Billy Bob Thornton’s Boxmasters offer a deal to girlfriends everywhere: “I’ll give you a ring when you give me my balls back.”
When I pulled up to the house, Csonka was sitting in the shade of the chinaberry tree, licking the claw of a land crab. He didn’t ask for melted butter or mustard sauce. I smacked the front door open with my shoulder, just like always, and entered the house. I heard feminine voices coming from my kitchen. Okay, one was feminine-Amy Larkin. The other was a whiskey and tobacco contralto.
“Look what the cat drug in,” Granny greeted me.
Cat being on her mind, what with another mess of catfish frying in an iron skillet.
“Glad you could make it,” I said to Amy, who gave me a shy smile. Maybe she was embarrassed by the boxing match on the beach.
She sat at the kitchen counter. No makeup I could detect, with that frosting of freckles across her nose. She wore a turquoise tank top and jeans, her hair tied back with a simple band.
I told her about last night’s dinner with Castiel and his angry threats.
She wrinkled her forehead and thought about it. “If the State Attorney won’t help, what about the U.S. Attorney?”
“No jurisdiction without a federal crime.”
“The local police, then?”
“I can try. But the missing persons investigation was closed a long time ago.”
“What about taking what we have to the Grand Jury.”
“Great idea, but we’re just private citizens. Only the State Attorney can do that.”
“And he wants to protect Ziegler, not prosecute him.”
I didn’t debate the point.
“You won’t give up, will you?” Amy asked, real concern in her voice.
“Jake never gives up,” Granny volunteered, dropping balls of jalapeno-spiked cornmeal into a pot of oil. Deep-fried hush puppies. The required side dish to fried catfish, a meal she insisted on cooking at least three times a week. “Nobody scares him, neither.”
Not true. A lot of people scare me. I just swallow the fear, and I don’t back down. As a result, I break a lot of dishes in the china shop.
“I won’t give up,” I promised, “and we’ll find the truth.”
That brought a warm smile from Amy, a look I hadn’t often seen.
Granny shooed us out of the kitchen, so I took Amy to the backyard, where the sticky sweet aroma of mango trees hung in the air. Just as we settled onto the porch swing, the screen door opened and Kip joined us. Even though it was well past dark, he wore sunglasses, his hair spiked with gel. This week’s look.
“Kip, this is Amy,” I said.
He gave her a bashful look.
Amy smiled and said, “Your uncle is helping me.”
“I’m helping, too,” Kip said.
“How’s that coming along?” I asked.
“I tried to find the biker guy, Snake, but there’s like hundreds of guys with that nickname who’ve been in and out of prisons.”
“Thank you for trying,” Amy said.
“No problem.” He stared at the tops of his bare feet.
“What else, Kip?” I knew that look.
“I found some other stuff, but I don’t think it’s good. In fact, I think it’s really bad.”
“What’s that?” Amy asked, her body suddenly rigid.
“Your sister’s car. I found it at the bottom of a canal.”
25 Mood Swings
Kip was doing the talking; Amy and I, the listening. Granny stayed in the kitchen, sprinkling cinnamon on her famous sweet potato pie.
“Right after your sister went missing,” Kip said, looking at Amy, “the cops checked other departments for abandoned cars. Didn’t find anything.”
Amy clutched her left wrist with her right hand, her body rigid.
“It’s a lot easier to now,” Kip continued. “Recovered-car databases are all on the Internet, and that’s how I found it. Six years ago, during a drought, an airboat hit a chunk of metal in a canal. It was the roof of a car. Take a look, Uncle Jake.”
He handed over a thick document with the logo of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “Consolidated Report: Abandoned Motor Vehicles, 2000–2005.” I thumbed through the pages until I came to an item Kip had underlined. The canal was in the Everglades about fifty miles due west of Miami, just before Tamiami Trail angles north into the Big Cypress National Preserve. Miccosukee Reservation land.
The canal ran along a dirt road that dead-ended at a levee. Anyone driving along there was either seriously lost or didn’t want to be found. The car was pulled from the water by Miccosukee police, who inventoried it. No bodies, no bones. No suitcases or personal effects. The license plate was missing, but the vehicle identification number was intact. It matched a 1988 Honda registered to Krista Larkin, which is how Kip had cross-referenced it.
It was one of a few thousand cars pulled from Florida waterways each year. Some people find it cheaper to dump a car than have it towed away. The Miccosukee police didn’t make a big deal about the Honda, which ended its life in a landfill after being dragged from the water.
Amy wrapped her arms around the boy and squeezed hard. Her body trembled, or maybe both their bodies did. She turned to me. “Krista’s car with no license plate. As if someone wanted to hide any trace of her.”
“That would be my guess,” I said, unable to muster anything positive. A young woman missing eighteen years, her car buried. The words “foul play” did not seem quite foul enough to describe what likely happened.
Now we had evidence of a possible homicide. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a number. When Castiel answered, I said, “Alex, I think you’re gonna want to open a Grand Jury investigation.”
I told him what Kip had found and waited for his congratulations.
“So what do you want me to do?” he asked.
“Dredge the canal, for starters.”
“If it’s on Miccosukee land, I’ve got no jurisdiction.”
“But you can ask the Mics to do it. Call their chief of police.”
He paused a moment before speaking. “You have no skeleton, right?”
“That’s why I want you to dredge!”
“Any forensic evidence found in the car?”
“No, but they didn’t treat it as a crime scene. It was just another sunken car.”
“How long after Krista’s disappearance did the car go into the water?”
“No way to know.”
“Maybe Krista sold the car and the new owner dumped it there. Or a thief did it. Or a tow truck driver. Whatever, you’ve got no more tonight than you did yesterday.”
“Goddammit, Alex! Who you working for? The people or Charlie Ziegler?”
The phone clicked off. Amy must have read it in my face. Before I could say a word, her look changed. In a matter of moments, she had gone from mournful to hopeful to angry.
“Ziegler owns your friend.” She made it sound like my fault.
“So it would appear.” It had taken a lot for me to get to that point, but the evidence against Alex just kept piling up.
“And all your talk was just hot air.”
“My talk?”
