“You better hurry. The service will be starting soon,” Melanie said.
He hurried down the front steps, and walked around the front of the church to Valencia Street, then began circling back to Sevilla. If people had started arriving an hour ago, then so had the Charger, otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten a parking space. So why had its occupants chosen to remain in their vehicle, with the engine running? That was the kind of thing undercover cops did, or criminals looking to settle a score. As far as he knew, Martin Daniels had led a clean life, but you could never be certain. As the naked neck chicken in Mali had taught him, it was better to be safe than sorry.
He hung a right on Riberia Street, and soon was on Sevilla. Not wanting to scare the occupants of the Charger away, he took off his sports jacket and folded it over his arm before approaching the vehicle from behind.
He rapped on the passenger window. It lowered, and a brutish man with a buzz cut and a boxer’s crooked nose stuck his head out. His teeth were stained a hideous brown, and his neck and hands were covered in tattoos in praise of the gangster life.
“What do you want?” the man asked.
His accent was Russian. Every country had criminal gangs, and in Russia they were called khuligans. Down in Fort Lauderdale where Lancaster lived, the khuligans ran strip clubs and escort services, and didn’t like to pay their taxes. They were harder to find in the rest of the state, and he wondered what brought this one here.
“Sorry to bother you, but I’m lost,” he said. “Can you help me out?”
The khuligan gave him a hostile look. Lancaster pretended not to notice and removed his wallet. Kneeling, he extracted a slip of paper with the church’s address and held it in front of the man’s face. While the khuligan studied the address, he took a hard look at the driver, who was a slightly smaller version of his partner, his neck and hands also covered in jailhouse art.
“You are looking for the church?” the khuligan asked.
“That’s right. Do you know where it is?”
He jabbed a crooked finger at the ornate building. “Right there!”
“Oh my God, is that it? If it was a snake, it would have bitten me on the nose. Sorry to bother you gentlemen.” He slipped the piece of paper into his wallet. Clipped to the interior was the detective’s badge that the department had presented him when he’d pulled the pin. He tilted his wallet so the badge was clearly visible, then waited a beat before speaking again. “So what brings you boys here?”
The khuligan struggled for an answer. Lancaster had dealt with Russian gangsters, and had found that their understanding of the American justice system was poor. Most of them didn’t know about probable cause, or being read their Miranda rights.
“We came to pay our respects,” the khuligan mumbled.
“You knew the deceased?”
He nodded. Lancaster glanced into the car, and the driver nodded as well.
“Tell me his name.”
The khuligan’s eyes locked onto Lancaster’s.
“Dr. Martin Daniels,” he replied.
“How did you know him?”
“We did work around his home. The doctor didn’t like to climb ladders, so we cleaned his gutters and pruned his trees. He was a nice man.”
“You’re landscapers.”
“I think the expression is handymen. We take whatever work we can get.”
He was passing with flying colors, but there was still the question of why he and his friend were sitting in the car, and not inside the church.
“Why haven’t you gone inside?” Lancaster asked.
“We wanted to wait and stand in back. People look at us funny. You know how it is.”
The man was either a very good liar, or he was actually a friend of Martin’s. Lancaster was starting to feel that the latter was true, and he stepped away from the car.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said.
“You are a friend of Dr. Daniels?” the khuligan asked.
“Of the family. See you inside.”
Lancaster headed toward the church. Beth would be furious if the service started without him, and he began to jog. Going up the steps, he found himself thinking about the Charger’s interior. There were shift paddles mounted on the steering wheel, and they gave him pause. The only version of the Charger that came with shift paddles was the SRT Hellcat, which was the quickest, fastest, and most powerful sedan in the world, with 707 horsepower and 650 pound-feet of torque. He’d come into some money a few months ago and gone car shopping, and had seriously considered buying the Hellcat. Its base price was $65,000, but that didn’t include the $1,300 destination charge and the $1,700 gas guzzler tax, or the sales tax. Throw those charges in, and it ran $73,500.
The average handyman made fifteen bucks an hour. Hardly enough to insure a Hellcat, much less drive it off the lot. The khuligan lied to him. Intuition was the messenger of doubt, and his gut had known that these two jokers were up to no good. Now, finally, his brain was catching up.
He spun around, sensing the worst.
The Charger was gone.
Chapter 2
In the natural order of things, we buried our parents.
It was how life was supposed to work. The parents pass away, the children bury them, and the cycle of life continues. It was how everyone wanted it, yet it didn’t soften the blow when a parent died. The grief was overwhelming, the pain a dagger to the heart.
Staring at her father’s coffin, Daniels found herself playing back their last conversation, wondering how she’d missed her father’s obvious dismay. She knew that he wrestled with depression — he talked about it often, addressing his mental condition in the third person, as if he were his own patient — but suicide had never entered the conversation.
Dad had hidden his suicidal thoughts to protect her. That made sense. But what bothered her was that she’d never seen it coming. She was an FBI agent, and trained to see clues that other people missed. But that hadn’t been the case with her father’s suicide. She’d been in the dark, which had made the pain of losing him worse.
The tall, silver-haired minister took the podium. His name was Stan Dransfield, and he’d been a close friend of her father’s since he’d relocated to Saint Augustine a dozen years back. Dransfield spent a long moment unfolding his notes. He was having a hard time composing himself, and the silence in the church was uncomfortable.
Melanie leaned into her. “Where’s Jon?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Is he checking out that suspicious car?”
She glanced sideways at her sister. “You saw it too?”
“Nicki did. She said it didn’t look right.”
“Jon felt the same way.”
Daniels glanced down the pew at her niece. Nicki was taking CSI classes at her high school, and had developed a sixth sense for sniffing out suspicious behavior. Jon had been onto something when he’d called out the Charger, and she wished that she hadn’t doubted him.
“Excuse me.”
Jon had returned. Beth drew her legs in, and he sat down beside her.
“Where have you been hiding?” she whispered.
“Checking something out,” he whispered back.
“Anything to report?”
“Nope. False alarm.”
Dransfield cleared his throat and began to speak. He was a gifted orator, and his words brought a soothing calmness to the packed church. Beth looked straight ahead, listening hard. Not to the man on the podium, but to the man sitting beside her.
Within moments, she knew that Jon was lying.
While a student at the FBI academy, Daniels had been trained in the science of reading body language. Behavior analysis, as the bureau called it, was the ability to decode and interpret a suspect’s silent tip-offs, commonly called “tells.” How a suspect sat in a chair and held their hands was often as important as the words coming out of their mouth.