Lifeguard - James Patterson [71]
I could feel her face brushing against my chest. For a second, I wasn’t sure who was holding whom. “I have news, too, Ned.”
“I know who Gachet is, Ellie.”
Her eyes grew moist and she nodded. “C’mon, I’ll drive you home.”
I guess I expected her to be completely stunned when on the way back to Sollie’s I told her the name my father had given me. But she just seemed to nod, turning onto Okeechobee.
“The Palm Beach police never followed up the lead on Stratton,” she said, pulling over and putting the car in park.
“I thought you informed them,” I said, a little dazed.
“I did,” Ellie said. “Or I thought so.”
It took me a second to see where she was going.
I think until that moment, hiding from the law, trying to prove my innocence, I’d never focused on just how angry I felt. But now I felt it coming on like some storm I couldn’t hold back. Stratton always had someone on the inside. He held all the cards.
“How do we handle this?” I asked Ellie, cars shooting by.
“We can get a deposition from your father, but these are law enforcement people, Ned. It’s going to take more than an accusation from a guy who’s got a grudge and whose history isn’t exactly unimpeachable. That’s not exactly proof.”
“But you got proof.”
“No, all I got was that someone covered up on the Tess McAuliffe case. If I brought that to my boss, it would barely raise an eyebrow.”
“I just buried my brother, Ellie. You don’t expect me to just sit here and let Stratton and these bastards get away with it.”
“No, I don’t expect that, Ned.”
I saw a look of resolve in her soft blue eyes. The look said, I need you to help me prove this, Ned.
And all I said was “I’m in.”
Chapter 87
IT TOOK ELLIE two days to get the proof.
It was like looking at a painting from a different angle, the prism turned upside down. Every image, every piece of light refracted differently. She knew that whatever she came up with, everything depended on this. She’d better be sure.
First, she went into the PBPD file on the murder-suicide involving Liz Stratton. There was a NIBIN search in there, tracing the history of the gun. As Lawson had suspected, it matched up positively as one of the weapons used in the massacre of Ned’s friends in Lake Worth. It also made the case against Liz and the bodyguard appear pretty airtight.
She flipped the page.
The Beretta .32 had been confiscated in a drug bust two years before by a joint operation of the Miami-Dade County Police Department and the FBI. It had been held in a police evidence bin in Miami and had been part of a weapons cache that had mysteriously disappeared a year before.
Paul Angelos, the murdered bodyguard, was a former Miami cop. Why would someone on Stratton’s payroll be carrying a dirty gun?
Ellie looked back for the officers who had been assigned to the Miami case. She figured Angelos’s name would be there, but it was the name at the bottom of the page that made her freeze.
This could be happenstance, she told herself. What she needed was solid proof.
Next, she started digging into the background of Earl Anson, the guy who had killed Ned’s brother up in Brockton. How would he find his way to Stratton?
Anson had been a longtime criminal from down in Florida. Armed robbery, extortion, trafficking in drugs. He’d spent time in Tampa and Glades prisons. But what puzzled her was that for both prison stints, despite a spotty record, he was bumped up for early parole. A four-to-six for robbery bargained down to fourteen months. A second-offense felony tossed to time served.
Anson knew someone on the inside.
Ellie called up the warden’s office at Glades, a max to medium institution about forty miles west of Palm Beach. She managed to get Assistant Warden Kevin Fletcher on the line. She asked him how Earl Anson had qualified twice for early release.
“Anson,” Fletcher said, punching up his record, “didn’t I read he just get waxed up in Boston?”
“You won’t be seeing him a third time, if that’s what you mean,” Ellie confirmed.
“No loss there,” the assistant warden sighed, “but