The Demon Pool (7 page)

The stretch of I-75 south of Tampa and north of Naples
provided the perfect piece of South Florida highway for “flying close to the
ground.” The Corvette ate up the miles, while the premium sound system cranked
out what Jefferson Briggs called his “driving music.” A custom CD of
hard-driving, classic, southern rock and roll. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils
jammed out their classic rock hit, “If You Wanna Get to Heaven.” He had been
working almost too hard, and tonight he and Kimberly would raise a little hell.

The radar detector’s sensors swept the road ahead.
The 638 horsepower, hand-assembled, LS9 motor that powered his Corvette purred
like a contented kitten. A supercharged, high performance monster, the LS9 went
from zero to sixty in a hair over three seconds.

Briggs was feeling good. His presentation to the
governor and his staff last week on the value of a new stem cell research initiative
had gone well, and the technology entrepreneur of the year award had iced the
cake.

Briggs had spent months putting together the best
genetic research team in the nation. He had positioned Advanced Genetic
Technologies to put Florida years ahead of the other major genetic and stem
cell research centers. With its aging population, Briggs believed that Florida
was ripe to support research that would extend the geriatric generation’s
golden years. He believed that he had the ultimate political and social winner.

Briggs convinced the governor’s staff to back the
new stem cell research initiative, and its hefty billion-dollar cost, by
emphasizing the benefit of a healthy population of long-living taxpayers. He
had shown them statistics validating a return on investment, of more than
fifteen to one.

It would not matter what party was in power once
the initiative passed. That kind of return appealed to both parties equally and
the first one hundred million dollars would go to Advanced Genetic
Technologies. Once that funding was in place, Briggs would take the company
public and give Bill Gates a run for his money. AGT would be the Microsoft of
the genetics research universe.
Everybody wins in this game. Especially me.

He had worked long, hard hours, month after
month, with few breaks. This trip was his first real getaway in close to a
year. Work had put a strain on his relationship with Kimberly, but he would
make it up to her over the next couple of days.

He looked over at her as she dozed fitfully in
the passenger seat. He anticipated a little piece of heaven in Naples. Briggs
felt at the top of his game.
King of the world.

Until a Dodge Viper blew past him like he was
standing still.

“Son of a bitch!”

A surge of testosterone-driven adrenalin coursed
through his veins and he pulled himself taller, as much as one could in a
Corvette. The digital speedometer said he was doing an even one hundred miles
per hour, though it felt no more than forty-five. It reminded him of a story in
an old, hippie comic book from the ‘70s. Briggs’ older, dope-addled brother had
collected the comics, which were about three equally dope-addled, cartoon
“brothers.”

Briggs remembered the story. Two of the hippies —
he could never remember which two — were bicycling down the freeway, one
pedaling and the other riding on the handlebar. The hippie on the handlebar,
apparently tired of the slow lane, popped an amyl nitrate capsule under his
“brother’s” nose. In the following frame, two totally beat-to-crap cops were
explaining to their desk sergeant what had happened to them. One of the
officers told the sergeant how they were driving on the freeway when these two
long-haired freaks on a bicycle passed them so fast, they thought their car had
stalled. So they got out.

The smile the story brought to his face faded as
the Viper streaked off into the night. He shifted down a gear and pressed on
the gas pedal. The radar detector remained quiet as the numbers on the digital
speedometer shot up. Most of the Florida Highway Patrol would be off tonight.
So would most of the local and county cops. It was Tuesday night, the week
after Labor Day weekend. The cops were fried. The business people who catered
to the tourists were fried. It was a good time for a fast drive down I-75 to
his favorite resort in Naples.

In a second, the Corvette’s speedometer read one
hundred and twenty. Briggs could make out the Viper’s distinctive taillights in
the distance. One twenty-five. One thirty. One thirty-five. The Corvette closed
on the Viper. Briggs smiled again as the Corvette slid up next to the red and
black Dodge. One hundred forty miles per hour. Briggs looked over, trying to
see into the Viper’s cockpit.

***

Unaware of Briggs’ latest bad boy drama, Kimberly
drifted into a deeper sleep and started dreaming. She dreamed that she was
walking on a beach somewhere when someone swept her off her feet from behind
and began carrying her. When she looked at his face, she had expected to see
Jeff. Instead, she saw Jim Demore. Somewhere in the distance, Jeff shouted “Son
of a bitch!” Must be jealous. Serves him right.

The dream collided with the audible reality of
Jeff’s voice and she woke up to the sudden acceleration of the Corvette. She
glanced first at the speedometer, then over at Briggs. To his left, a Dodge
Viper cruised nose-to-nose with the Corvette. She hated when this happened.
How
could someone make so much money, have so much success, and still have so
little control over his testosterone?

Under normal circumstances, a fast car and a rich
boyfriend not afraid to take a few chances got her motor running, but not
tonight. Something felt wrong. Any other time, she would’ve submitted to his
testosteronic urge and told him to kick the Viper’s ass. Not this time. She
reached over and put her hand on his leg. Her eyes reflected the promise in her
voice

“Slow down, macho man. I want to get to Naples in
one piece.”

“Just sit back and enjoy the ride,” Briggs said.
His eyes stayed glued to the highway.

Kimberly bristled at the condescension.
Well,
at least he didn’t say “Enjoy the ride, bitch.”

“Come on, Jeff. Slow down. Get me to Naples in
one piece and I promise you, it will be the best piece you will ever have.”

For the moment, it was all she had to offer.
Despite feeling an uncomfortable, nagging fear, her eyes and body promised only
pleasure. Kimberly had learned a long time ago not to let her body betray her
feelings.

To calm herself, Kimberly tried to remember her
dream. The cop she had met at the awards ceremony had shown up in it
. What
did it mean?

***

After Kimberly’s offer, most men would have slowed
down, and in this respect, Briggs was not different from most men. The
speedometer of the Corvette began a slow retreat, but the Viper did not seem to
move. The Corvette slowed more. The Viper matched its speed.

A light went on inside the cockpit of the Viper. A
woman looked over at the Corvette. She looked familiar. Maybe someone he had
seen on the South Florida cocktail circuit. She looked right into Briggs’ eyes,
pursed her lips together in a mock kiss, and then gave him the finger.

“Son of a bitch.”

The Viper accelerated and so did the Corvette.
Kimberly’s eyes went wide and she grabbed Briggs’ leg. She squeezed hard, dug
her nails in, and one of her fills snapped off. The two high-performance
vehicles screamed down the freeway.

The more Briggs thought about it, the more
convinced he was that he knew the woman driving the Viper.
But from where?
And why is she screwing with me?

Kimberly’s eyes remained wide and a façade of
fear replaced her feigned calm. She looked as if she were about to lose
control.

“Slow down, damn it. This is stupid.”

Briggs glared back at his girlfriend.

“This is personal. No one gives me the finger.
Especially not some game-playing, rich bitch in a piece-of-shit Dodge.”

The Corvette and the Viper drove nose to nose as
their speed passed one hundred forty-five miles per hour. Briggs squinted
through the Corvette’s windshield at two tiny red lights on the highway ahead.
By the time he realized that he was seeing the taillights of another vehicle,
it was too late to slow down. The speedometer read one fifty. Briggs swerved to
the right onto the paved shoulder. He missed the back of the construction truck
by inches.

Kimberly screamed hysterically.

“You fucking idiot, you almost killed us.”

***

Pedro de la Garza listened to Tejano music on his
truck’s AM radio and sipped hot coffee. The big, lumbering vehicle rumbled down
the highway at its max speed of fifty miles per hour, but at least it handled
better since the company fixed the steering. His crew of two Haitian laborers
dozed beside him in the front seat.

Pedro saw the dark outline of a tractor-trailer on the
shoulder just ahead. Pedro almost spilled his coffee when the red and black
Dodge Viper went screaming by in the left lane. He did spill his coffee when
the Corvette flew by on the right.

***

On the Corvette’s high-end sound system, Molly Hatchet
belted out, “Flirtin’ with Disaster.”

Her eyes as big as saucers, Kimberly screamed,
“Oh, shit!”

Urine flooded the seat under her.

Molly Hatchet played on, singing about gambling
with time and choosing one’s destiny.

 In the last seconds of his life, Briggs wondered
why life could not be more like his brother’s comic books, where dumb-ass cops
could step out of a moving vehicle at sixty-five miles per hour and live to
tell about it.

Traffic was light on the post-holiday interstate and
Jim Demore’s patrol car shot down the freeway doing a hundred. Fourteen seconds
from a dead stop standstill to the century mark on the speedometer.

The Florida Highway Patrol had purchased a number
of high-performance Dodge Chargers for use on the interstate highways and Jim
had snagged one. Even after becoming an accident investigator, his command
allowed him to keep the Charger. Of course, he also had to spend a fair amount
of time pulling extra shifts after holidays, giving the regular patrol officers
much-needed breaks. And of course, that pissed Linda off. However, the Charger
was a rocket ship with emergency lights.
Personal life — crap, work life —
good
.

He arrived at the accident scene ahead of the
other responders.
First among firsts.

According to dispatch, it would be another ten
minutes before the EMS units arrived. 

Until the current call, it had been an uneventful
evening. With the sparse post-holiday traffic, he had only written a couple of
tickets and had spent much of the night reflecting on his most recent and most
unfortunate encounter with Linda at the hotel pool in Ft. Myers. Nevertheless,
that little bit of X-rated, soap opera drama had not kept him from enjoying a
late afternoon coffee with Kimberly after her shoot ended.

To Jim, Kimberly was an enigma. Even while she
flirted with him over coffee, she had offered to talk to Linda on his behalf
and reminded him of Jeff’s offer. However, Linda had been clear about how she
felt and Jim definitely needed a break from their drama. He had smiled and
shook his head. He gave Kimberly a simple “no,” while inside his head his mind
shouted, “Hell no.”

Kimberly had returned Jim’s smile and gave him
her cell phone number in the event that he changed his mind on either
proposition. He left the resort wondering if the cell phone number might be a
third, unspoken deal.

Jim slowed as he approached the accident from the
northbound lanes and killed the Charger’s siren. He saw the rear end of a
silver Corvette protruding from the back of a tractor-trailer.

“Okay, that can’t be good,” Jim said.

He made a U-turn at a median crossover a short
distance beyond the accident. Coming back around, he stopped the Charger next
to the rear end of the trailer. He notified dispatch that he had arrived,
grabbed his campaign hat and flashlight, and stepped out into the still warm,
South Florida night.

Placing the hat on his head, Jim walked around to
the rear of the Charger. He pulled out several flairs from the trunk. One by
one, he dropped them in a taper, blocking the lane behind his car. He stood
still for a moment looking at the Corvette.

The force of the impact had left the Corvette’s
cockpit flush against the bottom of the trailer. Broken safety glass and parts
from the windshield frame littered the asphalt. The trailer was old and it
looked as if the under ride guard had failed completely, allowing the trailer
to swallow two-thirds of the Corvette.

Jim squatted next to the driver’s door. The
door’s cracked fiberglass panel bulged slightly where the impact had bent the
frame. Jim tried the door anyway. It did not budge.

 Although the crash had killed the Corvette’s
engine, small noises emanated from the engine compartment as damaged and broken
parts cooled. Jim reached out with his flashlight and tapped the driver’s door.
He listened for a moment and tapped the door again.

“Hey, anybody in there?”

Nothing. Not that Jim expected an answer. He was
not looking forward to what he would see when they pulled the Corvette out. The
sirens of the EMS vehicles screamed from the south coming up from Naples. Their
lights flashed in the darkness. A man walked toward him from the front of the
tractor-trailer. He looked to be somewhere around sixty, maybe a bit more,
medium height, with a worried look on his face.

“I am Pedro de la Garza,” he said. He pointed
toward the front of the tractor-trailer. “That is my truck parked in front of
the semi. I have two workers with me. They are sitting in the truck, but they
were asleep when the accident happened.”

Jim had a knack for sizing people up quickly and
he was seldom wrong. De la Garza looked to be a working man with an honest, if
worried, face.

“You saw the accident?”

Pedro nodded as Jim pulled a small notebook and
pen out of his shirt pocket.

A county heavy-rescue fire truck, followed by an
ambulance, passed by and then turned back south at the crossover, two hundred
yards beyond the accident. The EMS vehicles pulled up behind Jim’s car,
avoiding the flares. Six firefighters jumped from the rescue truck and two
ambulance EMTs soon joined them. The engineer from the heavy rescue truck
approached Jim.

“We heard this was a bad one.” He shrugged and
looked around. “I don’t see any blood or body parts. Just the one vehicle. Not
counting the trailer, of course.”

“I think it’s bad enough for whoever was in the
Corvette,” Jim said.

Pedro spoke up, “I think there were two.”

As Pedro spoke, a wrecker passed, its amber
lights flashing. It turned around at the crossover and pulled up behind the
tractor-trailer.

“Two? Two people in the Corvette?” Jim asked.

“Two cars. I did not see inside the Corvette.
But, I did see another car. I think they were racing. One passed me on the
left. Very fast. Like a Porsche. I think it was red. The Corvette went to the
right. I guess he didn’t see the trailer.”

Jim looked at the Corvette again. “I guess he
didn’t.”

The wrecker driver approached the trailer and
examined the damage to the Corvette, half talking to the group, half talking to
himself.

“Holy Mother of God. I guess whoever was driving
is still in there. This ain’t going to be pretty.”

Jim spoke to the group, “Better get started. We
need to see who is in there. If it was a race and someone died we don’t have an
accident, we have a potential homicide. Be careful what you touch.”

The wrecker driver went back to his vehicle and
backed up behind the trailer, stopping close to the rear of the Corvette.
Exiting the cab again, he walked around to the back of his rig. He extended the
tow cable and attached it to the Corvette’s rear axle. Fiberglass and metal
scraped together as he manipulated the controls and slowly extracted the car.
The noise overwhelmed the nighttime chatter coming from the underbrush next to
the highway. Pieces of fiberglass and carbon fiber panels, cracked and loosened
from both the impact of the collision and the extrication of the vehicle,
peeled off and fell to the pavement.

The cockpit of the Corvette cleared the end of
the trailer. It was worse than Jim had expected, but surprisingly, there was
only a modest amount of blood. There were two bodies. Headless bodies. The
collision had guillotined the driver and a female passenger when the cockpit
crashed through the trailer’s under-ride guard. The hands of the driver still
gripped the steering wheel. The passenger’s left hand clenched the driver’s
right leg. Jim smelled urine.

Jim raised a fist signaling the tow truck driver
to stop. With the cockpit exposed, the two youngest firefighters turned away
from the Corvette, covered their mouths, and trotted toward the grassy
roadside. Their vigorous retching accentuating their inexperience. The rescue
truck engineer stood across from Jim, next to the Corvette’s passenger door.

“Not much for us to do here.”

Raw meat sat exposed where their heads had once
been. Other than the decapitation, there looked to be little other trauma. As
Jim looked over the Corvette’s interior, something seemed familiar. He studied
the decapitated bodies. The woman had the figure of a swimsuit model. Jim
looked at her lifeless hands — perfectly manicured nails — except for two on
her left hand that had broken off.
Probably not a housewife
.

The driver’s hands held onto the steering wheel
in what was literally a death grip. On his left wrist was a very expensive
watch. Jim had seen that watch before. He walked around to the rear of the
vehicle and did what he should have done sooner. Jim looked at the license
plate. It read DBL HELIX — Jefferson Briggs’ vanity license plate. That meant
the woman was most likely Briggs’ girlfriend, Kimberly. This was a first. Jim
had seen dozens of accidents and more than a few fatalities. However, none of
the dead had been someone Jim actually knew. He quickly strangled his feelings.
Shit.

He reached down, pulled his cell phone from its
holder and dialed. A sleepy voice answered.

“Coroner.”

“This is Corporal Demore, Highway Patrol. We have
two dead at-the-scene, just north of the Naples rest area. A Corvette underrode
a tractor-trailer. Might have been a race. We’re going to handle this as a
vehicular homicide.”

“Alright,” the sleepy voice said. “I’ll let the
Sheriff know.”

Jim recognized the fatigue in the Coroner’s
voice. Labor Day weekend had been tough on the Coroner’s office. Vacationers
and alcohol always led to a bonanza business. It did not look as if they would
be getting much of a post-holiday break. Jim sighed. Neither would he. He
closed his phone and put it away. He glanced at the engineer.

“I could use a little help.”

“Finding their heads?”

“Yeah.” Jim reached for his flashlight. “And
we’ll need something to wrap them up in when we find them.”

The engineer glanced at the wreck.

“Wrap them or scoop them?”

Jim stared at the engineer. He kept his voice
steady.

“Either way, I’d appreciate some help.” Jim
turned on his flashlight.

The engineer gathered up his people. The two
youngest firefighters were rinsing out their mouths with bottled water.

“OK, people,” the engineer commanded, “the trooper
has asked for our help. Grab some flashlights.” Still speaking, he followed his
crew to their truck. “And watch where you step.”