Orchid Blues (Holly Barker 2)

"No, I wanted to talk to you first."

"If they've been in the water for that long, we're unlikely to find anything useful. Why don't you have your man go over the vehicles, then send me his report, along with the ME's."

"Glad to do it," Holly said, relieved, as she didn't want to wait for Harry's people before starting on the vehicles.

"Get back to me," Harry said.

As she hung up, it occurred to Holly that the FBI wasn't much interested in the Morrises; they were small potatoes.

Holly went to see the medical examiner. The two bodies lay side-by-side on stainless-steel tables in the lab, with a sheet over each. On a smaller table nearby, two piles of clothing and possessions lay.

The ME took a deep breath and started. "Cause of death is easy: two gunshot wounds to the head of each."

"How long have they been dead?"

"Probably since soon after they left their rental house," he replied. "Before they were shot, their hands were secured behind them with duct tape, and they were pretty badly beaten up; you might say, tortured. Both show evidence of lots of blunt trauma, probably from fists and boots."

"Anything else you can tell me?"

"Not much else to tell," he said. "You might look through their effects over there." He nodded toward the small table.

Holly slipped on some latex gloves and went through the clothing first. The couple had been dressed nearly identically, in jeans, knit shirts and sneakers. One of the woman's shoes was missing and so was her purse. The man's wallet was on the table, and Holly emptied it. There was more than a thousand dollars in cash, credit cards in several names, and three driver's licenses, all with different names, but each bearing the photograph of the man the bank employees had known as Franklin Morris. There was also a Rolex wristwatch and a signet pinky ring, both of which were engraved with the initials S.C.L., which did not match the names on any of the credit cards or licenses. Holly dropped all the effects into a plastic bag and gave the ME a receipt for them.

"Thanks, Doctor," she said. "Will you fingerprint them and take DNA samples?"

"Sure, that's standard. What then?"

"Eventually, we'll get a burial order, but first I want to try to identify them. Just keep them on ice for the time being."

"As you wish."

Holly left the ME's office and drove back to the station. She collected Hurd Wallace, the tech and four other officers, and together they walked over to the garage, across the parking lot.

The three vehicles were lined up in separate service bays. Holly called the group together. "Here's what we've got," she said. "These two people were tortured, then shot to death. Unless somebody tortured them for the fun of it, which I doubt, the torturers wanted something from this couple, and they may not have gotten it. I want two people on each vehicle. I want everything removed and examined, then I want you to take the vehicles apart."

"What are we looking for?" the tech asked.

"I don't know, but I think I'll know it when I see it. Let's get started, everybody."

The group began work, and as they began removing things from the vehicles, Holly walked back and forth from one to the other, watching their progress. The couple's belongings were unloaded from the trailer and set aside, and Holly examined them. There were suitcases and boxes of clothes; there were small pieces of furniture and kitchen equipment; there were a couple of soggy file boxes. And there was a computer. Holly slipped on some gloves and started to go through the contents of the file boxes.

She found multiple birth certificates in different names for both people and blank letterheads from various financial institutions, none of which Holly had ever heard of and which she suspected were nonexistent. Some of the papers had melded together while wet and would probably not be salvageable, she thought, but everything she saw in the file boxes had something to do with obtaining false identities or stealing identities from other people.

Hurd came over, and she showed him the materials. "Looks like these folks were hardworking con artists," he said.

"Did you finish with the convertible?"

"Pretty much. We've taken everything off it we can unbolt and looked in every cavity without finding anything. Harvey is taking off the tires now, to have a look inside them."

Holly walked around the convertible, which now looked as if it were at the beginning, rather than the end, of an assembly line. She looked in the trunk, which had been stripped of its spare tire, tools and lining. "Did the VIN get run yet?"

"Yes," Hurd said. "The convertible was stolen in Fort Lauderdale on the same day that the plates were stolen from the Buick. The van was stolen a couple of weeks later. I'm not quite sure how you trace a horse van. It doesn't seem to have a VIN, and it didn't have any plates, either. I guess we can run a check to see if any horse trailers were reported stolen in the past few months, but even if we find out where it came from, I don't know what that's going to tell us."

"It might tell us where they went after they left Lauderdale," Holly said. "Call the station and send somebody over to the ME's office to pick up the fingerprints of the corpses and their DNA samples. Run the prints first, on both the state and federal computers, and see if we get a hit."

Hurd pulled out his cell phone and made the call, while Holly walked around the van, which was nearly as disassembled as the convertible. "Anything?" she asked the officers working on the van. Both shook their heads. She walked over to the horse trailer, which looked more whole than the other two vehicles.

"There's not all that much to pull off it," a young officer said.