Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  It dawned on him right then that all his fire building today might be a gradual buildup toward burning down this house. Obliterating the ghosts once and for all, Rusty’s and all the others.

  “You see what it is? My tats.”

  Buddha brought her face close to the mirror and Thorn leaned in beside her and squinted at her reflection.

  “Jesus. Is that English?”

  “It’s backward. Mirror image.”

  “What is it? Why?”

  “The old man wanted to be sure every time I looked in the mirror I’d have to deal with it. He thought females were vain and he was determined I wouldn’t be. That part worked. No mirrors in my house. Not a one.”

  Thorn leaned closer to her reflection.

  “I can’t make it out.”

  “When I was a kid it was clearer. But as the years pass the skin stretches and it goes more and more out of focus.”

  Thorn waited in silence.

  “Ever heard of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths?”

  “Not really.”

  “First sermon Buddha gave, he did it at Benares right after he attained enlightenment. It’s all about suffering. The foundation of that entire religion.”

  She pointed at her forehead, then moved her finger as she spoke.

  “Karma and reincarnation. How deeds, good or bad, shape your next life. Right cheek is how desire causes all suffering. Wanting stuff, hungering for things, how yearning makes for problems. Left cheek is how we should abandon desire, and the chin, that’s about following the Noble Eightfold Path.

  “The old man was all set to ink the whole damn Eightfold Path on the rest of my body but they caught him before he got that far, so I guess I’m lucky.”

  She held his gaze in the mirror. Her eyes had cleared and the sadness had receded. In a moment of weakness, she’d wandered off into the past, into a morass of emotion that had almost swallowed her, and now she was climbing out of that dark pool, shrugging off its aftereffects. He could see her cop face resurfacing, the stubborn mouth, the jut of chin and lower lip.

  “It pains me to admit it, but I need your help, Thorn.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “But right up front we got to get one thing clear between us.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not interested in crawling into your bed. Not now, not ever.”

  Thorn willed away a smile.

  “Understood.”

  “Good.”

  “You must’ve tried makeup. That didn’t cover it?”

  “Oh, sure I can cover it over,” she said. “But it’s all still there.”

  Thorn was silent.

  “Just like I used to go by my initial, ‘B.’ People would call me that, but that didn’t feel right either. Same as the makeup. No matter how strange it is, my name is my name. My face is what it is. I can’t run from it.”

  At that moment when she smiled, she struck him as utterly indomitable. A woman less than half his age who had fathomed depths of hurt that Thorn could not imagine.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Wait here. I need to get something.”

  She brushed past him and walked down the hall and out the front door. By the time she returned, Thorn had located a pair of blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt on a high shelf in his boyhood bedroom. The jeans were snug and the Caribbean Club shirt was musty and torn, but still an improvement over the towel.

  He was making a pot of coffee when she came in the kitchen door with a brown paper sack.

  She set it on the floor by the white-tiled island and brought out a Ziploc plastic bag and lay it on the countertop. An evidence bag that contained what looked like a piece of newsprint.

  “Take a look. Tell me what you see. Take it out of the bag if you want. Handle it. It’s already been through forensics. Nothing helpful on it.”

  He opened the plastic seal and took out the obituary that April Moss had written about Rusty Stabler. Someone had scissored the edges into a sawtooth pattern.

  “I’ve already seen this. It was in the Herald a week and a half ago.”

  “I found it lying on the bedside table next to Mickey Stabler’s body.”

  Thorn read a few sentences and set the newsprint on the counter.

  “So Michaela had an obituary of her niece. Doesn’t seem strange. Though the ragged edges, that’s a little odd.”

  “We’ll get to the ragged edges,” Buddha said.

  She dug in the paper sack again and came out with an electronic tablet. Sugarman had the same kind. He read books on it, sent e-mail, surfed the Web. He’d tried to interest Thorn in its marvels but the gizmo seemed silly. Why would you trust hundreds of books to the memory of some flimsy gadget that could be destroyed with a hard knock? Real books were solid. Part of their beauty was the way they endured the rough-and-tumble years, how their smell evolved, the changing texture of their pages as they aged. Like every organic thing, books matured and decayed, on roughly the same journey as the people who read them.

  She brought the tablet to life and did some one-finger typing on its glass surface until she had the screen she wanted.

  She handed it to Thorn.

  A video was running, a movie or TV show, Thorn couldn’t tell. A person dressed in an iridescent blue bodysuit was sneaking up behind a man seated at an office desk. There was ominous music playing, violins, a cello, and scratchy percussions. It was nighttime. The guy was working late. He was hunched over paperwork, scribbling in the margins with a pen. The picture window across from the man showed a panoramic view of a city skyline twinkling against a black sky. The lights were gaudy, the blue, pink, and aquamarine skyscrapers of downtown Miami. But the office guy wasn’t looking at the view or he might’ve noticed the reflection of the intruder sneaking up behind him.

  The man’s cell phone rang. As he reached to answer it, the blue man moved swiftly, looping a wire over the businessman’s head and clenching it tight around his throat. A garrote. The man thrashed, waved his arms, but it was over quick. When his head slumped to one side and blood began to darken his white collar, the blue killer released the wire. He left it around the man’s throat and stepped away.

  He drew out a piece of paper from somewhere in his blue suit, then leaned around the dead man and lay the newsprint on the desk next to the man’s documents.

  The camera moved in close to the news clipping.

  Its edges were cut in the same sawtooth pattern as Rusty’s obituary.

  Filling the screen, its headline came into focus for a second or two. A woman named Ethel Rosen from Homestead, Florida, had died and left a large and surprising sum of money to some charity.

  The screen went dark.

  Thorn set the electronic tablet down on the counter.

  “Season one, episode two. A cable show on the Expo Channel. It’s called Miami Ops. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it.”

  “Don’t own a TV,” he said. “Stuck in the Dark Ages.”

  “Well, I’ve watched a couple of episodes. The female lead is an airhead. Whole thing’s silly and not all that suspenseful either.”

  “Everybody’s a critic.”

  She picked up the electronic tablet and slipped it back in her sack.

  “So that’s Zentai? That suit?”

  She said yes, that was Zentai.

  “How’d you find out about this show?”

  “Tracked it down on the Internet. Used a bunch of search terms. ‘Obituary.’ ‘Jagged edge.’ ‘Saw blade.’ Didn’t take but two minutes before Miami Ops popped up. I read the webpage, the reviews, and bingo.”

  “Somebody’s copycatting a TV show.”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “Why?”

  “There have to be a why? Crazy people do crazy things.”

  Thorn shook his head.

  “In my long, sordid history, I’ve had the misfortune of running into a few psychos. Several qualified as full-blown crazy. Insane in the membrane. But they always have a why. What th
ey do makes perfect sense to them.”

  She nodded, not buying it entirely but taking it under consideration.

  “Because Mickey defended cop killers, you don’t trust law enforcement, not even the FBI.”

  “Oh, parts of the FBI I trust just fine. On the national level, they don’t give a hoot if Mickey Stabler defended cop killers. That’s a local issue. The Oklahoma state police weren’t fond of her. Agent in charge in the Dallas field office, Jerry Jeff Peters, he loathed Mickey. He was cheering when he found out she died, I’m sure of that. But national level, no. Quantico, no.”

  Thorn watched her arrange herself on one of the kitchen stools as if she was settling in for a long stay.

  “Familiar with ViCAP?”

  Thorn shook his head.

  “All your brushes with the law, I thought you might’ve run across it. Well, what it is, the FBI has a nationwide program to help small-town sheriffs like me. The Critical Incident Response Group at Quantico. They run ViCAP, which is short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

  “After Michaela’s murder, I got permission to use their database. It’s where local crime reports across the country are filed and collated and analyzed. A cop like me out in the boonies, if I want to check if there’ve been similar cases anywhere in the U.S., I punch in a description of the crime I’m dealing with, I can even use specific search words, ‘obituary,’ ‘ragged edge,’ ‘spear,’ ‘Zentai,’ ‘Iklwa,’ any term you can think of, and the computer spits out comparable crimes in other jurisdictions.

  “Of course, for it to spit out something, that something had to be entered in the first place, meaning the local law enforcement agency, the cops in New Orleans or Miami or wherever, number one they had to notice an obituary left behind at a murder scene; and number two, if they noticed it, they had to put it into their report as worthy of attention; then number three, somebody had to scan that report and enter it into the ViCAP database.

  “So that’s where things break down. Understaffed, underfunded local law enforcement, cops getting lazy, cops overworked, cops not paying attention. The computer is fine. It doesn’t care if Michaela defended cop killers, the computer plays fair.”

  Thorn said, “So this ViCAP database, it didn’t have anything.”

  “Not a damn thing. Not Zentai, not ragged edge, not obituary.”

  “Then maybe it’s not what you think. Maybe Mickey got her niece’s obituary off a newsstand.”

  Buddha shook her head.

  “No, sir, the nearest place Mickey could’ve found a copy of the Miami paper was Dallas or Oklahoma City, hours away. From Monday when the obituary appeared till Saturday when Mickey was murdered, Mickey was at home preparing for a case. I visited with her every single day. She read that Miami obituary same place I did. Online. And she didn’t leave her house except for groceries just once. No, sir, the killer left that behind. It’s his signature. A taunt. Right out of a crummy TV show.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “Damn sure.”

  Thorn looked down at the place at the kitchen counter where he’d gravitated out of habit.

  Over the years at that very spot, he’d prepared a thousand meals. Cut up hundreds of avocados and must’ve made a few tons of guacamole, as well as countless burritos and fish tacos, and lots of margaritas. For a second he flashed on all that wonderful food and drink, and the nights he and Rusty had wolfed down tortillas smothered in cheese and enchilada sauce, top-shelf tequila and Cointreau and lime juice. The giddy evenings dancing in the kitchen to music that one of them started humming. This room, this countertop, these walls had borne witness to some of Thorn’s best moments, some of his happiest hours with Rusty and Sugarman and others. And now this. This young woman with her tortured past, her spoiled face, and her bulldog resolve. The scorched smell of the bonfire pervading the room.

  “I’m going up to Miami tomorrow, talk to the obituary writer.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s the logical next step.”

  “What kind of logic is that?”

  “April Moss has two boys,” Buddha said. “Both work on Miami Ops. One writes the show, the other’s an actor in it.”

  Thorn touched the edge of Rusty’s obituary.

  “Well, that’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.”

  “Had the same thought. It’s that nexus again. The killer’s home-based in Miami. The murder weapon was bought there, the TV show is shot there, the newspaper is from there.”

  “And you want me to be your tour guide, show you the big city?”

  “You willing?”

  “You strike me as a lone wolf, Sheriff Hilton.”

  “I am.”

  “Then why gum up the works with me?”

  “Well, for one thing, I thought you might make excellent bait.”

  “Bait?”

  “Somebody’s got a strong interest in you, Thorn. I don’t know who or why. But I’d like to dangle you in front of as many people as I can, see whose eyes light up. Maybe somebody’ll even try to take a bite.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “It’s there on your wife’s obituary. Turn it over.”

  Thorn sighed and did as instructed.

  On the flip side of the obituary was a portion of the society page. In the margin beside the pictures of men and women in tuxedos, pearls, stiff poses, and manufactured smiles, his name was printed in all caps. THORN.

  In bold black ink, someone had traced and retraced the letters four or five times—the way a kid with a crush will spell out the name of his true love, bearing down again and again in the same grooves.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Looks to me like somebody’s got the hots for you.”

  “You did this,” Thorn said.

  “No, sir. I promise you I did not.”

  “Then Mickey did it. She knew about me through Rusty.”

  “That was my first thought. But we can rule that out.”

  “Why?”

  “I know this is weird, but Mickey had a thing about the color purple. Don’t know why. I questioned her about it several times, but she never said. Started in her childhood, is all I know. She had pens galore. Fountain pens, razor points, felt-tips, ballpoints. Always jotting down notes, marking up the margins of her books. All her pens had purple ink. Every single pen in her house. Not a red or a blue or a black to be found. And believe me, I looked. Searched top to bottom. Purple ink, every single one.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “Believe it, Thorn. It was on her bedside table, just like that. Mickey lying there dead, and your name on the back of your wife’s obituary. The way it’s printed, going over and over the same lines, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out whoever the killer is, he’s got a powerful interest in you.”

  ACT TWO

  PURPLE BASEBALL BAT

  EIGHT

  OUT IN THE GRASSY CENTER of the Floridian courtyard Gus Dollimore and the director of photography were staring up at the clouds. Not long ago April Moss wouldn’t have known why. But she did now.

  For the last week she’d been getting an education in the finer points of TV production while several scenes from Miami Ops were being shot at the nursing home where her mother was rehabbing from knee surgery. Gus and the cameramen were looking up at the sky because they were waiting for the sun to move past a sucker hole in the clouds and give them a few minutes of precious sunlight, enough to go ahead and shoot their next scene. Natural light, as Gus liked to say, was a fickle bitch.

  Set back twenty yards from where the scene would take place, and a few feet behind the canvas directors chairs and the cameras and the lights, were about twenty of the elderly residents of the Floridian nursing home, most of them in wheelchairs. For them this was the day’s recreation. Instead of falling asleep in front of their favorite game shows, they could drift off watching a real TV show being made.

  As April crossed the yard, she spotted her mother sitting
stiffly in her wheelchair parked in the back row of the audience. She picked her way through the crowd, settled into a folding chair beside her mom, and said hello, but Garvey Moss was in a sour mood and didn’t reply.

  Since coming to the Floridian after a double knee replacement, Garvey had been in a major funk. Not doing her leg lifts, or riding the stationary bike. Refusing to walk. The pain was intolerable and the pain pills made her stupid. The stubborn woman wouldn’t budge from her wheelchair.

  A full minute ticked away before she acknowledged April.

  “TV people stand around more than road crews,” Garvey said. “Twenty idiots watching one guy shovel dirt. No wonder everything’s falling apart. All those people getting paid, nobody working. Just twiddling their peckers.”

  Garvey Moss. Seventy-five years old, but with the zest and looks of a woman twenty years younger. Her black hair hung long and straight halfway down her back—not a trace of gray. The same genetic good fortune kept her skin clear and unwrinkled and her brown eyes laser guided. April could only hope Garvey had passed on a coil or two of that DNA. The next few years would tell.

  “If I had a say,” Garvey said, “my grandbabies wouldn’t be mixed up in such a silly business. Those boys would have real jobs where they got dirt under their fingernails and grease on their faces. End of the day, they’d have something to show for what they did. Something solid.”

  “The boys are happy with their work, so you should be happy, Mom.”

  April looked around at the rest of the audience. Most were a decade older than Garvey. Well into their dotage, parked at the nursing home for the duration. To her left a woman in a green bathrobe was clutching a stuffed dog to her chest and whispering in its tattered ear. Two chairs down a gentleman was hunched over, playing with the zipper of his tartan plaid pants.

  Most seemed to be lost to one degree or another in the same demolished confusion, as if they’d been dropped into their chairs from some bewildering height. All the glowing particulars of their life histories had turned to smoke within them. In the last few days, April had met two or three who were capable of bright gurgles of memory, a smile, a coherent sentence. But most had moved into a postverbal state and seemed to be waiting patiently in this strange outpost for some major organ to fail.