increased the throttle. It was just coming up on three-thirty in the morning, the air perfectly still, the overcast sky pitch black except for the glow of Sarasota.
His house, about four miles south, was just north of the smaller swing bridge at Blackburn Point. These were waters he knew well. Besides their sailboat, which they kept in downtown Sarasota at Marina Jack, they had a small Boston Whaler runabout that he and Katy often took up the ICW as far as Anna Maria or sometimes down to the Crow’s Nest in Venice for leisurely Sunday brunches.
Just now the two houses north of his on Casey Key and several to the south were empty for the summer. All of them maintained private markers leading to small backyard docks.
Twenty minutes later he throttled back to idle, switched off the boat’s nav lights, and angled west to the island just after marker 37, no need to raise the engine because water depths here in the channel were three feet at lower low tide right up to the docks, less than five hundred yards outside the channel.
From here he could see the red and green lights on the Blackburn Point bridge and make out the silhouette of his house, and the spindly outline of the gazebo in the backyard where Katy had loved to have a morning cup of tea or an early-evening glass of wine.
At the last moment he cut the boat’s engine and drifted to the dock two houses up from his, and tied bow and stern lines to the cleats. He speed-dialed Rencke’s number, and Otto answered on the first ring.
“I’m tied up just north of my place. Can you cut the house alarm system?”
“Stand by,” Rencke said.
Now that the boat’s engine was off, the night had become silent, except for the frogs and other animals and the sounds of what was probably a night hunting bird in the distance.
“Done,” Rencke said.
“I’ll let you know when I’m out of there,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection.
Pocketing the duct tape, he jumped up on the dock, and headed through the sea oats and tall grasses at the water’s edge to the edge of his property. Only a few people had put up fences or security walls down here, which was just as well because McGarvey had a clear sight line, and he spotted the Bureau agent sitting in the gazebo almost at the same moment he smelled the man’s smoke and saw for just a brief moment the glow from the tip of the cigarette.
It was damn sloppy, but it told McGarvey that at least this man wasn’t expecting trouble, which in a slight way was troublesome. If the Bureau didn’t expect McGarvey to show up here, why had they posted guards, at least one of whom was lax?
He waited in the darkness a full five minutes to make sure the second man wasn’t on this side of the house, and that no communications passed between them, then he angled away from the water, his path between the house and the gazebo.
The agent, stood up, took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt out into the water, and McGarvey silently raced the last five yards, leaped over the gazebo’s low rail and hit the man low in the back with enough force to knock him down, but not enough to break his back.
McGarvey put pressure on the man’s carotid arteries and within seconds the agent was out. Working quickly McGarvey slapped a piece of tape over the agent’s mouth, then taped his wrists and elbows behind his back, his ankles and knees together and finally his torso and his legs to the gazebo’s rail.
The agent was beginning to come around when McGarvey disappeared up to the house, opened the rear door, and slipped inside, into the kitchen where he was brought up short.
He could smell Katy’s scent, and he stepped back, the same dark rage from Arlington threatening to blot out his sanity. It had only been a few days since they had left for Washington to see about Todd, yet it was a lifetime, ten lifetimes ago. But she was here.
He stayed at the kitchen door for a full minute, before he was able to rouse himself enough to go upstairs to the master suite, which was even worse for him than the kitchen. Katy was everywhere here. Her clothes, the bed, the bathroom, photographs of her on the walls, on the bureau were almost overwhelming even