Out on Brickell Avenue he ran south for a while, kept on running across the Rickenbacker Causeway, energized by the ocean breeze, the city lights, the black sweep of the bay. He watched the twinkling yachts cruising back to port and stopped at the apex of the bridge to catch his breath, then looked down at the iridescent water. He watched other joggers pass, watched cars flash by.
He’d seen no one, spoken to no one. Had jogged on the causeway for an hour, then taken a cool-down walk along Windsurf Beach, and wound up sitting there in the sand debating what he should do now that the show seemed to be finished.
No way to prove any of that. They’d have to take his word. Or not.
When he returned to his car after his run, his cell was ringing, and it was then he got word about the Zentai killer calling the newspaper. He’d thrown on a shirt and pants and taken the elevator up to Gus Dollimore’s penthouse and joined the others. That weird, restrained celebration.
Sawyer would have to defend this story, stay disciplined, keep it straight and simple and not let them find the smallest inconsistency. He scripted a line in his head, some righteous indignation:
“You think I copycatted my own show? You think I murdered a complete stranger for publicity? That’s insane. I’m not that desperate, man. TV shows fail all the time, and new TV shows are born, and writers go on writing.”
“Close the curtains,” Dee Dee called from her dressing room.
“What?”
“I said shut the curtains, Sawyer. Shut them tight.”
That was a first.
He rolled out of bed, padded to the edge of the window, and pulled the cord, no doubt sending dozens of devoted fans into shock.
“All right,” Sawyer called.
“Now lie down, close your eyes.”
Sawyer picked up Garvey’s quilt, refolded it, set it on the shelf beside the bed. He switched off the skinny vibrator that had been humming for the last hour, and lay down on the bed.
“Your eyes closed?”
“They’re closed.”
Sawyer stretched out on the sheets, propped his head on a pillow, shut his eyes. Waited.
“Are your eyes shut?”
“Shut,” he said.
He heard her slip into the room, heard her muffled breathing.
“Okay, you can look.”
Sawyer opened his eyes and found Dee Dee standing before him in a black Zentai suit. The Lycra hugging her so tight it showed every ridge of muscle, the perfect swell of her breasts, her nipples taut, the neatly barbered Mohawk of pubic hair, the slabs of muscles in her thighs.
“Look what I found, honey.”
Her hands were hidden behind her back.
“Not funny, Dee Dee.”
She stood motionless at the foot of the bed, crouched forward like some jungle creature about to spring.
“So let’s try it, big boy. Let’s see what it’s like. Huh?”
“Nothing doing,” he said. “Take it off.”
She inched down the side of the bed, slinking closer, her hands still hidden. Head lowered, rocking back and forth, an eerie cobra dance. Sawyer was growing mildly spooked.
“This isn’t cool.”
He shifted his legs, set his feet against the mattress, ready to dig in and thrust himself away. A chill rippled on his backside.
“Come on, goddamn it. Stop this shit.”
She crept forward another foot. Sawyer outweighed her by at least forty pounds, but Dee Dee had a crushing grip in both hands, and her core strength was astounding. From hours of Pilates and free weights and gymnastic work on the horizontal bar, and those pink rubber straps, she was all sinew and gristle, a body as sturdy, limber, and powerful as a python’s.
As she took another half step, Sawyer sat up, poised to hop sideways, make a break for the bathroom, when her left hand appeared from behind her.
Empty.
Then she took another step and her right hand flew out. In it she held a black square of material. Underhanded, she tossed it at him, and it fluttered open on his chest. A matching Zentai suit.
“Okay, bad boy. Let’s you and me field-test this baby.”
“Christ almighty.”
“What? Did I scare you? You think I was coming for you like I did for Slattery?”
“You can’t let anybody see you like that. It’s incriminating as hell.”
She eased down on the bed beside him and Sawyer felt a shiver pass through his gut. This black specter. Not Dee Dee, but her absence, her shadow half. Sawyer’s heart was bumping. Her body shape was even more pronounced without the distraction of her features. Its crisp lines, its haughty sexuality, the aggressive tilt of pelvis, the vulnerable swan’s neck and proud lift of chin. Absent her coquettish eyes, lush mouth, and sculptured cheekbones, the essence of Dee Dee was intensely primal, a woman stripped of her singularity, yet somehow more magnetic.
She stroked a Lycra hand across his bare thigh. Part silk, part rasp.
To his surprise, his cock had firmed. Racing blood, inflamed nerves.
“Hey, not to worry, Sawyer. I would never murder you, babe. I need those words you give me. I need you more than ever, now that I’ll be a star.”
She had a Lycra hand on his cock, starting a slow pump, when Sawyer’s cell rang on the bedside table.
“Leave it.”
Sawyer leaned over, checked the ID.
“It’s Flynn.”
“Leave it, sweetie. Dee Dee’s got you in her grip.”
He lay back and tried to give himself over to the strange sensation, that sleek material riding up and down his length.
The phone rang again. Sawyer turned his head.
“Now it’s Gus,” he said. “Something’s going on.”
Dee Dee released him and made a pouty huff.
Sawyer answered, listened, set the phone down.
“Okay, so what is it?”
“Get out of that suit right now.”
“What?”
“FBI’s in the lobby. We’re assembling downstairs in five minutes.”
SEVENTEEN
THORN WAS UP BEFORE THE sun that Saturday morning after laboring through a night of vivid, jerk-awake dreams whose particulars whisked away in the seconds it took him to walk into the bathroom, leaving behind only hazy after-images of Buddha Hilton and two young boys playing on a grassy lawn, tossing a ball back and forth and back and forth while Thorn watched from some hovering distance.
Where those dream images originated was clear enough. The walls of the garage apartment were covered with framed snapshots of the towheaded twins, Flynn and Sawyer, shirtless at ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen in a variety of settings but almost always doing something outside and together: rowing boats, playing tug-of-war with a heavy rope, dressed in matching seersucker suits for Easter services, playing bocce ball and horseshoes, tossing a Frisbee, shooting arrows side by side at straw-filled targets, romping with a succession of large mutts.
There were also shots of them standing alongside various men. A swarthy Cuban gentleman figured prominently in several, a red-haired fellow with a freckled forehead showed up in almost as many, and there were other men who’d apparently held shorter tenures in the Moss household. As he browsed the images Thorn was struck by a repeating pattern. In all the shots that featured the Moss twins and their mother’s apparent boyfriends, the brothers invariably stood at attention, stiff and awkward as if posing in a police lineup. Their postures and their matching forced smiles made it clear these male invaders into the Moss sanctuary never stood a chance.
Then there were the half-dozen prom night photos with an impressive collection of young ladies in ball gowns. Flynn preferred buxom, hot-blooded playmates with theatrical eyes and bold smiles and racy evening wear. Girls who appeared more fully ripened in both body and worldly experience than he.
Sawyer’s dates were mostly dark-haired, understated, trim young women, often as tall as Sawyer or taller. April look-alikes with pale skin and long limbs and easy smile
s.
The previous night when April showed Thorn the room, she seemed startled to find so many photographs hanging there. She apologized and acted ill at ease, telling Thorn she’d not been up there in several months, since the day Sawyer moved out to live on his own. It was he who’d decorated the room, framed and hung the snapshots, a sentimental kid, she said. A boy preoccupied with his past.
When she opened the closet door, they found it crowded with the boys’ abandoned clothes. Mainly faded polo shirts and battered jeans and some dark suits and button-down dress shirts—Sawyer’s corporate uniform, April explained, worn during his brief career as an attorney.
Thorn was welcome to any of the castoffs. She’d been too busy lately to cart them to Goodwill.
Now freshly showered, Thorn tried on a pair of blue jeans with ragged knees, and found them a perfect fit. He chose a dark green polo shirt with a crocodile on the breast, then checked himself out in the closet mirror, and shook his head. He looked closer to a preppie than he’d ever been. On his forehead, the lump had receded and was changing from blue to a moldy green. The swelling in his hand had also subsided and he could almost make a fist.
Out of curiosity he slipped on a pair of discarded boat shoes, the pricier version of the brand he’d lived in for most of his adult life. The shoes were maybe a half size larger than his usual fit, but felt a hell of lot more comfortable than the ones he’d been wearing the last few years.
Stashed beside a simple wood desk, he found a black nylon computer bag. Thorn emptied it of the yellow legal pads and documents and slender laptop computer, and refilled it with Buddha’s electronic tablet, the evidence bag, and her service revolver. Only two rounds left in the cylinder. He tucked her phone in his pocket.
Last night after April left him, he’d smuggled the loot up to the apartment, and now he carried it all back down to the car and locked the black computer bag in the trunk.
The neighborhood was quiet. Boxley, the Doberman he’d been introduced to the night before, trotted over to see if Thorn had acquired any new crotch smells since their last encounter. After satisfying himself with the state of Thorn’s privates, he wandered back to the front gate and lay down to stare out at a trio of gray squirrels that were chasing one another up and down the trunk of an oak tree.
Like many houses of its era, April’s home was masonry vernacular, a blocky two-story with parapets and arcades and a shady porch on three sides. The garage apartment was a separate structure that echoed the main house. This was one of the dwellings built by second-generation settlers in Miami. Approaching a century old, they had been designed and constructed by laymen from plans probably drawn up at kitchen tables. Sturdy and rectangular, yet somehow graceful.
As Thorn was headed toward the kitchen door, Jeff, the guy from Poblanos, appeared, squirming out of a crawl space hatch in the concrete apron of the house. He pushed himself out the small trapdoor, then bent back to the opening and dragged out a white garbage bag. He shut the grillwork behind him and latched it.
He saw Thorn and walked over. No greeting.
He untied the red drawstring and gave Thorn a look. A half-dozen large wooden traps, each with a fat brown rat smashed in the spring-loaded guillotine.
“You get an early start,” Thorn said.
“It’s rat season,” Jeff said.
“It’s always rat season,” said Thorn.
“Which makes this rat season.”
He smiled and cinched the bag shut and carried it to a pedestrian gate, let himself out, and walked across the street to a dark green pickup truck with orange tiger stripes running down its sides. He slung the bag of rats into the bed, started the truck, and rolled slowly away.
The house was still, no lights upstairs or down. April had given Thorn a key in case he got up early and wanted coffee.
Coffee, however, was not what he had in mind. He let himself in and cut through the kitchen, then went down the hallway that split the house in half. Parlor, dining room, and a maid’s room on one side, April’s home office and a sewing room on the other. Three bedrooms and two baths upstairs, the one zone he hadn’t yet seen. Last night April had confined the house tour to the downstairs only.
The walls were thick and solid with high ceilings and dark exposed beams. Ceiling fans were quietly at work in every room. The house had no air-conditioning, but the interior spaces were as cool as a spring-fed grotto. It had the solid, sound-absorbing feel Thorn had found in other Miami houses of its vintage. There were fewer and fewer of them remaining as the years went by and more citizens of the city grew so fabulously rich they could afford to level the historic homes and replace them with estates twice their size and half their elegance.
More family photos were mounted on the hallway walls. The boys at five or six with Garvey, their grandmother, who’d been a lively brunette with a pinup-girl body. A series of snapshots taken in Manhattan and on some Ivy League campus showed April in various flannel shirts and jeans, grunge but not grungy, a young mother, hand in hand with Flynn and Sawyer in Central Park and at the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and inside what looked like an efficiency apartment. If April wasn’t attending the boys, Garvey was.
Moving past the photos, Thorn heard someone stirring upstairs, a toilet flush, the creak of the pine floors. He picked up the pace, slipping down the hall and through the library with its floor-to-ceiling shelves covering one wall, chock-full with hardbacks, leather-bounds, high school yearbooks, a host of ancient paperbacks, and two different sets of encyclopedias.
He passed through the open door into the sewing room, where each of the walls was hung with a quilt. A red and yellow starburst on one, flowers and colorful vines and hummingbirds and vases of flowers on the others. An antique Singer sat between the two windows and a tall case stood close by, its every shelf piled high with folded fabric.
He started his search with the small sewing stand next to the Singer, going through the drawers from top to bottom. Pawing through bobbins and thread and packages of needles, thimbles, safety pins, buttons, and pincushions and cloth tape measure.
In another cabinet beside the shelves of fabric, he located a collection of scissors. There had to be at least twenty in various sizes. At the front of the second drawer was a pair of pinking shears.
He reached out, then caught himself in time and drew his hand away.
On a sewing machine table Thorn found a dark blue swatch of cloth the size of a handkerchief and used that to pick up the shears by the blade. He looked around for a piece of paper to cut, but found nothing suitable.
Footsteps sounded on the creaky stairway. For a second Thorn bobbled the pinking shears but caught them before they clattered onto the table. Using the blue cloth, he slipped them into the back pocket of his jeans and covered their exposed grips with the tail of his polo shirt.
He stepped into the library and was pretending to scan the titles on a high shelf when April appeared in the doorway.
She was wearing brown shin-length chinos and a simple white blouse with short sleeves. Leather sandals and a thin silver necklace. Her hair was loose, held off her face with two tortoiseshell clips. Thorn was no expert, but he didn’t believe the flush in her cheeks was rouge.
“You a reader, Thorn?”
“I like a nautical adventure now and then. A good mystery.”
“Not the girlie-girlie highbrow stuff?”
“In a pinch I’ll read anything. Even highbrow.”
“When the boys were young, I read to them every night because that’s supposed to instill a love of books. But turns out Flynn is dyslexic, and Sawyer only read what was required in school. Now he’d rather write than read. So there’s another myth down in flames.”
“How does Flynn learn his parts?”
“Someone reads him the scripts aloud and he memorizes his lines. He memorizes everyone’s lines. Has incredible recall.”
“Compensation,” Thorn said.
“Yeah, we’re very big on compensati
ng in the Moss household.”
She waved a hand in front of her face to disown what she’d just said.
“I need my coffee.”
Thorn seconded that.
He followed her to the kitchen and she made some strong Sumatran stuff whose aroma alone was enough to rev his heart.
She asked him what he liked for breakfast and he told her whatever she was having was fine. So it was scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon and whole wheat toast with apple butter, and a bowl of mixed fruit with shredded coconut.
“Haven’t had ambrosia since I was ten years old.”
While she made breakfast he stared out the back window into a wide lawn that ran down to the river.
She set a plate before him and took the chair opposite.
“How’s your head feel?”
“Like there’s two of them.”
“Do you need a doctor? I have a good GP, he’s a friend. I’m sure he could squeeze you in.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“If it’s bothering you, I could call him; I know he’d see you.”
“Thanks. I should be okay as long as no one slams a door on my head.”
Without appetite, he picked up his fork and started with the Canadian bacon, cutting one of the disks in half and folding it into this mouth. Chewy and perfect. He tried the eggs and they were better than scrambled eggs had a right to be. His taste buds seemed to be waking from a long sleep.
“I can’t imagine what you endured last night. That whole thing. Witnessing what you did, the killer assaulting you, murdering your friend right in front of you. That’s what you were talking about at the bar, isn’t it? The baseball bat in my obituary of Joe Camarillo. You knew something like that was going to happen.”
Thorn set his fork down.
“Yes, that’s what we were talking about.”
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