Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  He sighed as he walked up to his twenty-third door. It wasn’t that he regarded the work as demeaning, or even boring; processing evidence often meant hours spent poring over data or repeating the same task over and over again. That didn’t bother him in the least.

  But talking to witnesses drove him crazy.

  He could deal with the ones that lied—at least that meant he was getting somewhere. But most people’s stories were incomplete or contradictory or just plain wrong. It was deeply frustrating to the scientist in him, and it didn’t make the obsessive-compulsive part terribly happy either.

  He knocked on the door. There was a Spanish-accented shout of “Just a minute!” from inside, accompanied by a frenzied barking.

  The door opened and a balding, heavyset Cuban man with a thick black mustache stared blankly at him. He was dressed in a short frilly robe that ended at mid-thigh and had a poodle standing between his legs.

  “Jes?” he said. The dog growled balefully.

  “Miami-Dade police,” Wolfe said, holding up his badge. “I’m looking for a piece of evidence in a crime investigation that might have turned up in this neighborhood. Can I ask you a few questions?”

  The man stared at him. “Hokay.”

  “What I’m trying to find is a model rocket. It would look like a long tube with fins and a conical head, probably made out of cardboard. It may have come down in a tree or on top of a roof.”

  The man considered this. The poodle continued to glare, trembling with indignation. “Ha tube?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Habout thees long?” He held his arms apart and his robe fell open, revealing more than Wolfe cared to see.

  “It could be,” Wolfe said, keeping his eyes on the man’s face.

  “Weeth feens?”

  “Yes. With fins.”

  The man’s brow furrowed. He reached into one pocket of the robe and drew out a cigar, then pulled a lighter out of the other. He lit up, then favored Wolfe with a thoughtful look.

  “I do not theenk,” he said carefully, “that I have ever seen such a theeng.”

  The dog barked, and Wolfe made the mistake of looking down. He quickly looked back up again. “Would you mind if I took a look around your backyard? I won’t be…long.”

  The man took a long, slow drag on his cigar. “You may do thees theeng,” he said, “but be careful of the doggie poo-poo.” He closed the door.

  “Great,” Wolfe said. “I’ll do that.”

  Around the Miami-Dade crime lab, “What have you got?” was heard so often it was almost a standard greeting; but unlike being asked “How’s it going?” it usually generated more than an automatic response. When Yelina spotted Horatio waiting for an elevator at the lab, it was the first thing she said to him.

  “A very bad feeling,” he answered.

  “About?”

  “Doctor Kirpal Sinhurma. I’ve been out to his compound—excuse me, ‘clinic’—and what I saw did not fill me with religious awe. More like a nasty case of déjà vu.”

  “Oh? He remind of you someone?”

  “Several someones. David Koresh, Jim Jones, Reverend Moon…”

  “You think he’s running a cult?”

  “According to the expert I talked to, the techniques he’s using are textbook. He deprives his followers of food and sleep, puts them in a controlled environment and bombards them with his message. Group activities like exercise and sing-alongs to keep them exhausted and emotional and break down their sense of individuality. He’s even got them working for free, under the guise of ‘therapy.’ ”

  He almost spat the last word out. Yelina looked skeptical. “Are you sure, Horatio? The man has A-list celebrities lined up for his treatment. I mean, it’s just a diet, isn’t it?”

  “That’s just it,” Horatio said grimly. “He’s managed to slip in under the radar by selling his philosophy as a fitness trend. You buy his book, you listen to the current hot actor talking about how the diet changed his life, you get a sprinkling of New Age ideas from the Web site. Nothing too extreme, nothing too controversial. But once you’re at the clinic…that’s when you get the hard sell.”

  “Still—even if he is operating a cult, it doesn’t make him a killer. Aren’t you the one that’s always going on about letting the evidence decide?”

  Horatio paused as the elevator doors slid open. “And I will,” he said as they got on. “Actually, I’m sure he has a pretty good alibi for the crime itself. But that’s like saying a mob boss is innocent because he was somewhere else when the trigger was pulled. I’m telling you, Yelina, I talked to this guy. I looked him in the eye.”

  “Yeah? He come across like a psycho?”

  “Just the opposite. Warm, personable, completely at ease. Charisma to burn.”

  “Well then,” Yelina said drily, “by all means, let’s lock him up.”

  Horatio smiled despite himself. “I couldn’t shake him. You remember Seth Lockland?” Lockland was a serial killer and rapist Horatio had helped convict five years ago. Both Horatio and Yelina had been present when the needle had gone into Lockland’s arm, and the last look they’d seen on his face was a grin and a wink.

  “I remember him,” Yelina said. “Little bastard lived in his own world.”

  “Exactly. That’s the kind of relaxed arrogance this guy projects, Yelina. His attitude wasn’t ‘You have the wrong guy,’ it was ‘You’ll never understand.’ Sinhurma practically told me God struck Mulrooney dead on his say-so…and made sure his second-in-command heard him tell me, no doubt so the word will get spread to the faithful. He thinks he’s untouchable.”

  The doors opened and they walked out. “And I suppose you’re going to prove him wrong?” Yelina asked.

  “I’m going to prove what I always prove,” Horatio said. “The truth.”

  Atmosphere Research Technologies was in South Dade, just outside of Homestead. They specialized in studying lightning and its effects, and were known as one of the best such facilities in the world; it made perfect sense they were located in Florida, who along with Texas annually racked up the highest number of lightning-related injuries in the country.

  Horatio pushed open the thick glass door and stepped inside. A south-facing glass wall let plenty of light into a spacious reception area, with a low-slung, curving wooden desk against the back. A hallway led off to the left and a large, blown-up photo of a lightning strike over Miami took up most of the far wall. A round-faced woman in her fifties with short gray hair, wearing a white sweatshirt that read ALL CHARGED UP! ZAPCON 92 was working at a computer behind the desk. She looked up when he came in and smiled. “Hello?” There was something Eastern European in her voice, but Horatio couldn’t quite place the country.

  “Hello, yes,” Horatio said. “I have an appointment with Doctor Wendall. Horatio Caine.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re here.” Czech? Polish? Maybe Croatian…

  The man that bustled out a moment later was in his forties, completely bald, and wore a blue lab smock over a Miami Dolphins T-shirt, a pair of blue jeans and white sneakers. He had a wide, impish grin and eyebrows so thick and black it looked like they’d been put on with a Magic Marker. “Hi! You must be Lieutenant Caine!” He put out his hand and Horatio shook it.

  “Please, call me Horatio.”

  “Come on back to the lab—I’m just in the middle of something.” He led Horatio down the hall, past numerous doors and into one labeled LAB 4. The room held several workstations, a long table covered with disassembled electronic equipment and what looked like an aquarium full of murky, whitish liquid.

  Doctor Wendall pulled a plastic chair from beside one of the workstations and offered it to Horatio, then took one himself and sat down. “I’m just crunching some data,” he said cheerfully, motioning to a screen where numbers and figures were scrolling past too fast to read. “But I’m happy to help out, if I can. You mentioned something about a lightning-related homicide on the phone?”

  “That�
�s right. I was wondering if you could shed a little light on the subject.”

  Doctor Wendall chuckled. “Well, I have to admit, it’s not too often I hear the words ‘lightning’ and ‘homicide’ in the same sentence. For one thing, most people survive lightning strikes—less than a third are fatal. It seems an unlikely murder weapon.”

  Horatio smiled. “In my experience, murder weapons are sometimes chosen exactly for that reason. And I have reason to believe that this particular suspect might find a thunderbolt from the heavens to be an irresistible choice.”

  “Well—even assuming you don’t have Thor or Zeus in a jail cell downtown—I would have to say it’s possible. Lightning does kill about a hundred people a year in the U.S.; the question is, how do you persuade your victim to be one of them? Did you find him tied to a lightning rod on top of a building?”

  “Not exactly…” Horatio explained where the body was found.

  “A toilet? Well, it’s where they found Elvis, so I guess he’s in good company. And you say he was talking on a phone at the time?”

  “A cell phone, yes.”

  “Hmm. Well, a number of people do get hit by lightning every year while on the phone—but usually through a landline, which makes an excellent conductor. There was a story going around for a while about cell phones attracting lightning strikes, but it was only an urban legend—cell phones operate at an omnidirectional radio frequency of around six hundred milliwatts, which is not going to make any difference to ground potential. Were his eardrums intact?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “If it had come through the phone, it probably would have damaged at least one.” Wendall glanced over at the numbers scrolling down the screen, then back to Horatio. “Still, lightning’s hardly predictable. There was a case in Denmark where a bolt came in through a window, broke every other plate on a shelf, shattered sixty panes of glass and every mirror in the house, then jumped outside and killed a pig and a cat.”

  “I think I can safely say,” Horatio said, “that there was a definite lack of livestock on the premises. There was, however, something on the roof…we found evidence that a model rocket had been fired.”

  Wendall’s reaction was immediate; his eyes popped wide open with astonishment. “You’re kidding,” he said slowly.

  “I’m afraid I am not.”

  Wendall shook his head. “Okay, that changes everything…now I see how it could be done, sure. But really, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”

  “Oh?” Horatio leaned forward intently. “And who would the right guy be, then?”

  “His name’s McKinley—Jason McKinley. And I can tell you exactly where he is, too….”

  4

  CALLEIGH WALKED INTO THE LAB and wrinkled her nose. “Why is it every time I see you lately I smell cooking meat?”

  Delko grinned. “Are you sure?” He was stirring the contents of a small metal pan over a Bunsen burner.

  Calleigh set her folder down on the lab table. “You know, if H catches you using lab equipment to make lunch, you’re gonna be in big trouble.”

  Delko turned off the burner. “This isn’t lunch, it’s more along the lines of a comparison.” He took a small spoon and measured out a few scoops of the lumpy, gray material in the pan onto a small plate. A very similar pile of gray lumps was heaped onto a second plate beside it.

  “I got to thinking about what was found in the vic’s stomach,” Delko said. “Hamburger, only partially digested. He had to have eaten it recently.”

  “Maybe he went out for lunch on his break,” Calleigh pointed out.

  “I checked all the restaurants in easy walking distance—none serve chili. We didn’t find any evidence that he brought a lunch with him, which suggests the chili came from the restaurant itself. The empty package of hamburger I found in their Dumpster supports that.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. They don’t serve meat, and I can’t believe they’d let him use the kitchen to fry up his own.”

  Delko nodded. “Yeah, most vegans are pretty hard-core—they won’t even use the same cookware meat is prepared in. Then I thought, what if he didn’t know he was eating meat?”

  Delko pointed to the first plate. “This is regular hamburger. And this,” he said, indicating the other, “is TVP.”

  “Ah,” Calleigh said, understanding Delko’s point. “Textured Vegetable Protein. Fake meat.”

  “Right. TVP is often used in vegetarian recipes as a substitute for hamburger—look pretty similar, don’t they? I got this package from The Earthly Garden—they use it in some of their dishes. Guess what was listed as the daily special the day Mulrooney was killed?”

  “Vegetarian chili?”

  “Add some beans, some tomatoes, a big whack of spices…even a vegan might not notice he was eating something that used to have four legs.”

  “So somebody slipped him a meat Mickey? Why?”

  “I was wondering about that myself. I did a little research and found that many vegans claim to get violently ill if they eat meat accidentally—even if they’re unaware of what they’ve consumed at the time. Because animal proteins are digested at a lower PH than plant proteins, eating meat produces higher levels of stomach acid—so I had the vic’s stomach contents analyzed for their PH level.” He picked up a piece of paper and handed it to Calleigh.

  She glanced at it and nodded. “One point one? That’s awfully low.”

  “And awfully acidic. Maybe even enough to make him sick.”

  “Putting him inside the bathroom, either on or hugging the toilet. Okay—so who fed it to him?”

  “I thought you’d never ask. I lifted a print off the plastic wrap around that empty package of hamburger and our winner is…Shanique Cooperville, one of the wait staff.”

  “Does Horatio know?”

  “Already called him. He’s having her brought in for questioning, but H says there’s something else he has to confirm first. How’s your stuff going?”

  She leaned up against the wall, crossed her arms and sighed. “Hard to say. I’ve been going over that section of pipe I pulled out of the wall, but copper’s a soft metal; it’s got so many tool marks it’s hard to say what’s plumbing-related and what isn’t. The burn mark where the lightning went through gave me a nice outline of something, but I haven’t been able to positively identify it. Thought it was a clamp at first, but I haven’t been able to get a match.”

  “Any prints?”

  “Yeah, a couple of latents. Nothing from AFIS, but I thought I’d compare them to what you pulled from the hamburger.” She picked up her folder from the table and took a sheet out.

  “Hand ’em over,” Delko said, reaching for his own stack of paper. He grabbed a magnifier, lined the sheets up in front of him, and peered through it, one after the other. “Nope. Sorry.”

  “Well, that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it?” She took the sheet back, put it away in the folder. “I tracked down the contractor that did the work on the pipe. I’ll see if it matches anyone in his shop.”

  “Guess I’ll start processing that blender and the knives H found.”

  “Well, aren’t you just three steps ahead of the rest of us,” Calleigh said.

  “Hey, I just caught a lucky break with that print,” Delko said. “If it had been a bullet, I’m sure you’d be the one—”

  “—with the big, goofy grin on my face. Right,” Calleigh said. “Oh, well. Making chili is such a guy thing, anyway….”

  Boys and their toys, Horatio thought. Some things we never seem to outgrow…like the desire to throw things at the sky. Or maybe it’s just the need to play with explosives.

  He squinted up at a tower of wooden scaffolding three stories high, built on a concrete apron in the middle of a grassy field surrounded by low scrub. The only other structure in sight was a small trailer at the edge of the field, a white shoebox of a building with a single door and no windows.

  “Jason McKinley?” Horatio called out.

  A
head appeared over the railing that lined the top floor of the tower. “Yeah?”

  “Miami-Dade police. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

  There was a pause. “Sure, come on up.” The head disappeared again.

  A wooden staircase zigzagged up the outside of the structure, ending at a simple platform on top. A man with short, stubbly black hair, dressed in baggy khaki shorts, hiking boots and a faded orange T-shirt, was kneeling in front of a gray metal box the size and shape of a large trunk. A cluster of a dozen or so yard-long tubes grew from the top and several thick cables snaked away from the base and through a hole in the floor. The man had an access panel open and was fiddling with something in the interior.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Horatio said, “but Doctor Wendall says you’re the man to talk to about RTL.”

  McKinley stopped what he was doing and looked back at Horatio. He was in his mid-twenties, with a large, bucktoothed mouth and acne-scarred cheeks. A wispy goatee curled off his chin. “Rocket-triggered lightning? Well, I could deny it…but considering what I’m doing, I don’t think I’d have a lot of credibility.”

  Horatio smiled. “I’m Horatio Caine, Mister McKinley. I hope you don’t mind if I pick your brains for a few minutes?”

  “Well, I sure didn’t pick ’em, but I wound up with ’em anyways. And call me Jason. What do you want to know?”

  “I was wondering about the mechanics of the process…. How exactly does it work?”

  Jason fished a stick of gum out of his pocket and unwrapped it as he spoke. “Basically, we stick a rocket up a thunderstorm’s ass. Not surprisingly, this irritates the thunderstorm, and it retaliates by trying to blow the shit out of the rocket. It doesn’t realize that a bunch of clever monkeys on the ground have attached a really long wire to the rocket, and in fact can channel the lightning bolt right down to the ground—more specifically, to our instruments.” He popped the gum in his mouth and started to chew.

  Horatio’s smile turned into a grin. “Okay…it’s not that I don’t appreciate the laymen’s version, Jason, but I was hoping for something a little more technical. Despite the badge, I do know a thing or two about science. You can use big words around me—I’m something of a clever monkey myself.”