“Six degrees of personal.”
“And in the last half hour, it’s gotten a hell of a lot more personal. I’m staying with this to the end, Frank, with or without you.”
Sheffield glanced at Thorn, then looked back at the river.
“You’re going to need a wardrobe upgrade. That outfit might be haute couture in the Keys, but it won’t cut it in this town.”
“I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
Frank used both hands to scrub the weariness from his face.
“So give me something, Thorn. How does this guy choose the vics?”
Thorn took his time recounting the theory Buddha had developed. Monday obituaries led to Saturday murders. Three paragraphs down, three words in. Paragraphs three, six, and nine.
Frank sat back, chewed on that. Nodded.
“This fucking world,” he said.
“Very crude code. But it fits the Oklahoma murder Buddha was working. And a baseball bat appeared in last Monday’s obit, ninth paragraph, third word. If we look through previous Monday papers, my bet is, we find matches with other Saturday killings.”
“I’ll put somebody on that tonight.” Frank’s phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pants, checked the ID, and put it back. “So returning to the scene in Sheriff Hilton’s room. How’d it go down?”
“Asshole was wearing a black suit, spandex or whatever the hell it is.”
“Most likely it was Lycra.”
“You’ve been reading up,” Thorn said.
“Lycra bodysuits. They’re called Zentai. Some kind of Japanese fetish. Those Japs, man, when it comes to sex, they’re as depraved as the Germans.”
Thorn was quiet, watching the rubber raft’s wake slosh against the seawall and the hulls of the ships. Feeling his gut roll as the image appeared again—Buddha curled in the bathtub, broken, bloody.
“Okay, so you walk in on this guy. He’s using that aluminum bat on Ms. Hilton. You witnessed that, the actual attack?”
Thorn described his entry into the room, told him about going to the bathroom door, about the door smashing him in the forehead. Twice.
“Thought the bat did that,” Frank said. “It was the door?”
“If it’d been the bat, we wouldn’t be having this talk.”
“So you’re smacked in the head, you’re cross-eyed, but you still saw some of what happened, the guy in black finishing off Hilton.”
Thorn nodded.
“Description of the perp?”
“Thin, strong. Like you said, I was out of it, the room was spinning. What about the innkeeper, you talk to him? He should’ve seen something.”
“Zero help. He came running when he heard the commotion, got one foot into the room, glimpsed you stumbling around, and scurried the hell out of there to do his Braveheart call to nine-one-one.”
“That’s all I got, Frank, slim build, well developed.”
“Height?”
“I don’t know. It was a whirlwind.”
“You’re not forgetting anything?”
“I tore the suit. Somewhere around his right ankle.”
“That could be helpful.”
“That’s all I can remember. If something else bobs up, you’ll get it.”
“Because if I got the sense this was your approach, a one-way street, well, that would be the end of my cooperation. We clear on that?”
Thorn shrugged, a vague affirmative.
“Now you,” Thorn said.
Frank looked up at where the stars would be if the sky weren’t polluted with Miami’s extravagant light.
“Promise you’ll stay with me on this.”
“I do solemnly swear.”
“It’s not too late to fuck up and lose my pension.”
“I swear to stay on the rails so Frank can have his government check.”
Frank reached down, plucked a blade of grass and began to chew its tip, then flicked it away.
“Never saw an aluminum bat broken in half before.”
“Cheap materials,” Thorn said.
“It’s not the materials. You beat the shit out of that bat. You destroyed it. The murder weapon, I might add. You demolished some crucial evidence. That’s what I’m talking about, Thorn. That kind of behavior. I know you were crazed, but hey, man, you can’t let shit like that happen. Those Miami cops were a hair trigger from taking you down.”
“I’ll try not to lose it again, Frank. What can I say?”
“Try hard, Thorn. Try very hard. This isn’t the Keys. This isn’t live and let live. You’re in the war zone, baby. Everyone’s on edge twenty-four seven. You hear me?”
Thorn nodded. He tried to look sincere. Frank sighed. Not buying it, but what could he do?
“So what do you have, Special Agent?”
“All right, okay. Number one, it goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway, this guy is one brutal motherfucker, so he’s enjoying his work. What that means is he’s not stopping till we pull his plug.”
Thorn waited in silence.
“Forensically, it’s early. With the guy wearing a bodysuit, techs tell me it’s unlikely we’ll have hair, fingerprints, any DNA. They’re looking for strands of Lycra from his suit, which could possibly lead somewhere, help identify the manufacturer, start to narrow down the point of purchase. There’s a couple of retail outlets locally that sell these things. We’ll hit them soon as we can, but my bet is this suit came from some online merchant. Lots of outlets internationally. If that’s the case, it’ll be very hard to trace the origin. But we’ll run all that down. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the guy bought the thing in Miami and some salesclerk remembers him. We’ll see.”
“Buddha thought the guy was half-assed about covering his tracks. He tore up a sales receipt for the murder weapon he used in Oklahoma and left it behind in a trash bin not far from the murder scene. That’s one thing that led her to Miami. The weapon, a hand spear, was bought in a sporting goods store here in town.”
“Good,” Frank said. “I prefer half-assed criminals. Makes life easier.”
“Unless the bread crumbs are on purpose.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Guy’s smart half the time, dumb the rest. Seems fishy.”
“Smart and dumb coexist,” Frank said. “Not uncommon, some crook who’s come up with an elegant scheme, except it’s got a glaring error the doofus overlooked.”
“Buddha suspected we were being played.”
“You know where that sales receipt is?”
“In her purse or her luggage. She was a very organized lady.”
“Then the ID techs will catalog it,” he said. “We’ll check it tomorrow, take a look-see at the sporting goods place.
“How it appears right now, our best hope with forensics are the bloody footprints. Size ten, maybe a little larger. Something funky about the tracks, but that’s probably because of the stitching in the suit.
“I got a foot specialist I use, Henry Roediger, he does morphology studies on shoes and bare feet—our Cinderella analyst, we call him. Our if-the-shoe-fits guy. He can tell us if the killer’s got hammertoe, a bunion deformity, give us the biomechanical foot type, the average gait. Before he’s done with his casts and his lasers, he’ll tell us what this fucker had for breakfast a week ago.”
“Any sightings? Guy walking around town in a suit like that, people had to notice.”
“On that score, we have an embarrassment of riches,” Sheffield said. “Minute this hit the airwaves, the phone calls started. Already topping fifty. This time tomorrow we’ll be in the multiple hundreds. Every part of town, Gables, Grove, Kendall, Overtown, Aventura. We got short, fat, tall, skinny, men, women, children. Blue suits, red suits, green. Dicks hanging out, tits showing. Men in black carrying bows and arrows.”
“Jesus.”
“The usual flakes. And lots of old folks looking out their windows thinking some guy in bike pants and a tight shirt is our killer. Happens every time there’s somethi
ng big. Add the crazies to the drunks and the pranksters, it’ll be a never-ending gush of false alarms. Shit, after the Twin Towers went down, we had ten bomb scares an hour for two months.”
“Passenger manifests,” Thorn said. “Everything flying from Miami to Dallas/Fort Worth last weekend. How hard would that be?”
“Not hard to get, but I don’t know what good it would do.”
“The guy’s name could be on that list. I don’t care if it’s five thousand names, that’s a smaller group than what you’ve got now.”
“Ever heard of false ID?”
“You looking to get out of work, Frank?”
“Don’t start with me.”
They fell into silence. Thorn considered the Atlanta pedestrian stop, a Saturday event. He could give Frank that, have him use his channels to run it down with Atlanta PD. He could give him the pinking shears, the ding in the blade, and he could tell him about his own name printed on the backside of the obituary Buddha found at Michaela Stabler’s murder scene. But he didn’t. He held on to that. Holding on was all he was up to at that moment. He just sat quietly, gazing out at the dark, gleaming river.
FIFTEEN
A FEW MINUTES LATER, FRANK stretched his arms and scooted his chair around so he was facing Thorn.
“Okay,” he said. “I can hear your brain buzzing. Unburden yourself. You’ll feel better.”
For a second Thorn was tempted to blurt it out. But that second passed. Thorn trusted Frank more than he trusted most lawmen, but he had no faith in the bureaucracy Frank worked for. Information had a way of disappearing inside its formless structures and never giving back much return on the investment.
He decided to hand Sheffield just enough to keep the dialogue going, but reserve the small concrete leads he might be able to handle himself.
“Buddha had a theory,” he said. “She thought the guy outed himself because he wants to run the show. When he found out the two of us were on his trail, that threatened his power to shape events. He was afraid of losing control of the message.”
“Plausible. Ergo the attack on the sheriff. Which of course also suggests a high threat level on you.”
“Bring it on.”
“You packing, Thorn?”
“No.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
“I got two questions. How’d the guy learn about us, and how’d he track us down to the Waterway Lodge?”
“Start with the second. Who knew you were staying in this dump?”
“Only one I mentioned it to was April Moss. I asked her about the place this afternoon. If it was still in business.”
“So we find out who April talked to, who she might’ve spoken to. Then again, there’s a chance the guy picked you up somewhere along the line, tailed you here, saw you check in. Today when you were driving around, you happen to notice if you were being followed?”
Thorn said no, he hadn’t done that. He’d had no reason.
“So we interview Ms. Moss, see if she mentioned the delightful Waterway Lodge to anybody. If she didn’t, then somebody had you in their sights earlier.”
“If we were tailed, where’d it begin?”
“I don’t know. Walk me through your day.”
“Midmorning we drove up from Key Largo, got to the nursing home, the Floridian, a little after noon, hung around till April showed. Watched some of the TV show get made. It was midafternoon when we drove over to see you, three-thirty, around there, spent maybe half an hour, got to Poblanos a little before five. Maybe half an hour there, then we came here, checked in, got cleaned up, went to Perricone’s. After the restaurant we returned here and split up. I went to the East Coast bar, Buddha stayed put.”
“When you made this date to meet the Moss woman at Poblanos, there anybody listening in?”
“Her mother.”
“So maybe the old lady lets it slip to whoever where you’re meeting up with her daughter, and this whoever goes and hangs around Poblanos, picks you up there. Tags along, watches you take rooms here.”
“Either way, April or her mother, it circles back to that TV show. One of those people.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s the TV show.”
“A possibility. But don’t be in a hurry to hang this on somebody, Thorn. You fixate, that’s how you make mistakes in the investigation biz.”
Thorn wasn’t going to argue the point. But Frank was wrong. One way or the other, this was about Miami Ops. Everything pointed back to it.
“When you and April were talking at the bar, how much did you reveal?”
“Buddha let a few things slip. The killer might be copycatting the show, and it looked like he was using April’s obits for his blueprint.”
“But before the barroom talk, she was in the dark about all that? She didn’t know the nature of your investigation?”
“Why is that important?”
“Building a timeline. Who knew what and when they knew it.”
“Well, before the bar, April didn’t have any hint of what we were doing. All Buddha said at the nursing home was there was an urgent police matter she needed to discuss with her.”
Thorn shook his head, blinked his eyes, trying to kick-start his brain.
“Look, we can finish this tomorrow when your head clears.”
“Probably better.”
“You want, I can put you in a room at the Silver Sands. Dig a mattress out of storage. I been having a bedbug issue, and the room might smell a little rank, but the rent’s cheap.”
Thorn shrugged. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He sure as hell wasn’t staying on at the Waterway Lodge. He tried to think of his next move. Tried to get the logical synapses firing again, but the haze was clogging things.
He kept replaying his day with Buddha, running and rerunning the snippets of conversation, the way she’d showed up at his house in the dark, the bonfire, shooting the pistol from his hand, Thorn reading her backward tats in the mirror, the Four Noble Truths, the drive to Miami, sawblade, pinking shears, incest porn, Zentai, Iklwa, Buddha’s face-off with April Moss. Something going on between those two women, some weird recognition. All those left-field questions about Thorn’s long-ago date with April. Did Thorn take advantage? Did they use protection?
Frank said, “There’s something I’m puzzled by.”
“Yeah?”
“Homicide boys bagged all Sheriff Hilton’s stuff, took it off to run through their magic machines. What I didn’t see was her phone or that iPad she was playing with. You know what happened to those items?”
“Killer must’ve got them.”
“Come on, you can do better than that.”
Thorn watched a man on the upper deck of one of the freighters smoking a cigarette. When he was done, he flicked it into the river. It hit the gleaming surface and continued to glow orange for a moment more before winking out. Thorn was surprised the river didn’t erupt in flames.
“Even killers need to call their moms.”
“Hey, Thorn. A guy murders someone with a bat, assaults a witness, he’s scared off, must know the cops are on the way. But before he flees he stops to select a few pieces of choice electronic hardware, then shoves them in the pocket of his Zentai suit? I don’t think so.”
Thorn kept his eyes on the river.
“Plus,” Frank said. “Quick look at the bloody tracks tells me the guy was running out the door. A straight line from bathroom to the exit.”
“I don’t know, Frank.”
“Maybe you were too groggy to recall. Before the paramedics got here, before the place was swarming with cops, is it possible you sleepwalked those items out to the rental car and stashed them?”
Thorn closed his eyes and opened them again. It was all still there.
“I could get a warrant, or just go crash the window and have a look.”
“Go for it.”
“So is this how it’s going to play between us?”
Thorn waved away a night bug.
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“Just a reminder, Thorn. My pension, man. I’ll help you how I can, but I’m not going to give you carte blanche. There’ll be no running roughshod.”
Thorn kept his eyes trained on the dark river as if something important might happen there at any second.
Headlights swept across the grounds, then shut off. A car door slammed. Frank looked over to see who it was. Thorn kept watching the river.
“Well, well,” Frank said.
He heard the click of footsteps on the concrete walkway.
Frank stood up. Thorn kept staring at the thick brown syrup that was the Miami River. A grim blend of sludge and flushed bilges and toxic runoff.
“Good evening, Ms. Moss,” Frank said.
April murmured a quiet hello.
“My name’s Frank Sheffield, special agent in charge, Miami field office of the FBI. We’ve met once, though I doubt you remember.”
“I know who you are. I covered some of your work.”
Thorn kept his eyes on the river.
“I hope they were some of my honorable successes.”
“A couple were. Nobody’s a hundred percent.”
“We were just talking about you. We had some questions.”
“I heard about Sheriff Hilton,” April said. “It’s terrible.”
Thorn was silent, looking out at the hard gleam of the river.
“You’ll have to excuse him. He took a couple of raps to the skull.”
“I’m here,” Thorn said. “I’m listening.”
“Thorn, I’m very sorry about your friend. It’s dreadful.”
“I only met her last night. I wouldn’t call her a friend.”
“He appreciates your condolences,” Frank said.
“The reason I came,” she said. “I wanted to see if you were planning to stay on in Miami. Until this thing gets resolved.”
He thought about it for a moment and grunted.
“I believe that’s a yes,” Frank said.
“Do you have a place to stay?”
Thorn watched one of the freighters moving ghostly slow downriver. Heading back to Haiti with its haul. Silence was brimming up inside him.
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