Voodoo Eyes (15 page)

The ensuing photograph was a cropped blow-up of the profile. Although the features were obscured by poor light and shadow, Max could make out the driver’s prominent, Armenid nose – curving out at the top, bulging in the middle, following a straight line to the rounded tip. He also noted the arrow-shaped depression in the middle of the forehead. The driver looked distinctly male.

‘Did you run facial recognition?’ Max asked.

‘Yes. We got nothing.’

The rest of the photographs were satellite captures of the speedboat cutting across the ocean, rendezvousing with another boat, two figures boarding, the second boat disappearing. Then the speedboat was on fire, burning in stills – a blast turning successive images into radiant Rorschach blots of differing size and interpretation, before ending at the flame-defined outline of the jutting prow sinking into black.

They’d burned the boat to remove all forensic evidence. Which meant they didn’t want to be identified. Which meant that their details were on file, somewhere.

Max went back to the first photograph and looked into those blank, inky eyes staring back at him. This was the face Eldon and Joe had seen right before they died.

Wendy Peck pushed another glossy his way.

‘Recognise that?’

It was a blow-up of a bullet casing next to a ruler.

‘Lamar Swope gave it to you. Take a good look at it.’

A small black mark at the centre of the casing immediately caught Max’s attention. It could have been two halves of a broken heart, but the shape was slightly wrong: the upper part didn’t fully bulge out and the inner edges were smooth, while the outer ones were ragged.

Another photograph slid across the desk, the image now magnified.

And he was seeing a pair of long black wings, folded, at rest. They were shaped like vicious pincers, about to grab their prey, but they also had a tenuously human aspect. The upper part wore a kind of face in silhouette – he could make out a puckered mouth, the hint of a chin, a sharp nose and a brow – yet the overall shape was leonine. The rest of the wing was layered, a thick section, then a thinner one, tapering to a long curving point.

‘What is this?’ Max asked.

‘Las
alas negras.
Black wings. The mark of the Abakuás.’

‘Who?’

‘The Abakuás,’ she said and spelled it for him. ‘They’re an Afro-Cuban sect, a secret society that’s been on the island for over five hundred years. They started during slavery and endure to this day. They’re a people within a people. They live in Cuba, but they’re apart from it. They’re no friends of Castro and never have been. They hate his revolution and they hate the regime.’

‘And the shooter’s one of them?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Most likely, yes. The Abakuás do contract killings – among other things. Their triggermen are all ex-Cuban military. Highly skilled.

‘The Abakuás do most of their work in South America, but they’ve been active here, in Miami and in Trenton, New Jersey, and as far away as Spain, France, England and Russia. The MO rarely varies – bullets through the eyes, the calling card at the scene, the black wings. It lets people know who did it. At one time the CIA tried to recruit them as counter-revolutionaries. It ended badly.’

‘How badly?’

‘The first few times, only badly. As in a lot of time and money got wasted while one operative after another got led down a blind alley. You see, no one knows who the Abakuás actually are. They don’t ever identify themselves. You could be having a drink with one and you wouldn’t know who they really were.

‘In 1975 an operative got very close. Scott Colby, his name was. He’s believed to have made contact with a leading Abakuá, only this was never confirmed.’ She paused to sort through more photographs.

‘What happened?’

‘That’s the one that ended
very
badly. Colby disappeared,’ she said. ‘He was found after a month, in his hotel room in Havana.’

She handed Max more photographs, black and whites, sourced from the Cuban police.

A bearded white man slumped in an armchair, his arms dangling over the rests, fists clenched, head tilted back. He looked asleep, like he’d been up for days and conked out as soon as he sat down. The ensuing pictures were of his face: bloody star-shaped wounds instead of eyes, dried blood in his moustache, his mouth half parted over buck teeth. Then a close-up of his hands, the fists having been broken open by the coroner, revealing a shell casing nestled in each palm. Both were stamped with the black wings, confirmed by the next two photographs: close-ups of the jackets, the markings stuck to the metal like crushed insects. Finally, there were the morgue pictures. Colby had been tortured, his chest and legs fist- and boot-bruised, his left ribcage staved in, his back lacerated with long slashing cuts of varying depth, like whiplash marks. There were burns on his scrotum and most of his fingernails had been torn off.

Max had seen worse, but not for a long time. The sight of the body and what had been done to it made his stomach spasm.

‘He wasn’t killed in his room. He was put there, after the fact. This was a busy hotel. No one saw anything,’ said Peck. ‘Before they shot him, they found out what he knew about them, including the names of all the people he’d spoken to. Those contacts disappeared the same day. August 8. Over the next few weeks, bodies began washing up on the coast. All shot through the mouth. That’s also the Abakuá way. If someone identifies one of them, they’re shot through the eyes. If someone names them, talks about them, they’re shot through the mouth.’

‘What did Castro do when the bodies started turning up?’

‘The Cuban government said that they’d drowned trying to get to America. That’s what always happens. Sometimes the Cuban police will even dump the bodies of Abakuá victims in the sea themselves.’

‘And Castro can’t do anything about them?’

‘Castro has never been able to get at them. Like I said before, they’re a secret society. And secret in Cuba
means
secret. It’s fair to say that he fears them – more than he fears anyone,’ she said. ‘And with good reason. The Abakuás have infiltrated every corner of Cuban society, every rung of the regime. They’re in the government, the hotels, the military, the police, the taxis, the hospitals. They’re the uniformed cop on the street and they’re that cop’s superior, and they’re that superior’s boss. They’ve spread through the regime like cancer. They could easily overthrow it.’

‘Why don’t they?’

‘It’s not in their interests. They’ve got a sweet deal going on. They’ve got a monopoly on the black market, which is how they make their money,’ she explained. ‘When Communism collapsed, Russia stopped its subsidies to Cuba. No oil, no machinery, no food. The country was in dire straits. Castro announced what he called the “Special Period” – which meant Cubans had to make do without basic essentials. One month it was soap and toilet paper, the next it was rice. The Abakuás had seen this coming and been stockpiling food and toiletries while the Eastern Bloc crumbled. They sold the goods on at inflated prices. They made a fortune. It was even rumoured, at one point, that they supplied government bigwigs with meat.

‘They also foresaw that Castro would have to open up the island to tourists. They got in at ground level. They now supply every bar, every restaurant, every hotel in the country.’

‘So what’s their connection to Vanetta Brown?’ Max asked. ‘She’s not one of them. She’s not even Cuban. And they’re against the system that’s protecting her. They’re enemies of the very man who gave her asylum.’

‘Money makes the strangest alliances,’ she said. ‘We believe she paid the Abakuás to kill Burns and Liston and they did. When revenge is on your mind, you do what you have to do, use whatever you can.’

‘Or whoever you can,’ Max said, and looked at her pointedly.

He could have voiced the doubts mushrooming up in his head, the reasons the evidence against Brown now suddenly seemed so flimsy, but he knew whatever he said wouldn’t matter to her. She hadn’t brought him here to discuss a murder case, or even help solve one. She didn’t care about Eldon or Joe. This wasn’t about them. It was about her father.

He felt the room’s walls move in a little closer, the floor rise a little and the ceiling lower commensurately.

He knew where things were going. And he knew Wendy Peck was holding something over him.

She was studying him, watching his mental tumblers fall into place, hearing the doors opening and realisation barging in.

‘Will you do it?’ she asked.

‘Do what?’

She smiled again. Only it was a nice smile, one that changed her face and put a permanent crack in her austerity. He got a glimpse of how she might be in private, away from her desk and the constant pressure: a fun person who maybe told crude jokes and drank beer from the bottle.

‘Bring Vanetta Brown back to Miami to face justice.’

‘I believe that’s called kidnapping,’ he said. ‘And that’s not what I do. I handle divorces.’

She replaced the photographs in the file she’d been going through, closed it and moved the box to the opposite corner of the desk. She opened the second box file and began sifting through its contents.

‘You used to find missing persons. You were good at it. The best, some say. You never gave up.’

‘That was a long time ago. The world’s changed. And I’ve changed too. But not necessarily with it.’

She pulled out a thick wedge of paper and set it before her.

‘You found that Carver boy in Haiti, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Max tensed.

‘I remember that business,’ she said. ‘The family advertising in all the papers, on local TV. They put a lot of money into it.’

Max tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.

‘How much money did they pay you for finding the kid? Or should I ask, how much did you bring back from Haiti in 1996, Max?’

And there it was. No carrot, no incentive, no this-is-what’s-in-it-for-you. Just the stick. How did she know about that money? Who’d talked? Who’d told her? Again the room got smaller and tighter, and he felt himself shrinking before her.

‘It was $20 million in drug money,’ she continued. ‘Which makes you guilty of money laundering
and
tax evasion. If we can’t get you on one, we’ll definitely get you on the other. You deposited $6 million in trust funds for Captain Liston’s children. That’ll be frozen by the DEA and seized by the IRS. You own a $565,000 penthouse on Collins Avenue. That’ll go too. And that’s before you even make it to court. You see where this could go? It’s open and shut. With your record, you’d be looking at double-digit jail time, and, at your age, you’d die there.’

Max glanced out of the window. It was his only way out. Head first and into the street.

‘This thing you want me to do – this is something you need a professional for. Ex-CIA or military. Doesn’t even have to be an American,’ he said.

‘Don’t you want to bring the person who killed your friends to justice?’

‘Yes, I do. But I can’t do that personally. Look at me. I’m old. I don’t move as quick as I used to. And I haven’t held a gun in twelve years. I had my last good day ten years ago. Are you sure I’m your man? Because – put it this way – I wouldn’t hire me.’

‘I’m not
hiring
you,’ Wendy Peck said.

He had to hand it to her: she was a straight-up nasty piece of work, almost as bad as he’d ever been.
Almost
…

Max smiled at her bitterly.

How would the conversation have gone if he’d been more cooperative, played along? Would she have sold it to him as a patriotic mission? Talked about potential rewards if he was successful? The finder’s fees from her website and the FBI? The talk show appearances, the book deal, the movie of the book, the computer game of the movie? The end result would have been the same. He still would have been going to Cuba.

‘I want a few days to think about it,’ he said.

‘Who says you have that luxury?’

‘Lady,’ Max leaned towards her, ‘what you’re doing right now is completely illegal. And you know it. You’re abusing your position, abusing your authority and bringing your department into disrepute. You’re also wasting your department’s time and money. You’re supposed to be catching real terrorists and keeping this country safe, not conducting some private manhunt on the taxpayer’s dime. You’re way beyond your remit. You’re pulling the same rogue shit I used to when I was a cop – the secret location, the extra-curricular surveillance, the coercion, the threats. The difference between you and me, now and then, is that in my day, I could get away with it – and I
did.
But you can’t.’

She stared at him. But she was smiling again.

‘I’ll call you on Tuesday,’ she said.

‘That’s election day.’

‘You’re a convicted felon, Max. You can’t vote.’

19

Agent Joss dropped him off outside his apartment. He didn’t want the ride, hadn’t asked for it, tried to refuse it, but they’d insisted; their way of telling him where his leash started and stopped.

He turned on the coffee machine and then his computer. He knew Wendy Peck would be watching his every keystroke and he didn’t give a fuck. He fed her name to the Google dog and hit search.

Older than she looked – forty-nine – which made her thirteen when her dad had been murdered.

Immaculate career: graduated top of her class in law school, joined the DA’s office, prosecutor, Assistant DA. Put a lot of people away. Not surprisingly, she had a hard-on for cop-killers. Always sought – and generally got – the death penalty. Career paths like hers – standing up in a courtroom on behalf of the state, pleading her case, putting passion into an argument – usually led to politics, but that wasn’t for her. She didn’t have the populist touch. She switched sides, went private, became a highly successful defence attorney.

Launched
Justice4Dennis.com
website in 1996.

Joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2005.

Personal life: married 1980, divorced 1998. One daughter, Joanne.

*

Why had she picked him?