And I so desperately needed the change, she thought.
Yes—a complete change. She had even started going by her mother’s maiden name, Ainsworth. The trauma she had fled had been one thing; she was strong. The constant publicity had been another. Ironic, since media was what she had done as a congressional assistant—and was mainly what she was still doing now. Of course, her boss, Grady Miller, knew who she was and what she had fled from. He was supportive and wonderful, and she trusted him completely.
And why wouldn’t she? Grady was friends with Adam Harrison, executive director of the Krewe of Hunters, her best friend’s unit at the FBI. Without Meg Murray and her unit, Lara wouldn’t have survived.
“Hey!” Rick called to her, heading from the service building with a cooler filled with fish. “You’re here bright and early.”
“I understand that this is very special. That even employees don’t get free swims all that often,” Lara told him, grinning.
She liked Rick; he was probably about fifty, weathered from years in the sun, slim and fit. He was married to Adrianna, another of the trainers. She had actually met Adrianna first, right here, just two years ago when she had been at her previous job, doing media for then-congressman Ian Walker. Due to a series of murders in Washington, DC, with which Walker had been involved—indirectly, or so he alleged—he was no longer a congressman.
Murders—and Lara’s own kidnapping and imprisonment, naked and starving, in the dank underground of an abandoned gristmill in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
But she had survived, and now she was here, building a new life. Rick knew all about her past; he also knew that she’d survived mainly because of the ingenuity of a friend who worked for the FBI, and that she’d received extensive therapy since. To be honest, she hadn’t felt that she’d needed all the therapy; she’d come out of the experience grateful for her life, and furious with anyone who would commit atrocities and murder for personal gain. The henchman who had actually carried out the vile acts was, she was convinced, truly certifiably crazy, but that didn’t mean she was unhappy about the fact that he was going to rot in jail for the rest of his life, or that the woman whose manipulative will had set him on his murderous course would rot along with him.
“Well, Lara, you should definitely be in the water with these babies,” Rick said. “There’s nothing in the world like getting to know Cocoa and her buds. We bring in wounded soldiers, autistic kids—you name it. This interaction is good for whatever ails you.”
“Rick,” she told him firmly, “I’m absolutely fine, and I don’t want people tiptoeing around me. I’m here to do a bang-up job with Sea Life’s PR. Not that I’m not beyond excited to get to know Cocoa better.”
“Okay, we’ll start our training session on the platform,” he told her. “And then we’ll get in the water. No bull, though. I’ll kick you out in two seconds if I don’t think you’re going to be a good fit with the dolphins, okay?”
“Okay.”
From the platform, Rick began to teach her the hand signals that Cocoa knew. Lara dutifully imitated every sign Rick made, and Cocoa responded like a champ. She learned from Rick about the vitamins they gave to their dolphins to compensate because they didn’t hunt their fish from the wild, and how they were given freshwater, too, something they usually got from their fish—and still did—but this ensured that their intake was sufficient, and they loved it. The biggest issue was trust, Rick told her. No dolphin was forced to perform or work—ever, under any circumstances.
“How on earth do they learn what a hand signal means to begin with?” Lara asked. “I mean, it’s not like you can explain, ‘Hey, when I raise my hand like this, I want you to make that chattering noise while you back up on your flukes.’”
Rick grinned. “We use targets, and it’s a long process—except for sometimes when we work with the calves and they just follow their moms. Dolphins are social creatures, and they’re curious about us, too. They like interaction, and they love learning. When the trainer blows a whistle after a task, it’s to tell the dolphin that he, or she, did it properly. It’s called positive reinforcement, and I don’t know of any facility that uses anything else. When the dolphin hears the whistle, he knows to come to the trainer for a reward. It may be fish, like we’ve been using today. Sometimes it’s a toy and sometimes it’s a lot of stroking. Dolphins are mammals. They’re affectionate. Oddly enough, a lot like aquatic dogs, but even smarter. Smart as all get-out. I love working with them. I’d honestly rather be doing what I’m doing than be a millionaire working on Wall Street. I wake up happy every day, and I get to work in paradise, with my friends and these amazing creatures. You’re truly going to love it here.”
“I already love it,” she assured him. “I knew I would.”
She did love what she was doing. The first week she’d started, half of her media work had been planning out her own press spin, getting the media to get past her move to Miami and the Sea Life Center and concentrate on the dolphins and the work being done here. She thought she’d handled it very well. The “news” was always fickle; a high-profile celebrity had been involved in a sex scandal, a policeman in Oregon had been accused of taking bribes from prostitutes and the world had quickly begun to forget her. In the past three weeks she had been able to work with a society that arranged dolphin interactions for autistic children, adults and children with Down syndrome and an organization involved with veterans’ affairs and helping wounded servicemen and women. Writing press releases that dealt with the good things going on in the world wasn’t like working at all.
It was a bit more of a challenge to politely fend off reality-show producers or convince the rich and famous that they had to go by the same rules here as everyone else. No one was allowed to just hop in and play with the dolphins; trainers always called the shots. And, of course, no one bossed a dolphin around; if a dolphin didn’t want to play, it didn’t have to play. Each animal could escape human interaction if and when it chose to do so. There was no drama. No one interviewed anyone without the express permission of Willem Rodriguez, who had provided Grady with the financing to buy the place a quarter of a century ago. Willem had used his business savvy in the years since then to make Sea Life what it was now: an excellently run nonprofit with a top staff of trainers and veterinarians. It was one of the most important aquatic mammal centers in the States, possibly the world.
“Ready to get in the water?” Rick asked her.
“You bet!”
Lara slid in; Rick stayed on the dock.
“You’re not coming in?” she asked him.
“No, I’ve had all kinds of dorsal tows in my day. I’m going to teach you how to get one when you need one, though, whether you’re in the water or you’re on the platform, okay?”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“Swim out into the center of the lagoon,” he told her. “You’ve seen this done, so you know the hand signal. Give that signal and Cocoa will come get you. Just grasp onto her dorsal fin and go for a ride!”
Lara swam out. The day was heating up; the water was still deliciously cool. This was so entirely different from what she had left behind.
Life was good.
* * *
There was something strangely but beautifully surreal about the sight of Maria Gianni Gomez in the banyan tree.
It was almost as if she’d been posed.
Her arms were spread out almost gently, forming a casual arc over her head. Her face was turned slightly to the right.
Her eyes were open.
She was dressed in a flowing white robe. A small branch lay over her lower body, as if set there by a modest and benign hand that might have reached down with ethereal care. The great banyan with its reaching, twisting roots had grown in such a way that the center, where Maria lay, might have been scooped out to create a bed for her.
If it weren’
t that death was so visible in her open eyes, she could have been a model posing for any one of the sometimes very strange commercial shoots that took place in the notoriously and historically bohemian section of Miami.
Brett Cody was standing next to his partner, Diego McCullough, and looking up at the tree, studying the body where it lay.
“Ladder?” he asked Diego.
“One of the Miami-Dade cops went to get one. He’ll be right here, along with the medical examiner,” Diego said. “You got here fast,” he noted.
“We’re not all that far from Virginia Street,” he reminded Diego. He lived right down from the mall that was more or less central to the area, almost walking distance to this North Grove area of nicer homes. “You got here pretty quick yourself.”
Diego nodded. “I was at the coffee shop,” he said glumly. “This is just...so wrong.”
“She should have been protected,” Brett said, a feeling of deep anger sweeping over him. But someone out there had killed Miguel—who, after all, had made his living in the drug trade, where violence was common—and now had come after his widow, it appeared.
But how?
“She had a state-of-the-art alarm system and steel bolts on the doors, and there’s no sign of forced entry,” Diego said.
“We need to talk to the fed who was duty in front of the house when it happened,” Brett said. “We knew Miguel’s killers might think she knew too much, so we were keeping a watch on her.”
“He thought she jumped,” Diego told him. “She was deeply depressed, devastated, after Miguel’s murder. You don’t think that’s possible?”
“No,” Brett said quickly. Too harshly. He understood how the officer might have gotten that impression; the tree was fairly close to the master bedroom balcony, which overlooked the pool and the patio area.
But, Brett was certain, no matter what kind of an athlete she might have been when she was young, there was no way she could have jumped from the balcony and wound up where she was.
It would have been possible, however, for someone to throw her over and cause her to land exactly where she had.
“Hey, I know how you feel about this one, how much you wish you could have seen it through,” Diego said quietly. “But if you want to keep the peace, don’t tear into the officer on duty.”
“Sorry,” Brett said quickly. “I didn’t mean to bark like that. And I don’t blame the agent. He didn’t see anyone go by, and should someone have gotten past him, the house has alarms and a top-of-the-line security system. No one broke into that house. How the hell she was killed, I can’t begin to imagine. Unless Miguel has a clone running around somewhere—a clone with his fingerprints and his memories.”
They were both quiet for a minute, looking at one another.
“He was burned beyond forensic recognition,” Diego reminded Brett. “No DNA left, even in the teeth or the bones.”
“Identified by the melted remains of his jewelry, and the fact that we saw him get out of his car and go inside, the only person in there,” Brett said thoughtfully.
“Maybe Miguel wasn’t killed in that oil-dump conflagration,” Diego suggested.
Brett shook his head thoughtfully. “Those were definitely Miguel’s things forensics took from the fire. And Miguel truly loved Maria. There’s no way on God’s earth that he would have killed his wife. Even if he didn’t die in the fire,” he added.
They both turned at the sound of footsteps. A uniformed police officer was hurrying over with a ladder. Dr. Phil Kinny, medical examiner, was just behind, followed by two forensic teams, one from the local Miami office of the FBI and one from the Miami-Dade homicide division.
“Let me get a quick look up the ladder first, okay?” Brett called to Phil.
“As you wish,” Phil told him. “I’m here, ready whenever. I can only tell you how she died. You’re the one who’s going to have to figure out how she got in that tree.”
“Thanks,” Brett said.
The ladder was set carefully next to the tree; Brett nodded his appreciation to the young officer ready to steady it. Brett could have climbed the tree without it, but he was trying to maintain a level of professionalism. Once he had studied Maria Gomez in situ, photographers would chronicle everything before Phil started his exam and told them the preliminary time of death and whatever he could about the injuries that had presumably killed her.
Studying the woman, Brett felt again the terrible pang of guilt about the entire Gomez affair. He hadn’t been assigned to the Barillo crime case; other agents and officers—both the feds and local law enforcement—had worked it for years. When Miguel Gomez had come to him, he’d made a point of going undercover to meet the family and find out what was going on, what Miguel had done and what he could give the authorities.
Basically, Miguel had been like a slave laborer, doing whatever his boss told him to do, letting them use his property, forced into the crimes he’d committed. He’d been minding his own business in a family where distant relatives had fallen prey to the lure of money and rewards. It wasn’t always easy for newcomers to trust in the United States government. Miguel’s son had been approached leaving school by a couple of Barillo’s toughs and warned about what happened when the “family”—meaning Spanish-speaking immigrants—didn’t work together.
Nothing had happened to the boy, but Miguel had known that his son being threatened meant that he was supposed to play the game. Only later had he learned that Barillo prided himself on never going after innocent family members, and by then it was too late. He was in too deep.
He had done so for years. Then he had seen a friend who had avoided running “errands” for the family wind up in a one-car fatal crash. Miguel had realized that he might be doing as he was told, but it was impossible to know when you might do the wrong thing, even by accident, and wind up in a car crash—or worse, have one of your children wind up dead, despite the fact that word on the street was that Barillo prided himself on “taking care of” only those who were guilty of betraying the family, never wives or children.
Oddly enough, rumor had it that Barillo’s own children weren’t part of the family. He had two sons and a daughter. They were all seeking advanced degrees at some of the best schools in the nation.
He wanted a different life for them.
Miguel had found Brett by accident; he’d seen him in the street when the FBI had busted a small crew who had dumped five Cuban refugees off the coast in a rubber tube. Miraculously, the refugees had made it. Diego and Brett had been watching the group, and they had talked a terrified mother into identifying the suspects who had taken their life savings and then deserted them to die at sea. Brett and Diego had found the perpetrators because of her tip and taken them down. The United States Marshals had stepped in; the Cuban mother was now living safely with her family in New Mexico, all of them under new government-supplied identities.
Brett had liked Miguel, who’d stopped to talk to him after the takedown, and he’d known that the Barillo cartel had been a thorn in the side of South Florida law enforcement for a very long time, but he wasn’t himself involved in the investigation. The case, and responsibility for Miguel’s safety, had gone to Herman Bryant, head of the task force pursuing Barillo and his “family,” a large group of Central and South American, island and American criminals whose cunning and power rivaled those of the Mafia in its heyday. Herman had a task force of two units, twelve agents, working the ongoing investigation, two of those men undercover. The Barillo family was extensive and dealt with human trafficking, illegal immigration, prostitution, firearms and drugs. Every federal, state, county and city law enforcement agency was kept alerted to their movements.
The frequent discovery of the family’s victims’ mutilated remains reminded them all that Barillo and his crew stopped at nothing to reach their goals, following up threats and intimidation with
stunningly effective violence. The men who had infiltrated had reported back that loyalty to Barillo was all. Traitors were executed; the rule was immutable and simple.
But though Special Agent in Charge Herman Bryant was good at his job, and had managed to prevent murders, drug sales and more, so far they had been unable to crack the back of the giant beast. Bryant was a veteran of drug wars around the world; he’d dealt with cases from Brazil to the deepest sectors of China, interacting with local law enforcement agencies along the way. Brett had been certain that Miguel had been in good hands.
After Miguel’s murder, Bryant had urged Maria to make an excuse to leave Miami, or to move in with her children. When she’d refused, he had kept men watching her house. He had done all the right things.
Even though it didn’t really fit the Barillo methods for family to be killed—especially not with Miguel already dead.
Miguel had worn a wire the day he’d been killed.
Despite that, when he’d headed into his own warehouse before meeting with members of the Barillo family, he’d been killed. When—supposedly—he’d been early and alone. None of the officers watching had heard anything—no voices other than Miguel’s—before the warehouse had burst into flames so strong and high that the conflagration had been visible miles away. Clearly his boss had suspected he was a traitor and had taken care of things in his own violent way.
Miguel had been seen entering the building; no one else had been there.
It hadn’t seemed much of a question that the remnants of bone that had been found had belonged to Miguel Gomez. Melted fragments of the man’s watch had been found mixed in with the charred remains along with his signet ring, the initials still partially visible. There had been no reason to doubt that the man was dead.
But there must have been someone else in the warehouse who the officers hadn’t seen, who had, perhaps, been there waiting, staying when others had left for the day. Someone who was already there when Miguel first arrived and who had then set off a detonator to ignite the fire, and then had escaped unseen in the chaos.