Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  Jason didn’t look embarrassed at all; instead, he laughed. “Really? All right then, I’m gonna turn off all my ‘normal society’ filters and just talk like the science geek I am. But I warn you, it’s not pretty.”

  “I think I can handle it,” Horatio said.

  “The first thing we do is use electric field meters to look for an appropriate field in a cumulus congestus cloud. Usually, a negative charge tends to build up at the base of the cloud while positive charge tends to build at the top of the cloud. If a charge—negative or positive—starts growing at the base, an opposite charge shows up on our equipment.”

  “How strong a charge do you need?”

  “We don’t launch unless we’ve got a reading of eleven kilovolts per meter or higher. Even so, we only trigger a strike about half the time. We use a rocket with a one stage J-class motor, send it up around two thousand feet. It trails a Kevlar-sheathed copper wire off an attached spool, which feeds the charge down to this baby right here…”—he thumped the box beside him with his fist—“…and we monitor the whole process from over there.” He pointed in the general direction of the windowless trailer.

  “And who pays your bills?”

  “You mean, who does ART sell the research to? All sorts of places: power company, airplane manufacturers, NASA. We get some grant money, too—SFU students work for us on special projects sometimes. That’s how I wound up here.”

  Horatio nodded. “Pretty interesting work, sounds like.”

  “Most of the time, yeah. I get to tell people I yell ‘Shazam!’ for a living—unfortunately, it seems the more attractive the person I’m talking to, the less likely they are to get the reference.”

  “I always preferred Batman to Captain Marvel, myself.”

  “Me too! You know, between Adam West camping it up and Michael Keaton in a rubber suit, people forget he’s the World’s Greatest Detective. The Batcave has to have the best crime lab on the planet.”

  “Well, we can’t all be playboy billionaires….” Horatio peered at the equipment Jason had been working on. “So this is where you launch from. Nice setup.”

  “Oh? You a rocketeer yourself?”

  “I fooled around with it a bit when I was a kid. And I used to work in a related field….”

  “Aerospace?” Jason reached into another pocket and pulled out a folding multitool. He snapped it into its pliers configuration with a practiced flair and squatted down next to the open access panel again.

  “Bomb squad. You’d be surprised how often model rocket components turn up in homemade explosive devices.”

  “That why you’re here?” Jason reached into the hatch with the multitool and started poking around. “Somebody leave a pipe-bomb lying around with a rocket igniter for a detonator or something?”

  “No. I think someone used a rocket to trigger a lightning strike that killed someone.”

  Jason frowned and considered that. “Well, I guess it could be done. Don’t waste time looking for the wire, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the charge vaporizes it. Zap, pfft, gone. The rocket usually survives, though—that what you found?”

  “Not yet. But we’re looking….”

  Wolfe had searched alleys. He had searched backyards. He had found the highest building in the area and surveyed as many rooftops as he could see, and climbed onto the rooftops of every building he couldn’t. He had checked treetops, playgrounds, balconies and awnings. He had talked to anyone in the neighborhood who might have seen or found a model rocket, and so far he had come up with nothing.

  He had no intention of giving up. He stood on the corner, ran a hand through his unruly brown hair and thought about it. Presumably, the person who fired the rocket didn’t want it found. That meant it was probably painted in such a way as to not stand out. It could even have been rigged to explode after its job was done, which would mean he was looking for fragments, not a whole rocket. If it was made of cardboard, like many rockets, the rain would have turned the remnants into waterlogged scraps.

  “So,” he said to himself, “nondescript, soggy scraps of cardboard. Sure. No problem.”

  He looked up, trying to imagine the rocket blazing into the stormy sky. A flash as the lightning hit, and then—what?

  He studied the street. A fair amount of traffic, but not too busy. It was just off the part of the Gables known as the Miracle Mile, a commercial district full of chain outlets: big stores like Old Navy or the Gap, smaller ones like Starbucks. A bus pulled past him, then stopped halfway down the block, letting on an Asian woman with a bag of groceries.

  Wolfe pulled out his cell phone, called the lab and got put through to Calleigh.

  “Hello?”

  “Calleigh, can you check something for me real quick?”

  “What do you need, Ryan?”

  “Transit information. I’m in Coral Gables and I need to know when the bus comes by a particular corner.”

  “Isn’t there a phone number you can call for that?”

  “Sure, if you want to wait ten minutes to talk to an automated system. I’d rather talk to you.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet. Give me the location.”

  After he did, she said, “Okay, I’m looking it up online…. You’re in luck—there’s a listing for that very stop. Starts at six forty-five A.M. and runs every half hour until six forty-five P.M. After that, it’s once an hour until eleven.”

  “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

  “Gonna catch a bus?”

  “Nope. A rocket.”

  He thanked her and hung up, then called directory information to get the number for the transit dispatch office. He supposed he could have gotten Calleigh to look that up too, but he knew she had more important things to do.

  Twenty minutes later, he was showing his badge to a bus driver. The driver, an olive-skinned woman with her hair pulled back in a French braid, stared at it as if it were a forged transit pass.

  “Excuse me,” Wolfe said. “Were you driving this route yesterday?”

  “That’s right,” the woman said suspiciously. “What, did that drunk I kicked off complain?”

  “Nothing like that. Is this the same bus you drove yesterday too?”

  The woman’s frown deepened. “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

  “Did you hear something like a bang or a thump on the roof at this stop, around two forty-five?”

  “Driving this route I hear all sorts of bangs and thumps. Long as it’s not a flat or a gunshot I don’t pay much attention.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to wait here for a second.”

  An elderly black woman seated in the front asked anxiously, “Is it gonna be long? I got an appointment.”

  Wolfe smiled reassuringly. “Not long at all, I promise.”

  The bus was articulated, sixty or so feet long with a flexible join in the middle. Wolfe walked to the back door, where a series of oval-shaped metal rings on hinges were mounted up the side. He snapped each rung into place, then used them to climb up and onto the roof.

  Sure enough, he found what he was looking for caught between the corrugated folds of the flexible accordion section: a cardboard tube almost three feet long with a finned base and a tapered nose, painted a flat, matte black and singed even darker at one end.

  “Houston, we have solved our problem,” Wolfe murmured.

  “Hello? Lieutenant Caine?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded female, nervous, and familiar.

  “Can I help you?” Horatio said. He was in the Hummer, on his way back to the lab.

  “It’s Ruth, Ruth Carrell. I—I need to talk to you. In person.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked immediately. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m okay. I just—there’s a few things I’d like to tell you, and I didn’t feel right saying anything at the clinic.”

  “Is that where you are now?”

  “No, I’m in Miami Beach. Lummus Park, across from the
Starlite Hotel.”

  “I can be there in twenty minutes,” Horatio said.

  “Okay. I’ll wait.”

  Lummus Park was in South Beach, right on Ocean Drive. He took the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach, through Watson Island. A seaplane buzzed overhead, trailing water from its pontoons, on its way to the Caribbean or Key West or maybe just a quick tour over Miami itself. He drove across the glittering blue bay, past Dodge and Lummus Islands with the immense white bulk of their cruise ships, and then onto Fifth Street to Ocean.

  Ocean Drive was what most people thought of when they thought of Miami, ten blocks of neon-splashed art-deco extravagance, all of it looking out over a white sand beach and the deep blue of the Atlantic. Horatio was used to it, but it was always interesting.

  Parking in SoBe was slightly less difficult than getting in some of the clubs there—which is to say, almost impossible. For Horatio, of course, it wasn’t a problem. Lummus Park was frequented by many an in-line skater, and thus had plenty of flat concrete surfaces to park on…as long as you were willing to ignore little things like sidewalks in order to get there. Although Horatio was always unfailingly polite when doing so—excuse me, large tanklike vehicle coming through, thank you so much—he always got a secret kick out of doing it.

  Well. Maybe not that secret.

  He found Ruth Carrell sitting on a bench under a little thatched roof, looking out over the Atlantic. Rolling black thunderheads were gathering on the horizon, but the sky overhead was still bright and blue.

  Horatio sat down beside her and took off his sunglasses. Instead of the usual blue T-shirt, she was wearing sandals, a pair of jeans and a white tank top, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She held a small fabric purse in her hands, and looked troubled.

  “Ruth?” Horatio said. “Hi. How are you doing?”

  “Lieutenant Caine—”

  “Call me Horatio.”

  “Horatio. I’m…I’m confused.” She stopped and looked down at her hands.

  “About what?”

  “Doctor Sinhurma. I know he’s a good man, but…” she trailed off.

  This, Horatio knew, was the delicate part. She obviously wanted to talk, but she didn’t want to betray a man she saw as her saviour. If Horatio played it wrong, she’d only get defensive and angry.

  “This is hard, I know,” Horatio said. “And I understand, I do. Doctor Sinhurma clearly has the best of intentions, and I can see that he’s done a lot of good. It’s not my intention to persecute him—I only want to get to the truth. Doctor Sinhurma believes in the truth, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. It’s just—he has such a better understanding of the truth than I do. I mean, who am I to second-guess him—”

  “Ruth. There is only one truth, and it’s there for anyone that wants to see it.”

  She glanced up at him. “I guess that’s your job, isn’t it? Seeing the truth.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Is it always that simple? Things are or aren’t? People are innocent or guilty?”

  “Not always, no.” Horatio looked away, over the rippling gleam of the ocean. “My job is to establish the facts. What happened, how it happened, where and when and who it happened to.”

  “What about why?”

  He smiled. “That’s the tricky one. The first five are science, the last one’s often human nature. But you can find truth there, too. For instance—do you know why the ocean off Miami Beach is that particular color?”

  “No, why?” She shaded her eyes with her hand and stared at the waves shushing in.

  “A scarcity of plankton. Colder water holds more dissolved CO-two and oxygen, which is better for the growth of phytoplankton and zooplankton. The more plankton in the water, the murkier it looks. Florida seawater is warm; therefore fewer gases, fewer plankton…and crystal-clear, blue water. That’s the science.”

  He paused, then said, “ ‘When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.’ ”

  “Shakespeare?”

  “Herman Melville—Moby Dick. It’s easy to describe the sea in scientific terms…but he understood it on another level. He looked out over the same ocean I do, but saw it a different way. He saw a different part of the same truth.”

  “Yeah. Doctor Sinhurma’s like that. He sees parts of the truth that just go right over my head.”

  “I see. And the things he understands and you don’t have started to worry you?”

  She didn’t answer at first, and he thought he might have rushed it. Then, in a hesitant voice, she said, “A little.”

  He waited.

  “It’s just that—well, you know that thing I mentioned? That Doctor Sinhurma asked me to do?”

  “I remember.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. At first I thought it was no big deal, but then the more I thought about it the wronger it felt. And I really need to talk to someone, and I can’t talk to anyone at the clinic or to Doctor Sinhurma, and, and—”

  She put her hands over her mouth and started crying, her shoulders heaving. Horatio wanted to comfort her, but this was a negotiation and now was the time for him to make a demand. He leaned forward, offering her the hope of solace but not the guarantee, and said softly, “Ruth. What did he ask you to do?”

  She blinked at him with watery red eyes and said, “He asked me to be nice to someone.”

  “But not in a sexual way?” Horatio asked, recalling their previous talk.

  “No. Not exactly. Doctor Sinhurma invited me to his study one evening for a long talk. We talked about the Vitality Method and how important it was to change people’s lives, and how those people go on to affect other people, and how you can wind up affecting the whole world by changing just one person.”

  She pulled out a handkerchief—the one he’d given her previously, Horatio noted—and blew her nose. “And it takes a very special sort of person to find the right people to change, because if you change the right people it affects more of the right people, and—oh, I’m not explaining this very well, am I?”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  “Anyway, even though he didn’t say so, I knew that Doctor Sinhurma was one of those people who were good at finding the right people to change. And it’s such a huge responsibility, you know? He tried to hide it, but I could tell how hard it was for him, sometimes.”

  “You wanted to help,” Horatio said.

  “Yes! Because some people just can’t or won’t see how amazing Doctor Sinhurma’s methods are. And we were eating these pastries, these fantastic almond tarts he gives out sometimes as a special treat, and he says he’s going to tell me a secret—it turns out that actually they’re really healthy, they’re made with whole wheat flour and almost no fat or sugar, and then we started talking about how it was okay to offer somebody something they thought was decadent when it was actually good for them.”

  “Because ultimately, they would benefit,” Horatio said, nodding.

  “Yeah. And it turns out there was this—person—who Doctor Sinhurma thought would really benefit from the Vitality Method. A person who was one of those right people, you know? And he asked if I would talk to this person. Talk to them and…” She stopped, wiped her eyes and blew her nose again.

  “Offer them an almond tart?” Horatio prompted.

  She gave him a wan smile. “More or less. He didn’t ask me to do anything inappropriate, he just wanted me to make them feel welcome.”

  “And did you?”

  She sighed. “Yeah, I did.” She glanced at Horatio, then away. “Really welcome, if you know what I mean.”

  “Who was this person, Ruth?”

  “I—I’d rather not say, okay? I don’t want to get them in trouble—it’s not like they did anything wrong. I just wanted to talk to someone about it.”

  Horatio nodded. He knew what she
wanted to hear: that she’d done the right thing, that everything was fine and she was overreacting.

  But that was just on the surface. The fact that she wanted to hear those reassurances from Horatio instead of someone at the clinic meant she had serious misgivings.

  And now was not the time for Horatio to be kind.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Horatio said. “Would you have had physical relations with this person if Doctor Sinhurma’s opinion wasn’t involved?”

  She thought about it. “No, I guess not,” she said quietly.

  “Would you have done what you did if Sinhurma hadn’t had that long talk with you?”

  She looked over at him, and now he heard just a trace of anger in her voice. “Probably not.”

  “I know you’d like to paint yourself as a martyr in all this, Ruth, but that’s just not true. You didn’t sacrifice your honor to prove your dedication to a cause; you were manipulated into prostituting yourself—”

  She stood up abruptly. “I thought you would understand,” she said, her voice quivering. “But you don’t. It wasn’t like that—”

  “It’s not your fault, Ruth. You can’t blame yourself for what you did—”

  “Doctor Sinhurma says that ultimate responsibility and ultimate acceptance are the same thing,” she said flatly. “I accept what I did and take full responsibility for my actions.”

  Horatio could see he was losing her; she couldn’t face the possibility that her benefactor didn’t have her best interests at heart. “So,” Horatio said evenly, “you’re prepared to do it again?”

  The look on her face was as if he’d slapped her. “I—he wouldn’t—”

  Horatio stood up. “It’s not about what he would do anymore,” he said. “It’s about what you’re willing to live with. Think about that…and when you reach a conclusion, give me a call.”

  He slipped on his sunglasses and left her there, staring out at the ocean. Still clutching his handkerchief.

  Shanique Cooperville wore three-inch heels, a tight pair of white satin pants, a midriff-baring pink top, and a glare. Horatio met her eyes across the table of the interview room calmly and said, “Shanique. Thanks for coming down.”