“Maybe you should let me talk to her,” Vicky said.
“Are you implying that I’ll scare her and you won’t?”
Vicky grinned at him. “I could be.”
Harry snorted at the idea. “That’s only because she doesn’t know you.”
When they entered the adjoining room they found the elderly woman busily working a pair of crocheting needles, her fingers moving methodically, almost without thought. She had thin white hair and a heavily powdered face, a wasted attempt to hide the nest of wrinkles that covered her cheeks and forehead and neck. She had bright, clear blue eyes set deep in her head and Harry thought he detected a note of resigned fear resting there.
Vicky knelt in front of the woman, whose name was Delilah Moon. “I’m afraid you were right,” she said. “Your grandson is dead.”
The woman slowly nodded. “Good,” she said.
The word startled Vicky, but she quickly caught herself. “Did he hurt you?” she asked.
Delilah Moon lifted her blouse displaying deep bruises on her stomach and ribs. “He hurt me whenever he was drunk and I wouldn’t give him the money he always wanted. He was drunk most of the time, and I refused to give him money most of the time.”
Harry knelt down beside Vicky. “Did you stab him, Mrs. Moon?” He spoke the words softly.
“I did.” The old woman’s jaw was set and Harry could tell it was something she felt no regret over, something she would have done again.
“How did you happen to have the knife?” he asked.
The woman began to rock in her chair and Vicky reached out and laid a hand on top of hers.
“After the last time he beat me I started carrying it around. If he got out of control an’ I thought he was gonna hurt me, I’d wave it at him and he’d usually back off.”
“And this time he didn’t?” Vicky asked.
“That’s right.”
“Did he say anything to you when you stabbed him?”
The woman’s mouth tightened and her lips pursed. “He called me a nasty name,” she said.
“What did he call you?”
“He called me an old bitch.” Her jaw tightened. “But he won’t be doin’ that no more. An’ he won’t be beatin’ on me neither.”
Harry called social services for a caseworker and left Mrs. Moon in the care of two female deputies and the corpse in the hands of the medical examiner. Then they went to the state attorney’s office and laid out their case along with the lengthy rap sheet the victim, Charlie Moon, had assembled in his twenty-eight years on earth. The assistant state attorney, a short, fat man named Julius North, said his office would interview Mrs. Moon, but that he could see no reason why the elderly woman would be charged. “The newspapers would crucify me,” he said. “Besides, it sounds like she did the county a favor by bumping the bastard off.”
* * *
Back at the office, Harry and Vicky spent an hour writing up their reports, and it was just past ten p.m. when Harry’s personal cell phone rang with a call from his adoptive mother, Maria Doyle.
“Hey, Mom, what’s up?”
“Harry, oh, Harry.” The fearful timbre in her voice immediately set his hair on end. “Harry, somebody shot Jocko. He’s in Morton Plant Hospital in downtown Clearwater. They’re just taking him into surgery.”
Harry felt his legs go weak. Jocko was the only father he had ever known. “How bad is it?”
“Is very bad. They say he lost much blood.”
“Do the Clearwater cops have somebody with you?”
“Yes, a nice young girl.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Harry told Vicky what had happened and headed for the stairs.
“I’ll go with you,” she called after him.
* * *
With siren and lights they made the hospital in eighteen minutes.
“You go,” Vicky said. “I’ll secure the car and catch up.”
Harry found Maria in the surgery waiting room, her face haggard; her hands in her lap nervously twisting a handkerchief. He sat beside her and placed an arm around her shoulders.
“Have you seen a doctor since they took him into surgery?”
“No, no one,” she said.
“Where was he shot?”
“In the back. Two times. Then whoever does this pushes him in the water.”
“The water? Where was he?”
“When they found him, he was hanging onto a ladder in a little marina downtown.”
“Why was he at a marina?”
“You remember Joey O’Connell?”
Harry nodded. Like his adoptive father, O’Connell was a retired Clearwater cop, who left the job on a disability. O’Connell had been shot in the spine while trying to stop an armed robbery. Harry knew that Jocko visited him every week.
“What about Joey?” Harry asked. “What does he have to do with this?”
“Not him, his daughter.”
Maria was a short, stocky woman with graying black hair, warm brown eyes, and a round face filled with lines from her perpetual smile. She also ran his and Jocko’s lives like a marine drill instructor, or at least tried to. But it was an effort always filled with an irresistible love. Harry hated seeing her so frightened and in so much pain.
Vicky came in and sat on the other side of Maria, taking hold of her hand. “Any news?” she asked.
Maria shook her head. “Thank you for coming. You take good care of my boy.”
“I try, but it isn’t easy.”
Maria gave her son a reproachful look. “Tell me about it,” she said. “I try for almost twenty years. Does he listen?”
Harry ignored the comment. “Tell me about O’Connell’s daughter.”
“A nice girl,” Maria said. “She’s maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Her name is Mary Kate.” She shook her head sadly. “Some time last year she joins up with these Scientology people and a little while later she tells her father and mother that she can’t talk to them anymore, because they don’t belong to her church.” She shook her head again and drew a long breath as if that summed everything up. “Then last week Joey calls Jocko and asks him to find her, tell her she should come home. He thinks maybe these church people are keeping her a prisoner.”
“Why didn’t Joey go to the police? He knew Jocko was retired and didn’t have the authority to do anything, or even pressure anybody.”
“He told Jocko that he didn’t think the regular cops could do anything. But Jocko said he thought it was because Joey was ashamed. He didn’t want his friends in the department to know what happened to his daughter.”
Like everyone else in the Tampa Bay area, Harry was familiar with the Church of Scientology. It was a massive, highly secretive