She looked at the watches. “And those figure in all this somehow?”

“They figure in something. But we’ve got one more place to check.” He looked at his watch. “It’s still too early yet. We’ve got some time to kill. Let’s take a drive.”

“Where?”

“Not where, really. More like how far. Five miles.”

They left Cookie’s house and climbed back into the Tahoe. Puller checked the rearview.

“See the two guys anywhere?”

“No, but I didn’t expect to, really.” He looked at his odometer. “Okay, five miles out, five miles back. We’re going to head east. At least that seems to be the direction based on what Jane Ryon told me.”

They left Orion Street and then the community of Sunset by the Sea. Three miles out they left any semblance of civilization behind. Four miles out it was only them, the sand, and the ocean.

Five miles out Puller stopped the truck and looked around. They were on the main street. To the north looked busier, with some buildings visible in the distance. To the south was a row of palm trees.

“The ocean has to be on the other side of those trees,” said Puller.

“Provides a natural screen from the road,” observed Carson.

They pulled down a side road and quickly found that beyond the trees was a section of thick brush, more trees, and some surface roads running through them.

And then the sand.

And then the ocean.

Puller swung the Tahoe to a stop on an asphalt park-off and they climbed out. He looked in all directions except toward the ocean.

“Pretty isolated here,” he said. “No people.”

“I wonder why?” asked Carson. “The beach looks pretty enough.”

They walked toward it and quickly found out why the beach was not very popular. The sand was gritty, the beach was covered with sharp rocks, and then there was the smell.

Carson covered her nose. “Sulfur.”

“Must be some geological quirk around here that makes this stretch of beach the way it is. And then there’s that.” He pointed at the large sign erected on a dune.

It read, Warning. Strong riptide. No swimming allowed.

“So not all of Paradise is a paradise,” said Carson.

“I think we might have left Paradise about a half mile ago. Not sure what this place is called. Maybe it’s nothing.”

“It’s a wonder that sulfur smell doesn’t foul up the other beaches.”

“Wind probably doesn’t carry it that far,” said Puller. “Or there might be some sort of meteorological reason. I didn’t smell the sulfur until we got near the beach.”

“Me either, come to think of it. But why in the world would your aunt come here?”

“I don’t know. She was old, disabled. Used a walker.”

“So walking on a beach like this would be problematic. I’ve almost fallen twice.”

They stopped and looked around.

Puller fixed his gaze directly out at the ocean. “Any shipping channels out there?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s the Gulf of Mexico. I would imagine there are lots of ships coming and going. And then there’s all the oil drilling platforms.”

“Right. Like the one that popped and kept spewing oil for a long time.”

“I remember when the BP well burst open. J2 was tracking it for security reasons. And we did some background on the area. There are thousands of oil platforms out there. Most of them are concentrated off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. But some extend over into the Panhandle.”

“Oil is king.”

“At least for now, yeah.” Carson bent down, picked up a chunk of rock, and tossed it into the waves. “Can we go? I’m about to puke with this smell. And I’ll need a shower to get the stink off.”

“A lot of smells more gross than this in the military,” said Puller dryly.

“True. But that doesn’t mean I have to endure them when I’m on vacation.”

They walked back to the Tahoe. Before they got in Puller stopped and knelt down.

Carson said, “What is it?”

“The king.”

“Excuse me?”

She walked around to join him.

He ran his finger over the asphalt and it turned black. He lifted his finger to his nose and looked up at her.

“Oil. Not from a platform. From a vehicle.”

CHAPTER

62

MECHO WALKED THE LAWNMOWER up the ramp of the truck and positioned it next to two other pieces of motorized equipment. He turned and stared back out across the Lampert estate. He didn’t know how much the man spent on landscaping, but it must be a lot. They had come every day and worked all day. When one part was done it was time to move on to another. When the cycle was complete it started over again.

When he had asked the foreman about it the man had just shaken his head and muttered, “He spends more on grass than I’ll make in my entire life. What’s fair about that?”

“Life is not meant to be fair,” Mecho had told him.

“You got that right,” the man said. “Life is meant to suck. Unless you’re rich.”

“There are things other than money,” Mecho said. “To bring happiness.”

The foreman smirked. “Keep telling yourself that. You might actually start believing it.”

“I do believe it,” Mecho had said after the man walked off.

Mecho climbed down and washed the back of his neck with cold water from a bucket carried on the truck. He glanced toward the yacht. Lampert had never come back off it. He had been on there most of the day. But then again, when you had a yacht like that why would you get off?

Then Mecho wondered if he were there by himself. He doubted it.

He knew that Chrissy Murdoch was not there. He had seen her go into the house.

The maid Beatriz had not gone out there either.

But there were other women here. And one could have arrived directly at the yacht from the waterside via a tender and Mecho would not have been able to see it. The yacht blocked the water view along its full length.

Mecho looked back over at the guesthouse and then at the remains of the Bentley. The police had finally left, apparently having exhausted the evidence remaining at the crime scene.

Actually, they would not find any, because he had not left any. If they were looking for a bomb signature they would not find one. He had gone totally generic on that. It would provide them with a thousand possible paths to go down with nary a viable prosecution case at the end of any of them.

He looked up in time to see the sun reflecting off something in an upstairs room of the main house. He immediately walked in the opposite direction, took cover behind a tree, and knelt down, ostensibly to look for weeds to pull or mulch to tidy up.

From the partial cover provided by the tree canopy he looked up, shielding the sun’s glare with one of his huge hands. He counted windows. Third floor, second window from the left. Southwestern side of the house.

He squinted to see if he could tell who was holding the optics. But he couldn’t make out the person.

He ran a sightline from the window to what the person was looking at.

It was a simple process and yielded a simple answer.

The yacht.

With decent optics and from that height the person could probably make out quite a few details on the boat. Which also meant the person was well ahead of Mecho when it came to recon.

He saw Beatriz come out again.

Mecho moved swiftly enough to intersect her path. He walked along with her for a few paces. He asked the question that he needed answered.

She didn’t seem to want to, perhaps thinking he was casing the place for a later burglary. But finally she did tell him.

Mecho thanked her and said that he would try to help her.

“How?” she immediately asked him.

“I can get you out, perhaps.”

“You cannot do that,” she replied, her face turning as pale as her almond skin would allow. “My family.”