The Cursed Page 3

  Oddly, though, despite the small size of the office—or perhaps because of it—his was in an interesting position. Agents here worked closely with the Coast Guard, the city police, the county sheriff’s office and the U.S. Marshals Service—all because of Key West’s location, accessibility and...unique nature, its strange atmosphere. It was a crazy place to call home, but it was his crazy place. The island had a long and checkered history. It had provided a stop for pirates, a haven for wreckers, a hard passage for Confederate blockade runners and now it offered access for smugglers bringing everything from illegal drugs to refugees into the country.

  He’d grown up here—grown up most of the way, anyway. In his heart, it had always been home.

  And now he was back.

  “I’m taking on just about anything, Dirk,” Dallas said. He glanced over at Liam. He was here now, and so quickly, thanks to Liam. When they’d been kids here on the island, they’d been best friends. Then Dallas’s father had been offered a civilian position with the FBI, and Dallas had only been back for a few nostalgic vacations now and then since those long-ago years.

  But, he decided, for a pair of kids who had spent a few evil days torturing tourists on ghost tours and stealing beers from the unwary in a multitude of local bars, they’d turned out okay. And they were still friends who respected and trusted each other, something that was all-important right now.

  “We may have the best liaison system going just about anywhere,” Liam said to Dirk. “We have to. The island’s so small that every agency is understaffed, so we’ve got to work with each other. No other choice,” he said.

  “If you ask me, the Key West cops do a damned good job,” Dirk said.

  “They do,” Dallas agreed. “But sometimes cases overlap.”

  “Sure. I get it,” Dirk said, nodding. “The murder happened in Key West, but the victim could be from another state. He might have been smuggling drugs, or...hell, the U.S. Marshals Service might have had a warrant out on him.”

  Or, Dallas thought—because he knew—he might have been an officer of the law. Either way, I intend to get his murderer.

  He didn’t say so, though. Not yet. “So, are we looking at the obvious cause of death?” he asked.

  “Throat slit. But the killer only nicked the major bleeder,” Dirk told them. “That’s why he didn’t bleed out immediately. I’m thinking that since he made an appearance in a yard at about 3:00 a.m. he must have been attacked a few minutes earlier. Body temp and rigor mortis agree with that timing. The blood loss would have disoriented him. I have tissue and blood samples out now for toxicology tests, so I’ll be able to tell you more.”

  “Damn idiot. Why was he stumbling around in that yard?” Dallas asked, speaking to himself as much as to Liam and the M.E. “If he’d gotten help...”

  He immediately regretted the passion he’d allowed to enter his voice. The M.E. looked at him strangely, as if aware there was more here than met the eye.

  “I don’t think he could have been saved unless the damage had been done right smack in the middle of an emergency room,” Dirk told him, setting a hand on his shoulder. For an M.E., he seemed to have a decent sense about the living. He asked quietly, “You know him? The local boys were really good about protecting the crime scene, and they checked for identification first thing but came up empty. We’ll take fingerprints, of course, and run them through the system. If he’s got a sheet of any kind, anywhere, we’ll find him.”

  “You’ll match them,” Dallas said, looking over at the body. The dead man was Jose Miguel Rodriguez. Dallas had met him briefly once or twice; he’d been an extraordinary agent. Working undercover, he’d done a great deal to stop drug traffic into the South Florida area. Dallas had been due to meet up with Rodriguez the next day on the beach by Fort Zachary Taylor. “But not because of a rap sheet. And when you do ID him, make sure to keep his name and affiliation confidential among law enforcement agencies—the truth can’t leak to the news. This man was an agent working undercover—Jose Rodriguez. You can’t release anything I’m telling you now—and nothing can get out at all except that an unidentified body was found in an alley, with all other information pending the medical examiner’s report. Some things the public can’t get for a while, all right, Dirk?”

  “Gotcha,” Dirk said.

  “So he’s one of ours?” Liam asked, frowning.

  “FBI,” Dallas said. “He was working the Los Lobos case.”

  “The wolves,” Dirk said.

  Dallas nodded. “We’re all working it, Dirk. I’m not divulging any secrets—you’ve obviously heard about the Los Lobos gang, and everyone from the cops to the military has been alerted to keep an eye out for the members and their activities.”

  Dirk nodded. “Who hasn’t? When they started up, I had a few corpses up for autopsy at the morgue in Marathon. Seems they’re run by some big shot out of Colombia—supposedly an American expat. The members come in all colors and nationalities—the one thing is they have to swear absolute loyalty. The smallest betrayal means death—execution style.”

  “That’s why they’re doing so well,” Dallas said grimly. “No one knows who they are, and they’re all too scared to turn on the others. They know the islands. They slip in and out at night, moving from the Caribbean to the Keys.”

  “But from what I understand, they’re not drug dealers, they’re smugglers, right?” Dirk asked.

  Dallas nodded. “Museum pieces, looted artifacts. They’ve gotten into and out of a number of places here in the Keys, as well as in South America, Cuba, Jamaica—they’ve pilfered Mayan artifacts from Mexico. They also smuggle people in and out of the country. Anyway,” he added quietly, “Jose had infiltrated them, he was the first man on the inside ever. He was just getting in deep with the ‘field workers,’ who are at the beck and call of the headman. The thing about this gang is that many of them aren’t what you’d expect. They aren’t tattooed, and they don’t wear motorcycle jackets or lounge around like barflies. A lot of them look like upright and ordinary citizens—businessmen, churchgoers, even cops and politicians.”

  “They work like veins and arteries from a heart,” Liam said. “A very peculiar pyramid scheme.” He glanced at Dallas. “How many people do they think are involved all across the country?”

  “Our best intelligence officers—CIA, FBI, Homeland Security—estimate about a hundred and fifty scattered across the United States.”

  Dirk nodded, taking in their words. He was silent for a moment and then said, “Odd.”

  “What’s odd?” Dallas asked.

  “Los Lobos...the bodies I’ve had that the county officers think were members were done in true execution style—bullet to the back of the head. This is different,” Dirk said. “I’m not an investigator, of course. I can only tell you what...what the dead can tell. But it’s something to think about, right?”

  Yes, it was.

  Dallas hesitated before speaking. “Different crimes call for different punishments.” He hunkered down by the dead man. “Look at his hand, Dirk. He was holding something, right? Something somebody pried out of his hand.”

  “So it appears,” Dirk agreed.

  “Like a knife,” Dallas murmured.

  “Hard to tell. I’ll have more for you after the autopsy. Traffic is going to be bad, so it’ll be an hour or so before we even have him on a table.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, Dallas.”

  “I didn’t know him well. I just know that he was one of the good guys,” Dallas said. At least Dirk had done Rodriguez the mercy of closing his eyes.

  Dallas set his fingers lightly on the dead man’s shoulders as he studied him. For a moment he felt the fierce grip of pain and sorrow.

  This scene was too familiar. Not that long ago they’d lost another agent. Not that long ago he’d come upon a dead woman—that same agent—in the same posit
ion, lying in the street on her back. He had been close to what was going on...close to finding the truth, to rounding up a bunch of greedy bastards who didn’t care who they killed in their quest to amass more and more wealth.

  They had made arrests. But he had suspected then, and he suspected now, that the real killer—the man giving the orders—had eluded him.

  Jose Rodriguez had died on his back. His left hand was still curved and slightly twisted. His right hand lay in a puddle of blood.

  Frowning, Dallas studied the puddle.

  Jose had been trying to write something in his own blood.

  Dallas took a moment to envision the scene and figure out how Rodriguez had managed to write something while lying on his back. Only one scenario made sense.

  Jose had fallen forward, dying. He’d started to write something, but the killer had come up behind him before he finished, and wrenched him around so that he had landed on his back—his hand still in the pool of blood he had been using as ink.

  Dallas looked over at Liam. “Can you make that out?”

  “Make what out? It’s a pool of blood—oh! I see what you’re saying.”

  They both bent closer, trying to read the dead man’s message. “That first letter’s a C,” Liam murmured.

  “Yeah. I think you’re right. Then...a U?” Dallas asked.

  “Yeah, C-U-R,” Liam agreed. “Cur? Like a dog?”

  “I don’t think so. Can you get one of the photographers over here?” Dallas asked.

  Liam rose and motioned for a crime scene tech. The man hurried over, took pictures as Dallas indicated, and then moved back to the fence where he’d been working.

  “Whoever he was,” Dallas told the dead man quietly, “we’ll find him.”

  Two of Dirk’s assistants came for the body, and another tech walked up to Liam. “Sir? Anything specific you want us to look for?” he asked.

  “Inspect the alley and all the nearby streets, and the yard, too. Our vic was seen with a knife—a big knife, like a bowie knife. Try to find it. Search everywhere our victim could have been.”

  “Do we need a permit for the yard?” the tech asked.

  “Hannah is a friend. We have her blessing for anything that’s necessary. Do your jobs, but don’t be careless. Try not to leave the place looking like a war zone,” Liam said.

  The tech nodded and moved away.

  Dallas shook his head, looking from the yard to the house. “How the hell could anyone think that a dying man was a ghost?” he demanded.

  “The power of suggestion, probably,” Liam said. “People love ghost tours. They go on them all the time. They want to be scared. They don’t want real danger, but they want to be scared. Hell, Dallas, nothing’s changed since we were kids. This place survives on tourism. Tourists like stories. We’re full of them.”

  “But this guy was stumbling around your friend’s yard and she didn’t wake up until some tourist screamed, and then she was all, ‘Wow, you saw a bloody ghost in my yard? Okay.’”

  “Hannah is a good kid, Dallas. Lay off. She was dealing with screaming tourists who told her they saw a ghost, not a man.”

  Dallas nodded. “Yeah, all right.”

  “Come in and talk to her. Talk. Don’t yell.”

  “I was never yelling.”

  “You basically accused her of causing his death.”

  “The hell I did. I merely suggested that an intelligent and rational human being might have thought from the get-go that there was something more than a ghost in her yard.”

  Liam lowered his head, a slight grin on his face. “I’m going in for coffee. If you can be nice for a few minutes, you’re invited, too.” He looked up at Dallas, and his smile faded. “You heard the doc. He couldn’t have been saved unless he’d been in an emergency room when it happened. It’s not Hannah’s fault your man is dead.”

  “I know. I just...I just feel like something is escaping me and that I should be able to grasp it, and I can’t. I’ll be pleasant. I promise.”

  “No sarcasm?”

  “No sarcasm.”

  They took the path from the gate past the pool, where the techs were busy stringing tape to try to salvage what they could of the victim’s route from the yard to his death.

  There were no blood trails to the yard, which seemed impossible, but unless the techs could find something with their equipment that neither Liam nor Dallas had seen, Jose Rodriguez might as well have appeared in the yard like the ghost those kids had thought he was, because there was no sign of where he had been before he showed up by the pool.

  How could that be? He must have been bleeding steadily by that point.

  There was a crime scene marker at every spot where Hannah O’Brien had seen blood as she’d followed the trail through her yard to the alley.

  Dallas couldn’t help himself. He paused, looking at the lawn chairs beside the pool. He imagined the couple lying there....

  Opening their eyes.

  Seeing Rodriguez bleeding, holding a knife, then screaming in terror at what they thought was a ghost.

  They had still been out there freaking out when Hannah came out to see what was going on, so why hadn’t Rodriguez stayed there with them and asked for help?

  The pool was surrounded by attractive tile work, which gave way to lawn. It appeared that Rodriguez had stumbled past the chairs, then across the grass, past the bushes edging the yard and through the gate into the alley. It hadn’t rained recently, so the foliage was dry and brittle. He had to assume there would be evidence if Rodriguez had gone through it. Since there wasn’t, he had to assume Rodriguez had taken almost a straight line out to the alley.

  Had the gate already been open?

  He closed his eyes and tried to picture what had happened.

  Sliced, bleeding, dying...but he hadn’t headed to the house?

  Why?

  There could be only one reason.

  Rodriguez had come from the alley, trying to escape through the yard, and the killer had been behind him. But he’d seen the kids by the pool and hadn’t wanted anyone else to die, so he’d sacrificed his own life and turned around, back toward danger.

  So where was the killer now?

  And where was the knife the couple had seen Rodriguez waving?

  The answer was obvious.

  The killer had followed him until he had fallen, then wrested the knife—which might well have been dripping with the killer’s blood—from Rodriguez’s dying grasp.

  2

  Hannah had hurried past the pool area and inside without looking back. Once there, she leaned against the door, just breathing.

  She still felt as though, even if she were pinched, she wouldn’t feel anything.

  He’d been real. The “ghost” in her yard had not been a ghost at all. At least, he hadn’t been a ghost when her guests had seen him. He had been real—he’d been flesh and blood and...

  Alive.

  But according to the medical examiner, nothing could have saved him at that point.

  And still, in her mind, she kept replaying everything about finding his corpse as clearly as if it were happening all over again. First the blood...

  And then the body.

  She’d rushed to his side, fallen to her knees while fumbling to get her phone from her pocket. She’d touched him, ready to do whatever necessary to help him.

  And then she’d seen his eyes.

  Dead eyes.

  Every corpse she’d ever seen had been laid out tenderly in a casket at a wake or a viewing.

  The dead never look right, never, no matter how good the mortician is, Melody had told her once.

  But they didn’t look like the dead man in the alley. Lying there as if he’d known death was coming, as if...


  As if he had tried to speak, tried to say something before succumbing to the darkness.

  If only she’d gotten there sooner.

  No. She couldn’t have gotten there sooner; she hadn’t had any idea of what was going on when Shelly and Stuart had started screaming, and it had seemed so cut-and-dried. Shelly, already on edge after the ghost tour, had thought she’d seen a ghost and Stuart had gotten carried away on the wave of her hysteria. And then she’d had to deal with all the other guests shrieking and shouting and just generally going nuts.

  There was nothing she could have done. Even if she’d run right out to look for a bleeding man with a huge knife in his hand, it would have been too late. He’d already been dying.

  “Keep telling yourself that,” she muttered drily to herself. She realized she felt incredibly guilty, which was ridiculous, because she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  But the man had been alive....

  And now he was dead.

  She pushed away from the door. She didn’t just feel guilty about the dead man, she realized. She felt guilty for suspecting her resident ghosts of being up to no good, which had been entirely stupid of her. They always looked exactly the same. Melody was always beautiful in her Victorian gown, and Hagen always looked like a handsome swashbuckler in his fawn breeches, boots and muslin poet’s shirt. They didn’t change clothing—and they didn’t run around with weapons, much less bleeding.

  She needed to do something, get busy. She couldn’t just stand there all day feeling guilty. But she’d already stripped all the beds in a fury and cleaned the house, powered by the adrenalin that had raced through her after the scare and the effort of getting all her guests settled elsewhere. By the time the sun came up, the Siren was ready for business. Too bad she didn’t have that much energy every day.

  In the kitchen she poured herself another cup of coffee and took out her scheduling book. Stuart and Shelly and their friends had been due to stay another three days. There were prospective guests who had wanted to come, but she’d had to turn them away. Several had left their numbers, though. Maybe she could call them and...