Flashback (39 page)

It was Chief Ranger Arnie Flescher.

"Can you do it?"

"Let's slow down," he said.

Those words, spoken by a superior, usually segued into "No."

Anna made a point to say nothing, not the teensiest little peep that would give away the fact she was not really a team player.

"Cliff and the Activa will be out in a couple days. Why don't you hold off till then? Send the dead boatman's hand in and ID can be done in proper order at the lab. Finding out who these guys were has got to be attempted, but there's no rush on it that I can see."

Anna ran a quick check to make sure no snide words or sarcastic edges tainted words or tone, then said: "I think they may have had some-thing to do with the disappearance of Theresa Alvarez. I found a picture of her and the man Bob tried to rescue."

"Disappearance? I thought she ran off. Is this the guy she ran off with? We don't want to get a thick finger stirring in the domestic pot."

"Maybe she didn't run off."

"I don't want to hear this."

"How was it decided she'd run out on Lanny? Who said that? Lanny?"

There was a jumble of words as the chief and she talked over one another, forgetting the one-second wait the phone system levied.

"I don't know," the chief said at last. "It was just sort of known the way those things are."

"If she ran off she didn't take much with her and, according to her aunt, never showed up anywhere."

"Nope. Didn't want to hear that. Check it out."

"That's what I need your help with."

Several ticks of the big wall clock went by, the red second hand seeming to pause to gather its courage before each jump. "This is news," the chief said. His voice was sufficiently neutral Anna guessed he was pissed off. Chief rangers-the good ones-do not like being kept in the dark.

"I just saw the picture," Anna said. "And I talked to Mrs. Alvarez only a few minutes before I called you. I mean, I'd seen the photo before, but I didn't recognize the guy till just now."

Probably because he wanted results, he didn't question her story. "Okay," he said after a bit of thought that came at Anna in edged silences. "Here's what you do. No guarantees. It depends on how good the prints you lift are. The submersion in water may be a help. It sort of puffs things up."

Though the instructions were short and simple, Anna wrote them down. She had no intention of screwing this up.

Finally free of the phone, she collected her fingerprinting kit and returned to the researchers' dorm. As she turned the key to let herself in. she had the sudden and horrible thought that the hand, her only way of finding out the identity of the man blown to smithereens on the green Scarab, would be gone. In her naivet‚ she'd not secured the body parts, not even thought of them as evidence and had made no effort to lock them up. Anyone at the fort could easily get the key to the dorm if they didn't already have one.

Her fears were unfounded. Sitting in the refrigerator, palm up in lonely supplication, was the most important remaining part of what had once been a human being. Having had his penis severed, the victim might not have agreed with her assessment on the varying levels of importance, but there were no national data banks for finding matches to penis prints.

From the rough and disengaged life these five fingers had suffered, the skin was perilously loose, and Anna handled the thing with extreme care. Using black ink, she would print only the thumb. Her knowledge of how printing worked after death and submersion was sketchy at best. Should her method somehow destroy the skin of the thumb, she wanted to leave the other four fingers for a technician more schooled than she.

Had the hand been newly dead, firm of flesh, she might have lifted the print on sticky tape. As it was she feared the tape would pull away flesh as well as ink. When she gripped the back of the hand to roll the thumb, she had a bad moment. Till then the hand had been merely an object of study. Feeling the give of the flesh, the familiar bone structure beneath, it reverted to a macabre chunk of a once-living person. Revulsion would have had her throw it away with a girlish shriek. Closing her eyes, she let the impulse pass, then carefully rolled out three prints. The first two were smudged. She'd used too much ink. The last was good.

Because it seemed wrong not to do so, disrespectful or at least untidy, she gently wiped the digit free of ink before restoring it to its temperature-controlled sarcophagus.

Following the chief ranger's instructions, she scanned the print into the computer and e-mailed it to the man he'd recommended at the FBI office in Miami. Chief Ranger Flescher had worked with the agent a time or two and knew the man to be an avid diver. Anything that helped keep the park pristine he was glad to do.

Anna also faxed him a copy, though the final printout probably wouldn't be clear enough to read.

Mission accomplished, she returned to her station at the phone. Ironically, never a big fan of telephones, she had spent a good bit of her life on them. Molly, whom she saw once a year if she was lucky, stayed close in mind and heart over the phone. The last semiserious relationship she'd had with a man-an FBI agent now married to her sister-had been conducted largely over the telephone. Still, she hated it as a woman on life support might come to detest the tubes and pumps that kept her among the living.

Knowing herself destined to live with this love/hate relationship for many more years, Anna dialed Manny Silva, Lieutenant Henriquez's contact in the coast guard. Her run of luck was at an end. Silva was out. She left a message on his voice mail and went home. Fortified with an egg-salad sandwich and a coke, she hurried back toward the office.

It surprised her that the day was still gray, that the wind still blew. Crossing the parade ground, a few spatters of rain hit her face. Anna loved wild weather and threw her arms out as if to catch it. Wind made her crazy, like a cat in autumn leaves. An exhilarating sense of expectation. A hurricane would have been grand. The thought engendered a stab of guilt. Not all that many years ago Hurricane Andrew had devastated the town of Homestead. Park employees living there lost everything. Most didn't stay to rebuild but scattered to parks across the country. The demoralizing effect had been felt by the entire service.

Still and all... a hurricane would have been grand.

Having checked the answering machine to satisfy herself that she hadn't missed Manny Silva's call, she settled down with the old crossword puzzles.

Puzzles were done. Anna knew way more than she'd ever wanted to concerning what the paper in Key West considered news. Finally, the phone deigned to ring.

It wasn't Manny. It was Agent Tad Bronson of the FBI office in Miami. Before he would give Anna any information, she was forced to pay for it by talking dives and fishes and wrecks for a quarter of an hour. By bringing to bear what rudiments of southern hospitality she'd picked up in Mississippi, she managed not to snap, "Cut to the chase" even once.

Finally her patience was rewarded. "But I guess we've frittered away enough of the taxpayers' money on blue water. You'll be wanting to know about your fingerprints. Where'd you find this guy anyway?"

Anna paid another installment on the coveted information by telling Tad of the explosion, dives and body parts recovery.

"Well, we got a match on your boy," he said when she'd answered half a dozen questions on gear, water clarity and scavenger fishes.

'Bout goddamn time. "What did you turn up?"

"Guy's name is Ramon Diego, born in Cuba, came to the U.S. at the age of twelve with his mother. Became a citizen at twenty-two. No wants, no warrants. His prints were on file because he and his mom entered the U.S. illegally. Mother and son were kept in a holding area by immigration for a couple of months. That's where his prints got into the system."

"Anything else on him?" Anna asked.

"Nope, he lived a good clean life since coming to the promised land. No trouble. He hasn't gotten so much as a DUI, according to the records. I do have the DOB. According to his birth date, your guy would have been forty-three day before yesterday."

"I hope the fishes blew out the candles before they ate him," Anna said.

"What do you want this guy for?"

"I don't know yet," she said truthfully. "But he was up to something." Anna promised him the rest of the story next time he came to the park to dive, and he allowed her to disconnect.

Leaning back till two chair legs left the floor, Anna put her feet on Lanny Wilcox's desk. Thought came more easily when the body was disconnected from the earth. Two guys on a go-fast boat. One probably knew Theresa Alvarez. No ID on him yet. Prints probably not in the system. A tattoo supposedly favored by smugglers. The other guy on the boat was a Cuban refugee-become-U.S.-citizen. Given his age, he would have lived in Cuba around the time Castro threw out the landowning Americans, including William Macintyre's parents. Anna didn't know Mack's age. His skin was so sun-damaged it was impossible to tell. If he were younger than he looked, it was possible he'd met Diego either in Cuba when he was a little boy or in the refugee holding area in Florida.

She put her feet back on the floor. Too much speculation with too few facts. Nothing suggested Mack knew the men killed on the green boat, only that he knew Theresa and that she knew one of them.

Picking up the phone, she began punching in Manny Silva's number at the coast guard office. The receiver hadn't even cooled off completely from her last call. Thinking she'd probably end up with some bizarre fungus caused by holding damp plastic against her ear for too many hours, she settled in to listen to the rings, leave another message if need be.

"Manny Silva."

"Hallelujah."

"I beg your pardon?"

Manny Silva sounded like a parody of the generic midwestern radio announcer. His voice held none of the salsa or music implied by the name. Anna missed it, while being glad communication would be facilitated.

Explaining her outburst would be a waste of time and she couldn't think of any way to do so that wouldn't carry the insult of implying he should have gotten back to her sooner.

She let it pass, introduced herself and reminded him that she was the lady who'd sent him the boat engine registration number by way of Lieutenant Henriquez.

"Yes. Yes. We did get something on that. Hold, please."

Anna would have given up coffee for a week to see this man. He didn't say "yeah" it was "yes" and his voice was so neutral and careful she pictured him looking more like a Bob Johnson and suffering mild embarrassment that a warmer-blooded ancestor had saddled him with a name he couldn't live up to.

"Here. I was going to call George with this. I didn't know there was a rush on it." He left a short silence for Anna to apologize and tell him there was no rush.

She'd taken against his voice and said nothing.

"The boat was bought from the manufacturer by Eurico's Marine Supply in Miami. It was purchased new in May of this year."

"Anything on who Enrico's sold it to?"

"Inquiries were made, but Enrico's was not forthcoming."

Manny Silva was not particularly forthcoming himself.

"Could you run it from the other end? If I gave you a name could you see if he had a boat registered anywhere in Florida?"

"Not everyone registers, licenses or even names their boats for a variety of reasons, not all of them criminal, but yes, I can do that."

"Ramon Diego," Anna said and waited. The faint clicking of fingers on a keyboard passed the time. Manny evidently was not one to give out progress reports or make small talk.

"Nothing. Many Diegos. No Ramon Diego."

"How about boats reported stolen?"

"No. We ran that automatically. Only one Scarab was reported. It was last year's model and cherry-red in color. I suppose it could have been repainted and the year written down wrong."

"I'll check into it," Anna said but she wouldn't. She'd pawed through enough smithereens of the blasted boat, she was certain she would have noticed if there'd been a coat of red paint beneath the green.

She appreciated he'd wasted none of her time with chitchat and thanked him with a degree of genuine sincerity.

Her investigation had reached a dead end. On her lieu days she could rent a car and drive up to Miami to question the people at Enrico's, but it would be a waste of time. If they weren't telling the coast guard, they certainly weren't going to tell her. With no crime but dying in a boat not your own, she was nowhere near getting a subpoena.

For a while she sat like a lump, thinking of nothing at all. There were things she could do: check out the boat Patrice had reported, start writing the reports on Bob's injury and the loss of the Bay Ranger. None of the options struck her as entertaining. Sitting in a dim air-conditioned room with the phone to her ear had sapped her of motivation. A nap sounded good.

Three fifteen. The day was about shot anyway.

There was another call she could make, Anna realized. It was based on a hunch, but an informed hunch. The pieces she'd collected came together. Mack-William "Mack" Macintyre-and Theresa met in the Cuban neighborhood in Miami where they had grown up.