The King Tides (Lancaster & Daniels Book 1) Read online

  “Did you share the text with the sheriff?”

  “And have him say ‘I told you so’? No, I didn’t. The sheriff is a fool.”

  “I won’t argue with you there. When did you get this text?”

  “Two hours ago. Is that significant?”

  “It may be. I was knocking on doors earlier today. Maybe our kidnapper found out and got scared. He could have sent you that text to throw me off the scent.”

  “I pray that you’re right. Could Janey be nearby?”

  He started to say yes, but bit his tongue. The evidence pointed to a patron of the bar where Janey worked following her home and abducting her, but sharing that with Mrs. Dotson would do nothing but raise her blood pressure.

  “We’ll soon find out,” he said. “I’ll call you in a few hours.”

  “I’ll be here, praying,” the elderly woman said.

  Google said traffic still wasn’t moving. He switched to an app called Waze, which let its users report problems, and saw that a tanker had overturned in the median of I-95 and burst into flames, stopping traffic in both directions. His alternative was to take the Florida Turnpike, but users were reporting more accidents there. He was stuck.

  Inside the Starbucks he bought a cup of Pike Place, then took a table and connected his laptop to the free Wi-Fi. He recognized the bearded guy at the next table working on his laptop. Smart criminals knew to change their look. Not this clown.

  “Hey, buddy, remember me?” he asked.

  “Can’t say I do,” the bearded one said.

  “Last November, Starbucks in Pembroke Pines. You tried to steal the personal information off my laptop while I was using the Wi-Fi, and I hauled you outside to the parking lot and beat the boogers out of you. Remember me now?”

  The bearded one swallowed hard. “I’m not doing that stuff anymore.”

  “Got a job?”

  “I’m unemployed at the moment.”

  “Those are nice clothes for a guy who doesn’t have a job. And a really nice watch. I think you’re lying. I frequent Starbucks a lot. If I see you again, I’ll break something.”

  “You can’t threaten me like that.”

  “It’s not a threat. It’s a promise that you can take to the bank.”

  The bearded one wanted to make a stand, but the beating was still fresh. He slurped down his coffee and went to the exit. Turning, he stared at Lancaster.

  “Don’t let there be a next time,” Lancaster said.

  Never turn your back on an asshole. Lancaster had learned that lesson the hard way in Somalia when a SEAL team member had turned his back on a little boy standing outside a hut and nearly gotten Jon and the rest of the team killed. Lancaster watched the bearded one walk across the parking lot, get into his black BMW M3—not the car most unemployed people drove—and leave.

  He went back to work. When he wasn’t doing private jobs, he worked rescues for Team Adam, a select group of retired law enforcement officers who helped the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children find minors who were victims of abductions. The pay was minimal and the hours long, but in addition to the satisfaction of being part of a team that had the highest success rate of any law enforcement group in the country, he got to use the latest crime-fighting wizardry, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

  The most recent tool sat on his laptop, a software mapping program called Collector Application—CA for short. With CA he could supervise search missions without being present during the search. Best of all, CA took the guesswork out of the process, and allowed the search team to home in on what was important.

  He pulled up CA and typed in the location where Janey MacKenzie had been last seen. A topographical map of Melbourne appeared on the laptop’s screen with a red star indicating the location of the bar where she worked. It was called the Slip Slide. All set, he rang up Shorty. “Where are you?”

  “I just reached Melbourne,” the tracker said, his pack of bloodhounds baying in the back of his pickup. “You on the road yet?”

  “I’m still in Fort Lauderdale. Looks like it’s going to be a while before I can get to you. Let’s get this party started, shall we?”

  “Works for me. I’ve got my son Hollis and his friend Caleb with me. Hollis has a map of Melbourne on his iPad. Where do you want us to start our search?”

  “A bar called Slip Slide on North Eleventh Street. Our missing girl is named Janey MacKenzie, and she disappeared three nights ago after leaving work. But first go to her grandmother’s house and introduce yourselves. The old lady’s name is Mrs. Dotson, and she has the sheets from Janey’s bed that you can use to scent the dogs. Grandmom is super sweet. If you’re polite, she’ll give you a homemade cookie.”

  “Got it. You really think this girl isn’t out partying somewhere?”

  It was a fair question. Key West and South Beach were responsible for many missing-persons cases, their lure as strong as a siren’s song, and Janey was a perfect candidate for such an excursion. She had a wild side, her arms covered in sleeves of tattoos, her face a pincushion of piercings. A visit to her grandmother’s home, where Janey lived, told another story that had convinced him this was an abduction. Janey was studying business at the community college with the goal of marketing a line of beauty products whose fancy bottles and labels were scattered around the house. And she was helping pay her grandmother’s mortgage by working at Slip Slide. Janey had accepted the responsibilities of adulthood, and people like that didn’t run off on a moment’s notice.

  “That was what I first thought,” he replied. “This young lady’s different. She sent some texts, but they don’t sound like her.”

  “You think the kidnapper’s sending them?”

  “I do. Call me after you go see Mrs. Dotson.”

  “You got it.”

  Lancaster ended the call. He was nearing the end of the hunt and could feel the mixture of elation and dread that always greeted him. If they found Janey safe, champagne for all. But if she was found dead or badly hurt, the ending would be as uplifting as a David Lynch movie. Thirty minutes later, Shorty rang him back.

  “We just left Mrs. Dotson’s. She let the dogs sniff the girl’s bedsheets. We’re ready when you are.”

  “Do your dogs have their GPS collars on?” he asked.

  “Of course. This isn’t my first rodeo, Jon.”

  “Sorry.” He minimized the Collector Application program on his laptop’s screen and then pulled up another program called Traccar. Traccar was a GPS tracking platform that let him monitor the bloodhounds’ search for Janey in real time. None of these gadgets had been in use when he’d been a cop, which was why so many missing-persons cases he’d worked on had hit dead ends. That was then, this was now. A second map of Melbourne appeared on his laptop screen, courtesy of Traccar. He counted five tiny flashing red dots on the screen, all of them congregated around the same spot.

  “How many dogs did you bring with you?” he asked.

  “I brought six of my best,” Shorty said.

  “Only five are showing on my computer screen. One of the collars isn’t turned on. Five bucks says it’s one of Caleb’s dogs.”

  “You think so?”

  “I sure do. Go check.”

  “Hold on.” Silence, then, “Damn, it was one of Caleb’s. How’d you know that?”

  “I’ve worked with you and your son before, and you’ve never screwed up. Caleb is new, so it stood to reason that it was one of his dogs that didn’t have the GPS tracking device turned on. Now let’s see if we can find this missing young lady. Start with the area around the Slip Slide. I’ll be watching from my laptop.”

  “Sounds good. Wish us luck.”

  “Good luck.”

  He ended the call, then bought a double espresso and sucked it down. He was about to turn forty-two, and the late-afternoon caffeine jolt had gone from habit to ritual. But he had to be careful; too much caffeine made him as charming as a rattlesnake.

  He stared at the flashing dots on his laptop’s
screen. Janey did not own a car and drove her grandmother’s aging Corolla to work. On the night of Janey’s disappearance, her grandmother had needed the car to go grocery shopping, forcing Janey to walk to work, a distance of about a mile. Melbourne was a sleepy burg with little crime, which was why her disappearance later, after she left work, should have been cause for alarm. But Janey’s reputation for being flirtatious—“Only way a girl can make money in this town,” her grandmother had declared—had been enough reason for the lazy sheriff to convince himself that Janey was shacking up down in the Keys.

  The caffeine hit his system hard. There was always the chance that Janey was dead, but his gut told him that wasn’t the case. Janey’s abductor had done a good job of making his victim disappear, and that wasn’t easy. If you were going to spend the time planning an abduction, you wanted a reward. Keeping Janey alive was that reward.

  The red dots moved across his screen like a video game. Jimmy Buffett singing the virtues of drinking and screwing filled the air, and he answered the call.

  “Hello, Jon. This is Nolan Pearl,” his caller said.

  He turned away from his laptop. “Is everything all right?”

  “We’re okay. I spoke to the police, and they wrote up a report and said they’d get back to me. I left your name out of it.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I know you’re working another case, but could you come back to the house for a few minutes? I explained to my wife that I planned to hire you, and she got angry with me for not consulting her first.”

  “Your wife wants to talk with me?”

  “Yes. Melanie’s very protective of our daughter, as I’m sure you can understand. She was on the end of the dock and saw you shoot the man steering the boat. It scared the daylights out of her.”

  He frowned into the phone. “Then tell her to hire someone else.”

  “Please. It’ll just take a few minutes.”

  “What do you want me to do, crack some jokes, make your wife feel better? That’s not who I am, and quite frankly, that isn’t what you need here.”

  “She just wants to talk with you and set her mind at ease.”

  He nearly told Pearl to take a hike, but he restrained himself. His business was word-of-mouth; every time he blew off a client, it cost him down the road. If he didn’t go see Pearl, he’d just stay here, and get wired on more coffee.

  “I’ll come, but I want you to tell your wife something,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Pearl said.

  “I’m not your friend.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I’m your weapon. See you soon.”

  He’d worked undercover for the Broward Sheriff’s Office for a decade and developed a sixth sense for sniffing out bad guys. Leaving the Starbucks, he spied a black BMW M3 with tinted windows parked in the corner of the lot. His instinct told him the bearded guy had returned and was itching to get back inside and steal the personal information of the next unsuspecting customer who booted up his laptop. That was the problem with people who stole for a living. They’d figured out that crime really did pay. To stop them, you had to punish them, and you had to do it in a way that they’d never forget it. As a cop, he’d been restricted from doing that. Not anymore.

  He circled the block and a minute later was back in the Starbucks lot. Through the front window he spied the bearded guy sitting at a table by himself and went inside. Coming up from behind, he boxed the bearded one’s ears with the palms of his hands, causing him to pitch forward and smash his face against the keyboard. Boxing didn’t leave any bruises, but it would make a person’s ears ring for a while.

  Going outside, he ran over the bearded one’s laptop with his car, the crunching sound bringing a smile to his lips. He spied the miscreant standing in the window, holding a bloodied napkin to his face.

  He waved as he drove away.

  CHAPTER 4

  SOFT SPOT

  Pearl met him at the front door wearing the sheepish expression of a man who’d just lost an argument with his wife. “Thank you for coming back. Melanie is anxious to meet you. This situation has made her a nervous wreck.”

  Lancaster grunted under his breath. He didn’t like kissing ass, but on rare occasions he made exceptions. He followed Pearl through the house.

  “May I offer you something to drink?” his host asked.

  “No, thanks. Look, I can’t stay long. We’ve started our search in Melbourne and I need to focus my energy on that.”

  Pearl stopped and spun around. “You must think we’re being very insensitive.”

  “No, you’re being parents. I get that. I just happen to have another priority right now. Once it’s over, which hopefully will be soon, I can give you my full attention.”

  “You seem confident you’re going to find this woman in Melbourne.”

  “I am.”

  He didn’t try to explain. He knew when his hunches were going to pay off, even when the rest of the world thought he was wrong.

  Melanie Pearl awaited them on the lanai. She was an attractive woman with a short haircut and a trim figure, and he guessed she’d once been a nurse. It was only a guess, based upon the fact that nearly every male doctor he knew was married to a nurse, the profession producing a lot of couples. She looked her guest up and down and could not hide her displeasure.

  “Thank you for saving my daughter’s life,” she said stiffly.

  “Thank your husband. He called me.”

  “Very well. Please have a seat.”

  “No, thanks. I’m not staying for long. Your husband says you have a problem with his decision to hire me. Why is that?”

  “How should I put this? You seem rather coarse. My daughter has been traumatized, and I don’t want to make things worse for her. Do you understand?”

  “Not really.”

  She chewed her lower lip, unsure of how to proceed. Her dilemma was written all over her face. Her vision of what her daughter’s protector should look like didn’t resemble the man standing before her.

  “If I clean myself up and wear a nice shirt, will that work?” he asked.

  “Is that an attempt to be sarcastic?”

  “Look, Melanie, I won’t pretend to be something that I’m not. What you see is what you get, warts and all. Take it or leave it.”

  She shot her husband a look. Pearl struggled to find the words that would convince her this was the right decision. Lancaster decided to help him out.

  “Let’s cut to the chase. The two men in the cigarette boat were not normal kidnappers. Kidnappers want ransom money, and if they sense a problem, they switch targets. These men have another reason for wanting Nicki. Once I understand what their motive is, I’ll figure out a way to stop them.”

  “You’ve dealt with men like this before.”

  “Many times.”

  She hesitated. “Can I think about this?”

  “Take your time. It’s only your daughter’s life.”

  “You’re not making this any easier.”

  He’d muted his cell phone before coming into the house, and it now vibrated in his pocket. He excused himself and stepped off the lanai into the house to stare at the screen. Shorty had texted him. The bloodhounds had picked up Janey’s scent five blocks away from Slip Slide in a quiet residential street, only to have the trail go cold.

  A Traccar app resided on his cell phone. With it, he’d be able to see for himself where the red dots had converged. A blank screen stared back at him. No Wi-Fi service. He went back onto the lanai to find Pearl and his wife having a heated debate.

  “Do you have a house Wi-Fi that I can connect to?” he asked. “My case in Melbourne is about to break open, and I need to see what’s going on.”

  Pearl gave him the password. Lancaster went into settings on his cell phone and entered it. No luck. His phone had a mind all its own, while his laptop tended to obey its master. He went outside to his car and got on his laptop while sitting behind the wheel. He entered
the password and this time had better luck.

  Pearl appeared at his window. “Are you working your other case?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Would you mind coming back inside? I want my wife to see you in action.”

  “She doesn’t like me. I can’t change that.”

  “But I can. Please.”

  Pearl had a pleading look in his eyes. Lancaster had only one soft spot, and it was for people in trouble. He caved and followed Pearl back inside to the study. Melanie stood by a window, staring out at the crowded paradise that was South Florida.

  “Melanie, I want you to see this,” Pearl said.

  She moved to her husband’s side. Lancaster placed his laptop on the desk so its screen faced his hosts. Then he opened the Traccar app, and the map of Melbourne appeared, the red dots converged around a single spot.

  “What are we looking at?” she asked.

  “A cocktail waitress named Janey MacKenzie went missing three nights ago,” he said. “The local sheriff thinks Janey’s shacking up with a guy, and will show up in a few days. Her grandmother is convinced she was abducted, and hired me to find her.”

  “Is the grandmother right?”

  “Yes.” He pointed at the red dots. “These are a pack of bloodhounds with GPS trackers attached to their collars. They picked up Janey’s scent on a street between the cocktail lounge where Janey worked and her grandmother’s house, then the trail stopped. Here’s what I think happened. Janey was walking home after work and was approached by a patron offering to give her a lift. She accepted, and got into his car. He knocked her out and took her home. That’s my guess, anyway.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  He shook his head. Janey’s abductor coveted her. Unless Janey angered him, he’d keep her alive until she no longer satisfied his perverse cravings, which might be several days or longer. Knowing that a patron was the culprit thinned the pool of suspects. But the bar was popular and had several dozen regulars.

  He minimized the Traccar app and went into his video library. A black-and-white surveillance video taken of the Slip Slide’s parking lot appeared on his screen. The video was time-stamped and had been taken three nights ago. He had an idea and hit the Play icon.