Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  Before he’d left that morning, out of a lifetime of habit, he’d made the bed and pulled the flowered quilt up and tucked its border underneath the pillows. Now, sitting like smooth polished stones on each of the two white pillows, was a single brown egg about double the size of what a chicken would lay. Two eggs.

  The rat catcher’s calling card.

  He turned from the bed. The bathroom door was closed. Another goddamn bathroom door, only this one opened inward. He stepped closer to it and caught another odor, sweet and sickening, something well past its prime.

  He was expecting a handful of dead rats strewn around the bathroom, but when he cracked open the door, a low growling snarl rushed through the opening and brushed his ankles as it loped across the room and halted before the closet door.

  A raccoon, extra-large, with a thick, handsome coat, well fed and pissed, hunched up and bared its teeth at Thorn.

  He edged to the entryway door while the raccoon grumbled louder with each step Thorn took. Some of them could be rabid, and cornered like this one, they could get aggressive, but Thorn had cleared more than one raccoon from his dwellings over the years. All they needed was a clear path to an exit and some small encouragement.

  Thorn opened the door wide.

  The raccoon stood its ground in front of the closet. Thorn looked around for a broom, something long enough to prod it into motion, steer it to the door. But the small closet where the cleaning stuff was stored was next to the clothes closet, blocked by the growling raccoon.

  From inside the wardrobe closet came a gurgling moan and a forlorn cheep, then it came again, and the big raccoon swiveled and clawed wildly at the louvered door, scrabbling with both front paws.

  From long nights camping in the Glades, Thorn recognized the noise. Baby coons gurgled like that when scuffling with one another in the mangrove branches, early tests of strength and balance, establishing the pecking order. Matheson had marooned those babies within hearing of the mother and turned her into a more ominous species of animal than what he’d thought—one ready to brawl.

  Where she’d planted herself made it impossible for Thorn to reach the handle of the bifold door and swing it open. With her babies threatened, this raccoon would not hesitate to do battle with a creature a dozen times her size. Risk everything to free her young. She’d slash him, bite him, take a deep gouging grip on his leg if he came close.

  Jeff Matheson had gone to a lot of trouble to organize this wildlife tableau. A small drama no doubt intended to illustrate the natural protective behavior of a parent for its offspring, to mock his own desertion of family. Never mind that Thorn didn’t know he was the father of two sons until today. In Matheson’s mind, and maybe in Sawyer’s and Flynn’s, he’d deliberately forsaken his fatherly duties for a life of childish self-indulgence.

  Okay, he got it.

  Thorn yanked the quilt off the bed and gathered it in his arms, found a grip on two edges, then bunched it against his chest. In a motion he’d used hundreds of times to catch schools of baitfish, he floated the quilt like a casting net over the mama raccoon. He waited to see how she’d respond, then he waded in and grabbed the struggling lump, held her tight, and carried her to the doorway. He set her down and let her struggle some more, then came back to the closet and flung open the louvered doors and liberated her two bleating cubs.

  Back at the door, he whisked the quilt off the big raccoon, revealing her to her youngsters, who scampered over and jumped aboard, clinging to her heavy coat as she lumbered outside and down the stairs to the yard without a thank-you or a parting snarl.

  He spent the next half hour combing the room for any other morality skits or wildlife booby traps Matheson might have left behind, but he found nothing more. No scorpions, no pythons, no bright blue poison dart frogs. He opened all the windows to flush out the funky odor.

  The muggy air of early evening was being whisked off by the rising breeze from an approaching thunderstorm, a sudden ten-degree drop.

  He remade the bed. Then he ate his two cold fish sandwiches at the dining table and skipped the fries. He’d already had his quota of grease for the month. He washed it down with a fizzless, iceless cola.

  Out his western window he watched the leading edge of the squall, the first strobes of lightning flashing like a salvo of silver spears flung by the foot soldiers leading the charge. Next the crash and clank of war machinery that rocked the floorboards of the apartment and rattled the glassware, followed by the deep concussions of the heavy stuff, then the rain came in gusts so strong he finally had to shut the windows.

  The thunderstorm raged for an hour. By then Thorn was lying down, sharing his bed tonight with two eggs that lay side by side on the other pillow. Maybe they were dead, maybe not. The only way to know for sure was to wait.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SUNDAY MORNING THORN WAS UP at seven. He showered, selected a fresh polo shirt. Another day, another alligator on the chest.

  He paced around the apartment for an hour, looking out his window at the eastern windows of the house. April’s bedroom. Shades drawn. No lights. Car gone.

  At nine when Frank arrived, Thorn told him about April, that she’d started her obituary for Monday. They knocked at the front door but no one came. Frank called her phone and they could hear it ringing inside. No one answered, no voice mail.

  “You got a key?”

  Thorn dug it out. He knocked again. Still no answer.

  “We’ll set the trap at the Silver Sands,” Frank said. “It’s out of the way, I know it like the back of my hand. The beach access is a minor problem. Might have to call on Rivlin and Vasquez. But between the four of us, we can lock it down tight.”

  Thorn opened the front door and they stepped into the foyer. Thorn called out. Nothing. He walked down the hallway to the kitchen, Frank tagging along, looking at the family photos.

  “For a weapon I was thinking about a knife. Easy to defend against. Low collateral possibilities. The guy’s used a knife already, so unless he’s got a problem with repeating himself, that should work.”

  “I thought our killer drowned yesterday.”

  “Maybe she did. But like you say, a backup plan can’t hurt. And hey, those scissors, the pinking shears, or whatever. No matches with any of the prints we took from the TV show people.”

  “Matheson had access to those scissors. You need his prints too.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  In the kitchen Thorn found a note propped up on the kitchen table.

  Garvey and I went to breakfast at La Lechonera. Back later.

  Frank read it over his shoulder.

  “She have a cell?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have the number.”

  “I need to talk to her. She’ll have to work this in. The Silver Sands, the knife. I’ll have her use my name.”

  “She said her deadline is six this evening.”

  “We’ll keep calling.”

  * * *

  Henry Roediger, the forensic podiatrist, never worked on Sundays. He reminded Frank of that twice, and he shared it with Thorn another time. It wasn’t that he was religious or anything of that sort—he was a man of science after all—but he believed every man and woman needed a day of rest, and Sunday was his. Always had been.

  “We appreciate your making an exception in this case.”

  Dr. Roediger gave Frank a token smile.

  Roediger was a handsome man, average height, thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, a heavy jaw, and cloudy blue eyes that seemed to be in the early stages of cataracts. His white lab coat covered a striped blue shirt and a red tie knotted precisely and pants with scrupulous creases. His shoes were black gunboats, maybe size fourteen. The feet of a man twice his size. Apparently Roediger’s career path had been genetically predetermined.

  He worked out of an office in a one-story medical plaza in the south Gables. The office, the examining room, and the laboratory were filled with disembodied feet. Plaster casts of feet; color
ed diagrams of feet with every ligament and tendon and bone and muscle named in Latin; plastic replicas of feet; cutaway models of feet that displayed the many strands of fibers, small bones, pads of fat, and fragile joints, so anatomically complex it was a wonder Homo sapiens had ever managed to lift themselves upright on such intricate devices, much less run and jump and pirouette.

  Twenty-six bones, Roediger explained, fourteen in the toes, five slender bones in the instep, and seven more bones forming the back of the foot. It was both a structural base and a lever. Keeping us balanced and moving. Tendons, those inelastic cords attaching muscles to bones, kept the shape of the foot intact. The thirty-two muscles and tendons provided power, balance, and direction. The 109 ligaments that hinged the bones to the joints, fibrous cords, maintained the static shape of the foot. And the arch, the wondrous arch, that curved structure, that inspiration for the great cathedrals of the old world, one main arch along the inside of the foot and three small arches, the metatarsal across the foot’s ball, the outer and short arch. And the toes, oh my, Roediger said, the miracle of the toes, gripping, clamping, propelling, balancing, a marvel of engineering.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this speech,” Frank said to Thorn, “and it never gets old.” He winked behind Roediger’s back. “Now, doc, the feet in question, the ones from the murder scene. What’ve you got for us?”

  “You’re making fun of me, I know,” the doctor said. “But if you don’t have a clear overview of the foot, fully appreciate what you’re seeing, how can you expect to make an informed determination about the particular foot in question?”

  “I was hoping you’d make that informed determination for us, doc. It’s really too late in life to get up to speed on something so complicated.”

  “Always in a rush, Sheffield, always hurrying and scurrying. When do you stop and actually apply yourself to something? Absorb new information? Acquire deep knowledge? If you don’t slow down, let your brain waves ease a little, give yourself sufficient time to truly absorb information, you’ll always be skimming, sir, just gliding across the surface.”

  “Skimming is going to have to suffice for now,” Frank said. “What do you say, let’s glide into the lab, take a look at the killer’s foot.”

  In the lab Roediger brought up a footprint on his large computer monitor, a bloody track the killer had left behind at the Waterway Lodge. Thorn stepped back from the computer to keep himself from putting a fist through the glass.

  The track was closer to a smudge than a footprint. Hardly any definition, barely more than a swipe of blood across the oak floor.

  “That’s it? That’s the best you have?” Frank peered at the image.

  “Well, there’s a reason for that. The paramedics who were first on the scene and the patrol officers were less than professional in their methodology.”

  “They were in a hurry and tracked through the blood.”

  “To be fair,” Roediger said, “there was no way to get to the bathroom where the victim’s body was located without disturbing some of the tracks. But they did more than that. They disturbed all of them, all but this one.”

  “And this one’s not so great.”

  “Not great, but intriguing.”

  “Let’s get to the intriguing part.”

  Roediger bent to the keyboard and tapped in something. The image on the screen broke apart into five different colors, blues, greens, reds, yellows, and whites. The footprint came into slightly sharper focus, but only slightly.

  “In the collection of pedal evidence we commonly use white adhesive lifters or white gelatin lifters. Personally, I’m fond of the electrostatic dust lifter, a device originally used in the examination of dubious documents to interpret indented writing. Forensic podiatrists like myself found the electrostatic dust lifter also to be highly useful for lifting dry-residue footwear impressions at crime scenes.

  “Ordinarily I like to transfer the dust print to the dark-colored lifting film, then photograph it. The floor or other surfaces should be clean and the impression is usually made up of dry material like gravel dust or other airborne particulates.

  “We’ve found with the electrostatic dust lifter that we have the same success rate on porous or nonporous surfaces. We even use the device for obtaining lifts from carpets. In this case, on his entrance into the crime scene room, the killer had not yet stepped into blood, so it was very likely he made dusty tracks across the wood floor.”

  Thorn was just barely holding his tongue. Already on probation with Sheffield, he knew it wasn’t a good idea to strangle the forensic podiatrist right in front of him.

  “Unfortunately, with the death of Sheriff Hilton, no such data was collected.”

  “It wasn’t?” Sheffield said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one summoned me to the crime scene.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I don’t shit people. It’s not in my makeup.”

  “But the Miami PD, their ID techs must use the same equipment.”

  “Oh, no. Their gear is vastly inferior. They don’t have my budget.”

  “So all this electrostatic mumbo jumbo, why waste our time with that?”

  “I wanted to inform you for future pedal evidentiary matters.”

  “Christ on a crutch.”

  “So what’s this image on the screen?” Thorn asked.

  “A simple crime scene photograph, nothing more. I’ve run it through our processor to colorize the sections of the foot where it appears the most pressure is being applied. We can work with that. It’s basic, but it’s useful.”

  “Talk to us, doc.”

  “Once I’ve colorized the photograph, I rely on an algorithm I developed that interprets pressure patterns, and from that I can project weight distribution based on the flattening of the footprint, matching it against our database on shoe types and shapes. Thus, from the pressure patterns it’s possible to extrapolate several facts. In this case, I can say for certain this individual was running when this print was made.”

  “Running,” Frank said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Not tiptoeing?” Frank said.

  “And we can also fix the weight range somewhere between one hundred and forty pounds to one hundred and eighty.”

  “That’s it? Nothing more specific than that?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Which keeps all our suspects on the board.”

  “Ordinarily I could be a great deal more clear-cut about height and weight and gait and build, even sex, but with this print, no. It’s not just the photograph, it’s the object itself. One-forty to one-eighty is the best I can do.”

  “What about the object?”

  “That image you’re looking at,” Roediger said, “is neither a shoe print nor the print of a bare foot.”

  “Which leaves what?”

  Roediger bent to his keyboard, killed the image of the foot, and flicked away to an Internet search page. He typed something in the box and the screen filled with images of a kind of footwear Thorn had never seen. It hugged the foot and surrounded each toe separately. It looked like a joke shoe, something for Halloween.

  “Oh,” Frank said. “A guy I know jogs in those.” Seeing Thorn’s blank look, he said, “New craze in running. Like going barefoot, only it protects the sole from glass and shit. It’s got no support, which is supposed to make the foot stronger, take you back to your stone age self.”

  “Vibram FiveFingers shoe,” Roediger said. “It’s a crock of snake oil. Does more damage than good. It’s a podiatrist’s dream shoe.”

  “Fairly obvious why our perp needs one,” Frank said, “running around barefoot, that’s a problem, rip up his suit, hurt his feet, so he gets himself a pair of these FiveFingers jobs. But how does that change the forensics? A shoe like that, it should be more revealing. It’s got a sole you can work with, plus it’s a replica of his foot shape.”

  “All true
. However, I use two distinct programs, two different biometric modalities, each with separate and unique protocols. One applies to ordinary shoes, hundreds of shoe types and sole patterns linked to brand-name products; the other program works with bare feet. I’m not set up to deal with this hybrid footwear. My coding would have to be completely rewritten to account for all the variables in this particular type of shoe. I simply can’t provide real scientific analysis of such a shoe without doing further research and study.”

  “What, like hours or days?”

  “Always in a hurry, Agent Sheffield. Always skimming.”

  “How long?”

  “A month,” Roediger said. “Maybe two. I need to…”

  But Frank had turned away and was stalking out of the lab.

  Thorn caught up with him in the parking lot, Frank on his cell.

  “Well, fine, I get it, Rivlin. It’s Sunday, you’re having people over, how nice. Tell you what, just turn the burners on low for two minutes, get on your goddamn laptop, and look through the inventory online. Call me back either way. If it’s there, if it’s not there, I want to know. Yeah, Vibram FiveFingers.” He spelled “Vibram,” then hung up.

  “She was having brunch with her future in-laws.”

  “What inventory?’

  “Dee Dee’s condo. My people took the place apart, made a list of the contents. Ms. Dollimore had fifteen different dildos, Rivlin remembered that much, but she couldn’t recall if there were barefoot running shoes. We find those, there’s blood traces, we’re home free.”

  “Now what?”

  “See my video guru. You think Roediger’s a character, just wait.”

  On the way out Old Cutler Road, Thorn tried April’s home number again and got no answer. It was close to eleven. Even a long breakfast should be done by now. Maybe they were grocery shopping, taking a Sunday drive. It was odd that Thorn hadn’t seen or heard her leave this morning. He’d been up, windows open. Probably when he was showering. Yeah, he told himself. When he was showering.