Orchid Beach (Holly Barker 1)

“You know where?”

“Where does a guy like Sweeney go? Anywhere, I should think.”

“I could get the state police to put out a watch for him.”

“What for? We can’t charge him with anything, and I really believe he’s told us all he knows.”

Hurst shrugged. “I guess you’re right.”

“Tell you what you can do,” Holly said. “Put out a bulletin on Sweeney’s Colt thirty-two—the serial number will be on the receipt that guy Schwartz produced in court; the county attorney will have that. Maybe somebody sold it and we can trace it back.”

“I’ll do that,” Wallace said.

“Good. Now let’s all get back to work.”

The two officers left, and Holly, mindful

of what the council had said about her lack of knowledge of the town, decided to see more of it. She went next door to Jane Grey’s office. “I’ll be on patrol for a while,” she said. “Let the dispatcher know I’m in the car, okay?”

“Sure. How’d it go with the council?”

Holly closed the door. “They had voted, three to two, to make Hurd acting chief,” she said. “But Charlie Peterson, who I didn’t know was a lawyer, read them the riot act about my contract, and they calmed down and accepted the situation.”

“Hurd’s close to John Westover,” Jane said. “That’s where that came from. And the other councilman to vote against Westover would have been Howard Goldman, I think.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Howard’s sometimes the swing vote; he goes with Westover most of the time, but occasionally opposes him.”

“Good to know,” Holly said. “I got the impression that Irma Taggert is solid with Westover.”

“That’s right, and she’s a prig, as well. She’s always wanting to shut down the movie house if something racy is running. Even Westover won’t go with her on that.”

“What about the other guy?”

“Frank Hessian? He’s a cipher. Rarely says anything to anybody, doesn’t make waves.”

“How’d he get elected?”

“He’s a nice man, and everybody knows it. He’s a veterinarian. Everybody takes their pets to him.”

“Okay, I’ll see you later.” Holly left the station and decided to drive north on A1A. She hadn’t seen much of the high-rent district yet, and she wanted a look at it.

CHAPTER

21

H olly drove north on A1A, with Daisy in the front seat beside her. Gradually, the town gave way to a kind of suburbia, studded with the gates of upscale subdivisions. She turned into the first one she came to. There was a guardhouse, empty, and a keypad-operated gate, open. She drove down a typical upper-middle-class street, lined with roomy but unpretentious houses on half-acre lots. There were a pair of tennis courts at the end of the block, apparently serving the whole neighborhood. At a T junction, a cross street ran parallel with the beach, and the houses on the ocean were larger and sited on more land. Visits to two more such subdivisions revealed a similar layout. Daisy lost interest, curled up and went to sleep.

As she drove north the subdivisions grew in size, and one or two of them had an actual guard posted in the gatehouse, who waved her in when they saw her police uniform. In these neighborhoods, the lots were an acre or more and the houses more elaborate, some with white columns out front and circular driveways. Here the tennis courts were behind individual houses, and the beach houses were well into the million-dollar bracket, she reckoned.

She continued north and came to a state park, which turned out to be nothing more than a beach with a parking lot and rest rooms. Back on the road, the subdivisions were becoming more spectacular. She visited one, the reason for which seemed to be polo, and there were actually people on horseback swinging mallets at balls. “We’re in the two-million-dollar category now,” she said aloud to herself.

She drove all the way up to the Sebastian Inlet, where the river emptied into the sea under a large bridge; then she turned around and started south toward town. Now she visited subdivisions on the river side of the islands, most of which had marinas and golf courses, sometimes more than one. She thought of her father and how he loved his golf. She had played with him a lot and enjoyed it, but she had been working too hard to have the time to play often. Nothing had changed in that regard.

Now she came to a subdivision that was different from the others in several respects. It was larger, if the length of the twenty-foot-high hedge along the road was any indication; there was more than a mile of it before and after the main gate. Behind the guardhouse, she saw as she turned off the road, the interior of the development was shielded from the main road by an equally high hedge. The place was visually sealed off from the rest of Orchid Beach. There was a live guard at work, too, and this one was armed, the first time she’d seen that. She pulled to a stop next to the guardhouse. Ahead of her was an electrically operated wrought-iron barrier, and a few feet beyond that, steel claws erupted from the pavement. Anybody attempting to crash the gate would quickly lose all his tires to that contraption.

“Good afternoon,” she said to the guard.