Dave nodded. “Probably no fingerprints. He’s a professional knee-breaker.”
I took a step back and gave Dave room to work on Nick. He’d mend in time, the hole in his hand would fill leaving a small scar, but the partial act of crucifixion, impaling Nick to his boat, would forever burn in his heart. He was a proud man, a good man, and Bandini’s soldier had nailed a portion of Nick’s spirit to a wall and left him for dead.
I thought about the Harley that pulled out of the lot when I was talking with Kim inside the Tiki Bar. I played back the license plate number and then filed it in a dark place in my mind that I didn’t like to enter, the attic of the aberrant. It was where I stored old case files from my days as a detective, the profiles of killers I’d hunted. Their faces frozen in time, usually the moment a jury returned a guilty-as-charged verdict. Those images are now like glassy-eyed trophies long-since covered in dust and cobwebs, hanging on the dark inside of my skull, relics of the criminal mind. These were faces I didn’t want to remember but couldn’t forget. It was a shadowy mental hard-drive of stored experiences that taught me how good people can live honorable lives, but evil people exist by cannibalizing the soul of human virtue.
It was time to meet Carlos Bandini.
37
I left Jupiter an hour before sunrise just as a TV news satellite truck was rolling into the marina parking lot. Dave, who was keeping an eye on Nick and Max, was going to drive Nick to a medical clinic for a tetanus shot later in the morning. They’d planned to take a motorized rubber zodiac from Dave’s boat, cross the marina to the lot away from the news media, get into Dave’s car and leave. If the reporters hadn’t seen Nick entering the marina with me earlier, he’d remain anonymous.
Somebody in Carlos Bandini’s camp probably saw our faces on the national news and knew where to find us. And I had a good idea where to find Bandini. Maybe I could locate his hired gun first. He might be in the customized million-dollar bus, sleeping soundly after ambushing Nick. He could be just crawling into bed after drinking and celebrating the pounding he gave Nick and the warning he left for me. Maybe he was no longer in the area, shipped out to another Bandini Amusement playground, imposing the will of the family among its extended clan of thieves.
It didn’t matter. It’s hard to hide when you impersonate the hulk. As Kermit sang so eloquently, ‘It’s not easy being green.’ And it wouldn’t be easy for a knuckle-dragger the size of Nick’s attacker to disappear, even in a carnival with hordes of people and the macabre facade of the shows along the midway.
I drove another mile and turned right into the parking lot of a Denny’s Restaurant. As I drove across the lot, a black Ford SUV with tinted windows entered. I made a splint-second decision to park on the left side of the building, near the delivery entrance. I got out, walked toward the front entrance and went inside. The SUV was parking in the front.
I ordered breakfast from a nineteen-year-old college kid who said he was working here to earn money for the fall semester. He took my order and quickly brought back a plate with three scrambled eggs, turkey sausage, rye toast, potatoes, and a quart of black coffee. As I ate, I caught one man sitting at the counter staring at me, trying hard to place my face. He looked the other way.
I didn’t know whether Detective Dan Grant started his day before 7:00 am, so I sent him a text rather than calling: Dan — can we meet today? Urgent. Something’s come up. I’m at the Denny’s on Palmetto Blvd. - Sean
He responded within seconds: Five blocks away. Be there soon. Order coffee for me.
I was pouring my second cup of coffee when he walked through the door. He slid onto the bench seat across from me and shook his head. “Morning, Sean. I feel like I just saw you. As a matter of fact, I did. Caught a few minutes of Good Morning America, and I see your face, the face of Senator Logan’s wife, and all the commentators are talking about is this ‘love child,’ a daughter you two supposedly had together. One anonymous source offered a million bucks to anyone who knows her whereabouts, or the money goes to the girl herself if she can prove she’s the daughter.”
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to see you.”
“What do you mean?” He poured coffee from the plastic thermos pot the server had left on the table.
I pulled out two Ziploc bags and pushed them toward him.
“What the hell’s that?”
“The bag with the cotton swab has my DNA in it. The one with the folded handkerchief has Andrea Logan’s DNA in it.”
“How’d you get something that usually takes a court order to get?”
“She provided it.”
“Provided it?”
“Look, Dan, Andrea is being vilified by the cable news channels. She’s done nothing wrong. She’s not the first mother who’s given a child up for adoption. She shouldn’t be penalized, nor should her husband, for a decision she made two decades ago that she felt was the best thing for the child. I really need your help. Can you test the samples?”
He looked at me a long moment, sipping his coffee, his face filled with contemplation. “You placed two DNA samples on the table. Where’s the trump card, the DNA of Courtney Burke?”
“I don’t have it.”
“Then you have nothing to match these to.”
“I’ll get it.”
“If you get it, Sean, this’ll mean you’ve come in contact with a woman wanted in connection with the deaths of two men, and a suspect in the deaths of two others. If you find her, and only bring back a DNA sample, if she continues running, you could be charged with aiding and abetting a murder suspect.”
“And I’m hoping that you can prove she didn’t kill anyone.”
“The proof is in the physical evidence.”
“Not always. People are set up to take falls, you know that, Dan. And when did self-defense become a prosecutable offense?”
“We don’t know that she shot Tony Bandini in self-defense. That’s what she told the dwarf, but she didn’t want to stick around to tell the police. So what the hell does that tell you?”
“That she’s a scared kid. Someone who trusts no one.”
“Let’s speak hypothetically for a moment. If we’re talking in ‘what ifs,’ what if you do stumble upon a DNA sample for Courtney Burke. And what if that DNA test is a match, a scientific guarantee that she’s the daughter of you and Andrea Logan? And if Courtney’s arrested and charged with multiple murders, what’s that going to do when you’ve connected the Republican presidential nominee’s wife to a serial killer?”
“But if this girl’s innocent, to keep her off death row, I’m willing to make whatever valid connection I have to.”
“This thing has snowballed into a national, no, an international obsession in the last twenty-four hours. Your coffee shop video’s gone through the roof. Who the hell shot that?”
“Must have been the only other customer in the store. I saw his phone on the table when we walked in, I just never saw him pick it up because I was trying hard to comfort Andrea.” I pulled out a pen and wrote across a paper napkin.
Dan stirred sugar into his coffee. “What’s that, lotto numbers?”
“The tag number to the guy who ambushed, beat up, and left an icepick through the hand of a good friend of mine.”
“What?”
I told Dan what happened to Nick, and he shook his head. “How much does this have to do with you and your pal questioning Bandini’s guys after I did?”
“Some. The prime reason we dropped by the carnival was to see if Smitty was still working there. You told me your team couldn’t find him, and Randal Barnes, of course, denied even knowing him. So we went only after you’d been there. We just happened to see Smitty walk into a porta-potty. Figured it was a fairly small place for a conference, so we made it quick.”