Krewe of Hunters Series, Volume 5

by Heather Graham

  * * *

  Brett Cody and Matt Bosworth had obviously gotten on well during their past acquaintance, Lara reflected as she watched them laughing over old times. And seeing Brett joking around that way, he suddenly seemed more human to her. Though if she were being honest, she had to admit that the process had begun even before Meg and Matt had arrived just after one in the morning.

  Brett and Diego had suggested that she get some sleep, but she had known there was no way in hell she could sleep, not to mention if she wasn’t there to let Meg and Matt through the gate, they would have to wake Grady, and that didn’t seem fair.

  And so they had sat in the lounge area, and she had done her best to explain why she’d ended up in Florida after what had happened to her when she had quit her job with Congressman Walker and the ordeal she’d been through before heading south. In turn, they had told her more about the Greater Miami area, the violent drug wars that had gone on during the eighties, and how they were doing their best to prevent anything like that happening again.

  “Things have changed over the years,” Brett explained to her. “Our offices across the country have hundreds of agents working on cyber crime, things like identity theft that take place without violence on the internet. But there are also always going to be those who are still into real-world criminal enterprises like drug smuggling and—especially here—stealing everything a refugee has, promising to get him to these shores. Some of them even make good on their promises, but others have no intention of risking being caught with illegal human cargo. They leave their trusting victims at sea.”

  “And then there are crimes like this,” Diego said. “Senseless crimes—like the murder of Maria Gomez, who never killed anything bigger than a palmetto bug in her whole life.”

  “Even Miguel only got caught up in it because he was afraid not to,” Brett added.

  “And now there’s Arnold Wilhelm, a retired war vet, harming no one,” Diego added.

  It was right around then that Meg had called; the room had gone oddly silent for a minute, and Lara had jumped when her phone rang. Now she realized that Matt and Brett knew each other better than she’d expected, and all four agents shared an easy camaraderie that she found herself envying. Between them, Brett and Diego quickly brought Matt and Meg up to speed.

  As they spoke, Brett checked his emails and informed them that there would be a task force meeting including key state, county and city officers the next day. By then the exhumation would be complete, and hopefully Phil Kinny would be ready to tell them more about Miguel Gomez’s death. Matt told him that they had been assigned to the case through the director’s office and told to follow Brett’s lead as agent in charge.

  Brett smiled and shrugged at that. “Your unit does as it chooses, I guess.”

  “We aren’t here to step on toes,” Matt said.

  “You would be welcome to stomp all over my entire body if it got us some answers,” Brett assured him.

  It was nearly 2:00 a.m. when they finished talking. With Matt and Meg staying at the facility, it was overcrowded as far as sleeping arrangements went. Since Brett and Diego had an early appointment at the cemetery, Matt and Lara escorted them to the gate, and she made sure to lock up and set the alarm once they were gone.

  As they headed back in, Matt paused on the walkway, looking around. “Interesting,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “This place has great security as far as it goes, what with the gates and alarms, but that’s a big bay out there. What’s to stop someone from coming here by boat?”

  “Nothing, I suppose,” Lara said. “But our whole purpose is to study and protect marine life. Have you ever heard of anyone trying to steal a dolphin? Honestly, Matt, I don’t think anyone is after Sea Life. I think it was pure accident that Miguel Gomez’s… body parts wound up here.”

  “This whole case… I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Back inside, they discovered that Grady had woken up, and come down and met Meg, and the two of them had enjoyed extolling Adam Harrison’s virtues. Rick and Adrianna came down then as well, and despite the hour they had more coffee before finally determining that they all really needed to go to bed. Though Rick and Adrianna offered to give up their spot, Matt quickly said that he’d slept on the plane, so he was happy to catch a few z’s on the sofa, and Meg would bunk in with Lara.

  It was morning before Lara had a chance to speak with Meg and Matt alone, taking them for a tour of the facility and introducing them to the other members of the staff. Finally, the three of them sat on the platform by Cocoa’s enclosure and fed her fish.

  “This place is wonderful,” Meg said.

  It was really good to have the two of them there, Lara thought. Meg was a lithe, fit five foot ten, with raven-dark hair and deep, penetrating blue eyes that somehow communicated both confidence and cordiality. Matt was a bruiser—smart, fit and built like a tank. More than that, she knew they’d both had enough training to tackle almost any situation.

  “It was wonderful,” Lara said. “I mean, it still is, really. I love what I’m doing. I love Cocoa, and the other dolphins and the sea lions—and even the cats and birds, the lizards and the squirrels. But Cocoa just had to give me that finger. And then…the rest.”

  “You can’t let what’s really good in life be ruined just because there are evil people in the world,” Meg said.

  Lara looked at her friend and smiled. Meg had known her whole life what she wanted to do. As a child, she’d lost a member of her own family to a murderer, and even then, Meg had played a role in seeing that the man was caught.

  Because she saw the dead.

  “I saw him,” Lara told her in a rush. “The man whose body parts we found in the bay, I saw him—after he was dead. They haven’t released this yet, but his name was Miguel Gomez, and Brett Cody wasn’t surprised that I’d seen him—it was almost as if he expected it. Diego was talking about doppelgangers and twins, but Brett was staring straight at me and I knew—I just knew—that he believed me.”

  “Maybe he sees the dead, too,” Matt said.

  “All of a sudden?” Lara demanded. “You knew him before—did he see ghosts? Can you go your whole life delightfully oblivious and then suddenly start seeing ghosts of the dead?”

  Meg smiled at that. “You’ve seen the dead before. You saw the Confederate officer who helped us save your life,” she said softly.

  “You described him so clearly that I believed he was there.”

  Meg shook her head. “No, you saw him. Maybe you’ve always had the ability. Maybe there just wasn’t a ghost out there who needed to reach you. Until now.”

  Lara groaned inwardly. Once she’d been so passionate. So determined to create a world where good people wound up in power, where candidates were elected on merit, not because their campaign contributions were large enough to feed entire countries.

  She still dreamed of seeing good men and women in power; she still meant to write the speeches and white papers that could help put them there. But she was also in love with dolphins and sea life in general, and she’d become passionate about ecology, and that was all part of the bigger picture. Politicians owed a decent world to those who would come after them.

  “I’m going to suggest you open yourself up to this ghost and find out what he has to say,” Matt told her, then added softly, “I came into all this paranormal stuff kicking and screaming. Most of us do—unless we grow up with it and consider the dead as friends. After all, most of them are just as good in death as they were in life.”

  “What about evil?” Lara asked, feeling a little silly. “There are evil people, too, so there must be evil ghosts, right?”

  “I’ve heard about a few from some of our fellow Krewe members,” Meg said. “But the good is there to outweigh the evil.”

  “If only,” Lara
said.

  “If only?” Matt asked her.

  “If only good outweighed evil in life the way you say it does in death,” Lara said.

  “Then, we just have to make sure it does, right?” Meg asked her. “And,” she added, staring out at the sparkling water, where Cocoa, determined to get their attention, was doing a backflip, making the water spray and dance like diamonds beneath the blue sky and dazzling sun, “we have to take every minute we can to appreciate everything that’s so amazing about this world.”

  Cocoa swam over and stuck her head out of the water to look at them. Lara stroked her back and watched the delight on Meg’s face as the animal slid beneath her hands. She gave Cocoa a fish.

  “Meg will stay here with you,” Matt said, rising. “I’m heading over to the local office. Adam will have sent down our assignment paperwork by now. I’ll be back by the end of the afternoon.”

  Lara turned to Meg. “You don’t have to babysit me. I have work to do. And I’m sure you have a job to do, too.”

  Meg smiled at her. “Right now, my friend,” she said, “you are my job.”

  * * *

  Brett stared as Phil Kinny spoke, almost smiling.

  He didn’t consider himself completely ignorant when it came to the human body and medical matters, but Kinny had left him and Diego far behind when he started talking about neurotransmitters and other features of the brain.

  “Layman’s terms, please, doc,” he begged at last.

  Brett was glad that the head was turned away from him; he wasn’t sure he could have stood there like a hardened professional if what was left of Miguel’s face had been staring at him while he tried to grasp what the ME was saying.

  “Okay, first, we only use about ten percent of our brain power, give or take. But the brain is divided into sections that are responsible for different chores when it comes to our bodies. You’re heard about people with bullets in their heads surviving for years?” Kinny asked.

  “I don’t personally know anyone with a bullet in his head,” Brett said.

  “Wait, I do—and so do you,” Diego said.

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “David Archer, NYC office,” Diego said. “They can’t take the shell out—too dangerous. He gets scanned or X-rayed or whatever every so often to make sure it hasn’t moved. He’s not in the field anymore, works a desk now. Great guy, though.”

  “I knew he was shot taking down an Eastern European human trafficking operation,” Brett said. “I didn’t realize he’d been shot in the head, though.”

  Diego nodded. “Yep. And he’s basically fine.”

  “Yes, depending on where the bullet is, depending on the damage it caused, a person can live a pretty much normal life even with a bullet in his brain. I’ll try to explain more clearly what I think happened to Gomez, though I can’t say I understand all the science behind what I think happened myself,” Kinny said.

  “Just give us whatever you’ve got. We’re pretty desperate,” Brett said.

  “All right, an anatomy lesson, more or less in layman’s terms,” Kinny said. “The human brain is an amazing thing. Think of it as a computer for a few minutes. The frontal lobes are associated with what we call executive function—thinking things out, consciously controlling our behavior, our ability to reason, and also our capacity for abstract thought. Then we have the cerebral cortex, a layer of neural tissue that covers everything. It’s pretty thick in human beings. While our brains may be smaller than those found in some animals, they’re larger in proportion to our size. Understand?”

  “So a blue whale has a bigger brain than ours, but it’s much smaller in comparison to the many tons it weighs, right?” Diego said.

  “Something like that, but I digress. None of that matters in regard to my theory as to what happened to Miguel Gomez,” Kinny said.

  “Mike the chicken,” Diego said.

  Kinny arched a brow. “So you know that story?” he asked.

  Diego nodded. Brett looked from one of them to the other, then asked Kinny, “So the chicken story really is true?”

  “Absolutely,” Kinny said. “So, in a nutshell, you have the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and occipital lobe. We perform many different functions, and each of those functions is associated with a particular part of the brain. Even when someone is clinically brain dead, he may still move, react to stimuli, process nutrients, often even breathe without artificial help. In short, I believe, based on what I saw in my autopsy, that parts of Miguel’s brain were still functional even though other parts had been destroyed. In a very real way, he remained alive, at least technically speaking. Just as we breathe due to the programming built into a part of the brain that requires no conscious thought, so we perform other functions.”

  Brett frowned, trying to digest the science.

  It was actually easier to believe that Miguel’s neighbor had seen a zombie.

  “So someone managed to kill part of Miguel but not all of him. Then they somehow programmed him to kill his wife before finishing him off?” he asked incredulously.

  “I’ve given you the science, and I’ve sent a sample of his brain matter out for toxin testing. The man wasn’t shot, but I believe he was injected with some type of toxin that killed just the part of the brain that made him who he was,” Kinny said. “I can give you a technical explanation, use medical terms like cerebral cortex, neurotoxins and the like, but I mentioned before that the brain is like a computer, so think of it this way. Miguel had no internet connection going. He was essentially dead from the time his brain was damaged. This is probably the most insidious murder I’ve ever come across, and I’m guessing it was some kind of experiment, since this isn’t something there’s a lot of medical documentation on.”

  “Not your typical mob hit,” Diego said drily.

  “Not a typical hit in any way,” Brett said. He hesitated. “I don’t know a lot about this, but what about voodoo or Santeria?”

  “I know some people who practice Santeria,” Diego said. “They sacrifice chickens, but they don’t turn them into Mike the chickens.”

  Brett shook his head. “I know that what we think of as voodoo comes mainly from Hollywood, but to many people—especially in New Orleans and Little Haiti here—it’s a very real religion. Papa Doc used it to support his regime of fear in Haiti. He had a devoted group of voodoo priests who could supposedly make the dead rise. From what I understand, they used poisons that caused their victims to appear to be dead, and yet they weren’t. Even physicians couldn’t tell the difference. Then the priests used mind control when they brought them back to ‘life’ as zombies. Many people believe that the Tonton Macoute, his private militia, was made up of those zombies.”

  “It’s actually a crime to make a zombie in Haiti now,” Dr. Kinny said.

  “From what I understand, Papa Doc and the voodoo priests use a powder made from the poison of a puffer fish,” Brett said.

  Kinny nodded gravely. “It’s only really been about the past thirty years or so that science has begun to explore the creation of ‘zombies’ and admit that such things really are possible.”

  “So we’re looking for a homicidal voodoo priest?” Diego asked.

  “Or a mad scientist,” Kinny said.

  “Funny,” Diego responded.

  “I’m not trying to be funny. I’d say someone who has studied the human brain—and the creation of so-called zombies—is at least in on this. And I’ll pretty much guarantee you that the poison the tests find will be puffer fish toxin, whether real or synthetic,” Kinny said.

  “We were never intended to find the body,” Brett said. “And if it hadn’t been for that dolphin, we never would have. We would have gone on believing that Miguel was burned to cinders in a fire and that his neighbor must have been mistaken about the date or hallucinating or somethi
ng.” He let out a long breath and turned to Diego. “We have to find Mr. Randy Nicholson,” he told him.

  “That will go a long way to proving my point,” Kinny said.

  “And I’m betting Nicholson’s body ended up in the same condition—even if not the same place—as Miguel’s,” Brett said.

  “Damn,” Diego said. “This is a big city and a hell of a long coastline.”

  Brett looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “It’s curious. They kept Nicholson alive a long time. He was supposedly buried three months ago. Miguel only died recently.”

  “Maybe the killer gets rid of his victims once they’re of no use to him anymore,” Kinny suggested.

  Brett was silent for a minute and realized that Diego and Phil Kinny were looking at him, waiting. “Say you’re right, which you probably are. The question is, why? Why is he doing this? And why kill these particular people? It was easy for us to accept that someone wanted to murder Miguel Gomez, but why Maria, much less Arnold Wilhelm?”

  “Maybe he killed them just because he could, testing how far he can push his…minions,” Kinny suggested.

  Brett turned to Diego. “Time to see the good Dr. Robert Treme and find out why he signed a death certificate for a man who wasn’t dead.”

  * * *

  A group called Just Say Thanks was coming in on Sunday. Lara had been in contact with the events coordinator several times. She had just spent another hour with her on the phone now, assuring the woman that they were open and ready for the group’s visit. Meanwhile, Meg was bent intently over her Bureau laptop.

  Just Say Thanks had been founded by a wealthy household-appliance inventor who hadn’t served in the military but who was grateful to those who had the courage he didn’t. It was largely funded by about twenty wealthy people across the country, though they accepted donations. Their mission was to help wounded veterans, and especially those with PTSD, by getting them out into the world. Lara had been thrilled when they made contact, and Grady had even offered to underwrite their visit. Lara had done a half dozen press releases for the event, but now she continued contacting the media. Sea Life liked to welcome vets and went all out for them. The employees even lined up to applaud as the soldiers went by. It was a nice touch. Not nearly enough, but nice.