“I don’t have any reason to suspect him,” Holly replied, “but I don’t have any reason not to, either.”
“He has a boat at the Indian River Marina,” Jimmy said.
“Oh?”
“But so do I.”
“What kind of a boat do you have?”
“It’s a twenty-two-foot sloop. I bought it cheap and did a lot of work on it. My girlfriend and I take it out on weekends. I got Bruno’s berth for him; he bought a power boat, a fisherman.”
“Jimmy, you know the Boston Whaler that the marina uses as a work boat?”
“Yeah, it’s always around.”
“Have you ever noticed whether the keys are left in it?”
“No, I never took that much interest; it’s just like a hundred other Whalers up and down the river. Lauren’s talking to the night manager about it.”
“Well, at least you don’t have to duplicate your efforts,” Holly said. “And they’ll keep you posted on what they know, just as you should keep them posted.”
“Holly, can I ask you something personal?”
“How personal?”
“It’s about when Bruno tried to… you know.”
“Tried to rape me? What do you want to know?”
“How’d you stop him?”
“I broke his nose,” Holly said.
“How?”
“With a straight left. He wasn’t expecting it. I’ll give you a tip, Jimmy, if you don’t already know it: men, even bullies like Bruno-maybe especially bullies like Bruno-don’t like the sight of their own blood, especially when it’s covering the whole front of a starched and pressed colonel’s uniform.”
“What did Bruno do after you hit him?”
“He backed off; in fact, he backed right out of the building. Bruno is not stupid,” Holly said. “He got into his car, went down a stretch of country road and smashed it into a tree pretty good. Then he took off his seat belt, called nine-one-one, asked for an ambulance and went to the hospital to have his nose set and taped. That way, he had an excuse for looking like somebody who’d lost a street fight when he came back to the base.”
“I guess that was pretty smart. How do you know he did that?”
“Because I saw his car later. At Bruno’s trial, the prosecutor talked me out of testifying about breaking his nose, because he thought the humiliation might make his jury of other officers more sympathetic to him.”
“It wouldn’t make me sympathetic,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, but imagine if you were a brother officer, inclined to protect another officer, especially a full colonel.”
“Were there any women on the jury?”
“One. She looked miserable when the verdict was read; I expect she was browbeaten into going along.” Holly thought of mentioning Bruno’s attack on Lauren, but she didn’t know if Jimmy knew about that, and it was better for Lauren if he didn’t.
The phone rang, and Holly pressed the gate button. “That will be Hurd,” she said. She walked Jimmy outside.
“Hello Holly, Jimmy,” Hurd said. “Congratulations, Jimmy. I hear you made detective.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy replied. “Thanks, Hurd.”
Holly got the bag of cigarette butts from her car and handed them to Hurd. “Here you go,” she said.
Hurd accepted the bag. “We found the other body,” he said. “The one with the right hand missing.”
“Where?” Holly asked.
“A quarter of a mile down the road from where the rented Ford was found,” Hurd replied. “A search dog found it for us. We found her handbag, too.”
“Who was she?”
“A friend of the other woman’s. They came down from Atlanta together on vacation. You were right about her: she was five-nine, a hundred and twenty pounds, forty-five years old.”
“Any further evidence found with the body?”
Hurd shook his head. “She was taken down a well-worn footpath off the road, then dumped in a thick bunch of palmetto. We might not have found her without the dog.”
“What does it tell us,” Holly said, “that the murderer dumped one body down the road but took the other out to sea?”
“The question occurred to me,” Hurd said, “and I don’t have an answer.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Jimmy said.
“Maybe after he had taken one body down to the boat, he thought it was too risky to take the other, so he drove it down the road,” Holly suggested.
“And how did he control the two of them?” Hurd asked.
“What was the cause of death?” Holly asked.
“I just heard from the ME,” Hurd said. “A twenty-two slug to the back of the head.”
“Was the body naked, like the other one?”
“Yes, but there was no evidence of rape.”
“He liked the other one better,” Holly said, “and he managed them with the gun.”
“Why did he take her hand?”
“As a souvenir,” she replied. “He tossed it in the trunk, then apparently forgot about it.”
Hurd winced. “How could anybody forget a thing like that?”
16
Holly waved goodbye to the two men and went back inside her house. She stood at the sliding glass doors, looking out at the ocean, thinking. Then she went to her newly constructed office, tapped in the code to unlock the door and sat down at the Agency computer.
She entered her passwords through three levels of security, and then she logged on to the National Criminal Database, which combined the FBI and a network of local law enforcement, and typed in “James Morris Bruno, Jr.” The computer thought about it, then reported the messages, “No criminal convictions as an adult. No arrests as an adult.”
Holly thought about that. As an adult? She hadn’t seen that before. Bruno might have a juvenile record, but if so, it wouldn’t be part of a national database; in fact, it probably would be sealed. Where did Bruno grow up? She racked her brain. She had known all sorts of things about him when she had worked for him, but that had been years ago, and anyway she had worked at forgetting everything about him.
New Jersey, she finally remembered, but what city? She couldn’t remember. She went to the state of New Jersey website and, after working her way through multiple levels, she found it: Juvenile Criminal Records. She typed in Bruno’s name again, and the message came up: “Record sealed by the court.”
So, he did have a juvenile record. She wrote down the URL, then minimized the website and returned to the Agency site. Giving her password again, she entered a subsite called Unlocksmith, which demanded her authority for entry. The system had already identified her by her password, but it wanted a higher authority. She knew Lance Cabot’s entry code, even though she was not supposed to, and she entered that, followed by the URL of the juvenile case files.
After a few seconds, she was greeted with the message: “This site is available only to authorized personnel. Any attempt to enter without proper authority is punishable by up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.” There would be a record that somebody had visited the site, but the New Jersey authorities would never be able to trace it back to the Agency, because Unlocksmith entries were self-obscuring. Any attempt to backtrack would be met with gobbledygook.
She typed in Bruno’s name once more, and there was his record in all its glory: two assault-on-minor charges, one male, one female, and one conviction for statutory rape. She examined all three case files. The assault-on-minor charges consisted of one incident of schoolyard bullying that had put a younger boy in the hospital for two days and one incident of sexual assault on a twelve-year-old girl when Bruno had been fourteen-a harbinger of things to come.
The statutory rape charge had come when Bruno was sixteen and the girl thirteen. The initial charge was rape, but the girl had testified that her participation had been consensual, and, with the agreement of her parents, the charge had been reduced to one count of statutory rape and the sentence was one year in prison, suspended on condition of good behavior, record to be expunged after that, except it hadn’t been expunged. All three incidents had occurred in Morristown, New Jersey.