Orchid Beach (Holly Barker 1)

“Get an ambulance and a coroner out to Jane Grey’s address; she’s dead of a gunshot wound. Find Hurd Wallace and tell him to get out here, too, to secure the scene. I have Barney Noble in custody. I want a paramedic to treat him for superficial wounds at the station, when I get him there.”

“Roger, Chief,” the man said. “I’m on it.”

Holly put the microphone back in its cradle and turned to look at Barney Noble, who had struggled into a sitting position. One eye was already closed, and he was squinting at her with the other.

“Bitch,” he said.

“Barney,” she replied, “coming from you, that’s the highest praise I’ve ever had.”

CHAPTER

61

H olly waited for Hurd Wallace to arrive and take over the scene, then she drove Barney Noble to the station and booked him on three counts of homicide. Jane Grey was dead, and Holly was the eyewitness to her murder. She had never cared much for the death penalty, but now, in the case of Barney Noble, she had become enthusiastic.

When her work was done, she drove home, showered and tried to go to sleep. It couldn’t be done. She dressed in a fresh uniform and drove out to Palmetto Gardens. An FBI agent was manning the front gate.

“Where’s Harry Crisp?” she asked the man.

“At the com center, I think. I just let in some guy from the safe company.”

Holly drove into the compound and out to the com center. Federal agents, still in their black clothes and heavily armed, stood around the front door, looking bored.

“Harry inside?” she asked a man she knew.

“Yeah, Holly, go on in.”

Holly went into the building and downstairs to the vault room. Harry and a group of agents stood around watching a middle-aged man in a nerd outfit—polyester trousers, short-sleeved dress shirt, tie, pocket protector—open

a briefcase, take out a sheet of paper and start to turn the dial on the door of the vault. He turned a large wheel, and the door swung open a few inches.

“Jesus,” Harry said, “how’d you do that so fast?”

“It was easy,” the man replied. “I had the combination.”

“Oh.”

“We keep the combinations of all our safes, just in case.”

Harry stepped forward, took hold of the door and swung it slowly open. “Okay,” he said, “let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Holly followed him inside the vault room, which was, she reckoned, about eighteen by twenty-four feet. She stopped and stared. The room was filled with steel shelving and crisscrossed by aisles. On many of the shelves, stacked from floor to ceiling, were shrink-wrapped blocks of currency.

Harry took a block off a shelf and cut through the plastic wrapping. “Twenties, fifties and hundreds,” he said. He read a label. “There’s half a million dollars in this one package.”

There were some whistles, then silence, as the group toured the room.

“Bearer bonds,” Harry said, thumbing through a stack of certificates. “Hundreds, thousands of them.”

At the rear of the room were two steel cabinets with shallow drawers. Harry opened them to reveal trays of cut diamonds. In other drawers were rows of gold coins, mostly Krugerrands.

Holly finally managed to speak. “This is breathtaking,” she said. “Is there this much cash anywhere else in the world?”

“Maybe at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York,” Harry said. “Hardly anyplace else.”

“Why is it here?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I expect the computer data will tell us.” He turned to his men. “All right, I want an inventory, and I want it fast. The currency will be easy, since the packages are labeled. Count the Krugerrands and the diamonds; estimate the weight of each stone. There are gold bars over there. I want this done pronto!”