Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

“Fourteen pounds?” Calleigh said. “What do you use it for, insulation?”

  He laughed. “Okay, okay. But I was just the driver, all right? Didn’t grow it, didn’t sell it. Didn’t even know what I was haulin’, but that didn’t stop the cops from takin’ away my truck.”

  “Well, that’s what you told the court, but apparently they found it somewhat hard to believe. So do I.”

  Welfern shrugged. “Believe what you wanna. Ain’t gonna matter much to me.”

  “It might. A letter of recommendation from an officer can carry some weight at a parole hearing—and you’ve got one coming up in two weeks.”

  “So I do,” he admitted. “And you wanna know what, exactly?”

  “We’ve matched the strain of marijuana you were transporting to a hash-making operation in Miami. We know where the dope was headed; we’d like to know where it was coming from.”

  He snorted. “Is that all? Y’all are wasting your time, blondie. Don’tcha think that was the first thing they asked me to give up? If I couldn’t do it then, why could I do it now?”

  She gazed at him levelly. “Maybe it’s not that you couldn’t; maybe you just wouldn’t. Be strong, do the time. But you’ve been in here a while now, and what has it gotten you? I bet you spend a lot of time thinking about the guys that didn’t get caught, that didn’t go to jail. About all the things they’re getting to do that you’re not…”

  She let that hang in the air for a moment, then smiled warmly. “I’ll bet the closer that parole hearing gets the more you think about all those things. And how terrible it would be if they didn’t let you out. Might make you wonder if you hadn’t made a big mistake in the first place…but that’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Any chance you had to make a deal is long gone. What a shame.”

  His grin had vanished. “You got no idea how it works,” he said.

  “Don’t I? You roll over when you’re arrested, it’s obvious who talked. You do it now, nobody’ll notice. Especially if the bust comes from a completely different direction—in this case, as part of a murder investigation.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “And if I keep my mouth shut, you screw me with the parole board, right?”

  “No,” Calleigh said. “I didn’t come here to threaten you, Mister Welfern—I came here to give you a chance to do some good. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you’re interested.”

  He leaned back in his chair, stared at her through half-closed eyes. “You’ll come to my parole hearing?”

  “I’ll even wear a skirt,” Calleigh said.

  His grin came back. “Frostin’ on the cake…”

  “Nice ride,” Wolfe said. He and Delko, both in overalls, were looking at the vehicles brought in from the Vitality Method compound. The one Wolfe was admiring was a Dodge Viper painted a lurid shade of purple.

  “You should have seen the ones we didn’t take,” Delko said. “Some sitcom star was there for his daily injection, pulled up in his Maserati. I was tempted to wait until he came out again and arrest him for DUI.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Hey, this is H’s play. He’s already getting a lot of flak for the compound bust—I wasn’t about to turn us into the lead story for Entertainment Tonight.”

  Wolfe crossed his arms. “So you just let him drive away?”

  Delko grinned and shook his head. “No, I suggested to the man that if he were there for a medical procedure, it would be in his own best interests to have someone drive him home.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “With a very large, professional smile. I get the feeling it’s not the first time a cop has given him advice instead of a ticket.”

  They got to work. Each of the vehicles had to be gone through and all its contents listed; this consisted, for the most part, of writing down such mundane items as pens, tire pressure gauges, maps, combs and packages of tissues.

  In the spare tire compartment of a large white van, they found what they’d hoped for: a set of jumper cables, coiled on top of the spare like a bright orange snake with twin heads at either end.

  Wolfe picked up two of the alligator-tooth clamps, examined them carefully. “I think I’ve got something here, caught in the clamp,” he said.

  Delko picked up the other end and studied it. “I’ve got something, too—looks like copper. Let’s get these to the lab and take a closer look….”

  Darcy Cheveau looked just as relaxed waiting in the police interview room as he had the first time Horatio had talked to him at The Earthly Garden. He looked up as Horatio and Salas came in and said, “Hey,” as casually as if he were greeting someone he saw every day.

  “Mister Cheveau,” Horatio said, sitting down. Salas, as usual, remained standing. “I understand you’re the one that usually drives the Vitality Method van.”

  “Not all the time,” Cheveau said. “To and from the restaurant, usually.”

  “Uh-huh. How about maintenance? You ever have to tune it up, change the plugs, anything like that?”

  Cheveau shook his head. “Naw, man. I’m a cook, not a mechanic. The Doc gets all that stuff done professionally.”

  “So it runs okay? Never broke down on you anywhere?”

  “Nah—oh, wait a minute. Does changing a tire count? I had to do that once.”

  “That would count, yes,” Horatio said. “What about Albert Humboldt? He give you a hand?”

  “No. I changed it myself—Albert wasn’t even there. Why?”

  “So can you think of any reason Albert’s fingerprints would be on a set of jumper cables in the spare tire compartment instead of yours?”

  Cheveau stared at him for a second, then chuckled. “I don’t know, man. Albert’s a neat freak. The Doc mighta had him clean out the van or somethin’ when I wasn’t around.”

  “We also found some epithelial cells on the handle of one of the jumper cables. I was wondering if we could take a DNA sample from you to eliminate you as a suspect.”

  Cheveau shrugged. “Sure. Whatever you gotta do.” He stretched and yawned. “Just get it over with, huh? I gotta get back.”

  Looking at Cheveau, Horatio thought as he pulled out a swab, you’d never figure him to belong to a cult. He seemed like just another bad boy, the kind that always had a beautiful woman hanging off one arm and a six-pack under the other. From the way Salas was looking at him, she recognized his type too. Never thinking too far ahead, never worried about his health or his reputation or even the day after tomorrow. Guys like him seemed genetically predestined to wind up as an outlaw biker, a surfer, or a bass player in a rock band; usually, their idea of spiritual fulfillment was to live in a beer commercial.

  It just showed, he thought as Cheveau opened his mouth and Horatio stuck the cotton swab inside, that you never really knew what you were going to find when you went under the surface.

  “This is an OH-58 Kiowa,” the Florida National Guardsman told Calleigh. “Specially outfitted for the Reconnaissance and Interdiction Detachment.”

  “RAID,” Calleigh said. She squinted at the helicopter in the bright afternoon sun, shading her eyes with one hand. Matte black, with its oval body, pointed nose and tapered rear section, it reminded her more of something that swam than flew. “You military boys do love your acronyms.”

  The Guardsman, a lanky, beak-nosed man that had introduced himself as Chief Warrant Officer Stainsby, patted her canopy lovingly. “Yeah, and we love nicknames even more. They call us the ‘Grim Reefers,’ you know.”

  Calleigh smiled. “Well, considering how many marijuana crops you’ve been responsible for eliminating, that seems entirely appropriate. Shall we?”

  “After you,” Stainsby said, opening the door.

  “I want to thank you again,” Calleigh said as the rotors started up. “The directions I got were kind of vague. The person had only been there once, at night, and was being told how to get there by someone riding with him. If I tried to find it in a car I’d probably wind up hopelessly lost
.”

  “Yeah, some of the roads out there aren’t much more than trails,” Stainsby said, speaking loudly over the sound of the engine. “But we won’t be looking for roads.”

  “What will we be looking for, exactly?” she asked as they lifted off.

  “Anything out of place. You got to keep a sharp eye out, though; growers use all kinds of tricks. They hide crops by mixing them in with other plants sometimes, like corn or even tomato vines. The area we’re headed to, though, they’re probably growing it in the middle of a pine forest. Pot’s a lighter green than pine, but it takes a little experience to pick it out.”

  “Lucky I have you along, then,” Calleigh said.

  Law enforcement had been using Florida Natural Guard choppers for aerial surveillance of suspected drug crops for years. Calleigh and Stainsby were headed for an area near the Georgia/Florida border; Calleigh knew that growers near the state border liked to live on one side of the line and plant their crops on the other, hopefully confusing whose jurisdiction it was under.

  For a while they flew in silence, the racket of the chopper’s blades making it hard to talk. The landscape below them was a series of low, sandy ridges, with marshy swamps full of cypress, blackgum, bay and maple between them. The trees on the ridges varied from longleaf and slash pines to saw palmetto, and the occasional expanse of wire grass.

  “I hear some of these fields are booby-trapped,” she said at last.

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve never encountered any myself—we’re strictly recon, just spot ’em from the air—but I’ve heard stories. Fishhooks, sharpened stakes, bear traps—even shotguns wired to go off.”

  “Sounds pretty bad.”

  “They don’t care so much about cops, it’s thieves they’re trying to stop. A seven-foot-tall plant can be worth a thousand dollars; that’s a pretty good incentive to protect your investment. A lot of grow-ops are moving indoors—harder to find, easier to protect.”

  “But just as dangerous to officers,” Calleigh said. “I read about a case where the growers electrified a steel door, rigged jars of nitric acid to dump on a trespasser’s head and hooked a motion detector to a chemical spray. And then there was the lizard.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Crocodile monitor—relative of the Komodo dragon. The Komodo’s the biggest lizard in the world—they can get up to three hundred fifty pounds—but the croc’s the longest; they’ve found specimens over ten feet in length. They also have the longest fangs of any lizard, which apparently the owners of one particular grow-op thought would make a reasonably scary burglar deterrent…say, did you see that?”

  They were up around five hundred feet, flying over acres and acres of gently rolling hills of pine forest. “I thought I saw a flash down there,” Calleigh said, grabbing a pair of binoculars. “Can you circle around and get a little lower?”

  “No problem.”

  She tried to focus the binoculars on the area the flash came from. She got a blur of green—and then, suddenly, two human figures. One was standing, one kneeling.

  The flash had come from the shiny silver barrel of the large handgun the first held to the head of the second.

  “Put us down!” Calleigh yelled. “Now!”

  “Mister Humboldt,” Horatio said. “Thank you for coming in.”

  Humboldt glanced around the interview room nervously. “Is this going to take long? I’m supposed to be helping prepare dinner at the clinic—”

  “How long can it take to boil some rice?” Salas said. “But don’t worry—this’ll be over soon. We were just wondering if you could clear a few things up for us.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with what I already know,” Horatio said. “I know you have nothing to do with the driving or maintenance of the Vitality Method van. Correct?”

  “It’s—it’s not really my area, no.” Humboldt blinked several times rapidly. Salas smiled at him encouragingly.

  “And I know the jumper cables from the van were used to hook the rocket on the roof to the pipe in the toilet,” Horatio continued. “We found traces of Kevlar caught in one of the clamps, fragments of copper in another…and some skin. Guess you got a little careless when you were hooking it up, or maybe it was just awkward getting the clamp onto the pipe through that hole in the wall and your hand slipped.”

  “You—you can’t prove that—”

  “But I can. I already have your prints on the cable—and pretty soon I’ll have your DNA.”

  Horatio slapped a piece of paper down on the table. “Which is the purpose of this warrant,” he said. “I guess I owe you an apology, Albert; I don’t seem to have any questions for you at all. But you”—he said, as he pulled out a swab—“definitely have something for me….”

  10

  “PUT DOWN WHERE?” Stainsby said. “There’s no—”

  “There’s a clearing to your left!”

  The men had noticed the copter, of course—it wasn’t exactly quiet. The one with the gun, a large, bearded man in jeans, boots and a denim vest, was yelling something and waving the gun around. The one on his knees was dressed in camo fatigues and a black baseball cap—that was about all the details Calleigh had time to see before the chopper dipped down below the tree line.

  “I can’t set it down—the terrain’s too uneven!” Stainsby shouted. They were about ten feet up.

  Calleigh jumped.

  She hit the ground hard and rolled with the impact. “Get some backup out here!” she yelled, and then she was sprinting, gun already out, in the direction of the two men.

  “Miami-Dade police!” she shouted. “Put your weapon down—”

  A shot rang out.

  She darted behind a scrubby pine, which really didn’t provide much cover. The Kiowa was already shockingly far away; in another few moments the sound of its motor had faded to a distant clatter, like that of a determined woodpecker. She knew Stainsby was getting out of range of the gun, which had looked large enough to bring down the chopper if the shooter hit something vital.

  Smart move, she thought to herself. A lot smarter than her own; she was alone in the woods with an unknown armed maniac, who not only was probably more familiar with the area but apparently had a hostage.

  And booby-traps. Can’t forget about the booby-traps, she reminded herself. Somehow, she’d gone from being an observer, nice and safe in an aircraft, to starring in a Florida remake of Rambo in the space of about thirty seconds.

  Dad always did say I was too impulsive, she thought. Guess I’ll have to tell him he was right.

  She crept forward, listening intently. Birdsong and insects, nothing else. She crested a small rise and saw a camo-suited body lying motionless at its base. Even from a distance she could see that he’d been shot in the head.

  “Damn,” she whispered. She was too late.

  At least it meant she wasn’t dealing with a hostage situation—any standoff was tense, but in a situation like this it might be an hour or more before any backup arrived. That was a long time to stare down someone with a gun.

  Of course, now the shooter doesn’t have to drag a captive along. He’s free to be just as quick and sneaky as a fox…he’s probably getting a hunting rifle from his four-by-four right now. One with a high-powered scope and a laser sight.

  She shook her head, tried to stay focused. It was more likely he’d simply try to get away than get into a gun battle. All she had to do was keep her ears open; more than likely she’d hear a motor start up, and then she’d know where he was.

  But the next sound she heard wasn’t an engine. It was a deep, gravelly roar, echoing through the forest like the voice of some enraged ogre: “I AM GONNA KILL YOU!”

  So much for him running away…

  “Sir?” she called out. “I’m a Miami-Dade police officer! I’m going to have to ask you to discard your weapon—”

  “I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!” the man bellowed. “YOU AIN’T NO COP, AND YOUR PARTNERS AIN’T EITHER!”


  “Oh, lovely,” she muttered. What was she supposed to do now, stroll out and flash her badge? Recite the Police Officer’s Oath of Office?

  “You did notice the helicopter?” she called back.

  “DIDN’T LOOK LIKE NO COP HELICOPTER TO ME! MORE LIKE ARMY SURPLUS!”

  Good Lord, she thought. She was dealing with the most dangerous kind of felon: a complete idiot.

  “BESIDES—WHAT KINDA COP WOULD SHOW UP OUT HERE ALL ALONE? EVEN YOUR BUDDY TOOK OFF! PROBABLY DIDN’T WANT HIS BARGAIN-BASEMENT WHIRLYBIRD GETTIN’ ALL SHOT UP!”

  She sighed. I can’t even argue with him—no cop with half a brain would get caught in a situation like this.

  “What’s your name?” she tried.

  “DON’T MATTER WHAT MY NAME IS! I’M JUST THE ONE GONNA PUT YOU IN THE COLD, HARD GROUND, THAT’S ALL YOU GOTTA KNOW!”

  Wonderful. Even if he doesn’t shoot me, I may die of testosterone poisoning before anybody gets here. “Well, I have to call you something!”

  A pause.

  “DOOLEY!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “MY NAME! IT’S DOOLEY!”

  “Okay! Mine is—”

  “BUT I’M STILL GONNA KILL YA!”

  “All right! My name—”

  “JUST SO’S WE GOT THAT STRAIGHT!”

  “I got it, Dooley! I understand! Now do you want to know my name, or would you prefer to shoot a complete stranger?”

  That, apparently, required enough thought to distract Dooley from bellowing for a moment.

  “I AIN’T SURE!” he finally shouted. “MAYBE I’LL JUST CALL YOU TOAST!”

  “It’s Calleigh! CALLEIGH DUQUESNE!” she hollered back.

  She was answered with a gunshot. “WHATEVER YOU SAY, TOAST!”

  “Terrific,” she muttered.

  “I didn’t fire the rocket,” Humboldt said.

  Horatio stared at him coolly. “You keep saying that, Albert. Almost like you expect me to believe it.”

  “It’s true. That wasn’t—it wasn’t what I did.” He pronounced every word very clearly, very carefully, as if he were walking a verbal tightrope and didn’t want to fall off.