Chapter 39
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Miami, Florida
Lizzy lowered her gaze and closed her eyes. She was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely audible.
“We couldn’t make a proper home for those kids. We were just kids ourselves. I lied about being sick because we thought it would make everyone more sympathetic toward the kids and then they’d take care of the little ones after we disappeared,” Lizzy said quietly.
“And what happened with the woman?” Flint asked.
“We called her Suzie. She was drunk all the time when we saw her around the shelters. High or hammered or maybe both.” Lizzy’s fingers worked at the hem of her shirt, twisting the fabric into knots.
“We knew her a bit. Frankie more than me. She was just always there, you know? Invisible. Part of the scenery.”
“What was her real name?”
“I... I don’t know. We never asked.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Flint’s tone carried no sympathy. “Tell me what happened.”
She swallowed hard. The sound was loud in the quiet room.
“A couple of weeks earlier, I had offered her one of my old sweaters. I didn’t realize I’d left Lisa Peterson’s library card in the pocket.
Frankie and I were standing on the sidewalk when Suzie came walking past us and stumbled into Frankie when the bus was coming,” Lizzy said.
“Frankie tried to pull her out of the way. Not shove her into the bus. But she lost her balance. Fell face first off the curb and into the moving bus.”
“And then what?”
“She hit the bus, fell to the pavement. The bus wheels ran over her head and shoulders.” She shuddered as if she were reliving the moment of impact. “And then it was over. Just like that. One second she was standing there swaying to close to the street, and the next she was gone.”
In the brief silence, Flint noticed the sound of jet engines spooling up outside the hotel windows.
“We didn’t even talk about it at first. Obviously, we couldn’t stay there and give statements or anything like that. We just ran.” Lizzy paused when her voice cracked on the last word to regain self-control.
“And later?” Flint asked.
“Frankie said we’d never get another chance like that. A dead woman badly mangled, Lisa Peterson’s ID, no one who’d miss her. It was a perfect answer.”
“Perfect for you and Frankie, maybe,” Flint said. “But what about the kids? And that woman had a life too. People who might have cared about her. Now she’s forgotten while you lived and loved and thrived for a very long time.”
“We were desperate—”
“She was a convenient patsy. Don’t try to soothe yourself with placating lies, at least.” Flint stood and walked to the window. “Tom Wilson, the bus driver, never got over what he saw that day. Did you know that?”
She looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he quit his job because he thought he’d killed that woman. Left town. Changed his name. Spent the rest of his life haunted by what happened to her.” Flint turned back to face Lizzy and gave her a cold stare. “Until someone killed him, too.”
Her face went white. “Tom Wilson is dead?”
“Skydiving accident, they say. But I don’t believe it. Do you?”
Lizzy’s hands flew to cover her mouth as if to hold her screams inside. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, but once the tears began, they kept coming.
“We saw him in Cuba. Walking on the street. Just one of those fluke things, you know?” Lizzy explained. “He acted like he recognized me. So I pretended to be someone else. He seemed a bit skeptical, but I thought he was convinced.”
“How many more people have to die to keep your secrets, Lizzy?” Flint’s question hung in the air like heavy black smoke from a petroleum fire.
“You don’t know what it was like.” Her chin quivered and the tears kept coming as if she hadn’t cried in all those years, either. “We were kids. Scared. Running for our lives.”
“You’ve had twenty years to find another way,” Flint said quietly. “To contact the authorities or reach out to the families. Instead, other people have died to protect your secrets.”
“That’s not fair—”
“You want to talk about fair?” Flint’s voice turned dangerous. “What about the Fisher kids and that nameless woman rotting in a pauper’s grave? What about Tom Wilson’s wife? Was any of that fair?”
She doubled over slightly, as if his accusations hit her in the belly with the full force of his anger.
“It’s long past time to get this settled,” Flint continued, deadly calm. “You’ll tell me everything you know about Devon Cole’s operations. How he moves money, who he uses for enforcement, where he keeps his records. Everything.”
Her face revealed stark terror and her voice trembled, “I can’t. If he finds out—”
“He already knows you’re alive. Frankie works for him, remember? You think he doesn’t know who Frankie Tantanella’s wife really is?” Flint’s questions peppered her from all sides. “You think he won’t learn that Frankie’s wife was extracted from Cuba by American operatives last night?”
Flint’s logic was brutal and undeniable. Lizzy stared at him with horror, wagging her head as if she might erase his words from her mind.
“I’m not here to judge what you did as a sixteen-year-old,” Flint reminded her. “But I won’t allow Cole to keep going. And right now, you’re the best source of information I have about how he operates.”
Lizzy continued to stare at him as if he’d asked her to jump into the Grand Canyon and splat onto the Colorado River.
“Help me, Lizzy,” Flint said. “If you don’t, Cole’s people will find you anyway. At least if you work with me, you might survive this.”
She studied his face which was filled with determination but not cruelty.
Flint waited to give her time to absorb his offer. He wouldn’t abandon her to killers, but he did expect her to do the right thing.
“I’ll tell you what I know.” Her shoulders slumped as her spine rounded, all arguments finally defeated. “Her real name was Suzie, I think. The woman who fell into the bus.”
“What about her last name?”
She shrugged and shook her head to indicate she didn’t know. “She lived, off and on, at the Ravenswood shelter. That’s where I met her initially.”
Over the next hour, Lizzy told him what little she knew about Suzie, Devon Cole, and the fate of the Fisher kids.
By dawn, the storm had calmed but the sky remained a bruised gray. Rain clung to the windows in slow-moving sheets that caught the weak morning light. Outside, traffic across the wet streets was picking up.
Life had resumed its normal rhythm. But inside the hotel room, everything had changed.
Flint poured black coffee from the in-room pot. The smell was bitter and artificial, nothing like the Cuban coffee they’d left behind in Havana.
“Want some?” he asked.
Lizzy sat wrapped in the hotel blanket, her face pale but resolved. The frightened woman who’d entered his room was gone. In her place sat someone harder, more determined.
“Please,” she said quietly.
He handed her the second cup. She took it with both hands to absorb the warmth through her palms.
“Frankie told me about the fire,” she said finally. “The real story. Not until years later, after we were married.”
“In Cuba.”
She nodded. “Simple ceremony. No paperwork that would hold up anywhere outside of Cuba. Just a promise between us. That’s when he told me the truth.”
“That he was the arsonist.”
“Yes. Cole told him to scare Harry Fisher and burn some old records. Just a warning. Me and the kids weren’t supposed to be there. The house was supposed to be empty. Even the maid had the night off.”
“But you stayed because one of the twins was sick.”
“One of the twins had a fever. I didn’t want to drag him out in the weather.” Her voice grew quieter. “Our whole plan that night changed because he was sick, but no one told Frankie.”
“So Frankie doused the place, lit the fire, and then realized you were all inside,” Flint guessed.
Lizzy nodded and sipped the coffee. “He came inside to plant more accelerant in another wing of the house and heard me upstairs with the children. That’s when he found us.”
“And got you out.”
“It wasn’t easy. Fire was already moving through the first floor.
We were all so scared. I wrapped the baby in wet towels.
The kids didn’t even have shoes on, and it took me a minute to find them.
” She paused as if she were back there, experiencing the horror again as if it were fresh.
“Frankie kicked through a back door, and we made it outside, coughing and gulping fresh air. We were in the woods for hours on our own until Frankie found us again.”
The image hit Flint hard despite his resolve to stay detached. A sixteen-year-old girl and three small children, fleeing through dark woods while a house burned behind them. Of course, she was terrified. Anyone would have been.
But he wasn’t ready to give her a pass, either. “You could’ve gone to the police.”
“Cole had half the county in his pocket. And Frankie was already in too deep. He thought if we surfaced, Cole would finish the job himself. We’d all die.”
“What was Harry Fisher into that was worth killing his whole family?”
Lizzy was quiet for a long moment while she gathered her courage.
“Opioids. Early on, we all believed they were miracle pain killers. Harry wanted to invest in the businesses. Doctors, pharmacies. He thought he was doing a good thing for the community and everyone who lived there. Including his own family.”
“And later?”
“Later, we all learned how dangerous and addictive opioids were. So many people died...” Lizzy shuddered again. “And Harry wanted no part of it. He wanted out. Which Cole could not allow.”
“So Cole decided to make an example of Harry.”
Lizzy nodded. “A warning to others who might be getting cold feet, too. At that point, we all knew the lawsuits and criminal charges were coming.”
Flint understood the scope of the problem.
The rapid increase in opioid use caused a crisis and eventually reached epidemic proportions. Hundreds of thousands of deaths were attributed to opioid overdoses around the country.
Harry Fisher, a family man and pillar of the community, must have been horrified when he learned the truth about opioids.
He also wanted his money back. Cole refused. Because a man like Devon Cole never has enough money.
“The fire was meant to be a lesson to Harry,” Lizzy said wearily.
On top of everything else, lack of sleep was wearing her down.
“Harry made another mistake, too. Telling Cole he knew about Cole’s congressional activities.
Vote buying, defense contracts, campaign finance violations, corruption, self-dealing. All of it.”
Devon Cole had been a corrupt congressman. He’d also been running a full-scale criminal enterprise while in office and for many years afterward. Which was how he became a billionaire, if Flint had to guess.
“What do you know about Cole’s current operations?” Flint asked.
“Frankie was careful about what he told me. But I picked up things over the years.” She paused. “There’s money moving opioids through Central America now. Lots of it.”
“Specifics?”
“I don’t know specifics. But Frankie made trips. All over. Costa Rica, Panama, sometimes Colombia.”
“How often?”
“Two or three times a year. He’d be gone for weeks.”
“And when he came back?”
“Scared. Like he’d seen things he wished he hadn’t.”
This was useful intel, but Flint sensed she was still holding back.
He said, “Jason Fisher hired me because he suspected one of the twins, at least, survived the fire. Video from an ATM camera captured a man who looked like Dylan or Kevin. When Jason saw it, he started putting pieces together.”
Her eyes widened. “And the others?”
Flint shrugged. “We won’t know until we find them, but we believe all of the Fisher siblings are still alive. The question is what happens when they learn you and Frankie are too.”
She was quiet for a long moment, drained the last of the coffee and tossed the paper cup into the trash. “What do you want me to do?”
“First, you’re going to help me tell all of this to the Fisher family.”
“And after that?”
“Then you’re going to help me bring down Devon Cole.”
She stood and walked to the window, staring into the breaking dawn. “And if Cole comes after me?”
“Then we’ll deal with that when it happens,” Flint replied. “Once we make that call, there’s no going back. Cole will know you’re alive at that point for sure. Frankie will know you’ve chosen sides. And the Fisher family will know you’ve been lying to them for twenty years.”
“You said Cole already knew I survived,” Lizzy said suspiciously.
“He should. He probably does. In his shoes, I would know. But I haven’t asked him personally,” Flint replied.
She nodded slowly. “Then we’d better make sure we’re ready for what comes next.”
“Right after we get some sleep,” Flint said as he returned to his room.
Outside, shafts of sunlight cut through the clouds and painted the wet pavement gold. There was time for rest. The world would keep turning.
When he’d closed the connecting door, he located his satellite phone and made the call.