part0026

EVAN HAD THREE THINGS to do in Key West. He decided on a decreasing temperature scale to prioritize them. He’d start warm with the house fire location, drop down to frosty at the Key West PD and finish up cold as the grave at the Key West cemetery.

The news article that Crow had found reported that the fire had occurred at a small guest house at the top—or Atlantic Ocean—end of Duval Street, not far from where he’d stayed on his previous visit. The exact address wasn’t given. But the blackened property wasn’t hard to find amongst all the white clapboard bungalows surrounding it.

He parked across the street, stayed sitting in his car. It was immediately apparent that the property was a privately-owned house available as a vacation rental. The owners lived elsewhere, taking advantage of the lucrative rental market. As a result, there was no reception, no staff on site. In the relaxed Key West environment, check-in often consisted of a key left in an envelope for guests to pick up on arrival, particularly if arriving late. There would be nobody on site during the night apart from the guests themselves. Nobody to lend assistance if those guests had already passed out through smoke inhalation.

He waited for a lull in the traffic and pedestrians on the street, then scooted down the side of the house where he vaulted over a low white picket fence into a secluded yard. Dense planting surrounded the small pool and the pool house at the bottom end providing sufficient cover for half a dozen men to hide.

He dropped into a patio chair pushed hard up against the side of the pool house. Even in broad daylight, in its shadow and with the greenery affording almost impenetrable screening, he was all but invisible from the street and neighboring houses. In the dark that invisibility would have been guaranteed. The relentless chirping of the cicadas in the tropical night would have provided an audible cloak to match it.

The blinds on the windows at the back of the house were closed. It wasn’t a problem. What could he have learned from sticking his nose up against the glass? Or breaking in for that matter. Charred furniture and ash in a gutted house wouldn’t tell him anything.

He sat thinking in the chair for a while longer. Arms hanging down at his sides, he tapped a meaningless beat on the underside of the chair with his fingers. The sort of thing that would make anybody sitting in the chair next to him want to throw him in the small pool. But it helped him think, to picture what might have happened. Think perp he told himself. Think like a person who’s prepared to burn a young couple to death.

Like somebody who might have been sitting in this very chair. Somebody getting bored waiting. He stopped tapping the beat on the underside abruptly. Leapt out of the chair like somebody lit a fire under it. Flipped it over.

It couldn’t be coincidence that he’d discovered the same disgusting thing on Winter’s boat. Anybody could have stuck the gum to this chair. A succession of people passed regularly through the house. It wasn’t their chair, what did they care? Let the greedy owner clean it off, do something for the three thousand bucks a week he charged.

That’s all there would’ve been to it—if he hadn’t found a similar piece of gum on the underside of a table on Winter’s boat. Winter sure as hell wouldn’t have done it to his own table, not given how shipshape the rest of the boat was.

The same person had sat in this chair and at the table on Winter’s boat. A person who owned neither the house nor the boat. But who had killed all of the people. The elation he felt at the realization was short-lived, replaced almost immediately by the prospect of what lay ahead, the ridicule that would be raining down on his head very soon.

Coming hard on the heels of Cortez’s rejection of his theory, he doubted he’d fare any better with his tale of the mysterious chewing gum. In its favor, gum is a good source of DNA. Against that was the fact that he’d thrown the gum from Winter’s boat into the sea.

Not wanting to repeat his error, he left it where it was. The visit had been more productive than he’d expected. He toyed with the idea of calling Cortez to see if it would make a difference to her attitude. Then he got a mental image of the captain in his office, the animation in his face and hands as he told Cortez that the case was closed. He decided against it, drove instead to the Key West PD which sits behind a small pond on the corner of North Roosevelt Boulevard and Jose Marti Drive to bang his head against a different brick wall.

‘GUM?’ THE BRICK WALL, aka Detective Deutsch, said, his jaw working tirelessly on a piece of it in his own mouth. A piece that Evan could clearly see by virtue of the fact that he failed to close his mouth when he chewed.

Evan said that he could believe it, listened patiently while Deutsch ran through a few of the more lurid examples. Evan agreed it was shocking, the sort of things people did in the name of a night on the town.

Evan got the impression he wasn’t being taken seriously. So he felt comfortable doing what he did next. He squeezed the piece of gum between his finger and thumb before Deutsch realized what he was doing.

‘Lucky I didn’t stick it to the underside of the chair, eh?’ He held out his arms, wrists together to accept imaginary handcuffs as he said it, eyes full of amusement. ‘Then you’d be thinking it was me.’

Evan had already taken him through the details of Winter’s death. Deutsch, who knew Cortez by sight only and had attempted a man-to-man leer when Evan first mentioned her name, then went to some pains to have Evan admit that no, Cortez didn’t buy his cock-and-bull story either. And yes, it was true that the case was now officially closed.

‘Do you know how many people die in house fires every year?’ Deutsch asked him instead of answering whether he thought there was anything suspicious about the one in his jurisdiction.

‘Two to ten minutes , smartass. It’s not just the fire eating up all the oxygen in the room. There’s hydrogen cyanide and a bunch of other toxic gasses that you’re sucking into your body. So if you happen to be not just asleep but passed out from too much booze and drugs like these jokers were . . .’

Deutsch shook his head continuously as Evan ran through the possibilities. He didn’t bat an eyelid at the mention of the tooth fairy, proving to Evan that not only was he dismissing them before Evan uttered them, he wasn’t even listening.

‘No, nothing like that. There were no bruises or contusions, no ligature marks. Nothing to suggest anything other than they’d overdone it on the booze and weed while they were out and carried on when they got back. At some point they passed out with a joint still smoldering in an ashtray. It got kicked over and whumpf , the whole place went up.’

He then started to inspect his fingernails, never a good sign. Evan should have cut his losses. Instead, he mentioned the gum. He didn’t say anything about throwing the other piece in the sea, of course. He’d already given Deutsch enough to laugh about for one day.

FROM THE KEY WEST PD, Evan drove the few blocks to the cemetery, then drove slowly all the way around it. Covering nineteen acres and with an estimated one hundred thousand people buried there, it houses more than three times the thirty thousand living residents of the island. Established in 1847, it was built on the highest point in Key West after a hurricane wiped out the old graveyard and scattered the bodies the previous year. The final resting place of slaves and Civil War soldiers alike, many of the graves are ornate and above ground as in New Orleans. Amongst the many winged angels is a figure that’s less demure than the rest. On the grave of Archibald John Sheldon Yates sits a statue known as The Bound Woman . Rumored to be his wife Magdalena, she sits nude above his head. Her hands are tied behind her back, her face in distress as she struggles against the constraints of her bonds.

On Passover Lane he saw a house that he was certain was the one in the background of the video. He carried on without stopping, parked further down the street. Then he entered the cemetery on foot. Walking back the way he’d just driven, he stopped opposite the house, pretended to study the grave markers and above-ground burial vaults. He got out his phone and angled it towards one of the tombs as if he was taking a photograph. In fact, he was watching the video, pausing it when the house came into view.

There was nothing unusual or remarkable about it. Nothing to indicate what might have gone on inside it. Something that was so sensitive that everybody who’d come into contact with it, no matter how obliquely, was now dead. There was no way of telling just by looking at it. After what he’d found at the last house he broke into—Robert Garfield’s decomposing body—he wasn’t tempted to repeat the experience.

His mind ran riot with possible scenarios as he stood amongst the graves staring at the house, each more sinister than the last. Now that he was here, he couldn’t decide what to do. Wait a while longer to see if anybody went in or came out? Come back once darkness had fallen? What he really needed was to see the curtains twitch. Or a face at the window. Somebody watching him as he watched them.