John Puller 02 - The Forgotten Read online

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. You know this town better than I do.”

  “There’s nothing special about Paradise in the crime department. In fact, before this last wave of violence we were pretty clean.”

  Puller glanced at Carson.

  Bullock caught his look and said, “You know something I don’t?”

  “People disappear here?” asked Puller. “Disappear? What the hell do you mean? Spontaneous combustion?”

  “Do they live here one day and then they’re gone the next?”

  “Missing persons? No. We don’t get much of that.”

  “How many folks here are undocumented illegals?” asked Carson.

  “This is a beach town on the Gulf. Unprotected border. Tourist destination. Cheap labor is important.”

  “Meaning you have a lot of undocumented,” said Puller.

  “I wouldn’t say a lot.”

  “But if they went missing you wouldn’t necessarily hear about it. I mean, folks might not report it.”

  “I guess they might not. But what are you getting at?”

  “When I find out I’ll let you know.”

  Landry said, “I’ll fill you in, Chief. Some kids are missing. We have an APB out on them.”

  Before Bullock could react to this, Puller hefted his duffel over his shoulder and looked at Carson. “You ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “You just gonna leave it at that?” said Bullock. “I came down here to find out why my aunt died. I intend to finish that mission.”

  “And all the other stuff that’s going on?”

  “If it’s connected to what happened to my aunt, then that too.” He motioned with his hand to the bed. “You might want to get them out of here. The smell is only going to get more unpleasant, especially in this heat.”

  Carson followed him out as Bullock stood in the middle of the room looking at the dead men.

  Puller loaded his duffel into the Tahoe and climbed into the driver’s side while Carson got in the passenger seat. Landry hurried up to them. “Are you heading out?” she asked.

  “For now, yeah. You getting the elimination prints done?”

  “Organizing it right now.”

  “Let me know when you find out anything about the two stiffs. They weren’t down here for a vacation.”

  “I will.”

  Landry glanced at Carson and then back at Puller. “You have time to get together later?” Puller licked his lips and felt the heat rise to his face. “That’s a possibility. I’ll give you a call.” Landry looked like she’d been slapped and she glanced once more at Carson. “Are you at the Gull Coast?”

  At first Puller thought she was asking him, but then it became clear she wasn’t.

  Carson said, “Yes. Just checked in.”

  “I assume you’re down here on vacation.”

  “I am.”

  “Then you might want to try a place closer to the beach. The Gull is a long walk. And you don’t want to miss any rays.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said curtly and then turned and stalked off.

  Carson said, “Am I interrupting something?” Puller put the Tahoe in gear and backed out of the space. “No,” he said.

  “Okay. Where are we going?”

  “You want to hit the beach?”

  “Is that what you want to do?” she asked, looking surprised.

  “No. But I’m here working. You’re not.”

  “I’m not a sun worshipper. And I’m here because you’re here, so let’s get to work.”

  “All right.”

  “So where to?”

  “Where it all started. My aunt’s house.”

  CHAPTER 61

  “ What are you looking for?”

  Carson was staring at Puller, who was searching through his aunt’s closet.

  “Things that aren’t here.”

  He went back outside, dug through his duffel, and pulled out the stapled pieces of paper, rifling through them. He counted down the items on the list and nodded his head.

  “Breakthrough?” asked Carson.

  “You could say that.”

  Puller slid the papers into his pocket and stared over at Cookie’s house. Yellow police tape was still up, but there was no police cruiser parked out front. They were probably over at the new crime scene at the Plaza.

  “John, what’s going on?”

  “Just trying to piece something together.”

  “About the murders?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  She followed as he walked over to Cookie’s house and through the gate into the backyard.

  The house was dark.

  The door was locked.

  Ten seconds later the door was no longer locked.

  “Army teach you that?” whispered Carson over his shoulder as he eased the door open.

  “Army taught me a lot of things. Most of them useful.”

  She followed him inside.

  “While I’m here I might as well get some stuff for the dog,” he commented.

  He opened some cabinets in the kitchen, found the doggie supplies, and piled them in a plastic bag he pulled from the recycling bin next to the pantry door.

  “So you just came for the dog stuff?” asked Carson.

  Puller didn’t answer. He went over to the cabinet housing Cookie’s watch collection. He counted off again.

  “This is getting to be a little tiresome, Puller,” Carson said, a bite in her tone.

  “Just trying to add up the pieces before arriving at a course of action.”

  She looked at the watches. “And those figure in all this somehow?”

  “They figure in something. But we’ve got one more place to check.” He looked at his watch. “It’s still too early yet. We’ve got some time to kill. Let’s take a drive.”

  “Where?”

  “Not where, really. More like how far. Five miles.”

  They left Cookie’s house and climbed back into the Tahoe. Puller checked the rearview.

  “See the two guys anywhere?”

  “No, but I didn’t expect to, really.” He looked at his odometer. “Okay, five miles out, five miles back. We’re going to head east. At least that seems to be the direction based on what Jane Ryon told me.”

  They left Orion Street and then the community of Sunset by the Sea. Three miles out they left any semblance of civilization behind. Four miles out it was only them, the sand, and the ocean.

  Five miles out Puller stopped the truck and looked around. They were on the main street. To the north looked busier, with some buildings visible in the distance. To the south was a row of palm trees.

  “The ocean has to be on the other side of those trees,” said Puller.

  “Provides a natural screen from the road,” observed Carson.

  They pulled down a side road and quickly found that beyond the trees was a section of thick brush, more trees, and some surface roads running through them.

  And then the sand.

  And then the ocean.

  Puller swung the Tahoe to a stop on an asphalt park-off and they climbed out. He looked in all directions except toward the ocean.

  “Pretty isolated here,” he said. “No people.”

  “I wonder why?” asked Carson. “The beach looks pretty enough.”

  They walked toward it and quickly found out why the beach was not very popular. The sand was gritty, the beach was covered with sharp rocks, and then there was the smell.

  Carson covered her nose. “Sulfur.”

  “Must be some geological quirk around here that makes this stretch of beach the way it is. And then there’s that.” He pointed at the large sign erected on a dune.

  It read, Warning. Strong riptide. No swimming allowed.

  “So not all of Paradise is a paradise,” said Carson.

  “I think we might have left Paradise about a half mile ago. Not sure what this place is called. Maybe it
’s nothing.”

  “It’s a wonder that sulfur smell doesn’t foul up the other beaches.”

  “Wind probably doesn’t carry it that far,” said Puller. “Or there might be some sort of meteorological reason. I didn’t smell the sulfur until we got near the beach.”

  “Me either, come to think of it. But why in the world would your aunt come here?”

  “I don’t know. She was old, disabled. Used a walker.”

  “So walking on a beach like this would be problematic. I’ve almost fallen twice.”

  They stopped and looked around.

  Puller fixed his gaze directly out at the ocean. “Any shipping channels out there?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s the Gulf of Mexico. I would imagine there are lots of ships coming and going. And then there’s all the oil drilling platforms.” “Right. Like the one that popped and kept spewing oil for a long time.”

  “I remember when the BP well burst open. J2 was tracking it for security reasons. And we did some background on the area. There are thousands of oil platforms out there. Most of them are concentrated off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. But some extend over into the Panhandle.”

  “Oil is king.”

  “At least for now, yeah.” Carson bent down, picked up a chunk of rock, and tossed it into the waves. “Can we go? I’m about to puke with this smell. And I’ll need a shower to get the stink off.” “A lot of smells more gross than this in the military,” said Puller dryly.

  “True. But that doesn’t mean I have to endure them when I’m on vacation.”

  They walked back to the Tahoe. Before they got in Puller stopped and knelt down.

  Carson said, “What is it?”

  “The king.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She walked around to join him.

  He ran his finger over the asphalt and it turned black. He lifted his finger to his nose and looked up at her.

  “Oil. Not from a platform. From a vehicle.”

  CHAPTER 62

  Mecho walked the lawnmower up the ramp of the truck and positioned it next to two other pieces of motorized equipment. He turned and stared back out across the Lampert estate. He didn’t know how much the man spent on landscaping, but it must be a lot. They had come every day and worked all day. When one part was done it was time to move on to another. When the cycle was complete it started over again.

  When he had asked the foreman about it the man had just shaken his head and muttered, “He spends more on grass than I’ll make in my entire life. What’s fair about that?”

  “Life is not meant to be fair,” Mecho had told him.

  “You got that right,” the man said. “Life is meant to suck. Unless you’re rich.”

  “There are things other than money,” Mecho said. “To bring happiness.”

  The foreman smirked. “Keep telling yourself that. You might actually start believing it.”

  “I do believe it,” Mecho had said after the man walked off.

  Mecho climbed down and washed the back of his neck with cold water from a bucket carried on the truck. He glanced toward the yacht. Lampert had never come back off it. He had been on there most of the day. But then again, when you had a yacht like that why would you get off?

  Then Mecho wondered if he were there by himself. He doubted it.

  He knew that Chrissy Murdoch was not there. He had seen her go into the house.

  The maid Beatriz had not gone out there either.

  But there were other women here. And one could have arrived directly at the yacht from the waterside via a tender and Mecho would not have been able to see it. The yacht blocked the water view along its full length.

  Mecho looked back over at the guesthouse and then at the remains of the Bentley. The police had finally left, apparently having exhausted the evidence remaining at the crime scene.

  Actually, they would not find any, because he had not left any. If they were looking for a bomb signature they would not find one. He had gone totally generic on that. It would provide them with a thousand possible paths to go down with nary a viable prosecution case at the end of any of them.

  He looked up in time to see the sun reflecting off something in an upstairs room of the main house. He immediately walked in the opposite direction, took cover behind a tree, and knelt down, ostensibly to look for weeds to pull or mulch to tidy up.

  From the partial cover provided by the tree canopy he looked up, shielding the sun’s glare with one of his huge hands. He counted windows. Third floor, second window from the left. Southwestern side of the house.

  He squinted to see if he could tell who was holding the optics. But he couldn’t make out the person.

  He ran a sightline from the window to what the person was looking at.

  It was a simple process and yielded a simple answer.

  The yacht.

  With decent optics and from that height the person could probably make out quite a few details on the boat. Which also meant the person was well ahead of Mecho when it came to recon.

  He saw Beatriz come out again.

  Mecho moved swiftly enough to intersect her path. He walked along with her for a few paces. He asked the question that he needed answered.

  She didn’t seem to want to, perhaps thinking he was casing the place for a later burglary. But finally she did tell him.

  Mecho thanked her and said that he would try to help her.

  “How?” she immediately asked him.

  “I can get you out, perhaps.”

  “You cannot do that,” she replied, her face turning as pale as her almond skin would allow. “My family.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

  “It is not complicated,” she whispered back. “Do not do anything to help me. I am beyond help.”

  She turned and rushed off.

  Mecho looked around to see if this conversation had engaged the interest of anyone, security types or otherwise.

  He could see no one paying them any attention.

  They were merely servants conversing. Perhaps it was expected.

  Class to class.

  It was only when you tried to mingle outside your class—steerage passengers emerging on the main decks during daylight hours—that people became upset.

  But she had told him what he needed to know.

  The room with the optics belonged to Christine Murdoch.

  She was the one spying on Lampert and his yacht.

  And Mecho wondered why that was so.

  CHAPTER 63

  Peter Lampert sat back in the leather chair that was located in his private office on Lady Lucky. He was surrounded by only the best here. The best boat, the best equipment, the best crew, the best wine, the best views, and the best ass money could buy.

  It had been a long slog for him, though. South Beach was a rough place to survive, much less build a successful business. Lampert had tried the legitimate side for a long time. But ultimately he found it too stifling with all its rules and regulations and laws that could trip you up. He did not like regulatory agencies looking over his shoulder. He didn’t know of one businessman who did.

  After his hedge fund had imploded he had decided to build a different business model. Thus he had taken his talents to another line of work. He had installed proven business systems in a field that often existed on crude violence and sketchy accounting.

  Now he had built an incredibly profitable empire by charging fees tied to profitability, like royalties on a book. He charged a standard fee up front to find and transport product to the end user. If the product hit certain benchmarks once deployed in the field, additional monies started to flow back to him.

  If a prostitute reaped over six figures then monies started to come back to him. If a drug mule successfully completed ten missions, monies started to flow back to him. The lowest- level product, the common laborer, typically had a more modest threshold to meet because their initial cost was the least. But the pr
ofits generated by them added up because there were so many of them deployed in the field. Volume was volume.

  Slave labor in civilized countries was one of the fastest-growing segments of the criminal world. Not that he ever saw anything remotely criminal about it. To Lampert he was doing these poor folks a favor. As slaves they were fed and housed and lived a decent life, despite the fact that they were not free.

  He had often had these people taken from worlds where there was never enough to eat, never a roof over their heads, and where wages were something one dreamt about but never actually received.

  Freedom was vastly overrated in his mind.

  He had accountants placed in strategic areas with full access to the books of his business associates. These associates, often not the most cooperative of men, had fallen in line with his demands solely because he had made the business far more lucrative and stable than it ever had been before. And he guaranteed a steady stream of product across all service lines. That was the most critical factor in his business and it demanded constant foraging for bodies in some of the most remote places on earth. There was no margin of error in this segment of the business.

  As a result a boat that was late with product was a boat that would not be sitting above the water much longer, along with its captain and crew.

  He looked out the starboard window and checked his watch. Then he glanced back at the computer screen over which a stream of business data poured over secure networks.

  He played hard, but he also worked hard. It was not easy building what he had. Most people would not have the nerve or stomach for it. He had been bom with a silver spoon in his mouth on the shores of Lake Michigan. His father had been CEO of a Fortune 500 company. His mother was a beautiful socialite who entertained often and lavishly at their multiple homes. They had lived the life that most Americans dreamed of.

  He had gone to the most elite universities and set up shop on Wall Street along with a gaggle of his classmates. Many were now titans of industry and preferred to keep the money and influence that came with it in tightly controlled circles of people who were just like them. Upward mobility was nice to talk about to the masses, but not something that people at his level ever really took seriously. The pie was only so big. Why share it with folks who did not share your values?