“Who was it from?”
“Stranahan. That investigator.”
“Really.” Dr. Graveline worked hard at staying calm; he took pride hi his composure. He asked, “What was the message, Maggie?”
“Three words: ‘It won’t work.’ “
Dr. Graveline repeated the message out loud. Maggie sounded like she was bouncing off the walls.
“Don’t come back here for a while,” Rudy said. “I’ll wire you some more money.” He couldn’t think clearly with Maggie hyperventilating into the phone, and he did need to think. It won’t work. Damn, he didn’t like the sound of that. How much did Stranahan know? Was it a bluff? Rudy Graveline wondered if he should call Chemo and tell him to speed things up.
“What are we going to do?” Maggie demanded.
“It’s being done,” the doctor said.
“Good.” Maggie didn’t ask specifically what was being done. Specifically, she didn’t want to know.
After lunch, Mick Stranahan stopped by the VA hospital, but for the second day in a row the nurses told him that Timmy Gavigan was asleep. They said it had been another poor night, that the new medicine was still giving him fevers.
Stranahan was eager to hear what his friend remembered about Dr. Rudy Graveline. Like most good cops, Timmy never forgot an interview; and like most cops, Timmy was the only one who could read his own handwriting. The Barletta file was full of Gavigan-type scribbles.
After leaving the VA, Stranahan drove back to the marina at Key Biscayne. On the skiff out to Stiltsville, he mentally catalogued everything he knew so far.
Vicky Barletta had disappeared, and was probably dead.
Her doctor had closed up shop a few weeks later and bought out his four partners for fifty thousand dollars apiece.
One of those partners, Dr. Kenneth Greer, had never cashed his check—this according to microfiche records at the bank.
Approximately seven months after Rudy Graveline closed the Durkos Center, Dr. Kenneth Greer was shot to death while hunting deer in the Ocala National Forest. The sheriff’s office had ruled it an accident.
The hunter who had somehow mistaken Kenneth Greer for a white-tail buck had given his name as T. B. Luckner of 1333 Carter Boulevard in Decatur, Georgia. If the sheriff in Ocala had troubled himself to check, he would have found that there was no such person and no such address.
The nurse who participated in Victoria Barletta’s surgery had recently gone to New York to sell her story to a TV producer.
Shortly afterwards, a paid killer named Tony the Eel showed up to murder Mick Stranahan. Tony, with a brand-new face.
Then the TV producer arrived in Miami to take Stranahan’s picture for a prime-time special.
All traced to a four-year-old kidnapping that Mick Stranahan had never solved.
As he steered the boat into the Biscayne Channel, angling out of the messy following chop, he gunned the outboard and made a beeline for his stilt house. The tide was up, making it safe to cross the flats.
On the way, he thought about Rudy Graveline. Suppose the doctor had killed Vicky. Stranahan checked himself—make that Victoria, not Vicky. Better yet, just plain Barletta. No sense personalizing.
But suppose the doctor had killed her, and suppose Greer knew, or found out. Greer was the only one who didn’t cash the buyout check—maybe he was holding out for more money, or maybe he was ready to blab to the authorities.
Either way, Dr. Graveline would have had plenty of motive to silence him.
And if, for some reason, Dr. Graveline had been led to believe that Mick Stranahan posed a similar threat, what would stop him from killing again?
Stranahan couldn’t help but marvel at the possibility. Considering all the cons and ex-cons who’d love to see him dead—hoods, dopers, scammers, bikers and stickup artists—it was ironic that the most likely suspect was some rich quack he’d never even met.
The more Stranahan learned about the case, and the more he thought about what he’d learned, the lousier he felt.
His spirits improved somewhat when he spotted his model friend Tina stretched out on the sun deck of the stilt house. He was especially pleased to notice that she was alone.