When I’d finished the whole file, I took it back to Records. Dispatch called Rick Tate, and he told them to tell me he would pick me up out in front of the building in five or six minutes. It was almost six thirty. He came ghosting up to the curb and I got in. Daylight was dying, and I had heard distant booms of thunder as I waited.
“Like the file?” he asked.
“You sort of took it right out to a dead end.”
“What do you make of it, McGee?”
“He got a long-distance call in Fort Lauderdale, aboard his motor-sailer, telling him to meet somebody at that specific rest stop on the turnpike six miles southbound out of Citrus City, at a specific time. It was important to him to be there, and he either decided to be alone or it was requested that he be alone. It had to be in reference to something important to him: his illness, his money, his dying child, or the woman he was living with. So he drove on up in plenty of time, got gas, found a good place to eat, waited in the lobby out of the heat until it was time to go to the appointment. He kept it and they killed him.”
“Anything else?”
“It isn’t as bad a place for a killing as I thought. I’m going down the road and take a look at it tomorrow. Apparently, it is screened from the highway traffic. And it is not a high-use facility, especially in the heat of a late July afternoon. A planned killing taking place there would look unplanned, I think. Kind of coincidental. Spur-of-the-moment. And no problem getting away clean, back into traffic.”
“Any more?”
“Not much. Vague stuff. Somebody had to decide on the place. Why up here, all this way from Lauderdale? Did they come and scout it out first? Or is it just a kind of cleverness-that when a wellto-do traveler is killed far from home, it always sounds like a coincidental killing, a robbery with assault. Kill a man close to home and the choices are broader.”
“Ever a lawman?”
“Not quite.”
“I put it together pretty much the same. Except the appointment and the killing could be two different people. If he was early, he could have been killed, and then when the person who called him showed up, they took one look and took off like a rabbit. A few years, back in Florida and Georgia we had an M.O. of somebody sneaking up on sleeping truck drivers, shooting them in the head with a twenty-two long-rifle hollow-point, and taking whatever money they had. A long-haul trucker tends to carry a fair piece of cash for emergencies, especially an independent owner. As I remember there were eight or ten incidents. Never solved. They just all of a sudden stopped. My guess is that whoever was working it got picked up for something else. Maybe he’s in Raiford and it’ll start again when he gets out. He had the truckers real jumpy all over the area, believe me.”
“I remember reading about that.”
He started up and cruised toward the center of the city, moving up and down the side streets, looking at the dark warehouses and old apartment buildings as he talked.
“That murderous little bastard had to have some kind of transportation. We gave a lot of thought to that. A report came back from south Georgia, where he killed a driver in a rest stop on Interstate Seventy-five, just up past Valdosta, that a driver turning in had seen a motorsickle taking off like a scalded bat, and the rider didn’t hit the lights until he was back out onto the interstate. The way they think he worked it, he’d sneak in and trundle his machine back into the bushes and hide and keep watch on the night traffic in and out of the rest stop. He might have to wait two or three nights until he got the right setup, a single driver in a truck, the truck parked well away from any others, and enough waiting time to be sure the driver was sacked out. But the killings stopped soon after that, before they could set anything up to try to trap him.”
“What are you getting at, Rick?”
“That old M.O. that never got proved out stuck in my mind, and I woke up before dawn the day after the Esterland killing and went on out there and looked around back in the bushes. You won’t find this in the file because I didn’t put it in the file. We were getting the July rains. The ground was pretty soft. I poked around until I found where somebody had run a real heavy machine back through the bushes and made a half circle and brought it back to the place where it had been driven in. Okay, so it was a brute. It made a deep track, so I’d guess about a five-hundred-pound bike, and where the tread was clear in one place in the mud I saw that funny Y pattern of that rear K-One-twelve of a set of ContiTwins, like those BMW Nine-seventy-two cc come through with. You pay six or seven thousand for one of those, for just the bare-bones machine. I would like to think no biker had anything to do with it.”
He parked in shadows and turned toward me. “Listen, we got a group of nice people here. Maybe close to thirty couples in our club. The C.C. Roamers. Me and Debbie, we got a Suzuki GS-550-ET I bought used. We don’t get a chance to go as much as we used to, but we still go when we can. We take tours. Guys and their wives or girlfriends. There’s real estate salesmen, and a dentist and his wife, store managers, computer programmers, a couple of builders, a guy in the landscaping business. People like that. It’s great. We lay out a tour so we can take the back roads, ride along there in the wind. Have a picnic in a nice grove. You can hear the birds and all, those engines are so quieted down these days. I like it. So does Debbie. A lot. We’ve got our own special matching jackets and insignia. But the outlaw clubs give the whole thing a bad name. Like those damn Bandidos out west, and those Fantasies down in south Florida. Some of their officers are into every dirty thing going. Maybe, like they say, most of the troops are pretty much okay, just blue-collar guys from body shops and so on, who like to go roaring around with their women and drink a lot of beer and get tattooed and let all their hair grow and scare the civilians. Little recreation clubs like ours draw a lot of flack, McGee. And when there is biker violence, it reflects on us too, and people look at you funny and make smart remarks. That’s why I hope whoever was on that machine, he just pulled off to adjust something, or get out of the sun, or eat his lunch, or some damn thing. But he could have been an outlaw biker riding alone, and he could have run short of cash money, and so he hid there behind the bushes waiting for somebody to stop who looked worth robbing.”
“And if that’s how it was?”
“He’s away clean. No ID, no witnesses. I couldn’t even get a mold of the tire track. The rain washed it out before I could get back with the kit.”
“What do you really think?”
“I’ve got the gut feeling that whoever was on that machine beat Esterland to death. How long would it take him, a man powerful enough to hit that hard? You saw the autopsy report. They guessed he was hit six or seven times. Pull him out of the driver’s seat, brace him against the car; bang him six times, open the rear door and tumble him in, and slam the door. Fifteen seconds? Twenty seconds? Take the wallet, take out the cash, toss the wallet into the car. Walk back into the brush, crank up, and roll away. Forty seconds?”
“Was it the person he had the appointment with?”
“I’ve got no gut feeling about that at all. Maybe yes, maybe no. When you try to figure out the odds on whether a man setting up a secret meet is going to get killed by somebody else who just happened to be there, you can tend to say it had to be the one he was meeting. On the other hand, it could be just another one of those damn coincidences that screw up the work I do forty times a year.”