The autopsy had been signed by Dr. Garner Vorhees. The autopsy noted that Mr. Hris had been found unresponsive at his home. The autopsy did not mention the sentinel detention. The autopsy did not mention the taser barbs that two witnesses had seen in his shirt at the scene. I closed the folder.
The case was no longer about fake police impersonating real ones. The case was about a private security firm that had killed elderly Floridians and had relied on a coroner who was a relative of the firm's owner to cover it up. I called Camille Mortonson that same afternoon. Camille, we need a second team. We need the medical examiner.
We need exhumation orders on at least three bodies. The case just got bigger by an order of magnitude. She was quiet for a long moment. Hey Hayes, we will get the team. We will get the orders.
But this also means you have to survive Saturday morning. They are not just going to find you. If they killed Wilburn Hendricks over a Yorkie, they will not hesitate to put a baton in the back of your skull. I know, Camille. Send the team.
That night, I sat on my back porch with the file open on my lap. Estelle sat beside me. May was asleep with her tennis racket beside her bed. I thought about Wilburn Hendricks's autopsy. I thought about the next 48 hours.
I made a quiet promise to a man I had never met to his widow, a woman named Rosyn Hris, who, according to Theron's file, had spent 2 years asking the Manatee County Sheriff's Office for a real investigation and had been told twice that there was no jurisdiction. I promised Wilbur Hendrickx, sitting under a Florida sky on a back porch he would never see again, that the men who had killed him for an unleashed Yorkie were going to spend the rest of their lives in federal prison. And I promised Roslin that after we were done, she would never have to make another phone call to a sheriff's office that would not pick up. The 48 hours before the assault were the most carefully rehearsed 48 hours of my retirement. Camille Mortonson drove out to Bayu Pines on a Sunday night in plain clothes in a personal Volvo with a folder that looked like it could have come from a real estate agent's car.
We sat at my kitchen table, Camille, Estelle May, and me. Win Castayano joined us by encrypted video conference from Sarasota. Special Agent Drusen Crane, the bureau's lead tactical agent on the operation, joined from the panel van two houses down. Special Agent Brian Krauss, the bureau's lead surveillance specialist, joined on a second channel. We walked through the morning of the assault step by step.
At 7 a. M., the unmarked panel van at 672 to Bayou Drive would be on full operational footing. Four agents inside, 12 cameras around my house active, four directional microphones recording, a tactical radio loop tied to the Tampa field office. At 7:15 a. M., a second unmarked bureau van, a delivery style Mercedes Sprinter with no markings, would park three blocks away at the back end of the community on a side street called Cypress Knoll.
The Sprinter contained eight tactical agents in plain clothes, plus body armor and weapons and concealed holsters. Their response time to my front yard was, by tested measurement, 92 seconds. At 7:30 a. M., Estelle would drive May to her cousin's house in Bradenton with two backpacks of clothes. Camille had insisted gently but firmly that the granddaughter not be in the home at the moment of contact.