Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

“What about…what about drugs?” Julio asked slowly.

  Aha.

  “What about them?” Salas said.

  “Would a drug scandal be enough?” Julio asked, hope in his voice.

  “It might,” Horatio said. “What kind of drugs are we talking about, Julio?”

  “Hash. Black hash.”

  “You’re not going to pull a martyr act, are you, Julio?” Horatio said. He put his hands on the table and leaned forward, right into Ferra’s face. He put a hard, cold edge into his voice. “Try and take the fall yourself to save everyone else? Because I’m not stupid, and neither are my bosses. Anything you give me better not waste my time, because I will check out each and every piece of information you give me and I will do it very, very thoroughly.”

  “No. I mean, no, I’m not trying to do that. This is about someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Albert Humboldt.”

  “Humboldt the dishwasher.” Horatio straightened up, but stayed in Ferra’s personal space.

  “He wasn’t always a dishwasher. When he worked at the clinic, he was one of Sinhurma’s assistants. He has a degree in nursing.”

  “And he was involved in drugs.”

  “He used to smoke hash in a little pipe in his room. He got caught once and Doctor Sinhurma was very angry—he doesn’t believe in abusing drugs of any kind.”

  Horatio wondered how that policy went over with some of his celebrity clients, but kept it to himself. “Were you the one who caught him, Julio?”

  “No. It was Ruth.”

  “And what was Mister Humboldt’s reaction to this?”

  “Well, he was put on dishwashing duty at the restaurant, and he wasn’t too happy with that.”

  “Did he ever threaten Ruth? Say he’d get even?”

  “No! He was upset, but he was more sorry than anything else. He knew he shouldn’t have been doing what he was doing. He was trying to make up for his…mistake.”

  Almost said “sin,” didn’t you…“What about the plumber, the one that worked on the bathroom at the restaurant? Do he and Albert know each other?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, they do. He comes to eat in the restaurant now and then, and they always talk.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know, I never paid attention. But—” Julio hesitated, then went on. “I think I saw the plumber pass Albert something once. It was really small and wrapped in tinfoil.”

  Horatio considered this. Finally he said, “I’ll be honest with you, Julio. I don’t know if this is enough to forestall the inevitable…but…”

  “We’ll do our best,” Salas said.

  “Okay,” Julio said. “Can I go?”

  “Not just yet. I told you I was going to check out your story, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do….”

  “The compound bow,” Calleigh said to Horatio, holding up the latest piece of evidence. It looked much like a regular bow except that the bowstring was doubled through two wheels, mounted at each tip. “A fine piece of technology. Basically, it works on a pulley system. Recurve bows store energy as the tips bend toward the archer when the string is pulled taut. The compound uses a different system to store energy: the tips of the bow are pulled toward each other instead of back.”

  She demonstrated, pulling on the bowstring. “When you draw a compound, you turn the wheels—they’re called eccentric cams. An eccentric cam is really just a pair of levers, one extending from the cam harness to the axle at the tip of the bow and the other extending from the string to the axle. The cam’s like a scale with two unequal weights moving in toward the fulcrum and out toward the end at the same time.

  “As you can see, it’s not that hard to hold in place. When the harness is right next to the axle, the bowstring has maximum leverage; one weight sits at the end of the scale while balancing a heavier weight next to the fulcrum.”

  She let the bowstring snap back into place. “When you let go, the energy is released all at once. The formula for how much kinetic energy you’re actually throwing at your target is arrow weight in grains, divided by 450,800, multiplied by arrow speed in feet-per-second squared.”

  “More than enough to punch through Ruth Carrell’s heart,” Horatio said. “What about the arrows?”

  “They’re pretty old—the ferrules are glued on, whereas most modern arrows are screw-ons. I think the arrowhead that killed Ruth was added recently to an older shaft—but so far, I can’t tell if the shaft of the killer arrow matches the ones you found in Ferra’s garage.”

  “How about the paint?”

  “The other arrows were painted too—but none of them green. I was hoping to match the green paint to transfer on the bow, but look at this.” She held the bow out and pointed to a small mounting hole near the handle. “Fresh scratches—it looks like our shooter mounted an arrow rest on the bow and took it off afterward. Any transfer from the arrow would be on it.”

  “So either our shooter knew exactly what he was doing,” Horatio said thoughtfully, “or he was nervous enough to need a little technological assistance and had a friend who was savvy enough to help him out.”

  “Maybe not savvy enough. I took a good look at the spot where the arrows would normally rest, and sure enough, there were traces of paint. Still no green, but I got a match for black and brown. It’s not much, but I can prove the arrows we confiscated were fired by this bow.”

  “Every piece counts.”

  “I also ran samples of the varnish and the thread through Trace. They both match the Ferra arrows—but they’re both extremely common, too. The thread was broken by hand, not cut, so no tool marks, either. Nothing a jury’s gonna convict on.”

  “What about the feathers?”

  She sighed. “Unfortunately, you can’t do DNA fingerprinting from old feathers—they’re mainly keratin, just like hair. Hair shafts are hollow and sometimes have DNA inside, but the corresponding structure of the feather—the base of the quill—has been trimmed. Sorry, H.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “We have the weapon, which is a step in the right direction. Nailing the shooter is just a matter of time…and thanks to you, we now have another angle to work.” He told her about the plumber and what Ferra had said.

  “So Humboldt and Lucent were drug buddies,” Calleigh said. “And Ruth was responsible for Humboldt’s being demoted to scrubbing pots and pans. Think that’s enough for him to kill her?”

  “It’s hard to say. We’re dealing with people who have been pushed to a variety of emotional extremes, including paranoia; you add drugs to the mix—”

  “—and there’s no telling what one of them might do,” she finished. “True enough. What’s next? Bring in Lucent for questioning?”

  “Not quite yet. I’d like to have a little more leverage when we do…did you see anything in the plumbing shop that might get us a search warrant?”

  “Nothing probative—unless you want to bust him for raising dust bunnies without a license.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of possession—”

  “I think I can help you out there, H,” Delko cut in, walking up with a clipboard in his hand. “Mass spec on the knives confirms that they had traces of both burnt natural gas and MAPP gas on them.”

  “MAPP gas?” Calleigh asked.

  “It’s a combination of methylacetyline-propadiene and liquid petroleum. It’s a flammable, nontoxic gas used for—”

  “Let me guess,” Horatio said with a smile. “Soldering metal pipes, right?”

  “You got it, H. Used for soldering and brazing—especially by plumbers.”

  “And that, boys and girls,” Horatio said, “is enough to get us a warrant to inspect all the pipes in the possession of Leakyman Plumbing.”

  “You think some of those pipes may show traces of being used for other than their intended purpose?” Calleigh asked, making her eyes go all wide and innocent.

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Horatio said.

 
; Leakyman Plumbing was right on the Miami Canal; as Horatio pulled up in his Hummer, he could see a rickety boathouse attached to the back of the shop.

  “Think we’ll get lucky, H?” Delko asked as they got out.

  “No such thing,” Horatio said, taking his sunglasses off and slipping them in a breast pocket. “Just preparation and opportunity.”

  Samuel Lucent sat on a beat-up folding chair behind the counter, eating a pungent-smelling curry from a wooden bowl. He looked up as they entered, put down his spoon and stood up. “Yes? What can I do for you fine officers?”

  “Good cop radar, huh?” Horatio said. He pulled out the search warrant and showed it to Lucent, who leaned over to peer at it. “We’re here to search the premises, Mister Lucent.”

  A loud buzz sounded from another room. “Sure, sure,” Lucent said. “Just a second, I have to get that.” He turned and ambled toward the back.

  “Sir? I’ll have to ask you to stay here—”

  Lucent bolted.

  Horatio was over the counter in an instant, gun already out. “Eric! Cover the back!” he yelled.

  A door slammed shut with a sound far too solid for Horatio’s liking. Damn! Should have brought a patrol car with us, Horatio thought as he edged forward, his Glock aimed straight ahead. Looks like Sammy has something to hide, after all.

  “Samuel Lucent!” he called out. “Open the door and come out, now!”

  The door was just inside the other room, and Horatio could see that it hung in a heavy steel frame by industrial-strength hinges. He grabbed the radio from his hip and got backup with a battering ram on the way, but he knew that by the time it arrived Lucent might have destroyed valuable evidence.

  The room was filled with junk; a dismantled Jet Ski took up a large chunk of floor, and a steel, eight-foot-high framework on wheels dominated the rest, a thick, greasy chain-and-pulley dangling from a heavy strut across the frame’s top. Horatio recognized it as a portable engine-puller, designed to lift motors out of cars. It gave him an idea.

  A waist-high, rusted oxyacetylene bottle stood in one corner. Moving quickly, Horatio holstered his gun, then tilted the bottle and rolled it over to the engine-puller. It only took a few seconds to wrap the chain around the bottle and hoist it up to waist height, lengthwise like a torpedo.

  He rolled the engine-puller over to the door, with the base of the welding tank forward. He pulled the steel bottle back as far as he could, then swung it forward with all his strength.

  The impact sounded like someone taking a sledgehammer to a mailbox. A huge dent appeared in the metal of the door. Horatio hauled back and let fly again.

  THOOM!

  THOOM!

  THOO—CRACK!

  On the fourth hit, the lock broke and the door gave way, slamming inward. Horatio whipped his gun back out and cautiously edged ahead.

  Inside the room, he had a brief impression of a row of white buckets along one wall, several cube-like metal machines no higher than his knee, a battered white fridge, a table covered in a plastic sheet with kitchen equipment and some sort of long trays stacked on it. There was also another door, which stood open—Lucent had obviously gone through it.

  The roar of a Jet Ski powering up came at the same second Horatio heard Delko shout, “Hold it!” He ran through the door and into the boathouse just in time to see Lucent take off down the canal, a black garbage bag clutched in one hand, the Jet Ski’s rooster tail spraying a veil of water between Horatio and his target.

  Horatio sighted down the barrel of the Glock, drew a bead and fired. Once, twice, three times. The Jet Ski sputtered and died, coasting to a stop in the middle of the canal. Lucent dove into the water and tried to make it to the far side, but Delko was already in the water and halfway across, swimming with a strong, even stroke.

  “When you get to the other side, Mister Lucent,” Horatio called out, “please put your hands on your head and wait for my partner. Otherwise, my next shot is going to do more than ruin your noisy toy….”

  Lucent did as he was told. As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait at all; Delko beat him to the shore. A few seconds later, Lucent was wearing handcuffs.

  Now, Horatio thought, let’s take a closer look at what’s in that room….

  “The bag was full of marijuana,” Delko said. He and Horatio were in Lucent’s once-secure room; Lucent himself was locked in the back of a patrol car outside. “Pretty high-grade, too, by the smell.”

  “Obviously, our friend Samuel is more interested in botany than plumbing,” Horatio said, surveying the room with hands on hips. “Or maybe that should be chemistry….”

  “Actually, it’s more like what a miller does,” Delko said. He bent down, picked up a single fleck of green from the floor and held it out to Horatio. “See those little white hairs all over the leaf, makes it look like it’s covered in frost? You stick that under a microscope, you’d see mushroom-shaped glands called trichomes. They’re loaded with tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient in pot. It’s present in most parts of the plant, but you get the highest concentrations in the flowering parts of the female.”

  “The proverbial forbidden fruit,” Horatio murmured.

  “I guess,” Delko said with a grin. “Anyway, hashish is basically a concentrated form of the drug, made of bits of resinous stalk and leaf processed and pressed together—sort of like particleboard.”

  “Using different parts of the hemp plant instead of glue and sawdust.”

  “Right. Used to be made for the same reason, too—using leftover materials to generate out a cheap product, squeeze out a few more dollars worth of profit. Workers harvesting plants would get sticky hands, covered in resin and bits of leaf; they’d rub their fingers together and produce little balls of black goo.”

  Delko walked over to the table and picked up one of the trays. It was just a rectangular wooden frame with what looked like shiny yellow cloth stretched across it, stained with long streaks of green.

  “Then, of course, technology got into the picture,” Delko said. “People figured out that if you could separate the trichomes from the rest of stuff, and just press that, you’d have a product with a lot more punch. Looks like Lucent couldn’t make up his mind which process he wanted to use; he’s got several on the go in here.”

  “Is that silk?” Horatio asked.

  “Yeah. They rub the leftovers—called skuff—against it; the trichomes are small enough to break off and pass through the weave, but nothing else is. Sometimes they use steel mesh instead. It generates this fine dust, which they collect and press into little bricks—using that.” Delko put down the screen and pointed out something that looked like a vise with a fire extinguisher attached. “Hydraulic press.”

  “Uh-huh. And this device here?” He nodded at the metal cube.

  “Same idea, only mechanized. It’s called a drum machine—it’s got a drum inside that revolves, with a built-in screen. Basically, it works just like a clothes dryer.”

  “Except you can get high off the lint it collects…what about the kitchen equipment?” Horatio indicated several blenders and mixers on the table.

  “Well, the blenders use a different principle, which is that the trichome glands are heavier than water, while the rest of the skuff isn’t. They add ice and water to the skuff, which makes the glands brittle, then agitate the mix to break them off.”

  “Sounds like a marijuana margarita.”

  “Looks like one, too. The slush gets strained through a metal mesh, then put in a fridge to separate. After a half hour or so, the trichomes settle out, sinking to the bottom. They skim off the stuff floating on top and throw it away, then filter the remainder through these.” Delko picked up a stack of crinkle-edged paper cones. “Ordinary coffee filters. What’s left is dried out and then pressed into bricks.”

  “Okay. Last of all, we have all these five-gallon plastic buckets. Professor Delko?”

  “I did a little research, all right?” Delko said, sounding half-embarras
sed and half-proud. “Anyway, these combine the ice-water and screen techniques. They use a hand-mixer to agitate a mix of ice, water and skuff, let it settle, then filter it through these.” Delko picked up what looked like a small blue cloth sack with the number 220 on the side. “Technology again. The mesh weave is only two hundred twenty microns in diameter; that’s for the first filter. After that, they use a series of bags nested inside each other, each one with a successively smaller weave—the last one being around twenty-five microns or so. Fewer and fewer contaminants make it through the weave, so the residue left in the last bag is the purest and strongest; it’s sometimes called ‘bubble hash’ because it’s so pure it bubbles when exposed to flame.”

  Horatio walked over to the fridge, opened it and looked inside. Jars of greenish water with white sediment at the bottom filled the upper shelves, while square black bricks were stacked up on the lower ones.

  “Mixers, blenders, coffee filters and dryers,” Horatio murmured. “Very domestic. The one thing I don’t see, though, is a large quantity of source material—an operation like this must go through a lot, and the bag Lucent was carrying couldn’t be more than a pound or so.”

  “He must get regular deliveries,” Delko said. “Looks like we caught him at the end of the week.”

  “Right. The question is, who’s supplying him…and how is this connected to the deaths of Ruth Carrell and Phillip Mulrooney?”

  Horatio slipped his sunglasses back on. “Come on—let’s go see what our little homemaker has to tell us….”

  7

  “MISTER LUCENT,” Horatio said pleasantly. “That’s quite the operation you had going.”

  Samuel Lucent glared across the interview table at Horatio with undisguised hostility.

  “Thank you, mon,” he said sarcastically.

  “The problem, of course, is that no matter how you process it, the psychoactive ingredient remains the same—at least in a legal sense. Considering the quantity you had in your possession, you’re looking at a felony conviction and up to five years in prison.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Lucent said.