“Ah, man.” Bob was pre-discouraged.
“It is what it is. You want in?” Lucas asked.
“Of course. I’m already packing my Jockey shorts.”
“Girlfriend’s okay with it?”
“I told her it might be happening,” Bob said. “She worries, but she knows what’s what.”
“I’ve got to do some more diplomacy here, but Weather’s on board. I’ll talk to Russell and get your airline tickets going.”
“See you in Lauderdale, man.”
* * *
The next morning, a woman named Elsie M. Sweat called from Miami and introduced herself as an assistant U.S. attorney. “I’ve been briefed by Anna and Senator Colles’s assistant. We won’t do anything . . . ethically . . . challenging, but we can help you in your discussions with possible informants.”
“That sounds fine,” Lucas said.
“When do you expect to start?” she asked.
“Monday. I’m not sure we’ll need your help, but it’s a possibility. I wanted to have it lined up in advance.”
“We’re here. This Coast Guard thing has been a constant irritant and the FBI doesn’t seem to be making measurable progress,” Sweat said. “We’d love to get rid of the whole problem—so good luck and keep your asses down.”
“We’ll do that.”
Keep your asses down.
Lucas had been told that by other cops, and had even used the phrase himself a few times, but had never been told that by a prosecutor. Maybe there was something about the culture of South Florida that would make the reminder relevant?
“I guess we’ll find out,” he said aloud, that night in bed, in the dark.
Weather was nearly asleep: “What?”
“Just . . . ruminating.”
CHAPTER
THREE
Lucas walked out of the Fort Lauderdale airport’s Terminal Three into a sweaty night that smelled of ocean, even though the airport was a couple of miles from salt water.
He got lost trying to find a shuttle bus ride to Terminal One, where the car rental services were located. He finally walked there, cutting across a parking structure, dragging his roller bag. He rented a Nissan Pathfinder, drove north up I-95 and checked into the TRYP Hotel, with a room overlooking a complex of on- and off-ramps.
Bob was already at the hotel and when Lucas called his room, Bob said, “I’ve spotted what looks like a decent seafood restaurant that we can walk to. From the satellite photo, it looks like they’ll have a nice view of a marina.”
“Give me a half hour. I want to wash the airplane off and knock on the task force leader’s door and say hello . . .”
Lucas spent five minutes in the shower, pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, and a sport coat, then went up a floor and knocked on Dale Weaver’s door. They’d talked on the phone and Weaver seemed like a congenial guy, for an FBI supervisory agent, anyway, and Lucas had told him that he’d stop up when he got to the hotel.
Weaver came to the door, a stocky man with a square face, lined by years and maybe tobacco, balding, showing white in what was left of his originally reddish hair. He was wearing a T-shirt and gray sweatpants. The run-up to Monday Night Football was playing on a TV behind him. He smiled and said, “Davenport—you look just like your picture on the internet.”
“Well, hell. I thought I looked like George Clooney in real life.”
“He could be a distant relative,” Weaver agreed, as they shook hands. “Very distant. Fourth or fifth cousin. C’mon in.”
Weaver sat on his bed and Lucas took the desk chair and they spent twenty minutes getting acquainted, talking about the task force and the problems it faced. Weaver didn’t try to disguise the fact that they hadn’t accomplished much.
“We didn’t have a place to start. We know where the boat was kept, which was on the New River, next to a house. Down here, as you get closer to the coast, it’s like Venice, the New River and all these canals running up through the neighborhoods. The space was rented from an absentee homeowner based on an advertisement he’d put up on the net and he’d never actually met the boat owner.”
“Pretty convenient for the boat owner, given what they were doing with the boat,” Lucas said.
“Good piece of research by the assholes, is what I think,” Weaver said. “The homeowner, the guy with rights to the dock space, is one of those super-rich investment honchos. He has about six houses, up in Manhattan and the Hamptons and a ranch in Wyoming and another place down in the Islands. He’s here about three or four weeks a year. He has a management service to take care of cleaning and maintenance, and it was actually the service that put up notice for the dock space rental. Those people didn’t see the boat owner, either. They said the whole deal was handled by mail, they got a money order to pay six months’ rent, and one day the boat was parked there. They clean the house twice a month and they only saw the boat twice, so it probably wasn’t parked there for more than a month and a half. The last time they saw it was a week before it burned and sank.”
“And the homeowner looks straight?”
“We now know the color of his undershorts. I mean, however much junk got dumped in the ocean, he could buy all of it, and a hundred times more with the money he earned last year. I got the feeling he’s a crook, but not a dope crook, a financial services crook.”
“All right. Well, my partner and I—I think you’ve heard from him . . .”
“I have . . .”
“We’ve read all your research paper and we’ll be reading it again, and then we’ll go kick over some garbage cans. You’ve been around for a while, what do you think about that whole idea?”
Weaver shrugged: “Nothing else has worked. Might as well try some marshal stuff. I know about your record, so . . . glad to have you.”
That, Lucas thought, was the first time an FBI agent had actually said that to him.
* * *
Bob was waiting in the lobby. “Good talk?”
“Yeah, we’ll get along. Weaver will take anyone who can help. Any scrap he can get.”
They left the hotel and walked down a narrow dark lane to a place called the Rendezvous, got a table outside overlooking a marina crowded with half-million-dollar boats—those were the ordinary ones, the big ones were parked around the edges—ordered sea bass for Bob and chicken tenders for Lucas.
Bob was a large man, with a square face, small battered ears, short hair, and an easy smile. He was neither fat nor tall. He’d killed a cannibal earlier that year, more by accident than by intention, but nobody grieved for the dead man. Bob had finished third in the NCAA’s heavyweight wrestling division in his senior year at Oklahoma and could do a hundred good pushups in three minutes with his girlfriend, who weighed a hundred and thirty pounds, sitting on his shoulders. He was wearing a double-extra-large golf shirt, khaki shorts, and cross-trainers. He could have sold billboard space on his back.