Palm Beach Nasty by Tom Turner Page B

scores of lawsuits in the last five years, right up there with the cigarette companies. Crawford navigated his way around and realized it would take weeks to read everything about the guy. Jaynes had some pretty nasty chapters in his life and, it seemed, way more enemies than most. The surprising thing was how many of them were women.
    Crawford had seen pictures of Jaynes’s house—a word that hardly did it justice—in a Sunday Palm Beach Press profile. Crawford had heard that when Jaynes bought the place, it set the record for the highest selling price in Palm Beach. Fifty million. Then a few months ago, Trump sold his humongous beast to the Russian fertilizer king and . . . trumped it.

ELEVEN
    O tt was driving them to Jaynes’s house. They were going down South Ocean Road.
    “See that place,” Ott said, pointing to a big Mediterrean behind a high stucco wall, “that’s the house that Alex Cross built.”
    “Who the hell’s Alex Cross?” Crawford asked.
    “Christ, man, you illiterate or something?”
    Crawford raised his hands. “Sorry, never heard of him. Who is he?”
    “Only the most well-known James Patterson character there is.”
    Crawford laughed. “Okay, got it, Patterson’s house.”
    “Yeah . . . thanks to Alex Cross.”
    Ott hung a left and drove the white Caprice down a long driveway.
    Crawford was amazed they could just drive right in. Usually at a place like this there was some massive steel reinforced gate that could stop a tank. Or a manned toll booth-like gatehouse where you’d be eyed suspiciously unless you pulled up in a Maserati or a Maybach. The architectural style was not readily identifiable, just massively, grandiosely big. Municipal building big. Cold, too. Even the majestic royal palm trees, which formed a straight allée to the house, didn’t soften its starkness. Or warm up the battleship gray stucco exterior.
    Crawford remembered hearing that royal palms like these went for about a hundred dollars a foot. He estimated their height and how many there were, then started to do the math, but gave up. He needed a calculator.
    According to the Palm Beach County public records he had read, the mega structure had been built just six years ago. He recalled something he was told, how landscaping could make a house look as though it had been there forever. But from the outside of this one, he got the feeling it had never been lived in, everything too clean and new. It looked like a $50 million crash pad.
    Its parking court could easily accommodate fifty Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds. But the only car parked there was a fire-engine red Ferrari. ‘Rainmkr’ boasted its license plate.
    “Well, well, now isn’t that interesting,” Crawford said. “That car left the island right around the time of Darryl Bill’s murder on Friday night.”
    Ott pulled in next to the Ferrari.
    Crawford opened his door, got out and looked down at the gleaming red car. Ott climbed out and came around next to him.
    “You don’t really think that if Jaynes was behind it, he’d do it himself, do you?” Ott said.
    “My gut says ‘no,’ ” Crawford said, turning and walking toward the house. “But it’s been wrong before.”
    Crawford and Ott had talked over how they were going to play it on the way over. The pictures that Darryl Bill had taken were their ace in the hole. Misty had brought them into the station house in a sealed envelope, then beat it out of there in a hurry. There was only one that would nail Jaynes, but it would more than do the job. It was of Misty on top of a man with a long, jagged scar on his left shoulder. She was naked except for a blue tank top that had been hiked up over her breasts. She was smiling into the camera. It was pretty sick, Crawford thought, seeing how her brother was snapping the picture.
    They decided not to tell Jaynes they had seen the pictures. See whether he’d go into full denial mode or just how he’d react. They could nail him for sex with a minor, but