Murder Key (27 page)

             
I had come looking for Beth Horvath. I pulled down several
years
worth of books, extrapolating from what I knew about Beth’s age to come up with the years when she was most likely to have been in high school.

             
I looked at the senior pictures, because they were
bigger
and closer in time to the present. If I didn’t find her there, I’d check out the club pictures or sports teams. It’s almost impossible for someone to spend four years in a small high school and not be in at least one picture in the yearbook.

             
On the third volume, I found her. I looked at the face that went with the name, and felt something like an electric shock course through my body.

             
A large piece of the puzzle clunked into place, and the answers I’d been seeking were, like a developing Polaroid photograph, coming rapidly into focus.

             
I knew Beth Horvath.

Murder Key

FORTY

             
I drove out 25
th
Street, past the Mayfair Country Club, and took the State Road 46A ramp onto I-4 Westbound. I wasn’t sure what to do with the information I’d stumbled upon in that old
yearbook.
I’d have to think on it.

             
As I was passing through downtown Orlando, my phone rang. I checked the caller ID. It was Bill Lester.

             
“Hey, Chief,” I said.

             
“Where are you?”

             
“I’m going through downtown Orlando, on my way home.”

             
“We’ve found the senator,” he said.

             
“Where?”

             
“In Mexico, dead. Somebody called the police about a small jet that seemed to be abandoned on an airstrip outside of Veracruz. When the cops got there, they found the senator’s body in a passenger’s
seat,
shot once behind the ear.”

             
“The pilot?”

             
“No sign of him.”

             
“How do we know it’s the senator?”

             
“The Mexican police tracked the jet by its tail number, and Rufus Harris was notified. They faxed him a picture of the body. No doubt. It’s the senator.”

             
“Bill, what are they going to do with the body?”

             
“I don’t know. I’m not really in the loop. Rufus called me as a courtesy.”

             
“Get somebody over there to get a DNA sample from that body.”

             
“Matt, calm down. It’s the senator.”

             
“I know, but that DNA may help us find the person behind the drug operation. Can you get it done without anybody on our side knowing what you’re doing?”

             
“What’s going on, Matt?”

             
“I’ll explain later. Try to get the DNA.”

             
Just as we hung up, my phone rang again. It was Rufus Harris. “Matt,” he said, “We’ve found the senator.”

             
“I heard. Bill Lester just called. What else do you know?”

             
“Nothing. Just that the Mexican police found the jet and the senator’s body was in it. Looks like he was executed.”

             
“Have you got somebody on the ground down there?” I asked.

             
“Better than that,” he said. “Emilio Sanchez is on his way to Veracruz.”

             
I called Jock in Houston. He confirmed that he could get in touch with Emilio on his satellite phone. I told him I’d get back in a few minutes, and I dialed Lester.

             
“Bill,” I said, “Emilio is on his way to Veracruz. I think he can get the DNA sample without anybody here knowing about it.”

             
“Good, because I sure as hell didn’t know how I was going to do it.”

             
“Keep this close, Bill. I’ll be in your office
in about two hours
and I’ll fill you in on what I’ve found.”

             
I called Jock again and explained the situation to him. He assured me he’d get in touch with Emilio. Jock was going to catch the next plane to Sarasota, and he’d be at my condo that evening.

             
“That’s not necessary, Jock. We’re okay here.”

             
“We’re closing in,
podna
, and I want to be there for the kill.”

             
I drove west on autopilot, think
ing, trying to make the connect
ions that were bouncing around in my head. It was like that game children play where they try to connect the dots to draw the outline of an animal. I had a lot of dots, and the picture was starting to come into focus, but there were still a few dots missing.

             
A plan was forming at the edges of my mind, but I couldn’t quite put it all together. I still wasn’t sure who I could or couldn’t trust. Bill Lester was solid, as was Jock, and by extension, Emilio. I thought Kyle Merryman was safe, but I wasn’t certain about the feds.

             
Sure, we got the drug shipment, and we messed up the immigrant smuggling ring. With the senator dead, we had at least plugged that leak in our border security. But the drug honchos had gotten away. Had they had some advance warning, even with the tight lid we had put on the
Princess Sarah
operation?

             
Maybe. If the ones in charge of the drug operation knew what was coming down on them, they’d have known that we wouldn’t stop them before they got to the labor camp. They had a helicopter standing by to take the drugs, and probably the leaders, to safety.

             
When we stormed the chopper, we may have ruined their escape plan. Maybe they hadn’t left early, as McClintoc thought. They might have been in that car I saw leaving the labor camp as Logan was taking us out of range of the rifles firing at the aircraft.

             
The more I thought about that, the more I became convinced that the leaders wouldn’t have left without the drugs. They’d probably stashed the coke in the helicopter to take with them when they left. They weren’t in a real big hurry, because they knew the swat team would take time to get into place.

             
But if they’d known about the operation in advance, why not just change the plan and bring the drugs in somewhere else? Because, if they did that, some bright bulb in one of the agencies might guess that there was a leak, and with only a few people in on the planning for the raid, it’d be easier to narrow the fi
eld of suspects. No, they would ha
ve had to let it go ahead. The trawler and its crew would be easy enough to replace, and the drugs would be ready to sell on the streets the next day.

             
I’d have to chat with Bill Lester about who was in on the plan before we executed it, and see if we could begin to see a person through the smoke and fog.

             
I stopped in Lakeland for a quick lunch at a restaurant near the Interstate ramp, and continued on to Longboat Key. I left the Interstate and drove through dow
n
town Bradenton on Manatee Avenue to 75
th
Street. I cut across to Cortez Road and over the bridge to Anna Maria Island.

             
Even when I’m gone for only a short time, I love crossing that bridge. The waterway is always busy with boats, large and small, their occupants enjoying a day in the sun. I had the windows in the Explorer down to catch a whiff of the sea that rode the
off
shore breeze. Late luncheon diners were sitting at the patio tables at The Seafood Shack near the foot of the span. I was back in paradise.

             
I drove directly to the Longboat Key Police station and chatted for a while with Bill Lester, both of us drinking black coffee. Jock called while I was with the chief, and we agreed to meet at Mar Vista for dinner. Bill begged off, an
d I drove south to the Village
in the waning daylight of a late fall evening.

* * * * *

             
We sat on the patio overlooking the water, watching the lights across the bay wink on as full darkness descended. Jock was in a good mood, anticipating the end of our adventure. Cracker Dix stopped by to say hello and to tell me he hadn’t seen the Hispanic guy again. He also said that he was going to England or a month-long visit with his parents. People
didn’t
leave the island without letting someone know.

             
Jock looked closely at me, as we sipped our beer. “What’s the problem, Matt? You look a little down.”

             
“I’m tired, Jock. Tired of people trying to kill me. Tired of killing people. I thought all that was over when I left the war, but it’s come back to get me. I cut a man’s throat last week.”

             
“He was going to drop you out of a helicopter,
podna
.”

             
“I know, and he needed killing. But I keep thinking about the fact that som
e
where there’s someone who loved him; a mom or dad or wife. Somebody’s going to grieve over him.”

             
“You never get used to this, Matt. I’ve killed a lot of men, and I remember every one of them. They all left somebody.”

             
“The North Vietnamese soldiers come to me in the night sometimes,” I said. “Men that I killed; boys, really, like I was. They tell me about their families, their children.

             
“Once, my A team caught a ride on a C-130 that was re-supplying some Marines at a base camp that had a little airstrip. We came in at a sharp angle, a combat landing the pilot said, and set down between piles of burning debris. The smell was terrible, the odor drifting into the plane. Then I realized they were burning bodies in those piles.

             
“Sometimes, in the night, that smell wakes me up. Only it’s not North Vietnamese bodies in the piles. It’s my men; the ones I lost.”

             
“You’ve never talked to me about the war,” said Jock. “Have you tried to get some help with this?”

             
“Yeah. W
hen I first got back. But I think it’s just something I have to live with.

             
“I ran into that C-130 pilot a few years back when I flew into Atlanta for a court appearance. He was a Delta Captain, and he’d come out of the cockpit to say goodbye to the passengers. He didn’t recognize me, but after the plane emptied, I went back and told him who I was. He remembered me and the team, and that god-awful day with the burning bodies.

             
“He was through flying for the day, and we went out to a bar near the airport. He couldn’t drink in the terminal in his uniform, and I had a free night. I didn’t have to be in Court until the next morning.

             
“We drank more than we should have, and talked more than either of us had in a long time, about things best forgotten. I think the fact that we were just strangers passing in the night opened each of us up in a way that might not have been possible between better friends.

             
“He said that he thinks often about that day with the burning bodies, and sometimes, when he’s not expecting it, he’ll be landing at some modern airport, and he’ll smell that fleshy smoke and see, for an instant, the pyres on the side of the runway.”

             
Jock leaned back in his chair. “Matt, this last few weeks has put a terrible strain on you. Are you sure you’re okay?”

             
“I’m fine, Jock. The dreams haven’t been this bad in years. It’s just all this killing going on around me. And then, I slit a man’s throat.”

             
“Look at it this way,” said Jock. “You both learned som
e
thing in the service. The pilot learned to fly, and you learned to cut throats. That day in the shed at the labor camp, which of those learning experiences do you think was the most useful?”

             
He was grinning, trying to joke me out of a somber moodiness that I hadn’t known I was still capable of.

             
During the first few years after I got out of the Army, I would go off into my little corner of mental hell, and end up drunk and passed out somewhere that I shouldn’t have been. Those days were interspersed with weeks of activity, lawyering on a grand scale. But it was those bleak days that finally ended my marriage and my law career.

             
“You’ve got a point,” I said. “What about you?”

             
“I’m done. I told the agency I’m giving it up. That guy Diaz in Veracruz keeps popping up in my mind. He’s like one of those targets on the firing range. He jumps up out of nowhere, and I have to shoot him again. I’ll get over it, but I’ve lasted longer with the agency than most, and it’s time to retire. I guess a man’s only got so much killing in him.

             
“I know about the dreams. I have them, too. I’ve tried to square my life with my own conscience, and sometimes I’m successful.