The Memory Killer

by J. A. Kerley

I looked at Gershwin. He was thinking the same as me: Rodrigo Figueroa wasn’t acting like a guy who used toxic drinks to abduct and torture men. Figueroa decocked the piece – his back-up, I figured – and tucked it into an ankle rig.

  “You were lying about having my DNA,” Figueroa said. “You’re here getting it.”

  I shrugged. “Best I could do.”

  “You thought I was Ocampo because you saw me in a … gay bar?”

  “We had to check. You’ve done some odd things.”

  “Watching a drag show?”

  “Trying to hang on to the case. Wanting access to the reports. Doing a gazelle when I brought Patrick White to Missings. Calling in a vic, which could have been a smokescreen. And you’re the right size and build.”

  He rubbed his face in his hands, shaking his head. “Jeez … You might have just asked. Here—” He pulled a hank of hair. “Got an evidence bag?”

  I reached to my pocket. “Uh, yes.”

  “Run your goddamn sample. It’ll say you’re a moron.”

  We heard slapping footsteps and turned to see a man in his mid-thirties, short brown hair, polo shirt over running shorts, blue flip-flops. He peeked tentatively around the corner of the carport, a blue umbrella over his head.

  “What’s going on out here, Rod? Who are these men?”

  “It’s fine, Anthony,” Figueroa said quietly. “I work with these guys. We’re talking about … a case. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “They can come inside, Rod.”

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  The guy looked between us, nodded, and flip-flopped back to the house.

  “I didn’t choose what I am,” Figueroa said, suddenly looking defeated, though I was unsure by what. “It chose me.”

  “We’re not looking for explanations, Rod. We’re just looking for Donnie Ocampo.”

  “I went out with women,” he continued, like he had to justify that he’d tried to not be gay. “Dozens of them. I made it with them. I lived with a woman for almost three months. I’ve been to three counselors and two shrinks. I even went to that church therapy to get straight. But it’s still here. I can’t escape it.”

  He was pleading a case and I hadn’t even known we were holding court.

  “Maybe it’s your father you can’t escape,” I said.

  He stared, his mouth ajar, eyes wide in the misshapen face. Then the eyes closed and Rodrigo Figueroa blew out a long and resigned breath.

  “Yeah …” he said, almost a whisper. “Papa thinks real men are a cross between John Wayne and Johnny Wadd, women are just … Jesus, women are like my poor mother … there to spread their legs and fix supper afterward. Every time I think I can get free, I can come out, I get freaked at what’s gonna happen and, and … ah shit,” he choked, “who’m I kidding? I’m just yellow.”

  “No one knows you’re gay?” I asked. “I mean, in the department?”

  He shook the bright mop. “Hunh-unh. I never go near Miami bars, always above Lake Worth. Or go for weekends in Tampa, Saint Pete, Fort Myers. I never get drunk, out of line, anything that might get me noticed. If word got to my father, I’d be … I don’t even know. In the department I do the horny dude thing, leering at the women, keeping straight porn in my desk, centerfolds in my locker. My old man thinks I’m as masculine as a goddamn stag. I am masculine … I’m just not his kind of …” He looked at us with sad eyes. “You really thought I was Ocampo?”

  “We’re pretty desperate. This is one bad dude out there.”

  “I know, and I tried to do my part to get the word out.”

  “Word out?”

  “I saw your sheet on Ocampo, the photos. I figured they should be thick in the gay community, so I got some buddies to distribute them.”

  Question sensibly answered. And I had two more. “So why were you so hardcore about keeping the case, Rod?”

  “I figured if it was gay-oriented, I might quietly tap into it quicker. Then I did some digging and heard you knew your stuff. As far as wanting the reports, the cases affected my world.”

  “That time I came into Missings so Patrick White could file? You saw us, right?”

  “I’d seen the guy you were with. I didn’t know him, but if I recognized him …’

  “He might recognize you. And say something.”

  “Most of my life is being worried I’m gonna get found out.” He nodded at the bag in my hand. “Like when you run that sample …”

  I tossed it back to him. Rod Figueroa wasn’t Donnie Ocampo. Gershwin and I slumped out the garage door. I paused, turned back inside, writing a number in my notepad. I tore it off and handed it to Figueroa.

  “A guy named Canseco,” I said. “He usually works a younger crowd, but I think you might want to sit down with him.”

  52

  The phone rang its way into my sleeping head. My hand was bringing the bedside receiver to my lips before I realized I was at Morningstar’s house.

  “Hello?” I said.

  A pause. “This is Robert Costa. May I speak to Dr Morningstar?”

  I looked at the digital clock: 6.42 a.m.

  “I, uh … hang on a second.”

  I put my hand over the receiver and shook her sleeping shoulder. Her eyes blinked open. “Costa,” I said. “On the phone. For you.”

  She gave me a puzzled look and took the phone. I stood and wandered to the window, trying not to eavesdrop. I could hear her voice, low, a conversation. The phone hit the cradle and I turned to see Vivian looking away, her eyes on the floor.

  “Viv?” I said. “What is it?”

  “William Prestwick’s dead, Carson. He—”

  “My God. What happened?”

  “Prestwick somehow stood in the bed and tied a cord to the sprinkler and …” She shook her head. “And I guess he just relaxed his knees.”

  All I could see was Prestwick in the bed, the gentle and consoling Patrick White at his side. “How did he … when …?”

  “He was found an hour ago. Though heavily sedated, it appears he managed to unwrap his dressings. There’s a mirror in the room.”

  We dressed in a quiet funk and drove to the hospital, arriving at half-past seven. I saw Patrick White sitting alone in an alcove, his face in his hands.

  “Gimme a few,” I said to Morningstar.

  She gave my hand a squeeze, which it needed, and went off to find Costa. White was on a small sofa in an alcove and I nodded as I entered his space.

  “What makes someone do these things, Detective Ryder?” he asked, his voice ragged from grief. “Hurt someone like Billy was hurt?”

  I crossed the room and looked out the window, the sun too bright and the day too clear to have to deal with another human tragedy sparked by Donnie Ocampo. But here we were.

  “I think it’s self-loathing, Patrick. Filtered through insanity and directed outward. If I could, I’d issue every gay man in town an anti-Donnie Ocampo potion, because the bastard seems to be invisible.”

  White nodded and retreated into himself for a long moment. “You know the saddest thing in all this, Detective Ryder?”

  “What’s that, Patrick?”

  “It was destined to happen. No matter how Billy’s face was rebuilt, he’d never have been Billy again. If he hadn’t killed himself last night, it would have been next week or next month. From the moment that monster put his knife into Billy’s face, Billy was dead.”

  I found Vivian and we left the hospital, driving in silence until I dropped her off at her office. My trip to the department brought me within a few blocks of the comic shop and my Rover veered that way, like I needed to see the place one final time. The scene crew was working, but I figured they were about to close up shop.

  I noted a sad-eyed Jonathan leaning against the side of the shop with his arms crossed. I parked and crossed to him.

  “I can’t get in,” he said, nodding toward the yellow-taped door. “They won’t let me.”

  “It’s a crime scene, Jonathan. What do you n
eed?”

  “I got some games in there. My skateboard. My iPod.”

  “I can get you inside for a few minutes.”

  A young tech unlocked the door. It was cool and quiet, except for the sounds of feet upstairs, the techs cleaning up. Jonathan leaned behind the counter and grabbed a skateboard, the surface printed with a graphic of the Hulk. He bagged a stack of video games, then reached into a cubbyhole under the counter and came up with an iPod, dropping it into his pocket. “That’s it,” he said, eyeballing the place and figuring he’d never be back.

  His knit hat was hanging on a wall peg and I nodded to it. “You want your hat?”

  “Gary’s gone. I don’t need it.”

  “You lost me, partner. Don’t need it?”

  He snatched the hat from the peg and turned it inside out, revealing a small black box glued to the fabric.

  “A camera?” I said.

  “The kind bike racers wear so people can see what they see on the bike. Tiny, huh? The lens looks out between the yarn.”

  I turned the hat right-side out. The lens was smaller than a pencil eraser and poked between strands of fiber, as close to invisible as it got.

  “You were Gary’s camera downstairs,” I said, figuring it out.

  “There’s a camera outside the door, another by the register. But this was Gary’s favorite. When someone talked to me, it was like they were talking to him. He thought it was cool, like he could see things through my eyes.”

  We heard a sound through the floorboards, a piece of furniture being moved.

  “What are they looking for?” Jonathan asked. “Nobody ever told me shit.”

  I leaned the wall and explained the situation in edited detail. Jonathan was wide-eyed.

  “You say you think Gary was, like, in contact with his crazy brother?”

  I shrugged. “Gary never mentioned anything?”

  “He just told me not to worry, it was his business.”

  I shouldered from the wall, time to boogie. “Anyway, that’s why all the people are combing through the place, Jonathan. Plus we’re looking at his computers.”

  “For what?”

  “A diary, maybe. Notes about his brother. Things Gary wanted kept secret.”

  He looked toward the ceiling. “They won’t find anything.”

  “You don’t think Gary had secrets?”

  “If he did they’re not on the computer. Gary sent special files to his cloud account. You know, like a server somewhere. Cloud stuff doesn’t live on the computer.”

  “You know where this, uh, cloud stuff is?”

  “Like I told you, I know where everything is. But the cloud account takes a special password.”

  I stared at him.

  “I know that, too,” he said, studying his fingers.

  An hour later, sitting beside one of the department’s computer whizzes, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Tonya Sparrow, I watched as Gary Ocampo’s cloud-shrouded files came tumbling to earth: six years of business records, a half gigabyte of porn, mostly pretty young men having rather typical sex, all things considered, and a multi-gig file named Debro.

  “What’s in Debro?” I asked Sparrow.

  “Dunno yet,” she said. “It’s the only one that’s encrypted.”

  “Can you break it?”

  She studied a screen dense with computer language, then looked at her watch.

  “Gimme twenny minutes.”

  Ninety minutes had passed since Patrick had spoken with Detective Ryder, unable to lift himself from the sofa, to make his legs work. His insides felt scooped out. Solicitous staffers had offered food, drink, comfort, but he’d waved them away with small murmurs of thanks and they finally stopped asking, walking on tip-toe when they passed.

  Patrick gathered himself to standing, took a deep breath, and entered the room that had held Billy Prestwick. The facial wrappings had been removed from the floor, but everything else remained: the IV bottles, the monitors on their wheeled stand, the bedside table holding the medications Costa was using to counteract the robinia and lessen the effects of the datura.

  After learning of the substances affecting his patients, Patrick had looked up the toxic compounds in the black locust: the protein robin, the glycoside robitin, and the alkaloid robinine. Costa had been giving Billy activated charcoal and a combination of drugs to jump-start the protein synthesis inhibited by the toxins. The combination – formulated in conjunction with Dr Morningstar and a toxicological specialist at the University of Miami – seemed to have an effect. No one had died, at least. The concoction was administered via injection. Four syringes – prepared in the hospital pharmacy – waited by the bed, intended to heal a man beyond healing.

  Patrick stared at the empty bed. The monster who had killed Billy was still out there. He might be out there forever. Some of the saddest but truest words he’d heard had been spoken an hour and a half ago by Detective Ryder:

  I’d issue every gay man in town an anti-Donnie Ocampo potion, because every one of them is at risk.

  Patrick crept to the door. The hall was quiet, the nearest staffers at the nurses’ station, a hundred feet down the hall. Patrick hustled back to the table. He took a deep breath, not knowing quite what he was doing, only that it was against every hospital rule and procedure.

  He removed a syringe and slipped it into his pocket.

  53

  Sparrow had been a bit optimistic, the cracking of the encryption taking closer to an hour. Gershwin had arrived, torn up at hearing Donnie had claimed another victim, his death toll now two in the past day. He leaned against the wall as Sparrow off-loaded the decrypted files to a DVD. They were video files.

  “How much video?” I asked.

  “A couple gigs, maybe an hour’s worth, pretty low resolution.”

  “You watch any of it?”

  Sparrow frowned as she slipped a disk from the computer. “I don’t think it’s an Adam Sandler movie.”

  She set Gershwin and I up in a small room with a large monitor in the corner and handed us a remote. We grabbed coffees from the machine down the hall and came back to see what Gary Ocampo had been hiding in the cloud.

  “Ready?” I said, flicking the screen into life.

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  We saw stuttering, murky images: dozens of moving male bodies, some alone, others in groups, dancing or crowded around tables. The audio was low, the party-fueled voices reduced to a sonic blur. I noted a long bar running to the right.

  “The Stallion Lounge,” Gershwin said.

  The camera tilted down and I saw a hand and a glass. “It’s Donnie,” I whispered. “He’s wearing the camera in a hat. I’ll bet it’s a knit cap.”

  “A hat?” Gershwin said. “We’ll never see his face.”

  The camera panned the room and stopped on jerky images of men chattering around a table filled with glassware. Two went to the dance floor, two remained. One smiled, his face angling toward the camera.

  “Kemp,” Gershwin said.

  The camera veered wildly as Donnie looked around the room, returning to Kemp.

  “Do you see us, Brother?” said a rasping voice. “Are you there?”

  Donnie’s voice. The first time we’d heard it … cold, clinical, amused. No accent.

  “He’s talking to Gary,” Gershwin said.

  The two dancers returned to pull the others toward the dance floor. One stood, everyone chiding Kemp for sitting. Seconds passed and Donnie’s voice returned.

  “Could you tell me if Dale’s a-boot? Dale Kemp? He is? Can I talk to him?”

  “The call,” Gershwin said. “Donnie’s calling the bar. He’s faking an accent.”

  The camera panned to the barkeep, the bar’s landline at his ear. He put his palm over the receiver and yelled into the crowd.

  “Dale!” Almost lost in the rumble of voices and music.

  The camera returned to Kemp, hand behind an ear as he pointed to his chest, “Me?” He crossed the floor. The ca
mera elevated and Kemp’s table grew closer. Then the table and solo drink, so close I could reach out and lift it.

  A blur of motion over the glass. The room spun wildly and the camera reset in its original position. “Donnie spiked the drink,” Gershwin said, breathless. “Then went back to his table.”

  I wanted to yell No! when Kemp returned and lifted the drink. Ten minutes passed before he patted his belly and went to the restroom. “He’s getting sick,” I said, needlessly.

  Kemp returned for ten more minutes and downed the final ounce of beverage. He spoke to his dancing companions.

  “Damn flu,” I imagined him saying. “I’m heading home.”

  The last shot was his back going out the door. When the video picked up again a naked Kemp lay on the gray floor of a long room with brick walls, his eyes wide with terror as he batted at invisible demons in the air. Hands reached in and rolled the kid over and roughly etched his back with a ten-penny nail. When his mouth opened in a scream, all that exited was a spray of spittle.

  “The bitch is branded,” Donnie said. The Gemini sign filled the screen as Donnie leaned close. I aimed a silent nod toward Key West. My brother had theorized that the victims were marked upon arrival.

  Then, rape. Kemp’s shoulders shook with impacts as his arms flailed against the ground and his face howled soundlessly into the floor.

  “Are you with us, Brother?” Donnie grunted. “Are you turned on?”

  The scene turned to black. It was cool in the room, but I was pouring sweat.

  Gershwin swallowed hard. “These were sent to Gary live?”

  “Think of concert-goers sending video to friends.”

  The next recording started: Brian Caswell after a performance and vamping at a table, a feather boa floating over a sequined purple blouse, leather miniskirt, diamelle-studded high heels. Donnie didn’t even have to sneak up and spike Brian’s drink: he simply handed it to him in a flute of celebratory champagne. “Great show, you earned this.” The video blanked out and resumed with a hallucinating Caswell being marked and assaulted.

  “Are you there, Brother?” Donnie grunted. “Are you enjoying the payback?”