The next shot was inside the airport and showed Ortega coming through the door. A later shot captured him in the concourse and yet another had him walking next to a blond man toward baggage claim. They were caught one last time inside the terminal, Ortega pulling a cart with Lessor’s luggage; then the shot changed again to the fisheye ceiling cam and the parking garage.
The picture was grainy and the angle terrible, but the team saw a man come up to Ortega, then two more men, after which Lessor and one of the men got into the limo, Ortega ended up in the trunk, one of the men drove the limo, and the third one—the one who’d approached Ortega—walked away, out of the shot.
“So it was a kidnapping,” Calleigh said, but there was the lilt of a question in it.
Delko said, “Where did the third guy go? Was he bearded?”
Calleigh asked, “Do we have any enhancements yet?”
“Or other angles?” Delko asked.
“Slow down, troops. It does look like a kidnapping, but with the quality of these tapes it could be Jehovah’s Witnesses passing out The Watchtower, for all we know.”
Nods all around.
“And,” the CSI supervisor continued, “we can’t rule out the possibility that the whole thing was staged. Lessor is, after all, a fugitive from a Nevada murder charge and he might be looking for a way to disappear.”
“And to distract the cops,” Speedle said.
“We’re the cops,” Delko pointed out.
Speedle just looked at him.
“So, we have two crimes,” Calleigh said, as if savoring the words. “Felipe Ortega’s murder, and either a kidnapping…or an escape.”
“One at a time,” Caine said. “Let’s start with going after Felipe’s killer. If we get evidence that has to do with Lessor, bring that to me, and we’ll sort that out as we go.”
Back in his office, he called Las Vegas and told Catherine Willows about what he had seen on the videotape.
“You think it’s legit?” she asked.
“Too early to tell. I’ll keep you posted. You want my gut on this?”
“That would be refreshing,” she said. “I work with a guy who thinks opinions are a contagious disease.”
“I think it’s a real kidnapping,” he said.
4
Beach Party
SOUTH BEACH—the lower half of the city of Miami Beach, home to the fabled Art Deco hotels of the area—included, not surprisingly, the south beach.
And that beach could be chilly on a spring night, which of course didn’t stop Jim Miller and Julie Daly. The two teens were determined to find a place where they could be alone, and the lack of pedestrian traffic on the beach made that a relatively easy task.
Julie was the most amazing girl Jim had ever met; she was smart and funny—they spent so much time laughing. Imagine a girl who liked Adam Sandler movies! And the Three Stooges! He could not believe his luck. Plus, she was right out of a Britney Spears video—not Britney, but like one of those other girls who were almost-but-not-quite as cute.
At home, Jim shared a room with his little brother, and at Julie’s, her mom was always home, as were two little sisters, so they never got any time alone. When they watched TV together, there were always family members around, whichever house they chose. Only when they went out to a movie did they have any privacy. But tonight, they had skipped the movie they had told their folks they were going out to see, and had driven here to South Beach instead.
Jim had parked his mother’s BMW at Collins Park and the couple crossed Miami Beach Drive hand in hand, headed for the beach. By the time they found a nice secluded spot—where the beach curved slightly, bordered by scrub brush, and they could be alone—they were almost two blocks east up from the southern end of the boardwalk that ran all the way up to the Fontainebleau.
Julie helped him spread the blanket. Then they sat on it and talked for a while, about silly things at school that day, and dumb things their respective siblings had done…finally, some privacy!
Maybe fifteen minutes had passed when the scent of the ocean rode the breeze and brought a chill to the air that threatened to overcome the mood and the moment.
Although they had planned on coming here, neither of them had brought a jacket. Next to him, Julie shivered, and Jim slipped an arm around her. She looked up at him then, her face shining in the moonlight, her blue eyes taking on a silver cast, her full lips only inches from his.
He kissed her.
It was tentative at first, only their lips meeting; then he felt her lips part and his tongue seemed to act of its own volition. The chill he had felt only a moment ago was gone, and he was flushed with excitement.
Her willingness banished all shyness from him, and his hands moved on their own now, too. His embrace shifted and she moaned. He’d never heard anyone make a sound like that, except maybe on Cinemax; and then a phone rang.
They both paused.
“Do you need to get that?” he asked, thinking it was her mom or something.
She was sitting up now. “It’s not mine…. Isn’t it yours?”
He sat up too. “No. I didn’t bring mine.”
She dug in her jeans and held up her tiny cell, which was silent, even as the phantom phone rang on. “See—it’s not mine.”
The phone trilled on, sounding strangely muffled.
Whoever it was, making this unwanted call, the mood was broken.
“Where’s it coming from?” she asked, the ringing continuing.
They both stood, the blanket at their feet, and glanced around the moon-swept beach.
“Somebody must’ve dropped their phone,” Jim said. “You know, by accident.”
“Nobody drops their phone on purpose,” she said.
He glanced at her—she seemed suddenly a little cross for some reason.
“Find it,” she said, “and make it shut up.”
Dutifully, Jim started crawling around on his hands and knees, while Julie straightened her shirt. The ringing seemed to be coming from just this side of the scrub brush that formed a border to the boardwalk.
With the phone still ringing, Jim started feeling around the edge of the brush when he realized the chirping phone was behind him—he’d overshot it somehow. If he ever found the damned thing, he was going to give whoever was on the end a good cussing-out for screwing up his chances tonight.
Julie was next to him now, on her hands and knees as well, digging in the sand, like they were looking for buried treasure. “I think it’s down here somewhere,” she said.
She looked so cute in the moonlight. Angrily, he pitched in and started digging in the spot where Julie was frantically hauling out handfuls of sand.
“Who would bury a cell phone?” he asked.
She didn’t answer—it was sort of a rhetorical question, after all—and just kept digging.
Then Jim touched something that didn’t feel like sand. “I’ve got something!”
Stopping, Julie sat back and watched as he started excavating more carefully. Clawing at the sand, he soon realized they had uncovered a black garbage bag, inside of which the phone tittered one last time, then fell silent, as if all the cell had wanted was to be found.
This pissed Jim off even more. Now the phone had finally stopped its annoying interruption of his potential ecstasy; but they were too far into digging out the bag to quit. He knew Julie wasn’t likely to say, “Oh well,” and grab his hand and lead him over to the blanket and go straight for his zipper.
Finally, Jim cleared enough sand away that he could tug on a corner of the bag, but…
“Ick!” he said, pulling his hand away.
“What?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“It’s…sticky.”
“You think this is just somebody’s garbage they buried on the beach? After a picnic, maybe?”
There was a little picnic area with tables just beyond the scrub brush.
“I don’t know,” Jim said. “Maybe. And their cell phone fell in or something?”
/> She started digging again. “Let’s get the cell phone out, anyway.”
“Why bother?”
“You want it to start ringing again?”
This hint of a promise that they might be able to resume their petting—however unlikely—propelled Jim back into action. He pulled hard, harder, and the bag shifted, starting to pull free from the sucking sand.
As the bag broke free, the plastic ripped, and the abrupt shift sent Jim tumbling backward, and when he came up, that sticky wetness was on his hands, arms, and chest. The sticky stuff, whatever it was, looked black in the moonlight. He looked over at Julie, holding up his damp gooey hands, and saw the girl staring into the hole, her eyes so wide the white was showing all ‘round, and her face was white, too, and it wasn’t from the moonlight.
She took a deep breath, then another, like someone preparing to start a race…
…and then she screamed.
Still on his knees, Jim leaned forward to look into the hole himself, to see what she had seen.
Jim felt all the air being sucked out of him and his stomach jumped into his chest and his heart leapt into his throat.
Looking up at him, its hair matted and stiff, eyes open and staring, was a man’s face. The face was attached to a head, but the head wasn’t attached to anything at all.
Next to one cheek, almost as if the bodiless head were leaning against it, was a left hand, hacked off at the wrist, and just outside the hole, where it had flopped in the sand, was the right hand, similarly hacked, the cell phone lying near the stiff-fingered palm.
Julie turned to him, in shock, and grabbed at him for support. Then—apparently feeling the sticky goo he’d gotten on him and now her—pulled back and screamed again, even louder. She got to her feet and sprinted toward the surf, screaming as she went. The sound got fainter even as it echoed across the night.
Only then did Jim realize that the black all over him was black just in the moonlight. If there had been any other kind of light, the goo dripping off him would have been a wet scarlet smear of blood.
His dinner tried to make a break for it, and Jim forced it down, as he instinctively pushed away from the hole; then he scrambled toward the scrub brush and there was no stopping it. He hurled, lurching with spasms that were also, somehow, sobs. When his stomach finally emptied, Jim looked toward the ocean where he saw Julie in the surf.
She was naked and she was frantically scrubbing blood off herself.
Following her example, he tore off his shirt, dropped his jeans, and dashed toward the water in socks and tightie whities. In his wildest dreams he had never imagined they would get naked together on the beach.
And it didn’t feel good at all.
Shortly after 5:00 A.M., the sky like a purple bruise the rising sun was miraculously healing, Horatio Caine was driving in almost nonexistent traffic across Tamiani Trail when his cell phone rang. He took it off his belt and punched a button. “Horatio.”
“Actually,” Catherine Willows’s voice said apologetically, “I thought I’d get your machine. It’s mid-shift, here. Did I wake you?”
“No. I’m heading in early. Don’t like to let trails grow cold.”
“Well,” she said, “I was just going to leave you some information I thought might help.”
“By all means.”
“Lessor made four trips to Brazil in the last twelve months. Ostensibly to look for talent, but he’s also purchased a beach house. Appears he may have been setting up a new life.”
Caine picked up the thread. “Then he hired the three guys to ‘kidnap’ him so he could disappear.”
“Yes. It’s a viable theory—at least, one that fits the facts, such as we have at this stage.”
“Maybe Boyle Hotels is contemplating a Rio hotel. Guy obviously likes to have living quarters handy when he’s going to be doing prolonged business in a place.”
“I can check into that.”
“Would you, please?”
“Sure…. Do you have any evidence I don’t know about?”
“Not really. When we spoke, it was near end of shift, yesterday. But we’re hitting this hard, and early, today.” The phone made its “call waiting” signal in his ear. “One second, Catherine,” he said.
“No problem.”
Caine clicked over to the other line. “Horatio.”
“Rise and shine, H.” It was Speedle.
“What’s up, Speed?”
“Remember we talked about coming in early today, gettin’ a head start?”
“I’m in my car now, heading in.”
“Well, don’t. Come to me. I got something you’re gonna want to see.”
“Where are you?”
“Miami Beach, south end of the boardwalk. It’s Lessor.”
“You found him? Dead or alive?”
“The part we found is dead. Some kids dug up a garbage bag on the beach—somebody threw away Thomas Lessor’s head and his hands.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen,” the CSI said. As he clicked back over to the other line, Caine hit the button that turned on the flashers and the siren.
Practically yelling to be heard over the siren, he said, “If Lessor’s kidnapping is a hoax, Catherine, it’s a pretty damn convincing one.”
“Is that your siren?”
“It is. I’ve just been told we found our missing man’s head and hands in Miami Beach.”
Astonishment in her voice, the Vegas CSI asked, “Where in Miami Beach?”
“Like I said, Catherine. In it.”
He assured her he’d be back in touch and roared down the mostly empty roadway.
Head start indeed.
5
According to Boyle
A PAL ON NIGHTSHIFT had called Tim Speedle in. Caine had circulated throughout the department the Vegas booking photo of Thomas Lessor, and the nightshift guy had recognized the victim. So the ball had been passed to Speedle, who’d intended coming in early, anyway.
As soon as Speedle saw the head, draped in a garbage bag, in a hole in the sand, the young CSI knew that Thomas Lessor hadn’t fled the country to avoid facing murder charges in Nevada.
Farther up the beach, Eric Delko searched the area around a circle of four picnic tables while Calleigh Duquesne worked the sand with ground-penetrating radar—probably a futile gesture on a sandy beach, but maybe she’d get lucky. The GPR worked well with soil, but sand made it practically worthless.
Lessor’s body had to be somewhere, though, and Speedle figured the chances were fifty-fifty that the killer would bury the body somewhere near the head. After all, who wanted to be driving around the city with a headless, handless corpse in the trunk?
Speedle continued to document the scene with his camera. Photographing took a long time, but the pictures were important. He stayed with it, working as fast as possible, not wanting to leave the head and hands under the rising sun any longer than necessary. Nonetheless, he was thorough, shooting the scene from the place where the two kids had said they were necking, then grabbing a 360 from the grave itself and then another using the nearest of the Art Deco lifeguard huts as a centerpiece.
The latter happened to be yellow with lavender trim. Laker colors, Speedle thought. After finishing the second 360, he took more photos from the boardwalk looking out toward the beach. You just never knew what might be important later, or what part of the scene you might have to testify about in court. Juries always liked to have photos as references and Speed was happy to oblige.
He was shooting the last of his pictures when Caine strolled up, dressed in his usual black suit and sunglasses. “You’re sure it’s Lessor?” he asked.
“Take a look,” Speedle said and pointed toward the hole in the sand.
Caine walked and, lifting his sunglasses, peered down. “That would be a yes,” he said.
“His wallet was in the garbage bag, too—all his ID.”
“How did this happen to get unearthed?”
“Two kids fooling around on the beach
,” Speedle said, gesturing vaguely. “They heard Lessor’s cell phone ringing and dug it up from under the sand.”
“Where are they now?”
“Home with their respective parents. This happened around eleven—the MDPD didn’t get to this till near dawn.”
“Why not?”
Speedle shrugged. “The kids were scared. They freaked out. Went home. Called each other on the phone and hashed it over. Finally, the girl told her parents.”
“Probably didn’t want to get in trouble for not being where they were supposed to be,” Caine said.
“Which wasn’t on the beach, making out.”
“One can assume. What detective caught this?”
“Bernstein.”
Bernstein was devoted to the job and a hard worker, which Speedle appreciated. He had a nononsense attitude that, intimidating or not, made him one of the most popular detectives with the CSIs.
“What else have we got?” Caine asked.
“Two in the back of the head.”
“Execution?”
Speedle nodded. “Looks like a pro hit, .22, maybe. Mob style.”
“Any other evidence?”
Speedle gave his boss a one-shoulder shrug. “We’re looking, only the sand runs from here to Myrtle Beach and there’s no guarantee that the killers buried anything here other than what we found.”
Caine sighed, surveyed the endless beach. “We won’t find the rest of the body, but we have to keep looking. Who knows what else we’ll turn up.”
“You don’t think the rest is buried here?”
“No. The head and hands, the ID, deliberately disposed of separately from the body. It won’t be around. What I don’t understand is…why here?”
“Why not?”
Caine gestured out to the ocean. “A short boat ride, and Lessor’s identity would be so much chum. Why would professionals bury this crucial evidence in a foot of sand on a well-traveled beach?”
“So—we stop looking for the body?”
Caine arched an eyebrow.
“I know—we still go over every square inch. If there’s anything, H, we’ll find it.”
His boss allowed a brief smile to escape. “This is a double murder now, Speed—let’s stay alert. We may not have a stellar citizen in the late Thomas Lessor, but he still deserves our best…as does Felipe Ortega.”
Florida Getaway Page 6