“Welcome to my world. Once it’s gone to Bermuda or Luxembourg or somewhere, it’s almost impossible to follow.”
We split up the accounts and reviewed them, looking for irregularities and connections. “I’ve got one,” I said, after an hour or so. “I have a bunch of checks here with the same signature as some of the checks on the bookstore account. The first name F and the last name C. For a company called Triple Lambda LLC.”
“The gay symbol,” she said.
“Exactly. Triple Lambda has both a merchant account and a checking account with Florida Southern.” A merchant account was set up to accept payments from credit card companies, with the cash then transferred to the checking account.
“Lots of volume of small transactions—ten and twenty dollars,” I continued. “Which is consistent with sales of online porn.”
“And which add up to big numbers,” Katya said.
Most of the money from Triple Lambda’s checking account was transferred regularly to an offshore account, but FC wrote weekly checks to Frank Cardone on that account, always for $1,500. “You think that’s his salary for managing the porn house?” I asked.
“Nice work if you can get it,” she said.
We worked for another hour, and then compared notes. “We have at least two businesses connected to Frank Cardone, the man who manages the porn house,” I said. “One runs the X-rated bookstore, the other the website that sells the movies made in the house.”
“I’ll feed this information into my investigation and see if it’s enough to get a search warrant on the house,” Katya said. “If you find any other connections to Kurov, let me know.”
I didn’t like passing off my investigation to Katya, but if it got me the warrant I wanted I was willing to deal.
• • •
That night, I exchanged a couple of texts with Lester. He had contacted Shane McCoy and arranged to go over to Lazarus Place the next night and give the kids some quick self-defense lessons and maybe get a bunch of them interested in working out regularly.
I answered the last message with a couple of hearts and a ZZZ emoticon. It felt good to have that connection with Lester again.
• • •
Tuesday morning I left for work early but still got caught in a traffic jam on Sunrise Boulevard while an accident was being cleared at the entrance to I-95. While I waited, I read the local news headlines on my phone. One short article jumped out.
The headline was “Unidentified man found dead at Fort Lauderdale Beach construction site,” and it gave me the creeps. I checked to see that the flashing lights were still ahead of me and when no one was moving, I clicked through to read the whole article.
Friday morning workmen renovating a 1960s era apartment building on Fort Lauderdale beach discovered the body of an unidentified man.
The man, in his early twenties and of Asian descent, was believed to be camping out in the building, according to police spokesperson Carolyn Braider-Hare. Anyone with information is encouraged to call Crime Stoppers at 954-493-TIPS.
Early twenties, Asian descent, camping in an apartment building under renovation? That had to be Dorje, didn’t it?
29.
Enlightenment
I managed to inch forward enough at the traffic light so that I could make a U-turn, swinging in behind an old Jeep plastered with alt-rock decals and a roof surfboard rack. The jerk chicken stands and check-cashing operations gave way to the yuppie stores on the outskirts of Wilton Manors, and I passed the Exotic Imports showroom. I took Sunrise Boulevard all the way to the beach, then turned south on A1A.
Without Shane’s directions, I had to circle around the neighborhood between the ocean and the Intracoastal until I found the Morningstar Apartments where he and I had met Dorje. I wasn’t surprised to see crime scene tape surrounding it.
There were no cops in the area, and no construction vehicles in front of the building. I parked in one of the spots with a faded yellow bollard that read “reserved.” The only tenant in the building was dead, and wouldn’t be needing the parking space.
I stood there trying to get a feel for the place, as sunshine filtered through the clouds. Poor Dorje, he was just trying to get by. Had someone followed him back to his hideout over the weekend? Had he picked up a trick who’d gotten violent?
Living rough was always risky, especially for young kids, which was why there was such a need for shelters like Lazarus Place. There were too many dangers out there in the world. It was a shame Dorje had run into one of them.
Or was there something more going on? Dorje was the second person on the periphery of my investigation who ended up dead. Was there a chance that the same person killed both Dorje and Alexei Verenich?
It was too early to do much speculation. I didn’t even know how Dorje had died.
A skinny, elderly man approached, carrying a small Chihuahua in his arms. Not the way I’d consider walking a dog, but what did I know? He walked with a slant, leaning to his left, as if he’d had a stroke or some other physical damage.
“Hell of a thing,” he said to me as he passed, nodding toward the building. “You work there?”
I showed him my badge. “You probably know what goes on around here. I’ll bet you’re out with the dog a lot. You ever see anybody coming or going after hours?”
“A couple of damn kids,” he said. “Camping out in the building. Probably doing drugs. This used to be a nice neighborhood before all this construction.”
“The boy in the building,” I said. “You ever see him?”
“Don’t know which one it was. There were a few of them, thought they were slick because they only went in and out after dark and before dawn. But I’d see them.”
“Anyone else besides boys?”
The man thought for a moment. “Yeah. Last week a middle age guy went in, must have been six o’clock or so, because it was right after Buster’s dinner. Saw him trying to climb over the dumpster and he fell right on his fat ass. Serves him right, hanging around with them kids.”
Could that have been Frank Cardone? “You remember what day it was?”
“Nah. The days all blend into each other, you know?”
The dog mewled in the man’s arms and the man said, “All right, we’re going home.”
I thanked him and he resumed his march, but he stopped a moment later and turned back to me. “There was one other guy, now I remember,” he said. “Maybe thirty, skinny, with a T-shirt cut off at the shoulders to show off his muscles. He didn’t have no trouble getting up over the dumpster, though. Almost like he was in the Olympics or something the way he sprinted over it.”
“When was that?”
“Saturday morning,” he said. “I remember because Buster had diarrhea. I was out a half-dozen times that day, but I only saw the sprinter once, right after dawn.”
“The police are going to want to talk to you,” I said. He gave me his name and address as Buster wriggled in his arms, and finally he put the dog down on the ground and it peed copiously.
After they left, I looked around for a couple of minutes but I didn’t want to cross the police tape. I didn’t know anybody in the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, but I had met Dr. Maria Fleitas, assistant coroner at the ME’s office, on a previous case. I figured she was the best place to start. I hoped she’d be on duty, and I was lucky that when I called the office I was able to reach her.
“Sure, come on over,” she said. “I finished the autopsy yesterday evening but we don’t have an ID or next of kin so I haven’t had any request to release the body.”
It was only a couple of miles from the beach to the Medical Examiner’s Office, but it felt like a whole world away. To get there you had to go past the industrial buildings, around the airport, the animal shelter, and row after row of manufactured homes that were a stark contrast to the palatial homes off Las Olas.
The ME’s compound was unimpressive, a collection of single-story buildings and trailers. A couple of guys in uniforms
swarmed around a bomb truck in the driveway of the sheriff’s station next door, and then the truck backed out and drove away.
The morgue was busy and I had to wait until the sheriff’s deputy ahead of me got the forms he needed before the receptionist could call Dr. Fleitas for me.
She was a short Latina with funky red-framed glasses and shoulder-length dark hair with bangs. She wore light-green scrubs and lab coat with her name embroidered on the left breast. “Agent Green,” she said. “You’re developing a habit of identifying my John Does.”
“Anything I can do to help,” I said, as I shook her hand.
“You have a photo this time?”
I shook my head. “If it’s the guy I think it is, I met him myself a few days ago.”
As we walked down the hallway to the refrigerated room, I explained how I’d been introduced to Dorje at the apartment building by the beach. “Very beautiful young man, long dark hair, half-Caucasian and half-Tibetan,” I said.
“Sounds like him. Though his face isn’t very pretty anymore.”
I shuddered as we ducked out the backdoor and hurried across to a refrigerated trailer. The sun was bright as a knife and I was glad to get into the cool air, even though the smell of death inside was harsh and visceral. She handed me a tub of Vicks VapoRub and I rubbed a bit on my upper lip—something I’d learned the last time I’d been at the morgue.
I followed her into an operating room and watched as she opened the door of a cooler. She bent down to check the ID on a bed-like shelf. Then she slid the shelf with the body out and pulled down the sheet covering the face.
My stomach lurched as I recognized Dorje. Someone had swiped a knife down his face in several sharp lines, tearing through his perfect skin. Had he survived the attack, he would have never been beautiful again.
“Is this your guy?”
I nodded, though I couldn’t speak for a moment, worried that the muffin I’d had for breakfast was going to come up and spatter Dorje’s corpse.
“I was told his name is Dorje,” I said.
She grabbed her clipboard and I spelled the name for her.
“No last name?” she asked.
“Not that I know. No fingerprint match in the database?”
“Nope.” As she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, she said, “A number of things happened to Mr. Dorje and I haven’t been able to put the timeline together yet.”
I took a deep breath. Mistake. I choked for a moment, then said, “Tell me.”
She pointed at the lines on his face. “These were done before he was killed. Lots of blood, probably very painful. There are bruises around his wrists and ankles consistent with being forcibly restrained with a nylon fiber rope, though the person, or persons, responsible removed the ropes from the crime scene.”
“Cause of death?” My throat was dry and scratchy.
“Two bullets to the brain,” she said. “Fired from the rear, probably while the victim was restrained and lying flat on the floor.”
I thought of Alexei Verenich, who was killed the same way. Would the bullets match? “Who’s the homicide detective handling this case?”
“Ana Cespedes. You’ll like her. She’s smart.” I copied down Detective Cespedes’s name and phone number. Then I took a couple of photos of Dorje’s face, even though the slash wounds gave me the creeps.
From my car, I called Detective Cespedes and left my name and number. I didn’t want to drive all the way to Miramar while I waited for her to return my call, so I found a coffee shop nearby, set up the VPL, and did some searching on Dorje.
It was hard to find anything without a last name. Dorje was a common given name among Tibetan men. It meant “the thunderbolt of enlightenment.” A dorje was also a ritual object that lamas used in religious ceremonies, a short rod with decorated balls on either end. And it was the name of a British rock group.
I found a bunch of men named Dorje on Facebook but none of them matched. I was clicking random links by the time I found a page belonging to a girl named Yonten Brewer, who posted a photo of herself and her brother Dorje.
She was almost as beautiful as he was, but her dark hair was wild and frizzy, while his was slick and shoulder-length. She was from Mountain View, California but attending the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Dorje Brewer had no online profile, but I was able to find an address and phone number for a Richard and Dohna Brewer in Mountain View. I wasn’t going to be the one to call and break the news, though. I’d leave that task to Ana Cespedes.
I answered a few e-mails and did some personal surfing until I got a call back from Cespedes and agreed to meet her at the Fort Lauderdale Police Station where Roly and I had rendezvoused a few days before.
She met me in the lobby. She was a petite woman with a heart-shaped face and dark hair in ringlets. Three earrings in each ear, a mix of gold balls and stars. She appeared to be under thirty, so I was impressed she’d made detective so young.
“You said you have an ID on the John Doe from the beach?” she asked as she led me up to her desk on the second floor of the building.
“I do.” I handed her a piece of paper on which I’d written Dorje’s name, along with the information on his parents. I pronounced the name for her, too.
“Tell me about your interactions with this kid,” she said, as we sat down at her desk. “How did you find him?”
“Let me start at the beginning,” I said. “So you can see how Dorje fits into my case.”
I explained about the connection between the face-eating zombie, the flakka distribution, the porn house and the lost boys. “I got a lead on the boys from a guy named Shane McCoy, a counselor at Lazarus Place.”
“I’m familiar with Mr. McCoy. He’s been pestering me for a while about a boy who disappeared from his operation. And you found him?”
“I did. His name is Ozzy Perez, he’s fifteen, and I believe he’s acting in gay porn, either voluntarily or because he has no place else to go.”
She made a couple of notes.
“I met with the kids living at Lazarus Place and in the course of speaking with them, one of the boys told us that Dorje knew the guy who was making the movies.”
She turned to her computer and began making notes. “Was this boy Dorje living there too?”
“No. Shane had heard that he was squatting at a construction site on Fort Lauderdale beach, so he took me over there.”
“Mr. McCoy was familiar with Dorje?”
“It was my understanding he’d tried to convince Dorje to come live at Lazarus Place, but had been unsuccessful.”
She nodded and made more notes. “What happened when you met with Dorje?”
I explained about climbing over the dumpster and talking with Dorje. “I showed him a screen capture from the video and he identified the man in it as someone who’d asked him to participate in porn videos.” I remembered Dorje saying that the boys had to be very handsome, and how proud he’d been of his own appearance, and I shuddered at the way his face had been marred.
“Did he give you a name for the man?”
“Just Frank. Later I spotted the man at a gay bar called Second Star, and followed him to his car. The registration told me his last name is Cardone.”
“Second Star? I don’t know that one. Where is it?”
“It’s a low-key operation,” I said. “With a reputation for fixing up underage boys with older men. Your vice department probably knows about it.”
“Never assume,” she said.
“It makes an ass of you and me,” I said, and she looked at me curiously. “Sorry, it’s something my mother’s husband says. The bar’s on Flagler Street south of Sunrise—no sign out front, just two neon stars.”
She made some more notes. “So you identified this Frank Cardone as participating in porn videos featuring underage boys. Why haven’t you arrested him?”
“Not enough evidence yet.” I gave her the address of the porn house. “If you can get a warrant to search the
premises I’d like to be included. I want to see if it’s where the porn videos are being filmed, and if there are underage boys participating, I want to help them get somewhere safe. I also want to see if someone in the house is distributing flakka.”
She typed more information into her computer, then turned back to me. “Getting back to my case,” she said. “When you spoke with Dorje, did he appear frightened?”
“Not at all. More like arrogant.”
“Didn’t mention anyone with a grievance against him?”
I shook my head.
“How was he able to live at that building unnoticed?” she asked.
“Shane told me he’d heard a rumor that Dorje was trading favors with the construction superintendent. He may be able to give you more information, and I’d suggest you interview the kids at Lazarus Place. One of them might have been in closer contact with Dorje.”
“You think one of those kids might have been involved in his death?”
I shook my head. “This was a pretty violent situation,” I said. “My experience is limited, of course, but this looks like the work of an adult rather than a teenager.”
“Any idea who that adult might be? This Mr. McCoy?”
“Shane seems to be a good guy who cares about runaway kids. I don’t know him that well, but I haven’t seen any indication in his behavior that he’d be capable of such a violent act.”
Then I recalled Shane’s obsession with finding and speaking with Ozzy. That wasn’t violent, it was protective. But then, if Shane ran across whoever had been victimizing Ozzy, would that obsession turn into violence? That wasn’t a matter for Detective Cespedes, though.
I waited until she finished making notes to ask, “Did you pick up any prints from the site?”
“Yes. It looks like Mr. Dorje had a lot of company in the room where he was staying.”
“Cardone has a record for a couple of misdemeanors, so his prints ought to be in the system.”
“But without a connection to the body or the instruments of death, there’s no guarantee that even if his prints appear I’ll be able to pin him as the murderer. He could say he was a visitor like you.”
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