Off the Chart (25 page)

It was five after five, an hour before their next scheduled conversation, when Janey called out, “Daddy, Daddy,” while across the room Sugarman was paging methodically through the slick pages of a guide to tropical wildlife.

He swung off the bed and rushed to the computer.

“I'm here,” he said. “What happened? Something wrong?”

“I know it's early, but I couldn't wait,” she said. “So much is going on.”

“What? Where?”

“In the jungle,” she said. “So many birds and things. I had to tell you before I forget them all.”

Sugarman leaned back in his chair. He smoothed a hand across his forehead, the muscles clamped tight.

“Did the police trace the phone line? Do you know where I am yet?”

“No, sweetie. That isn't going to work. We're going to have to do it ourselves, the old-fashioned way.”

“Oh.” She looked away and wiped sweat from her face. “Well, I saw a flock of toucans, Daddy. Four or five.”

“Toucans,” he said. “You're sure?”

She was excited again. A kid who'd seen some exotic birds.

“With big bills, lots of colors. Yellow faces and throats, black bodies. Their bills are like candy corn. Red, yellow, green, a lime color. They flap their wings a few times, then glide. I saw them twice while I was looking out. And a giant green iguana and a great blue heron and a cormorant.”

“Go slow, Janey. I'm writing this down.”

“The battery is lower. It's below half. And I ate a whole sandwich but only drank one Coke. I'm not that thirsty.”

“Good, good.”

“What about that butterfly, Daddy? Did you look it up?”

“I looked it up, yes. I'm afraid it's no help.”

Trying to find a neutral tone between the gloomy truth and false hope.

“Why not?”

“It's a blue morpho butterfly,” Sugar said. “It's called ‘the emperor.' It's all over Central and South America, out in the Caribbean, Trinidad, Tobago. All over the place. So it doesn't tell us anything real specific.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice falling away into a sigh.

“It's okay, honey. Don't worry. We're going to do this. I promise. Now there was a bird you mentioned before. What was it? One you saw right at first.”

“No, wait,” she said. “I forgot this other thing. An animal. It was very cool. Like a squirrel with long legs and fat and no tail.”

“What color?” Sugarman said. “Hold on, I have a book.”

He swung from the chair, hurried to the bed, and pawed through the volumes littering the guest bed until he found the
Rain Forest Mammal Guide
.

“Reddish brown,” Janey said. “It was walking down the path that runs along the edge of the jungle. I thought it was a rat at first, a giant rat, but then I got the binoculars and it looks more like a squirrel with long legs. And fat.”

Sugarman paged through the mammal book until he found the
plates. Drawings of squirrels, pages and pages of rats, porcupines and armadillos, rabbits. And then a page of creatures he didn't recognize.

“No tail?” he said.

“Yeah, and pointy face like a squirrel.”

He held the page up to the Web camera. Pointed at one.

“Like this?”

She paused, peering into the screen.

“The one above it.”

“This one? You're sure?”

“I think so. Is it reddish?”

“Yes, reddish, no tail, like a giant squirrel. Only with long legs.”

Sugarman checked the numbered print against the descriptors on the opposite page.

“An agouti,” he said.

“Agouti?”

“Yeah, I guess that's how you say it. Agouti. Hold on, I'm checking its geographical range.”

Sugarman used the index, tracked down the page. Read the paragraph.

“What's it say, Daddy?”

He read aloud.

“‘Chiapas and Campeche, Mexico, southeast through all countries of Central America. Northwest Venezuela, north and west Colombia, and Ecuador west of the Andes.'”

“Wow,” she said. “I'm really far away, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Sugar. “Really far.”

“Does that help, Daddy?”

“It helps, yeah. You're not on an island. I think we can rule that out. Mexico, Central America, northern South America. You're on the coastal mainland somewhere. That's an important step.”

“But the toucans, they were so neat. Like a zoo.” She paused for a second. “Daddy? What're you doing?”

“Looking for the toucan, sweetie.”

She was humming a song. Something he vaguely recognized from the radio, the pop stations she and Jackie preferred. His nine-year-old daughter was singing in a jungle somewhere a thousand miles away
while Sugar paged through the heavy bird guide, past the owls and cuckoos and nightjars, the hummingbirds, trogons, and jacamars, birds he'd never seen, never imagined. Finding at last the toucans, which shared the page with the woodpeckers, motmots, and kingfishers.

“What did its bill look like, Janey?”

“I told you, Daddy. Like candy corn. Yellow with a pink or orange tip. Blue on the bottom beak.”

“Keel-billed,” he said. He held it up for her to see.

She squinted for a moment, then said yes, that was it.

“Listen, Janey, can you see the horizon out your window?”

“The horizon?”

“Where the sky meets the land, can you see it, or are there trees in the way?”

She got up and walked around the room. The Web cam caught her at one window, peering between the slats. In half a minute she was back.

“Yeah, out two windows I can see it.”

“Okay, good.”

“Why, Daddy?”

“It's something we can do tonight. Something I remembered from when I was in Scouts. Listen. Do you remember which direction the sun came up this morning?”

“In the east, Daddy, where it always comes up. I'm not a little kid.”

She stepped back from the camera and held up an arm and pointed toward one wall and recited, “North, south, east, west.”

“Good, Janey. So can you see the eastern horizon?”

She looked behind her, then back at the Web camera.

She said yeah, that was where the marina was.

“So the sun came up over the water this morning?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Great,” Sugarman said. “Then tonight, just as it gets dark, we'll try something that should help tell us where you are. It's still a full moon. It should work.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Oh, I remember,” she said. “It was a kingfisher, Daddy. That other
bird. The one I saw before. It looked like a kingfisher, but it was different. Smaller.”

“Can you describe it?”

She was silent for a moment, looking to her left, grimacing.

“What's wrong, Janey?”

He saw her rise from her seat, then bend down to the screen, mouth twisted out of shape, gritting her teeth.

“I need to go to the potty.”

“All right.”

“My stomach's not feeling so good all of a sudden.”

“Oh, sweetheart. I'm sorry.”

“I maybe ate my sandwich too fast. I was so hungry I couldn't help it, so I kind of wolfed it. Or it was the water. I don't know. But I gotta go, Daddy. I'll sign off and call you back in a few minutes. Okay?”

“Okay, sweetie. Go on. Sign off. I'll be here waiting.”

And she disappeared.

Sugarman sat still for a moment staring at the screen, blinking away the fog in his eyes.

It only took him a minute to find the correct page for the detailed description and a moment more to discover that the keel-billed toucan, despite its exotic coloration, its enormous quirky bill, was a bird quite at home in a lot of places in the Caribbean lowlands from tropical Mexico all the way to South America, the same territory as the agouti. Telling him nothing he didn't already know.

His circle had shrunk to just a quarter of its previous size, but it was still one hell of a giant slice of pie.

 

The interrogation took place in Thorn's living room. A solid breeze dancing in the old lace curtains. One of the white-shirts handled the questioning while his two partners talked quietly a few feet away on the upstairs porch.

Thorn planted himself in the upholstered chair, an overstuffed softie that angled beside the window with a western view. He glanced out, watching the ID techs finish their work and some other men
from the ME's office balanced atop two tall stepladders taking down the bodies from the tree.

Anne accounted for Thorn's whereabouts from about ten that morning until that very moment. He'd been at Vic Joy's estate in Islamorada all morning and through the afternoon.

“Those bodies weren't here when I left,” Thorn said. “So they were strung up between ten and whenever the sheriff arrived.”

“We'll handle the math, thanks,” the white-shirt said.

The man wore black-rimmed glasses that looked like they'd been hastily plucked off the rack at a drugstore checkout counter. He was Thorn's height and roughly his build. Lean but wide-shouldered. Black trousers and black shoes. Maybe not a Mormon missionary, but a zealot nonetheless. Probably with his own share of rehearsed speeches at the ready.

He informed them that his name was Ralph Fox. Special Agent Fox, head of a joint task force made up of agents from both the CIA and the FBI and a couple of other federal agencies. He paused to see if Thorn registered the magnitude of his position.

Thorn considered saying, “Wow,” but restrained himself.

“And you say you met with Mr. Webster and Mr. Rasmussen last night?”

“I was shanghaied into a meeting,” Thorn said. “And Zashie is the name the big guy used.”

“What was the nature of that meeting?”

“I was recruited to help with their investigation.”

“Recruited?” Taft said, and chuckled. “You, working with these guys? Come on, Thorn. Give us something credible here.”

Agent Fox stared across at Taft for a long moment, a little jerk on the chain of command. The sheriff scowled but shut his mouth and took a seat on one of the stools a few feet farther from the action.

“And what were you being recruited to do?”

“If you're this big task force czar, how come you don't already know?”

“What were you recruited to do, Mr. Thorn?”

Fox tugged on an earlobe, looking off at the far wall.

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

Taft shook his head and glared at Thorn.

Unperturbed, Agent Fox did a slow tour of Thorn's living room, giving the place a cold analysis. Though Fox was probably in his late forties, his face was nearly unlined, as though he'd held his expressions in check since childhood, no grins or grimaces allowed, an eternal poker face.

Anne Bonny's eyes kept drifting to the far window, as if at any moment her pirate hero would appear and whisk her away from all this turmoil.

“Who's the other guy in the tree?” Thorn said. “He the one telling lies to Sugarman last night? Or was that you?”

“How do you make your living, Mr. Thorn?” Fox was examining the bookshelves, Thorn's paltry library, mainly hardback novels he'd picked up for pennies at the flea market. Adventure yarns, his share of sea stories, a couple of literary novels he'd been trying to wade through for years.

“I tie fishing flies,” he said. “Bonefish lures. You know that fish?”

“And you can earn a living doing that?”

“It keeps gas in the Rolls.”

“Thorn, don't be a prick,” Taft said. “This isn't a game show.”

“Hey, if the suggestion here is that I've been supplementing my income with a little maritime piracy, I'd like to dispel that idea right now. I tie lures. It doesn't bring in much, but I don't need much.”

“Nobody's said anything about maritime piracy, Mr. Thorn.”

With his back to the others, Agent Fox took a book from the shelf, riffled its pages, then put it back. He walked over to Thorn's chair and reached into his shirt pocket and handed Thorn the mug shot of Marshall Marshall. Thorn took it and looked it over. The mongrel hadn't gotten any prettier.

“The sheriff says you failed to identify this man earlier. Is that correct?”

Thorn said nothing.

“You see, Mr. Thorn, your defiant attitude isn't helping your situation. We know Mr. Marshall sometimes works as front gate security at Vic Joy's estate. We know you had an encounter with the man this morning because it was observed by our surveillance team. So you see, Thorn, we know you've already provided false testimony to us
once. What I don't understand is why you would lie if you have nothing to hide.”

“He's a jerk,” Taft said. “That's why. It's his frigging nature.”

“Sheriff,” Agent Fox said.

“Okay, yeah,” Thorn said. “So I had a brief encounter with Marshall. Fine, you nailed me, congratulations on the sharp police work.”

“What other facts have you misrepresented to us?”

“Ask me some more questions, I'll see what I can do.”

“Why would a federal investigator recruit such a man as you, Thorn? Can you help us with that? What do you bring to the table?”

“You'd have to ask Webster.”

“Jesus Christ, Thorn. Give it up, man.” Taft stood up and stalked to the door. “He's not going to tell you shit. You're wasting your time, Fox.”

Taft let the screen door slam behind him.

Special Agent Fox took off his glasses and reached into his back pocket for a handkerchief. While he rubbed at the lenses, he turned his pale eyes on Thorn.

“I understand you don't trust me, Thorn. You don't believe I have your best interests at heart, so you're going to be as perverse as possible.”

“That about covers it,” Thorn said.

Fox put his glasses back on and tucked the handkerchief away. He came close to Thorn's chair and squatted down in an Indian crouch, bringing his face to within inches of Thorn's.