Category five, p.4
Category Five, page 4
John Gutierrez was the first person Sheppard had hired for the bureau’s Tango office four years ago, when he was lured back to the FBI by the man who headed up the Southeast division. Cuban-American, he was blessed with hardy genes and a handsome face that women, both gringas and Latinas alike, seemed to find irresistible. In the time that Sheppard had known him, he had been involved with dozens of women, but the latest relationship had been going on for six months now, a record for Goot. The man’s love life was so tempestuous that Sheppard didn’t understand how he had any energy left over to do anything else.
Goot hailed from a family of santeros, practitioners of a Cuban mystery religion that had originated in Nigeria, an amalgam of Catholicism and paganism. Even though he wasn’t a practitioner himself, his exposure to Santeria had made him far more open to Mira’s abilities than anyone else Sheppard had worked with in the bureau. And, of course, it helped that he and Sheppard were also close friends and had spent countless hours discussing the more mysterious parts of life.
“I find it difficult to believe a Hummer did all this.” Goot threw out his arms. “It looks more like a tank.”
“My sentiments exactly. Have you seen the sheriff?”
Goot shook his head. “One of the locals said he’s in the employee kitchen. Probably stuffing his fat face. How many cops are down?”
“Other than Granny Moses, I don’t have any idea.”
Goot went into one of the cells that had been occupied and shone his flashlight around at the woman’s meager belongings. “We have names on these cons?”
“We don’t have anything.” Except a call from Sheriff Doug Emison, asking for help. Sheppard followed him into the cell and while Goot rooted through the woman’s belongings, Sheppard poked around and finally lifted the mattress and turned it on its side.
Several photos were taped to the bottom of it. A color Polaroid showed a man and a woman, who was pretty in a trashy way, with blond hair that was short, curly, and wild. Her thin body was pressed into very short shorts and a tight-fitting blouse that revealed substantial cleavage. She looked to be thirty or thirty-five. The man looked older, early forties, Sheppard guessed, with short, black hair and a movie star smile. In one picture, he and the woman stood on a beach at sunset, arms around each other’s waists. In another photo, they were on a balcony, the woman standing with one hip thrust out provocatively, her laughter almost audible, and the man standing with his arms wide open, as if begging her to come into them.
He flipped the photos over and glanced at the notes on two of them. Billy & me, Bahamas, 1999. Billy & me, St. Augustine, 12/02. The other photos didn’t have anything on the back of them. “Find anything?” he asked Goot.
“Maybe something Mira can read.” He handed Sheppard a Baggie with a pair of earrings in it. “If she’s so inclined.”
“She probably won’t be,” Sheppard replied. “Not with a hurricane possibly on the way.”
“She thinks it’s going to hit?” Goot suddenly sounded worried. “That they’ll upgrade to a warning?”
“She thinks I’m going to be in an accident and insisted I take her van.”
“And because you’re in her van and she’s now driving your car, the event won’t happen?”
“Something like that.”
“You live in a strange world, amigo.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“But what about the hurricane?”
Sheppard didn’t know. He’d left the house before they could discuss it. But he knew there were certain phrases that immediately triggered a Mira Mental List of Things to Do and he was betting that she was going through her list now, especially with Annie pressuring her about evacuating. “I don’t know what Mira feels about the storm.” He told Goot about Nadine, who traveled in the same Cuban circles that he did. “She’s at home, but we don’t know if she can even travel.”
“My abuelita tossed the bones on Danielle last night. She says we’ll get wind and rain, but won’t take a direct hit.”
“Let’s hope she’s right.” Sheppard handed Goot the photos. “I found these under the mattress.”
Goot went through them as Sheppard held his flashlight over them. “So we’re looking for Billy?”
“Who drives a Hummer. Yeah. Maybe. C’mon, let’s go find Emison.”
The sheriff was on the other side of the damaged wall, pacing back and forth across the debris, his cell phone pressed to his ear. He looked to be on the verge of a stroke. He was a short man of perhaps fifty, going soft in the gut, his hairline receding, with the hair he had going gray. A southern cracker through and through, he hailed from the good ole boy school. He and Sheppard rarely saw eye to eye about the often thin line between local and federal investigations, but over the years they had learned that cooperation benefited them both. Even so, Sheppard and Goot didn’t entirely trust the man.
“Shep, John, where’ve you two been?”
His rolling good ole boy twang grated on Sheppard’s nerves. It always did. “In the cell block.”
“C’mon” Emison said gruffly, stabbing his thumb toward the employee kitchen. “We threaded the security images through a laptop. Mira didn’t come with you, Shep?”
“Why would she? You know what time it is?”
Emison glanced at his watch. “Oh. Yeah. Well. I guess I just assumed she would come. We could use some additional input.”
Sure. For free. Everyone wanted psychic input for free, Sheppard thought, even the idiots who professed to be skeptics. Emison had benefited in the past from Mira’s input, but he stuck to the party line. Psychics? There’s no such thing. That was the thing about skeptics. When they needed help, they weren’t skeptics anymore.
“You didn’t ask for her help, Doug.”
Emison spun around, cheeks burning with color, eyes bulging as though he’d been struck in the stomach. “Some maniac roars in here in an armored car, springs two cons, kills some of my people, blows up the Hummer on Vine, and the fire catches onto trees, yards, two homes.… Bet your ass I need help.” He kicked open the kitchen door, marched in there, went over to the laptop that was up and running on the table. He hit a key. “Here’s what we have of what happened.”
Sheppard and Goot watched several minutes of streaming video. The Hummer was impressive, all right, outfitted with metal plates that covered the rear and side windows and all but a slit of glass on the windshield. Even the tires were partially protected by metal plates. There wasn’t a single image of the driver. The only view of the two cons was within the cell block, right after the Hummer had slammed through the walls. But thanks to the swirling dust, the images weren’t clear.
When the video stream was finished, Emison unhooked a memory stick from his belt and inserted it into the USB port on the MacAir. Sheppard never had figured Emison for a tech geek and found it fascinating that the sheriff even knew about memory sticks, much less owned one. And why was he backing up the video stream?
“So what’s with the memory stick, Doug?” Sheppard asked.
“My kid got me into this.” He looked embarrassed. “Whenever I got pissed at Windows trying to back up data on CDs, my son would be laughing. He bought me this for my birthday and convinced me to buy a Mac. Cool, huh?”
Cool. Yeah. Cool, awesome. Weird. Emison just didn’t say words like cool. “Okay, here’re the photos,” Emison said, and brought up photos of the two women—the blonde from the mattress pictures and a mulatto woman. “The blonde is Crystal DeVries. She was arrested six months ago for a federal bank robbery that she committed with this guy…” He hit another key and up came an image of the man in the mattress photos. “Billy Joe Franklin. He got away with five million bucks—the real figure, not what the press reported—and she took the fall. Whole thing happened in broad daylight. DeVries has been in the Tango jail since late February, while Dade’s jail is being renovated.”
Sheppard thought he’d seen this guy’s face before, but couldn’t place the when and the where.
“Who was he before the heist?” Goot asked.
“That’s where it gets mighty interesting.” Emison pressed another key, bringing up a photo of a blond-haired man, surfer type. “Meet William Franklin, weatherman at the National Hurricane Center.”
Bingo. Sheppard often forgot specifics—names, where, when—but never forgot a face. The hair color was different, certain small details had changed, but the face was the same.
“He was mostly out of sight,” Emison continued. “But occasionally they put him in front of the cameras. Five years ago, he apparently didn’t get the promotion he figured he deserved, so he beat up his competition in front of several dozen witnesses. He got fired. He would’ve done time except the guy he beat up dropped the charges.”
“Weatherman to bank robber,” Sheppard murmured. “That’s a significant leap backward.”
“What bank?” Goot asked.
Emison named a federal bank in Miami, but it didn’t ring any bells for Sheppard. No reason it should. He didn’t do banks. “Did DeVries have any priors?”
“Key question, Shep. A juvenile record for B and B. About half a dozen of them. Never did time, though. From around 1995 to 1999, the year that Franklin got canned, she worked for a local Miami TV station as a researcher for the weather department. That’s when she met Franklin. After he got fired in 1999, she lived in Pensacola—and so did he, same address, according to MVD—and in Tallahassee, so did he. Same address.”
“What’d they live on?” Goot asked.
“I’m waiting for IRS and Social Security records,” Emison replied.
“And the mulatto woman? What’s her story?” Sheppard asked.
Emison slipped a pouch of chewing tobacco from his pocket, opened it, pinched a wad between his thumb and index finger, and stuck it in his cheek. Now he looked like an overfed squirrel. “Tia Lopez. Her trial venue was changed from Jacksonville to Miami. She got moved down here in January, because of the Dade jail renovations. Frankly, I think they transferred her here because she spooked the other cons. Arrested for quadruple homicides. The ex-boyfriends, spouses, lovers, pimps, whatever, of her abused women’s support group in Miami. Nine years ago, she was also the primary suspect in the disappearance of her husband, a city councilman. The cops never came up with squat for evidence. After seven years, he was officially declared dead and she left Jax and moved to Miami. He was white, by the way.”
As though that exonerated him of any crime, Sheppard thought.
“Disappearance,” Goot repeated. “What does that mean?”
“What the hell do you think it means?” Emison snapped. “One day he was at work, the next day he wasn’t. In seven years, they never found a body, a weapon, nada. The only thing they had was hearsay that he was abusive.”
“I smell a money trail,” Sheppard remarked.
“You got it. He was worth a couple of mil, courtesy of his family. After he was declared dead two years ago, she moved to Miami with her millions. And not too long afterward, the exes started dying. The court ordered a psych evaluation.”
“And?”
“Well, Lopez is an Andrew survivor. That’s what they call themselves these days. She was one of thousands who wandered through the devastation around the Metro Zoo during the aftermath. She was pregnant at the time, went into premature labor. The baby died, Lopez buried it in the ruins. The court shrink thinks it damaged her.”
Emison uttered this as though he didn’t have a clue why burying your premature newborn in the ruin of Andrew would damage anyone.
“What else?” Sheppard asked.
“She’s very bright, IQ way up there, but self-educated.”
“Does she know Franklin?” Goot asked.
“Nope. She and DeVries were cell mates for a while, then had cells right next to each other?” Emison looked at Sheppard with supplicating eyes, liquid eyes filled with regret, pain, sadness, anger. “Call Mira, will you, Shep?”
“And ask her what, Doug?”
“To help us out.”
Now it was suddenly clear to Sheppard why Emison had called him; he wanted Sheppard to run interference with Mira. “You call her.”
“She doesn’t like me.”
“She doesn’t like me, either. But she knows that I, at least, pay for her services,” said a voice behind them.
A familiar voice. Sheppard turned just as Leo Dillard hurried into the room, all puffed up with his own importance. His face was just as plump as Sheppard remembered, his nose just as crooked, and the mole on the curve of his jaw looked darker. Melanoma? Oops, too bad. His thick white hair looked as though it had been coiffed lately, probably at taxpayers’ expense, and his skinny body was jammed into tight-fitting jeans more appropriate for John Travolta than an FBI bureaucrat.
Dillard was second in command of the bureau’s Southeast division and twelve years ago, during Sheppard’s first stint in the bureau, Dillard had been his boss. He was Sheppard’s immediate boss now, too, but only on paper. It was understood that Sheppard answered to the man who had hired him, Baker Jernan, Dillard’s superior. Dillard lived and worked in Birmingham, Alabama, and Sheppard’s contact with him was mostly through e-mail and an occasional phone call. This arrangement suited Sheppard just fine. He and Dillard didn’t get along. Never had. Never would.
“Well, Leo, what brings you here?”
“One of our Key West agents had gotten a lead on Billy Joe Franklin, so I came down here to help out.”
Uh-huh. And to claim the credit if and when the perp was brought in, Sheppard thought. The one thing Dillard did very well.
“You know about the bank heist, boys?” Dillard asked.
“We don’t do banks,” Sheppard reminded him. “But Doug filled us in.”
Mira usually referred to Dillard as Sheppard’s “karmic cross,” but he felt it was simpler than that. The bad blood had begun twelve years ago in Miami and had gotten worse when Sheppard had been hired to head up the Tango Key office, a job Dillard had wanted. A demotion for Dillard, but Tango was a better place to live than Birmingham. Sheppard suspected that Dillard had envisioned himself whiling away his days on the beach, sipping margaritas and surrounded by babes in string bikinis, all at the taxpayers’ expense.
The bad blood had grown more intense during the black water events of last summer. After Mira and Annie had disappeared, Dillard had tried to remove Sheppard from the investigation. Sheppard was sure Dillard still had questions about what, exactly, had happened during that episode and Shep wasn’t about to enlighten him. Besides, what would he say? It’s like this, Leo. That black water mass was nature’s time tunnel and Mira and Annie went through it, back to 1968. And then I went back to find them.
Right. That would land him in a padded room. And if Dillard ever discovered the extent of Sheppard’s claustrophobia, he would use that against him.
“So, Shep, any chance you can get Mira down here?
These cons vanished into thin air. I’d like to take her over to the spot where the Hummer blew up and go from there.”
“And you’re paying for her time.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course.”
“I’d like that in writing, Leo.”
Dillard snapped his fingers and Emison, dutiful foot soldier, brought up a consultant template on his MacAir, printed it out, handed it to Sheppard. He glanced through it and laughed.
“She won’t do it for this price, Leo.”
He looked indignant, as though Sheppard had said something he found personally offensive. “That’s our usual consulting rate.”
“Good. Then call a psychic nine hundred line. I think the going rate there is three or four bucks a minute. I’m sure you’ll get incredibly valuable information.”
Dillard pursed his mouth. “Look, we don’t have time to shit around here.”
“Then you should have contacted her directly to begin with rather than calling John and me down here under the pretense that you needed our help.”
“But we do need your help.” He gritted his teeth, lips pulling away from them in Dillard’s version of a smile. “In the event that a warning goes up and the cons haven’t been found, we’ll need you boys to check ID for anyone evacuating the island.”
Goot, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, jammed his hands in the pockets of his khaki slacks and said, “Yeah? And where’re you going to be, Leo?”
“Checking ID, helping to set up shelters, going wherever I’m needed.”
Leo Dillard, good Samaritan? Maybe he’d had a religious epiphany since Sheppard had seen him last. Or perhaps the bank was offering a juicy reward if Franklin was brought in and Dillard had figured out a way to cash in on it. Never mind that it would be illegal. Rumor had it that Dillard had big gambling debts and in desperate times, desperate men took desperate measures. As much as Sheppard wanted to believe that Dillard would stoop to something illegal, it seemed more likely that he believed nabbing Franklin would win him a significant raise and/or a promotion.
“But a warning hasn’t gone up and may never go up,” Dillard was saying, his eyes darting toward Sheppard, eyes that resembled beads of water sliding across some grossly dark surface. “So in the meantime, Doug and I need you to convince Mira this is a worthy cause. What fee would she accept?”
“Beats me, Leo.” Sheppard pulled out iPhone and punched out Mira’s cell number. “Ask her yourself.”
Those slippery dark eyes now turned to stone. Dillard regarded the phone as though it were a creature that might take a hefty chunk out of his hand, then he snatched it away. Sheppard tried hard not to snicker.
Chapter 3
Between 1900 and 2000, sixty hurricanes made landfall in the ‘Sunshine State,’ the most direct hits from hurricanes.
National Hurricane Center
It took them a dozen trips from the van to the house and back to unload the supplies Mira had bought at market. Even the dog helped, carrying the lighter packages inside in the hopes that she would get a treat—maybe even a treat for each package.
