Mrs. Lessor nodded. “I was worried when I hadn’t heard from him. Daniel called and told me the police were looking for Thomas. I just wanted to hear the sound of his voice.”
Sevilla picked up the questioning. “Was it common for your husband not to call for such a long period?”
She sighed. “It never used to be, but we had so much trouble with the cell phones when he made his trips to Brazil that he kind of got out of the habit, you know…of calling all the time. He was very busy, after all.”
Caine asked, “Why did he make those trips to Brazil?”
“Business. He was always looking for new acts for the hotels. He had an eye for talent.” She mentioned several prominent recording artists who had first performed at one of the two Boyle hotels.
“Had he made any discoveries on these South American trips?” Caine asked. “That have been booked into either hotel?”
Boyle answered this one. “We were in negotiations with several acts from down there. Tom was a real starmaker, no question.”
“I see.” As casually as possible, Caine asked, “Was Erica Hardy on a path to stardom, you think?”
The name of the woman Lessor had killed—or in the view of his family, had been accused of killing—hung a moment in the air.
Mrs. Lessor’s color returned. “I would appreciate it, Lieutenant, if you would not mention that name in my presence.”
“I apologize for bringing up a sensitive subject,” Caine said, “and at a time like this. But the situation with your husband in Las Vegas may be pertinent.”
“That woman was a liar and an extortionist,” Mrs. Lessor said, cold fury in her tone. “Bad things happen to bad people.”
Like somebody cuts off their heads, Caine thought.
“The Las Vegas authorities believe your husband murdered the young woman,” Caine said.
“Well, they are mistaken.”
She was shredding the tissue in her hands now, an unconscious gesture Caine found interesting.
“Thomas,” she was saying, “was a loving and faithful husband. Erica Hardy was an ambitious climber, who tried to blackmail Thomas into giving her more money and hyping her to record producers and other venues. The truth was she was a minimally talented singer, but she did have a local following, and Thomas continued to book her into the lounge for purely business reasons.”
About halfway through his mother’s obviously sincere speech, Boyle began to slowly shake his head.
“You don’t agree?” Caine asked.
Boyle looked from his mother to the two detectives. “As much as it pains me to say so…I’m afraid my stepfather wasn’t as faithful as my mother believes.”
Mrs. Lessor’s eyes widened, her nostrils flaring, as she recoiled from her son. “Daniel! How dare you?”
“Mother, it’s the truth.”
“It’s the truth as you see it, Daniel, but you have no right to share these family thoughts in public.”
Caine said, “Mrs. Lessor, we’re not the public. And what you share with us stays with us.”
“Unless it gets into court,” she snapped.
“Unless it gets into court,” he admitted.
She glared at her son. “You have the gall to attack Thomas after he’s dead? Moments after we learn of his death? I’m ashamed of you. Ashamed.”
“Mother…”
Sitting forward, Caine said, “Mr. Boyle, at the hotel, you professed to be close to your stepfather.”
Stiffly came Boyle’s lame response: “We were friendly.”
Caine twitched a small smile. “I’m not convinced.”
Boyle drew a deep breath; let it out. “I had suspicions. Strong ones. I shared them with Mother. But Thomas and I, we were cordial. We had joint business interests, obviously, and we got along…as far as it went.”
“You felt your stepfather was…not faithful to your mother?”
Boyle nodded forcefully. “But Mother is right: I have no proof.”
Now Mrs. Lessor sat forward; the conflict had beaten back her grief and she was again in complete control of herself. “You’ll have to forgive my son, Detectives,” she said. “Daniel has always been jealous of my relationship with Thomas.”
She turned her gaze upon her son now, who again wore a puppy dog mien. “You never did find proof of these alleged affairs—did you, Daniel?”
“No, Mother.”
Mrs. Lessor said to Caine, rather haughtily, “Which I think only further shows that Thomas was, indeed, faithful to me.”
“I’m not trying to cast any aspersions on your late husband,” Caine said. “He was murdered. I’m looking for motives, for enemies.”
Mrs. Lessor, slightly embarrassed, said, “I…I understand. Forgive me, Lieutenant.”
“Yours is a natural reaction. Please understand that my role here is to find your husband’s murderer. We are on the same side—whether your husband was a saint or Satan makes no difference to me whatsoever, other than to examine the reasons someone might have to want to harm him.”
She considered that. “I can’t think of anyone. He was a charming man. People liked him.”
Out of his mother’s line of sight, Boyle rolled his eyes.
Caine changed tactics, wheeling toward the son. “Where were you two nights ago, Daniel?”
Mrs. Lessor’s eyes flared again; she was apparently about to jump to her son’s defense, but—surprisingly—Daniel put a calming hand on his mother’s arm.
“It’s all right, Mother,” he said with a bitter little smile. “After what I said, I suppose I’m the most likely suspect now, aren’t I?”
Caine neither confirmed or denied this, merely saying, “You didn’t like your stepfather. There’s no crime in that. What concerns me, Mr. Boyle, is that you lied to me about it, when we first met.”
Boyle slipped back into his chair so he was on even ground with Caine; he did not sound at all argumentative when he replied.
“The reason I lied about how I felt about Tom,” Boyle said, “is that I’ve always kept my real feelings from anyone—other than Mother. And, anyway, there was no reason to drag Tom’s name through the mud.”
“Until you had proof, you mean,” Caine said.
“Until I had proof,” Boyle admitted.
“So you—if you don’t mind my saying—ingratiated yourself with your stepfather.”
“That’s right. I admit it—I brownnosed the son of a bitch.”
“Daniel!” his mother said, horrified.
Boyle pressed on. “I didn’t want to tip my hand. I wanted to catch the bastard cheating, so I could prove it—so I could convince you, Mother, of how wrong you were about him.”
She shook her head, folding her arms, looking away from her son, eyes glistening.
Caine said to Boyle, “And when you couldn’t convince her?”
Boyle shrugged. “I’m a patient man.”
“Do you believe he killed Erica Hardy?”
Mrs. Lessor looked at her son with hard, accusing eyes.
“I don’t know,” Boyle said. “I do find that a little hard to buy…. Mother, I never said he was a killer. I said he was a no-good, cheating SOB.” He looked back at Caine. “And sooner or later, I would have caught him…. Only…now it’s over. No reason to worry about it. Or fight about it. Right, Mother?”
She said nothing.
Caine said, “If we could get back to my initial question. Where were you two nights ago?”
Boyle shrugged. “The hotel. Ask the staff. Check the security video, if you want. You don’t need a warrant—I’ll sign off on it. Look at the tapes and you’ll see me all over ‘em, until after midnight.”
“Then?”
Another shrug. “I came home.”
“Any proof of that?”
Boyle thought for a moment. “My driver, Ron Plummer, can confirm it.”
“Anything else?”
Another moment of thought. “Yes! The security code on my house. The security company will tell you that
I reset the alarm system sometime between one and one-fifteen. Only two people know that security code—myself and my mother, who was in Las Vegas at the time.”
Caine glanced over at Sevilla, who’d been taking copious notes. She said, “We’ll check that out, Mr. Boyle. Thanks for cooperating.”
“No problem.” His demeanor arrogant now that he had the apparent upper hand, Boyle said, “I’ll send my driver over with the tapes—then you can question him too.”
Caine returned his attention to Deborah Lessor. “My apologies, but I have to ask. Is there anyone in Las Vegas who can verify that you were there?”
She nodded; she seemed rather distant now. “Anybody and everybody in the Oasis Hotel. I was staying in the suite that Thomas and I keep there. I had room service for dinner and didn’t go out until breakfast the next morning.”
Rising slowly, Caine smiled and said, “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Lessor, Mr. Boyle. This has been difficult for you, and uncomfortable for us.”
Sevilla said to Mrs. Lessor, “We’re sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Neither Mrs. Lessor nor Boyle rose; they both were settling into a kind of shell-shocked state after the unexpected interrogation.
In the car on the ride back, behind the wheel, Sevilla asked, “So—how big a blip is Boyle on your radar?”
“Just because he’s on a videotape inside his own hotel,” Caine said, “doesn’t mean he didn’t hire this out. Lessor’s death was execution style—a mob hit or a contract killing. Having an alibi is a long ways from being innocent.”
Sevilla tossed off a smile. “I don’t like him, either.”
Caine smiled back. “Adele, you know me better than that. It doesn’t matter whether I like this guy or not. The evidence will tell us whether he’s a murderer.”
“Or just an asshole?” she asked lightly.
“Or just an asshole,” Caine said.
Sevilla said nothing for a while, driving, thinking, then shared those thoughts: “There’s a lot of money at stake here, Horatio—at least for Daniel Boyle. Maybe between the money and his hatred for his stepfather, Boyle decided that the only way to deal with Lessor was to kill him.”
“You don’t buy this as a mob hit, then? It’s just supposed to look like one?”
She looked over at him. “What do you think?”
Caine shrugged. “Double tap, small caliber, head-and-hands removed—you have to admit, it does sound familiar.”
“Is there a mob motive, though? We don’t have any evidence, no indication, in that direction, do we?”
“Only the nature of the killing itself. We’ll take a closer look at Lessor’s life, and if there were mob ties we don’t know about, we’ll find them.”
“What about Ortega, our dead chauffeur?” Sevilla asked. “Any way this was about him, and Lessor’s just a coincidence?”
Shaking his head, Caine said, “Kid was clean. I don’t think he was even supposed to die.”
“How can we be sure of that?”
He slipped off his sunglasses and showed her his eyes. “They cut up Lessor’s body and buried it. A sloppy job, I grant you, but they didn’t want him found. Then they turn around and leave the limo in plain sight—which you don’t do unless you want it found.”
Sevilla half-smirked. “They found Jimmy Hoffa’s car.”
“Unless I missed it on the news, they haven’t located Hoffa yet. Okay, Adele, try this. If you double-tap Lessor and cut him up, why not do the same to the chauffeur? Why leave the guy trussed up in the trunk?”
“If his death was an accident, maybe…”
“…or maybe,” Caine said, “he meant nothing to you and you left him to be found alive.”
Sevilla nodded, seeing it now, but her jaw remained set. “Only the kid died an accidental death. But we’re in Felonyville, so it’s still murder.”
“It’s two murders,” Caine said, making a peace sign. “It’s just too damn bad that the death of a prick like Lessor had to lead to an innocent kid like Felipe buying it, too.”
And they drove on in somber silence.
6
Deuces Wild
DISGUSTED WITH HERSELF, Calleigh Duquesne shook her head over her microscope, her ponytail swinging back and forth like a platinum pendulum.
The CSI wasn’t often wrong when estimating the caliber of a bullet from an entrance wound; but she had missed Thomas Lessor’s. Just by a titch, granted…but a miss was a miss. She had figured on a .22 and the culprit had turned out to be a .25. To most, the difference would have been impossible to see, let alone recognize; Calleigh chastised herself all the same. “Bullet Girl” just didn’t make ballistics mistakes.
She sat looking at a side-by-side of the two slugs retrieved from Thomas Lessor’s skull. Each had tiny lines carved in it from the rifling of the barrel through which it had been fired. A deep gouge in the one on the left was surrounded by tinier scratches flying down either side of it, like tailing streamers. The bullet on the right, though, seemed to have only the streamers. Slowly, Calleigh rotated it, the deep gouge showing up on the other side…
…the two bullets a match.
Lessor had been shot by one gun, most likely—one shooter…pop! pop! and it was over, the bullets bouncing around inside his skull like a demented game of puddleball. She wished she had the casings as well, but—so far, anyway—that was wishful thinking. Though they were pretty sure Lessor had been cut up at the beach, on a picnic table, no proof had surfaced indicating he’d been shot there, too.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t.
The killer could have picked up the casings or kicked sand over them…and it wasn’t like the CSIs hadn’t looked. After Calleigh had finally given up with the ground-penetrating radar, she’d gone back over the area with a metal detector, in hopes of finding the elusive casings, only she’d struck out with that, too.
The next step was NIBIN—the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. Developed about six years ago by the boys and girls at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, NIBIN worked on the same basic theory as AFIS and CODIS. The only real difference was the subject for each: fingerprints for AFIS; DNA for CODIS; bullets for NIBIN.
The NRA had fought the database tooth and nail, but law enforcement was slowly winning the fight for wider use. NIBIN would search for matching bullets used in the commission of crimes both in Miami-Dade and nationwide. The ATF’s expansion plan had supplied over two hundred sites nationwide with the IBIS (Integrated Bullet Identification System) equipment necessary to run NIBIN.
Calleigh had used NIBIN several times to match bullets from unsolved crimes within the county—and even a couple of times with crimes committed upstate—but she’d never had any luck beyond that. Still, it was a good tool, and worth the time.
Since the ATF and its partners had started using NIBIN, over 5,300 hits had been logged. So, a double tap like this one—a classic but by no means routine MO—the bullets might just show up in another hit somewhere around the area. She was lucky she had .25s. If she’d been right about the bullets being .22s, NIBIN would have been worthless without casings.
Jurisdictions didn’t even bother loading .22s into NIBIN. The bullets were so soft that they were unmatchable in most cases. The casings, on the other hand, could be matched up easily. With only the bullets in the Lessor case, however, Calleigh felt like she’d caught a real break, having a killer who’d used the slightly larger caliber.
While she waited for NIBIN to do its thing, Calleigh began filling out the paperwork to send the bullets to the FBI for a neutron activation analysis (NAA). When she and the rest of the CSIs finally narrowed in on a suspect in the case—and if they found a box of bullets in said suspect’s house—she wanted to be able to prove in court that her bullets, the bullets removed from Lessor, came from the same box that the killer had at home.
The NAA would do just that. It was one of those things, though, that was just too expensive to do locally or eve
n on a statewide basis. She was only about halfway through the process when NIBIN matched her bullets.
Calleigh was blown away. Getting a match like this was like winning the ballistics lottery. But…New Jersey? Having never gotten a hit from out of state before, she feared a false positive—that the computer had come up only with a near match.
And a near match, like a “near hit,” was, after all, a miss.
The match had come from Trenton, where the CSI of record was a firearms expert named Irv Brady. This was a helpful coincidence—Calleigh had met Brady at a ballistics convention in Dunedin, Florida, a little over a year ago; he’d been one of the featured speakers and was a well-respected expert in the field. She fumbled through her Rolodex—he wouldn’t have made it into her PalmPilot—and came up with the business card he had given her at the convention.
Calleigh punched Brady’s number into her cell phone.
It took only one ring. “Brady.”
“Irv? That is, Mr. Brady? This is Calleigh Duquesne, Miami-Dade Police. I don’t know if you remember me…?”
“Nickname ‘Bullet Girl’?” he said good-naturedly. “With a charming southern accent?…Now, I just might. How are ya?”
“Irv, I’m fine, only I’m on a case that could stand to catch a break. And I think maybe we just did…in your backyard.”
“Yeah?” His voice was deep and rich, like that of a really first-rate department store Santa. She hoped he had a real nice gift for her, too.
“I got a hit from NIBIN that matches a case number from Trenton.”
“No kidding? I love it when the technology actually works. What have you got?”
“It’s a .25—matches an unsolved homicide of yours back in ’87.”
“You got the case number?”
“Sure,” she said, and read it to him.
Not missing a beat, Brady said, “Mob hit.”
Calleigh blinked. “You remember it just from the case number? Irv, you are good.”
“Not that good. This is just one that, well…it pissed me off. Moke named Johnny ‘The Rat’ Guzzoli went and got himself whacked in a dark alley in the Burg.”
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