Hothouse Orchid (14 page)

35

H
olly was driving back from the airport after her day’s training when an unmarked police car suddenly passed her, moving fast. Lauren Cade was looking at her in the rearview mirror, waving, with Hurd Wallace sitting next to her. Holly’s curiosity was piqued: another murder? She accelerated and fell in behind the car.

They pulled off the road at Vero Discount Tires, and Holly followed. What were they doing? Getting a flat fixed? If so, what was the hurry? She got out of the car. “Hey, Lauren, Hurd.”

“Hey, Holly.”

“What’s up?”

“We’ve got a lead in the rape/murders,” Lauren said.

“At a tire place?”

“We found a tire print with a deep cut in it at the crime scene yesterday,” Hurd said, “and we got a report from Jimmy Weathers that Jim Bruno’s cruiser had such a tire cut, but Bruno replaced the tire earlier today. Join us?”

Holly went with them into the tire store.

“Afternoon,” a clerk behind the counter said. “What can I do you for, folks?”

Hurd flashed his badge. “Did Police Chief Bruno buy a replacement tire here today?”

“Sure did. Right before lunch.”

“Can we see his old tire?”

“Sure, if we can find it. Follow me.”

They followed the man through the back door into a shop, then out behind the building.

“The chief’s old tire will be in this pile over here . . .” The man stopped; there was no pile of tires. “I’m sorry,” he said, “looks like we had a pickup this afternoon. The pile was here this morning.” He called to one of the men in the shop. “Hey, Mike, did we get a pickup today?”

“’Bout an hour ago,” Mike yelled back.

The man turned back to Hurd and his group. “We get a pickup from an outfit in Melbourne about once a week. They specialize in disposing of old tires, batteries, that sort of stuff.”

“Can you give me the name and address of the company?” Hurd asked.

“Sure. I’ve got it inside.” He went back into the front room, rummaged through a desk drawer and came up with a business card. “Here you go,” he said, handing Hurd the card. Environmental Disposal Corporation. They’re out beyond the Melbourne airport.”

“Thank you,” Hurd said. “Holly, you want to come with us?”

“I can’t Hurd; I’ve got to cook dinner for a friend, and I haven’t even been to the store yet. Good luck.” Holly watched them drive away.

T
hey found the EDC sign between the airport and the interstate, and Lauren turned into a road leading toward a group of steel buildings. She parked the car in front of a building with a sign that said oFFICES, and she and Hurd went inside.

Hurd showed his badge. “May I speak with the manager, please?”

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” the woman said. “Please have a seat.”

They did, and ten minutes passed before a man in a shirt and tie appeared.

“I’m Charles Meeton,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“We need to find a tire that you picked up in Vero Beach today,” Hurd said.

“Sir, we’ve got
lots
of tires here,” Meeton said.

“This one would be on a truck that picked up tires at Vero Discount Tires an hour and a half, two hours ago,” Hurd said.

A noise came from outside that practically drowned him out. “What’s that?” Hurd asked.

“Just some of our equipment,” Meeton said. “Alice, can I see the dispatcher’s log?”

Alice handed him a clipboard.

“Let’s see,” Meeton said, “that would be Al Parker’s truck. What number is Al Parker’s truck, Alice?”

Alice consulted another clipboard. “Fifteen,” she said.

Meeton handed her back his clipboard. “Come on, folks, let’s take a look outside.” He led the way out the way they had come in.

Outside, the noise was deafening. “There’s Al’s truck,” Meeton shouted over the din, pointing. A hundred yards away, a dump truck was depositing its load in what appeared to be a steel-sided container about fifteen feet across. The three of them began to walk toward it.

Hurd fell in alongside Meeton. “What’s making the noise?” he shouted.

Meeton shouted something back.

“What?”

“The shredder,” Meeton yelled. “You see, we shred the tires, and then . . .”

But Hurd was already running toward the truck, waving his arms. “Stop!” he was yelling at the driver. “Stop!”

Lauren caught up with him as he was yelling at the driver. The man got into the truck and worked a lever, and the back of the dump truck went down. Lauren hopped onto the running board and looked into the truck bed: empty.

Hurd was yelling at Meeton again to shut off the shredder. Meeton walked from behind the dump truck, waved at the shredder operator and drew a finger across his throat. The man pulled a lever, and the noise stopped.

Hurd turned to Meeton. “We’ve got to get into the hopper,” he said.

Meeton led the way up a rickety flight of stairs next to the hopper, and Hurd and Lauren followed. Lauren looked into the huge hopper and saw a dozen or so tires lying on a conveyer belt, ready to be fed into the shredder.

“There’s a ladder over here,” Meeton said. He flung a leg over the edge and found the top rung of a steel ladder bolted to the inside of the hopper. Hurd and Lauren followed him down.

“Your chances of finding a specific tire are slim and none,” Meeton said, pointing to the remaining tires. “But you’re welcome to look.”

Lauren spoke up. “Bruno’s tire would have gone onto the top of the pile,” she said, “which means it would have been at the bottom of the truck bed. We’ve got a shot.”

She and Hurd began picking up tires and looking at them. “Bruno’s was a Michelin,” Lauren said. “I remember that.”

Hurd was looking at the names on the tires and pushing them aside. “Lots of Goodyears,” he said.

Lauren looked, too. “Here’s a Michelin,” she said. Hurd joined her as they rolled the tire so as to see the whole tread. “Not this one,” she said.

They continued to look through the remaining tires but found nothing.

“Well,” Hurd said, “it’s gone.” As they climbed back to the top of the ladder, he pointed to the rear of the shredder. There seemed to be no piece of a tire larger than what would fit into his hand.

They stopped back on the stairs and Lauren looked at the shredded rubber. “I guess we could go through all that,” she said.

“What’s the point?” Hurd replied. “Even if we found exactly the right piece, we couldn’t prove it came from Bruno’s car.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said. They were both filthy from handling the old tires. “Is there some place we can wash up?” she asked Meeton.

Lauren and Hurd were glum on the ride home.

36

T
eddy Fay sat at his computer, looking at a digital map of Vero Beach. He found James Bruno’s street. It was a few blocks from the local airport. Teddy printed out the map, then got into his car and followed it to Bruno’s neighborhood.

He turned off Indian River Boulevard, drove past a large church and found himself in a neighborhood of ranch houses that appeared to have been built in the 1950s. They were well-kept, their lawns mown and their flower beds tended, but Teddy suspected that when demand for land grew in Vero, this would become a neighborhood of teardowns, with single houses bought up, razed and their lots combined to accommodate larger, more ostentatious houses.

Teddy found Bruno’s house. There was no car in the carport, but Lauren had said that Bruno worked odd hours, so Teddy had no way of knowing when to expect Bruno to be at home. He drove past the house, then turned right at the corner and right again, to put him behind Bruno’s property.

He found himself looking across a concrete drainage channel that had only a small stream of water flowing through it. After a tropical storm or a hurricane, Teddy reckoned, this would be a raging torrent.

On the other side of the hedge was a tall, ill-kempt hedge with a number of gaps in it that was the rear border of Bruno’s property. Through the gaps, Teddy could see a weedy backyard and the back of the house, whose trim needed painting. This had all the ear-marks of a rental, since the other houses on the street were so well kept, but it looked good to Teddy. It would have old hardware and easy locks.

It was late afternoon, and people were arriving home from work, a lot of them probably from the Piper aircraft factory only a few blocks away. A light airplane flew overhead, then made a turn toward the airport. There were lots of students studying at the flight safety school, which trained hundreds of new pilots every year.

Teddy drove away from the neighborhood and stopped at a large home-building supply store, where he bought a few things, then stowed the paper bag in the trunk of his car. Then he headed toward the Publix market on US-1 to pick up a few things for dinner.

H
olly was coming out of the market, carrying two bags of groceries, when her cell phone vibrated. She set the bags down on the sidewalk and took the phone from its holster. “Hello?”

“It’s Josh. Don’t cook; I’m bringing dinner.”

“Now you tell me? I’m just coming out of the market with a bunch of stuff.”

“We’ll save it for another time. Have you got red wine at home?”

“Yep.”

“Then I’ll see you at seven. Bye-bye.”

Holly returned the phone to its holster and bent to pick up her bags. As she did a gray-haired man got out of a silver Toyota and came toward her across the street, heading for the market.

As he passed, he gave her a little smile, and she smiled back, as people in Vero and Orchid Beach usually did in their small-town, neighborly way. Holly continued to her car.

T
eddy had recognized her immediately but had not altered his course to the market. It was as good a time as any to see if she would recognize him. He passed her with a smile, and she smiled back. Inside the store, he stood behind a stack of canned goods and watched her through the window. She opened the rear door of her car—a Porsche Cayenne Turbo, he noted—put her groceries inside, got into the car and drove away without a second glance at the market.

That went well, he thought, and he wondered how a woman on an Agency salary could afford a car that cost around a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe he would look into that.

H
olly drove home, let Daisy out onto the beach and put her groceries away. She showered and changed, then went downstairs to watch the news before Josh came.

T
eddy put his groceries away and started a roast chicken. Then he went to his computer and found a meandering route through several cities, until he found an idle machine in San Diego, California. From there he logged on to the Agency mainframe, then navigated to personnel, where he opened Holly Barker’s file.

He read through the file slowly, from Lance Cabot’s initial letter of recommendation for her hiring, through her training at the Farm, where she had done exceptionally well in every category and had run up the highest pistol score in the history of the Agency. He made a note not to put himself in a position, as he once had, where she might have an opportunity to shoot at him. He felt lucky to have gotten away with the leg wound.

There had been a break in her training at the Farm, when she had been transferred to special duty in New York, under Cabot. He was clearly her rabbi at the Agency, and she had chosen him well, if, indeed, she had done the choosing. This was the period when Teddy had met her at the Metropolitan Opera, when he was disguised as an elderly Jewish gentleman, retired from the garment trade. A short time later, she had come uncomfortably close to him again, but he had managed to escape from the city.

He noted that she had recently been promoted to assistant deputy director, again under the aegis of Lance Cabot, and that she had, accordingly, received a substantial raise. Still, her Agency income didn’t seem to support the purchase of an expensive German SUV with a 500-hp turbocharged engine.

He went to her original application and read, in fairly telegraphic form, of her progress through her army career and her hiring as chief of police in Orchid Beach. Then he came to her financial disclosure form.

“Ahhhh,” he said aloud to himself. The woman had a substantial estate, amounting to nearly three million dollars, nearly all of it inherited from her fiancé, who had been killed as an innocent bystander in a bank robbery the day before her wedding. Teddy felt sorry that she had experienced such pain, but her personal wealth accounted for the ownership of the Cayenne as well as for her Orchid Beach house.

Teddy logged off the mainframe and closed his computer. What an interesting woman she was, he thought. It was a pity that he couldn’t know her better. Still, from what he had just read, he knew more about her than most people.

He went back into the kitchen, checked on the roasting chicken, and began preparing the rest of their dinner.

He couldn’t do what he wanted to tonight, because Lauren would be there. Jim Bruno would have to wait a little.

37

L
ance Cabot was at his desk in the early morning when there was a rap at his door. His secretary was not in yet, and no one was screening his visitors. “Come in,” he said.

The door opened slightly and the disheveled head of the computer geek who had visited him before appeared. “Got a second?”

“What is it?” Lance asked, not a little annoyed. He couldn’t remember the kid’s name, but he thought he had solved his problem.

“Our visitor returned to the mainframe early last evening,” he said, “this time via a chain of computers around the country ending in San Diego.”

“And?”

“And he got into Holly Barker’s personnel records.”

This stopped Lance in his tracks. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, giving himself time to think.

“Absolutely. I still haven’t been able to track him back to a specific computer, but I think he may be in the state of Florida.”

“What was it he was looking for last time?”

“Information on the background of a retired army colonel, James Bruno. Also, he accessed his driver’s license record in Florida.”

“Can you set some sort of trap for him?”

“I already have; when I came in this morning I had an alert from the mainframe waiting on my work station.”

“But you can’t track him to a specific computer?”

“That’s hard. The guy—or girl—is very smart. If he continued to use the same computer chain, that would make it a lot easier, but both times I discovered him he had created a new chain. It’s like he’s making big geographical leaps around the country every time he logs on.”

“And to stop him we’d have to change all the log-on codes?”

“Right. And circulate the new codes to every authorized Agency employee around the world, in a highly secure manner.”

“And that’s a big job.”

“It is, and every time we do something like that we run the risk of opening new security breaches, of having the codes fall into the hands of some hacker lurking out there.”

“When was the last time the codes were changed?”

“Six years ago. We had teething problems, of course, but the mainframe has remained secure since we worked those out. If we issue new codes, we’ll have to start all over again.”

Shit, Lance thought. He stared at the desk in front of him.

“If I could make a suggestion?” the kid said.

“Go ahead.”

“This guy has not shown any evil intent with these intrusions; he’s just looking for information. It might make sense to let him continue and hope that he’ll make a mistake that will make it easier to nail him. I’ve got the alert on the mainframe, and if he makes a more threatening move, then we can act on a code change.”

Lance was pleased to have a way out of this mess. “All right, do that, but every time he logs on I want to know what he’s looking at.”

“I’ll see that you do,” the kid said. He gave a little wave and left, closing the door behind him.

Lance was still thinking, though. This intruder had made two visits to the mainframe, both looking for information about Holly, and he didn’t like that. Of course, it could be somebody from Holly’s past: an old lover, maybe, who had worked at the Agency and still harbored a crush on her. But he kept returning to another possibility: Teddy Fay.

Lance had really begun to believe the man was dead; certainly that’s what he had repeatedly told the director, though she still seemed skeptical. To be frank with himself, he didn’t care if Teddy was alive and well as long as he didn’t call attention to himself and embarrass everybody, particularly himself but up to and including the director and her husband, President Will Lee.

Lance turned to his phone and pressed a speed-dial number, then he stared at the screen.

H
olly was jarred awake by the ringing phone. She rolled over and looked at the bedside clock: seven fifteen. Then she realized the television screen at the foot of her bed had come alive, and Lance was staring at her—and at Josh, who had not yet woken up.

“Call me back on your secure line,” Lance said, “as soon as you can be alone.”

Josh woke up. “Huh?”

“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep,” Holly said. She grabbed the remote and switched off the TV.

“I heard a man’s voice,” Josh said.

“No, you didn’t,” Holly replied, placing a hand on his forehead and pushing down. “Go back to sleep.”

She got out of bed, threw on a shirt and jeans and went downstairs to her Agency cubbyhole. She tapped in the code that opened the door, then went inside, closed the door behind her and logged on to her computer. A few keystrokes later, she had Lance on the screen.

“I’m here,” she said.

“Sorry to wake you; something odd has come up.”

“Go ahead.”

“One of those geeks in computer services has come to me twice, now, with the news that someone outside the Agency has managed to log on to the mainframe, at least twice.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Of course, he may have logged on before, but he has been caught at it only twice.”

“Who is it?”

“Unknown. He creates a sort of channel through several computers around the country, then logs on from one of them, so we haven’t been able to pinpoint his location.”

“What has he been doing on the mainframe?”

“Both times we’ve caught him he’s been looking at information about you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Is there some old lover of yours out there who used to be Agency who might still be obsessed with you?”

“No. I don’t know anybody who fits that description, especially the obsession part. What did he want to know about me, do you think?”

“The first time, he was looking up background information on one Colonel James Bruno.”

“What kind of information?”

“The trial record of his court-martial and Bruno’s Florida driver’s license application.”

“Bruno is a suspect in the series of rapes and murders we’ve been having here,” Holly said. “The search could be related to that.”

“The other time we caught him, he went into your personnel records.”

“Holy shit,” Holly said involuntarily.

“Exactly. Who would want to do that?”

“I can’t imagine,” Holly said.

“I can imagine somebody who might be just a tiny bit obsessed with you.”

“Enlighten me, please.”

“You attended the opera with him once, and you may have put a bullet in him at one point. Let’s not mention any names.”

Holly winced. “You say you haven’t been able to pin down his location?”

“Not yet. He may be on the move, but the last time, our geek thought he might be somewhere in Florida.”

“You think he might be looking for revenge?”

“Possibly, but he wouldn’t need your personnel file for that; he’d just find you and kill you.”

“Well, yes. Maybe he hasn’t gotten over our last encounter.”

“Perhaps not, but I don’t have any sense that you’re in any real danger. You might keep an eye out for him, though, or for someone who might be him.”

“I take your point.”

“Then go armed and be careful.”

“I’ll do that,” Holly replied.

The screen went blank. Holly shut down the computer and left the little office. She walked into the kitchen to find Josh, naked, making coffee.

He jumped. “Where did you come from?”

“I was just on the phone.”

“Where? I couldn’t hear you.”

“In a secret place,” she said. “You look very nice.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” he said, backing away. “I’ve got to get to work.”

“Oh, you have some time,” she said, advancing on him.