by Donn Cortez
“No problem.” Her tone suggested the exact opposite.
Detective Salas, standing beside the table, said nothing. She crossed her arms and favored Shanique with a look that could be described as tolerant. “You’ve been on the Vitality Method for what, eight months now, right?” Horatio asked. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Fine.”
“Good, good. Still, it can’t be easy—giving up all those tastes forever. No more steak, no more omelettes, no more shrimp cocktails or eggs Benedict or barbecued chicken—”
“What, are you trying to make me sick? I don’t miss any of that stuff,” she snapped.
“Oh?” Salas asked. “You mean you don’t cheat? Maybe have a little side of bacon with your granola and soy milk now and then?”
Shanique rolled her eyes. “You don’t get it. Giving up animal products isn’t like quitting smoking or drinking or trying to lose weight—it’s a shift in how you think, in what you are. I don’t think of those things as food anymore; just the idea of putting any of that in my body disgusts me.”
“I see,” Horatio said. “So handling something like—I don’t know, a package of raw hamburger—you’d find extremely distasteful.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Yes.”
“Then could you please explain how your fingerprints wound up on such a package in the Dumpster of The Earthly Garden?”
Her glare faltered. “I—I don’t know.”
“I do,” Horatio said. “You brought it to the restaurant so you could slip it into the vegetarian chili that was on special that day. Not to the stuff being served to the public, though—just the bowl that Phillip Mulrooney had for lunch. And I can prove it.”
She didn’t reply, but Horatio could see she was rapidly losing her confidence. He pushed a little harder. “Mulrooney, a known vegan, had meat in his stomach. We found a dirty bowl with his fingerprints and traces of the doctored chili in a buspan, and your prints on the package of ground round.”
She tried to regain a little of her former bluster. “So? Even if I did, what’s the charge? It wasn’t like I poisoned him.”
“The charge,” Horatio said, “is accessory to murder. Right now I can link you to a very questionable crime scene…questions that I will get the answers to. At the very least, I can arrest you for assault—and if Mulrooney’s death was not an accident, the fact that your actions put him in that bathroom puts you in a very bad place….”
Her resolve cracked, then crumbled, replaced by resignation in her eyes and voice. “I just wanted to show him he was wrong.”
“About what?” Salas prodded.
“About Doctor Sinhurma. About the Vitality Method. About—about us.”
Horatio nodded. “You had a relationship with Phillip Mulrooney?”
“We were sleeping together, yes. Until he started having doubts.”
“Doubts about you?” Horatio asked.
“Doubts about Doctor Sinhurma. Phil started questioning his methods, even his intentions. I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Horatio leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “What sort of things was he saying?”
“Crazy, paranoid things. That the Vitality Method was brainwashing, that Doctor Sinhurma was running a cult. He stopped taking the shots.”
Horatio frowned. “What shots?”
“Vitamin shots. We get them every night at the clinic.”
“And when he discontinued the shots, the doctor moved him to the restaurant?”
“Well, Doctor Sinhurma wasn’t going to lock him up and make him take his vitamins, was he? He’s a nutritionist, not Charles Manson.”
“So you two argued,” Salas said. She leaned on the table with both hands. “The hamburger was a little payback.”
“No! I just figured…I could tell he was thinking about leaving the clinic. Sooner or later, he would have dropped the diet, too. I thought if I made him sick, he’d see how poisonous meat is, how bad it was for his body.”
“Like making a kid smoke a whole pack when you catch him with a cigarette, is that it?” Horatio asked.
“I thought it would make him realize. I thought it would make him understand, like he did when we first got together. It was so special, so golden…. Doctor Sinhurma, we have so much to thank him for. And when Phil stopped seeing that, it just—it just hurt me.”
“So you hurt him.”
“It was for his own good.”
“Well, going meat-free may be good for you,” Horatio said, getting to his feet, “but high voltage definitely is not.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at the moment,” Horatio said. “But don’t plan any long Caribbean vacations.”
5
CALLEIGH WALKED THROUGH the open doorway into a room dimly lit by sunshine slanting through a battered set of blinds over the front window. The faded sign on the door read LEAKYMAN PLUMBING in bright orange, red, and green letters. She could hear reggae music playing from somewhere in the back—old Bob Marley, it sounded like. “Hello?” she called out.
She could hear someone moving around in an adjacent room, but heard no reply. She surveyed the room: black plastic pipes of varying sizes and thicknesses leaned into one jumbled corner, while a row of white toilets stood against a wall like squat albino gnomes. A wooden counter took up most of another wall, and was piled high with tools, fixtures and stacks of paper. A calendar five years out of date tacked up behind it displayed a topless blonde with an improbable physique demonstrating a unique way to hold a plunger.
“More like Dustyman,” Calleigh murmured, running a finger along the counter.
“Hey, out there—just a sec, mon,” a voice called back. “I be right out.” A bearded black man, his hair in dreads, appeared a moment later through a doorway behind the counter. He wore a tie-dyed purple T-shirt and round, orange-tinted sunglasses.
“What you need?” he asked. His voice held a distinctive Jamaican lilt, burred by a smoker’s rough undertones. “If it flushes, flows, or fountains, we can fix you up.”
“That’s a catchy slogan,” Calleigh said. “I need to ask you some questions about something in the ‘flushes’ category.”
“Sure t’ing. What you wanna know?”
“I understand you did some work for a restaurant called The Earthly Garden?”
“Ah, they recommend me, huh? Yes, I put a new toilet in for them. Did a good job, they were very happy.”
“This was how long ago?”
“Oh, quite a while. Six months or so ago.”
“Really?” Calleigh frowned and pulled a notepad from the pocket of her black blazer. The jacket shifted, revealing the holster riding on her hip and the badge right beside it, and did so in a fashion that looked entirely accidental. “My information says it was only put in last week.”
The man’s smile remained in place, but his eyes hardened. “Oh, yes. My mistake. The toilet is new—it was the sink we put in six months ago.”
Calleigh smiled back. “Look, you don’t have to impress me with the quality of your work and how long it lasts. I just want some facts to help out with a criminal investigation, and then I’ll get out of your hair. Okay?”
“Sure, sure,” the man said, shrugging. He picked a pack of cigarettes up from beside the till and shook one out. “Ask away.”
“What was the reason the new toilet was installed?”
The man lit his cigarette with a small butane torch before answering. “It was old. Old and cracked, with a bad seal. They wanted a new one.”
“Uh-huh. And why did you choose a stainless steel version and copper piping, as opposed to porcelain and PVC?”
The man took a long drag and blew it out through his nose. “Hey, I give them what they ask for. They want stainless, they get stainless. They want copper…” He paused, and gave a pointed glance at her badge. “…they get copper.”
She ignored the look and continued. “And who, exactly, asked for those things?”
&
nbsp; “I don’t recall—exactly,” he said. His sunny tone of voice had begun to cool.
“I understand—it being a whole seven days ago and all,” she said. “You know, workplace toxins can have serious neurological consequences. Maybe you have something lying around that’s affecting your short-term memory?” Her voice maintained its Southern hospitality, but her eyes met his and didn’t blink. “Something you’d rather not be found by a person with a search warrant?”
He chuckled—and looked away. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I just like to give my customers their privacy, you know?”
“How commendable. I had no idea the concept of confidentiality had spread from doctors and lawyers to plumbers…now, who was it that ordered the work done?”
“Humboldt. Albert Humboldt. He told me he wanted something primo—I think he was trying to impress his boss, you know?”
“I think I do,” Calleigh said. “And you know what? I think my boss is going to be impressed, too.”
Horatio joined Wolfe in the layout room. The rocket lay on the light table, looking like the remains of a cheap special effect for some Z-grade science fiction movie. “Found it on top of a bus, huh?” Horatio said. “Good work.”
“Thanks,” Wolfe said. “No prints, though. Trace is running a mass spec comparison on chemical residue, seeing if we can get a match to what you found on the roof.”
“Good, good. How about identifying marks on the rocket itself?”
“No serial number, but I have managed to pin down the make: an Estes Cometmaster. Widespread commercial availability, unfortunately.”
“How about the technical specs? What sort of altitude is it rated for?”
“Sixteen hundred feet if you stick to the recommended guidelines.”
Horatio grabbed a white lab coat and slipped it on over his suit jacket. “I’m guessing this one was customized to go a little higher than that—the fuel mixture is probably a custom blend, too.” He picked up a magnifier and held it over one of the fins. “And take a look at this…hand me a pair of tweezers, will you?” Horatio carefully picked a tiny sliver of material from where the fins met the body of the rocket. He held it up and examined it closely. “This model is from a kit, right? Not preassembled?”
“That’s right. You think it’s transfer?”
Horatio put the sliver in a small envelope and handed it to Wolfe.
“Could be. When the rocket was put together something may have been trapped between two of the pieces.”
“Or it could have gotten wedged in there after hitting the bus.”
“Depends on what it is, doesn’t it…what else do we know?”
“I can tell you it was launched using a rail system, probably mounted on a tripod,” Wolfe said. He pointed to two small circular projections that jutted from the side of the rocket, one near the base and one about halfway up. “These are called launch buttons. They slide into a groove on the rail—keeps the rocket vertical when it takes off.”
“How about the shard we found in the burn pattern?”
“Trace identified it as a fragment of ceramic tile. Rocketeers sometimes use tiles as blast deflectors, but they can shatter—that’s why the burn was in a fractured pattern.”
“So they took the launch rail and the broken deflector with them, but missed a piece….”
Horatio’s cell phone rang. “Caine,” he answered.
“Horatio,” Yelina said. “We’ve got another DB connected to the Mulrooney case.”
“Connected how?”
“She was also one of Sinhurma’s patients. Name is Ruth Carrell.”
Ruth Carrell’s body lay in a wooded lot, just off the Tamiami Trail. She wore the same clothes she’d worn the first time Horatio had talked to her, and lay sprawled on her back, her blue shirt turned a blood-soaked dark purple. Yellow-finned star fruit, brown-pelted kiwis and bumpy green atemoyas clustered around her, spilled from two cloth bags she had obviously been carrying.
Alexx examined the body while Horatio looked on. Her combination of compassion and professionalism never failed to impress him; she never lost sight of the fact that she was looking at a person, someone with hopes and dreams and a history, even while she was calmly inspecting the most grisly wound.
“Puncture wound in the chest,” Alexx said. “Thin blade, double-edged. No hilt mark.”
Horatio looked down. “Muddy out here. No other tracks but hers. How’d the killer get close enough to stab her without leaving footprints?”
“He didn’t,” Alexx said. She grabbed the body by one shoulder and rolled it partially over, exposing an equally bloodstained back. “He shot her from a distance. See the exit wound?”
Horatio frowned. “An arrow?”
“Went right through her heart, looks like.” She shook her head. “Honey, this is not the way to meet Cupid.”
Horatio pulled out a pair of tweezers and carefully extracted a small item from the sole of the body’s right shoe. He held it up and studied it. “Plant matter. Doesn’t fit with the rest of the vegetation here, or what I saw at the compound.”
Calleigh was walking the perimeter of the lot. She called out, “Horatio? Can you tell which way she was facing?”
“From the way the body’s lying and the tracks, I’d say she was standing looking toward that edge of the lot,” Horatio replied, pointing.
“Which means our arrow should be over here, on the opposite side,” Calleigh said, heading for a small stand of brush. “Assuming the killer didn’t retrieve it.”
“And our archer would have been standing somewhere in this area,” Horatio said, heading in the opposite direction. There was a small stand of trees and the rusting corpse of a washing machine that looked like it had been cleaning clothes back when Eisenhower was in the White House.
Calleigh peered into the brush. “Brambles,” she said. “Terrific!”
Alexx walked up behind her. “If I was the one who had to get in there and search,” the ME said, “I wouldn’t be too happy, either.”
“Hmm?” Calleigh said, “Oh, no, Alexx—I wasn’t being sarcastic. I really did mean ‘terrific’—because if our Robin Hood did try and retrieve his arrow, there’s a good chance he left some transfer on some of these stickers. If we’re really lucky, maybe even some blood….”
She pulled out a spray bottle of orthotolidine and misted it over the branches. She preferred ortho over Luminol in situations like this for two reasons: Luminol, while usually reliable, required darkness to show up properly, and it also reacted to certain kinds of plants—horseradish and potatoes in particular. Orthotolidine produced a bright blue color in the presence of hemoglobin or myoglobin, which stood out sharply in daylight—or at least it did when there was any blood to detect.
“No luck, darn it,” she muttered. No blood, no fibers that she could see; it looked like the killer hadn’t braved the brambles after all. Still, that meant the arrow had to be there, somewhere—and if she couldn’t find a bullet, Calleigh would gladly settle for an arrow.
Horatio inspected the site where the arrow must have been launched from. The ground here was grassy, not muddy; there were no clear footprints he could see.
After satisfying himself that the killer hadn’t left any obvious traces, he looked around. The road beside the lot was fairly busy, but his view of traffic was obscured by waist-high scrub. He could see the back of a large, beat-up panel truck, though; its owners were the ones who’d discovered the body. They’d been selling produce out of the rear of the vehicle and Ruth had stopped to do some shopping. After making her purchases, she had started to walk back to her car—parked a short distance away—when something must have caught her attention in the lot. She had walked in, and never returned. One of the produce vendors, looking for a bush to stand behind and relieve himself, had noticed the body around twenty minutes later. Yelina was still talking to him, but apparently he hadn’t seen or heard anything else.
Calleigh was already burrowing into the brush on her hands and kne
es. Horatio discreetly looked the other way.
“Horatio?” Alexx said. “I noticed something else on the body, too. She belonged to the same group that Phillip Mulrooney did, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, she has needle tracks on her upper thigh, just like he did.”
“I’m not surprised,” Horatio said. “Apparently the vitamin part of the Vitality Method is administered through nightly injections. Mulrooney had recently stopped getting his.”
“That explains why they were intramuscular,” Alexx said. “Absorbs into the body at a slower, steadier rate.”
“But hers are still fresh, right?”
“I’d say so.”
“Good. Hopefully the tox screen will tell us exactly what she was being given….”
“Got it!” Calleigh cried. She emerged from the bushes, wisps of hair straggling away from her head where the brambles had pulled at them, bits of leaf and twigs clinging to her clothes. She held an arrow with a wide, bloodstained head triumphantly in one gloved hand. “It was in there pretty far, but it hit a branch and stuck.”
“Nice work,” Horatio said. “Let’s get that to the lab.”
“And let’s get you inside,” Alexx said.
She wasn’t, Horatio knew, talking to him.
“Hello, Randolph,” Horatio said.
“Uh, my name is Mark—,” the handsome but confused-looking man in the blue T-shirt said.
“Mark, Randolph—you all sort of look the same to me,” Horatio said. “Follow me, Eric.” He led Delko around the main building, Mark trailing behind.
“Doctor Sinhurma isn’t here right now,” Mark tried again. “He told me that if the police stopped by I was supposed to help in any way I could—”
“Really? That’s very kind of you, Mark. Did Doctor Sinhurma say where he was going?”
“Uh, no.”
They crunched along the path, Delko doing his best not to stare as they passed the pool.