it. I've been hit a helluva lot harder,” he glanced at Venturi, “by my wife.”

“You probably deserved it then, too,” Venturi said mildly. “Will Micheline be trouble tomorrow?”

“No. She's ready to go,” Danny said, and stepped out into the sultry night.

Micheline stayed in her room and refused to come out for dinner. She ate yogurt and fruit for breakfast but spoke only in monosyllables.

Danny showed up, his lip swollen. Unlike the prior departures, they rode to the airport in silence. Keri, busy at the hospital, was unable to join them.

In a corner of the parking garage, a subdued Micheline took Venturi's hand. “Thank you for everything,” she whispered. “I'm sorry I've been so difficult.”

He nodded.

She kissed Victoria's cheek.

She'd been ignoring Danny, who walked her to the gate as the others watched from a distance.

“If he boards that plane, I swear to God I will hunt him down like a rabid dog,” Venturi said.

“I'll ride shotgun,” Victoria told him.

Danny's kiss glanced off her cheek as Micheline neatly avoided his lips. Then she walked away. He turned to leave, then stopped to look back. She did not. She walked faster, chin up, moving forward into her future.

He stood watching for a long moment, then rejoined the others. No one spoke until they were in the car.

Danny broke the dense silence. “I love my wife,” he said, “and my kids. All of us over the age of fifteen have old loves in our pasts. I did the best I could for them both. She's safe, on her way now, and my life can get back to normal.”

“How's your lip?” Venturi asked.

Danny shrugged nonchalantly. “
No problemo
, bro. I've been hit harder by my little girl, and she's three.”

“I trusted him,” Venturi said later. Keri had joined him and Victoria at the house for a quiet dinner. The earlier transitions, farewells, and departures had been celebratory. Nobody celebrated this one.

“I should have followed my gut,” he said. “I knew it was too risky and could turn ugly. Without grossing you both out, I can tell you that my hair stood on end more than once. I regret involving you. I should've quit when we were ahead.

“I can't figure Danny out anymore. He's changed. What happened to trust and honor?”

“Love and lust.” Keri took his hand. “When sex or money is involved, trust no one.”