Orchid Beach (Holly Barker 1)

“Antiaircraft-gun emplacements?” Ham offered. “Ground-to-air missiles?”

“Come on, Ham, we’re not in Vietnam. It must be something else.”

“What else would you need to hide from overflights?” Ham asked. “That netting doesn’t work if you’re on the ground, you know.”

Jackson spoke up. “Does it strike anybody that this place looks more like a military installation than anything else?”

“Yeah,” Ham said. “I mean, there’s lots of big houses and the golf courses, but if you don’t count those, it looks military to me.”

“Look,” Jackson said, pointing. “Radar at the airfield. Orchid Beach Airport doesn’t have radar.”

“Ham,” Holly said, “if you had to take Palmetto Gardens, how would you do it?”

Ham looked at the photographs again for a moment. “I’d chopper in a regiment of airborne, take the airfield and overwhelm the rest of the place in a hurry.”

“How would you do it if you were the cops, instead of the military?”

Ham shook his head. “I wouldn’t,” he said.

CHAPTER

39

H olly started the next day by asking Jane Grey to run all the employees of Palmetto Gardens who were licensed to carry firearms through the state’s criminal records section.

A couple of hours later, Jane came into her office. “Not one of them had anything on his record more serious than a juvenile offense or a speeding ticket,” she said.

To Holly, that meant one of two things: either they had screened every applicant for a record and discarded those who had one, or they had cleaned up the records of some of their employees. There was no way to judge, from the state’s records, which was the case. And, if they had done some record scrubbing, there was no way to determine for which employees, except the five that Jackson knew about. There was another way, though.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate today, Holly. Is there anything else you need?”

“No, Jane, and thanks. You get back to work.”

Holly turned to her computer and logged on to the national crime computer, in Washington. One by one, she entered the names from the list she had run through the state computer, printing out individual files. It took her a couple of hours, but when she was done, she was astonished at the results.

Holly picked up her private line and called Jackson. “Can we meet at Ham’s?” she asked.

“What’s up? Why don’t we go to my house?”

“Just meet me there as soon as you can.”

“I’ll see you around six.”

She called Ham and told him they were coming.

“You young people sure like it here,” Ham said, as Jackson arrived. “Holly’s already here.”

“What’s going on?” Jackson asked her.

“I didn’t want to meet at your place or mine, because I thought there was an outside chance that one or both of them had been bugged.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just feeling paranoid.”

“Tell me about it.”

Holly took the stack of criminal records from her briefcase and laid them on the dining table. “This morning I ran all the gun-toting employees of Palmetto Gardens through the state crime computer. They were all clean. This afternoon I ran them through the national crime computer. Of a hundred and two, seventy-one had criminal records, lots of them for serious crimes.”