Kitabı oxu: «The Memory Killer»
Dedication
To Mary Jane,
Who made me laugh
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by J.A. Kerley
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
“You’re beautiful, sweethearts! Brianna thanks you for coming tonight. And if you haven’t come yet, there’s always later!”
The performer blowing extravagant, double-handed kisses from the red-curtained stage would have been a stunning woman if she were a woman: large dark eyes with heavy lashes, delicate features, plump and roseate lips. Her hair was a wild, piled-high stack of scarlet, her gown built from chips of orange flame, sequins flashing as she kicked a long leg from the thigh-high slit, the slender ankle ending in a glittery, sling-back stiletto heel.
“You go, girl!” someone called, and the crowd roared approval as the sound system played the signature sign-off, Elton John’s “The Bitch is Back”. Brianna Cass – né Brian Caswell – winked to the crowd and ran caressing hands down the deep-cut décolletage of the gown to cup breasts built of neoprene foam. Her eyes widened in mock surprise.
“I think they love you! They’ve grown a full size tonight!”
Raw, raucous laughter and good-natured catcalls accompanied Brianna’s stage-step descent into an adoring crowd of gay men, the air a mix of alcohol, cologne and pot. Brianna flamboyantly sashayed to a large table beneath the stage. Someone handed her a Japanese fan, and she sat, fanning herself as laughing men clamored to buy her drinks.
“Hey, waiter. Hey!”
Alone at a tiny table in the corner of the shadowed club, Debro waved his hand to catch a server’s eye, but the waiter ignored him to take orders from a quartet of fortyish queens partying in a nearby booth. Debro’s table initially had three chairs, but he’d pushed two to another table. He had things to do and tablemates couldn’t be allowed.
The waiter took the queens’ orders and angled toward the bar.
“Hey, you,” Debro called. “Waiter!” Debro hated to yell – it garnered attention, which caused his invisibility to falter – but now that Brianna had finished her ridiculous, mocking act, he had to move fast.
“Waiter!”
The waiter looked toward Debro, sighed, walked over. “Yaas, do you need zomething?” he said in a faux accent, nose in the air. For a split second Debro imagined punching the man’s face and raping him on the floor of the nightclub. Instead, Debro nodded to Brianna, surrounded by well-wishers.
“What’s Brianna’s favorite drink?”
The twink gave Debro an appraiser’s stare, but Debro knew the waiter could only see himself in the wide mirroring lenses of his outsize sunglasses, the black knit hat pulled almost to the tops of the shades, a turtle-neck tee snugged beneath his chin. It helped make him invisible.
“Chom-pine,” the waiter said. “Brianna like z’chom-pine.”
“Champagne? What’s her favorite?”
“Z’most expensive, of courz. Creeesh-tal … Two-hondred-eighty dollars.” The waiter barely avoided sneering at Debro’s drink choice: Miller Lite beer.
“Bring me a bottle of the stuff,” Debro said, reaching for his wallet. “And one of those long champagne glasses.”
The server regarded Debro with new eyes. “A bottle of Creees-tal and a flute, zen?”
“Yeah, a flute. Whatever.”
The man bustled away and Debro shot a glance at Brianna, standing and waving at well-wishers before turning for the hall leading to the restroom. “Do you see the bitch, Brother?” Debro whispered into the darkness. “Will Brianna come home with us tonight?”
The waiter returned with the champagne and glass. “Do you vish me to pop z’cork?”
Debro nodded and the man unwrapped the wire and tugged the cork without success. “Goddamn things are impossible,” the man muttered in his real voice, Midwestern nasal, probably Ohio. Debro took the Cristal and his strong hands easily twisted the cork loose, wisps of vapor floating from the bottle. The waiter bowed and backed away, money in hand.
Sitting and sliding the table a foot deeper into the shadows, Debro reached into his jacket for his cell phone. Taped behind it was a tiny vial of amber liquid. His fingernails pried the cap from the vial and he tapped the phone above the flute as the vial emptied. Anyone looking his way saw only a man appearing to send a text.
Brianna re-entered the room, a half-dozen full glasses on her table, gifts from admirers. Her long red nails began doing an eenie-meenie-miney selection of what to drink first.
Time.
Debro took a deep breath and stood, snugging his collar higher and hat lower as he crossed the crowded room. Four young males were at Brianna’s table, but they took a single glance at Debro and turned away. Debro was not trendy. It was part of his invisibility.
The only eyes on Debro belonged to Brianna, her head cocked as if finding Debro a curious intrusion on her space. He pushed a false and adoring smile to his face, feigning embarrassment as he held the bottle and flute to his side.
“Great show,” Debro said. “You’re so nasty and fun. May I offer you a drink?”
“Is that champagne?” Brianna said. “Brianna loooves the bubbly.”
Debro displayed the label and Brianna trilled her delight. Debro poured, his hand hiding the amber viscosity at the bottom of the glass. The champagne mixed with the fluid and bubbled to the mouth of the flute.
“From a grateful admirer,” Debro said, handing Brianna the glass. She batted big eyes, emptied it in three seconds, then held the flute toward Debro to return it.
“Thank you, sweetcakes,” she said. “That was dee-double-licious.”
“I bought it for you,” Debro said, setting the champagne on the table. It had done its work.
“Aren’t you the darling boy,” Brianna chirped, crossing the long legs and pouring another glass. “Have we met before, sweet prince?”
But Debro was already moving away. He returned to the table in the shadows and stared at the drag queen drinking his champagne, a mean and insulting bitch who – like the two other nasty boys hallucinating on the floor of his home – was long overdue for punishment.
He checked his watch. All that remained was the waiting.
2
Ten days later
Call me, Jeremy, I thought, sitting on my deck on Florida’s Upper Matecumbe Key and pressing my fingers to my temples as my eyes squeezed shut with effort. Skype me. Text me. Write me. I opened my eyes and stared at the smartphone on the table beside my deck chair.
Nada.
My friend and former colleague, Clair Peltier, a pathologist in Mobile, Alabama, is as pure a scientist as ever conceived. Yet Clair believes in synchronicity, a metaphysical linkage of time and space and energy, where wishes, dreams, actions and events form alliances unfathomable to the human mind, but totally logical within the universal matrix. I’d spoken to her last night, explaining that a person close to me seemed to have vanished from the planet and I was worried.
“Think about the person, Carson. If they’re part of you they’ll feel it.”
“I have been, Clair.”
“Think harder.”
I looked up to see a fat white moon in a cobalt sky, low enough to be enhanced by the atmospheric lens, its light broken into diamonds atop waves shivering across the three-acre cove behind my home. It would be a beautiful night if I knew my brother was safe.
I’d not heard from Jeremy in seven weeks. Though I’d once gone a year without word from my brother, he was then twenty-five and in an institute for the criminally insane, imprisoned for the murders of five women and I, ashamed, didn’t visit the institution for twelve months. He’d also been belatedly indicted for killing our father, who he tied to a tree and disassembled with a kitchen knife; I had just turned ten at the time, Jeremy was sixteen.
Jeremy spent almost a decade in incarceration until the director of the institute, Dr Evangeline Prowse, broke every rule in her life and profession by sneaking Jeremy to New York. In a bizarre twist of fate – since those knowing Jeremy Ridgecliff was my brother were countable on one hand – I, Detective Carson Ryder, having a record of apprehending psychotics, was summoned to either catch him or kill him.
During the journey I discovered my brother’s role in the women’s murders was ambiguous, and not deserving of death or life-long incarceration, and I helped Jeremy elude the police, a breach of my professional oath that troubled my conscience to this day. Jeremy’s killing of our father likely saved my life, and troubled my conscience not the slightest.
After his disappearance in New York, I again had no contact with Jeremy for over a year, until he called from an isolated rural community in Eastern Kentucky, where he’d assumed the identity of a retired Canadian psychologist named Auguste Charpentier, living in a well-appointed cabin and growing wealthy using an unorthodox analysis of the stock market. Since he’d surfaced, we’d communicated enough that I knew something was amiss if he’d gone this long without acknowledging my calls, texts, and e-mails.
I also knew that nothing good had ever come of my brother spending too much time alone with his thoughts.
Call me, Jeremy, I thought, one final time, adding You thoughtless bastard.
The phone lay dead and I glanced at my watch; four minutes past midnight. I checked the beer bottle on the table beside my deck chair; empty. Both indicated it was time to totter to bed. I took another look at the moon and whistled. Mr Mix-up, my huge pooch, ran up from hunting crabs in the sandy backyard. I yawned and scratched his head and we headed inside.
As I latched the door my cell phone trilled the opening riff of Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom”. My heart paused mid-beat: Had I conjured up my wayward brother? I checked the screen and frowned – Roy McDermott, my boss at the Florida Center for Law Enforcement.
“Carson, it’s Roy,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
Roy always identified himself, as though I could forget any voice attached to a ceaselessly grinning jack-o’-lantern face topped by a hay-bright shock of unruly hair, an untamable cowlick floating above like antennae.
“I’m sitting on the deck and enjoying the moon, Roy,” I semi-lied. “What’s going on?”
“Viv Morningstar just called. She was looking for you, but couldn’t find your number.”
Dr Vivian Morningstar was the Chief Forensic Pathologist for Florida’s southern region. We’d worked together several times and I’d found her as attractive as she was professional. I’d made a few attempts at flirtation, but her eyes had told me I was dancing in the wrong ballroom.
“What does the Doc want, Roy?”
“She’d like you to meet her at MD-Gen first thing in the a.m. It involves a poisoning.”
MD-Gen was Miami-Dade General Hospital, Dade being the county. A hospital – with its emphasis on the living – seemed a bit far afield for the forensic pathologist.
“She doesn’t want me at the morgue?”
A chuckle. “It’s Viv, Carson. She basically ordered me to send you to MD-Gen.”
Vivian Morningstar on a case was like Patton on the march … all ahead full, damn the bombs and bureaucrats. Her staff revered her, but tempered their love with terror.
“And you told her …?” I said.
“Only that I’d pass the message on. Say hello to the moon for me.”
3
I awoke an hour before my 6.00 a.m. alarm and jumped through the shower, pulling on jeans and a blue Oxford shirt, grabbing a coral linen jacket to keep the shoulder-holstered Glock from startling citizens at stop lights.
I went beneath my home, stilted to ride above storm surges, and climbed into a fully outfitted Land Rover Defender originally confiscated in a drug bust. Colleagues called me Sahib and Bwana, but having the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country, I laughed it off.
I turned on to Highway 1. An hour and two coffee stops later I entered Miami-Dade General and elevatored to a room in the Intensive Care section. Doc Morningstar was leaning against the wall and studying reports, her dark and shoulder-length hair fallen forward. She was slender and athletic and appeared taller than her five ten, the effect of improbably long legs currently hidden under khaki slacks. Her blouse was a silky purple, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, her only ornamentation a pair of small enameled earrings, purple coneflowers to match the blouse.
Morningstar glanced up, brushed back the errant hair, and nodded, any potential smile damped by the patient centering the room, a young man, late teens to early twenties, blond, with sunken and lifeless eyes and flesh so pale as to seem blue. A mask covered his nose and mouth, so many tubes and hoses running to the mask it appeared a mechanical octopus was clinging to his face.
I gave the doc a What’s-up? look.
“Name’s Dale Kemp,” she said quietly. “Hikers found him three days ago near the Pahayokee overlook in the Glades. He’s been raped, semen found, but nothing in the database.”
DNA sampling used to take weeks, but recent technology made it a matter of hours with one of the new machines, and we’d recently added one to our arsenal. But if there was no match for the perp in the database, it was still a dead end.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
Morningstar set aside the reports. Her eyes were huge and the kind of hazel that seems pale one moment, dark the next.
“An overdose seemed indicated, but nothing showed. The attending physician, Dr Philip Costa, knew I had a sub-specialty in toxicology and called yesterday. I suggested a more complex series of tests, initially thinking scopolamine or atropine, and my preliminary tests found a massive quantity of datura stramonium in his blood, among other things.”
“Datur-strama … what?”
“You might know its plant source: Jimson weed.”
My mental Rolodex whirred. “Also called Loco weed?”
She nodded. “I also found robitin, a phytotoxin from Robinia pseudocacia, or black locust tree. When it’s ingested by animals, they become stupefied, unable to recognize their surroundings. They often die.”
“Jeee-sus,” I said.
“There’s probably more in this crazy cocktail, Ryder. But the datura and robinia seem the main components.”
“What’s the effect of the Loco weed?”
“In controlled quantities, datura has medicinal uses. Larger doses create delirium and fearful hallucinations. It can result in odd behavior, such as stripping off clothes, picking at oneself, staring into space. A person dosed with datura can look in a mirror and see a complete stranger. Or a cow. Or nothing at all.”
Hallucinations atop stupefaction. “Where was he last seen, anyone know?”
“He was ID’d via Missing Persons at Miami-Dade PD. Last sighting was at a Miami Beach bar. He didn’t come to work the next day.”
“When’d he disappear?”
“Ten days ago. There’s something else I wanted to show you. Take a look at his back.”
We gently rolled Dale Kemp over. I saw bruises and scratches and an odd pattern between his shoulder blades: a pair of coupled circles etched into the skin, as if a tenpenny nail had been drawn across his flesh hard enough to welt, but not break, the skin. Two vertical lines fell below, the tops of the lines touching the ovoids. A horizontal line fell between the verticals.
“A figure eight,” I said. “On top of some lines.”
“Or, looking from below …”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “A freaking infinity symbol.”
We rolled him back. I looked between the kid and the readings on the monitor. “He’ll always be like this?” I asked. “It’s permanent?”
“There aren’t a lot of field trials to draw from, as you’d expect.” She nodded at an array of prepared syringes on the bedside table. “The robinia inhibits protein synthesis, so we’ve concocted a treatment to enhance reactions. It also contains physostigmine, an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.”
“Uh …”
“Sorry. The first to reduce toxic effects of the black locust, the second helps reduce the hallucinations.”
I found it odd Morningstar used the word we’re and us, as if Kemp were her patient. The only course recommended for Morningstar’s standard “patients” was burial or cremation.
“Where could you get these plants, Doc?” I asked.
“Jimson weed grows wild across the country. Black locust grows in most states east of the Mississippi.”
I made a pouring motion. “What … someone just dumped twigs and leaves into a blender and made this stuff?”
“The active chemicals were likely extracted from the plant sources and concentrated. That would take a knowledge of chemistry. But probably basic.”
“As basic as jurisdictions?” I said, growing puzzled by Morningstar’s request that I be here. A rape, though horrific, was not reason to call me, the FCLE’s specialist in psychotics, sociopaths and other mental melt-downs.
“Jurisdictions?” she said.
“You said Kemp was found by Miami-Dade cops, was in their Missings file. Why did you call me, Doctor?”
Morningstar walked to the window and gazed down on the parking lot, forlorn in its dawn emptiness. Not only was I uncertain why I was here, I was also puzzled at her involvement. When she had solved the toxicology problem, her work was over, time to return to the dead. She seemed more like an attending physician than a pathologist.
Morningstar turned back to me. “I, uh … it’s not a typical case, is it, Detective? The combination of substances seems so calculated and cold that it feels … evil.”
Another anomaly. Evil was not a word normally used in the clinical halls of Morningstar’s pathology department. Had the bizarre methodology of the case unsettled the usually imperturbable pathologist?
“So you’d prefer the FCLE to investigate? Me in particular?”
“It’s your world, right, Detective? Who else but a psychopath might, uh …”
Words failed and she stared at the body motionless amidst the tubes and wires, his thoughts turned to nightmares and even the nightmares burned away, perhaps forever, by a combination of toxins you might find in your own backyard.
“Who else but a psychopath might turn common plants into Satan’s private date-rape drug?” I said.
Morningstar nodded. “I figured you’d have the right words.”
4
“You want to grab a case from Miami-Dade?” Roy McDermott said from behind his broad desk, patting down the straw-hued cowlick that immediately bounded back in defiance. “What? We don’t have enough cases of our own?” Outside his twenty-third-story window the Miami skyline was a study in muscular architecture. The FCLE was in the downtown Clark Center, and was the state’s top investigative agency, usually summoned when special expertise was needed. We stayed busy.
“Doc Morningstar thinks it’s the way to go.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, partner, but she’s a pathologist, not an investigative professional.”
“We can do it, right? Assert jurisdiction?”
Roy nodded reluctantly. “We’re state, they’re local. But it’s basically a missing-persons case that’ll probably get filed as a sex crime. I don’t see the reason, Carson. It’s not like we’re begging for work.”
My phone rang and I checked the caller: Morningstar. I made notes as she detailed her latest findings.
“That was the good Doc herself,” I said when we’d finished.
Roy clapped his hands in mock delight. “Goodie. Does she have any more cases to add to our list?”
“She has a newly isolated agent in the tox combo. Something called raphides. Given the plant-based nature of the other toxins, Morningstar thinks it came from dieffenbachia.”
“The houseplant? I used to have one in my office until it died. Probably had something to do with stubbing out cigars in the pot.”
“Dieffenbachia is also called dumb cane. Seems the raphides cause paralysis of the vocal cords.”
Roy spun to study the skyline. “So the perp drops this nastiness in a drink. The black locust makes the target head home with cramps and muscle weakness, the datura makes him hallucinate like Timothy Leary squared, and this last stuff …”
“Makes it impossible to call for help,” I said.
Roy turned back to his desk and picked up the phone.
“You’re tight with Vince Delmara, right?”
I nodded. Vince was a senior investigator with the Miami-Dade County Police Department. We’d worked together on my first case in Florida last year, and I’d found Delmara a first-rate detective, old school, the kind to visit a crime scene just to sniff the air. We’d hit it off from the git-go.
“Good,” Roy said. “Let Vince schmooze you through the transfer and it’ll go easy.”
“You think?”
He grinned. “Unless some honcho has a burr under his saddle, they’ll be delighted to pass the potato to us.”
My partner in most operations was Ziggy Gershwin. I gave him a call and was outside his Little Havana apartment minutes later, waiting until a slender man with coal-black hair pushed from the door, jamming a scarlet shirt into tan chinos, his cream jacket hanging across his shoulder, a rolled tortilla in his mouth like a cigar. An ancient woman was walking a tan puff of dog down the sidewalk and Gershwin’s cordovan boat shoes leapt over the bewildered canine, earning an icy glare from the woman. I filled him in as I drove, as much as I knew.
“Oy caramba, Big Ryde,” Gershwin said as he buttoned his cuffs. “That’s some crazy cocktail.”
A few months back Ziggy Gershwin would have been wearing threadbare jeans, a T-shirt advertising a beer brand, and orange skate shoes, but becoming an active agent in the FCLE had upped his fashion game. The product of a Jewish father and Cuban mother, his full name was Ignacio Ruben Manolo Gershwin, and he’d been Iggy as a child. But a teacher had started calling the hyperactive, darting kid Ziggy, and it stuck.
“Morningstar thinks Kemp received repeated and heavy doses of the tox mix, Zigs, maybe starting at a bar.”
“What, we’re doing legwork for Miami-Dade?”
“We’re appropriating the case. The Doc figures it’d take a psycho to sicken and weaken people, turn off their screams, then fill their head with hallucinations while he rapes them.”
“No matter how lovely Señorita Morningstar may be, isn’t she a pathologist and not a—”
“Heard it from Roy,” I said, cutting him off.
I called and found Vince at his desk in MD’s headquarters and said we’d be by in minutes. He had two words: Bring coffee. He meant real brew, not the stuff cooked up at cop houses across the land, desiccated brown crumbles boiled into a bitterness no sugar could blunt. We stopped at a bodega and filled my large Zogirushi with righteous espresso thunder and were at MD in minutes.
Vince Delmara was in a cluttered cubicle in the Homicide unit, his wingtips on his desk as he reviewed jai-alai scores in the Miami Herald. He looked up, saw us approaching, and folded the paper. Vince was medium height and slender and his dark complexion was marred with acne pocks, his black hair brushed straight back. His dark eyes were large and piercing and with his prize-sized proboscis Vince called to mind a thoughtful buzzard. He always dressed in dark suits, white shirts and neon-bright ties, capping the ensemble with a Dick Tracy-style fedora to enter the bright Miami sun, which he regarded with vampiric suspicion.
I poured his ceramic mug full of caffeine and Vince’s toucan-sized beak sniffed. He drank, leaned back his head, moaned, then, as if his day had been re-booted, set his eyes on Gershwin and me. “Jesus … too much Scotch last night. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up wearing a fucking kilt.”
“Your wife still make you stop and get a few pops before you come home?” Gershwin asked.
He nodded. “Says it makes me easier to live with.”
“She must have found you real easy to live with last night,” Gershwin said.
“Beatrice is in Tampa visiting her sister. I had to live with me last night.” He took another blast of java. “What can I do you gents for?”
“We’ve got a guy who was a Missing, Vince. He’d been drugged, kept for a week, then dumped. We’re planning to pull the case into our purview. Doc Morningstar thinks it’s a psycho at work.”
Vince gave me a raised eyebrow. “Last I noted, Carson, the gorgeous doc was a pathologist and—”
I sighed and raised my hand. Had everyone been handed the same libretto? “I know, Vince. But I figured you might smooth the way, politics-wise.”
He sucked coffee and thought. “Well … given that details are just getting clear, the case will transfer from Missing Persons to Sex Crimes, but I’ll bet it’s still officially in MP. Lemme see what Missing Persons has listed.” He sat at a blank screen, pecked the keys. Nothing happened.
“Works best when you turn it on, Vince,” Gershwin said. “Let me do the honors.”
Gershwin flipped the switch and seconds later we saw a photo of Dale Kemp in the corner of a screen of missing persons. His well-attended blond hair sparkled with highlights above sculpted cheekbones and penetrating gray eyes. His occupation was listed as medical-products salesman, and I figured his good looks created a buzz among the female staff when he entered a physician’s office.
Vince read the investigative report: “Moved here last April from Minneapolis. Liked to hit the beach and bars, but who doesn’t when they’re twenty-seven and in Miami.”
“Gay?” I asked.
“Yep, but you got to read between the lines. Lemme see who owns the case.”
Vince expanded the screen to the full report, tapped a bottom line. “The case is still in Missings, headed by Katey Beltrane, twenty years in the biz, eight in MP, and a pro. She’ll thank you for lightening her case load. Step in and snatch a case from an insecure pissant and you’ll—”
“Wind up in shit-fight corral,” Gershwin finished.
Vince tipped back the fedora and nodded at Gershwin. “For a young buck, you know a couple things. Let’s get it done so I can see how much I lost on jai-alai last night. Here’s a tip, never call your bookie when you’re smashed.”
5
We elevatored down to a wide hall, a sign above the first door saying MISSING PERSONS. Opening the door revealed a thirtyish guy with his feet propped on the desk and reading a Hustler magazine. He stood, six feet plus, heavy in the shoulders, with hair so blond it had to be dyed. He wore it long over his ears and down his neck. His face was oddly lopsided, and his nose slanted off to one side. He slipped the mag into a folder as if filing official business.
“Where’s Lieutenant Beltrane?” Vince asked.
“Getting her ass fixed,” the big guy said.
“What’s wrong with her ass?” Vince said. “I always liked it.”
“Beltrane busted her hip falling off a ladder. She’s got physical therapy for six weeks.”
The guy glanced at the clipped-on temp IDs Gershwin and I had received at the desk. He made no effort to extend a hand, so neither did I.
“I need to speak to whoever’s running the department,” Vince said.
Big boy crossed his arms and leaned the wall. Even with full sleeves I could see the guy had guns. “So start talking.”
“You’re heading the unit?”
The guy looked irritated at Vince’s emphasis. “I came here two months before the loot took the big dive. Smith retired two weeks later, Jalesco transferred to Bunco. I outranked the others, so when Beltrane hit the floor, I was in charge.”
Vince simply stared like the guy was a scotch-generated mirage, the first time I’d seen Vince at a loss for words. I stepped in, glancing at the nameplate: Det. Figueroa.
“Look, Detective Figueroa, given certain insights into the case by the pathologist, the FCLE has decided to put Dale Kemp’s case under our jurisdiction.”
The guy scowled. Delmara’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it, muttered “Got to take this. A snitch who usually pays off.” Vince hustled to the bathroom across the hall, an appropriate venue for talking to a snitch.
I turned back to Figueroa, who was squinting in thought. “Your jurisdiction?” he said.
I tried upbeat. “Look on the bright side, bud: one less hassle to deal with.”
“Fuck your bright side, mister. This is Miami-Dade, not a bunch of county clowns with cowshit on their boots. We can handle it.”
Upbeat wasn’t his preferred métier, so I tried making nice. “I mean no disrespect to your abilities, amigo, but our interest in the case stems from—”
“I read the report,” Figueroa interrupted. “It smells bogus. I’m not even sure it should be here.”
“The victim was drugged, abducted and raped,” I said, puzzled. “How’s that not a crime?”
Figueroa shook his head like I was a moron. “A couple hot boys meet up at a bar, go somewhere to hook up and do drugs. They get all sexed up and time don’t mean jackshit. Then one guy decides he’s tired of it. The other has a hissy fit, gets his butt-buddy all dopey and drops him in the Glades to teach him a lesson. Don’t say you haven’t seen it.”
I had encountered variations of Figueroa’s scenario, and had considered it in this case, but the drug combo wasn’t anything near recreational.
“You didn’t see the tox reports, Detective Figueroa. He’d had some nasty stuff.”
Rod Figueroa smirked, probably his default expression. “I’ve seen these dudes on Ecstasy, heroin, crank, ice, PCP, mushrooms, glue, cough syrup, paint thinner, and mixes of them all … what you got to beat that?”
I thought about explaining the calculated potency and effects of the mixture given Kemp, but it would have been like trying to open a twelve-foot stepladder in a room with an eight-foot ceiling. And anyway, I was tiring of Rod Figueroa.
“If it’s your opinion that this wasn’t a crime, Detective,” I said, ju-jitsuing him with his own words, “then we’ve taken nothing from you. If you could be so kind as to send us any files you have, I’ll be appreciative. Have a nice day.”
I set my card on his desk and backed away. I nodded at Gershwin and we spun and left the office. I heard the sound of tearing paper, but didn’t turn. We retreated down the hall and waited until Delmara appeared.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Figueroa doesn’t seem cut out for the job, Vince, an obvious bias against gays. Most Missings cops I know are past that.”
“Figueroa’s an asshole. He comes by it naturally – his daddy’s an asshole, too. But a high-ranking asshole in MDPD, which is why junior’s got way too much pull for a guy barely thirty. Little Roddy was in Theft last I saw, but I guess Daddy wanted junior to get some Sex-Crimes cred on his way up.”
“Daddy is?”
“Captain Alphonse Figueroa. A guy who started on a beat in Little Havana and made all the right moves. Knew he was making ’em, too.”
“Political type?” I asked.
“Understudied with the old school macho types who ran the place a couple decades back. They pushed Figueroa upstairs, gave him a cushy desk in Community Relations. Daddy Figueroa’s a piece of work … I think he’s on his fifth wife. Unfortunately, he’s high-profile in the older Cuban community, one of the department’s PR assets. So junior gets a lot of sway.”
“What’s wrong with Figueroa’s face?” Gershwin asked. “Looks like someone scrunched it in a vise.”
Delmara shrugged. “Some kind of accident when he was a kid, running a jet ski while drunk, plowed into a boat. No one’s ever really said.”
“Figueroa’s moving up in the department?” I asked.
“Daddy says, ‘Maybe my sonny boy should get experience in the Missing Persons unit’ and you can hear the yessirs and pens filling out transfer forms.”
“The asshole’ll probably be Chief some day,” Gershwin muttered.
Delmara slapped a hand on my partner’s shoulder.
“You are indeed old beyond your years, Detective.”
Gershwin and I crossed Biscayne to Miami Beach, heading to the Stallion Lounge, the last place Dale Kemp had been seen. I figured it had to open early to air out from previous evenings, the smell of beer and bodies and a gazillion drenchings of cologne thick as fog in the semi-darkness. It was booths and a few tables, half of the floor set aside for dancing. The walls were dark wood with sconces for light. A mirrored ball hung from the ceiling.
I saw four guys in a back booth. Two were in full black leather regalia, like they were rehearsing for the Village People, the others resembled prep-school wannabes, clean-cut, white tees tucked into dark jeans. Loafers at the end of long and crossed legs. Except when they turned our way, their eyes looked a thousand years old.
A guy stood behind the long bar rinsing glasses, and I knew he’d made us from the moment our heels slapped the floor. He was inches over six feet and looked carved from a block of chocolate, pneumatic biceps rippling as he toweled the glassware, his chest broad and ripped under a blue denim vest that glittered with studwork.
We walked his way, but his eyes stayed on his drying. “You’re wasting your time,” he said in a sing-song voice that didn’t fit the physique. “We card everyone.”
He meant they asked for proof of age, though I figured a faux driver’s license printed on construction paper would pass muster.
“Good for you,” I said, pulling Kemp’s photo from my jacket. “But that’s not why we’re here. Know this guy?”
The bartender flipped the towel over a cannonball shoulder, took the shot and held it closer to the light. “Dale. He’s in here pretty regular, though I haven’t seen him in a few days.” The eyes got serious. “He all right?”
“We think he may have had his drink spiked. It would have been about ten days ago.”
“That’s just fucking nasty.”
“Dale have any enemies you know about?”
He blew out a breath. “Dale could be cruel sometimes. Especially to ugmos who hit on him.”
“Ugly people?”
“Dale never dispensed charity.”
I took it that meant deigning to frolic with less attractive beings. “Anyone seem particularly interested in Dale that night?” I asked. “Hit on him?”
“Are there bees around honey? People are always scoping Dale out.”
“Anyone buzzing around that particular evening?”
“I can’t recall anyone who …” he stopped and frowned.
“What?” I asked.
“Dale got a call on the house phone. That doesn’t happen much, everyone having cells. He was at a table and I yelled over that someone wanted to talk. Dale took the phone and handed it back, said there was no one there.”
“Male voice?”
“Deep and kind of raspy.” He lowered his voice an octave. “‘Hello, is Dale Kemp a-boot?’ Those were his words.”
“You’re using a Canadian pronunciation,” Gershwin said. “Kind of.”
The barkeep nodded. “Or maybe it was kind of British.”
I leaned close. “Tell me this, if you remember. When Dale came to the phone, was he holding his drink?”
He closed his eyes. “He held the phone in one hand and put the other over the receiver, asked who it was. He must have left his drink behind.”
“That’s the picture in your head?” Gershwin asked. “For sure?”
“I always like looking at Dale.”
We returned to the Rover where I tapped my fingers on the wheel. “The perp sits in the corner, watches. When Kemp’s friends aren’t near, he calls the landline, asks for him. The barkeep calls, Kemp gets up …”
Gershwin finished the scenario. “The perp hangs up and walks by Kemp’s booth, pausing to spike his drink with homemade witches’ brew.”
I put the safari wagon in gear and we pulled into a balmy afternoon, the street a festival of brightly plumaged youth bustling from bar to bar, called by music or hormones, the world an endless caravan of vibrant moments. They were young and beautiful and invulnerable.
Or so they supposed.
Debro left his downstairs apartment and walked upstairs with his feet crunching on the wood-plank steps. The ancient building had been a small auto-parts warehouse and the red-brick walls were crumbling on to the steps. The door at the top was metal. He unlocked it and stepped into a spacious antechamber furnished with a table beneath a wall-mounted cabinet. The far end of the chamber held a door with a small wire-reinforced window at eye level.
Debro went to the window and flipped a switch on the wall. The room beyond the chamber lit up, the light from track-mounted spots screwed into the ceiling joists. After purchasing the building last year, he’d machine-sanded the floor to be an inch higher in the center, sloping down to small gutters, the gutters feeding into the drainage system from the roof. He’d then covered the floor in linoleum, caulking the seams.
All he had to do to clean up after his penitents was hook the hose into the wall faucet and rinse the floor. Debro allowed his boys twenty ounces of water a day, which was easily mopped up, food a few nutritional gel packs squirted past their lips daily, nothing solid.
It took time to do things right … to make things right.
Debro put his eyes to the window. Two lovely sluts were in attendance, Brianna in the corner, and his latest penitent, Harold, propped against a wall and dodging invisible birds or missiles or whatever. He tried to scream but only wet croaks emerged. Every couple of minutes he’d try to stand but even his glorious, dancing legs crumpled under the weight of the black locust.
Brianna was a different case, curled in the fetal position, pissing and emitting watery gruel from her sphincter. Brianna and her sphincter had ceased to be fun. Beside, she’d been here for over a week now, and had learned her lesson.
Debro nodded: the choice was made. He stared at Brianna for several long seconds. “Brianna’s leaving us, Brother,” he said. “It’s time to get another.”
Debro returned to his apartment to consult a map of South Florida. Part of his extensive planning had involved sites where the punished could be sent, and over a dozen locations had been ringed in red. He closed his eyes, circled a digit over the map, let it drop. He had a place to drop a used one. Now all he had to do was get a fresh one.
No problem. It would soon be night.
6
We headed to Kemp’s apartment, a furnished house Kemp rented with two male roommates, flight attendants. Both had been away during the time Kemp had been abducted. One roomie, Lawrence Kaskil, arrived as we did, pulling up on a sleek racing bicycle in a white T-shirt over black Lycra biking shorts.
“I called the police on the second day I was back,” Kaskil told us, tossing his blue helmet into a closet and exchanging his biking shoes for neon green flip-flops. “It wasn’t unusual for Dale to be gone overnight, but after two days I got worried.”
“You got back from where?”
“Mexico City.”
“Your other roommate, Tad Bertram, was where during this time?”
Kaskil flapped to the small kitchenette and studied a calendar stuck to the fridge with a magnetic Scotty dog. “Tad overnighted in London, then to Cairo. He dead-headed to Rome for two days and is now back in London. He’ll be in tonight. I dread telling him about Dale.”
“Dead-headed?” Gershwin said.
“Taking a flight, but not working it. He took a couple days off to see the sights.”
I took a look at the calendar, new to us, the Missing Persons unit having neglected to do any follow-up. But Rod Figueroa had it all figured out: just a case of sexed-up boys. And why work when you can gawk at nekkid wimmen in your Hustler?
“These notes on the calendar,” I said, checking the previous month. “Dale – Tampa, Dale – SA, Dale – ORL … What’s that about?”
“Overnight sales trips. Tampa, St Augustine, Orlando. Dale put out-of-town days on the calendar.” Kaskil paused. “But sometimes he was gone overnight and it wasn’t indicated.”
“When he’d meet someone?” I said. “Like on a date?”
Kaskil nodded. “Those could be, uh, impromptu.”
“You and your other roomie, Tad Bertram … you’re gone a lot?”
“We’re here maybe eight or ten days out of the month. We joke that we each pay a third of the rent, but Dale gets the place to himself seventy per cent of the time.”
“When you arrived home from Mexico City, did anything seem amiss?”
Kaskil’s features tightened in thought. “It was like Dale had played with rearranging the furniture, then put it back almost in place, but not quite.”
“Let’s talk enemies – did Dale have any?”
“A lot of times Dale gets cruised, and if he’s not in the mood he can be fast with put-downs. But no, there’s, like, no one who has it in for him. Not enough to do such an ugly thing.”
We asked everything we could think of, then walked to the door. Kaskil asked if he and Bertram could visit Kemp and I discouraged it, telling them to wait until he regained consciousness.
I didn’t mention it was a crapshoot as to that ever happening.
We interviewed neighbors and friends of Kemp, getting nothing. When the day dwindled to dusk, Gershwin headed home and I decided to crib at the Palace, saving the hour-long drive. The Palace was a recent addition to the FCLE’s ongoing accumulation of confiscations. Gershwin and I had nailed a piece of garbage who’d made big money trafficking in human beings, hiding his gains in real estate. One property was the Palace Apartments, a small building on the west side of downtown, near the Tamiami Trail.
Roy McDermott was a director of the FCLE not for deductive abilities, but his artful wrangling of funds and favors from the lawmakers in Tallahassee, a group the masterful McDermott milked like plump cows. Roy had convinced legislators to sell off all Kazankis’s properties except the Palace, to be used as quarters for visiting FCLE staffers and an occasional safe house for witness-protection efforts.
I arrived and grabbed my overnight valise from the rear of the car. My ID card buzzed me through two bulletproof doors – an addition for the witness-protection aspect – and into a small lobby with framed seascapes on the walls. A clipboard on an elegant mahogany table indicated three rooms were occupied: two agents from Jacksonville and a departmental attorney from Tallahassee. They were on floors one and two, leaving the top floor, the fourth, fully mine.
My suite resembled an upscale extended-stay facility: twin couches and chairs in the main room, plus a large TV screen and modest sound system, a desk, a wardrobe, chest of drawers. The galley-style kitchen held cooking necessaries and a half-size fridge. The bathroom had both shower and Jacuzzi. The bedroom had a queen-size bed, another desk and chair in the corner.
Though a part of the FCLE’s inventory for three months, the Palace had already developed a fine tradition: if a visitor brought potables to the room and had something left when departing, the beverages stayed. I held my breath and opened the refrigerator …
Three cans of Bud, two of Heineken, two Cokes, and seven airline-sized bottles of liquor, including two Bacardi golden rums. Bless you, I thought, mixing a rum and Coke – no lime, but I could rough it – then tucking the file beneath my arm, and heading out. The fourth-floor suite had one aspect I prized above all others: a stairway to the roof.
I climbed and opened the door to the night skyline of Miami. Buildings towered like glass and metal hives with a skeleton staff of bees still buzzing within, whole floors dark, others alight for the cleaning staff and workers pulling all-nighters. A helicopter rumbled in the distance as traffic sounds drifted up from the street.
On my last stay I’d purchased a sturdy folding chair, and bungeed it to a vent. I set it up, put the drink beside me and my feet on the two-foot ledge. Below my soles was sixty feet of open air and three a.m. traffic, half taxicabs. I sipped rum and Coke, pulled my phone, and took another stab at my errant brother.
Per Clair’s instructions I thought so hard that my mouth formed the words Answer the phone, Jeremy. I visualized my brother cocking his head to the phone ringing in his office and lifting it to his ear … visualization another of Clair’s suggestions.
Answer …
The phone again directed me to his voicemail. Two dozen of my calls already lay in the electronic wasteland of my brother’s VM box … so much for synchronicity. Anger boiling in my gut, I held the phone to the night sky, growling, “God-dammit, Jeremy. Call me now and let me get on with my life.”
Five seconds later my phone riffed an incoming call. I checked the screen and saw the name AUGUSTE and stared in disbelief: Jeremy’s alter ego, Auguste Charpentier. I wondered if I’d already gone to bed and was dreaming.
Elmore replayed the riff, too strident for a dream, and a triumph for either Clair or coincidence. My finger hesitated over the connect button, wondering whether to voice relief or ire. Given the number of messages in Jeremy’s voicemail, I figured irritation was my due.
“Where the hell are you?” I snapped. “Why haven’t you been answering?”
“Goodness, so testy,” Jeremy said, his voice melodically Southern, not the Frenchified accent he affected with others. “I’ve been busy, Carson. No time for your idle chit-chat.”
“Idle chit-chat? I had no idea whether you were in Kentucky or Florida or … worse.”
“You mean back home in dear ol’ Alabammy?”
“Jail,” I said. “Prison. You might have been caught and I’d never know.”
“Don’t I get one call? I’d probably call you, Carson. Unless I used it to order a pizza.”
“You’re fine, then?” I sighed. “You’re still in Kentucky?”
“I’ll look for clues. I see endless trees outside my window, Carson. And the goddamn whip-poor-wills are screeching like banshees. Yes, I’m in Kentucky. Why do you ask?”
“Last year you implied you were moving to Key West. It never happened. The whole Key West thing … it’s just to unsettle me, right?”
My brother was a world-class manipulator and since he lived in isolation with no one to jerk around, I got to be the puppet.
“Why would I wish to unsettle you, dear brother?” he said, his voice a study in innocence.
“You enjoy keeping me off balance,” I said. “It’s your hobby.”
“Such drama,” Jeremy yawned. “I’ve simply been traveling, Carson. Too busy to return your calls.”
“Travel is dangerous for you. Traveling where?”
My brother’s face was on every Wanted list in the country. The photo was from his last year at the Institute, when he’d done a Brando before sitting for the photographer, filling his cheeks with tissue, propping his ears forward, flaring his nostrils. Though never expecting – at that time – to escape, he had planned for the occasion, the just-in-case kind of thinking that exemplified my brother’s mind. As a result of his planning, Jeremy resembled his photo only slightly, but a seasoned eye might see through the façade, and it would be over.
“Traveling hither and yon,” he said. “Seeing old friends.”
“You have no friends.”
“Don’t be a Negative Nelly. Of course I have friends.”
“Who?”
He changed course, affecting the high and tremulous voice of an elderly woman. “I’m … muh-muh-moldering here in the w-woods, Carson. Now th-that I’m … nearing my duh-dotage … I need h-human cuh-cuh-contact.”
“Spare me the routine. You’re not even forty-five yet. And human contact means danger.”
“I disagree, Brother,” Jeremy said, back to normal voice. “In populations where the locals are known for a live-and-let-live attitude and a soupçon of eccentricity, I can hide in plain sight if I’ve planned well.”
My irritation was turning to uneasiness. When my brother grew restive, bad things occurred. He was being cryptic as well, another dark sign.
“Planned how?”
“I’m building my final chapter, dear brother. I’m coming back to the world.”
He chuckled and hung up.
Coming back to the world? Heeding a shiver at the base of my spine, I folded my chair and retreated from the roof, suddenly feeling small and vulnerable under the vast dark plain of sky.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
