Chapter 25

I was already in a back booth at Lester’s Diner, working on one of their famous fourteen-ounce ceramic cups of coffee, when Sherry walked in. She was wearing her business suit, slacks that covered her prosthesis, and a jacket that covered the 9-mm Glock she carried in a belt holster on her side. Despite everything going on, my first thought was, Damn, she’s pretty, and I told her so when she slipped into the bench across from me.

“Am I?” she said. She has a habit of answering every compliment with that question.

“You’re very beautiful today.”

“Am I?”

“You handled that perfectly.”

“Did I?”

“You’re the smartest woman I know.”

“Am I?”

You get the drill. After our first few months together, so did I.

And today she was the prettiest person in the restaurant. Why I needed to tell her that while my head was spinning with questions about Diane and what the hell to try next was beyond my comprehension.

“You look terrible,” Sherry finally said, bringing me back to Earth.

“Thanks.”

She shrugged, but extended her hand across the table and laid it on top of mine.

Lester’s is an authentic 1950s-style diner with an aluminum railcar look on the outside, and service at the counter on a swivel stool or at vinyl-cushioned booths running down the inside wall. Since the Broward Sheriff’s Office was once housed in a nearby warehouse, the place became a favorite hangout for cops. Sherry liked it for nostalgia’s sake. I liked the coffee.

One of the gray-haired, sixtyish-looking waitresses in a white, knee-length uniform with a yellow apron and a pencil stuck behind one ear came over to take our order. I succumbed to the ranch breakfast special while Sherry ordered only tea.

“Max, it’s ten at night,” Sherry observed after the waitress said, “Comin’ up, hon,” cracking her gum.

“Hey, a man’s gotta eat,” I said, not remembering when I had last done so.

I was now holding Sherry’s hand in mine. We stared at each other in silence for a moment.

“Word at the office is that the feds are reviewing tapes of any traffic cameras that might have caught the Chrysler leaving the warehouse district and then using that as a point of reference in an expanding circle,” she said. “When they get a second sighting, they can use that as direction and try to narrow the search.”

I nodded.

“But it takes a lot of time and eyes-on,” she continued. “Even with unlimited manpower, it could still take hours, maybe days.”

I nodded again. She was preaching to the choir. She knew that I knew all of these tactics and the length of time a search could take.

“If they were smart, they wouldn’t have had to run,” I said, just voicing to Sherry what I’d been thinking since leaving Billy and asking her to meet me. Billy was not a brainstormer, but I was, especially with Sherry, who knew the lay of the land and had the experience to respond in kind.

“They could have stayed tight in a local safe house and waited. Hell, they were safe where they were. I was just lucky getting a tip that paid off.

“Maybe I flushed them,” I said, putting it out there. “Maybe one of the informants let it loose, somehow.”

Sherry reached across the table and took my hand away from my neck. Without realizing it, I’d left her hand lying there on the table. Mine had gone to the scar left by the bullet wound from Philly, my fingers rubbing the slick soft skin where the hole had been. It was an old habit, a tic brought on by stress and anxiety. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d caught myself doing it.

“Max, they’ve got to know that the heat is never going to come off this,” Sherry said. “Everyone will make this their top priority for as long as it takes.” She took both of my hands and cupped them in hers, our elbows making a tepee over the table.

“You don’t mess with a judge, a federal judge, in this country. Just like the state attorney said, we’re scorching the earth on this.”

“Don’t know. Maybe it was taking longer than they’d thought,” I said, still speculating on the kidnappers’ reason for moving. “Maybe their plan was falling apart.”

“If they’ve got a plan,” Sherry said. “Far as I’ve heard, there’s still no ransom demand.”

“What else have you heard?”

When the waitress arrived, we sat back and cleared a space for my late-night breakfast. My appetite surprised me, and I went through the eggs and hash browns while Sherry went through a list.

The feds had sent everything they got from the warehouse to the FBI lab in Miami. They’d already found a fingerprint on the portable toilet left in the room where Billy had smelled Diane’s perfume. If it was hers, good, I thought. If she was still cognizant enough to try leaving those kinds of bread crumbs, maybe they hadn’t hurt her. The feds would run every hair follicle and sweat stain and tossed-away napkin from the Dumpster for saliva and try to make DNA matches. Sherry said they’d already tracked the pickup route for the company that serviced the trash and would start raking through the contents present and past.

“No blood samples,” Sherry said.

I looked up from my last piece of toast with a quizzical look.

“They found sheets and towels and some discarded clothing in the Dumpster, none with blood stains.”

I knew she was trying to give me good news—something to hold on to. And she was right. The lack of any kind of blood was always a good sign.

“You need to rest, Max,” she finally said, and looked over her shoulder to alert the waitress. “You’ve got nothing to run on now. Let’s go home.”

I looked in her eyes and despite my anxiety, the days of no sleep, and the frustration, I went for selfishness and, yes, neediness. We paid the bill, tipping heavily, and went home.

Afterward, we lay in Sherry’s bed with the overhead fan cooling the sweat on our bodies and the aqua light from her backyard pool seeping in through the window and painting the ceiling. Even though her skin was still hot from our lovemaking, she laid her head on my chest because she knew I liked it. I stroked her hair and stared up into the rippling blue light above us.

“Thank you,” I said finally.

“For loving you?”

“For trying to relax me, take my head out of the game for a while.”

“That’s not why.”

“Why then?”

“I was horny.”

“Liar.”

“Yes, but still—did it work?”

“It always works. But the sun still comes up tomorrow.”

“And do we know what it might shine on when it does?”

“We are, as they say, waiting for a break in the case.”

“Didn’t you already create one break?”

“Yes, but the jury is still out on whether it helped or hurt.”

“Juries get to judge after the fact.”

“True.”

We were silent again. Maybe we even dozed a bit, or slept.

My phone buzzed at 6:10 a.m. It was mine, not one of the burners. I rolled over and answered.

“Max, they picked up the Chrysler on a photograph from the tollbooth camera on Alligator Alley going west.”

I am a light sleeper, even when I’m exhausted. It’s an old cop thing. I deciphered the information coming from Billy with barely a blip in concentration.

Alligator Alley is the old name of what is now I-75, which takes you westbound across the state from Fort Lauderdale to just shy of Naples. It was built by a construction company in the late 1960s as a fast two-lane road from west to east coasts. When I-75, which goes all the way to Michigan from Florida, started using it as its main extension from Tampa to Miami, the name was officially changed. It was widened in recent times and the lanes separated because of increased traffic and the fact that when it was a narrow two-lane, head-on wrecks in the dead of night were of epic proportions.

There were two other things I knew about it. One, the far west toll plaza was dedicated to the memory of Edward J. Beck, a toll taker who was murdered on the job in 1974. Two, midway across are entrances to the Seminole’s Big Cypress and the Miccosukee Indian Reservations. Together those Indian-held lands cover more than two hundred square miles of the Everglades.

“Did they catch it coming out at the Beck Plaza?” I asked Billy.

“No. No sign after that. But they could have gone north or south on State Road 29.”

“Right,” I said. Neither of us had to say it—Indians. Why the hell were Indians coming into all of this?

“You have some contacts out there, right, Max?”

“Yeah, in the Glades—one of the best. But inside the tribe is a lot tougher. You’ve got the big business casino boys pulling their ‘privacy of a business entity’ line and on the Indian side they stay behind their ‘we’re a nation of our very own’ cloak. It’ll be tough to crack in terms of search warrants or information coming out if tribal members are involved.”

“I’ve got a legal connection,” Billy said. “I helped with a case a few years ago when one of the tribe’s big names got arrested for killing a Florida panther, a designated threatened species.”

“They said it was a tribal custom,” I said, remembering.

“They came to a mutual agreement,” Billy said.

“Let’s hope they’re as cooperative this time.”

“I’m also working another angle.”

I waited.

“I’ll get back to you, Max. I know you’ll do what you do.”

“Count on it,” I said, and pressed the disconnect button.