Stuart Woods - Hothouse Orchid

As Holly approached her front gate she saw a car parked on the side of the road a few yards from the gate-a blue Chevrolet, she thought. As she pulled up to the gate, Jimmy Weathers stuck his head outside the window and waved. She beckoned him to follow.

They both got out of their cars at the front door, and Daisy ran to greet Jimmy. “Hey, Jimmy,” Holly said.

“Hey, Holly, can I come in a minute?”

“Sure.” Holly unlocked the front door, and they entered. “That your car?” she asked.

“No, it’s an unmarked police car. Bruno promoted me to detective, so I’m working in a plain car and civvies now.”

“Congratulations, Jimmy. You want something to drink?”

“Something soft would be good; I’m working.”

Holly got a Diet Coke out of the fridge and handed it to him. “How’s your investigation going?”

“Well, Hurd and Lauren have kind of started to get in my way. I just spent a couple of hours with Lauren at the marina.”

“I guess that’s partly my fault,” Holly said. “I called Hurd when Daisy found the body on the beach. I don’t think you’re going to be able to do much about Hurd and his new unit, except develop your own leads, and even then you’ll have to keep him updated on what you turn up.”

“I talked to him a few minutes ago,” Jimmy said. “He told me about the cigarette butts. Do you think you could give them to me?”

“Hurd’s coming by to pick them up later,” Holly said. “Anyway, you’d just have to send them to the state lab for testing, which is what Hurd will do, too.”

“I guess I just wanted to impress Bruno with them,” Jimmy said.

“Catch the perp,” Holly said. “That’ll impress him. Tell me, does Bruno smoke?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He was quitting when I knew him,” Holly said. “I just wondered if he’s started again.”

“I’ve never seen him smoke. Is Bruno a suspect in your mind?”

“I don’t have any reason to suspect him,” Holly replied, “but I don’t have any reason not to, either.”

“He has a boat at the Indian River Marina,” Jimmy said.

“Oh?”

“But so do I.”

“What kind of a boat do you have?”

“It’s a twenty-two-foot sloop. I bought it cheap and did a lot of work on it. My girlfriend and I take it out on weekends. I got Bruno’s berth for him; he bought a power boat, a fisherman.”

“Jimmy, you know the Boston Whaler that the marina uses as a work boat?”

“Yeah, it’s always around.”

“Have you ever noticed whether the keys are left in it?”

“No, I never took that much interest; it’s just like a hundred other Whalers up and down the river. Lauren’s talking to the night manager about it.”

“Well, at least you don’t have to duplicate your efforts,” Holly said. “And they’ll keep you posted on what they know, just as you should keep them posted.”

“Holly, can I ask you something personal?”

“How personal?”

“It’s about when Bruno tried to… you know.”

“Tried to rape me? What do you want to know?”

“How’d you stop him?”

“I broke his nose,” Holly said.

“How?”

“With a straight left. He wasn’t expecting it. I’ll give you a tip, Jimmy, if you don’t already know it: men, even bullies like Bruno-maybe especially bullies like Bruno-don’t like the sight of their own blood, especially when it’s covering the whole front of a starched and pressed colonel’s uniform.”

“What did Bruno do after you hit him?”

“He backed off; in fact, he backed right out of the building. Bruno is not stupid,” Holly said. “He got into his car, went down a stretch of country road and smashed it into a tree pretty good. Then he took off his seat belt, called nine-one-one, asked for an ambulance and went to the hospital to have his nose set and taped. That way, he had an excuse for looking like somebody who’d lost a street fight when he came back to the base.”

“I guess that was pretty smart. How do you know he did that?”

“Because I saw his car later. At Bruno’s trial, the prosecutor talked me out of testifying about breaking his nose, because he thought the humiliation might make his jury of other officers more sympathetic to him.”

“It wouldn’t make me sympathetic,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, but imagine if you were a brother officer, inclined to protect another officer, especially a full colonel.”

“Were there any women on the jury?”

“One. She looked miserable when the verdict was read; I expect she was browbeaten into going along.” Holly thought of mentioning Bruno’s attack on Lauren, but she didn’t know if Jimmy knew about that, and it was better for Lauren if he didn’t.

The phone rang, and Holly pressed the gate button. “That will be Hurd,” she said. She walked Jimmy outside.

“Hello Holly, Jimmy,” Hurd said. “Congratulations, Jimmy. I hear you made detective.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy replied. “Thanks, Hurd.”

Holly got the bag of cigarette butts from her car and handed them to Hurd. “Here you go,” she said.

Hurd accepted the bag. “We found the other body,” he said. “The one with the right hand missing.”

“Where?” Holly asked.

“A quarter of a mile down the road from where the rented Ford was found,” Hurd replied. “A search dog found it for us. We found her handbag, too.”

“Who was she?”

“A friend of the other woman’s. They came down from Atlanta together on vacation. You were right about her: she was five-nine, a hundred and twenty pounds, forty-five years old.”

“Any further evidence found with the body?”

Hurd shook his head. “She was taken down a well-worn footpath off the road, then dumped in a thick bunch of palmetto. We might not have found her without the dog.”

“What does it tell us,” Holly said, “that the murderer dumped one body down the road but took the other out to sea?”

“The question occurred to me,” Hurd said, “and I don’t have an answer.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Jimmy said.

“Maybe after he had taken one body down to the boat, he thought it was too risky to take the other, so he drove it down the road,” Holly suggested.

“And how did he control the two of them?” Hurd asked.

“What was the cause of death?” Holly asked.

“I just heard from the ME,” Hurd said. “A twenty-two slug to the back of the head.”

“Was the body naked, like the other one?”

“Yes, but there was no evidence of rape.”

“He liked the other one better,” Holly said, “and he managed them with the gun.”

“Why did he take her hand?”

“As a souvenir,” she replied. “He tossed it in the trunk, then apparently forgot about it.”

Hurd winced. “How could anybody forget a thing like that?”

Holly waved goodbye to the two men and went back inside her house. She stood at the sliding glass doors, looking out at the ocean, thinking. Then she went to her newly constructed office, tapped in the code to unlock the door and sat down at the Agency computer.

She entered her passwords through three levels of security, and then she logged on to the National Criminal Database, which combined the FBI and a network of local law enforcement, and typed in “James Morris Bruno, Jr.” The computer thought about it, then reported the messages, “No criminal convictions as an adult. No arrests as an adult.”

Holly thought about that. As an adult? She hadn’t seen that before. Bruno might have a juvenile record, but if so, it wouldn’t be part of a national database; in fact, it probably would be sealed. Where did Bruno grow up? She racked her brain. She had known all sorts of things about him when she had worked for him, but that had been years ago, and anyway she had worked at forgetting everything about him.