Florida Getaway

by Max Allan Collins

  “Right, H.”

  After helping the EMTs bag the body parts and collecting the cell phone and wallet as evidence, Speedle went up the beach to check on his co-workers. Calleigh, her blue eyes hidden behind dark glasses, her long hair tied back in a ponytail, wore tan slacks and a brown-striped white short-sleeve blouse. As Speedle approached, she stopped and wiped her forehead with a damp rag.

  “And what’s your story?” she asked.

  “Just finishing up. The body—what there is of it—is on its way to the morgue. How’s your luck?”

  She shook her head and sunlight glanced off her ice blonde hair. “It was a long shot to begin with.”

  “H says, stay at it.”

  Eyebrows lifted. “What a shock,” she said coolly.

  “Hey, guys!” Delko called. “Over here.”

  The pair went to Delko, whose black shirt and gray slacks were touched with sand, his field kit opened on the beach near him.

  “Find anything fun?” Calleigh asked.

  “Oh yeah. Somebody was partying, all right.” Delko pointed at a dark spot on the side of one of the planks that made up the top of one of the four picnic tables in the circle he was working. The little area was bordered on either side by scrub brush.

  Calleigh leaned in close and stared. “Dried blood?”

  Delko nodded. “Looks like it. Testing it now.” He held up a cotton swab that was a bright pink…

  …meaning that Delko had just run a presumptive blood test using phenolphthalein, indicating that the dark spot on the picnic table was, in fact, blood.

  “Looks like a photo op,” Speedle said.

  In her breezy drawl, Calleigh said, “I’ll call for a truck to take all these tables back to HQ.”

  Delko said, “I’ll check the sand again and see if I missed something under the table.”

  They all went about their various duties, and then Delko called out to them again.

  “Calleigh! You got a photo marker handy?”

  “I can make that happen.” She reached down into her field kit and walked over to Delko with the plastic A-frame, on which the number “1” was etched. “Got a bullet for me?”

  Delko smiled a little. “Is that all you think about?”

  “No. I think about guns, too.”

  He shook his head, laughing a little. “Well, this is a battery, small one. Watch battery, maybe.”

  “Or maybe somebody’s hard of hearing.”

  Delko took the marker and set it on the sand next to a small metal object. “Could be…. Let’s hope whoever it is doesn’t hear us coming.”

  Delko bagged the battery, and they kept at it.

  Horatio Caine stood in the morgue’s elevated observation room, a cubicle with an eagle’s-eye view of the main one below, where Medical Examiner Alexx Woods had Lessor’s head and hands arrayed on the central metal table, positioned where they would be if the rest of the body had been present. It was as if the ME were examining an invisible man who’d only partly materialized.

  “You been through it, haven’t you, sugar?” she asked Lessor’s face, her voice soothing. She often spoke to her patients, and they would speak to her—not in words, but in the evidence they and their killers had left behind.

  Caine wondered if her habit of talking to the dead was a method of distancing herself from the tragedies that regularly appeared on her silver table; or was it just the opposite, a method of personalizing the victims? He had never asked. Probably he never would.

  Both Caine and Alexx wore headsets that allowed them to hear everything the other said. Upstairs, watching the autopsy through a computer monitor, Caine said, “Magnify four times, please.”

  The image on the monitor grew by four as the computer carried out the voice command.

  There were ongoing political squabbles over funding the crime lab in so elaborate a manner; but Caine’s arrest and conviction record was just what Miami needed in a day and age when their once idyllic city had become unfortunately identified with crime. Those who considered Caine’s “toys” an indulgence didn’t understand the realities of criminal investigation in the twenty-first century. To Caine, any “toy” that made it easier for his team to serve justice was worth its price.

  Right now he was studying the entrance wounds at the back of the skull at the same time as Alexx, down in the main room.

  “Double tap,” he said.

  “Small caliber,” she added. “Could be a mob hit.”

  “I had the same thought.”

  “Head and hands removed to make ID of the body difficult to impossible.”

  “Yes,” Caine said, “but buried on the beach not far from the picnic table where the dismemberment apparently took place.”

  Alexx did not offer an opinion on why that might be; this was outside of her purview. She asked, “Did the victim have a history with organized crime?”

  “Not that we know of, but he was in the hotel industry both here and in Vegas. The thought isn’t beyond the pale. Any luck with the bullets?”

  She was having a closer look. “There’s no exit wound, so they should still be in there. If it’s a .22, which is what the entrance wound looks like, it could have pinballed around…. If the little devils’re in there, I’ll find them.”

  “I know you will,” Caine said, his voice as soothing as hers had been to the corpse. “What about the points where he was dismembered?”

  She held up the hands, looking at the fairly smooth amputation cuts. “Sharp,” she said. “Wide blade.”

  “Magnify two times,” Caine said to the monitor, and took a closer look himself.

  The cut looked very smooth—no interruptions, no serrations, nothing to make it appear that it took the killer more than one blow with whatever tool he used to dismember the body.

  He asked, “Any ideas, Alexx?”

  She shrugged. “Could be a machete. You know the Columbians and the Haitians are both partial to them—Cubans, too.”

  The crime unspooled in Caine’s mind’s eye….

  Lessor gets off the plane, and his driver Felipe Ortega is waiting for him, holding up a name placard. The two meet, gather Lessor’s luggage, and head for the door. In the parking garage, the three men are waiting. They load Lessor and his bags in the back, bind Ortega, and stuff him in the trunk.

  This much Caine has seen on the airport security videotapes, lousy though they were. The difference was, now he knew it wasn’t staged.

  The killers drive the limousine to the parking lot on Collins Avenue, force Lessor outside onto the beach, and put two in his head, leaving the limo unstained by blood.

  Lessor’s body is transported to the picnic area—deserted on a cold night, hidden from view of the boardwalk by scrub brush—and the head and hands are cut off. The rest of the body is cut into pieces, too, possibly put in several bags, and disposed of elsewhere. The head and hands and the victim’s personal effects are buried on the nearby beach….

  Had they been interrupted? What caused them to hurriedly bury the most readily identifiable body parts?

  The car is moved into a spot where it will be easily found, so that the chauffeur will be recovered alive. This is a hit—only Lessor targeted, and the masks have kept the chauffeur from being a viable witness; no need to kill him…

  …only something goes wrong—Ortega gets sick and when he can’t open his mouth, he asphyxiates on his own vomit.

  “What can you tell me about Ortega?” Caine asked.

  Alexx moved to the late chauffeur’s lanky corpse on another metal table and looked up toward Caine, in the observation perch. “I think he was scared to death, Horatio.”

  “Who wouldn’t be under those circumstances?”

  “No,” she said, an uncharacteristic edge in her tone. “I mean literally scared to death. He may have been clinically claustrophobic, reacting to the small space; or he heard the gunshots and figured he was next. Fear is not just a mental state, Horatio.”

  “It’s physical,” he sai
d, with her now.

  “Yes,” she said. “His epinephrine level went through the roof—blood glucose, blood glycerol, and blood fatty acid levels were all raised from sympathetic impulses sent by the hypothalamus.”

  “Panic attack,” Caine said.

  “Panic attack,” she nodded. “Which led to his vomiting, and the duct tape kept him from being able to expel.”

  “And he asphyxiated.”

  “He had no other choice.”

  This confirmed Caine’s own view. He said, “Okay, let’s get the testing done on Lessor—start with finding those bullets, get them to Calleigh, and both of you keep me posted.”

  “Heading somewhere?”

  “I’m going to inform Lessor’s stepson of this death in the family.”

  “I don’t envy you.”

  “Actually, it’s going to be interesting. Lessor’s stepson hated him.”

  “By the time I get them,” she said, nodding toward the bodiless head on the adjacent table, “the hatred’s out of them. It’s the other residue that helps us find the killers.”

  “Isn’t it, though.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Then she turned back to the body parts on the table and almost cooed, “Don’t you worry, sugar—we’ll find out who did this nasty thing to you.”

  As he exited the observation room, Caine got on his cell and phoned Detective Sevilla to ask her to accompany him to see Daniel Boyle.

  “Meet you at the car,” Sevilla said.

  Instead of taking the big, obvious Hummer, Sevilla drove her unmarked Taurus. Caine called ahead to the Conquistador and learned that Boyle was not there, rather at the family home, a large two-story stucco near mansion on Key Biscayne. When Sevilla pulled up in front of the place, she let out a low, appreciative whistle.

  “I guess if you run hotels,” she said, “you get to live in one.”

  “Sometimes you have to check out, anyway,” Caine said.

  “Oh?”

  “Just ask Thomas Lessor.”

  The lushly well-manicured lawn was slightly smaller than a football field, and—like most South Florida homes—Boyle’s castle had no screen doors, just massive double oak slabs.

  Caine rang the bell.

  Soon the door swung open and he found himself standing before a beautiful, very pale woman in a perfectly cut white pants suit; she was tall—her eyes met his—and her dark hair was bobbed, her eyes large and light blue. She had an Audrey Hepburn neck rising out of the turned-up collar of her jacket, with a single strand of pearls tight around her throat.

  “You’d be the police,” she said, her voice deep and rich, but a slight tremor betrayed emotions beneath the carefully controlled surface.

  Her assumption about their official status was no wild deduction: both Caine and Sevilla wore their badges, Caine’s on his breast pocket, Sevilla’s on her belt.

  Sevilla affirmed, “Miami-Dade Police. Is Daniel here?”

  Before the elegant woman could answer, a voice Caine instantly recognized as Boyle’s came from inside the house. “Who is it, Mother?”

  This confirmed Caine’s suspicion that the door had been answered by Deborah Lessor, Thomas’s wife; presumably she had flown here from Vegas out of concern for her missing husband.

  “Mrs. Lessor,” Caine said with a nod. “I’m Horatio Caine, with the crime lab. This is Detective Sevilla.”

  “You’re the people who’ve been looking for my husband. Have you found him?”

  He ducked the question. “May we come in? We’d like to talk to you and Daniel.”

  She stepped aside and Sevilla entered, Caine just behind her; they were barely in when Daniel Boyle appeared.

  Today, the handsome if pug-nosed hotel manager wore a black cashmere pullover, black slacks, and (again) Bruno Magli loafers. Seeing Caine, Boyle’s voice turned cold and hard. “If you have something to report, call first.”

  His mother took Boyle’s arm. “Daniel—please be civil. These people are trying to help.”

  Caine said, “Listen to your mother.”

  Boyle frowned and seemed about to take things up a notch, when Sevilla got between the two men, heading off a confrontation. “Is there somewhere we can sit down and talk?”

  “Certainly,” Mrs. Lessor said.

  To the left, a door opened on a home office and a hall that led toward the back of the house; to the right, a doorway led to the dining room and, beyond that, the living room.

  Still glaring at Caine, Boyle made an open-palmed gesture toward the living room.

  They all went in, Mrs. Lessor taking a seat at one end of the huge black leather sofa that dominated the far wall. The near wall was home to an entertainment center and large-screen plasma TV that seemed to Caine at least as sophisticated as his much-vaunted equipment back at headquarters.

  Boyle flopped sullenly into one of two matching leather chairs that sat angled on either side of the sofa. A low, black metal table sat in the middle of the group, matching end tables at either end of the sofa between the chairs, all the pieces seeming to hold each other at arm’s length. On the left wall rested a wheeled silver cart with several liquor bottles, an ice bucket and a pitcher of water. The walls were white stucco and bare but for the occasional modern art litho. With the air-conditioning turned up at least one notch too far, the room had all the charm of a meat locker. Sevilla sat at the other end of the sofa from Mrs. Lessor and Caine perched on the edge of the leather chair to her left.

  “What’s this about?” Boyle asked. “Have you found him or not?”

  Ignoring the man, Caine looked at his mother, and could not help being struck by her wide blue eyes. “Mrs. Lessor, I’m sorry; but we have bad news.”

  Mrs. Lessor turned from Caine to her frowning son, then back. “Then you haven’t found Thomas?”

  Caine shook his head. “I’m afraid we have. Mrs. Lessor, your husband died last night.”

  The woman’s pale features managed somehow to fade even more, her eyes closing, her chin drooping to her chest; twin tears trailed down her cheeks.

  “I…I knew just looking at you…” Her voice choked off as a sob clogged her throat.

  Finally, the son rose and went to his mother, kneeling in front of her, letting her lean into his arms, hugging her as she wept, all the time repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Mother,” his voice low, intended only for her. Boyle seemed genuinely sorry, too—but the compassion, Caine sensed, was for his mother…not his late stepfather.

  Sevilla pulled a tissue from her pocket and leaned in, offering it to Mrs. Lessor. “We know this is difficult, but if you think you’re at all up to it…we need to ask you some questions.”

  Mrs. Lessor pulled away from her son, graciously, giving herself room to sit up straight. She took the tissue from the detective, touched it to her eyes and face; then she took in a deep breath, held it a moment, and let it out in an audible rush. Boyle remained at his mother’s knee, her right hand holding his left, the tissue wadded in her left hand.

  “Then this is still a police matter,” she said, dignified.

  “It is,” Sevilla said.

  “Then the circumstances…must involve…”

  Mrs. Lessor began to cry again. Another tissue, more sympathy from her son; but soon she steeled herself. “I want you to tell me what happened to my husband. How did he die?”

  Sevilla said, “Mrs. Lessor, the circumstances were not pleasant. I must ask you to prepare yourself, as best you can.”

  “Go ahead, Detective.” Her voice was shaky, but her face held a determination that Caine respected.

  “I’m going to have Lieutenant Caine, from Criminalistics, give you the details.”

  “Please.”

  Caine said, “Mr. Lessor was kidnapped at the airport and taken to a secluded place where he was shot and killed.”

  “Oh dear God…”

  “While the kidnapping was undoubtedly a terrible experience for him, Mrs. Lessor, he died instantly. He did not suffer.”r />
  “Shot…shot, you say…?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Who did it?” Boyle asked through his teeth.

  Caine tilted his head. He drained any hostility he might feel for Boyle from his voice, which came out soft, reasonable. “That’s why we’re here, bothering you when we would prefer not to. We are going to find the people who did this.”

  Mrs. Lessor touched her son’s hand—a signal. Like an obedient dog, he climbed on the sofa next to her. She asked, “When can I see my husband’s body?”

  Sevilla glanced at Caine, who said, “In a case like this, the remains are physical evidence. We do not need an identification from a family member in a—”

  “Lieutenant, I want to see my husband’s body. Is there a reason why that’s a problem?”

  Sevilla and Caine exchanged another glance, then Caine said, “We did not recover your husband’s body.” There was no dancing around it. “Not in its entirety.”

  Fingers holding the tissue moved to the woman’s mouth.

  “What…what…?”

  Sevilla spat it out: “Whoever killed your husband also dismembered him.”

  The pale woman went gray and Boyle jumped up and ran over to the drink cart. He poured a glass of water and returned, handing the glass to his mother, who seemed to not even notice, her eyes flitting around the room as if trying to decide where to land.

  “Dismembered?” Boyle asked tactlessly, sitting beside his mother, his eyes large and intensely focused on Caine.

  “Yes. As for the rest of his body—”

  “You will try to recover it,” Boyle’s mother said urgently.

  “Of course, Mrs. Lessor. We’re doing everything we can.”

  She finally seemed to notice the glass in her hand. She took a sip, then set the glass on the end table next to her. “Where did you find…him?”

  Caine could tell that the woman would not let up until they had given her all the details; and she had a right to them.

  So he said, “The body parts had been placed in a garbage bag and buried on the beach, South Beach.” He explained about the two kids and the cell phone, then added, “Which brings me to my first question—did either of you call Mr. Lessor last night?”