whenever they swooped down on a hapless vessel, careful to leave no evidence behind, the pirate gang apparently maintained a hideout so well hidden, the Bahamian cops had long since given up trying to find it. Even with the promise of a large cash reward, no one had ever come forward to reveal where it was. And while the local law enforcement was sure it was situated somewhere among the hundreds of tiny islands along Bahamas’ outer cays, that’s about all they knew.
Whiskey wanted to complete this gig quickly and then maybe relax a little. So, they knew they had to do what the Bahamian cops couldn’t or wouldn’t do. They had to find the Muy Capaz hideout.
But they had to get on the gang’s tail first. As it turned out, the DVDs BABE had given them also proved helpful in doing this. Not the ones containing information from the Bahamian cops’ database; as Jennessa had said, those were practically useless. It was the information BABE had generated on its own—detailed records on past victims of the Muy Capaz—that held the key.
The tourist agency consortium estimated at least twenty people had met their end at the hands of the pirates in the past year. In their continuing effort to keep the lid on, the Bahamian cops had classified these people as simply missing persons or unrecoverable accidental drownings, basically making them instant cold cases. But BABE knew better.
Twitch found the pattern they were looking for. After going over the records of the missing victims, he noticed that more than half of them shared two things in common: one, they were leasing boats in the Bahamas at the time of their disappearance; and two, there was no record of how they got to the Bahamas in the first place. No tickets bought from regular commercial airlines, no evidence of passage on any cruise ships or ferries. But because these people were going to pick up their chartered boats, they had to get to the islands somehow.
A charter flight was one way to do this. So Twitch started a search of every small airline flying between Florida and the Bahamas. A whiz at busting through firewalls and hacking files from the Internet, he got into the flight records at Fort Lauderdale airport, and one name kept popping up: Colonel Cat.
It turned out that on more than a few occasions over the past year, Cat had flown customers to the islands shortly before the Muy Capaz struck—in some cases, just hours before a pirate attack.
More damning, though, was that on those same occasions, the very thing Cat had tried to avoid—leaving a paper trail—actually tripped him up. Scuba divers, deep-sea fishermen, people wanting to fly over the mysterious Bimini Road—all these people paid him freely with credit cards or checks.
But the passengers Cat took up around the times of the Muy Capaz’s crimes? They must have all paid in cash, because there were no receipts. No paper trail. The absence of evidence was the evidence itself.
Cat had outsmarted himself.
By connecting the dots on dates close to a Muy Capaz crime wave, Twitch estimated twelve of the pirates’ victims might have been on Cat’s antique airplane at some point.
That was more than half, and that meant it was more than coincidence. After that, the rest was easy. Whiskey hired Cat’s plane, then beat the shit out of him, and he eventually sang like a canary.
So far, so good.
But then they realized not everything they’d heard at the BABE briefing was adding up.
For instance, while interrogating Colonel Cat, they’d discovered—much to their surprise—that the Muy Capaz had hit three more yachts just the night before, each time with Cat’s help.
But there was no full moon the previous night; in fact, the moon was barely waxing at half. So much for the “Wolfman Complex.”
Even stranger, at one point, when they were beating the daylights out of Cat, and Batman asked him how deeply was he involved in voodoo, the pilot actually laughed in their faces. He told them the only voodoo he was involved with went up his nose or into his veins.
Well, no matter, Batman thought now as he pushed the old airplane past 12,000 feet and continued to climb. Every mission had its twists and turns, its intangibles. Timeline or not, voodoo angle or not, they were still on a good pace to wrap up these Capaz monkeys, get paid by BABE, and then spend a little time enjoying the fruits of their labor