Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

"No. I just verified that he works for the insurance company. Why? You find out he belongs to the Klan or something?"

Billy is not usually a vindictive person.

"We need to track his work background," I said. "He told me he had been a cop in Charleston and Savannah, but we need to find out if he ever had any connection with the state pen near Moultrie."

Billy was quiet on the other end, spinning the information in his head, frustrated by the lack of logic.

"You want to connect the dots on this one for me?" he finally said.

"It might be nothing," I said. "But let's check."

Old cop thinking. Someone lies to you, there's a reason, even if it's a lie by omission. Maybe McCane just didn't include it because being a prison guard isn't exactly a revered position in law enforcement. Maybe there was more. Maybe I was paranoid. I drove north up the oceanside highway, watching the surf work at the Florida sand. Maybe I was back in the game.

When I got to Billy's apartment, he was still in his back office, working the computers. I opened a beer and watched over his shoulder while he ran his fingers over the keyboard, popping up government websites and directories. He'd run McCane's dossier and there were some major gaps in it, and that often meant that the person you were trying to track had either spent time in the system, or was in law enforcement, or had somehow had his history expunged. Billy had then called a prosecutor friend in Atlanta who lowered his voice when Billy asked him if Frank McCane's name and the prison at Moultrie rang any bells. He asked Billy not to use him as a source, but told him the story.

"McCane was a d-dayshift guard at the prison and had b-been there for several years. After a change in the governor's seat, there was a c-crackdown on the Department of Correction's internal system, which had been rife with abuse," Billy said. "McCane had b-been the unofficial head of a shakedown club among the guards."

"So he was indicted?"

"Not exactly." Billy said. "When they backed him into a corner with proof, he made a d-deal with the governors office, t-turned over information on the warden and gave up his job. The only s-stipulation was lifelong p-probation. He could no longer w-work for the state, and if he was ever arrested on the outside, they'd re-file the whole l-load of charges from the p-prison on him."

"So he moved out of the state, gave up public police work and went with the insurance job," I said, putting the obvious into the air. "Your friend give any details on what McCane specialized in during this stellar career?

"Very little," Billy said. "He's a state p-prosecutor. It's a political year in Georgia. N-No one's going to b-be in the mood to hang their butt out."

I drained the beer and went for another. Billy declined to join me and I changed my own mind on my way to the refrigerator. The Moultrie prison was stuck in my head from a Philadelphia case, and I was trying to dig it out of its place in the past. I started a pot of coffee.

"Can you find a Philadelphia Inquirer archive on the box?" I called back to him while the coffee was brewing.

"Sure. What are we looking for?"

"Name of an inmate. A guy we tried to help out after we broke a car theft ring. The bust went bad and a port officer got killed. This guy was a locksmith at the time and he ended up on the rotten end of a murder charge."

"They would have done a news story at the time?"

"I hope so."

While Billy clicked at the computers, I sat at the kitchen counter telling him the story, unraveling a day at a Delaware River port warehouse in a time before I was a completely disillusioned police detective.

A handful of us had been assigned to an auto theft task force that was working with Customs on the theft and importation of cars and trucks from the northeast to Haiti and the Caribbean.

The feds had been working the scam up and down the coast. The theft ring was the typical game. At the low end, they hired car thieves to do the heists. The boosters were given special lists of makes and models, actual orders to fill. Most of the cars were high- end SUVs, especially Toyota 4Runners. At the time, the loose pack of military thugs running Haiti had a liking for the all-terrain vehicles. The Toyota emblem on the front of the hood looked distinctly like a bull with horns, and to them the bull image carried an aura of masculine power. The SUVs brought top dollar.

The car thieves were told the less damage the more they would get paid, and they'd boost the cars and park them in a commuter lot at Philly International Airport to be sure they didn't have anti-theft locators. If the cops traced the electronic beacon, all they'd get was the car abandoned at the airport.

Once the cars cooled, the shippers would then move them inside a warehouse at the port where a guy could cut a key. When they were ready, a tractor-trailer would back up to the warehouse loading dock and the cars would be driven inside. The crew would then pack the rest of the trailer, floor to ceiling, with household goods, boxes of clothes, bags of rice. If an inspector decided to pop the back door, all he could see in the first ten feet were legitimate goods for shipping.

"What do you think? Five years ago?" Billy said from the other room, still clicking.

"No, more like seven."

Most of the task force work had been with informants, kids picked up on auto theft charges who were looking to deal information for a break. We'd put surveillance on a warehouse and it was primed. I was one of four detectives, a U.S. Customs agent and a handful of port police used to cut off any escape routes. We were in position. It was hot and dusty as we leaned into a corrugated wall around the corner.

"Summertime," I said to Billy.

"I think I've got it," he said.

We waited in the heat until the tractor-trailer was loaded and started to pull away on its route to the holding area, where the container would be loaded onto an outbound freighter to Haiti. When the trailer cleared the doors we jumped, guns drawn.

"U.S. Customs, hands in the air!" the agent yelled as three of us came through the front and two more took down a door to the back.

The element of surprise. Four men were eating lunch around a wire-spool table, another was in the glass-walled office, sleeping with his feet on the desktop. One was busy near the back of the warehouse, his head down and a pair of safety glasses on his face while he worked over a machine. He was my guy-the key man.

It would have gone down like clockwork but for the idiot in the john. The last one to see us had to be the cowboy.

Everyone in the warehouse had already let the air out of their lungs when the asshole came sprinting out of the cheap wooden door of the bathroom and started firing a second-rate.38, thinking he might get to the loading dock door. He made it twenty feet before he took four rounds and dropped. But one of his random shots also hit a port policeman.

"Harlan P. Moticker," Billy said from his room. "The locksmith."

"That's him," I said, walking into the study.

Harlan was the outsider in the group, hired to cut the keys for the stolen vehicles so they could go abroad in no-fuss driving condition. He was a southern boy down on his luck, trying to make a go of it up north and making extra cash on the wrong side.

All seven men were arrested and when the port cop died of his wound, the ante got raised. Because a person had died during the commission of a felony, they were all charged with murder.

"Can you check the Department of Corrections in Georgia to see if he's still in?"

Billy had already pushed his chair to the other screen.

Harlan P. was the only one of the group who wasn't connected to the offshore ring. As a result, he was the only one who had nothing to deal. He had no useful information for Customs, so no matter how much he wanted to cooperate he still ate the whole twenty-five to life. He'd been paid two hundred dollars for the job.