Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  So, Wolfe thought, assume they must have been hidden. How?

  He looked around. Maybe something on wheels?

  There was a tall, multishelved aluminum cart in one corner, the kind usually used for bakery deliveries. Wolfe grabbed it, rolled it over to the window. The top shelf just obscured the sill—and it was wide enough to block any view of the first-aid kit as well.

  The cart’s shelves were open on two sides. The controller could have been on one of the middle shelves, right at the back. Stick a few loaves of bread in front of it, you wouldn’t be able to see it at all. Of course, there is the problem of when you’d set all this up—do it before the restaurant opens and you risk it being there all day, maybe being discovered. And then you’d have to get rid of it all afterward.

  He rolled the cart back out of the way, got a chair and put it against the wall. He climbed up on it and studied the sill of the window carefully.

  “Huh,” he said. “Interesting.”

  It wasn’t what was there, though; it was what wasn’t….

  “Scorch marks,” Wolfe told Horatio. They were back in the computer lab, Horatio studying images of the end of the copper pipe on a large flatscreen.

  “I didn’t find any,” Wolfe continued. “You said the lightning bolt vaporizes the wire connecting it to the rocket, right?”

  “That’s what my sources tell me.”

  “If the Kevlar-coated wire led directly to the pipe, we’d see charring along the pathway—it would have had to be in contact with the sill, the wall, probably the edge of the hole. So the fact that there wasn’t any—”

  “—means a heavier grade of wire was used to make the connection,” Horatio finished. “Sure. I’d come to the same conclusion myself.”

  “You—had. Oh.”

  Horatio smiled patiently. “Good thinking. The question is, exactly what sort of wire are we looking for…and where is it?”

  Wolfe looked over at the screen. “Studying the tool marks? Calleigh said she was having a hard time telling new ones from old.”

  “It is pretty marked up,” Horatio admitted. A network of scratches crisscrossed the pipe, the heaviest concentration near the ends. “But I’ve got a theory. You see these gouges right here?” He tapped the screen.

  Wolfe peered at it for a moment. “Looks like it was made by something with teeth—vise grips or pliers, maybe.”

  “Just what I thought. Could have been made when the pipe was installed, or even when it was cut. But Calleigh hasn’t been able to match it to any tool, plumbing or otherwise.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that what we’re looking for is a heavy-duty wire with a clamp at the end—at both ends, actually.”

  “Jumper cables?” Wolfe tried.

  “Jumper cables. Not quite as common in Miami as the colder parts of the country, but even here vehicles sometimes need a boost.”

  “Could be in the bottom of a canal by now.”

  “True. But that doesn’t mean we stop looking.”

  Wolfe hesitated, then said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to come across as negative.”

  “Negative or positive are equally wrong, Mister Wolfe. Objective, focused and patient are what we strive for.”

  “Right. What’s next?”

  “Well, we still need to find or at least identify the launch system. Any progress on that?”

  “I think I know where in the restaurant it was placed, but that’s about it. And unfortunately my contacts in the rocket community have sort of—blown up.”

  “All right. I have a contact of my own—I’ll see if he can shed any more light on the subject. In the meantime, we’re also looking for jumper cables; that means we check vehicles. I noticed a large white van parked at the clinic the last time I was there, and I’m betting that’s how Sinhurma ferries his patients to the restaurant and back.”

  “Think we can get a search warrant?”

  Horatio smiled. “We don’t have to. The knives we found in the kitchen and the statement Ferra made about witnessing a drug transaction in the restaurant between Lucent and Humboldt tie The Earthly Garden to the hashish operation. That means, under the Florida Contraband Forfeiture Act, that we can impound anything connected to the business that might be the proceeds of drug-dealing, especially if those proceeds are seen to be highly mobile. That definitely applies to the van—and does not require a warrant.”

  “And once it’s in in our possession, we’re legally allowed to inventory its contents,” Wolfe said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be that easy to tie Sinhurma himself to a drug-dealing operation.”

  “Maybe not,” Horatio said. “But that’s not our intention at the moment. If it also happens to make the doctor nervous, that’s just a bonus….”

  Jason McKinley’s office at Atmosphere Research Technologies was neat and sparse, the only clutter a row of action figures posed on top and around his monitor. There was a file cabinet along one wall, a corkboard covered in sheets of printout above it and a small desk that held his computer.

  Jason himself was seated behind the desk, and stood up to shake Horatio’s hand when he came in. There was no other chair, so Horatio remained standing when Jason sat down again.

  “So, back to pick my brains?” Jason said. His voice sounded thick and phlegmy, and his eyes were red. “You keep this up, I won’t have any left.”

  “You look a little—if you’ll pardon the expression—under the weather,” Horatio said.

  Jason pulled out a wad of partially used tissue and blew his nose. “Excuse me,” he said. “Allergies. Some people get ’em in the spring, I get ’em in the fall. If I take medication, I can’t concentrate on anything more complex than making a cup of coffee—so, I suffer. Anyway, what did you need?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me about launch systems.”

  “Sure. Pretty straightforward, really. There’s two kinds, rod and rail—”

  “This would be a rail.”

  “Ah. Okay, then, there are a number of options, most of which are electrical. You can use something called green fuse or Jetex wick to set off a rocket like an old-fashioned stick of dynamite—you know, light the fuse with a match and stick your fingers in your ears—but it’s illegal and unreliable. Pretty unlikely, too, I’d say.

  “There’s an igniter kit sold under the name FireStar that’s popular. Comes with a solution you have to mix up and then dip wires into—the voltage you need for ignition varies with the thickness of wire you use.”

  “How much voltage are we talking about?”

  “Six to twelve volts. Hachoo! Excuse me. Now, if it was a single composite motor, they might have used a copperhead, which is made of two strips of copper separated by a thin layer of Mylar. That takes a lot of juice, though—twelve volts at least, and they’re not that reliable.”

  “Twelve volts,” Horatio mused. “Like a motorcycle battery?”

  “Yeah, they get used a lot—smaller than a car battery, with enough of a charge to ignite black powder. Or you could go with a Magnelite, which doesn’t take quite as much power and uses magnesium-tipped wires—they burn really hot, good for single high-power motors.” He blew his nose again.

  “What about lower-power systems?” Horatio asked.

  “Well, there’s an Electric Match—they only need two hundred milliamps. Or if you go really minimal, you’ll use a flashbulb igniter. They fire at fifty milliamps, setting off a Thermalite fuse. You have to be careful with ’em, though—flashbulbs can be touchy. Easy to set off by accident if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “So if you were designing an idiot-proof, easily transportable launch system, you’d probably use a Magnelite igniter and a nine-to-twelve-volt power system—maybe a lantern battery?” Horatio asked.

  “Maybe,” Jason said. “You find the rocket yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, we have,” Horatio said. “It more or less fit the description you provided.”

  “I’m g
lad I could help,” he said. “You know what? I think I’m gonna give in and take some antihistamines after all. Better to sit here with my brain fried than drown in my own mucus.”

  “Well, then, I better leave you to it,” Horatio said, smiling. “I wouldn’t want to have to arrest you for doing research while under the influence.”

  Jason tried to laugh, but it came out more like a wheeze. “Wouldn’t be the first time….”

  After he left Jason, Horatio drove around for a while just thinking. A lot of CSI work was like that; you could only collect so much data before you had to sit down and actually figure out what it meant. Eric liked to mull things over while he was running, Calleigh said she got some of her best ideas while on the shooting range, but Horatio did a lot of his processing behind the wheel. There was something Zen-like about all those activities, when the body was doing something it had done a million times before. It focused the will while leaving the mind more or less unoccupied, and therefore free to solve problems.

  His drive took him past the Holocaust Memorial on Meridian Avenue, and as always, the forty-two-foot sculpture seemed to squeeze his heart as he looked at it. A gigantic hand of green-painted bronze reached up toward the sky in a desperate gesture that implied both hope and despair, grasping for…what? Help, certainly, but from whom? God, or Man?

  A line of numbers—a concentration camp tattoo—ran down the arm and into the base of the sculpture, a writhing mass of naked humanity: men, women, children, some of them embracing, some of them trying to claw their way out, some of them trying to help others. A glimpse into hell. It never failed to move Horatio, and today it turned his thoughts toward questions he had no answers to.

  They weren’t questions of theology, though. Despite its trappings, this case wasn’t about religion; as far as Horatio was concerned it was about a con man, plain and simple, one who’d lied and manipulated his way into his victims’ lives and now threatened them. That was something he intended to prevent…because, in the end, it didn’t matter who the victims were reaching out to.

  What mattered was that someone take that hand, and pull them up.

  “There are three kinds of DNA in plants,” Valera said. She and Calleigh were looking over her data in the DNA lab. “Chloroplast, mitochondrial and nuclear. We use nuclear cells for IDing species, and PCR the chloroplast to generate a profile of a specific plant.”

  Calleigh nodded. Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR, was an umbrella term for DNA typing. It involved extracting DNA from a cell, then getting it to replicate itself millions of times over in a process sometimes referred to as molecular xeroxing.

  “In a human subject,” Valera said, “I’d use the Short Tandem Repeat method for further analysis.” STR used an electrophoretic gel or capillary device to separate and identify a number of different DNA markers at the same time, in a process called multiplexing.

  “Right,” Calleigh said. She was familiar with the thirteen specific DNA sites, or core loci, that were used by law enforcement to ID a specific individual.

  “But typing plants for forensic purposes isn’t as advanced a science as human genetic fingerprinting,” Valera cautioned. “The polymorphic loci aren’t as firmly established, and they haven’t been physically mapped to chromosomes yet—let alone done any multiplexing. I could have gone with RAPD testing, where we add random sequences of PCR primers, get the oligomers to bind with the template, then stain the gel with ethidium bromide to produce a band pattern—but there’ve been a few problems with that. Different labs have produced different results, probably because their thermal cycler ramp speeds vary.”

  “Your results are only as accurate as your equipment,” Calleigh said.

  “So I went with AFLP—Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphisms. It uses PCR to amplify restriction fragments with attached adapter oligomer sequences. We add fluorescent dye, which gets incorporated at the same time the PCR primers bind to the oligomers, which amplifies DNA fragments of varying sizes. A DNA sequencer with a laser makes the dye fluoresce and generates a banded pattern. This gets recorded by a CCD camera and we run the whole thing through an analysis program, which stores and interprets the pattern.”

  “Sounds fairly advanced to me,” Calleigh said.

  “Well, they’re really just adaptations of the technology we use for human DNA testing—but it can produce a result you never see outside of science fiction movies.” Valera gave her two pieces of paper, which Calleigh compared side by side.

  “Identical genetic sequences,” she said. “Clones.”

  “That’s right. Dope growers have been refining and cross-breeding different strains for four decades; when they get a really high-quality product, they take a cutting and grow more of the same. And while they don’t mind sharing seeds, they’re more proprietary about cuttings.”

  “Like owning a prize bloodhound,” Calleigh said. “You might put him out to stud, but there’s a certain pride of ownership that comes with possession of the original.”

  “Well, none of your samples shared the same pedigree.”

  Calleigh frowned. “But these two are identical.”

  “Yes, but the one in your left hand didn’t come from any of the samples you gave me. A lab in Wisconsin has been trying to put together a database of marijuana DNA; they’ve already got data from Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Wyoming, West Virginia, Tennessee…” Valera paused, frowning, then added, “…Kentucky, Vermont, Georgia, Canada, and Taiwan. I went to school with one of the people working on it, and she was nice enough to give me access. One of the profiles in their database matched yours, so I tracked down the case file, too.” Valera handed over a folder.

  Caleigh opened it, scanned the first page. “Hmmm. Now that is intriguing. Looks like I should pay a visit to the pound…”

  Horatio was about to tuck in to a Cuban sandwich at Auntie Bellum’s when Salas strolled up.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

  “Please,” Horatio said.

  She slid into the booth on the other side. “Eating alone, Horatio? No one wants the pleasure of your company?”

  He smiled and picked up his sandwich. “You’re here.”

  “Yes, but I’m a glutton for punishment. Other people apparently don’t have my high Caine threshold.”

  “I sense I’m not going to like what you’re about to tell me.”

  She reached over and stole one of his French fries, holding it delicately between a red-nailed forefinger and thumb. “That depends. If you enjoy being told you’ve pissed off the people that sign your paycheck, then you’ll be ecstatic.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich, chewed thoughtfully and swallowed before answering. “And what, pray tell, would the brass be upset with me for?”

  She stared at him skeptically. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t know?”

  Horatio drank some iced tea. “I didn’t say that,” he said, putting down the glass. “I just happen to like the way you deliver bad news.”

  “The mayor had a supermodel scream at him this morning.”

  “See? That’s what I mean,” Horatio said with a grin. “A screaming supermodel is vastly more entertaining than simply being told I screwed up.”

  “Horatio, you screwed up.”

  “Did I?”

  She pointed the French fry at him accusingly. “You know, that habit you have of ending every other sentence with a question mark can be really annoying. And if you say ‘Is that so?’ I’m gonna clock you.”

  “All right then, I’ll stick to making definitive statements. Statement number one: I know exactly what I’m doing. Statement number two: I’m sure the mayor has been yelled at by people a lot scarier than a professional mannequin. And statement number three: nervous people make mistakes.”

  “So impounding every vehicle at the Vitality Method clinic was just a scare tactic?”

  “Not every vehicle. Just the ones owned by Sinhurma.”

  “Which, as it turns out, are basically all of them—
his less well-to-do patients sign ownership over to him in lieu of payment, and his richer clients just give him cars.”

  “Yes, we took away three Mercedes,” Horatio said. “Delko couldn’t wait to start ripping them apart.”

  “Oh, wipe that smirk off your face. You really think you can get away with using the contraband act to pressure Sinhurma?”

  “I needed to rattle him, Yelina. Locked away in that compound, surrounded by people who worship him, he thinks he’s invulnerable. Nothing alters that point of view quicker than a few squad cars showing up and taking away your toys.”

  “And that’s all you hope to accomplish? Shaking him up?”

  Horatio shook his head. “No, I’m hoping to find more evidence. Specifically, evidence in the Mulrooney murder.”

  “None of which will be admissible if you can’t make the forfeiture stand up in court.”

  “Sinhurma is drugging his patients without their knowledge or consent, and making a hefty profit out of it. It’ll stand.”

  She sighed. “Okay. I’m just the messenger, anyway; personally, I hope you nail the bastard. But be careful; Sinhurma has a lot of powerful friends.”

  “Not for long…”

  The man sitting across the scarred wooden table from Calleigh wore an orange jumpsuit, prison-issue sneakers and a sneer. His eyes were blue and his hair was no more than short blond fuzz covering his scalp like a peach; he was handsome, in a heavy-lipped, heavy-lidded kind of way. His name was Joseph Welfern Junior, and he was currently a resident of Dade Correctional Institute.

  “Mister Welfern,” Calleigh said. “I’ve got a few questions for you.”

  The man’s sneer twitched into something closer to a grin. “Go ahead an’ ask. I got nothin’ better’n do than shoot the breeze.”

  Calleigh glanced down at the file she held. “I see you were arrested for transporting marijuana.”

  “Hell, that was just a little stash for personal use.” His tone was friendly.