Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  “Then look through the menu of the BlackBerry you’re holding. I’ve loaded it up with all the data we’ve collected so far: the toxicology report on Ruth Carrell’s bloodstream, the DNA sample we took from the jumper cable that matches Albert Humboldt, photos of the tool marks on the pipe that match the jumper cables—”

  Horatio’s phone went off.

  “It’s all there, Jason,” Horatio said. “But you better make up your mind fast. I’ve got a call coming in from Doctor Sinhurma right now, and I guarantee he won’t wait forever for either of us.”

  Horatio switched phones and answered.

  “You promised you would not interfere with my envoy,” Sinhurma said tersely.

  “I haven’t gone anywhere near that trailer, Doctor. It’s not my fault if your lapdog won’t come when he’s called.”

  “Lapdog? You sound betrayed, Horatio. Could it be that seeing where Mister McKinley’s loyalties truly lie is bothering you?”

  “He’s not a prize for us to compete over, Doctor. He’s a human being, just like the rest of your followers. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  “I have lost sight of nothing, Mister Caine. I know what you’re trying to do. The wolf separates the weakest sheep from the flock before he springs.”

  Horatio ran a hand through his hair; it came away damp. “Just take it easy, Doctor. I think Mister Kim may be a bit recalcitrant when it comes to signing those documents. Mister McKinley is obviously trying to convince him, and that may take a little time—”

  “You don’t have as much time as you think, Horatio.”

  The line went dead again.

  Horatio immediately switched to the other phone. “Jason? Jason, I hate to rush you, but you need to make a decision before the doctor makes it for you.”

  No response. Then: “Horatio?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve—you’ve got a lot of data here.”

  “I know it’s a lot to take in, but—”

  “No, no, it’s fine…reminds me of cramming for finals with a head full of No-Doz and three pots of coffee sloshing around in my gut.” He sounded almost wistful. “I’m…impressed. You must have some pretty cool stuff in that lab of yours.”

  Horatio smiled. “Not quite a batcave full, but we try. If you’d like to take a look sometime, I’d be happy to show you around.”

  “Yeah? I—yeah. Okay. I’m—I’m sorry, Horatio. I’m really, really sorry.” His voice trembled.

  “It’s all right, Jason. All you did was provide information; you’re not responsible for what was done with it—”

  KA-THOOM!

  The explosion that cracked the air wasn’t the trailer going up, but a thunderbolt ripping across the sky. Static ate the cell phone signal with a deafening crackle, and the clouds overhead stopped spitting and released a torrent of water. Between the rain drumming against the tent overhead and the interference on the phone, Horatio could barely make out what Jason was trying to say.

  “—don’t let him—QZZZSSKKK—bomb—ZZZX—buried—CRKK—waiting for signal—”

  “Jason! Jason! What signal? What’s Sinhurma waiting for?”

  “KRZZZXX—shazam—”

  “Shazam,” Horatio whispered.

  He bolted out into the rain, heading for the sniper still on the crest of the dune—he couldn’t count on the walkie-talkie. By the time he got there, he was drenched from head to foot.

  “Sinhurma’s going to launch a rocket!” he barked. “If he does, shoot it down!” The sniper nodded, as if being told to shoot down rockets in the Everglades was pretty much an everyday occurrence for him.

  Forty-four feet per second, Horatio thought. Not exactly easy to hit…He hoped the sniper included skeet-shooting in his daily regimen; either that, or trying to pick off hummingbirds.

  He sprinted back to the tent, trying to raise Jason on the way. He finally got a clear signal.

  “—Horatio?”

  “I’m here. If the rocket doesn’t work, can Sinhurma set off the charges manually?”

  “Only the one under this building. Wires are buried between the trailers at the northeast corners. He has a camera there.”

  “I figured as much…. Can you defuse the explosives under your trailer from the inside? Without Sinhurma seeing you?”

  “I—I think so.”

  “Do it. Do it now.”

  Light flared above Sinhurma’s trailer, a shooting star ascending to the heavens. The rocket. It was followed by the sharp crack! crack crack! of rifle fire…but to Horatio’s dismay, the star continued to rise. He missed. It’s up to the storm now….

  He waited for the brilliant line of electricity to race down the wire and spark chaos. Waited. Waited…

  Nothing happened.

  He keyed the walkie-talkie and shouted, “Take the middle trailer! Go, go, go!”

  And then things did happen, fast.

  SWAT officers swarmed through the front door—Sinhurma hadn’t even bothered to lock it behind Jason. Gunshots echoed through the rain. Horatio waited for the trailer to go up and take everyone with it.

  But it didn’t.

  16

  “HE’S DEAD,” Horatio said.

  Jason sat in a folding chair, shivering and wet, a blanket draped around his shoulders. His hands were cuffed, but Horatio had insisted they be in front of him. Jason looked like he hadn’t slept in days, his eyes dark and haunted.

  “We found Sinhurma inside,” Horatio said. “When the rocket failed to trigger a lightning strike, he injected himself—we’re not sure with what. He was in convulsions by the time we got in.”

  “And the others?”

  “In custody. Shanique Cooperville tried to slash her wrists, but we got to her before she seriously hurt herself. The others surrendered—apparently you weren’t the only one having doubts.”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Not as much as you might think. Between your cooperation and the fact that you were drugged without your knowledge, I think we can work something out.”

  “I didn’t fire the rocket, Horatio—the one that killed Phil? I swear I didn’t.”

  “I know,” Horatio said. “I had someone look into it—you were working with Doctor Wendall that day, weren’t anywhere near The Earthly Garden. No, the rocket was launched by someone at the restaurant.”

  “Who?”

  “The same person who killed Ruth…”

  “I don’t get it,” Delko said.

  He and Wolfe were processing the trailer. Sinhurma’s body lay sprawled on the floor, his carefully crafted poise and dignity stolen by death. The hypodermic they’d found jutting from his arm had already been photographed and bagged; a thin line of foam drooled from the doctor’s open mouth to the floor.

  “What’s to get?” Wolfe said. He was taking pictures of the interior. “He was crazy, he killed himself.”

  “Not that,” Delko said. “Shazam. What the hell is shazam?”

  “It’s the magic word Billy Batson says to change into Captain Marvel,” Wolfe said. He focused carefully on the body and clicked off several photos. “Calls down a mystical bolt of lightning that gives him his superpowers.”

  “Oh,” Delko said. “Well, I guess that makes sense, then, in a deranged messiah-complex kind of way.”

  The explosives, bolted to the bottom of the trailers in waterproof tubs, had been found and disconnected by Horatio with Jason’s help. The launch console, though, still sat on a table beside Sinhurma’s body. It had several gauges for reading local electrical fields, and three toggles: one for firing the rocket and two others for detonating the trailer charges.

  Wolfe lifted it up, examined it. There was an access plate at the back that he pried off, revealing a twelve-volt battery inside. “Look at this. If anyone had taken the time to rig a simple bypass, Sinhurma could have blown himself up with the flick of a switch.”

  “Yeah, well, be thankful they didn’t. Sinhurma was so sure God was on his side that he let th
e storm make the call.”

  “But Sinhurma didn’t build this,” Wolfe said. “Jason did. And he knew there was a fifty percent chance the rocket wouldn’t trigger a lightning strike.”

  “So?”

  “So Sinhurma didn’t leave it in the hands of God,” Wolfe said. “Jason did.”

  “Guy thinks like a CSI,” Delko said. “Trust…but verify.”

  Calleigh and Horatio gazed across the interview table at the prisoner in the orange jumpsuit. He’d been held in county lockup since the standoff in the Everglades had ended; the fact that he’d narrowly escaped being blown into bloody fragments seemed to have altered his attitude since the last time Horatio had talked to him. His cocksureness was gone, replaced by a hollow-eyed, twitchy nervousness.

  Of course, Horatio thought, he could just be missing his daily vitamin shot.

  “Darcy Cheveau,” Horatio said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Yeah. Yeah,” Cheveau said. “I didn’t know how crazy he was, man. It just—it all made sense at the time, you know?’

  “I suppose,” Horatio said. “I wouldn’t suggest using that as a defense at your murder trial, though.”

  “What? Hey, I was the one that almost got killed—”

  “You may be yet,” Horatio said, and now there was an undertone of steel to his calm voice. “But it’ll be the State of Florida putting a needle in your arm as opposed to a religious fanatic with a homemade bomb.”

  “No. No way. If anybody killed anyone, it was the Doc—”

  “That’s not true,” Horatio said, “and we both know it. Sinhurma wouldn’t dirty his hands with something like murder. That’s the sort of thing you get your loyal followers to carry out.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cheveau said. He looked away, putting a hand up in a dismissive wave.

  “I’m talking about Ruth Carrell,” Horatio said. “Roll up your sleeve, please. The left one.”

  “Why?”

  “You can do it,” Calleigh said, “Or we can get an officer to do it for you.”

  Cheveau shrugged. “Whatever.” He rolled his sleeve up to the elbow.

  “Nasty welt you’ve got there,” Calleigh said. There was a swollen, reddish mark on the inside of Cheveau’s forearm.

  “Just a scrape.”

  “Yes it is,” Calleigh said. “And I can tell you exactly what scraped it. You’re not really that familiar with archery equipment, are you, Mister Cheveau?”

  “Not really. That was more Julio’s thing—he was always practicing at the clinic’s range.”

  “Which is why Sinhurma didn’t use him,” Horatio said. “Too obvious. Julio supplied the equipment, but someone else shot the arrow. Novice archers often have welts like yours—if you don’t hold the bow just right, the string strikes the inside of the forearm on release.”

  “Sure,” Cheveau said. “Like I couldn’t have gotten a mark like this a million other ways.”

  “A million other ways wouldn’t leave your epithelia embedded in the bowstring,” Calleigh said. “Which we matched to the DNA sample you gave. I can prove you used that bow.”

  “All right, so Julio lent it to me and I fired a few shots at the target range. Doesn’t mean I killed anyone.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Calleigh said. “And you know, that really bothered me. I figured a way to link the bow to the arrows found with it, and I figured a way to link you to the bow, but I couldn’t tie the arrow that killed Ruth Carrell to you or them. But I don’t give up easily…and finally, the clouds parted. And you know what I saw?”

  Cheveau forced a laugh. “I have no idea.”

  “Pollution.”

  “What?”

  “Did you know that Florida’s weather systems turn it into the nation’s storm drain?” Calleigh asked. She opened the file folder in front of her on the table. “And I mean that literally. A large proportion of the pollution spewed into the air by Eastern industry gets blown toward the coast, where it runs into moisture from the Atlantic. Big old thunderstorms form, and the rain scrubs the chemicals right out of the sky. Unfortunately, it just transfers them from one medium to another—from the air to the ecosystem. The ground, the water, and everything that lives in it.

  “During the 1980s, this was a major problem. Incinerators for medical and industrial waste were extremely popular, and were commonly used to dispose of things like batteries. Environmentalists finally got legislation passed in the early nineties, but it took about seven years before anyone started seeing concrete results.”

  Cheveau stared at her and tried to look bored. Horatio favored him with a smile that made it impossible.

  “And one of the ways those results manifested was in Floridian birds,” Calleigh continued. “See, the bird population of the Everglades went down almost ninety percent between 1950 and 1980, largely because of all the toxic materials that were winding up there—especially mercury. They know this because mercury is covalent with keratin, the substance feathers are made out of. It’s stable over a long period of time—once it’s there, it more or less stays there.”

  “And why should I care about any of this?”

  “Because, Mister Cheveau, the way that they tracked these environmental changes was to measure the amount of mercury present in feathers from Florida birds. The arrows from Julio Ferra’s garage and the arrow that killed Ruth Carrell were hand-fletched, meaning the feathers were probably local. I couldn’t DNA-type them…so I tested them for mercury contamination instead.”

  She took a sheet of paper out of the folder and pushed it across the table toward him. “The results show an identical level of mercury in both sets of feathers, right down to parts-per-million. All those feathers came from the same bird…and together with the hand-fletching, it links the arrows together.”

  “It probably doesn’t make much sense to you right now,” Horatio said. “You’re still suffering from the effects of Doctor Sinhurma’s ‘treatment.’ But don’t worry—the prosecutor will spell it all out in court.”

  “Whatever. Are we done?” Cheveau tried to sound casual, but he couldn’t hide the nervousness in his eyes; they twitched from Horatio to Calleigh and back again.

  “Not quite,” Horatio said. “There’s still the matter of Phillip Mulrooney’s death.”

  “What, am I supposed to be guilty of that, too?”

  “Yes, Mister Cheveau,” Calleigh replied. “You are.”

  “You were Sinhurma’s button man,” Horatio said. “The one he turned to when he needed something unpleasant done. But he was smart enough to borrow a technique used by street gangs—use one person to obtain the weapon, another to fire it, a third to dispose of it afterward. Tribal loyalty keeps everyone’s mouth shut, and blame is supposedly too widely dispersed to nail any one suspect. But the chain of evidence, no matter how long it gets, is still there…and my team always uncovers it. Link by link.

  “Jason built the rocket, but someone else fired it. Humboldt supplied the jumper cables, but someone else hooked them up. Ferra donated a bow and arrow…but someone else used them to kill Ruth Carrell. And that someone else, Darcy…is you.”

  “You can’t prove that,” Cheveau said. His voice had taken on the same kind of blankness Horatio had heard before; under extreme stress, he was reverting to the rote behavior Sinhurma had programmed into him. “Phillip was killed by an act of God.”

  “Actually, it was the act of a blender,” Horatio said. “Or at least one was used as an accomplice. A burned-out appliance we found in The Earthly Garden’s Dumpster had a distinctive pattern melted into the head of the plug. We couldn’t match that pattern to anything we found in the restaurant—not at first….”

  Horatio looked up from the comparison microscope. “The tool marks near the blade match the clamp of one of the jumper cables,” he said. “There’s even a trace of melted plastic on the end. This is what was jammed between the plug and the outlet.”

  “But who put it there?” Delko asked.r />
  “Somebody who knew where they were hidden when not in use,” Horatio said.

  “Albert Humboldt?”

  Horatio studied the knife, his eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I think both ends of this knife have left their mark….”

  “Samuel Lucent told me he thought Albert was getting high with someone else at work,” Horatio said. “I know it was you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I think you do,” Horatio replied. “Archery isn’t the only thing you’re a little clumsy at…. The technique used for hot-knifing hash is to compress the drug between the heated blades of two knives underneath a bottle with the bottom broken out—but the bottle isn’t actually necessary, is it? If you’re experienced, you can simply hold the knives close to your mouth and catch the smoke with one well-timed inhalation. Experienced or lazy, I suppose…Which one was it, Darcy? Were you trying to show off, or did one of you break the bottle and were too stoned to manufacture another one?”

  Cheveau stared at him, but didn’t reply.

  “Whichever it was, the results are plain to see. As plain as the burn on your face.” Horatio pointed to the whitish, crescent-shaped scar on Cheveau’s upper lip. “A very distinctive mark—one that matches the end of the knife jammed into that plug.

  “Jason told you that there was only a fifty percent chance that the rocket would attract a lightning strike, and that just wasn’t good enough, was it? Sinhurma was confident that Fate was on his side and against Mulrooney’s…but you weren’t. You didn’t want to risk failing your beloved leader, so you cheated. You connected one jumper cable to the rocket and the pipe, and the other just to the pipe. You dumped a bucket of water under the door to provide a path from Mulrooney’s knees to the metal drain, removed the knife’s wooden handle and clamped the remaining end of the cable to the exposed base, then jammed it between the plug and the outlet on the nongrounded side. You zapped Phil at the same time you fired the rocket—reasoning that even if lightning didn’t strike, Mulrooney would still be electrocuted. Afterward, Humboldt was supposed to dispose of the rocket equipment, which he did—except he was stupid enough to keep the jumper cables. You couldn’t get Humboldt to get rid of the knife or the blender—you didn’t want anyone else to know you had doubts about Sinhurma’s plan—so you threw the blender in the trash, replaced the handle of the knife and hid it. You figured that even if it was found, it would be dismissed as drug paraphernalia.”