by Donn Cortez
Horatio gave him an indulgent, fatherly look. “I intend to. What you don’t know is how lucky you are that I nailed you instead of the DEA…see, those guys confiscate everything they can get their hands on—cash, cars, property, jewelry—and sell it at auction. And you know where all that money goes?”
“I do,” Lucent said sullenly. “Right back into their very own budget.”
“That’s right. So if I were a DEA agent, I’d be kind of unhappy that you forced me to put holes in that shiny new Jet Ski you tried to escape in. It wouldn’t look good on my bottom line. But—lucky you—I don’t give half a damn about that. Actually, I don’t much care about the stack of homemade bricks piled up in your refrigerator, either.”
Horatio could see he had the man’s attention. “And why would that be?” he asked suspiciously.
“Because I have other concerns. Two people have died and it’s my job to catch who’s responsible. That’s a job I take very seriously…whereas putting away a middle-management lab rat like yourself barely shows up on my radar.”
“What are you trying to tell me, mon?”
“I’m saying that, as far as I know, nobody’s ever died from smoking hashish. And while it’s true you did run, you didn’t take a shot at me—which, in my book, goes a long way toward establishing you as a salvageable human being. If you cooperate, I could talk to the judge and ask for leniency.”
Lucent considered this. “I don’t know nothing about any killings,” he said finally. “And I’m not gonna rat anybody else out—”
“I’m not interested in going after your supplier or your customers,” Horatio said. “Unless one or the other is involved in murder. Is that the case?”
“I told you, I don’t know about no murders—”
“Okay, then. How about Albert Humboldt?”
“What about him?”
“You know him, then?”
Lucent shifted in his chair uneasily. “I suppose I do. We hang together, by and by.”
“That a euphemism for getting high?”
“Hey, I did not say—”
Horatio put his hand up. “Don’t bother. I already know you dealt a little hash to Humboldt. I don’t care. What did Humboldt tell you about the toilet you installed at the restaurant he worked at?”
“The what?” He sounded completely baffled.
Horatio sighed. “The toilet, Samuel,” he said. “For The Earthly Garden. Stainless steel bowl, connecting copper pipe?”
“Uh—sure, yes. Al was very specific about what he wanted. Had to special-order it and everything.”
“He tell you why?”
Lucent frowned. “He kept making little jokes. Something about a hot seat, I think, which makes no sense—steel is chilly, you know? But then, Al is a strange one, I think.”
“Oh? How so?”
“The whole Vitality Method thing. Very, very strange, it seem to me. He seem to think it will make him happy and popular, but I think it just make him dumb and stupid. He scrubbing dishes for nothing, you know? All because the big doctor say it good for his soul.”
Horatio sat down in a chair opposite Lucent. “And how does the doctor feel about his patients using drugs?”
“Oh, he don’t like it one bit,” Lucent said with a chuckle. “Al, he get in plenty of trouble when he get caught. But he still like to smoke, you know.”
“I see. How about any of the other people at the restaurant? Any of them like to smoke?”
Lucent eyed him speculatively. “I think maybe yes. Never with me, you know, but from the way Al talk, I think now and then somebody there might like a little puff too.”
“It seems like Doctor Sinhurma doesn’t run a very tight ship….”
Lucent laughed. “Maybe not, but he got some pretty fine women, you know?”
Horatio smiled. “So you’ve been out to the clinic?”
“Just the one time. Beautiful people everywhere! But it all too much for me—I like my sleep, you know? Those crazy mothers, they up at the crack of dawn doing push-ups, don’t eat nothing but rice. Not for me, I think.”
“I can see how you might find that limiting,” Horatio said. “So nobody else involved with Sinhurma has ever been in your little drug kitchen?”
“No way.”
“You better not be lying to me,” Horatio said mildly. “Because my people are going over every square inch of that place even as we have this conversation. And if you’re being less than honest, the words I put in that judge’s ear will be less than flattering.”
“I swear, mon,” Lucent said.
Ryan Wolfe had the light table in the layout room covered with knives, cleavers, and blades of various sizes and shapes. He had a short length of Kevlar-coated wire that approximated the scrap Horatio had found on the rocket, and he methodically used each and every tool to carve a small chunk off the wire. He then used the comparison microscope to examine each sample side by side with the first, looking for a match.
He didn’t find one.
It didn’t mean he was out of options, though. Delko’s linking of the knives to the plumber through gas residue gave him an idea; if the fuel mixture for the rocket was, as Horatio had theorized, a custom blend, then maybe he could find the person who mixed it.
He hit the web, then made some phone calls. Ryan himself had never done any rocketry, but some of his friends from school had been just as geeky as himself; it didn’t take long to find one with contacts in the local amateur rocketry scene. He told Ryan he’d send a few e-mails and get back to him.
Ten minutes later there was a message in his in-box giving him a time and place. He jotted it down on a piece of paper, then headed out to pick up some Diet Coke and Cheetos. Regardless of whether they were playing D&D, tinkering with computers or building model rockets, there were some things a gathering of geeks always required; by bringing an offering of such goods, Wolfe hoped that his status as a cop would be less of an issue.
It probably didn’t matter, though. Even though many geeks identified themselves as rebels, few of them could resist the lure of esoteric technical knowledge, and as a CSI, Wolfe had plenty of that coin of the realm.
He just hoped they wouldn’t ask to play with his gun.
“Okay, first of all,” the overweight man with the bushy orange beard said, “we’re not into model rocketry. We’re into amateur rocketry.”
Wolfe sat on the edge of a beat-up green recliner, both of its arms patched with gray duct tape. Across from him was a couch in even worse condition, completely upholstered in some god-awful tartan fabric except for its middle cushion, which was covered with dark brown leather and somehow gave the impression that the sofa was missing a tooth.
At the moment, there were three men sitting on it, all of them clutching plastic Big Gulp containers filled with approximately enough Cola product to carbonate and caffeinate a fish tank. The men at either end of the couch were both recognizable as archetypal geeks to Wolfe; heavyset, bearded, eyeglassed, wearing baggy shorts and T-shirts that proclaimed allegiance to a brand of software and a science fiction franchise respectively. One had frizzy orange hair that stuck up, the other had black hair pulled back in a ponytail; other than that, they could have been brothers.
The one between was as thin as the other two were fat, as if by sitting in the middle he had lost half his mass to either side through osmosis. He had a bony face, a shiny cranium fringed with white hair, and a nose road-mapped by red veins. He wore a checked sweater vest over a short-sleeved pale blue shirt, stained brown corduroy pants and sandals with black socks.
“What’s the difference?” Wolfe asked.
The one with the ponytail—Mark—rolled his eyes. Eye-rolling was as common a trait in geekdom, Wolfe had noted, as high-fiving was amongst jocks.
“Model rocketry is basically for kids,” Mark said. “You buy the rocket and the motor commercially, it’s all very safe. Amateur rocketry is about innovation—coming up with your own designs, your own fuel mixes, your own payloa
ds. Half the time our stuff explodes on the pad or in midair.”
“I don’t think that’s really fair?” the one in the middle—Bruno—said. He had the kind of Southern accent that turned every statement into a question. “I mean, I think our ratio of successful missions to CATOs is closer to seventy/thirty?”
“CATO?”
“Catastrophic Take-Off,” the redhead—Gordon—answered. “It’s how we refer to a rocket that blows up.”
“So you guys make your own rockets.”
“Mostly,” Gordon said. He took a long, meditative pull on the thick blue straw stuck in his Big Gulp. “We mess around sometimes with adapting commercial designs, seeing how big a motor we can put in, that kinda thing.”
“Excuse me?” Bruno said. “I also don’t think it’s fair to say that model rocketry is just for kids? Some model rockets are really quite powerful?”
“So what?” Mark said. “It’s all just preassembled, commercial crap. It’s like thinking that buying an SUV makes you some kind of outdoorsman. Any idiot with the money can walk into a hobby shop, buy a sport scale, slap on some flashy decals and stick a G motor in it. That doesn’t make him a rocketeer.”
Gordon laughed. “Mark doesn’t think anyone’s a rocketeer, unless they’ve built the airframe out of PVC pipe, mixed the fuel on their own stove, hand-painted the thing and then launched it using an ignition system made of old strobe-light parts.”
“Don’t mock the Space Condor,” Mark said. “It was a creature of nobility and grace.”
“It flew twenty feet sideways and set your neighbor’s doghouse on fire,” Gordon said. “With the dog in it.”
“Science requires sacrifice,” Mark said.
“Uh, so this is the whole club?” Wolfe asked. Another identifying characteristic of geeks was that when you got them in a group, any conversation had the tendency to abruptly veer off on a bizarre tangent, then keep changing direction as it ricocheted off puns, anecdotes, technical information, pop culture quotes and the occasional non sequitur. You had to keep a firm grip on the narrative rudder or you’d wind up mired in a discussion of the engineering specs of Seven of Nine’s underwear.
“Nah, we got here early to talk to you,” Gordon said. “The rest are coming in half an hour or so for the cooking party.”
“Um. Uh. Erm,” Bruno said, suddenly looking intensely uncomfortable.
“Oh, take a pill—a red one,” Gordon told him. “Roger vouched for him, okay? Besides, cooking parties aren’t illegal—you really think we’d invite him if we’d get into trouble?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Wolfe said. “Don’t worry about that. Gordon already showed me your storage facilities. You guys are fine.”
Cooking parties, as Wolfe’s friend Roger had explained to him, were social events where rocket enthusiasts got together to mix fuel. Ammonium perchlorate composite propellant, one of the trace elements found in the residue of the rocket launched from The Earthly Garden, had been classified by the Safe Explosives Act of 2002 as a low explosive; though rocket-builders had been using it for years, in order to purchase it now they were required to be fingerprinted, have their backgrounds checked and have their propellant storage be available at any time for inspection by local and federal authorities. To get around this, rocketeers invoked a law allowing low explosives to be manufactured for personal use; originally designed to let farmers mix fuel oil and fertilizer to blast irrigation ditches, it also worked just fine when applied to brewing up model rocket fuel.
“Really, I appreciate you sitting down with me like this,” Wolfe said. “I just want the benefit of your expertise for a few moments.”
“What do you want to know?” Mark asked.
“Well, I’m trying to figure out the origin of a particular blend of rocket fuel. It was used to send a rocket to a height of two thousand feet and had this chemical composition.” He handed Gordon a sheet with the mass spec figures on it.
“Hmmm. Candy rocket,” Gordon said. Bruno and Mark were both leaning over, trying to read the paper at the same time.
“With an APCP kicker?” Bruno added.
“Gotta be at least an I class,” Mark muttered.
“My boss says it was probably a J motor,” Wolfe said.
“I said at least an I class,” Mark retorted. “Probably a J, or even a K.”
“Anything over a G requires certification,” Gordon said. “A G motor is one defined as capable of generating an impulse of eighty-eight Newton-seconds but not exceeding a hundred sixty Newton-seconds.”
“But if he mixed the fuel himself, he wouldn’t have to worry about that,” Mark pointed out. “APCP is only regulated above sixty-two and a half grams. He obviously didn’t use that much.”
“And this rocket was used to commit a crime?” Bruno asked—at least, Wolfe thought it was an actual question.
“It’s part of the evidence of a crime scene, yes,” Wolfe said. “I can’t say too much, I’m sorry.”
“I bet it was drugs,” Mark said. “Somebody stuffed a rocket full of crack and it blew up all over a playground or something.”
“Why would they do that?” Bruno said.
“Smuggling,” Mark said.
“What, smuggling a few hundred yards?” Gordon scoffed. “That doesn’t make any sense. I bet it was some crack house or something, and some tweaker came up with the idea of keeping his stash in a rocket pointed out the window, just in case of a raid—”
“Might work if you could dump it in the ocean,” Mark said. “You could even have a second stage that went off when it hit the water, turn it into a torpedo so it would be almost impossible to find—”
“Ha!” Gordon exclaimed. “I can just see a bunch of DEA guys busting down the door, and then this crackhead hits the ignitor and fires this thing out the window—”
“And the police? Would probably think it was a mortar or something?”
“Oh, man,” Gordon chortled. “That would wind up being such a bad idea—”
“Guys?” Wolfe interjected. “It had nothing to do with drugs, okay?” Which wasn’t strictly true, but he had to try and get them back on track before they started designing a narcotic-loaded air-to-sea missile. “What I need to know is, do any of you recognize this particular fuel mix?”
“People don’t generally dope candy rockets with ammonium perchlorate,” Mark said. “Iron oxide or charcoal, maybe, to increase the burn rate.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen this, either?”
“Sorry, man,” Gordon said. “But people are experimenting with mixes all the time. You could check who’s registered to buy APCP, I guess—but a lot of rocketeers aren’t going to be on it. We have a problem with the idea that a fed or a cop could search our premises at any time, without a warrant, just because we have a hobby that involves firing little tubes into the air. That’s why we have cooking parties in the first place.”
“Firing little tubes in the air is a pretty good description of how to shoot down an airplane,” Wolfe said quietly.
“Sure, if you have a sophisticated guidance system to make sure you actually hit the thing, and something a lot more volatile than APCP,” Mark said. “The stuff is less explosive than gasoline, for Christ’s sake! And even if you manage to document every molecule in the country, any terrorist that really wanted to make his own rocket would just do exactly what your guy did—he’d use sugar! What’s the government going to do, outlaw candy?”
“I…see your point,” Wolfe conceded. “But it’s not really as simple as that—”
“Well, no, the actual fuel-making process is a little more complicated,” Mark said, missing Wolfe’s point entirely. “You need an oxidizer, of course. Your guy used potassium nitrate—saltpeter—which is pretty standard and easy to get. It’s used in fertilizer, preserving meat, even toothpaste. You have to bind it with the fuel, in this case dextrose—”
“Which is also interesting, actually,” Gordon put in. “Most candy rockets use sucrose. Dextrose is a good c
hoice, though—lower melting point and less caramelization.”
“True,” Mark said. “That’s important when you’re mixing the slurry.”
“Slurry?” Wolfe said.
“The blend of oxidizer and fuel. First, though, you have to grind both up into a fine powder. Then you can heat them together or mix them dry. You gotta be careful if you do it dry, though—the mix is really combustible at that point.”
“So it’s safer to mix by heating it up?” Wolfe asked.
“Long as you’re careful, yeah,” Mark said. He shifted on the couch, wedging his Big Gulp between his thighs. “I use an electric deep fryer for that kinda thing—no exposed heating element, and you can control the temperature exactly. Anyway, you let the finished product cool and mold it into shape—that’s basically it. Stick it in an airframe, jam a couple Nichrome-tipped wires in it and hook the other end to a battery, you got yourself a rocket.”
Wolfe nodded. “So whoever mixed this up knew what he was doing. He was an experienced rocketeer.”
“Definitely,” Gordon said. The other two nodded in agreement.
“In that case,” Wolfe said reluctantly, “I’m going to need a copy of your membership list.”
There was a sudden silence. Gordon looked amazed, Bruno looked stunned and Mark looked like he’d been expecting it all along.
“You want our fingerprints, too?” Mark said sarcastically.
“That won’t be necessary,” Wolfe said.
Working a crime scene was, Horatio thought, much like writing a novel. The common perception was that it was a linear process: fact A led to fact B, which led to conclusion C and so on. A nice straight line, starting at the beginning and running to the end.
In practice, though, it was—like life itself—essentially fractal. Just as every twist of the plot led the imagination of the author to explore another possibility, every piece of evidence branched off in a different direction, each leading down a different path.
Fiction, though, contained endless possibilities, endless choices. Fortunately for Horatio, evidence did not; sooner or later it would lead him either to what he was looking for or to a dead end. The image of a tree with infinite, extending branches was often in his mind when the details of a case began to spread into increasingly wider territory.