Don't Lose Her (8 page)

Chapter 16

I
f I slept again, I wasn't aware of it. After picking apart the case by her poolside, Sherry and I had lapsed into a silence that under other circumstances both of us would have enjoyed. Instead, she gave up on the neck massage, sat, and shared a second beer with me, and then excused herself to go to bed. I stared into the blue-green light and found myself waiting for one of the three cell phones next to me to ring, to call me to arms, to give me a direction or an enemy or a hope.

At some point in the night, I caught myself massaging a dime-size disc of scar tissue at my neck, letting my fingertips glide over the unnaturally smooth skin, probing it, measuring it, remembering it and the day that bullet had ripped through skin and muscle and barely, just barely, missed my carotid artery.

Being an officer of the law had seemed like a destiny for me, an odd sort of birthright, though emulating my father would never be a motivation. My career had been checkered. I was not smart. I was not ambitious. I was relatively big and athletic, not afraid of long shifts, and could always defeat boredom by studying people—their movements, routines, facial expressions, body language, and interactions with one another—which made me a good street cop, but not an internal climber.

When I'd given up my short stint as a detective, I'd gone back to the streets, on a third shift walking a beat in Center City. When the shooting that ended my career occurred, I never even felt the first shooter's round pierce my neck. They told me later that I continued to the storefront and on one knee actually turned over the body of the boy, pressing my hand to the hole in his skinny chest created by my exiting bullet.

Later, in the hospital, commanders offered me a disability payout to leave the force, and after killing a child in the street, I agreed. I took the money, invested, and then moved to South Florida. I left the place and the profession that had formed me with the hopes that I could leave the past behind. But like every human with a modicum of self-actualization, I learned no one can bury the past deep enough. It is always there, scar tissue stirring the present.

Before sunrise, the birds began to flit in the canopy above Sherry's pool: wrens with their tea-kettle calls, mockingbirds with their loud
clack
, and the annoying green parrots, a colony of which had somehow taken up residence in the neighborhood and was known to go screeching through the trees like a bunch of squeeze toys.

I got up, gathered my three phones, and went inside to take a shower. I grabbed something to eat out of the refrigerator and, as was my habit, I leaned across the bed where Sherry lay sleeping and silently kissed her good-bye on the side of the forehead. I was once told it was a cop's kiss, knowing every time you went out on a shift, there was a chance you might not be back. Whether it gave your loved one any peace was debatable; maybe it only made
you
feel better. Maybe it was selfish. But if such an act is a display of selfishness, then maybe selfishness is overly maligned.

I took the F-150 instead of the Fury. I was thinking about the incognito nature of my morning trip. Billy's plan was for me to arrive at 6:30 a.m. at the federal courthouse's underground parking lot, where I'd be cleared to enter by security. Then I'd meet Billy at Diane's office, where he had been living for the past two days. From there, he had arranged for a limousine to leave the garage ahead of us. We'd soon follow in my pickup, staying in cell phone contact with the limo driver. When he got to Billy's condo, we would slip in behind the building, where Billy would have on-site security personnel allow us up on the basement freight elevator. Maybe the whole plan was unnecessarily elaborate, but both of us had seen the media at its worst, and if the limo distracted the hounds, then Billy—the anxious and aggrieved husband of the kidnapped federal judge—wouldn't have his ducking head and profile flashed on CNN all day.

When I arrived at the courthouse, I took Tamarind Avenue around to the back and stopped in front of the lowered parking garage gate to give the uniformed officer my name, my private investigator's and driver's licenses, and the business card of the FBI agent in charge whom I'd met in Diane's office the last time I'd been here.

It still took ten minutes for the guard to clear me. Inside, I parked as close to the elevator as possible and noted how sparsely populated the garage and the hallways inside the building were. It was an eight-to-five kind of place; the day-to-day workers—clerks, bailiffs, secretaries, lawyers—wouldn't start flowing in for another hour or so.

Yet when I locked my truck and looked down past the pillars to the east end of the garage where a corridor leading to the holding cells was fenced off, a man clad in the black paramilitary uniform of a SWAT officer was standing with an MP5 automatic rifle slung over his chest. When I took the elevator to the first floor, I met a uniformed Palm Beach County officer on duty at the security and screening checkpoint.

While I emptied my pockets of keys and change and three cell phones, I looked out through the glass-front doors and could see two news vans already parked, or perhaps still parked, out in the public lot. No one was doing any early stand-up reports for
The Today Show
or the many local morning newscasts, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they would.

Even though I hadn't tripped any signals when passing through the metal detectors, the officer on the other side still wanded me. Once cleared, I headed upstairs to Diane's chambers. Outside her doors, I was met again by men I assumed were federal agents, who radioed my presence inside and then passed me through after obtaining clearance. Things were tight. They're always tight after the fact, after the hijacking, the bombing, the homicide, the riot, or the abduction.

Law enforcement is a reactive entity—often closing the gate after the horse is out. It is that way out of necessity. A free society can't function any other way. But tell that to a father who signed a petition against those stoplight cameras and whose daughter was later run down by someone blowing the light in his neighborhood. Tell it to the guy who derides the TSA for slowing his business travel and then finds out his family was on the plane blown out of the sky by a terrorist wearing a shoe bomb. Tell it to the folks who lobbied for less regulation and then found four feet of toxic sludge in their backyards when the nearby coal plant's retention wall collapsed.

People never want government telling them what to do until something hits them between the eyes. Then their reaction is to blame someone for not keeping them safe. You don't want rules and regulations? Welcome to chaos.

The reception area of Diane's office was empty, her assistant nowhere in sight. If schedules and attorney inquiries and requisite daily handlings of bureaucratic housekeeping were being done, they weren't being done here. When I walked through the door to her chambers, the silence was telling. There was one agent sitting close by the electronics that had been set up to monitor and record all incoming calls. There were empty coffee cups and several editions of the local newspapers stacked around him. The lone agent nodded at me, stood to shake my hand with one perfunctory pump, and then looked into my eyes awaiting any question or utterance I might offer. I said nothing.

Billy was still behind Diane's desk, staring into the computer monitor there, his fingers dancing on the keyboard. He did not look up as I stepped to his side. With nothing to report himself, he waited on me in vain. He looked as bad as someone whose loved one was missing and had spent days without sleep, banging out emails and making phone calls to anyone who might be helpful or could be bribed or cajoled with favors or pressured with economic ruin to hand over any information that might lead to the whereabouts of his wife.

I put my hands in my pockets and after a full minute I finally said: “You ready to go?”

Billy looked up at me with eyes I didn't recognize: the flesh around them was pouched and swollen, the whites striated with red veins, the pupils focused and burning with a deep anger and volition that would have caused me to reach for my handgun had I seen them in the head of some street criminal in my patrol days.

To my question, he only nodded and then stood with a wobble in one knee and a hand that had to go out on the nearby bookcase to steady himself. I instantly wondered how long it'd been since he'd been out of Diane's chair, but I knew better than to reach out. I let Billy gain his own balance, but I hooked his forgotten suit coat off the back of the chair as he led us out of the office.

“I've g-got to g-get home, M-max,” Billy said as we headed down the corridor towards the elevators. “I've got m-more c-computer­ p-power in m-my own office than they d-do here and m-my c-contacts­ aren't always g-going to b-be f-forthcoming unless w-we're on a s-secure l-line.”

If he was pulling in his national and international players, the big economic guns that he'd cultivated and with whom he'd shared his financial expertise, I could see why they would be reluctant to talk openly to him while he was sitting in a federal courthouse. Billy wasn't a scammer. As far as I knew, and admittedly I knew little about big-time finance, he played it legally and above-board. With his background at the Wharton School and the myriad friends he'd met there and throughout the law community, his clientele was varied and far-reaching.

He'd made them money over the years, and I knew he'd tapped them for some of his philanthropic endeavors. He knew they would help in any way they could, but they weren't comfortable flaunting it. The real players don't put their business out on the street. They keep it confidential. Just like in the underworld, if you're a player you don't talk about it out in the barrooms or at open lunches or on unsecured phone lines. Wannabes brag; the real ones just quietly and effectively go about their business.

As we walked to the elevators, a few early birds began to appear. A black janitor with his wheeled refuse can and a broom slid his way into our path, and Billy stopped and took the elderly man's hand, which was offered in a muted gesture of consolation and hope. Further down, a middle-aged woman stopped to wish Billy well and “knew, just knew” Diane would soon be home. Before we reached the elevator, a knot of suited men turned their faces to us. All nodded their heads in greeting and uttered sentences of support. Among them was a silver-haired man of medium height whose eyes were focused on Billy, but not intently.

“Mr. Manchester. I was just on my way to your wife's office, sir,” said one, who stepped forward as though the spokesman for all.

I determined that the man was in his late sixties or early seventies. The suit was pinstriped with an American flag pin in the lapel. His facial skin was flaccid and devoid of anything resembling a tan, unusual for Floridians. His rheumy gray eyes worked an expression of sincere empathy onto his face.

“Judge Krome,” Billy said. They both extended their hands and shook.

“I can't imagine what you must be going through,” the judge said. “It's terrible—just terrible.”

Billy stood mutely, nodding, looking the man in the eyes but then skewing his sight away. It was so uncharacteristic of him not to always look a person in their eyes when he was speaking to them or when he was being spoken to that I felt a tick of embarrassment. All of us swallowed the silence.

Then instead of simply understanding the situation and moving on, the judge continued. “Have they, the authorities, I mean, have they heard anything at all?”

“No. No word,” Billy said.

Again, I had to feel for my friend. If you are not within Billy's inner circle, he is not comfortable talking in extended sentences. He wouldn't admit that his stutter bothers him, but he knows it bothers others who only know him from his reputation and are sometimes stunned or wonder if they are the butt of a joke when he is caught having to use his jagged speech. With strangers or simple acquaintances, he has always found it best to hold himself to the use of single-syllable words and tight sentences.

Perceptive people pick up on the vibe. This guy didn't, and it was starting to piss me off.

“Well, I assume that the Marshal's Service and the FBI are here and working? I haven't been updated at all. Have there been any developments?”

Now I couldn't help myself from stepping forward, using my body language to tell the guy to back off and let us pass. In turn, the judge seemed to have discovered me there for the first time and took a step back. He looked me up and down. I wasn't in a suit, was in fact dressed casually in a pair of faded jeans and a short-sleeved, poplin field shirt. My hair wasn't at official length. I had no badge or firearm.

In his courtroom, no doubt I would have gained his ire as improperly attired for the business of judicial comportment. But at six foot three, I towered over the judge, and when I started to move my broad shoulders into his line of vision, at last he got the point. Billy did not move to introduce me or to make any excuse for my presence.

Finally, the judge said: “Well, if there is anything I can do, Mr. Manchester …”

“Yes, Judge,” Billy said. “Uh, I m-mean n-no, s-sir. The authorities, as y-you know, are d-doing wh-what th-they c-can.”

We continued down the hallway, the heels of Billy's dress shoes clicking on the marble tile. He may have whispered the word
asshole
, under his breath. Or maybe I did.

“All of the m-men in that group d-deal m-mostly in economic crimes,” Billy did say. “Krome's been here for twenty-five years b-but has n-never m-moved into the sp-spotlight or the role of administrative judge as his v-vitae w-would w-warrant.”

We arrived at the elevator door, and I pushed the
DOWN
button.

“I m-met him once at a f-fund-raiser. He was d-doing little m-magic tr-tricks f-for the other attendees. P-pick a c-card, any c-card t-type of st-stuff. M-making c-coins d-disappear and f-finding­ th-them in s-someone's n-nose… . Th-there's s-something about a jurist d-doing sleight-of-hand tr-tricks th-that s-seems, w-well, inappropriate.”