Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 9

“Joe D’Angelo,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.” His hand felt rough and dry, his grip firm and confident. His eyes met mine with a directness, an openness, that I found appealing.

“So, you used to work with Mike?”

“Yeah, I was with the DEA. Retired now.” His dark hair had been “styled,” not just cut, and the only bit of gray was at his temples. He nodded his head toward the far end of the dock. “So, what’s going on?”

I shouldn’t have expected any different. One thing I’d learned about cops is that little social niceties often aren’t on their list of acquired skills.

“Yeah, Sey, that have anything to do with your emergency?” Mike asked.

“The boat I said I found?” I pointed toward the body bag. “That’s what was in it. That and a kid, a little girl about ten years old.”

Joe turned away from the scene and looked at me. His features were pinched with concern, and I could not help but notice how light his green eyes were. “The kid, she was alive?” he asked.

“Yeah, bad shape, though. Dehydration, sun. On her way to Broward General right now. Who knows how long she had been out there.”

Joe shook his head. “Poor kid. It always gets to me when there are kids involved.”

“You got kids?” I asked him.

“One. A grown daughter.” He paused and his eyes went unfocused, as though looking at something far away, before he turned to look across the Intracoastal. Without turning back to face me, he said, “I haven’t seen her in a long time. Too long, I guess.”

He stood there, his head turned away, and I didn’t know whether to speak or to wait or to walk away and leave him alone.

“This kid,” he said, turning to face me and coming back from wherever or whatever memory he had traveled to. “She able to tell you anything about what happened to her?”

“Nope. She could barely talk. She’s so thin, she looks like she’s been starved for months, not just days. Hopefully, she’ll be all right, but then, you know how it is.” I shrugged. “She’s Haitian, so as soon as she’s healthy ...” I motioned with my hand for them to fill in the blanks.

“Yeah. It doesn’t seem fair, does it,” Mike said.

“At least she’s lucky you found her,” Joe said, squeezing and then patting my upper arm. I smiled back at him and nodded, not sure whether or not he was flirting with me and not sure whether or not I liked it.

The officers pushing the gurney with the body bag passed within a few feet of us, and one of them nodded at Mike, left the group, and started toward us.

Mike shook hands with the first officer and several others who followed. Most were big men, either in uniform or plainclothes, and they greeted Mike, shook his hand, and patted him on the back. They gathered around their old friend, and the laughter erupted in sharp, loud bursts, but something about their camaraderie seemed forced. They all tried to look anywhere but at the missing leg.

“Hey, Mike,” I said, “some of us still have to work for a living. Think you could move your boat so I can get out?”

He looked up and our eyes met over the top of the heads around him. He didn’t say anything, but there was gratitude in his eyes. “Come on, Joe—” he clapped the other man on the shoulder—“let’s get ourselves some sea, sun, and rum.”

A voice right behind me made me spin around. “That could very well have been valuable evidence, the water you pumped out of that boat.” Collazo had walked up behind me, and he now stuck his face about six inches from mine.

“What are you talking about?”

“Collazo, back off,” Mike said. “You don’t need to pull that bullshit with her. She’s not going to hide anything from you.”

Collazo didn’t break eye contact with me when he said, “Mike, I know you’d never interfere with a police investigation.”

“Hey, Joe,” Mike said, “I think he’s showing off for us.” Both men laughed. “Collazo, remember Joe? He worked with us back around, what was it, eighty-two? On that Northwest Lauderdale Task Force? Oh, wait a minute, you were still on patrol then, right? I forgot. Didn’t recognize you without your radar gun.” Mike and his friend hooted, while Collazo ignored them.

“I had to pump it out,” I said, “or I wouldn’t have been able to tow it in.”

“That’s why you should have called the experts. The water you pumped out of that boat was probably discolored due to the blood from the woman’s body.”

“The water was . . . ,” I started to say. I’d wrung out Solange’s dress, her white First Communion dress, only it wasn’t white anymore. And how long had she been sitting in that bloody water?

“Perhaps there was blood there from her attacker as well,” he said.

“Her attacker?”

He nodded. “It won’t be official until the autopsy, but this wasn’t a drowning. She bled out from her wounds. It looks like that woman died from a blow to the head.”

V

It was almost three o’clock by the time I finished with Collazo and could get back to work. Mike got his engine started, and I threw off his lines. Joe stood at the wheel, handling the controls better than Mike ever did. Considering he had claimed on the radio that he had an urgent need to get back ashore, Joe certainly didn’t look like he was in any hurry now, with a rum and Coke in the cup holder by the helm and a contented smile on his face. I smiled back at him and waved as they pulled away. His need to get back probably had more to do with boredom than an appointment. Some guys just don’t have the patience or the temperament for the slow pace of sailing. Hell, I’d once had a sailor call for a tow because he had run out of ice.

I got Gorda under way and, once offshore, I poured on the speed to get back to Hillsboro. It took me an hour and a half to cover the ten or so miles up the coast. The Gulf Stream usually gave me a little more push than that, but it seemed the current was not running as strong as usual. While en route, I put Gorda on autopilot and pulled out the large-scale chart for the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola. The chart showed the Gulf Stream running at a speed of 2.6 to 3.3 knots at its axis. I thought about Solange and wondered what it was like being alone and adrift, in a boat with a dead woman. How long had she been out there? At the Gulf Stream’s usual rate of drift, they would have traveled seventy-five miles in twenty-four hours, and she looked like she’d been out there even longer than that. But there was just no way I would believe they had come from Haiti in that boat. There were times, like right now, when in certain places, the Stream didn’t always run at full strength. And close inshore there was frequently a countercurrent. My guess was that Solange had been on a larger boat before being set adrift somewhere to the south. Of course the Miss Agnes came to mind, but the timing was off—if she’d been set adrift from that boat, she should have been somewhere up off northern Palm Beach County. If I could find the exact time she got into the small boat, I could calculate the rate of drift and figure out where she started from.

B.J. looked happy to see me as he took my lines to tie Gorda back alongside the crane barge. He had been sitting cross-legged on the deck in the shade, his head bowed over a paperback book, when I pulled alongside. I wanted to freeze- frame the image of him sitting there smiling at me and put it away in a special keepsake box before I ruined it. I’d been doing a lot of that lately.

The Miss Agnes was afloat and nearly sitting on her lines, while the crane’s two huge pumps were spewing water out of her innards.

“So Seychelle Sullivan does it again,” B.J. shouted after I turned off Gorda's engine. The noise from the gasoline pumps still made conversation only marginally possible.

“What do you mean?”

“Out saving the world, rescuing small children, finding dead bodies. Everybody’s talking about it on the radio. Perry and Mike set off a regular gabfest on channel seventy-two.” He pointed to the workers sitting inside the deckhouse. “The guys and I were listening for over an hour while the pumps were working.”