I rose from my chair and acted like I was done. I had one more question, and I knew that it had to be said at exactly the right time. I waited until Vonell had let his guard down, then pounced.
“Was Teen Angel involved in Sampson Grimes’s kidnapping?” I asked.
Vonell started to answer, then clamped his mouth shut.
“Yes or no?” I asked.
Vonell dropped his eyes to the floor.
“Answer me or the deal’s off,” I said.
His head snapped up. “But Detective Cheeks said-”
“To hell with what Detective Cheeks said. Yes or no?”
Sexual predators had a code of silence they rarely broke. But Vonell knew I’d make good on my threat. He let a moment pass, then replied.
“I believe he was,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“ D o you believe me now?” I asked.
Cheeks stood over the sink in the men’s washroom, dousing his face with cold water. Lifting his gaze, he looked at me in the mirror. “Teen Angel might have helped kidnap the Grimes kid. Or he might be a closet pedophile who sits at his computer and fantasizes with other pedophiles about stealing kids. There are a lot of guys around who do that, you know.”
“Not Teen Angel,” I said. “He’s helped with abductions before.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Yes. Teen Angel helped a guy named Ray Hicks abduct a little girl from an elementary school in Ocala. It was as clean as anything I’ve ever seen. I saw the e-mails Teen Angel sent Hicks. They spelled the whole thing out.”
“You’re saying this guy is a pro.”
“A pro’s pro.”
Cheeks patted his face with a paper towel. He was one of the few guys I knew who could clean himself up and not look any better. “How do we find him?”
“Vonell said he works in security for a local theme park,” I said. “Call the parks, and tell them you have evidence that a pervert is working for them. They’ll cooperate once they hear that.”
“You think so?”
“It always worked for me,” I said.
Vonell’s lawyer was waiting for us in the hallway. He’d written up an agreement on a legal pad that he shoved into Cheeks’s face along with a pen.
“My client is being arraigned this afternoon,” he said. “I need you to sign this statement stating that the charges against Vonell are being dropped from molestation with a minor to indecent exposure. You said you’d do this. It was part of our agreement.”
Cheeks took the pen and scribbled his name on the bottom. The lawyer stuck the pen in his pocket, and started to walk away.
“Can I see that?” I asked.
The lawyer handed me the agreement. I read it quickly, and saw how he’d painted Vonell into some harmless middle-aged guy who occasionally showed off his dick in public. Vonell had been arrested for molesting a teenager, a crime that would leave a deep psychological scar on his victim for the rest of her life. Somehow he’d forgotten to mention that, and I shredded the agreement before his disbelieving eyes.
“Get lost,” I said.
The lawyer followed us up the stairs, cursing his head off. When he didn’t stop, the sergeant on duty in the reception area escorted him out of the building.
I followed Cheeks to his office on the third floor. Case files covered the desk and floor, and the room’s shelving units sagged beneath the weight of missing person reports. Visible above the sea of paper was a phone, and a family photograph with Cheeks’s ex-wife razored out.
Cheeks got on the horn and called Broward’s three major theme parks. He spoke with their human resources departments, and using a threatening tone, obtained the names of each employee in security and their Social Security numbers, which he passed on to me.
“This is too easy,” he said.
“No one wants a pervert working for them,” I said.
Sitting at his computer, I accessed the sheriff’s department’s sexual predator website, which contained files of every known sexual predator in the United States. Entering each name and Social Security number into the search engine, I looked for a match.
On the twentieth name, I got a hit.
“Busted!” I said.
Cheeks came around to where I was sitting, and stared at the screen. The pervert’s name was Lonnie Lowman, and he had surfer-white blond hair and bedroom eyes. His charming good looks had no doubt attracted a sixteen-year-old girl in Seattle, who’d willingly gone to his home one weekend, before being held captive and molested. In the mug shot, Lowman was still glowing from his conquest.
I went through his file. Lowman had done three years in prison, and been paroled for good behavior. Part of his release had required him to register himself as a sexual predator at his new address. Lowman hadn’t done that. Instead, he’d traveled three thousand miles across the country and set up shop in Fort Lauderdale.
“Where does Lowman work?” I asked.
“Wet and Wonderful,” Cheeks said.
“That figures,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“All of the kids are in bathing suits.”
Florida hadn’t invented theme parks, but it had certainly made them popular. There were theme parks devoted to cartoon mice, old movie studios, the Bible, and underwater dancing mermaids. The theme park where Lowman worked was called Wet amp; Wonderful, and featured hair-raising water rides for kids and the world’s largest swimming pool.
It was a gorgeous day and the park was jammed. As we crossed the parking lot, I tried to determine which was louder-the deafening roar of traffic on nearby I-95, or the high-pitched screams of kids riding the wave machines.
The park’s business office was attached to the ticket office. Cheeks showed his badge to a cashier, and we were ushered into a reception area. We declined coffee and did not take the chairs we were offered.
Soon the park’s female general manager appeared. She had a bluetooth stuck in her ear, a cell phone in one hand, and a walkie-talkie in the other. I wanted to ask her if she juggled, but didn’t think it was the right time for a joke.
“How can I help you gentlemen?” she asked.
“We need to speak to an employee named Lonnie Lowman,” Cheeks said. “I believe he works in your security department.”
“May I ask what this is about?”
“We’d like to question him in regard to an ongoing criminal investigation,” Cheeks said, making it as vague as possible.
The GM lifted the walkie-talkie to her face. Before she could radio Lowman, I stopped her.
“Please don’t do that,” I said.
“Excuse me?” the GM replied.
“Tell us where Lowman works, and we’ll go talk with him.”
A wall of resolution rose in the GM’s face. “I’d prefer to bring Lowman here, and have you question him in my
