Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3) Read online

  Barbara still had her gardening clothes on, and her arms were streaked with dirt. She looked at me, tentatively, and I took her into my arms and held her in an awkward embrace. “We’ll find him,” I said. “I have everyone I know looking.”

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  “We wait,” I said. “Let’s go inside. I want to look around.”

  The house had been furnished by its snowbird owner in dark wooden furniture that had probably come from up North and looked out of place. Barbara’s things were scattered around the small living room, and I looked into the room where she had set up Royal’s crib. It was empty, of course, and it made me sick to my stomach to look at his stuffed animals and elephant-patterned bed sheets. “He was in here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who else has a key?”

  “The owners, but they’re in Cleveland,” she said. “And the real estate agent who showed it to me.”

  “Have you called them?”

  “No.”

  “Call them,” I said. “Anyone else?”

  “No,” Barbara said.

  Damn. I checked the front door to see if it might have been picked. People who were no good at it often left scratch marks, but there were none. All the windows were closed, and the air conditioning was running. The only way into the house was through the locked front door, or through the back door, and Barbara had been ten feet away planting flowers. I went through all the rooms again and still found nothing, except for a blue silk nightgown that was drying on a hanger, suspended from the shower curtain rod in the tiny bathroom. I had never seen it before, and it was larger than what Barbara might wear.

  “Whose is this?” I asked her. She had been right behind me.

  “That’s Megan’s,” she said. An odd look came over her face.

  “What was Megan doing here?”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” she said. “Royal is missing, Vince. Focus, for god’s sake.”

  “Does Megan have a key?”

  She hesitated.

  “Barbara? Does she have a key to your house? I know that she lives nearby.”

  “Yes,” she said. “She has a key.”

  “You’d better tell me what the hell is going on here,” I said. Barbara was holding back, and my blood pressure was rising. Our son had been stolen right out from under her nose. I wasn’t about to screw around.

  “We’re lovers,” she said, looking away from me, as if she was talking to someone else. “It started at the club. She was giving me a massage, and it—deteriorated. I’m not even gay, Vince, at least I never thought I was. She seduced me, and I let it happen. I can’t believe that it started, but then I couldn’t stop. And I fell in love with her, which is the worst part.”

  I was too stunned to say anything, but I happened to know what she meant. Megan Rumsford had seduced me—twice—and I had let it happen, too.

  “She was here last night,” Barbara continued. “She stayed over. We had a lot to drink, and she told me that you had slept with her, the night before. I was so angry, oh my god, I wanted to break your neck I was so jealous. That’s when I came over to the house.”

  “I did sleep with her, but it wasn’t anything I’d planned. She came into my room, and I thought it was you at first.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “She’s like that. She’s crazy sometimes. She’ll say some strange things.”

  “Like what?”

  “She said that she wanted you to get her pregnant. She scared me, and I didn’t know if she was in love with me or with you, but I started to realize how bad this had become. After I came back from your place I told her that she and I needed to take a break. She was very upset, and she took off. I don’t believe I got caught up in this, Vince. I know you’ll never forgive me.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Megan? This morning,” Barbara said. “But Vince, Megan wouldn’t—”

  “Where is her house?”

  “The next block over. You can walk there.”

  “Show me,” I said, and I took my phone out and dialed Megan’s number. The call went to voicemail, but by that time my wife and I were running through the streets of the development in the direction of Megan Rumsford’s house.

  There was no garage, and no yellow Jeep in the driveway. The front door was locked, and I picked up a large paving stone from her walkway and heaved it through a plate glass window, which spewed glass fragments all over the lawn. I carefully climbed in over the jagged edges of the remaining glass and looked around the house. Nobody was home—it was dead quiet, and there was no food out or any other signs that someone was there. Megan had left, and I hoped to God that she hadn’t taken Royal with her, but I was already pretty certain that she had. Where had she gone?

  I went back outside by the front door, where Barbara was waiting.

  “Not inside,” I said.

  “Where would she take him?” she said. “He’ll be a wreck. He’ll need diapers, and to be fed—”

  “Hold it. Where does she keep her paddleboards?”

  “Out behind the house.”

  I reentered the house and exited by the back door onto a small patio. Two pairs of sawhorses were over to the side, and one of the paddleboards rested on one of the pairs. It was the beginner board—the one that she had let me use. The other board was gone.

  I rushed through the house to the front lawn and grabbed Barbara. “Back to your place,” I said, and we sprinted around the block to where my car was parked. “You stay here. The deputies should be coming soon.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Blue Cypress Lake,” I said.

  “Not without me,” she said. “Don’t leave. I need to get my things.”

  She disappeared through the door, and I took the opportunity to take my Glock out of the trunk and attach the holster to my waistband at the small of my back. If Megan Rumsford was crazy enough to steal my baby, she might be crazy enough to do anything.

  *

  Barbara remained in the car while I went into the building at Middleton’s Fish Camp. We had already spotted Megan’s Jeep by the boat-launching ramp in the same spot where she had parked it when she and I had gone paddling and I had discovered Segundo Pimentel’s dead body in his boat. That seemed like a lifetime ago, and I prayed that everyone would be safe this time. You didn’t do bad things to nine-month-old babies. They are not pawns. They are off limits, and anyone who thought or did otherwise would receive the full fury of the nine-millimeter automatic that was strapped to my back.

  A heavily tattooed young man in a tractor hat was seated in an office to the side of the main store, staring at a laptop computer screen. He didn’t look up when I came in, even though the screen door had slammed shut behind me.

  “I need a boat, right now,” I said. “This is an emergency.” The kid still didn’t move his glance. “Did you hear what I said?”

  He turned his head toward me, reluctantly. “We don’t rent boats after six PM, mister. Y’all out of luck.”

  I walked up to his desk and slammed the laptop shut. “Listen up, kid. My baby boy just got kidnapped. Get your ass out of that chair and find me a boat. Right now.”

  The young man turned pale, and for a moment I thought that he might pass out, but he stood up and took a set of keys from the wall. “I’m sorry, mister,” he said. “I didn’t understand. I’ll help you. I heard a baby crying while I was out fishing, and I kinda wondered.”

  “Where?”

  “Moonshiner’s Camp. I fish that spot all the time.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “My wife’s coming, too. She’s in the car.”

  “Won’t take us but a minute,” he said. “I got an Air Ranger, seven-hundred-fifty horse. Follow me.”

  *

  The boy’s name was Blair, and I knew his grandfather—he had been a deputy when I had first started out at the Sheriff’s Department. That was as far as our conversation had gotten, because once he started the engine of the
Air Ranger and the prop blades began to rotate behind us, you couldn’t hear anything short of a nuclear attack. Blair took the high seat with the controls, and Barbara and I strapped into two padded chairs in the bow of the boat, which were the marine equivalent of the front seats of a roller coaster. Airboats can go over a hundred miles an hour on flat water, and the evening was calm and still, with a three-quarters moon rising in the east that illuminated our way north to the top of the lake. It would have been an exhilarating ride had I not been terrified—not by the boat, but by what might be happening to our baby son.

  I signaled Blair to cut the engines as we drew near. There was just enough moonlight for me to see the dock, which was clear of alligators and was also clear of any paddleboards. Megan Rumsford wasn’t here—or at least she wasn’t if she had used her board. Segundo Pimentel’s bass boat was long gone, and there was no light coming from inside the cabin. But there was a sound. It was the sound of an infant who was very, very unhappy.

  “Royal!” Barbara screamed. “He’s in there!”

  Blair docked the boat and Barbara and I dashed up the wooden steps to the house. I had grabbed a flashlight and lit our way, but Royal’s plaintive sobs were already directing us and Barbara snatched him from a cardboard box on the floor of the cabin where he had been imprisoned with nothing else inside it except for a roll of paper towels. She held him to her chest, and his shrieks slowly subsided. Out came the breast, and he latched on for dear life, intermittently heaving huge, gasping sobs while he nursed.

  I found some kerosene lamps and lit the wicks while the two of them sat on Segundo Pimentel’s rattan sofa. A mother and child reunion, as the song went, and I almost wept with relief.

  “I’ll be back,” I said to Barbara. “You’ll be all right now.”

  Barbara looked up from her nursing child. “Where are you going?”

  “To find Megan.”

  “Please don’t hurt her,” Barbara said. “This is all my fault.”

  I wasn’t going to make any promises. I didn’t respond.

  I left the cabin, closing the screen door behind me, and made my way down the steps to the airboat. “Can you run this thing quietly?” I asked Blair.

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “I got a trolling motor in the well. I could sneak up on a jackrabbit and his ears wouldn’t twitch.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Use the trolling motor. It’s not far from here.”

  *

  “I hear you,” Megan Rumsford said as we approached the little island with the three-sided building. The moon was behind us, and it reflected slightly on the structure, but I couldn’t see where she was. “Don’t come any closer.”

  “It’s Vince,” I said from the slowly approaching airboat. “Everything is going to be OK.”

  “No it’s not,” she said from the darkness. “I mean it. I have your shotgun. I took it out of your trunk.”

  “Megan—”

  “You don’t love me, Vince. You made love to me, but you don’t give two shits about me. You never did.”

  I signaled to Blair to move the boat closer. “Let’s talk about this. I can make this better for you. I can help you.”

  “I know,” she said. “You were a cop. You dealt with crazy people all the time.”

  “You’re not crazy.” The airboat was silently drifting closer to the island, and in a few more seconds I would be able to set foot on it.

  “Says who?” she said. “And don’t get off that boat or I’ll shoot this thing.”

  “Please don’t. Come on, Megan. Help me out on this, OK? I can barely talk, I’m so goddamn exhausted.”

  “You need me, right Vince? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes. That’s right. I need you.”

  “Damn right,” she said from the darkness. “I healed you, Vince. You were in a coma for almost a month. My physical therapy class came to visit you, a few days after you had been shot. We had a program at Fletcher Allen Hospital, in Burlington. We were supposed to learn how to treat patients who were bedridden, so that their muscles wouldn’t atrophy and they wouldn’t get bedsores. I was assigned to you, and I’d never seen anyone like you. You were so—still. So quiet, and so beautiful. I massaged you that first night, and I felt something powerful. I don’t even like men. All they do is piss me off. But you were different.”

  “You were in the hospital?”

  “You’re not listening, Vince. The night nurses got to know me, because I kept coming back, after all your visitors had left, including your wife. I would see her in your room, and I wanted to fucking kill her, because you were mine. Eventually she would leave, and then I had you to myself.”

  “Megan—”

  “I took your sheet off. The nurses never knew about it, because I would shut the door. I was quiet, although I wanted to scream. Sometimes I could get you totally hard, and some days it didn’t happen, but you were mine for four weeks. Until you fucking woke up.”

  “Listen, Megan—”

  “Listen, Vince,” she said. “You made love to me, and you were supposed to get me pregnant. I was supposed to have your child.”

  “That was a mistake,” I said, and I immediately regretted saying it. The woman was in crisis, and I needed to get her trust—at least enough so that I could subdue her, and end this.

  “Goodbye, Vince,” she said. “And just so you know, all I ever wanted from Barbara was to get close to you. Touching her was like touching you. But that’s over now.”

  I heard a scraping sound like furniture dragging across a floor, followed by a horrible, muffled scream. Somebody was being strangled, and the life was quickly being choked out of them.

  Blair turned on his flashlight at the same time that I did, and we both saw Megan Rumsford’s writhing body, her legs kicking wildly while she dangled from an improvised hangman’s noose that had been fixed to the roof of the lean-to. I scrambled ashore as quickly as I could, with Blair behind me, and I held Megan’s suspended torso while he took a knife from his belt and cut her free. She dropped to the ground, and the air slowly returned to her lungs. Several minutes passed while we sat there, and no one spoke.

  “You were so damn handsome,” Megan said, as I held her in my arms. “Lying there, so quiet, like you were dead. The perfect man.”

  My dream. Megan had been the one who had massaged me for the weeks that I’d been in a coma in the hospital in Vermont, after I’d been shot. And then she’d moved all the way to Florida because she was obsessed with me, and it had finally boiled over. She was the source of my recurring dream—or, nightmare. And I was her dream man, because I couldn’t open my mouth to spoil things.

  Megan Rumsford was mentally ill, for sure. But I knew plenty of women who would have had no argument with her logic.

  MONDAY

  Bobby Bove woke me from my slumber five hours after I had returned from the Indian River County Sheriff’s building where Megan Rumsford had been processed and put into a holding cell under a suicide watch. Tal Heffernan was in a cell down the row from hers, after having shown up at Sonny Burrows’ house with a gun. Venus and Pluto, who usually never moved from the couch, had disarmed Heffernan within seconds, and Sonny had held the detective’s own gun on him while Susanna Pimentel called 911.

  Sonny and I were at the Sheriff’s until three in the morning with Bobby, and I finally went home to an empty house: Barbara had taken Royal back to her house-sit, the Arguelles family had moved out, and Chloe and Susanna had stayed at Sonny’s. I was up almost until dawn, coming down from the adrenaline rush and wondering about my future. I was still in shock over what Barbara had said and how close we had come to losing Royal. The strange part was that his kidnapping had had nothing to do with my work. It had been because of Megan’s fixation on me, which had also been a complete shock. What was it that had made a young woman—who didn’t even like men—develop an obsession over a fifty-two-year-old guy who could barely walk straight? Maybe the shrinks would find out. She would certainly be seeing her
share of them when they did her evaluation.

  I answered my ringing phone.

  “Heffernan wants to talk to you,” Bobby Bove said. “I think he’s close to confessing to all three jobs.”

  “Where’s his lawyer?”

  “He waived his rights, and there’s no lawyer. It would really help if you got over here.”

  “Give me twenty minutes,” I said. I took a fast shower, got into a T-shirt and jeans, and was on the road ten minutes later. Vero was busy with morning traffic, and the sun was rising in a lazy ball that was already beginning to bake the streets and sidewalks. The air conditioning at the Sheriff’s office felt good. Bobby led me to an interrogation room where Tal Heffernan sat, looking about as bad as a man could look.

  “No recording,” Heffernan said to Bobby.

  “I’ll leave you guys,” Bobby said, and he shut the door.

  Talbot Heffernan looked up at me. It was clear from the dark circles around his eyes that he’d had even less sleep than I had. “Where is she?” he said.

  “Chloe?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s with my friend,” I said. “Do you want to see her?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Goddamn. It’s a strange feeling being on the wrong side of this table.”

  “I’ve been there too,” I said, because I had. “When did you find out about them?”

  “Her and Segundo? I’ve known since the beginning,” he said. “I worked for them, Vince. They paid me to look the other way, even including when Segundo was fucking my wife. She thought that I didn’t know, but I’m a detective, for god’s sake. I figured it out the first week.”

  “What else did they pay you for?”

  “A lot of things,” he said. “I knew where the people were who needed to unload cash. The Pimentels paid me a cut, and I pissed it away, and all of a sudden Segundo tells me that he and Javier were about to go under.”

  “And then Raimundo Pimentel conveniently died,” I said. “Because you shot him.”

  “That was Javier’s idea. He hated the old bastard. Raimundo was relentless about Javier being queer, and when he died that was supposed to release millions to the kids. But Segundo had already pissed his money away too, which I didn’t know about.”