King Tide

by A. J. Stewart

He shook his head and breathed deeply. “No. We’d need a big enough chamber and a bucket of glue. But there is another way.”

  “Which is?”

  “The print kit in my car. ”

  “You have a print kit in your car? Why didn’t you use that before?”

  “You seen the weather outside?”

  I had. I’d been out in it too many times already. But I had a horrible feeling that I was going to experience it one more time.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I was starting to develop the opinion that Detective Ronzoni couldn’t swim. It never occurred to me that there were people in Florida who couldn’t swim, and it amazed me when I met one. I would probably be less startled to run into Elvis on Worth Avenue. But I guessed it was a skill that some people just never picked up, despite the sun and the fact the state was a peninsula surrounded by water.

  He didn’t out-and-out say he wasn’t going to go out and get the print kit, but he more or less assumed it would be me who ventured out again.

  There were two problems with Ronzoni’s plan. The first was that after he unlocked the storm door on the front of the lobby we couldn’t find his car. The forecourt lights on the hotel were out, so we searched with flashlights. It shouldn’t have been difficult because he had parked at the base of the front stairs. But his Crown Victoria wasn’t there.

  It’s a hell of thing to see a cop looking for his missing car. Losing a car is no picnic for anybody, and it can be an out-of-body experience to think that someone has stolen your vehicle. But it’s all magnified by an order of ten for a cop. It just doesn’t happen. People don’t steal cop cars. Maybe on television, but not in real life. Ronzoni looked positively dumbfounded. But his car wasn’t stolen.

  The parking lot was a lake, or perhaps an estuary, a brackish extension of the ocean on the other side of the hotel. The hotel itself had become an island, and the vehicles in the lot had been lifted by the storm surge. Cars were bobbing around like rubber duckies in a tub.

  My Caddy had gotten off light. It was a first. I don’t have good luck with cars. My insurance company had a special category of risk with my name on it. But my SUV had somehow gotten wedged with the tailgate up on the south end of the front steps, and was half out of the water. It didn’t look like it was going anywhere.

  We scanned the lot for Ronzoni’s car. I found a vehicle with a remotely similar shape to a Crown Vic doing pirouettes on the north end of the front lawn. The flashlight was struggling at the distance, but it looked about right.

  “Maybe,” said Ronzoni. “But what is that? Looks like a mast?”

  “Might be behind. Hard to say.”

  “How you gonna get out there?”

  I shook my head. “Not this way.”

  I walked back inside. Ronzoni’s car looked like it was at the north end of the building, closer to the utility exit near the diesel tanks than it was to the main entrance. So I headed that way.

  But then there was the second problem with Ronzoni’s plan. I was in a borrowed linen suit that was the only dry thing I had, and I was traveling commando, so stripping to my underwear wasn’t an option. I had trashed my cheap poncho in the diesel bunker so even if I did strip down to my birthday suit I had nothing to cover up. And I had already had an octopus get friendly with my manhood so there was no way in hell I was going out there in the buff.

  I made Ronzoni stop and unlock the door to the boutique so I could find something suitable. I think he assumed I was going to grab another disposable poncho, but then I saw something a lot more stylish. It was a trench coat, tan in color, with the buttons and the belt and the whole nine yards. The tag said Burberry. I thought it made me look like Columbo, or Inspector Gadget.

  “Are you stealing that?” Ronzoni asked.

  “No. I’m borrowing it.”

  “If you wear it out in the flood you’ll ruin it.”

  “You didn’t seem so concerned about the poncho,” I said.

  “The poncho was worth a nickel. This thing looks like a month’s salary.”

  “So at what cost does something become stealing?”

  “When it becomes material goods. And that coat is definitely material goods.”

  “So I’ll put it back and you can go out in the storm and get your damned kit.”

  Ronzoni huffed. “Try not to get it dirty.”

  “Yes, dad.”

  I led Ronzoni through the service corridors to the utility exit that led out to the diesel tanks. I wrapped the coat tight around myself and pulled the belt in hard. The wind gushed up underneath the coat. So this was what it was like to roam around the highlands of Scotland in a kilt. A touch more drafty than I’m used to.

  I didn’t head out toward the tanks. I edged around the hotel building, staying on the high ground as long as I could. The wind helped with that goal because it was driving me back into the wall. I got to the northwest corner of the hotel and peeked around.

  A dark lake lay out before me. Random spots of light twinkled off the surface, scattered here and there in the darkness. I scanned the water with the flashlight, back and forth. There was a surprising amount of debris floating around, random edges and shapes that were impossible to decipher in the wind and rain and darkness.

  I spotted more than one vehicle. But I focused in on the one slowly rotating in an eddy that had formed just down from where I stood. From my closer vantage point it definitely looked like a Crown Victoria except for one unexplained shape that threw all the lines of the car off kilter.

  Ronzoni said the fingerprint kit was in a case inside a waterproof bag in the trunk, so I waited until I saw what I thought was the trunk end of the car slowly ebb around toward me. Then I waded in.

  To say I felt foolish was an understatement. I was sneaking around in the dead of night, in the middle of a hurricane, wearing boat shoes and a trench coat and not a stitch more. I felt like some kind of weirdo pervert. The water crept up my legs as I got in deeper, and then it got uncomfortable as everything started to float.

  I reached the car at the rear door. The vehicle was slowly rotating like one of those tea cups on the kiddies’ ride at Disney World. I put my hand on the rear fender and made my way around. As I did I shone the flashlight all over the car and I figured out what was so out of place.

  Ronzoni had thought he had seen some kind of mast, and in a Robinson Crusoe kind of way he had. The windshield of his police-issue vehicle had been punctuated by a wayward palm tree. It had been uprooted and tossed like a spear right through the middle of the windshield. It stuck up into the night, leaning away from the prevailing wind, and I realized it was acting as a sail of sorts, moving the car around dependent on the movement of wind.

  It spun the trunk toward me, so I edged around and pulled Ronzoni’s keyring from the top pocket of the coat and opened the trunk. I leaned on the bumper to reach in and it dipped down, nearly sending me head first into the trunk. I had visions of me falling into the trunk and it closing behind me. That would have been the perfect end to a less than perfect day, but I kicked my feet and used them like a keel to keep my balance. I reached in and grabbed the bag. It was heavy plastic and orange in color, as if Ronzoni expected to find himself lost at sea in his Crown Victoria. It was a ridiculous notion until I reassessed my current circumstances.

  I didn’t close the trunk. I didn’t see the point. The wind would do it, or not, but the Crown Vic wasn’t likely to be worse off either way. The bag more or less floated, so I dragged it across the surface until I reached the upslope to the hotel and then I threw it over my shoulder and trudged up out of the water.

  I made it back to the utility door and banged on it, and then again. I got no response and wondered if Ronzoni had fallen asleep. So I banged again. The door cracked open, Ronzoni pushing it against the wind with his back.

  I barged my way past Ronzoni into the corridor and he eased up his weight against the door and it slammed home, nearly knocking him off his feet.

  “You didn’t hear me
banging?” I asked.

  “All I hear is banging. You got the coat dirty.”

  I snarled. I almost told him about the palm tree planted in his car, but I figured he would enjoy it so much more if he got to see it for himself with the coming of the sun.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Ronzoni let the bag drip-dry and carried it back to the gym. I quickly got toweled off in the lobby bathroom and changed back into my suit. I would have gone to my room for a shower but I didn’t want to miss what Ronzoni was up to. I left the trench coat on a hook in one of the bathroom stalls. I figured a cleaner would find it and would send it to lost property, or someone would do a stocktake and find it missing and write it off. There was insurance for those sorts of things.

  Ronzoni had taken the bag to the far end of the gym, near the treadmill that should have been overlooking a stunning ocean view but was instead looking at the inside of a storm shutter. The wind was still banging the shutters a touch every time the direction of impact varied slightly.

  I watched Ronzoni take out a small toolbox and open it. It looked like a makeup case. He had a selection of plastic jars and he chose one along with a long-bristled brush, like the kind of thing a lady might use to apply rouge. He opened the jar. Inside was powder .

  “I'm using orange powder. It will show up better on the black bar.”

  I nodded and smiled. I didn’t need the running commentary. I knew exactly what he was doing and why. It was the results I wanted to see, so I didn’t see the point in getting into a whole pissing contest about who knew what.

  He used only his forefinger and thumb to hold the brush and he spun it around lightly over the surface of the safety bar. His touch was light. He would have been a good makeup artist, in another life. He spun the brush back and forth, leaving a light dusting of print powder on the bar. The orange powder showed up all the smudges and marks and traces of oil left on the black bar. But when he was finished, what it didn’t show was a clean print.

  “They’ve been wiped,” he said. “See these smudges here and here? They were latent prints. But whose is anyone’s guess.”

  “The fact the safety bars were hidden tells us something. Paul Zidane didn’t crush himself and then get up and hide the bars.”

  “You can’t say for sure that he didn’t remove them before he lifted. Defense would argue he got all macho after talking to you and took the bars off himself to prove a point.”

  “Usually you prove a point to someone, not when there’s no one in the room.”

  “Maybe he was going to tell you about it later. Maybe he was proving the point to himself.”

  “That doesn’t make sense with what everyone says about him. He’s a lifter, he’s into the whole scene. I guarantee the ME will find some kind of steroid in his bloodstream. When you do something as often as he lifted weights it becomes habit. There’s a process. The challenge isn’t in bucking the process— it’s in doing the process and winning anyway. It wouldn’t be his process to take the safety bars off, quite the opposite.”

  “Except he did take them off, Jones. They were off when he lifted because he doesn’t get crushed if they are in place. Even if someone else was here, even if someone else let the weight drop on him. Hell, even if they pushed it down on him— ”

  “The point is someone else was here.”

  Ronzoni stuck the palm of his hand up at me to demand my silence. I didn’t think much of that, and was about to tell him so when I noticed he was thinking. It was such an unusual occurrence that I let the palm thing slide and watched him go about it. He turned his head one way, and then the other, and then he stepped behind the bench above Paul Zindane’s head and looked down over the bar at the sheet below. Then he stepped back to his print kit. He switched to a new brush and selected a different jar of powder.

  “What?” I asked him.

  He moved back to the head of the bench and opened his jar and swished around his brush with his forefinger and thumb.

  “If someone else was here, if it was not an accident, then someone made sure the bar stayed on his throat. You said before that if he was doing it right it should land on his chest.”

  “It’s called a chest press, not a neck press.”

  “So maybe someone helped it roll down to his neck.”

  I nodded. “And maybe their prints are on the bar.”

  Ronzoni said nothing. He focused on the weight bar. He twirled his brush and left a light dusting of powder again. This time I noted the powder was black not orange. But the barbell that had crushed Paul Zidane’s throat was shining chrome. The black showed up nicely. I stepped over and watched Ronzoni do his thing. The bar had areas where it was smooth chrome and other areas where the metal had been crosshatched to make a rough surface that helped the lifter grip the bar better. No one wanted a few hundred pounds to slip from their grasp.

  “Can you get prints from the crosshatched areas?” I asked.

  “No,” said Ronzoni. “Not a flat surface so there’s no prints to be had there. But logic says if Mr. Zidane was lifting the bar he would have gripped it there, right? So anyone pushing down against him would probably have their hands on the smooth bits.”

  I nodded. Ronzoni was on a roll.

  He dusted the full length of the bar. There were some prints at either end of the bar, outside of the weights.

  “Those are ours,” he said. “From when we lifted the thing off him.”

  But the rest of the bar was more long smudges. Like someone had wiped down this bar as well.

  “Makes sense, I suppose,” I said. “If you wipe down the safety bars, you’re gonna wipe down the murder weapon.”

  Ronzoni nodded but kept looking at the lost prints on the bar.

  “Worth a shot,” I said.

  Ronzoni said nothing. He didn’t look like he was thinking now. He looked like he had zoned out, like his brain was fried. That was the Ronzoni look I knew.

  “Tell me how you would do this,” he said. “Would you stand here?”

  “Makes most sense. If he doesn’t have the safety bars on, then he has a spotter. That’s the process. He might have both but he would never have neither.” I moved closer to Ronzoni and pictured the scene in my head. “So the spotter might help him lift the weight out of the rack, or not. Some guys don’t like the help. So no, the spotter doesn’t help. Paul was one of those guys. He’s lying there, and he brings the weight down to his chest, and then extends his arms fully to raise the weight up. ”

  “How many times?”

  I looked at the weight plates at either end of the barbell, which hadn’t been touched.

  “Once. He’s going for max rep. The most he can lift in one go.”

  “So does the spotter help him put the bar back into the rack?”

  I thought about Paul again. “No. Same rule applies. Some guys don’t want anyone to touch the bar except in emergency. It’s a pride thing. He’s that guy.”

  “So the spotter doesn’t touch the bar.”

  “Not then.”

  “When?”

  “If all goes well, never.”

  “So then the spotter could be a woman?” Ronzoni asked. It sounded like he was asking a rhetorical question, but it really required an answer.

  “Shania could out-lift you.”

  Ronzoni shrugged. “Just saying’. It widens the field. Does the lifter do the weight again?”

  “Sure, maybe. Maybe he starts a touch light and goes up in weight. Then he does it again. Just one rep. But the second time the spotter knows the process. Paul gets it from the rack, holds it high and then lowers it down to his chest. That’s when the spotter makes their move.”

  “How?”

  “While it’s down, or maybe on the way down. Already got gravity helping you. Push right down on the bar.” I pretended I was pushing down on a bar, my hands wrapped around and my palms facing down. Ronzoni nodded.

  “Help me,” he said. He moved to the end of the barbell and motioned for me to take the othe
r end.

  “Just rotate it, one-eighty degrees. ”

  We twisted the bar around so the black powdered smudges were facing down, and fresh gleaming chrome was facing up. Then Ronzoni got his brush and his powder and started dusting again.

  He said, “If they’re pressing down with their palms . . .”

  He dusted the smooth chrome section of the bar. And he started grinning like the Cheshire cat as he did. I saw big fat finger prints appear from nowhere on the chrome bar.

  “They’re wrapping their hands around the bar and touching their fingertips on the underside. But they didn’t think to wipe there because they didn’t realize they’d touched it.”

  Ronzoni powdered the length of the bar. Eight clean prints came up. A hand wrapped around the bar, pushing down. Not lifting. All the fingers. They wouldn’t have looked cleaner if they had been taken during a booking at the police department.

  I stood back and let Ronzoni take his pictures and then use his collection tape to stick and peel each latent print off the bar and onto a card. He labeled each card with its position relative to the other fingers. When he was done he laid them out in a row, and he picked up the champagne glass with the print on it and compared the prints.

  They didn’t match.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “How can they not match?” asked Ronzoni.

  “Is that a serious question?” I chuckled. I had dragged Ronzoni into believing my hypothesis that the two deaths were not only both murders but also possibly even linked. That there was a two-time killer among us. Now that he had gotten there, to have the theory blown out of the water rendered his brain frazzled.

  “But what are the odds? Two murders within a few hours, in a small group of people, but not linked?”

  “Who says they aren’t linked?”

  “The evidence?”

  “No, Ronzoni. You’re the one always thinking about how defense will say this and defense will say that. The evidence says there are two different people involved. It doesn’t say the two events aren’t connected.”