They stopped at the door and both cops froze. Alicia Wells stood up when she saw them. Her eyes were red and she held a tissue.
Sutter said, “Now, this is gonna be interesting.”
Camy Parks sat at her desk, gazing out a window that looked over a fenced parking lot where they held seized vehicles. The file from the cruise-ship bombing sat on her cluttered desk. She had to admit that after two years without any progress at all, the case had lost a lot of its original interest for her. At first, when there’d been media activity and people were asking her about it, she had attacked the case like a pit bull, but over time, as leads washed out-and with them the inquiries-she felt like she had been placed on some kind of inactive squad. That was what she had liked about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms-they were never inactive. She loved the feeling of having too much work and being the underdog agency. Now, with her duties restricted to the one case, she had lost some enthusiasm. That is, until recently. Now people were interested in the case again. She had the two good-looking cops working with her, Tasker the quiet and introspective one, and Sutter the too-sharp-for-his-own-good one. She even had been able to bring Jimmy Lail along on the case. That had been a thrill at first, but now he was wearing on her nerves.
Something about the case had never seemed right and she couldn’t put her finger on it, but lately it had just gone plain spooky. This guy Wells moved like a ghost. He was in the area, but no one could put their hands on him. Then there was that business with the Klan house. Where had the FBI gotten that info?
Her cell phone rang. She looked at the face of it and saw: “Incoming Call.” That meant that it was a number that was blocked. Had to be Jimmy calling from his office.
“Hello,” she said into the tiny phone.
“Hey, baby.”
She let out a small sigh. “Hello, Jimmy.”
“What’s my girl up to?”
“Work. It’s ten-thirty. You should be working, too.”
“What’s with my lady this morning?”
“Jimmy, did you call for a reason other than to annoy me?”
“Whoa, girl, I was gonna ask you if you wanted to have dinner and some lovin’ tonight.”
“Can’t tonight.”
“Even for Joe’s Stone Crab?”
“That’d be nice, but it’s September. Joe’s is closed.”
“I’ll take you anywhere you wanna go.”
“Not tonight.”
“Why not, baby?”
“I’ve got to wash my hair.” She cracked a smile at that old one.
“C’mon, baby, that’s a bunch of-”
She didn’t hear the rest as she mashed the “end” button on her phone. She smiled, thinking that between Sutter and Tasker, one of them had to be free tonight.
twenty-eight
Tasker focused on east Palm Drive as it turned into Southwest 344th Street, the empty Homestead speedway a few miles behind them. Sutter sat in the backseat of the Cherokee, talking-more like reasoning-with Alicia Wells. She had come in from the cold, like a spy from the sixties. And she had problems. Alicia told the investigators some of her story, but obviously held back quite a bit. What she did say was that Wells might have a secret box near the Turkey Point power plant and she thought she could find it. Knowing that the discovery of physical evidence might help them find the elusive repairman from Naranja, Tasker decided Alicia could talk in the car and headed out to this quietly modern part of the county.
Alicia sat, half-turned toward Sutter in a sundress and, clearly, no bra. She had garnered a few stares back at the office, which was another reason Tasker thought it best to hustle her out of the FDLE building. She had cried on and off during the brief interview, and now Sutter was waiting for her to regain her composure. He handed her a tissue. She held it to her nose and cut loose with a deafening honk as she blew her nose. Tasker thought a semi had rolled up behind him.
Alicia said, “That’s better, thank you.” She wiped her eyes again.
Tasker asked, “Still up this road, right?”
“I’m guessing it’s on the dirt road to where we used to fish. The boys told me that Daniel could see them from where he liked to park on the bank of the canal.”
“And you can find it?”
“I’m not stupid. Just choose not to deal with everything. Wish I didn’t have to talk to you fellas, but I do.” She looked at Sutter. “And I’m sorry I pepper-sprayed you.”
Sutter smiled. “It was a good move. A smart move. I never expected it.” He handed her another tissue. “And believe me, I cried and blew my nose a whole lot more than you are now.”
She smiled and let out a short giggle.
Tasker said, “You said Daniel worried you. Did he give any specifics?”
“Naw, only that it was gonna be spectacular and on Thursday.” She blew her nose again, earning an amazed stare from Sutter. “And that it was gonna be in Miami.”
“Anything else?”
“Just that he didn’t seem to care if people got hurt. He might be a little confused. He gets that way sometimes. Focused on something and then forgets other stuff. If he was working in his workshop, he’d sometimes forget to eat.” She put her hand on Sutter’s knee. “I couldn’t live with myself if someone got hurt and I didn’t do anything.”
Sutter said, “There’s a lot of that going around.” He threw his intense stare over to Tasker in the driver’s seat.
Alicia went on. “Daniel is a good man. He’s a great father and treated me better than I ever been treated. I don’t want him in trouble, neither. I reckon if you catch him before he hurts someone, he might just get probation.”
Tasker remained silent. He didn’t want to mislead her. He left his eyes on the straight road and kept driving.
“Daniel is a little different in some ways.”
“How do you mean?” asked Sutter.
“He likes order in his workshop, but everywhere else he likes things just… goin’ nuts. I mean, he lets those boys of his run wild. They’re holy terrors.”
“If everyone who let their kids run wild was crazy, we’d all be in asylums,” said Tasker.
She leaned forward and rested her hand on his shoulder. He looked up in the rearview to see her piercing blue eyes. It felt like electricity was shooting through his body where her hand touched.
Alicia said, “No, it wasn’t like they were bad. He punished them if they sassed or didn’t eat good. He liked them to start fires and break stuff. He watched them and sometimes gave pointers on how to make it worse.”
Sutter said, “They ever hurt anyone?”
“Not that I know of.”
Tasker thought back to the FBI profiler. Maybe she wasn’t so full of horseshit. “Did he ever say he liked to be in control of things like that? Like fires or breaking things?”
“Naw, but he told me once that he liked when things were out of order. When they were in… I can’t think of the word he used.”
Tasker and Sutter said in unison: “Chaos?”
“Yeah, that’s it. He liked to see how people reacted to chaos. He had an idea, a what-do-you-call-it?”
This time nothing popped into Tasker’s mind.
Alicia said it herself. “He had a theory that the bigger the flash, the crazier people acted. Didn’t matter if there was any real danger-it was all show.”
Tasker asked, “He ever say how he tested this chaos theory?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
“You don’t have any idea where he might be staying?”
“Nope. He just calls me or my mama from a pay phone. I don’t even got an idea where he uses the pay phones. One time it was in a Publix, ’cause I heard the people talkin’ on the store speaker.”