Sacred Read online

  There was a long dead pause on the line.

  When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. “You know what it takes to buy a federal judge?”

  “A lot of money.”

  “A lot of money,” he said. “And a lot of power, Patrick. I’ve been looking into the alleged head of the Church of Truth and Revelation, guy by the name of P. F. Nicholson Kett—”

  “No shit? That’s his full name?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just, what a dorky name.”

  “Yeah, well, P. F. Nicholson Kett is like a god and guru and high priest all rolled into one. And no one has seen him in over twenty years. He transmits messages through underlings, supposedly from his yacht off the coast of Florida. And he—”

  “Florida,” I said.

  “Right. Look, I think the guy’s bullshit. I think he died a long time ago and he was never much to begin with. He was just the face someone put on the Church.”

  “And the face behind the face is?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it ain’t P. F. Nicholson Kett. The guy was a moron. A former advertising copy editor from Madison, Wisconsin, who used to write porno scripts under an assumed name to make ends meet. The guy could barely spell his own name. But I’ve seen films and he had charisma. Plus he had that look in his eyes of all fanatics, part fervent belief, part comatose. So someone took this guy with good looks and charisma and propped his ass up to be a little tin god. And that someone, I’m sure of it, is the guy who’s suing my ass at the moment.”

  On his end I heard the sudden eruption of several beeping phone lines.

  “Call me later. Gotta run.”

  “Bye,” I said, but he was already gone.

  As I came out of the hotel onto the walkway that curled through a garden of palm trees and incongruous Australian pines, I saw Angie sitting on the chaise, her hand over her eyes to block the sun, looking up at a young guy in an orange Speedo so small that comparing it to a loincloth would probably be an insult to loincloths.

  Another guy in a blue Speedo sat on the other side of the pool watching the two of them, and I could tell by the smile on his face that Orange Speedo was his pal.

  Orange Speedo held a half-full bottle of Corona by his shiny hip, a lime floating in the foam, and as I approached, I heard him say, “You can be friendly, can’t you?”

  “I can be friendly,” Angie said. “I’m just not in the mood right now.”

  “Well, change your mood. You’re in the land of fun ’n’ sun, darlin’.”

  Darlin’. Big mistake.

  Angie shifted in her chaise, placed the case file on the ground by the chair. “The land of fun ’n’ sun?”

  “Yeah!” The guy took a swig of the Corona. “Hey, you should be wearing your sunglasses.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Protect those pretty eyes of yours.”

  “You like my eyes,” she said in a tone I’d heard before. Run, I wanted to scream to the guy. Run, run, run.

  He rested the beer on his hip. “Yeah. They’re feline.”

  “Feline?”

  “Like a cat’s,” he said and leaned over her.

  “You like cats?”

  “Love ’em.” He smiled.

  “Then you should probably go to a pet store and buy one,” she said. “Because I get the feeling that’s the only pussy you’re going to get tonight.” She picked up the case file and opened it on her lap. “Know what I mean?”

  I stepped off the path onto the pool patio as Orange Speedo took a step back and cocked his head and his hand tightened around the Corona bottle neck until his knuckles grew red.

  “Hard to come up with a comeback to that one, ain’t it?” I smiled brightly.

  “Hey, partner!” Angie said. “You braved the sun to join me. I’m touched. And you’re even wearing shorts.”

  “Crack the case yet?” I squatted by her chaise.

  “Nope. But I’m close. I can feel it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Okay. You’re right.” She stuck her tongue out at me.

  “You know…”

  I looked up. It was Orange Speedo and he was shaking in rage, pointing his finger at Angie.

  “You’re still here?” I said.

  “You know,” he repeated.

  “Yes?” Angie said.

  His pectorals pulsed and rippled and he held the beer bottle up by his shoulder. “If you weren’t a woman, I’d—”

  “Be in surgery about now,” I said. “Even as it is, you’re pushing it.”

  Angie pushed herself up on the chaise and looked at him.

  He breathed heavily through his nostrils and suddenly spun on his heel and walked back to his buddy. They whispered to each other, then took turns glaring at us.

  “You get the feeling my temperament just isn’t right for this place?” Angie said.

  We drove over to the Crab Shack for lunch. Again.

  In three days, it had become our home away from home. Rita, a waitress in her mid-forties who wore a weathered black cowboy hat, fishnet stockings under cutoff jeans, and smoked cheeroots, had become our first pal in the area. Gene, her boss and the chief cook at the Crab Shack, was fast becoming our second. And the egret from the first day—her name was Sandra, and she was well behaved as long as you didn’t serve her beer.

  We sat out on the dock and watched another late afternoon sky gradually turn deep orange and smelled the salt off the marsh and the gas too, unfortunately, and a warm breeze fingered its way through our hair and shook the bells on the pilings and threatened to toss our case file folder into the milky water.

  At the other end of the dock, four Canadians with pink lemonade skin and ugly floral shirts scarfed platters of fried food and talked loudly about what a dangerous state they’d chosen in which to park their RV.

  “First those drugs on the beach. Eh?” one of them said. “Now this poor girl.”

  The “drugs on the beach” and the “poor girl” had been all over the local news the last two days.

  “Oh, yuh. Oh, yuh,” one of the women in the group clucked. “We might as well be in Miami, and that is the truth, yuh.”

  The morning after we arrived, a few members of a Methodist widows’ support group on vacation from Michigan were walking the beach in Dunedin when they noticed several small plastic bags littering the shoreline. The bags were small and thick and, as it turned out, filled with heroin. By noon, several more had washed up on beaches in Clearwater and St. Petersburg, and unconfirmed reports even placed some as far north as Homosassa and as far south as Marco Island. The Coast Guard surmised that a storm that had been battering Mexico, Cuba, and the Bahamas may have sunk a ship carrying the heroin, but as yet they hadn’t been able to sight the wreckage.

  The “poor girl” story had been reported yesterday. An unidentified woman had been shot to death in a Clearwater motel room. The murder weapon was believed to have been a shotgun, the blast fired at point-blank range into the woman’s face, making identification difficult. A police spokesman reported that the woman’s body had also been “mutilated” but refused to specify how. The woman’s age was estimated at anywhere between eighteen and thirty, and Clearwater police were trying to identify her through dental records.

  My first thought upon reading about her was, Shit. Desiree. But after checking into the section of Clearwater where the body was found and hearing the coded language used on last night’s six o’clock news, it became apparent that the victim had probably been a prostitute.

  “Sure,” one of the Canadians said, “it’s like the Wild West down here. That is for sure.”

  “You are right there, Bob,” his wife said and dipped her entire batter-fried grouper finger in a cup of tartar sauce.

  It was a strange state, I’d been noticing, but in ways it was growing on me. Well, actually, the Crab Shack was growing on me. I liked Sandra and Rita and Gene and the two signs behind the bar that said, “If You Like the Way The
y Do Things in New York So Much, Take I-95 North,” and “When I Get Old I’m Going to Move to Canada and Drive Real Slow.”

  I was wearing a tank top and shorts and my normally chalk-white skin had reached a happy shade of beige. Angie wore her black bikini top and a multicolored sarong and her dark hair was twisted and curled and the chestnut highlights were turning almost blond.

  I’d enjoyed my time in the sun, but these past three days had been a godsend to her. When she forgot her frustration over the case, or once we’d reached the end of yet another fruitless day, she seemed to stretch and blossom and unwind into the heat, the mangroves, the deep blue sea and salty air. She stopped wearing shoes unless we were actively on the chase for Desiree or Jeff Price, drove to the beach at night to sit on the hood of the car and listen to the waves, even eschewed the bed in her suite at night for the white rope hammock on her balcony.

  I met her eyes and she gave me a smile that was part sad knowledge and part intense curiosity.

  We sat awhile like that, smiles fading, eyes locked, searching each other’s faces for answers to questions that had never been vocalized.

  “It’s been Phil,” she said and reached across the table to take my hand. “It felt like sacrilege for us two to, you know…”

  I nodded.

  Her sandy foot curled up over mine. “I’m sorry if it’s been causing you pain.”

  “Not pain,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Not real pain,” I said. “Aches. Here and there. I’ve been worried.”

  She brought my hand to her cheek and closed her eyes.

  “Thought you two were partners, not lovers,” a voice cried.

  “That,” Angie said, eyes still closed, “would be Rita.”

  And it was. Rita, in her ten-gallon hat, her fishnet stockings red today, bringing us our plates of crawfish and shrimp and Dungeness crab. Rita loved that we were detectives. Wanted to know how many shoot-outs we’d had, how many car chases we’d been on, how many bad guys we’d killed.

  She placed our plates on the table and moved the pitcher of beer off the case file to put our plastic utensils somewhere, and the warm wind picked up the folder and the plastic sporks and tossed them to the deck.

  “Oh, dear,” she said.

  I got up to help her but she was quick. She scooped up the folder and closed it, caught the one stray photo between her thumb and index finger just as it had lifted off the deck and headed over the railing in a gust. She turned to us and smiled, her left leg still up in a half pirouette from when she’d lunged for the photo.

  “You missed your calling,” Angie said. “Shortstop for the Yankees.”

  “I had a Yankee,” she said, as she looked down at the photo she’d caught. “Wasn’t worth shit in the sack, always talking about—”

  “Go on, Rita,” I said. “Don’t be shy.”

  “Hey,” she said, her eyes fixed on the photo. “Hey,” she said again.

  “What?”

  She handed me the folder and the photo and dashed off the dock inside.

  I looked at the photo she’d caught.

  “What was that all about?” Angie said.

  I handed the photo to her.

  Rita came running back onto the dock and handed me a newspaper.

  It was a copy of the St. Petersburg Times, today’s edition, and she’d folded it back to page 7.

  “Look,” she said, breathless. She pointed to an article midway down the page.

  The headline read: MAN HELD IN BRADENTON SLAYING.

  The man’s name was David Fischer and he was being held for questioning in the stabbing death of an unidentified man found in a motel room in Bradenton. Details in the article were sketchy, but that wasn’t the point. One look at a photo of David Fischer and I knew why Rita had handed it to me.

  “Jesus,” Angie said, looking at the photo. “That’s Jay Becker.”

  18

  To get to Bradenton, we drove 275 south through St. Petersburg and then rode up onto a monstrous bridge called the Sunshine Skyway, which stretched over the Gulf of Mexico and connected the Tampa/St. Petersburg area with the Sarasota/Bradenton landmass.

  The bridge had two spans, which seemed to be modeled after dorsal fins. From a distance, as the sun dipped toward the sea and the sky turned purple, the dorsal fins appeared to have been painted a smoky gold, but as we rode over the bridge itself, we saw that the fins were made up of several yellow beams that converged in ever-smaller triangles. At the base of the beams were lights that when turned on and combined with the setting sun, gave the fins a golden hue.

  Christ, they loved their colors down in these parts.

  “‘…the unidentified man,’” Angie read from the paper, “‘believed to be in his early thirties, was found facedown on the floor of his room at the Isle of Palms Motel with a fatal knife wound to his abdomen. The suspect, David Fischer, forty-one, was arrested in his room which adjoined the victim’s. Police refused to speculate on motive or comment on what led them to arrest Mr. Fischer.’”

  Jay was being held in the Bradenton County Jail, according to the paper, pending a bond hearing, which would have been held sometime today.

  “What the hell is going on?” Angie said as we drove off the bridge and the purple in the sky deepened.

  “Let’s ask Jay,” I said.

  He looked awful.

  His dark brown hair was flecked with gray that had never been there before and the bags under his eyes were so puffy I’d have doubted anyone who told me he’d slept this week.

  “Well, is that Patrick Kenzie sitting before me or is that Jimmy Buffett?” He gave me a weak smile as he came through the doorway into the visitation area and picked up the phone on the other side of the Plexiglas.

  “Barely recognize me, eh.”

  “You almost look tan. I didn’t know such a thing was possible for you pasty Celtic folk.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s makeup.”

  “Cash bail is a hundred grand,” he said and sat down in his cubicle across from mine, cradled the phone between chin and shoulder long enough to light a cigarette. “In lieu of a million-dollar bond. My bail bondsman’s a guy name of Sidney Merriam.”

  “When’d you start smoking?”

  “Recently.”

  “Most people are quitting at your age, not starting.”

  He winked. “I’m no slave to fashion.”

  “A hundred grand,” I said.

  He nodded and yawned. “Five-fifteen-seven.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Locker twelve.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Bob Dylan in St. Pete,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Run the clue down, Patrick. You’ll find it.”

  “Bob Dylan in St. Pete,” I said.

  He looked over his shoulder at a slim, muscular guard with a diamondback’s eyes.

  “Songs,” he said. “Not albums.”

  “Got it,” I said, though I didn’t yet. But I trusted him.

  “So they sent you,” he said with a rueful smile.

  “Who else?” I said.

  “Yeah. Makes sense.” He leaned back in his chair and the harsh fluorescents overhead only accentuated how much weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him two months ago. His face looked like a skull.

  He leaned forward. “Get me out of here, buddy.”

  “I will.”

  “Tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll go to the dog races.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I got fifty bucks on a gorgeous greyhound. You know?”

  I’m sure I looked confused again, but I said, “Sure.”

  He smiled, his lips cracked by the sun. “I’m counting on it. Those nice Matisse prints we saw in Washington that time? They’re not going to last forever.”

  It took me thirty seconds of looking into his face before I understood.

  “See you soon,” I said.

  “Tonight, Patrick.”

/>   Angie drove back over the bridge as I looked through a street map of St. Petersburg we’d bought at a gas station.

  “So he doesn’t think his prints will hold up?” Angie said.

  “No. He told me once that when he was with the FBI, he made himself up a false identity. I guess it was this David Fischer guy. He has a friend in Latent Prints at Quantico, so his fingerprints are actually on file twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “Yeah. It’s not a solution, it’s a Band-Aid. The local police send his prints to Quantico, this friend of his has the computer programmed to spit out the Fischer identity. But only for a couple of days. Then the friend, to save his job, will have to call back and say, ‘The computer’s coming up with something odd. These prints also match a Jay Becker, who used to work for us.’ See, Jay always knew if he got in some sort of jam, his only hope was to make bail and skip.”

  “So we’re aiding and abetting bail-jumping.”

  “Not so as they can prove it in court,” I said.

  “Is he worth it?”

  I looked at her. “Yeah.”

  We crossed into St. Petersburg and I said, “Name some Dylan songs.”

  She glanced at the map on my lap. “‘Highway Sixty One Revisited.’”

  “Nope.”

  “‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’”

  I grimaced at her.

  “What?” She scowled. “Okay. Positively Fourth Street.”

  I looked down at the map. “You’re a wonder,” I said.

  She held up an imaginary tape recorder. “Could you say that into the mike, please?”

  Fourth Street in St. Petersburg ran from one end of the city to the other. At least twenty miles. With a lot of lockers in between.

  But only one Greyhound station.

  We pulled in the parking lot and Angie sat in the car while I went inside, found locker twelve, and dialed the combination on the lock. It popped open on the first try and I pulled out a leather gym bag. I hefted it, but it wasn’t terribly heavy. It could have been filled with clothes for all I knew, and I decided to wait until I was back in the car before I checked. I closed the locker and walked back out of the terminal, got in the car.