“Why exactly was Maria mad at you, Mr. Boyle?”
“Because you learned what her real name was! And the only place you could have gotten that information was from yours truly. She said I betrayed her…that she couldn’t trust me anymore!”
“And you pointed out that you couldn’t trust her, either—that she’d betrayed you with Tom Lessor…right?”
“…Right.”
“So,” Caine said slowly, “you can’t really lay this breakup at my feet. Listen, Mr. Boyle, I’m in the middle of a very complicated murder investigation. This is the crime lab, not the lonely hearts helpline.”
“All right…I’ll admit to you that the personal relationship…the personal relationship isn’t the biggest problem you’ve caused me.”
Barely following Boyle’s ramblings, if at all, Caine paused outside the ballistics lab long enough to ask one more question; he was that curious, anyway. “Sir—what are you talking about?”
“Maria was so bothered by what you told her last night, so furious with me, that she called my mother this morning and demanded to be released from her contract here at the Conquistador. Told her that I’d made ‘inappropriate sexual advances’ and wanted out.”
Calleigh looked up from her microscope, smiled at Caine, and he waved a little, but stayed out in the hall, moving away from the lab door.
“How exactly did this go down, Daniel? Were you present during the phone conversation between your mother and Maria?”
“No. Maria called Mother, before she came around to see me.”
“And your mother called you?”
“Later, yes…but first I heard about it from Maria. She burst into my office and tore me a new one and gloated about how she’d played my mother.”
“Played her how?”
“Maria convinced my mother to honor that upcoming Oasis contract.”
“You mean, Maria’s playing Vegas, after all?”
“Yes—and sooner than you’d think.”
“How so, Daniel?”
“There was a cancellation in the Oasis lounge, an act got caught in a double-booking situation, and, anyway, Mother told Maria that if she could get herself on a plane today, with her entire band, they could open tomorrow night at the Oasis.”
“Is that even possible?”
“Absolutely. Maria and her boys will be rehearsing this evening. Things move fast in this business.”
“I should say.” Caine tried to quickly process this new information and all its ramifications. “Does your mother know about your stepfather’s relationship with Maria?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“What about the arrest of Maria’s uncle?”
“I didn’t tell her. Why would I? I can’t see hitting her with that, at a time like this…my stepfather isn’t even in the ground yet.”
Caine recalled how “concerned” Boyle had been on that score—the man’s remark about toting Lessor’s remains home in a carry-on bag.
“Daniel, surely your mother asked you about Maria’s claims of sexual misconduct on your part.”
“She did, and I told her I did have a consensual relationship with Ms. Chacon. But we both felt the possible legal ramifications—sexual harassment lawsuits can be a bitch, Lieutenant—were worth avoiding. Maria is a fine performer, and she’ll do well at the Oasis.”
Caine understood part of Boyle’s initial anger, suddenly. “You’re not upset about losing your little girlfriend, are you, Daniel? The real problem I caused you is you’ve lost your star attraction at the Explorer Lounge.”
“I’m a businessman at heart…and my mother is, too. Otherwise, why would she book that little bitch into the Oasis?”
Caine frowned. “Do you know when Maria’s leaving for Vegas?”
“Sure. Her flight’s scheduled to leave at two-thirty.”
The CSI checked his watch—it was past noon.
And in this day and age, people got to the airport early. If he left now, he could probably find her at MIA.
“I appreciate the information,” Caine said. “And Daniel—you’re better off without Maria Chacon in your personal life and your professional one. The woman is a killer.”
“I figured that,” he said hollowly. “Why did she do it, Lieutenant Caine? Why did Maria have Tom killed?”
“I can’t really discuss that, Daniel,” he said. “But let’s just say she and Tom Lessor were well matched.”
A slight pause. “I hear that,” Boyle said. “Is my mother in any danger?”
“To Maria, your mother is just a means to an end.”
“That’s what everyone is to Maria,” Boyle said.
And the two men said their good-byes. Caine had already been on the move and was in the parking lot now, having left a slightly bewildered Calleigh behind in her lab.
Half an hour later, after winding through traffic with his siren screaming (for whatever good it did in a city that no longer seemed to notice such things), Caine found himself striding through the main concourse of Miami International Airport, looking for Maria Chacon aka Ciccolini.
Traffic was as heavy in here as on the expressway, people all around him dragging wheeled suitcases, all scouring signs to find their gates, gazing at monitors with anticipation and dread. Occasionally, the din of the crowd would fade slightly as an intercom voice made a canned announcement in English, Spanish, and Japanese, leaving a good share of passengers out in the linguistic cold.
Maria Chacon probably spoke at least Spanish and Italian, in addition to English; but her native tongue, Caine knew, was the language of deceit.
He had been looking for her for the better part of a half hour—and was thinking that either she wasn’t here yet, or somehow he’d missed her—when he got the idea to go back outside.
Caine spotted her maybe twenty yards away, sitting on a bench with a couple guys he recognized from her band, all puffing cigarettes. MIA had unwittingly done him a small favor years ago, when they forced smokers to congregate in only a couple of spots just outside the airport.
In black slacks, black silk blouse and denim jacket, an oversized leather purse over one shoulder, her long hair in a ponytail, Maria looked like one of those people you thought might be a celebrity, but couldn’t quite place. From a distance she might appear to be a normal human; but even the most cursory closer inspection revealed that she was somehow special…and knew it.
He sat down next to her, several other smokers huddling around them, an ashtray at each end of the bench and one out front in the middle, three oases for the smokers to drop their ashes and stub out their butts so they could keep the place neat and tidy as they poisoned themselves.
At first she didn’t notice him, not enough to recognize him, anyway. Then he said, “Nervous?”
Maria turned toward him, eyes wide, nostrils flaring. “What the hell…?”
“Must be. I remember how you said you burn through the cigarettes…when you’re nervous.”
She sighed smoke, gazed at him with half-lidded contempt. “Are you here to arrest me, Lieutenant?”
“No. Just…seeing you off. Saying good-bye—for now.”
“Oh, I’m not coming back to Miami. I have no desire to work this sleazy town again.”
“You never know when a command performance might come along.”
A half-sneer. “You don’t have anything on me, Lieutenant.”
“Tell me—does it give you even a twinge? I’m curious.”
She said nothing.
“Letting your old uncle take the rap for you. Doesn’t bother you at all?”
She stared out at the cars and taxis and buses, their fumes mirroring the smoker’s own exhaust. “Let’s suppose I did what you say I did…which I didn’t. Let’s say my uncle did this because I asked him to. Which I didn’t.”
“Let’s.”
She turned toward him again, showing him eyes so cold he knew he’d never forget their chill. “Uncle Vinnie still committed the murder. My joining him in locku
p doesn’t help him in the least.”
“And an old mob guy like him isn’t likely to sell you out for a shorter sentence. He wouldn’t fink on his boys, and certainly not his niece.”
She gave him the definitive what-the-hell shrug. “What’s a ‘short’ sentence to a guy his age?…He’s had a great ride. So he closes out his act playing a small room. Way it goes.”
“You’ll play a small room yourself, Maria—the room where they give the lethal injections, it’s not the Flamingo.”
“Big talk from a little cop.” She took a deep drag on the cigarette, and rose, standing over him now, as if the high ground would give her the advantage.
From below, he said, calmly, “You won’t be hard for me to find, Maria—your name’ll be in lights. And when I have evidence proving that you sent the geriatric hit squad that took down Tom Lessor and Felipe Ortega, I’ll be in your audience. Look for me—I’ll be the one who isn’t clapping. And I will bring you back to Miami…and you will stand trial for murder.”
She leaned past him, provocatively, and stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, looking sideways at him as she did. “You know why you’re in Miami, Lieutenant? Because you aren’t ready for the big time. Strictly road company.”
Then she rose and, with a dismissive wave, walked away and through the automatic double doors into the airport, leaving Caine sitting in a cloud of blue smoke.
She turned back once and blew him a kiss, and laughed. He tried to hold her eyes, but Maria Chacon turned and disappeared into the crowd…still a free woman.
After the solitary ride back to headquarters Caine was in no mood to see Speedle standing in his office doorway, a goofy grin on the young CSI’s face, one hand behind his back.
“You’re smiling, Speed.”
“I sure am.”
“Make me smile too.”
“Okay.”
Speedle brought out a plastic bag for Caine to see.
“A cell phone,” Caine said. “I’m not smiling.”
“Anthony Rosselli’s cell phone. I went back to the beginning—with fresh eyes, right?—and found this in the property room. Rosselli had it on him when he was arrested, and nobody ever bothered to have a look at it.”
Caine’s eyes tensed. “Tell me you got a search warrant before you did anything.”
Speedle’s face fell. “Jeez, H, gimme a little credit! ’Course I did.”
Caine tried to restrain the smile but it escaped anyway. “Nice to know you’ve been paying attention.”
“See—I did make you smile.”
“Make me smile wider. Anything on it?”
Shrugging, Speedle said, “Don’t know yet—waiting for Detective Sevilla to actually serve the warrant to Rosselli before I do anything.”
“Keep me posted.”
“You know it, H.”
Speedle disappeared down the hall and Caine hunkered down in the office to start collecting the various documentation he would need to appease the accountants at a second budget meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning. He was glad that his supervisory position allowed him to still work crime scenes; if his duties were solely this bureaucratic nonsense, he’d have long ago found something more meaningful to do. Like working security at a dog food plant.
The day went away before Caine realized it; suddenly he was turning on his desk lamp as darkness seeped in and took over his office. He got up, stretched—the muscles in his back loosening—then his spine talked to him, making several cracks, and he decided to take a turn around the warren of labs to see if anyone from his team was still around.
He found Delko in front of a computer monitor, two shoeprints next to each other on the screen. “Talk to me,” Caine said.
“Me or the screen?” Delko said, good-naturedly.
“At this point I’m not that choosy.”
Delko gestured to the monitor. “Matched the shoeprint from the brake pedal to one of Rosselli’s. He was the driver. Fibers from his suit match some I got from the driver’s seat, too.”
“All right,” Caine said, nodding. He was just turning to leave when Calleigh came in, her arm raised to keep the black suit she carried on a hanger from grazing the floor.
“Presenting…Vincent Ciccolini’s suit,” she announced. “GSR on the right arm and breast.”
Gunshot residue—music to Caine’s ears. “Ciccolini’s our shooter?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Caine clapped, once. “All right…this is coming together. Either of you seen Speed?”
They both shook their heads, then went back to their work.
Caine searched several rooms before finding Tim Speedle in the sound lab, huddled with technician Peter Ballard. Trim, his dirty brown hair starting to recede, Ballard had skin the ghostly pallor of someone who spent way too much time inside. Headphones on, he sat in a chair in front of his massive mixing board, the oscillations of whatever he was testing flooding past on the screen in front of him like a bizarre vital-signs monitor.
Speedle sat in a chair next to the tech, his eyes closed as he concentrated on whatever was coming through his headphones. When Caine touched his shoulder, Speed jumped out of the chair, his hands tearing the headphones off as he spun to face his boss.
“Jesus, H! Christ…”
Caine twitched a smile. “Sorry, Speed—didn’t mean to startle you. How much caffeine have you had today, anyway?”
The young man’s rolled eyes were his only rejoinder, and he took a moment to gather himself, his heart obviously pumping hard. Ballard worked, with marginal success, at keeping his eyes on the monitor and biting his lip to keep from laughing.
“So, Speed—any luck with Rosselli’s phone?”
“What’s the most irritating thing about old people you can think of?”
Caine shook his head. “Don’t think we’re gonna play this game, Speed. Just give.”
But Speedle pressed on, raising a declamatory forefinger. “Their inability to master even the most rudimentary technology. Do you know anybody over seventy who has mastered their VCR’s timer?”
“I haven’t mastered mine. Your point, Speed?”
“God bless him, Anthony Rosselli never learned how to erase his cell phone messages.”
“Which means?”
“Which means there’s a shitload of messages…if you’ll pardon a technical term. Pete and me been runnin’ through them for”—Speed glanced at the clock on the monitor—“going on three hours.”
Caine tried to make that work. “Rosselli had three hours of messages?”
“No, H—the system will hold thirty messages, two minutes max, and Rosselli’s been getting them hot and heavy for the last week.”
“And this adds up to three hours how?”
“Well, ya see, most of ‘em are from Abe Lipnick…and the late Mr. Lipnick had some sort of a speech impediment. We checked his medical records and he had a stroke a little over a year ago. He had no residual damage except for a problem with his speech. Which is why it’s been so much fun trying to decipher his messages.”
“Any luck?” Caine asked.
Peter finally spoke up. “I considered having you round up a close friend or two of the late Mr. Lipnick’s—who would be able to translate fairly easily, being familiar with him and all.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I thought that would complicate the courtroom process—add in a nasty human variable. We need to be able to play these tapes for a judge and jury.”
“Agreed.”
“So,” Peter said, “I decided to stay in the domain of electronics—the kind that I know will hold up in court. After I figured out what filters to use, we were finally able to understand most of what Mr. Lipnick was saying.”
“Just the same, H,” Speedle said, “these are guys who probably had their phones back in Jersey wiretapped for decades. So they were pretty careful.”
Peter played one of the original, unprocessed messages for Caine, who tried to listen closely;
but when the message was done, he just shook his head. “Did he say something about Venetian chinook sorrow?”
Speedle grinned, grunted a laugh, and said, “Now you know the kinda hit parade we’ve been dancin’ to all afternoon.”
“It’s evening.”
“See?”
“Let me play it for you with the filters on,” Ballard said. He twisted some knobs, punched two buttons, then pushed PLAY again.
Lipnick’s gargle now sounded slightly metallic; but the words were clear: “Vinnie says we should know tomorrow.”
“See what you mean,” Caine said. “Any of them been helpful?”
“Some circumstantial stuff,” Speedle said. “But pull up a chair—we’ve got one message left to check.”
Caine leaned against the wall and Ballard played the last message with the filters on. Again, the vaguely metallic voice of Abe Lipnick came on. “Maria says we should collar the tomcat at the airport. She says he’s usin’ a limo. Oh yeah, and Vinnie says bring Nixon and the sex perv.”
Tom Lessor, a limo, and the Nixon and Clinton masks.
Peter shut off the tape player and a stunned silence filled the room.
“It’s not a smoking gun,” Caine said. “But I’ll take it.”
“Yes!” Speedle smacked a fist into an open hand. “All because that old geezer never learned to use his cell phone.”
“Funny,” Caine said. “From Tom Lessor’s cell phone ringing under the sand to the cell phone of one of his killers…”
“It’s a trip,” Speedle admitted.
Caine checked his watch; his Vegas contact, Catherine Willows, would not be in at work for at least two more hours. He could call this in to the LVMPD dayshift; but he would stick with Catherine and her crew. He’d call her tonight from home and ask her to pick up Maria Ciccolini.
“Okay, guys, hit SAVE on that baby, and call it a day. The accounting department’s crawling all over me about overtime.”
“We got her, H,” Speedle said, grinning. “We’ve got her.”
“I believe we do. Peter, can you make me a cassette copy of that last message and give me a small tape player?”
“No prob, Horatio. I’ll drop it by your office on the way out.”
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