an important point, yet didn’t alter the fact that someone had sabotaged our seaplane and almost killed us. But who?
My thoughts went again to the supposed filmmaker, Luke Smith. The only thing I knew about him was that his business card was as fake as his name. Even the Bernie Yeagers of the world can’t conjure up information on a faceless person named Smith who disappears after the briefest of encounters. I had tried Smith’s cell phone and the business number on the card—both no longer in service. I had searched for his film company on the Internet but found nothing. Frustrating. The man knew a lot about me, but all I knew for certain about him was that someone familiar with the marina or people living in Dinkin’s Bay had provided him with information about me and possibly still were. He had a working knowledge of cameras, which was suggestive, but didn’t prove he was a filmmaker. Smith’s interest in Flight 19, real or not, might also be a gambit designed to get me and/or Tomlinson and Dan Futch alone in the Everglades.
While I stood at the binoculars, the dog appeared and made a grunting noise. Thus far, the sound was as close as he’d come to whining—his signal he needed to visit the mangroves. Because I’d yet to hear him bark, either, it crossed my mind that maybe the snake had damaged his vocal cord. I pointed toward shore and said, “Okay,” thinking, Is this the perfect dog? But abandoned the notion when, instead of trotting toward the walkway, the retriever took a shortcut by vaulting over the railing. He hit the water with a cannonball crash that displaced a shower of golden spray, compliments of the last rays of a winter sunset.
It was six-thirty. Tomlinson would arrive in less than an hour, so I showered and tried to finish some work in the lab. My mind kept wandering, though. I wasn’t obsessing about the supposed filmmaker or the articulate perfectionist who might have been sent to kill me. No . . . my fixation was more mundane. Dinner with the married mistress was at eight, and I dreaded the inevitable awkwardness. Just the three of us, alone, making small talk?
Dinner was Tomlinson’s idea, of course.
—
ONE BY ONE, I retraced my steps from the night before and led my hipster pal to three video cameras hidden in foliage outside Cressa Arturo’s beach house, each time touching a finger to my lips to remind him to keep his eyes open but his mouth shut.
Using night vision, the units were easily found. Infrared lights were mounted atop two of the cameras, and the camera positioned at the gate fired a laser across the driveway—a trip wire that recorded all comings and goings associated with the married mistress. Which is why we’d parked my truck at the Island Inn, just down the beach, and had cut in through the side yard.
Last night, after discovering the cameras, I’d been tempted to steal one of the data cards in hopes that the shooter would accidentally appear at the start or end of a video. But a missing memory card was too damn obvious. So tonight I’d brought an exact replacement, a thirty-two-gig SanDisk with contact ports intentionally fouled—a way of explaining why the card was empty. Believable, but not if more than one camera had failed. So I told Tomlinson, “Wait here,” then worked my way toward the swimming pool and made the switch after confirming the camera there wasn’t already filming.
Risky, and I knew it. The cameras were all keyed by auto triggers of some type—a heat sensor, in the case of the camera near the front door—but it was possible the shooter was also stationed nearby. Dozing in his car maybe. Or had a room at the Island Inn where he was watching the house live on a computer screen. Jostle a camera, a motion sensor might flash an alert. But what was the worst that could happen? If the shooter surprised us, we would take off running like a couple of kids after TP’ing a house. This wasn’t the jungle after all, this was affluent Sanibel. No one would appear with guns blazing.
Changing the memory card didn’t set off lights and alarms. No obvious problems, anyway. Soon we were walking West Gulf Drive toward my truck, casting giant moonlit shadows while we talked.
“She signed a prenuptial,” I explained. “So the question is, does it contain an infidelity clause? If so,