There were two stories commonly told about Brian Keyes at the Miami Sun. The first happened a year after his arrival, when a fully loaded 727 fireballed down in Florida Bay. Keyes had rented an outboard and sped to the scene, and he’d filed a superb story, full of gripping detail. But they’d damn near had to hospitalize him afterward: for six months Keyes kept hallucinating that burned arms and legs were reaching out from under his bedroom furniture.
The second anecdote was the most well-known. Even Al Garcia knew about Callie Davenport. She was a four-year-old girl who’d been kidnapped from nursery school by a deranged sprinkler repairman. The lunatic had thrown her into a truck, driven out to the Glades, and murdered her. After some deer hunters found the body, Cab Mulcahy, the managing editor, had told Brian Keyes to go interview Callie Davenport’s grief-stricken parents. Keyes had written a real heart-breaker, too, just like the old man wanted. But that same night he’d marched into Mulcahy’s office and quit. When Keyes rushed out of the newsroom, everyone could see he’d been crying. “That young man,” Skip Wiley had said, watching him go, “is too easily horrified to be a great journalist.”
Besides Keyes himself, Skip Wiley was the only person in the world who knew the real reason for the tears. But he wasn’t telling.
A few months later Keyes got his private investigator’s license, and his newspaper friends were amused. They wondered how the hell he was going to hold together, working for a bunch of sleazoid lawyers and bail bondsmen. Brian Keyes wondered too, and wound up avoiding the rough cases. The cases that really paid.
“Still doing divorces?” Al Garcia asked.
“Here and there.” Keyes hated to admit it, but that’s what covered the rent: he’d gotten damn good at staking out nooner motels with his three-hundred-millimeter Nikon. That was another reason for Al Garcia’s affability. Last year he had hired Brian Keyes to get the goods on his new son-in-law. Garcia despised the kid, and was on the verge of outright murdering him when he called Keyes for help. Keyes had done a hell of a job, too. Tracked the little stud to a VD clinic in Homestead. Garcia’s daughter wasn’t thrilled by the news, but Al was. The divorce went through in four weeks, a new Dade County record.
Now, Brian Keyes had a friend for life.
Garcia poured the coffee. “So you got a biggie, Brian.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s a touchy one. Can’t say much, especially now that you’re lined up with the other side.”
“Did you work the Harper case?”
“Hell, everybody up here worked that case.”
Keyes tried to sip the coffee and nearly boiled his upper lip.
“Hey,” Garcia said, “that piece-of-shit rag newspaper you used to work for finally printed something intelligent this morning. You see it?”
“My paper was in a puddle.”
“Ha! You should have read it anyway. Wiley, the asshole that writes that column. I hate that guy normally—I really can’t stand him. But today he did okay.”
Keyes didn’t want to talk about Skip Wiley.
“He wrote about this case,” Garcia went on. “About that little scuzzball we arrested.”
“I’ll be sure to get a copy,” Keyes said.
“I mean, it wasn’t a hundred percent right, there was a few things he screwed up, but overall he did an okay job. I clipped it out and taped it on the refrigerator. I want my boy to read it when he gets home from school. Let him see what his old man does for a living.”
“I’m sure he’ll get a charge out of it, Al. Tell me about Ernesto Cabal.”
“Dirtbag burglar.”
“Was he on your list of suspects?”
Garcia said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve got thirty detectives working on this murder, right? You must have had a list of suspects.”
“Not on this one.”
“So what we’re talking about is blind luck. Some Beach cop nails the guy for running a traffic light and bingo, there’s Mr. Sparky Harper’s missing automobile.”
“Luck was only part of it,” Garcia said sourly.
Keyes said, “You caught Cabal in the victim’s car, but what else?”