Orchid Blues (14 page)

“Well, I got the idea that they weren’t hurting for money.”

“Of course not,” Holly said, “they just robbed a bank.”

“I guess they could be making good money from this gun show of theirs,” Harry said.

“You’d have to move a lot of weapons,” Ham replied. “But I bet they could move a lot of weapons, if they felt the need. I bet if you wanted a couple hundred assault rifles or fifty Uzis, they could find them for you in a hurry.”

“Anything else about last night?”

Ham thought for a minute. “Something they said,” he replied.

“What?”

“It was when the brandy was poured, kind of a toast.”

“What was the toast?”

“They all said, ‘On the day.’ ”

Twenty-eight

HOLLY WAS ON THE WAY TO WORK WHEN HER cell phone rang. “Holly Barker,” she said into the instrument.

“It’s Hurd,” he said. “Franklin Morris’s car has been found.”

“Where?”

“At the Pirate’s Cove Marina, in Sebastian.” Sebastian was the next town north of Orchid Beach, on the Indian River. “He didn’t go far, did he?”

“Nope.”

“Grab the tech and meet me there.”

“You know the place?”

“I know it. It’s near that seafood restaurant, Captain Hiram’s, isn’t it?”

“That’s the place.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said, then punched off.

The Pirate’s Cove Marina had fallen on hard times and had been closed for the better part of a year, not having found a buyer who would rescue it from bankruptcy. Holly remembered it from when she had first arrived in town, and, she thought, it had gone downhill fast. There was a chain at the entrance, with a sign saying, Strictly No Admittance. Trespassers Will Be Shot. The chain was lying in the dirt road.

Holly parked and got out of the car. A small group of people were standing down at the water, next to a boat ramp. A Sebastian police car was there, too, and a wrecker. Holly walked down to the ramp.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” she said to the Sebastian cop. “I’m Chief Holly Barker from Orchid Beach.”

“How you doin’?” he asked, looking her up and down.

Holly was used to that and ignored it. “I hear you found a car we’ve been looking for.”

“There it comes,” the cop said, nodding toward the water. The wrecker’s cable stretched down the ramp and into the water, and the machinery was making terrible groaning sounds. A foot at a time, the Chrysler convertible backed up the ramp, leaking water. “That’s too nice a car for somebody to do it that way,” the cop said.

A man wearing a wet suit walked over, a set of fins in his hand. “That ain’t all that’s down there, Sergeant,” he said. “There’s a van and a trailer, too.” He pointed. “Right about yonder.”

“Well, that’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of,” the cop said.

“We’ve been looking for all three,” Holly said. She looked down at the rear end of the convertible. “Sergeant, would you do me a favor?”

“If I can,” the sergeant replied.

“Will you run the plate on that convertible for me?”

“Sure,” the cop said and went to his patrol car.

Holly watched the car continue its progress up the ramp. Finally, it was high and dry enough for the wrecker to tow it to one side. The man in the wet suit unhooked the cable from the convertible’s rear bumper and began pulling the hook toward the ramp. “One down, two to go,” he said, half to himself. A moment later, he pulled down his mask, put on his flippers and walked down the ramp until he disappeared underwater.

Hurd pulled up in his unmarked car, with the tech beside him in the front seat. He got out and walked over to where Holly stood, glancing at the convertible. “It got wet, huh?”

“Yep,” Holly said, “and the van and the trailer are still out there.” She turned to the tech. “See what you can find in the convertible,” she said. “Sergeant, you mind if my tech goes over the car?”

“Well, if you’ll share information, that’ll be all right. Save our man a trip down here.”

The horse trailer was backing up the ramp now, spilling water from between its slats. “Fully loaded with furniture,” Holly said. “Now, I wonder where Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Morris could be?”

“Afoot, I reckon,” Hurd said.

The sergeant came back from his patrol car. “The plate on the convertible belongs to a Buick in Fort Lauderdale,” he said. “Reported stolen eight months ago—the plate, not the car.”

“Thanks, Sergeant.” She turned to Hurd. “Morris took a pretty big chance driving around with that plate on his car. If he’d been stopped for speeding or a broken taillight, he’d have been in trouble. Tell our man to get the VIN off the convertible, and let’s run that. I’m sure the convertible must have been stolen, too.”

The diver was going back into the water with the hook again.

“I don’t get it,” Hurd said. “If they were going to ditch the vehicles, why didn’t they just walk away from the house and leave everything there. Why go to the trouble to pack everything up, then dump it all in the river?”

“Doesn’t make any sense, does it,” Holly said, half to herself. She was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

The van started up the ramp now, water pouring from an open driver’s-side door.

“Come on, Hurd,” she said, then started down the ramp. She approached the vehicle, taking care not to touch it. “Raymond!” she yelled, “get over here.”

The tech trotted toward them, carrying his bag.

Holly stuck her head inside the van. The front seat was empty, but a woman’s foot, wearing a sock, but shoeless, rested on the back of the passenger-side seat. Holly looked into the rear seat. “Mr. and Mrs. Morris, I presume.”

An hour later, the tech had finished. “They each took two in the head,” he said, “small caliber, probably a twenty-two, maybe a twenty-five caliber. No exit wounds, so the ME will recover the lead. A lot of trauma about the head and shoulders, too—both of them.”

“How long have they been in the water?” Holly asked.

“The ME will give us a final answer, but my best guess is, since the night they disappeared. They’re pretty soggy but well preserved. The water is cool, down by the bottom, I reckon.”

“I guess that tells us that Franklin Morris wasn’t working independently,” Holly said. “Whoever he was working with must have thought he was too much of a liability after the robbery.”

“And who do you think that would be?” Hurd asked. “The folks out at Lake Winachobee?”

“This doesn’t add up at all,” Holly said.

Twenty-nine

HOLLY, IN A PHONE CONVERSATION WITH THE Sebastian chief of police, arranged for her department to take possession of the two bodies and three vehicles, then she had the bodies removed to the Orchid Beach medical examiner’s offices and the vehicles taken to the police garage, with orders that no one was to touch them until she arrived. Then she went to her own office and called Harry Crisp.

“We’ve found Franklin Morris and his wife,” she said.

“Locally?”

“Next town up. Both cars and the trailer had been rolled down a boat-launching ramp at a defunct marina. Both bodies were in the van.”

“Cause of death?”

“My tech says two each in the head, but the ME hasn’t done his report yet. You want to send somebody up here?”

Crisp thought for a moment. “How long have the bodies and the vehicles been in the water?”

“My tech says since the couple disappeared.”

“Have you been over the vehicles yet?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you first.”

“If they’ve been in the water for that long, we’re unlikely to find anything useful. Why don’t you have your man go over the vehicles, then send me his report, along with the ME’s.”

“Glad to do it,” Holly said, relieved, as she didn’t want to wait for Harry’s people before starting on the vehicles.

“Get back to me,” Harry said.

As she hung up, it occurred to Holly that the FBI wasn’t much interested in the Morrises; they were small potatoes.

Holly went to see the medical examiner. The two bodies lay side-by-side on stainless-steel tables in the lab, with a sheet over each. On a smaller table nearby, two piles of clothing and possessions lay.

The ME took a deep breath and started. “Cause of death is easy: two gunshot wounds to the head of each.”

“How long have they been dead?”

“Probably since soon after they left their rental house,” he replied. “Before they were shot, their hands were secured behind them with duct tape, and they were pretty badly beaten up; you might say, tortured. Both show evidence of lots of blunt trauma, probably from fists and boots.”

“Anything else you can tell me?”

“Not much else to tell,” he said. “You might look through their effects over there.” He nodded toward the small table.

Holly slipped on some latex gloves and went through the clothing first. The couple had been dressed nearly identically, in jeans, knit shirts and sneakers. One of the woman’s shoes was missing and so was her purse. The man’s wallet was on the table, and Holly emptied it. There was more than a thousand dollars in cash, credit cards in several names, and three driver’s licenses, all with different names, but each bearing the photograph of the man the bank employees had known as Franklin Morris. There was also a Rolex wristwatch and a signet pinky ring, both of which were engraved with the initials S.C.L., which did not match the names on any of the credit cards or licenses. Holly dropped all the effects into a plastic bag and gave the ME a receipt for them.

“Thanks, Doctor,” she said. “Will you fingerprint them and take DNA samples?”

“Sure, that’s standard. What then?”

“Eventually, we’ll get a burial order, but first I want to try to identify them. Just keep them on ice for the time being.”

“As you wish.”

Holly left the ME’s office and drove back to the station. She collected Hurd Wallace, the tech and four other officers, and together they walked over to the garage, across the parking lot.

The three vehicles were lined up in separate service bays. Holly called the group together. “Here’s what we’ve got,” she said. “These two people were tortured, then shot to death. Unless somebody tortured them for the fun of it, which I doubt, the torturers wanted something from this couple, and they may not have gotten it. I want two people on each vehicle. I want everything removed and examined, then I want you to take the vehicles apart.”

“What are we looking for?” the tech asked.

“I don’t know, but I think I’ll know it when I see it. Let’s get started, everybody.”

The group began work, and as they began removing things from the vehicles, Holly walked back and forth from one to the other, watching their progress. The couple’s belongings were unloaded from the trailer and set aside, and Holly examined them. There were suitcases and boxes of clothes; there were small pieces of furniture and kitchen equipment; there were a couple of soggy file boxes. And there was a computer. Holly slipped on some gloves and started to go through the contents of the file boxes.

She found multiple birth certificates in different names for both people and blank letterheads from various financial institutions, none of which Holly had ever heard of and which she suspected were nonexistent. Some of the papers had melded together while wet and would probably not be sal vageable, she thought, but everything she saw in the file boxes had something to do with obtaining false identities or stealing identities from other people.

Hurd came over, and she showed him the materials. “Looks like these folks were hardworking con artists,” he said.

“Did you finish with the convertible?”

“Pretty much. We’ve taken everything off it we can unbolt and looked in every cavity without finding anything. Harvey is taking off the tires now, to have a look inside them.”

Holly walked around the convertible, which now looked as if it were at the beginning, rather than the end, of an assembly line. She looked in the trunk, which had been stripped of its spare tire, tools and lining. “Did the VIN get run yet?”

“Yes,” Hurd said. “The convertible was stolen in Fort Lauderdale on the same day that the plates were stolen from the Buick. The van was stolen a couple of weeks later. I’m not quite sure how you trace a horse trailer. It doesn’t seem to have a VIN, and it didn’t have any plates, either. I guess we can run a check to see if any horse trailers were reported stolen in the past few months, but even if we find out where it came from, I don’t know what that’s going to tell us.”

“It might tell us where they went after they left Lauderdale,” Holly said. “Call the station and send somebody over to the ME’s office to pick up the fingerprints of the corpses and their DNA samples. Run the prints first, on both the state and federal computers, and see if we get a hit.”

Hurd pulled out his cell phone and made the call, while Holly walked around the van, which was nearly as disassembled as the convertible. “Anything?” she asked the officers working on the van. Both shook their heads. She walked over to the horse trailer, which looked more whole than the other two vehicles.

“There’s not all that much to pull off it,” a young officer said.

“Let’s get in on a hoist and look underneath,” Holly said. The two officers maneuvered the trailer over the hoist, and soon it was six feet off the ground. Holly walked around under it, dodging drips of Indian River mud. “Pretty dirty,” she said. “Use the pressure washer.”

She stood back as the underside of the trailer was cleaned, then she looked again.

“What’s this?” an officer asked.

Holly joined him at the rear of the trailer, where a metal box had been fixed to the chassis. “That doesn’t look like it belongs on a trailer,” she said. “Get it out of there.”

The officer went to get a radial saw and returned. “Looks like it’s been welded there,” he said. “This blade ought to do the job.” He put on goggles, switched on the saw and began working on the welded seams. After a few minutes of noise, the box dropped onto the garage floor.

Holly walked over and inspected it more closely. “Looks like some sort of strongbox,” she said. “There’s a keyhole. Anybody a good lock picker?”