He punched a series of buttons then pulled a couple of levers, and I got the sense that some of the background hum of the arena had disappeared. I couldn’t really hear anything outside the room, and I wondered if the arena had gone dark.

  The machine room certainly hadn’t. I saw the guy move to the next electrical panel and unlock it as well. This one was different. Fewer buttons and switches and more large fuse breakers. I saw him flip all the breakers across to what I assumed was the off position. Then he pulled a couple of the larger breakers completely out of the box and put them in his pocket.

  The room fell back into darkness for a second. Then the emergency lighting system must have kicked in, as one small lamp in the far corner sent long spear-like shadows across the space.

  The man quickly moved to the third panel and opened it up. In the semidarkness I saw him pull out a large breaker, and with that, the emergency lighting died.

  I couldn’t see him anymore. The room was pitch black once again, and I heard the man step across to the door of the room and yank it open. There were no shards of light shining in from the maintenance concourse. The entire arena was in darkness. It was dead in the water. I could hear the pensive hum of the crowd outside the door, that quiet uncertainty when a large crowd is trying to comprehend what is happening, in the seconds before panic sets in.

  I was moving before I heard the thunk of the door closing. I dashed across to the electrical panels and hit the icon on my phone for the flashlight. I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about the backup system if the man had taken the breaker fuse with him, so I went straight to the first of the boxes, the one with all the buttons and switches.

  I hit every button that was green and yanked every switch and lever that was pointing down into an up position.

  The lights came back on in the room, but I wasn’t sure about the arena.

  I strode to the door and pulled it open. My efforts hadn’t been as fruitful as I had hoped. There were patches of dim light coming from the arena, possibly the glow of a large scoreboard rebooting. But the majority of the lights were still out. I held up my phone flashlight and saw Sergeant Castañada. He had a man against a wall, his hands already behind his back in cuffs, with Castañada’s hand at the base of his neck, pushing his face into the cold concrete.

  “Rico Martin, I presume?” I said, shining my flashlight into his face. He grunted and snarled but said nothing.

  “What about the lights?” asked Castañada.

  “Yeah, good call.” I reached into Rico Martin’s pockets and pulled out the breakers he had taken and shined my flashlight on them for the sergeant to see.

  I moved back inside the room and, like a kid doing a puzzle, tried to match the right breaker with the right hole. I managed to replace the breaker for the emergency lighting first, and under the dim light of the backup halogen lamp, I shoved all the other breakers back home.

  When I stepped out of the room, I could hear the sound of people clamoring for the exits. I didn’t hear yelling or screaming, so it didn’t sound like mass panic, more like a collective agreement that the game was over.

  “Are we good?” asked the sergeant.

  “Better,” I said.

  I looked at Rico Martin. I recognized him. I’d seen him at the arena once before, talking with Francisco Monaro, doing the so-called repairs after the previous sabotage. And I recalled one other thing: he had gained access to the electrical room using a set of keys I had seen him hand back to Monaro.

  I put my hands back in Rico Martin’s pockets.

  “Hey man,” he said. “You some kind of pervert?”

  I simply yanked out the set of keys and held them up. They were nothing special—just an ordinary set of keys—but what drew the eye was the pink flamingo hanging off a chain on the ring.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  As Sergeant Castañada dragged Rico Martin along the maintenance concourse, we heard the arena announcer telling everyone to be cool. I thought calm might have been the word such a person would use at such a time, but then I thought of Amanda Swaggert and the too-clever-for-words nickname of the hockey team, so telling people to be cool was on-brand for a team named Chill. The announcer said there had been a temporary electrical problem but that it was all fixed now, and he would make another announcement shortly about the restart of the game. As we passed the gap near the playing surface, I saw a sliver of the crowd. They didn’t seem to be getting the message. Most folks looked to be making for the exits.

  Castañada called his crew in, and we deposited Rico Martin with Devon in the security office. When the first two of Castañada’s men arrived, he turned to me.

  “Your show, Jones. Clock’s ticking, folks are getting away.”

  I tried to think what the next move would be. I couldn’t stop the crowd from leaving, and I wasn’t sure if that would be enough to trigger Trainor’s control clause, unless we managed to nail him. We had Rico Martin with his hand in the cookie jar, but there was still a lot of air between Martin and Trainor. Then I thought of the keys.

  “This guy got into the room using keys that belong to the facility manager. He’s the next link in the chain.”

  “What about your senator or this Trainor guy?”

  I shook my head. “Trainor’s not going anywhere. He’s up in his cushy suite, watching the kind of panic he thinks will get him control of the arena. We’ll get to him, but when we do, it’s got to be a slam dunk.”

  “You use a lot of sports analogies, you know that?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Castañada shrugged. “So what about the senator?”

  “I think he’s a crook, and I think this whole govern while you run a business that profits from your legislation is as corrupt as all hell, but, no, I don’t think he’s involved. This was a gravy train for him, nothing more. All about lining his pockets in an ethically bankrupt but technically legal way. I think he sent his crew to follow me as a caution.”

  “Riviera Beach PD might have been a bit more helpful if you hadn’t gone down that rabbit hole.”

  I shrugged.

  “So where’s this facility manager?” asked Castañada.

  “I know exactly where.”

  As we walked, I explained my thinking to Castañada and his team.

  “It was all a fake-out, from the minute I got here. It was the facility manager, Monaro, who suggested the substation as a possible weak point, and that got me looking at it. That’s when I found evidence of Neil Yeow’s involvement—I have video of his truck there. And then Monaro got fired, but I figure that was a fake-out too. It put me right off his scent. But it was after his so-called firing that he presented me with the evidence of the sabotage: the burned-out circuit from the substation. So now I had Yeow at the scene, and the evidence of the damage caused.”

  “So where’s this Yeow?”

  “He’s at home. Because he didn’t do it. He was never at the substation. That was a setup, and Yeow was the fall guy. His truck was there, but he wasn’t driving it. And the burned board that Monaro showed me? He didn’t want to tell me who found it, but when I pressed him he gave me a name: Rico. I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts the whole circuit board thing was done after the fact, to make it look like the substation was the hub of all wrongdoing, when it wasn’t.”

  “What was?”

  “It was all here. Right where they could control it. Rico Martin’s name is all over the entry logs, apparently here to fix things, but I’m willing to bet he was actually here to break them. We’ll need to check all the video feeds, in due course.”

  “So you’re trying to say you were wrong, without saying you were wrong,” said Castañada. “That’s a tough act to pull off.”

  “I’m saying they got me looking the wrong way for a while. Looking at the wrong henchman. But the guys behind it all are still the same: Barassi and Trainor. See, they doubled down on framing Yeow by using his truck when they set fire to my house. But we can place one of Barassi’s goons there, and I’m willing to bet the other was Rico Martin, not Yeow.”

  “If we get a solid on the arson, we might be able to apply pressure, get them to roll over.”

  “I’m not sure how far we’ll get with that,” I said. “The thug is Barassi’s personal enforcer, and Martin is his brother-in-law, and from what I hear, they’re a pretty tight crew.”

  “So who then?”

  “Yeow already told my partner that Barassi put him up to calling me out, which led to me being assaulted. I think you’ll get something from him.”

  Castañada got on his phone and called in a unit to pick up Neil Yeow from his home.

  “But he didn’t do anything,” I said. “Not really. He was the patsy. We need to roll the facility manager.”

  “Who is he again?”

  We reached the door of the facility control room, and I pushed it open.

  “Francisco Monaro,” I said.

  The sergeant and his deputies stepped into the room as Monaro looked up from his laptop.

  “What’s going on?” Monaro asked me.

  “Maybe it’s a voodoo curse?” I said.

  “Francisco Monaro?” asked Sergeant Castañada.

  “Yes? Who are you?”

  “Palm Beach Sheriff.”

  Monaro frowned, and his look only grew more intense as Castañada read him his Miranda rights.

  “You’re arresting me?”

  “I’m reading you your rights, so you understand that anything you say can be used in a court of law.”

  Monaro looked at me. “Is this serious?”

  “I think being arrested is generally pretty serious, yeah. But, look, Francisco, we have Rico Martin in custody. You know him, right? He’s the guy who just turned off all the lights and tried to kill the game. And you know how he got into the electrical room?”

  I dangled the keys with the pink flamingo. Monaro’s face dropped.

  “Now, unless you want to go down with him, you best start talking.”

  Monaro set his jaw and looked at Castañada then back at me. I thought he was going to clam up, which was going to be a problem.

  But he caved. He sung like a canary.

  “Look, I didn’t want any of this, you know? Rico came to me during an inspection visit and told me to turn a blind eye to a few things. He offered me cash.”

  “Everybody likes cash,” I said.

  “Well, I turned him down, said no. I reported it to Mr. Gelphert. I told him everything. Next day Rico returns and says that running to the boss man was not what friends do to each other. Then he showed me a photo of my wife and kids in our driveway, and he said friends also don’t hurt each other’s families. So I said okay. I wasn’t going to do anything; I’d just look the other way.”

  “But you didn’t just look the other way,” I said. “You fed me the story about the crazy voodoo curse.”

  “Oh, that was real.”

  I shook my head. “You showed me the fake damaged circuit board.”

  “Rico gave it to me. He said I should show it to you.”

  “So the firing was a fake-out?”

  “No. The boss fired me. That was real. But Rico said I could get my job back.”

  “How?”

  “He didn’t say, but then right after, you called and said I needed to come back, so I figured you were all in on it.”

  “Do these bruises look like I’m in on it?” I gave him a moment to take in my battered appearance. “Did Con Gelphert ever say anything more to you, after you told him about Rico approaching you?” I asked.

  “Yes. When I saw him later, he said I should just keep my head down, do what they wanted. I asked him why he wanted to damage his own arena, and he said it was above his pay grade, that it was just big business. He said just take the money and be happy.”

  I looked at Castañada and we raised our eyebrows at each other.

  “It’s not enough,” he said.

  “What is it with you guys and not enough?”

  “We have to present a case in court, not in a bar. And it’s just he said–he said. One guy’s word against another.”

  “Not really,” said Monaro.

  “What do you mean, not really?”

  Monaro pulled out his phone. “After Rico first approached me, I got scared. I recorded everything after that.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Castañada had one of his deputies take Monaro back to the sheriff’s office and called another from the security room to do the same with Rico Martin. Then we headed for the corporate suites.

  “You sure they’ll still be here?” he asked.

  “They’ll be loving this crowd leaving, more than any hockey game.”

  Castañada flashed his ID, and we took the elevator up. There was an usher on the suite level who pointed us to the box where we would find Con Gelphert.

  He was standing in the suite overlooking the arena, still a quarter full of folks who had paid good money for hospitality and weren’t leaving until the final buzzer.

  Gelphert frowned at me and opened his mouth to tell me to get out, or some such bravado, but was shut up by Castañada reading him his rights.

  “You’re arresting me? For what?”

  “The list is long and growing,” I said. “Let’s start with willful damage and fraud.”

  “You can’t arrest me. I haven’t done anything.”

  “All evidence to the contrary,” said Castañada. “But if you want to deal, you can tell us who ordered what.”

  “I will say nothing without a lawyer.”

  “I’m sure there’s one in the building,” I said.

  “That is your constitutional right,” said Castañada. “You can call one when you get to jail.”

  Gelphert’s jaw dropped so far I thought it might smash against the floor.

  “Jail? I can’t go to jail.”

  “That’s where arrested people go,” said Castañada. “But don’t worry, no one will speak to you until a lawyer arrives, and that won’t take any longer than forty-eight hours.”

  “Forty-eight hours? In jail?”

  “We don’t hold people in hotel suites, Mr. Gelphert.”

  “No, you can’t do that. I haven’t done anything. Do you know what my neighbors will say if they hear I’ve been in jail?”

  “I’ve got a fair idea,” I said.

  “Look, I didn’t do anything, I tell you.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, “because right now, you’re the one holding the bag for everything. We have recorded evidence of you orchestrating the sabotage, the fraud, the whole enchilada.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t me. It was John Trainor.”

  “We can’t talk about this,” said Castañada. “You’ve requested a lawyer.”

  “I changed my mind. I revoke my request.”

  “You hear that, Jones?” said Castañada. “He revokes his request.”

  “I hear it.”

  “Yes, I do. I’ll tell you what you want to know. John Trainor said we needed to show that the county wasn’t capable of running a facility like this, which, let’s face it, they’re not.”

  “Why did he need to do that?” asked Castañada.

  “Because he needed control of the arena. It’s better that way. What do politicians know about running an arena?”

  “What do you know?” I asked.

  “I know plenty.”

  “But all these problems, the missed games and lost revenue, that all looks bad for you.”

  “John said it might look bad for a bit, but . . .”

  “But what?” asked Castañada.

  “He said that if I took one for the team, then soon the league would need a new commissioner.”

  “That’s funny, he offered the same thing to Senator Vargas,” I said.

  “He did? Why that—!”

  “Did Mr. Trainor order you to sabotage the arena?” asked Castañada.

  “No. He said someone would take care of it.”

  “Who?”

  Gelphert inspected his shoes.

  “Who, Mr. Gelphert?”

  “Otto Barassi.”

  Castañada had Gelphert taken away after assurances that, for now at least, he would be going to the sheriff’s office, not jail.

  “Where do you keep these guys at the sheriff’s office?” I asked.

  “In lockup.” He smiled. “Who’s next?”

  “Trainor’s right next door.”

  “Okay. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

  We strode out to the owner’s suite next door. Castañada took the lead with one of his remaining deputies. Maggie Nettles was standing outside the door.

  “You didn’t get in?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, I got in. He wasn’t too happy to see me,” she said with an evil grin.

  “Well, it’s gonna get better. He’s about to get arrested. When he comes out, you should have your phone ready for a nice picture. Maybe you can ask your questions again, get a nice additional no comment.”

  “I do know how to do my job, Jones.”

  I followed Sergeant Castañada into the suite, and we made a beeline for Trainor. He was at his tall table again, watching the remaining fans below.

  “Why are they smoothing out the ice?” he asked the guy with him. “They should be calling it off. It’s dangerous or something—”

  “Mr. Trainor,” said Castañada. “Palm Beach Sheriff. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind stepping outside with me for a moment.”

  Trainor frowned then caught sight of me. He attracted the attention of an older guy at another table, who came over to him.

  “I am Mr. Trainor’s attorney, and you are?”

  “Sergeant Castañada, Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Well, Sergeant, whatever it is, you can call my office tomorrow during business hours to ask any questions you may have of my client, and we’ll decide whether we care to respond.”

  “It won’t wait.”

  “Oh, Sergeant, unless my client is under arrest, he is free to enjoy his time without harassment from the likes of you.”

  “That’s true,” said Castañada.