“I don’t want to hear how you know what shit tastes like,” I said. “Where’s that book of DEA bulletins?”
I found the book, a large, three-ringed notebook into which we put all the interesting notices sent to us by the DEA. After leafing through it for just a few minutes I got to the page I remembered. “There,” I said. “This is it.”
Vince looked where I pointed. “Salvia divinorum,” he said. “Hey, you think so?”
“I do,” I said. “Speaking from a purely inductive-logic standpoint.”
Vince nodded his head, slowly. “Maybe you should say, ‘Elementary’?” he said.
“It’s a relatively new thing,” I told Deborah. She sat at the table in the task force room with me, Vince, and Deke standing behind her. I leaned over and tapped the page in the DEA book. “They just made salvia illegal in Dade County a couple of years ago.”
“I know what the fuck salvia is,” she snapped. “And I never heard of it doing anything but making people stupid for five minutes at a time.”
I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “But we don’t know what it might do in incremental doses, especially combined with all this other stuff.”
“And for all we know,” Vince added, “it doesn’t really do anything. Maybe somebody just thought it was cool to mix it in there.”
Deborah looked at Vince for a long moment. “Do you have any idea how fucking lame that sounds?” she said.
“Guy in Syracuse smoked some,” Deke said. “He tried to flush himself.” He looked at the three of us staring at him and shrugged. “You know, in the toilet.”
“If I lived in Syracuse, I’d flush myself, too,” Deborah said. Deke held up both hands in an eloquent whatever gesture.
“Ahem,” I said, in a valiant attempt to keep us on topic. “The real point here is not why they used it, but that they did use it. Considering the size of the crowd, they used a lot of it. Probably more than once. And if somebody is using it in quantities that large —”
“Hey, we should find the dealer easy,” Deke said.
“I can do the fucking math,” Deborah snapped. “Deke, get over to Vice. Get a list of the biggest salvia dealers from Sergeant Fine.”
“I’m on it,” Deke said. He looked at me and winked. “Show a little initiative here, right?” he said. He cocked a finger-pistol at me and dropped the thumb. “Boom,” he said, smiling as he turned away, and as he sauntered out the door he very nearly collided with Hood, who pushed past him and came over to our little group with a very large and unattractive smirk on his face.
“You are in the presence of greatness,” he said to Debs.
“I am in the presence of two nerds and an asshole,” Debs said.
“Hey,” Vince objected. “We’re not nerds; we’re geeks.”
“Wait’ll you see,” Hood said.
“See what, Richard?” Debs said sourly.
“I got these two Haitians,” he said. “Guaranteed to fucking make your day.”
“I hope so, Richard, because I really fucking need my day made,” Deborah said. “Where are they?”
Hood went back and opened the door and waved at somebody out in the hall. “In here,” he called, and a group of people began to file in past him as he held the door.
The first two were black and very thin. Their hands were fastened behind them with handcuffs, and a uniformed cop pushed them forward. The first prisoner was limping slightly, and the second was sporting an eye that was swollen almost shut. The cop gently pushed them over to stand in front of Deborah, and then Hood stuck his head back in the hall, looked both ways, apparently spotted something, and called, “Hey, Nick! Over here!” And a moment later, one last person came in.
“It’s Nichole,” she said to Hood. “Not Nick.” Hood smirked at her, and she shook her head, swirling a shining mass of dark and curly hair. “In fact, for you, it’s Ms. Rickman.” She looked him in the eye, but Hood just kept smirking, and she gave up and came to the table. She was tall and fashionably dressed and she carried a large sketch pad in one hand and a handful of pencils in the other, and I recognized her as the department’s forensic artist. Deborah nodded at her and said, “Nichole. How are you?”
“Sergeant Morgan,” she said. “It’s nice to be drawing somebody who’s not dead.” She arched an eyebrow at Debs. “He’s not dead, is he?”
“I hope not,” Deborah said. “He’s my best hope to save this girl.”
“Well, then,” Nichole said, “let’s give it a shot.” She put her pad and pencils down on the table, slid into a chair, and began to arrange herself to work.
Meanwhile, Deborah was looking over the two men Hood had brought in. “What happened to these two?” she said to Hood.
He shrugged and looked preposterously innocent. “Whataya mean?” he said.
Debs stared at Hood a little longer. He shrugged and leaned against the wall, and she turned her attention back to the prisoners. “Bonjour,” she said. Neither of them said anything; they just looked at their feet, until Hood cleared his throat. Then the one with the swollen eye jerked his head up and looked at Hood nervously. Hood nodded toward Deborah, and the prisoner turned to her and began to speak in rapid Creole.
For some quixotic reason, Deborah had studied French in high school, and for a few seconds she apparently thought it was going to help her understand the man. She watched him as he raced through several paragraphs, and then finally shook her head. “Je nais comprend — Goddamn it, I can’t remember how to say it. Dexter, get somebody up here to translate.”
The other man, the one with the sore leg, finally looked up. “There is no need,” he said. His words were very heavily accented, but at least they were easier to understand than Deborah’s attempts at French.
“Good,” Deborah said. “What about your friend?” She nodded at the other man.
Sore Leg shrugged. “I will speak for my cousin,” he said.
“All right,” Debs said. “We’re going to ask you to describe the man who sold you that Porsche — it was a man, wasn’t it?”
He shrugged again. “A boy,” he said.
“Okay, a boy,” Debs said. “What did he look like?”
Another shrug. “A blanc,” he said. “He was young —”
“How young?” Deborah interrupted.
“I could not say. Old enough to shave, because he did not — maybe three, four days.”
“Okay,” Deborah said, and frowned.
Nichole leaned forward. “Let me do this, Sergeant,” she said. Deborah looked at her for a moment, then leaned back and nodded.
“All right,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Nichole smiled at the two Haitians. “Your English is very good,” she said. “I just need to ask you a few simple questions, all right?”
Sore Leg looked at her suspiciously, but she kept smiling, and after a moment he shrugged. “All right,” he said.
Nichole went into what seemed to me like a very vague series of questions. I watched with interest, since I had heard that she was supposed to be good at what she did. At first, I thought her reputation was inflated; she just asked things like, “What do you remember about this guy?” And as Sore Leg answered her she would just nod, scribble on her pad, and say, “Uh-huh, right.” She led him through an entire description of someone coming into their garage with Tyler’s Porsche, what they had said, and so on, all the boring details. I didn’t see how it could possibly lead to a picture of anyone living or dead, and Deborah clearly thought the same thing. She began to fidget almost immediately, and then to clear her throat as if she were trying not to interrupt. Every time she did, the Haitians would glance at her nervously.
But Nichole ignored her and continued with her hopelessly general questions, and very slowly I began to realize that she was getting a pretty good description. And at just that point she shifted to more specific things, like, “What about the outside shape of his face?” she said.
The prisoner looked at her blankly. “Outside…?” he sai
d.
“Answer her,” Hood said.
“I don’t know,” the man said, and Nichole glared at Hood. He smirked and leaned back against the wall, and she turned back to Sore Leg.
“I’d like to show you a few shapes,” she said, and she took out a large sheet of paper with several roughly oval shapes on it.
“Does one of these remind you of the shape of his face?” she said, and the prisoner leaned forward and studied them. After a moment, his cousin leaned forward to look, and said something softly. The first man nodded and said, “That one, on the top.”
“This one?” Nichole said, pointing at one with her pencil.
“Yes,” he said. “That one.”
She nodded and began to draw, using quick and very certain strokes, pausing only to ask questions and show more pictures: What about his mouth? His ears? One of these shapes? And so on, until a real face began to take form on the page. Deborah kept quiet and let Nichole lead the two men through it. At each of her questions they would lean together and confer in soft Creole, and then the one who spoke English would answer while his cousin nodded. Altogether, between the two handcuffed men doing their muted Creole patter and the nearly magical emergence of a face on the page, it was a riveting performance, and I was sorry to see it end.
But end it did, at last. Nichole held up the notebook for the two men to study, and the one who spoke no English looked hard and then began to nod. “Oui,” he said.
“That is him,” the other said, and he gave Nichole a sudden very large smile. “Like magic.” He said majeek, but the meaning was clear.
Deborah had been leaning back in her chair and letting Nichole work. Now she stood and walked around the conference table, looking in over Nichole to look at the drawing. “Son of a bitch,” she said. She looked up at Hood, who was still lounging around by the door with a faintly sleazy smirk still on his face. “Get that file over there,” Debs said to him. “The one with the photos.”
Hood stepped over to the far end of the table, where a stack of folders teetered beside the telephone. He flipped through the top five or six while Deborah fidgeted. “Come on, goddamn it,” she said to him, and Hood nodded, held up one folder, and brought it over to her.
Deborah scattered a pile of photographs on the table, sorted through them quickly, and nudged one out and over to Nichole. “Not bad,” she said, as the artist picked up the photo and held it beside her sketch, and Nichole nodded.
“Yeah, not bad at all,” Nichole said. She looked up at Deborah with a happy smile. “Damn, I am good.” She flipped the photo back to Deborah, who grabbed it and held it up for the two Haitians to see.
“Is this the man who sold you the Porsche?” Deborah asked them.
The man with the swollen eye was already nodding and saying, “Oui.” His cousin made a great show of staring at the picture, leaning forward to study it carefully, before finally saying with complete authority, “Yes. Absolutely. That is him.”
Deborah looked at the two of them and said, “You are positive? Both of you?” And both of them nodded vigorously.
“Bon,” Debs said. “Tres beaucoup bon.” The two Haitians smiled, and the one with the swollen eye said something in Creole.
Deborah looked at the cousin for a translation.
“He says, will you please speak English, so he can understand you,” the man said with an even bigger smile, and Vince and Hood both snickered.
But Deborah was far too happy with the picture to let a minor jab bother her. “It’s Bobby Acosta,” she said, and she looked at me. “We got the little bastard.”
TWENTY
The uniformed cop led the two prisoners away to a holding cell. Nichole gathered her things and left, and Deborah sat back down and stared at the picture of Bobby Acosta. Vince looked at me with a shrug and an expression of, Now what? and Deborah looked up at him. “Are you still here?” she said.
“No, I left ten minutes ago,” Vince said.
“Beat it,” Deborah said.
“I wouldn’t have to beat it if you’d just hold it for a minute,” Vince said.
“Go shit in your ear,” Debs said, and Vince walked out with one of his horrible artificial laughs trailing behind him. Deborah watched him go and, since I know her very well, I knew what was coming, so I was not surprised when it came. “All right,” she said to me when Vince had been gone for about thirty seconds. “Let’s go.”
“Oh,” I said, trying very hard to look like I had not expected this, “do you mean you’re not going to wait for your partner, as department policy and a specific order from Captain Matthews have suggested?”
“Just get your ass out the door,” she said.
“What about my ass?” Hood said.
“Go boil it,” Deborah said, snapping up out of her chair toward the door.
“What do I tell your partner?” Hood said.
“Tell him to check the salvia dealers,” she said. “Come on, Dex.”
It occurred to me that I spent far too much of my time obediently following my sister around. But it did not occur to me how I could avoid doing so again, so I followed.
In the car, Deborah drove us up onto the Dolphin Expressway and then north on 95. She did not volunteer any information, but it was not terribly hard to figure out where we were going, so just for the sake of small talk, I said, “Have you somehow figured out a way to find Bobby Acosta, just by staring at his picture?”
“Yeah,” she snapped, very grumpy again. Deborah had never been very good with sarcasm. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
“Wow,” I said, and I thought about it for a moment. “The list from the dentist? The guys who got the vampire fangs?”
Deborah nodded, steering around a battered pickup hauling a trailer. “That’s right,” she said.
“And you didn’t check all of them with Deke?”
She looked at me, which I thought was a bad idea, since we were going ninety miles an hour. “One left,” she said. “But this is the one; I know it.”
“Look out,” I said, and Debs glanced at the road just in time to steer us around a large gasoline tanker that had decided to switch lanes for no apparent reason.
“So you think this last name on the list can tell us how to find Bobby Acosta?” I said, and Deborah nodded vigorously.
“I had a gut feeling about this one, right from the start,” she said, steering into the far right lane with one finger.
“And so you saved it for last? Deborah!” I said as a pair of motorcycles cut in front of us and began to brake for the exit.
“Yeah,” she said, gliding back into the middle lane.
“Because you wanted to build the suspense?”
“It’s Deke,” Deborah said, and I was thrilled to see that she was watching the road now. “He’s just…” She hesitated for a moment, and then blurted out, “He’s bad luck.”
I have spent my life around cops so far, and I expect that the rest of my life I’ll do the same, especially if I get caught someday. So I know that superstitions can pop up at some odd times and places. Even so, I was surprised to hear them from my sister. “Bad luck?” I said. “Debs, do you want me to call a santero? Maybe he can kill a chicken, and —”
“I know how it sounds, goddamn it,” she said. “But what the hell else can it be?”
I could think of a lot of other things it could be, but it didn’t seem politic to say so, and after a moment Deborah went on.
“All right, maybe I’m full of shit,” she said. “But I need some luck on this thing. There’s a clock ticking here, and that girl…” She paused almost as if she were feeling strong emotion, and I looked at her with surprise. Emotion? Sergeant Iron Heart?
Deborah didn’t look back at me. She just shook her head. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I shouldn’t let it get to me. It’s just…” She shrugged and looked grumpy again, which was a bit of a relief. “I guess I’ve been a little… I dunno. Weird lately.”
I thought about the last few days,
and realized that it was true: My sister had been uncharacteristically vulnerable and emotional. “Yes, you have,” I said. “Why do you think that is?”
Deborah sighed heavily, another action that was very unlike her. “I think… I dunno,” she said. “Chutsky says it’s the knife wound.” She shook her head. “He says it’s like postpartum depression, that you always feel bad for a while after a major injury.”
I nodded. It made a certain amount of sense. Deborah had recently been stabbed, and had come so close to death from blood loss that the difference was a matter of a few seconds in the ambulance. And certainly Chutsky, her boyfriend, would know about that — he had been some kind of intelligence operative before being disabled, and his body was a raised-relief road map of scar tissue.
“Even so,” I said, “you can’t let this case get under your skin.” As soon as I said it I braced myself, since it was a surefire setup line for an arm punch, but once again Debs surprised me.
“I know,” she said softly, “but I can’t help it. She’s just a girl. A kid. Good grades, nice family, and these guys — cannibals…” She trickled off into a moody and reflective silence, which was a really striking contrast to the fact that we were speeding through heavy traffic. “It’s complicated, Dexter,” she said at last.
“I guess so,” I said.
“I think I empathize with the kid,” she said. “Maybe because she’s so vulnerable at the same time I am.” She stared straight ahead at the road, but didn’t really seem to see it, which was a little bit alarming. “And all this other stuff. I dunno.”
It might have been because I was hanging on for dear life in a vehicle that was careening through traffic at breakneck speed, but I didn’t quite get her point. “What other stuff?” I said.
“Ah, you know,” she said, even though I had said quite clearly that I did not know. “The family shit. I mean…” She scowled suddenly and looked at me again. “If you say one fucking word to Vince or anybody else about my bio clock ticking, I swear I’ll kill you.”
“But it is ticking?” I said, feeling mildly astonished.
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