A False Dawn

THIRTY-SEVEN

After Leslie left, it took me less than a half hour to sweep Jupiter for other bugs. Nothing. I sat in the helm and called my neighbor to check on Max. I was told she had made herself quite at home and displayed no signs of missing me.

I saw Dave Collins pop his head out of Gibraltar’s hatch and climb onto the cockpit. It looked like he’d spent the night on his boat. I caught his attention and signaled for him to walk over to Jupiter.

I climbed down from the bridge and stood next to Nick’s boat while Dave approached. He said, “You either escaped or Nick made your bond. I’d say you have become one pain-in-the ass for Detective Slater. In that e-mail you sent, Slater looked like he was suffering from a stroke. He’s adapt at profanity.”

“Thanks for helping Nick with the edit. He didn’t make it to bail me out.”

Dave seemed astounded. “After Nick sent the e-mail and copied me, I burned it to a DVD for safekeeping, and he left to make bond. Odd. What charges did the detective throw at you to justify an arrest?”

“Trumped up charges. I twisted a guy’s wrist trying to keep my head from becoming a punching bag. He filed assault charges, or was told to file charges.”

“What do you mean?”

I explained the course of events to Dave while he sipped from a large coffee mug. When I was finished, he nodded and said, “Hope your attorney’s good. You’re going against some big money. Tectonic plates are shifting, and you’re on the fault line.”

“You could say that. I feel like I’m in the middle of an earthquake. Come look at the bug I found on Jupiter.”

“Did you call an exterminator?” he asked, grinning.

“It’s a small one. Found it in my smoke detector. Thought you might have seen something like it before, maybe you’d know who might use it.”

“Let me take a look. It’s been a while.”

“I always heard you guys never really retire.”

He took his sunglasses off, stepping into Jupiter’s salon. The music from the radio filled the room. I pointed to the bug sitting in the spot where the smoke detector’s battery used to be. Dave fished in his shirt pocket for a pair of bifocals. He studied the bug for a half minute before motioning for me to follow him to the cockpit.

He said, “It’s new. Sensitive. Powerful. It’ll pick up a fart.”

“Would the sheriff’s office have something like that?”

“Doubt it. Or they could be teaming up with the feds, using the fed’s gear while trying to find whatever it is they think you can tell them.”

“Could be. As rumors of a possible serial killer swirl, Kim says two agents from the FBI were asking questions about yours truly. It’s all horseshit, Dave. I have a power-hungry detective who wants to become the next sheriff, and he knows I didn’t kill the girl. Yet, I think he’s taking great pains to protect whoever did kill her.”

Dave tossed the remains of his coffee over the side of Jupiter. “Let’s take a walk.”

I nodded and we stepped out of the cockpit and started slowly down the dock.

“We need to put things in some kind of perspective,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“The juggernaut in all of this is simply timing. You were in the right place at the right time to start a cataclysmic fall of the dominoes. A psychic told you the name of the woman you found, Angela. It could be accurate or not. We have no last name. We do have Joe Billie who was in the immediate proximity of where you discovered the victim before you found her. You have the father and son symbiosis of Josh and Richard Brennen. Anyone else?”

“After I ruffled feathers last time in the migrant camp, when I stuck the vic’s shoe in the faces of Juan Gomez and Silas Davis as I was leaving, I overheard Gomez call someone. The name that sounded like Santa Ana. It could be a place or their attorney.”

“Or a hit man.”

“That’s comforting.”

“The reality, Sean, is that you’re shaking up the comfort level of a very powerful group and the businesses that group represents. It doesn’t mean that they are directly responsible for the deaths, but the killings are possibly linked to their business mode, their brand, agriculture. Some labor contractors are running modern-day indentured servant camps, profiting from human trafficking and forced prostitution. So a few of the girls run. They’re getting caught and killed. Rather than take them back and beat them into submission, someone is killing them, which doesn’t make sense because the women would be worth more alive than dead.” He stopped walking and turned toward me. “The question is why are they dying?”

“Because the perp knows they become numbers, not people, when they’re killed. He’s sadistic, and he’s a chameleon. He can blend in anywhere, but when he’s alone with his victim, the evil drips like hot candle wax. John Wayne Gacy used to ask his victims, ‘How does it feel knowing you’re going to die?’”

Dave scratched a three-day growth on his face. “We might have somebody intimately connected in this wheel that finds sadistic sex, rape, and killing a sport. We have two recent bodies, no ID’s, and no hard evidence to connect the spokes.” Dave paused to watch a sailboat motoring opur of the marina. “So what are we missing?”

“The thread that ties us to the killer. A strong clue is the DNA found in the hair stuck to the duct tape. I’ll ask Leslie to get a DNA sample from the person who, at this point, might fit this pattern killer’s profile.”

“Who’s that?” Dave asked.

“Richard Brennen.”