Orchid Beach (28 page)
“Neither does the NSA. Their earlier scans were handled routinely by lower-level personnel. All they did was to listen in; they didn’t do any analysis. Now they’re going to take another look at the transmissions and see if there is any change in what’s coming out of there. They’ll also do an analysis of the information.”
“I still don’t understand it,” Holly said, “but maybe that’ll help somehow.”
“Sounds like your old man’s idea of the antiaircraft emplacements wasn’t all that far-fetched,” Harry said. “Though, for the life of me, I just can’t believe that anyone on the Florida coast would start shooting at airplanes.”
“Who would do something like that?”
“It doesn’t make any sense as a security precaution. It might make more sense if they intended to use that kind of weaponry to buy some time.”
“Time for what?” Jackson asked.
“Time to evacuate. From what Cracker had to say in his interview with Holly, it sounds like they have a plan to hold the place just long enough for some aircraft to get out of there. I mean, they can’t get into a shooting war with the outside and expect to win, can they?”
“They could sure hold off my department for a while, though,” Holly said.
“I think that’s what they’re counting on. In a pinch, they can get out of there before reinforcements arrive. Your dad’s right; they couldn’t hold out against a military assault, but cops with small arms couldn’t take the place.”
“Have you found out anything else so far?” Jackson asked.
“We’ve had a report from Miami Center on the aircraft in and out of there. They’ve had airplanes with registrations from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada, Japan and, mostly, from the United States. We ran down the U.S. tail numbers and nearly eighty percent of them were owned by a charter service out of Miami, which is owned by a Delaware corporation, which is owned by a Luxembourg company. Wheels within wheels.”
“Spooky,” Holly said.
“We checked out Diego Ramirez, the general manager of the place, too. He’s Panamanian, a former colonel in Manuel Noriega’s palace guard. He got out before the invasion and has been living quietly in Miami. No criminal record in this country, and his immigration status is okay.”
Holly spoke up. “I checked out the property ownership this afternoon, but the results were disappointing.”
“Dummy ownership, I’ll bet,” Harry said.
“Not even that. Every house is owned by the Palmetto Gardens Corporation. But, of course, that’s a Cayman Island corporation. Here’s a list of the directors.” She handed him a sheet of paper. “The only one I recognize is Ramirez. You might check out the others.”
“Good work, Holly.”
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Harry said, “about what sort of people could own and operate this place. It seems to be operated without regard for profit, which is strange, and if the members are taking up the slack, then it has got to be the most expensive club in the world to belong to. Rich people, even billionaires, didn’t get that way by flushing money down the kind of toilet that Palmetto Gardens seems to be, so that leaves just two other candidates for ownership that I can think of—governments or drug cartels. The presence of Diego Ramirez there, given the recent history of Panama, makes me lean in favor of the drug cartels, or maybe a combination of governments and the cartels.”
“That makes sense,” Jackson said. “Even if you got Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and the Sultan of Brunei together, with all their money they would expect a return on investment, or, at the very least, some kind of value for money.
With only a couple of hundred houses there, the expense per house has got to be staggering.”
Harry continued. “We’re going to bug Barney Noble’s Range Rover tonight, come hell or high water,” he said. “It’s at Westover Motors, still outside in the rear parking lot; apparently, it gets serviced first thing in the morning. Arnie is out on Jungle Trail, scanning their VHF radio frequencies, all their handheld radios, and he’ll record what he can get there. Once the frequencies are identified, which should be easy, we can jam them, if we have to go in there.”
“Don’t you need a court order to bug Barney’s car?” Holly asked.
Harry shook his head. “Between you and me, Holly, this is just to get information; we’ll never use it in court, so the hell with a warrant. It’s quick and dirty, but it’ll work. Oh, one more thing—I’m trying to get a female agent into Palmetto Gardens as a domestic worker. There’s an ad in the local paper and a hiring office on the mainland. We’re flying up a woman who’ll try to get an interview tomorrow morning.”
“That’s a great idea,” Holly said. “We really need somebody inside.”
“Well, there’s always Cracker,” Harry said. “I think you scared him shitless this morning, and I don’t think he’ll spill to Barney, do you?”
“I sure hope not. I’ve got him by the short and curlies. I didn’t lie to him about that. I know who his parole officer is.”
Bill spoke up. “I learned something this afternoon,” he said. “I don’t know how important it is.”
“Tell us,” Harry said.
“I tracked down the people who were in charge of most
of the infrastructure work at Palmetto Gardens, a construction company called Jones and Jones, in Vero Beach.”
“And?”
“We went over a map of the place, while he showed me what he had done out there. The only really unusual thing was at the communications center.”
“What?”
“He put in a basement and a sub-basement, fully waterproofed and insulated.”
“A sub-basement? In Florida? It’s probably full of the Indian River by now.”
“He said it was
fully
waterproofed,” Bob said.
“Got any ideas what it’s for?”
“It’s all heavily reinforced, superdense concrete. I reckon it’s either a bomb shelter or a vault.”
“Now,
that’s
interesting,” Bob said. “Anybody else?”
Holly spoke up. “Well, I learned something from Cracker this morning that I didn’t expect to.”
“What’s that?”
“I think he killed Hank Doherty, maybe Chet Marley, too. Or, at least, he was one of the killers.”
“The dog?” Harry asked.
“Daisy.”
“She went nuts, didn’t she?”
“She sure did. Whoever killed Hank got him to lock Daisy in the kitchen first, but Daisy sure remembered him.”
T
he next morning, Holly was back at her desk. She and Harry Crisp had agreed that she should keep something like regular office hours so that, if anyone were keeping tabs on her, she would appear to be doing nothing out of the ordinary. She was working her way through the stack of personnel files when Hurd Wallace rapped at her door.
“Morning, Hurd,” Holly said. “Come in and have a seat.”
“Morning,” he said, sitting down.
“What’s up?”
“I feel sort of out of the loop,” Wallace said.
“What loop is that?”
“Well, I’m beginning to get the impression that you know something about Chet Marley’s murder that I don’t.”
“What makes you think that?”
“You seem to be doing a lot of investigative work these days that I’m cut out of,” Wallace said.
“Such as?”
“You’re making trips to the county planning office and looking up documents there; you’ve had Barney Noble in here, and he didn’t look happy; and then you interrogated that guy yesterday, the one whose picture you had up on the bulletin board a while back.”
“All that is true, I guess.”
“What’s it all about, Holly?”
“Well, it’s no big thing, Hurd. I found out that this guy, who is one of Barney’s security guards, has a criminal record and shouldn’t be licensed for security work or to carry a gun.”
“And what did you do about it?”
“Barney promised me he’d take him off security work, so I haven’t done anything, except talk to him.”
“Why’d you sic the dog on him?”
“How’d you know about the dog?”
“She made a lot of noise.”
“I didn’t sic her onto the guy. She just didn’t like him, I guess. I don’t know why.”
Hurd nodded.
“What’s the problem, Hurd? What’s on your mind?”
“Tell you the truth, I get the very strong impression that you don’t trust me to do my job. Ever since you got here, we’ve hardly talked about anything, and I guess we didn’t have to, until I got the deputy chief’s job. But now I figure I ought to know everything that’s going on.”
Holly felt cornered. Wallace was right; she didn’t trust him, but she hadn’t meant for him to know that. “I’m sorry I’ve given you that impression,” she said.
“You know, if Chet had confided in me about what he was working on, we would probably have already made an arrest in his killing. And now you’re working on something you’re keeping from me. What happens if
you
end up dead? Where is the department then?”
“Hurd, you have a very good point there.”
“It doesn’t seem to be doing me very much good, Holly. Are you going to bring me in on this or shut me out?”
“There isn’t anything to shut you out of, Hurd. Ask me questions, and I’ll give you answers.”
“Do you have some particular interest in Palmetto Gardens?”
“What do you know about that place, Hurd?”
“Just what everybody else knows: practically nothing. What do you know about it?”
“Just about what you know,” she lied. “You think we ought to know more about it?”
“I certainly do.”
“Why?”
“I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to you that we have what amounts to a city-state, right here in our jurisdiction—that they don’t allow us to patrol out there, that we can’t even enter the place unless we’re escorted. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“It did until I visited the place,” Holly said.
Wallace came close to changing his expression. “You visited the place?”
“I’ve been out there a couple of times. Barney Noble gave me the five-cent tour, and he invited my father and me to play golf out there once. He and my dad served in the army together.”
“What’s it like out there?”
Holly told him about her two visits.
“I don’t like the idea of the security people having automatic weapons,” he said.
“Neither do I, much,” Holly replied, “but there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Wallace shrugged. “We could make a stink at the state level about the licenses being issued.”
“The automatic weapons licenses?”
“Couldn’t hurt.”
“You think we could get the licenses pulled?”
“Maybe. I know some people.”
“We’d need more than personal contacts, Hurd. If the licenses were canceled, Barney would request a hearing and get it. He’d be able to say that none of his people had ever fired one in anger.”
“And we’d be able to say that they’ve no need for more firepower than we have in our department.”
“I don’t know what that would get us, except to alert Barney Noble that we have more than a passing interest in what he’s doing out there.”
“Would that be a bad thing?” Wallace asked. “It might rattle him a little.”
“What’s the purpose of rattling him?”
“To let him know that we take an interest in what goes on on our turf.”
“I think I’ve already let him know that, with this Cracker Mosely thing.”
“What’s Cracker Mosely?”
“The man I interrogated yesterday.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s an ex-cop out of Miami. He killed a drug dealer with his baton and did time for it.” Holly wanted to see
where Wallace would go with that information.
He wrinkled his brow, a major use of facial expression for him. “And yet he got licensed for security work?”
“And to carry a gun.”
“How’d that happen?”
“A computer check showed no criminal record.”
“Well, that’s a major lapse, isn’t it?”
“I thought so.”
“Have you called anybody at state records to find out why?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
Holly shrugged. “I just want to let it ride for a while and see what happens.”
“While you’re letting it ride, I’d like to run records checks on all the security people out there.”
“How? We don’t even have their names,” Holly said.
“I could run a check on security-guard licenses issued in Orchid and cross-check that against the Palmetto Gardens addresses.”
Now Holly was stuck. So far she hadn’t told him anything that Barney Noble didn’t already know, but this was new territory. She took a deep breath. “I’ve already done that, Hurd.”
“So you have a list of the security people?”
“Yep.”
Wallace shook his head. “You might have told me that a few minutes ago and saved me all these questions.”
“I wanted to see what questions you’d ask, Hurd.”
“Well, my next question is, does anybody else with a criminal record belong to the Palmetto Gardens security department?”
Wallace was now only a step from where Holly’s curiosity had taken her, and she saw that it would cost her nothing to make it easier for him.
“Well, yes and no,” she said.
There was a tiny ripple of anger across Wallace’s placid face.
Holly held up a hand. “There are a hundred and two people at Palmetto Gardens who are licensed to carry weapons.”
“
A hundred and two
?”
“That’s right. Only fifteen of them are security guards, in the formal sense.”
“Have you checked to see if any of them has a criminal record, like Mosely?”
“None of them shows a criminal record in the state computer system.”
“Yeah, but neither did Mosely.”
Holly took a deep breath and let it all out. “Seventy-one of them show up in the national crime computer as having criminal records.”
Wallace stared blankly at her for a moment while he digested that information.
“What do you think I ought to do, Hurd?” Holly asked.
“I think you ought to call the fucking FBI,” he said. “Right now,” he said, pointing. “There’s the phone.”
Holly laughed. She would have thought Wallace incapable of such an outburst.
“Let me tell you my problem, Hurd,” she said. There was no point in holding this back any longer. “Chet Marley thought there was someone in this department who was working with…somebody outside this department.”