James Swain - The King Tides

“This is Special Agent Elizabeth Daniels. I’m in the field and can’t take your call. Leave a message, date, time, and I’ll return your call at my first opportunity.”

A short buzz filled his ear. He wrestled with how much to say, and decided to keep his message short and sweet.

“Good evening. My name is Jon Lancaster, and I’m a private investigator living in Fort Lauderdale. I would like to speak to you about the Cassandra videos. We can do this over the phone or in person. Please call me when you get this message. I’ll be up.”

He left his cell phone number and ended the call. Then he got an iced tea and went onto his balcony and sat in a chair and watched the day come to an end. Beth Daniels had become an FBI agent because of her past. She was on a mission, and probably the kind of agent who worked all hours on cases and regularly checked her voice mail.

His eyelids had grown heavy. He hadn’t gotten much sleep in the last few days and was exhausted. His bed was calling him, only he didn’t want to be asleep when Daniels rang him back. He didn’t expect her to be forthcoming with information and would have to word his questions carefully and draw her out. He needed to be sharp to do that.

Sipping his drink, he wondered how long it would be before he got a call back.

The blare of a car horn snapped him awake.

It took him a moment to get his bearings. He was still in a chair on the balcony, and it was pitch black outside. The lack of city lights suggested early morning. His empty glass sat by his feet; beside it, his cell phone. By glancing at the screen, he could tell if he’d gotten any calls while asleep. There were none.

Special Agent Daniels hadn’t called him back. He would have bet money that she was going to. His batting average was poor when predicting women’s behavior, and he guessed that was why he was still single.

He heard the horn again. His unit faced the front of the building, and he went to the railing and looked down. A car was parked by the guardhouse, trying to get in. The apartment had twenty-four-hour security, but at night the guard often went inside to drink coffee with the cleaning people.

The guard came out of the building and trotted toward the guardhouse. Instead of going inside, he walked around the security gate and greeted the visitor. It was a woman, and she hung out of the open driver’s window and flashed her credentials. They had a brief conversation, then the guard punched a code into a keypad and the gate rose. The visitor pulled in and found a parking space and got out. The guard met her at the entrance to the building, and used a key card to gain entry. She went in and the guard started to follow, only to be rebuffed. She didn’t want his help. The guard looked uncomfortable with this, but said nothing. The visitor entered, and the front door closed behind her.

The building had two hundred residents, and the visitor could have been here to visit anyone, but his gut told him it was Daniels, come to pay him a visit. He’d worked with the FBI doing jobs for Team Adam, and he knew that they kept a fleet of private jets at an airport in DC that agents could hop on when a case broke wide open.

He went inside and brushed his teeth and ran a washcloth over his face. Then he unlocked the front door to his apartment and went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. He pulled a carton of half-and-half out of the fridge and saw that it had expired. As he poured it down the drain he heard the front door open.

“Hello. I’m in the kitchen making coffee. Come on back.”

No response. He cleared his throat.

“I’d offer you something to eat, but I’m afraid all I’ve got is cheese and crackers and a couple of slices of cold pizza.”

Still no answer. Daniels was definitely not the friendly type. He took a pair of mugs out of the cabinet and set them on the counter.

“How do you like your coffee? I’ve got sugar and sweetener.”

Daniels stepped into the kitchen. She was slight of build and maybe five six in her bare feet. Her resemblance to Nicki was uncanny, right down to the center part in her jet-black hair. She wore a dark-green pantsuit and had a badge pinned to the jacket lapel. Clutched in her hands was a .40-caliber Glock that was pointed at his chest.

“FBI. Put your arms in the air.”

“Is that a no on the coffee?”

“Do it!”

He played cool and stuck his arms in the air. She made him walk into the dining room and had him sit in a chair. He’d bought a dining room set to fill out the apartment and didn’t think he’d used it once, preferring to eat on the balcony or while watching TV in the living room. The chair creaked under his weight.

“Put your hands behind the chair,” she ordered him.

“Is this necessary? I called you, remember? And I unlocked the door.”

“It could be a trap.”

“If you thought it was a trap, you would have brought backup.”

“Stop arguing with me.”

She was on edge, her voice high-pitched. Squeezing a trigger was easier when the shooter was under duress. Not wanting to get shot, he stuck his arms behind his back. She handcuffed his wrists and used a plastic tie to secure the cuffs to a rung in the back of the chair. Then she came around the chair and stood in front of him. The Glock was returned to its jacket holster. She crossed her arms and gave him a stern look.

“You can make this hard, or you can make this easy,” she said.

“Easy sounds better,” he said.

“Tell me where you stored the Cassandra videos.”

“They were on a cell phone that I purchased, but they were erased.”

“You’re saying you don’t have them.”

“If you don’t believe me, you can check. My laptop is in my study. The password is ‘jimmybuffett,’ all lowercase. My cell phone is on the balcony on the floor. The second cell phone that had the Cassandra videos is next to it.”

“Why do you own two cell phones?”

“I’m working a job. I bought the second one using a false identity so I could look at data that a guy had stored on it.”

“That’s against the law.”

“I think I knew that.”

She retrieved the laptop and placed it on the dining room table so he could watch her look through it. “What am I going to find on here?” she asked.

“Mostly bootleg concert videos of Jimmy Buffett that I shot on my cell phone,” he said. “There’s also a video of me fishing with a buddy of mine.”

“No kiddie porn?”

“No, ma’am. Would you like me to explain what’s going on, or do you prefer stumbling around in the dark?”

She shot him a pair of daggers. “Watch your mouth.”

“Just trying to help.”

She took her time reviewing the videos stored on his laptop. Finding nothing illegal, she went onto the balcony and got the two cell phones, and reviewed their contents while he watched. It was an old interrogation trick. She was hoping he would twitch when she got close to finding what she was looking for. When the cell phones turned up empty, she marched into his bedroom and began pulling open drawers and dumping their contents onto the floor.

“There’s nothing to find,” he called out to her.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she replied.

She returned to the dining room and opened the drawers on the china cabinet he’d taken from his parents’ house after they’d passed away. Each item she pulled out of the cabinet was given a cursory examination before being placed aside. His grandmother’s porcelain serving ladle slipped out of her grasp and shattered on the floor.

“Are you trying to provoke me?” he asked. “Because if you are, it won’t work.”

She did not apologize for the breakage. She was filled with hostility, her rage simmering just below the surface, and he imagined her in the trunk of the Hanover killers’ car, facing certain death. It was the kind of experience that most people never got over.