Pitt shook his head. "After I left, the hotel security guards sealed off the gondola. The next person inside was a uniformed police officer."
"Then what did you do?"
"I paid one of the hotel lifeguards to swim out and retrieve my sailboard. He owned a small pickup truck and was kind enough to run me back to the house where I was staying with friends."
"In Miami?"
"Coral Gables."
"Mind if I ask what you were doing in town?"
"I wound up an offshore exploration project for NUMA and decided to take a week's vacation."
"Did you recognize any of the bodies?"
"Not damned likely. I couldn't identify my own father in that condition."
"Any idea who they might be?"
"I assume one of them was Raymond LeBaron."
"You're familiar with the disappearance of the Prosperteer?"
"The news media covered the disappearance in great depth. Only a backwoods recluse could have missed it."
"Any pet theories on where the blimp and its crew were buried for ten days?"
"I haven't a clue."
"Not even a wild idea?" Victor persisted.
"Could be a colossal publicity stunt, a media campaign to promote LeBaron's publishing empire."
Interest grew in Victor's eyes. "Go on."
"Or maybe an ingenious scheme to manipulate LeBaron conglomerate stock prices. Sell large blocks before he disappears and buy when prices tumble afterward. And sell again when they rise during his resurrection."
"How do you explain their deaths?"
"The plot backfired."
"Why?"
"Ask your coroner."
"I'm asking you."
"They probably ate tainted fish on whatever deserted island they hung out on," said Pitt, tiring of the game. "How would I know? If you want a scenario, hire a screenwriter."
The interest in Victor's eyes blinked out. He relaxed in his chair and sighed dejectedly. "I thought for a second you might have something, a gimmick that could get me and the department off the hook. But your theory went down the drain like all the others."
"I'm not surprised," said Pitt with an indifferent grin.
"How were you able to switch off the power within seconds of entering the control car?" Victor asked, bringing the interrogation back on track.
"After piloting twenty different aircraft during service in the Air Force and civilian life, I knew where to look."
Victor appeared satisfied. "One more question, Mr. Pitt. When you first spotted the blimp, from what direction was she flying?"
"She was drifting with the wind out of the northeast."
Victor reached over and turned off the recorder. "That should do it. Can I reach you at your office number during the day?"
"If I'm not there, my secretary can track me down."
"Thank you for your help."
"Nothing substantial, I'm afraid," said Pitt.
"We have to pull on every thread. Lots of pressure with LeBaron being the bigshot that he was. This has to be the weirdest case the department's ever encountered."
"I don't envy you finding a solution." Pitt glanced at his watch and rose from his chair. "I'd better get a move on for the airport."
Victor stood and reached across the desk to shake hands. "If you should dream up another plot line, Mr. Pitt, please give me a call. I'm always interested in a good fantasy."
Pitt paused in the doorway and turned, a foxlike expression on his face. "You want a lead, Lieutenant?
Run this one up the flagpole. Airships need helium for their lift. An old antique like the Prosperteer must have required a couple hundred thousand cubic feet of gas to get her in the air. After a week, enough would have leaked out to keep her grounded. Do you follow?"
"Depends on where you're heading."
"There is no way the blimp could have materialized off Miami unless an experienced crew with the necessary supplies reinflated the hull forty-eight hours before."
Victor had the look of a man about to be baptized. "What are you suggesting?"
"That you look for a friendly neighborhood service station that can pump two hundred thousand cubic feet of helium."
Then Pitt turned into the hallway and was gone.
>
"I hate boats," Rooney grumbled. "I can't swim, can't float, and get seasick looking through the window of a washing machine."
Sheriff Sweat handed him a double martini. "Here, this will cure your hangups."
Rooney ruefully eyed the waters of the bay and drained half his drink. "You're not going out in the ocean, I hope."
"No, just a leisurely cruise around the bay." Sweat ducked into the forward cabin of his gleaming white fishing boat and turned over the engine. The single 260-horsepower turbocharged diesel knocked into life. Exhaust rumbled from the stern and the deck throbbed beneath their feet. Then Sweat cast off the lines and eased the boat away from the dock, threading through a maze of moored yachts to Biscayne Bay.
By the time the bow skipped past the channel buoys, Rooney was looking for a second drink. "Where do you keep the courage?"
"Down in the forward cabin. Help yourself. There's ice in the brass diver's helmet."
When Rooney resurfaced he asked, "What's this all about, Tyler? This is Sunday. You didn't drag me away from my season box in the middle of a good football game to show me Miami Beach from the water."
"Truth is, I heard you finished your report on the bodies from the blimp last night."
"Three o'clock this morning, to be exact."
"I thought you might want to tell me something."
"For God's sake, Tyler, what's so damned earthshaking that you couldn't have waited until tomorrow morning?"
"About an hour ago, I got a call from some Fed in Washington." Sweat paused to ease the throttle up a notch. "Said he was with a domestic intelligence agency I'd never heard of. I won't bore you with his downright belligerent talk. Never can understand why everybody up North thinks they can blindside a Southern boy. The upshot was he demanded we turn over the dead from the blimp to federal authorities."
"Which federal authorities?"
"Refused to name them. Got vague as hell when I pushed."
Rooney was suddenly intensely interested. "He give any hint why they wanted the bodies?"
"Claimed it was a security matter."
"You told him no, of course."
"I told him I'd think about it."
The turn of events and the gin combined to make Rooney forget his fear of water. He began to notice the trim lines of the fiberglass craft. It was Sheriff Sweat's second office, occasionally pressed into service as a backup police cruiser, but more often used to entertain county and state officials on weekend fishing trips.
"What do you call her?" Rooney asked.
"Call who?"
"The boat."
"Oh, the Southern Comfort. She's a thirty-five-footer, cruises at fifteen knots. Built in Australia by an outfit called Stebercraft."
"To get back to the LeBaron case," Rooney said, sipping at his martini, "are you going to give in?"
"I'm tempted," said Sweat, smiling. "Homicide has yet to turn up lead one. The news media are making a circus out of it. Everybody from the governor on down is pressuring my ass. And to top, it off, there's every likelihood the crime wasn't committed in my jurisdiction. Hell, yes, I'm tempted to pass the buck to Washington. Only I'm just stubborn enough to think we might pull a solution out of this mess."
"All right, what do you want from me?"
The sheriff turned from the helm and looked at him steadily. "I want you to tell me what's in your report."
"My findings made the puzzle worse."
A small sailboat with four teenagers slipped across their bow and Sweat slowed down and gave way.
"Tell me about it."
"Let's start at the end and work backwards. Okay with you?"
"Go ahead."
"Threw the hell out of me at first. Mostl
y because I wasn't looking for it. I had a similar case fifteen years ago. A female body was discovered sitting in a patio chair in her backyard. Her husband claimed they'd been drinking the night before and he'd gone to bed alone, thinking she would follow. When he awoke in the morning and looked around, he found her right where he left her, sitting on the patio, only now she was dead. She had all the appearances of a natural death, no marks of violence, no sign of poison, just a generous amount of alcohol. The organs seemed healthy enough. There were no indications of previous disease or disorder. For a woman of forty she had the body of a twenty-five-year-old. It bugged the hell out of me. Then the pieces began to come together. The postmortem lividity-- that's the discoloration of the skin caused by the sinking of blood due to gravity-- is usually purplish. Her lividity was cherry pink, which pointed to death from either cyanide or carbon monoxide poisoning or hypothermia. I also discovered hemorrhaging of the pancreas. Through a process of elimination the first two were discarded. The final nail in the coffin was the husband's occupation. The evidence wasn't exactly hard core, but it was enough for the judge to put him away for fifty years."
"What was the husband's line of work?" asked Sweat.
"He drove a truck for a frozen-food company. A neat plan. He pumped booze in her until she passed out. Set her inside his truck, which he always took home nights and weekends, turned up the refrigeration unit, and waited for her to harden. After the poor woman expired, he put her back in the patio chair and went to bed."
Sweat stared blankly. "You're not saying the corpses found in the blimp froze to death."
"I'm saying exactly that."
"No mistake?"
"On a certainty scale from one to ten, I can promise an eight."
"Do you realize how that sounds?"
"Crazy, I would imagine."
"Three men disappear over the Caribbean in ninety-degree weather and freeze to death?" Sweat asked no one in particular. "We'll never make this one stick, Doe. Not without a handy frozen-food truck."
"You've got nothing to stick it to anyway."
"Meaning?"
"The FBI report came in. Jessie LeBaron's ID was on the money. That isn't her husband in the morgue. The other two aren't Buck Caesar or Joseph Cavilla either."
"God, what next," Sweat moaned. "Who are they?"
"There's no record of them in the FBI's fingerprint files. Best guess is they were foreign nationals."
"Did you find anything at all that might give a clue to their identity?"
"I can give you their height and weight. I can show you X rays of their teeth and previous bone fractures. Their livers suggested all three favored generous amounts of hard liquor. The lungs gave away their heavy smoking, teeth and fingertips the fact they smoked unfiltered cigarettes. They were also big eaters. Their last meal consisted of dark bread and various fruits and beets. Two were in their early thirties. One was forty or over. They were in above-average physical condition. Beyond that I can tell you very little that might pin an ID on them."
"It's a start."
"But it still leaves us with LeBaron, Caesar, and Cavilla among the missing."
Before Sweat could reply a female voice rasped out his boat's call sign over the radio speaker. He answered and turned to another channel frequency as instructed.
"Sorry for the interruption," he said to Rooney. "I've got an emergency call over the ship-to-shore phone."
Rooney nodded, went into the forward cabin, and poured himself another drink. A delicious glow coursed through his body. He took a few moments to go to the head. When he returned topside to the wheelhouse, Sweat was hanging up the phone, his face red with anger.
"The rotten bastards!" he hissed.
"What's the problem?" Rooney asked.
"They seized them," Sweat said, pounding the helm with his fist. "The damned Feds walked into the morgue and seized the bodies from the blimp."
"But there are legal procedures to follow," Rooney protested.
"Six men in plainclothes and two federal marshals showed up with the necessary paperwork, stuffed the corpses into three aluminum canisters filled with ice, and took off in a U.S. Navy helicopter."
"When did this happen?"
"Not ten minutes ago. Harry Victor, the lead investigator on the case, says they also rifled his desk in the homicide office when he was in the john and ripped off his files."
"What about my autopsy report?"
"They lifted that too."
The gin had put Rooney in a euphoric mood. "Oh, well, look at it this way. They took you and the department off the hook."
Sweat's anger slowly subsided. "I can't deny they did me a favor, but it's their method that pisses me off."
"There's one small consolation," mumbled Rooney. He was beginning to have trouble standing. "Uncle Sam didn't get everything."
"Like what?"
"Something omitted from my report. One lab result that was too controversial to put on paper, too wild to mention outside a looney house."
"What are you talking about?" Sweat demanded.
"The cause of death."
"You said hypothermia."
"True, but I left out the best part. You see, I neglected to state the time of death." Rooney's speech was becoming slurred.
"Could only be within the last few days."
"Oh, no. Those poor guys froze their guts a long time ago."
"How long?"
"Anywhere from one to two years ago."
Sheriff Sweat stared at Rooney, incredulous. But the coroner stood there grinning like a hyena. He was still grinning when he sagged over the side of the boat and threw up.
>
The home of Dirk Pitt was not on a suburban street or in a high-rise condominium overlooking the jungled treetops of Washington. There was no landscaped yard or next-door neighbors with squealing children and barking dogs. The house was not a house but an old aircraft hangar that stood on the edge of the capital's International Airport.
From the outside it appeared deserted. Weeds surrounded the building and its corrugated walls were weathered and devoid of paint. The only clue remotely suggesting any occupancy was a row of windows running beneath the huge curved roof. Though they were stained and layered with dust, none were shattered like those of an abandoned warehouse.
Pitt thanked the airport maintenance man who had given him a lift from the terminal area. Glancing around to see that he wasn't observed, he took a small transmitter from his coat pocket and issued a series of voice commands that closed down the security systems and opened a side door that looked as if it hadn't swung on its hinges for thirty years.
He entered and stepped onto a polished concrete floor that held nearly three dozen gleaming, classic automobiles, an antique airplane, and a turn-of-the-century railroad car. He paused and stared fondly at the chassis of a French Talbot-Lago sports coupe that was in an early stage of reconstruction. The car had been nearly destroyed in an explosion, and he was determined to restore the twisted remains to their previous elegance and beauty.
He hauled his suitcase and garment bag up a circular staircase to his apartment, elevated against the far wall of the hangar. His watch read 2:15 PM., but his mind and body felt as though it was closer to midnight. After unpacking his luggage, he decided to spend a few hours working on the Talbot-Lago and take a shower later. He had already donned a pair of old coveralls and his hand was pulling open the drawer of a toolbox, when a loud chime echoed through the hangar. He pulled a cordless phone from a deep pocket.
"Hello."
"Mr. Pitt, please," said a female voice.
"Speaking."
"One moment."
After waiting for nearly two minutes, Pitt cut the connection and began rebuilding the Talbot's distributor. Another five minutes passed before the chime sounded again. He opened the line and said nothing.
"Are you still there, sir?" asked the same voice.
"Yes," Pitt replied indifferently, tucking the phone between his shoulder a
nd ear as he kept working with his hands.
"This is Sandra Cabot, Mrs. Jessie LeBaron's personal secretary. Am I talking to Dirk Pitt?"
Pitt took an instant dislike to people who couldn't dial their own phone calls. "You are."
"Mrs. LeBaron wishes to meet with you. Can you come to the house at four o'clock?"
"Pretty fast off the mark, aren't you?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Sorry, Miss Cabot, but I have to doctor a sick car. Maybe if Mrs. LeBaron cares to drop by my place, we could talk."
"I'm afraid that won't do. She's holding a formal cocktail party in the greenhouse later in the evening that will be attended by the Secretary of State. She can't possibly break away."
"Some other time then."
There was an icy silence, then Miss Cabot said, "You don't understand."
"You're right, I don't understand."
"Doesn't the name LeBaron mean anything to you?"
"No more than Shagnasty, Quagmire, or Smith," Pitt lied fiendishly.
She seemed lost for a moment. "Mr. LeBaron--"
"We can cut the fun and games," Pitt interrupted. "I'm quite aware of Raymond LeBaron's reputation.
And I can save us both time by saying I have nothing to add to the mystery surrounding his disappearance and death. Tell Mrs. LeBaron she has my condolences. That's all I can offer."
Cabot took a deep breath and exhaled. "Please, Mr. Pitt, I know she would be most grateful if you could see her."
Pitt could almost see her speaking the word "please" through clenched teeth. "All right," he said. "I guess I can make it. What's the address?"
The arrogance quickly returned to her tone. "I'll send the chauffeur to pick you up."
"If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to drive my own car. I get claustrophobic in limousines."
"If you insist," she said stiffly. "You'll find the house at the end of Beacon Drive in Great Falls Estates."
"I'll check a street map."
"By the way, what kind of car do you drive?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"To inform the guard at the gate."