Stuart Woods: Cold Paradise

“Thanks, Dan.” He hung up the phone. “Fritz, you’re doing me a very great favor.”

“Glad to be of service. Lieutenant, running those prints was a very great favor to us. I’d love to clear this case.”

“I hope you clear it before the weekend,” Stone said.

“Why the weekend?”

“Because there’s going to be a big wedding here, and Mr. Manning might just try to crash the party.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Parker said. He stood up and shook Stone’s and Dino’s hands. “Thanks for your help. I’ll let you know if we find the guy.” He turned to leave.

“Fritz,” Stone said, “what was your victim’s name?”

“Winston Harding,” Parker replied.

Stone watched Thad Shames leave the house and walk through the gardens toward the yacht.

“Maybe I should talk to him alone,” Stone said.

Dino got up. “I’ll be in my cabin if you need me.”

As Dino departed, Thad came up the gangplank and walked to the afterdeck, where Stone waited for him. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Thad. Have a seat.” Stone wasn’t going to enjoy this.

“What’s up? Why did you want to see me alone?”

“Because what I have to tell you is for your ears only. You must not share this with Liz, or even Callie.”

“You sound very serious,” Thad said.

“This is very serious.”

“Tell me.”

“Today, Dino and I have had visits from two FBI agents and a detective from the Houston, Texas, police department.”

“About Liz?”

“No, about Paul Manning.”

“What about Manning?”

“One of the problems with finding Manning was that, for a long time, he had never been fingerprinted. Lots of people haven’t. If you have never been arrested, applied for a security clearance or served in the armed forces, then you’ve probably not been fingerprinted. The Bureau maintains a huge database of everyone who has ever been fingerprinted, and it can be accessed by authorized law enforcement agencies.”

“I understand. And Manning has never been fingerprinted?”

“He has, once. After the business on St. Marks, Manning paid me a visit in New York. He wanted money. Fortunately, I had been expecting him, and Dino showed up shortly after his arrival and arrested him on charges of insurance fraud. Since he was wanted in St. Marks on three murder charges, and since the insurance company had no hope of retrieving any funds from him, they waived their claim on Manning and allowed him to be extradited to St. Marks. But first, he was taken to Dino’s precinct, the Nineteenth, in Manhattan, and routinely fingerprinted.”

“And then his prints went into the FBI computer?”

“No. Whoever handled the fingerprinting at the Nineteenth considered Manning’s arrest as a foreign matter and didn’t forward his prints to the FBI. But they remained on file at the precinct, and earlier this week, I remembered that Manning had been printed.

“The FBI also maintains a database of fingerprints that are associated with unsolved crimes. If a perpetrator leaves a print at a crime scene, it’s run against all known prints, and if there’s no match, it goes into the unsolved crimes database under a file number that relates to the case. I asked Dino to run a match of Manning’s prints against that database, and it turned up a match with a bank robbery in Arlington, Virginia, four years ago. That crime was also matched by modus operandi and description of the perpetrator to three other bank robberies in Maryland. All the robberies took place near Washington, D.C., where Manning kept an apartment under the name of William Charles Danforth.”

“So Manning is a bank robber, as well as a murderer?”

“Yes. It appears that he had been supporting himself in that manner while he was writing a novel, which has now been published and has become a best-seller.”

“Busy guy.”

“Yes, he has been. Which brings us to today’s visit from the FBI and the Houston detective. The FBI told us they were interested in the Virginia bank robbery, which was patently nonsense because the Bureau would never spend its resources on such a small crime, especially when they know the banks won’t even prosecute small robberies unless violence was employed.”

“So what were they really interested in?”

“The Houston PD, in investigating a suspected homicide, also came up with a fingerprint, which they ran against the FBI’s databases. They turned up the Virginia bank robbery, too, and then, when Dino’s precinct turned up the same thing, it alerted both the FBI and the Houston department that somebody else had a match. What’s more, Dino could attach an identity to the prints, as well, and that’s why we had these visits today.”

“Did you or Dino tell them who the prints belonged to?”

“Yes, we did.”

“So they’re looking for Manning, now?”

“Yes. And we think he may be in Palm Beach.”

“Well, this is very good news, Stone.”

“It is. I hope they’ll have him in custody soon, which would prevent Manning’s trying to disrupt the wedding.”

“Why do you think he would try to do that?”

“Last night, while the yacht’s crew was off duty, and Dino and I were asleep on the yacht, somebody let go all her mooring lines and removed the gangplank. If Dino hadn’t woken up, the yacht would almost certainly have collided with a bridge south of here and done great damage; maybe even have sunk the yacht.”

“Jesus. And you think it was Manning?”

Stone avoided mention of Dolce. “He seems the likely candidate. It was hardly the prank of a roving band of juvenile delinquents.”

“And you think he might try to disrupt the wedding?”

“Yes. We’ve taken security precautions against that possibility.”

“So everything that can be done has been done?”

“Yes.”

Thad stood up. “Then I’m going to put it out of my mind.”

“Please sit down, Thad. I’m not finished.”

Thad sat down.

“The Houston PD is interested in Manning because one of his fingerprints was found on a bedside glass of a man they believe may have been poisoned.”

“So he killed somebody in Houston, too? Good God, the man’s a maniac.”

“That certainly appears to be so. But what’s important to us here, today, is that the man the police think may have been poisoned was Winston Harding, Liz’s late husband.”

Thad seemed to freeze in place. “Oh, my God,” he said, finally.

Stone felt he had finally made his point.

“The poor girl. This man has made her life hell, and now we learn he murdered her husband, too?”

Maybe he hadn’t made his point, after all, Stone thought. He was going to have to spell it out. “That is a very distinct possibility,” Stone said. “And it has implications for you.”

“You mean, you think Manning may try to kill me?”

Stone nodded. “It’s a possibility we can’t ignore.”

“But you’ve already taken security precautions.”

“Yes, but how long are you willing to live under those circumstances?”

“I see,” Thad said. “You mean that he might try to kill me at some time in the future?”

“Yes.” Stone was having trouble getting the rest of it out. “Thad, I think that, under the circumstances, you should postpone the wedding.”

Thad looked alarmed. “For how long?”

“Until Manning is caught and… interrogated.”

“Gosh, I don’t know if we could do that at this point without causing a major hullabaloo in town. We’ve already invited two hundred people from Palm Beach and all over the country. Some of them have already arrived.”

“Of course, Manning may be arrested today or tomorrow.”