Off the Chart (24 page)

“What the hell?”

“Hard day at the office.”

Anne stepped up beside him, and Taft paused a moment to take her in. She was a few inches taller than the man, and he tilted his wary eyes up to hers.

“Anne Bonny Joy,” she said. Then a second later, “Vic Joy's sister.”

Sheriff Taft looked back at Thorn, studying him for an awkward moment.

“Man, oh, man, what kind of shit have you gotten into, Thorn?”

“Goddamn it, Taft, what's going on?”

The sheriff glanced again at Anne, then unbuttoned his shirt pocket and drew out a photograph and handed it to Thorn. A black-and-white police mug shot, taken head-on. It took him a half-second to place the guy. The red-haired mongrel outside Vic Joy's house. Same hooked nose, same sneer.

“We got a match on the fingerprints on that knife in your door. The guy's a local. Marshall Anthony Marshall.”

Thorn handed the photo to Anne and she took a minute with it.

Thorn wasn't sure which way this was spinning. Those men down by the water weren't here because of a mug shot. The ambulance, the white van, the dark Crown Vic. Those were out-of-towners. Probably Jimmy Lee Webster and his gang throwing their Washington weight around. The idea of handing over Marshall Marshall to the authorities didn't faze Thorn, but the consequences did. Getting Vic entangled with Sheriff Taft, forcing him and Marty Messina to waste time on the legal horseshit that would arise, did nothing to get Janey free any sooner. Not that he could see.

“Don't know him,” Thorn said. “Looks like a nice young fellow, though.”

“He's not,” Taft said. “He's got more priors than the pope has beads.”

“I'll be darned. Looks can be deceiving.”

Taft burned him with a look.

“You want to get this thing solved, Thorn, or are you going to keep playing this one-on-one bullshit?”

“Don't know him, Sheriff. Wish I could help.”

Anne shook her head. Didn't know him, either.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Yeah, right.” Taft snapped the photo out of Anne's hand and slid it back in his pocket and buttoned the flap. “Thanks so much for your assistance. Now there's this other little thing.”

He half-turned so Thorn could view a slice of the activity at the shore.

“I came over here a couple of hours ago to run the photo by you. I knocked, I waited, but you weren't around. I was starting to leave; that's when I saw something in the trees down by the water.”

“In the trees?”

“It wasn't birds,” Taft said. “Nothing natural.”

Thorn tried to step past him, but Taft put a rough hand on his chest and held him in place.

“Since I couldn't locate you,” the sheriff said, “I took the liberty of tracking down your friend at Miami PD. The ID tech lady.”

Thorn drew his eyes from the bustle by the water and looked at Taft.

“Yeah, and what does Alex have to do with this?”

“I thought maybe she could help me track you down.”

“Well, I'm here.”

“Yeah, you are, but she's still coming down from Miami. On her way right now so she can give us a hand with things. Since she's a fellow officer, I thought I might actually get some honest answers from her about what the hell kind of game we're playing here.”

“Great,” Thorn said. “Perfect.”

“What time was it when you left your house today, Thorn?”

“I don't know. Nine, nine-thirty.”

“And you noticed nothing unusual on the premises when you were leaving?”

“What is it, Taft? Why don't you just tell me?”

“You noticed nothing unusual on the premises this morning?”

Thorn sighed.

“That's right, nothing unusual. Would I have seen this thing? Maybe I walked out and it was there and I didn't notice.”

“Oh, you would've noticed this, Thorn. No two ways about it.”

The sheriff brushed a hand across the front of his shirt, then tugged on both cuffs. Getting prissy around an attractive woman.

“Miss Joy,” Taft said. “You might want to stay up here, spare yourself the ugliness.”

She glanced at Thorn.

“Is she free to go?” Thorn said to Taft.

He stepped back and grazed her body with an unnecessarily long look.

“Better if she stayed. Unless she's got some really powerful reason to flee a homicide scene.”

Four o'clock, two hours till his next talk with Janey. Sugarman was trying damn hard to keep from imagining the details of her situation, the fright and confusion she must be feeling, the small, hot cell where she was imprisoned. And his own dread was getting in the way as well, clouding his ordered thoughts. Putting a quiver in his handwriting as he scribbled down a list of everything he could remember from their earlier conversation. Smell of the ocean, a blue iridescent butterfly with wings edged in black, those animal sounds coming from nearby, heat and rain. And pulling that together with what he'd picked up from Kirk Graham. A thousand nautical miles. Maybe even eleven or twelve hundred.

He used a razor blade to cut a page from the musty
Encyclopedia Americana
, a map of North America, then he dug an old metal compass out of a tool drawer in the garage. He calibrated the compass against the map's legend, setting it for eleven hundred miles, then drew a circle with the center point in Islamorada.

The pencil tip traced a path that went as far north as Philadelphia, as deep into the west as Kansas, Texas, and central Mexico, then curved south and east to include all of Central America and turned due east to skim at least a hundred miles inland across northern Venezuela and Colombia before the dark line arced out into the Atlantic and encircled Puerto Rico and the string of small islands of the West Indies, from Martinique and Saint Lucia north to Nevis, Saint Kitts, and Barbuda.

He set the compass down and looked at his circle. Next he might have spent some time doing the math and figuring the square miles of his search area, but he could see no point in that. A number that large would only increase his sense of utter futility.

Janey was somewhere eleven or twelve hundred miles away. Seven or eight hours by air, in a hot, rainy, animal-rich region somewhere near the sea. It sounded like a rain forest, a tropical jungle. Which meant he could rule out Philadelphia and Cleveland and Memphis, in fact, all of the noncoastal U.S. and even most of the coast, which was, for the most part, too densely developed or too temperate to match her description. There might be a few areas along the Louisiana or Mississippi shore that would qualify, swampland where animal life was abundant and the smell of the sea was nearby. Surely he could eliminate a good deal of arid and desert Mexico. Which left him hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory, both the coastal regions rimming the Caribbean Sea and the islands scattered throughout it. A search area so vast, it took his mind out of focus. Sent his spirits spiraling downward.

As he was mulling his next step, studying the map and his enormous circle, the terrible notion came to him that the pilot of that plane might not have flown in a straight line at all—for any of several perfectly ordinary reasons. Dodging thunderstorms perhaps could send him hundreds of miles off course. And then there was Cuba lurking out in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, a huge no-fly zone that would make any flight path heading south or southwest from Islamorada have to add a lot of extra miles.

He needed Kirk Graham for a better idea about how many. But his own quick calculations, using the compass to step off fifty-mile
chunks of possible flight paths, showed him that hundreds of miles and as much as an hour or two could be lost by a wide diversion around the island of Cuba.

And then, of course, there was the disturbing possibility that the pilot of the plane had been sufficiently devious or paranoid to intentionally add flight time to the trip to throw off any such computations as Sugarman was now attempting. But because he could not confirm that, his only choice was to go with the zone he'd outlined and hope there was time for him to shrink that enormous circle down to a single dot before Janey's situation got any worse.

The smell of the sea was something. And the blue butterfly. And there'd been a bird she'd mentioned. But now he couldn't recall.

He set the map aside, looked across at the dark screen of the laptop, then began to comb through the volumes he'd borrowed from the Key Largo Library.

 

“It's called a gibbet cage,” Anne said. “It's a pirate thing.”

Taft swung around and stared at her.

“A pirate thing?”

“Eighteenth-century pirates, yes. You don't see a lot of them anymore.”

“No shit,” Taft said.

Thorn was sitting nearby on the yellow bench watching the forensics people taking photographs, measuring the site, searching the grass and the muddy shoreline for footprints or any other traces left behind.

Hanging from a heavy limb of the oldest gumbo-limbo in his yard were three men. They hung side by side, a foot or so between each body. A ton of stress on that limb, but it was holding up fine. Each of their naked corpses was locked inside a tightly fitted frame of what looked like reddish iron. A one-inch flat band of metal circling the neck, another around the chest, and two more around the torso. Their legs were banded at knees and ankles like braces on a child with polio. Iron bands ran along the shinbone and joined the ankle and knee braces together and linked them to the rest of the cage. The men's heads were gripped by four iron strips that looked like the
inner frame of an ancient diving helmet. Two heavy chains connected the helmet with the hip bands. Apparently it was a device meant to hold a man stable, not necessarily to torture or kill.

Jimmy Lee Webster and Zashie and a man Thorn didn't know were hanging there. Throats slit, then hoisted up to the tree branch. From the swaths of blood on their white chests it appeared they'd been caged and hung from the branch with their hearts still beating.

The two white-shirted investigators nudged close to Anne and were listening to her recitation. She seemed eerily casual about the scene, while Thorn noticed that even the cops were taking care not to lift their eyes to the three bodies in the tree.

“After pirates were executed, they were hung inside these devices so their relatives couldn't cut them down and bury them. Public humiliation. Before the condemned man was killed, he was measured for his suit of iron, and pirates were supposedly more terrified of this than of their coming execution.”

“How do you know all this?” one of the white-shirts asked.

Anne looked up at the bodies swaying in a hard breeze.

“Unfortunately, it's my area of expertise.” Her voice was vague and far removed from the moment, and Thorn realized then that it wasn't casualness he detected but a numbed state somewhere between bewilderment and panic.

Anne said, “Originally the contraptions were forged by blacksmiths. Each one custom-fitted so the bones of the dead man would stay in place for a long time after the flesh rotted away.”

She glanced again at the pennant fixed to the old flagpole at the end of Thorn's dock. He'd noticed it himself a few minutes earlier. No flag had flown on that pole for years. This particular pennant was intended to be secured to the mast of a ship. It was triangular and across its black field printed in gold script were the words the
Black Swan.

Neither Taft nor the other men had mentioned the pennant. No reason they should notice it, really. The three men in the tree were occupying their full attention. While the investigators worked, Thorn sat on Lawton's yellow bench and looked out at the water and tried to draw a few even breaths. His own personal iron band was tightening invisibly around his chest.

As a pontoon boat motored by out on the sound, a sunset party with drinks and finger food, Thorn heard the noises he'd been anticipating: the crunch of gravel in his drive, the throaty purr of Alexandra's Accord.

Anne took that moment to draw away from the investigators and walk over to Thorn's bench and sit down close beside him.

“They said I could take a break.”

Thorn inched away slightly. Like that would do any good.

“You doing okay?”

“No,” she said. “Not at all.”

“That pennant? You recognize it?”

She swallowed hard and watched Alex and Lawton climb out of the Honda.

“It's part of that long story I was getting to. That flag is from the boat he was on the day I met him. The guy at the Lorelei.”

“Daniel Salbone.”

She stiffened, then turned her head slightly so she was using the extreme edge of her peripheral vision to see him. As if to look at him head-on might push her beyond her limits.

“How did you know that? Vic told you, didn't he?”

“No, not Vic. One of those guys in the tree told me.”

“What guy?”

“The little one on the end. He was chasing Salbone.”

“He was?”

“Former Secretary of the Navy, Jimmy Lee Webster.”

“When was this, that he told you about Daniel?”

“Last night.”

“So what does that mean? You're working with them? Trying to capture Daniel?”

“I could care less about Salbone. I'm trying to recover Janey. That's all.”

She swiveled slightly and peered at him for several seconds, her mind working at the tangle until after a moment she seemed to grow weary of the effort and turned her gaze back toward the dock and that flapping pennant.

“I knew it,” she said. “Down in my gut I knew he was still alive.
Now he's come back to get me. He told me he would, and now he's here. Daniel's here.”

“Maybe,” Thorn said. “It's damn strange, though, murdering three men, then leaving behind your calling card.”

“He's not a violent man. Something bad must have happened.”

Thorn watched Alexandra and Lawton having a conversation beside the car, Alex probably warning him to behave himself.

Thorn said, “With people like Jimmy Lee Webster chasing him, trying to kill him or put him away, it might've brought out a different side of the man. A side you don't know.”

“Why here?” she said. “Why didn't he try to find me at Vic's?”

“I've been wondering the same thing.”

Thorn watched Alex stride across the yard. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a white collarless blouse, weekend clothes. She had on a blue Miami PD baseball cap and her long jet-black hair was tucked up inside it.

Because of her dark sunglasses, Thorn couldn't tell if she looked his way or not. She kept her head erect, appeared full of no-nonsense gravity. Strictly business. She marched over to the base of the gumbo-limbo where Taft stood talking to two of the white-shirts. She glanced up at the bodies in the tree, then shook hands with the investigators. Lawton peeled off from behind her and headed over to the bench. The puppy galloped along at his heels.

“That goddamn bus come yet?”

“No, Lawton. Not yet.”

The puppy lifted his leg on the side of the bench and made it his own.

“Hell, I've decided I don't like Miami anymore. Too many goddamn Cubans jibber-jabbering everywhere you go. I like it better down here, more like America. Why'd we have to leave anyway? You kick us out because of something I said? Did I insult somebody?”

“No, Lawton, you were fine.”

“Well, why then? Why'd we get our walking papers?”

“You don't have to leave,” Thorn said. “You and Alex are welcome to stay as long as you want.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, that's not what Miss Bossy High-and-Mighty
says. She says we're not living in the Keys anymore.”

“She said that?”

Anne stood up.

“Hey, you're not going to introduce me?” Lawton said. “Juicy young thing and I don't even get to know her name. I'm available, you know. A highly eligible bachelor. Got a good monthly stipend, plus Social Security. Got my own teeth, and my prostate is tough as a little acorn.”

“You'll have to pardon Lawton,” Thorn said.

But Anne wasn't listening. She was staring at the gibbet cages.

Lawton picked up his puppy and held him in his arms. The dog seemed to be doubling in size every twenty-four hours. A gloss to his coat, his ribs no longer showing.

“‘Death isn't the greatest loss in life,'” Lawton said to Anne. “‘The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.'” Lawton set the puppy down. “That's my Zen wisdom for the day. Ignore it at your peril.”

Anne glanced around and seemed to notice Lawton for the first time. He gave her an old goat's lusty smile.

“So what's with the tree ornaments?” Lawton said. “Is it goddamn Christmas again already?”

Alexandra shook hands with Sheriff Taft and turned and headed over to the bench.

Thorn stood up. “Let's go, Dad. They don't need us here anymore.”

Alexandra tucked a business card into the pocket of her jeans and motioned for Lawton. The puppy pawed at Alex's leg trying to get the top dog's attention, but she was ignoring it.

“Thorn said we could stay. No hard feelings. Stay as long as we like.”

Alex kept her gaze fixed on the old man.

“We've got to get back. Thorn's got some problems he needs to attend to. He doesn't need us around.”

“That's not true,” Thorn said. “I do need you. I need you very much.”

She half-turned, reached up, and removed her glasses. Staring at him with eyes that had changed since morning. Grown neutral and
remote. Looking at him with almost scientific distance, as though she were examining a victim lying before her, choosing the best camera angle. No hint of anger, no sign of love.

“I'd say three dead men hanging from the branches of your tree constitutes a fairly serious problem, Thorn. I don't believe you'll be having much time for distractions anytime soon.” Although Anne stood less than a foot away from Thorn, Alex didn't look at her. She put the sunglasses back in place and waved at Lawton again. “Now come on, Dad. We've got to go.”

“Please don't leave, Alex. I need to explain a few things.”

“No need,” she said, still looking at Lawton. “I think I've got the picture. Dad, come on.” And this time she used her police voice, do-it-by-God-or-else, and Lawton shrugged at Thorn and followed her back to the car.