gone to run a short errand, was back now and had more than once tried to disperse the crowd. The police had briefly questioned him, but as he hadn’t been on-site, he’d just gone back to guarding the front gate. Nick had seen the guy had tears in his eyes. After all, Brit had said he was friends with her father. Jackson kept shaking his head, stunned about how this could have happened.
“Counselor Markwood,” a policeman who recognized Nick called from inside the taped-off area, “you here as a guest, or you representing someone?”
Nick rose from the bench where he sat with Claire and walked a few steps away to talk to the officer. “I’m a guest, at least for now,” Nick told him. “My wife and I brought a group of charity kids here today before regular opening hours. We didn’t see this happen but ran over when we heard the noise. I don’t think anyone knows why he did that—the deceased.”
“Yeah, especially since he evidently didn’t enter with the animal’s food,” the officer told him. “A box of it was dropped just inside the enclosure but wasn’t taken in or thrown into the cage. Real weird if it was an accident, but the detectives will check security protocol when they get here, and we’ll have to wait for the ME’s report. It was suicide to go in there. He should have known that. His wife and daughter are too shaken to explain things so far, and his son’s playing in a concert uptown. His phone’s off right now, according to his wife, so we don’t have all next of kin notified. Wish the media buzzards wouldn’t circle,” he added with a glance at the growing crowd at the gate.
With a tap of his fingers to the bill of his cap, the officer went back to his position by the cage. Despite sitting, Claire’s legs were shaking as she watched and listened. Observation and analysis were in her forensic psych blood. The only time her brain wasn’t spinning with what, how, who and why was if she slept or messed up her meds and had a narcoleptic nightmare. But a nightmare this was.
Nick came back over to her. “You still doing okay? You should carry your pills even when you rely on herbal tea.”
“I thought we’d be home by now. Nick, I know your ears perked up when you heard him say accident or suicide, but who would choose that dreadful way to kill himself and horrify his family and others when he could just jump in the Gulf or get a gun?”
He nodded as they huddled together on the wooden bench. “You know, this all hits close to home. I’d really be all in if this had any implications of being a murder like with my father, but you can’t charge a big cat with that.”
He put one arm around her and gripped her knee with his other hand. He was shaking too. She knew how hard he’d struggled to cope with the supposed suicide of his father when it had turned out to be murder, one that had taken Nick years to prove and to bring the killer to justice.
That early loss had so impacted his life that he’d founded the private South Shores investigation company. With its small, secret staff, he kept it separate from his law firm, and most of the cases managed to fly under the radar. Through South Shores funding and legal expertise, he helped others who had lost a loved one by mysterious means. He was especially drawn to cases where the cause of death was undecided and unproven: accident, suicide or murder. And had they walked into another tragic situation, or would Ben’s family have an explanation of how or why this happened?
Brittany’s frenzied words still haunted Claire: Why would you do it this way?
* * *
Jace Britten brought the Zika virus mosquito–spraying plane into the Marco Island airport and, after waiting for an old Piper Cub to land behind him, taxied toward the small hangar. What a far cry from his navy pilot days landing his fighter jet on a carrier at sea or flying solo missions over endless, blazing sand in Iraq. As much as he longed to take to the skies again in an F-35 or a big commercial Airbus loaded with lives he would die to protect, this was it for now.
But, he had to admit, he kind of liked this assignment to spray for those hellish mosquitoes that caused women to deliver babies with congenital birth defects. Zika danger had hit not only Southeast Florida but now threatened here, Southwest Florida too. And his ex-wife was pregnant with her new husband’s baby. As much as he had issues with Nick and Claire sometimes, they were good for his daughter, Lexi, and he hoped like hell that Claire would have a healthy baby. Maybe this spraying would help.
But he was serving above and beyond that too, since he was tracking the whereabouts not only of drug dealers but other criminals for the government. It was a new endeavor for him, but one that at least made things more interesting and still helped the US fight its enemies. He figured he was still serving his country as he had once. And he needed the job after leaving the airline.
“Roger that,” he responded to final directions from the small control tower. “Over and out.”
He steered the plane, which the FBI secretly owned, toward the hangar where a contact he’d met only once would service the plane, actually electronically “debrief” the recordings from his latest Stingray mission. The camera and tracking device mounted under the fuselage were worth about $400,000 of government money, and there were other pilots in the air like him, especially along the Mexican border. The Stingray aviation surveillance program relied on a tracking system that acted like a cell phone tower, one that recorded locations and could photograph events. If it had to, a Stingray plane could first focus on an area or neighborhood, then pinpoint a person and snap quite a clear picture—if they had a cell phone on them, and who didn’t lately?
The FBI had wanted him to take a desk job in DC, overseeing Stingray, but he hadn’t wanted to leave Naples, Lexi—and now Brit. Nor had he ever gotten flying out of his blood. He needed some excitement, the kind that gave him a new lease on life. And Brit—whom he’d actually met through her father, an ex-marine who had been in special ops—was a very intriguing woman both in bed and out. She had a good sense of humor too. She’d joked from the first that he had to marry her so that her name would be Brittany Britten.
He rechecked the controls, unlatched his seat belt and popped the door. He was barely off the concrete hangar floor and out into the sunny, windy afternoon when his cell sounded—the “Marines’ Hymn.” Yeah, he was a die-hard leatherneck, always would be.
The caller ID said it was Brit.
“Hello, tiger girl,” he said.
“Don’t. Don’t say that.”
“What’s the matter? You’re crying. Where are you?”
“Jace, believe it or not I’m with Claire and Nick at the BAA.”
“What hap—”
“My father went into the tiger’s cage—somehow. I mean I know how. Jace, it mauled him, killed him. The police are here and—”
He felt like he’d been hit in the gut. Ben. That big man dead? In the tiger cage! He’d—he’d gotten so close to him so fast. He couldn’t be dead! Jace had liked the older man from the first. He’d kidded him just the other day that it had been a long time since he’d had a wingman, and Ben was like that to him.
“Brit, I’m so sorry. Is Lexi still there? Is she okay?”
“No. I mean, yes, the children are safe. Everyone is gone, even the paramedics. They took his body to the medical examiner for an autopsy. Why cut him up when he’s a mess? I—I need to talk to the police now, keep the press away. It ruins everything—this place, my plans, our lives.”
He felt like throwing up, but his military training
