CHAPTER 18

Our morning meeting took just over a half hour. I went over how the scene played out, what Donner and Reynolds had come up with overnight, the agent at the bureau’s take on it, and where we needed to focus our energy. My calls to Minnesota turned out to be fruitless. It seemed as if the twenty-year-old case had long since been forgotten. No one that I spoke with seemed to have much insight, but the captain that I’d talked to took my name and information. He said he’d try reaching out to the detectives, both retired, who’d worked the investigation. Hank and Jones stayed back at the station. Hank said he would contact the San Francisco and Houston police departments where the past bodies had been found. Jones was going to start wading through the missing persons reports covering a wider area. Rick stopped in to the meeting briefly to let us know that they were still working on the cinder blocks and strap. That, and he had found blood in Sanderson’s car.

I drove an unmarked cruiser toward the Ybor Channel. I’d made contact with the port terminal’s main office, and they said that they’d have someone meet me at the terminal at ten o’clock. I held my cell phone to my ear, waiting for the receptionist at the medical examiner’s office to pick up. The phone had rung a good seven or eight times.

“Hillsborough County Medical Examiner’s Office. This is Brenda.”

“Hey, Brenda. I was expecting to get the answering system. It’s Lieutenant Kane. I’m looking for Ed.”

“Sure, Lieutenant. Sorry about the wait. I was on the other line. Let me get you transferred back to his office.”

“Appreciate it,” I said.

I was on hold for just a moment until Ed picked up.

“Medical examiner,” he said.

“It’s Kane. What’s the status on getting whatever scan you had set for our frozen woman?”

“We’re doing it around eleven,” he said. “I’d think that we should have some answers right around lunch.”

“Okay. Do you just want to give me a ring when you know more?”

“That works for me if it works for you,” Ed said.

“All right. Sounds good. I’ll talk to you a bit later.” I clicked off from the call and pulled up to the guard shack. I didn’t see another car waiting. The fence was closed. No one seemed to be coming from the building off in the distance to greet me. I inched the car forward to the call button and pressed it.

“Port Terminal Six,” a man’s voice said, echoing from the small speaker behind a metal grate.

“Lieutenant Carl Kane from the Tampa Police. I’m here to meet with someone about having a look at some security footage.”

“Sure, Lieutenant. Come on up to the main building, and I’ll meet you at the door.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The gates before me bucked and then swung inward, opening.

I pulled the cruiser through the gates and drove across the couple-hundred-plus-car parking lot for the long rectangular blue-and-white building with the big number 6 painted on its side. Through my driver’s side window, I could see both boats from our marine unit anchored in roughly the same places they were when the body was recovered. I figured I’d talk to the guys before leaving the area, though Wolfe had told me that he would call if they recovered anything.

I parked the cruiser in a spot nearest the cruise terminal’s main entrance and hopped out. I could see a short dark-haired man, dressed in a suit, standing outside the front doors as I approached. I had expected someone in a security guard uniform. I reached into my inner suit jacket pocket and pulled out my credentials, not that I thought presenting them was really needed. I normally wore my badge on a lanyard around my neck, but my sister had sent me a nice badge holder for my birthday a month back, and I figured I could at least try it out a few times.

I flipped the leather cover open, exposing my badge. “Lieutenant Carl Kane,” I said from a couple of feet away as I walked up.

“Brenden Nolan,” he said and reached for a handshake. “I’m the assistant to the chief security officer for the port.”

“Good to meet you,” I said and shook his hand.

“The call that came in to the office was that you were interested in looking at some security video.”

I put my credentials away. “That’s correct. I was the one who called the office this morning.”

“Okay. I didn’t get exactly what the TPD was looking for, but I imagine that it has something to do with the police boats in our backyard there?” He nodded toward the channel.

“It does. We’re looking for any footage that covers the waterway.”

“We have cameras in the back that cover the dock. Also some inside the terminal that probably have a view of the water.”

“That works for me,” I said. “You guys don’t have a guard normally stationed here?”

“No,” he said. “The terminal is only staffed when we have a boat coming in or going out. There’s only one line that runs out of this location, so it’s far and away our least busy terminal.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay, well, let’s head inside and upstairs to have a look at some video.”

I followed Mr. Nolan into the building and up a flight of stairs. The interior of the building was similar to an airport terminal, except instead of chairs filled with people waiting to fly, they would have been filled with people waiting to hop a cruise ship and sail the seas. As it was, the building was empty. Mr. Nolan made a right at the top of the steps. I followed him down a stark white hallway until he stopped at a black metal door that had the word Security etched into a plate and bolted to the outside.

Mr. Nolan pulled a set of keys from his pocket and slid one into the dead bolt, unlocking the door. He pushed the door open, and I got a look into the room, which wasn’t much bigger than a home office. A long single desk took up the back wall of the room, with a pair of office chairs tucked in beneath it. A standard looking computer monitor sat on the desk’s surface. Above the desk, four forty-some-inch monitors were bolted to the wall. All four screens were on, and they had four separate streams of footage displayed. My eyes went from one to the next, looking for the Illusion displayed on any of the screens. I didn’t see it. Most of the camera streams showed an empty parking lot and the interior of the empty terminal—though some of the footage did capture the water. I continued to take in the rest of the room—it was standard office fare, consisting of file cabinets, printers, and miscellaneous notes and posters stuck to the wall.

Mr. Nolan pointed me to one of the office chairs, and I took a seat as he did the same.

I pointed up at the monitors. “It looks like you guys have a decent amount of cameras here. Hopefully we can get something.”

“About twenty cameras or so total. So you said we’re looking for footage that catches the channel… When are we thinking?”

“I’d say from yesterday around seven p.m. going back. Yet I would think that this would be something that occurred overnight the previous night.” The time that I gave him was specific to see if we caught the Intrepid or the satellite boat on screen. If we could get them fishing out the body, we’d have the same location as where it went in.

“Okay.” He leaned back in his chair and looked up at his monitors. “I’m guessing cameras fifteen through eighteen will be the ones we’ll want. Let me get them pulled up. What exactly are we looking for?”

“Boats, suspicious activity, anything out of the ordinary.”

“I assume that you’re looking for something specifically, or your police boats wouldn’t be out there with divers.” He paused for a moment. “Are you able to share with me the nature of this request?”

I figured if we found footage of the body going into the water, or the Intrepid and the team pulling the body from the water, he’d know soon enough why I was there. I didn’t imagine that telling Nolan would affect our investigation, yet I’d give him the “discretion” line either way. Plus he’d framed his question about what had happened so nicely. “We found a body in the channel during an unrelated investigation,” I said. “We’re looking for anything related to dumping the body in the water. Discretion with that information would be appreciated by the TPD.”

“Absolutely,” he said. He clicked a few buttons on the computer keyboard and pointed up. Each screen bolted to the wall went full size with coverage. “This is seven o’clock last night. He pointed up at the farthest left screen. I saw the Intrepid, the accompanying boat, and our divers.