Next Victim

by Michael Prescott

  She looked at him as if remembering that he existed. "You recover anything from the crime scene?"

  "Like a piece of paper with a bloody fingerprint on it? Or the killer’s business card? Sorry."

  "We need to take a look."

  "I already looked. So did my partner. So did the LAFD’s arson unit."

  "Nobody was looking for things that could be connected with Mobius."

  Winston said, "Mobius?"

  McCallum seemed irritated with herself, as if she’d said too much. "Never mind. It’s just…a nickname." She turned to Dodge. "We need to go back there, check it out."

  Dodge shrugged. "Who am I to question the wisdom and authority of a representative of the federal government?"

  "Mind if we take my car?"

  "We’ll have to. Left mine at the campus. My partner drove me over here."

  "Let’s go, then."

  Dodge didn’t intend to be ordered around. He lingered, talking to Winston. "Think there’ll be any problem with the ID?"

  "Not once I get the antemortem data. His family dentist is in Palo Alto. So far we haven’t gotten the records."

  "But once we do?"

  "Then it’s no problem. There’s a lot here to work with. Tooth wear, enamel hypoplasia, fillings in two incisors, porcelain crown on one of the molars. Lot of dental work for a twenty-two-year-old. Kid must’ve consumed a lot of Popsicles."

  "So you can make a comparison?"

  "Yes, Detective. I may not be an odontologist, but I can compare X rays easily enough."

  Odontologist was a fancy word for dentist. Dodge had looked it up once. There were forensic odontologists who specialized in identifying remains from dental work, but they were used only as consultants, called in when the regular MEs were out of their depth.

  "Okay," he said. "When you get the records, give me a ring pronto, okay? I need to know if this is Scott Maple. His folks are probably a little curious too."

  "As soon as they arrive, I’ll be on it," Winston said, but she was still looking at Agent McCallum, maybe hoping for more of an explanation.

  If so, she was disappointed. McCallum walked out the door. Dodge followed, taking his time about it, just to get her steamed.

  It worked. "Will you put a move on, please?" McCallum snapped.

  "Sounds like this Mobius character has been active for a while. Another few minutes won’t make much of a difference."

  "It could make all the difference. He’s on a tight schedule, I think. He’s planning something, and he intends for it to go down soon."

  "And what’s this big thing he’s got planned?"

  She didn’t answer, but Dodge found himself walking faster anyway. He was thinking of the activity around City Hall, the extra squad cars on the streets. He had a feeling that whoever this Mobius was, he was the reason for all the excitement. Which meant this was something big. Something Myron Levine would fucking kill to have as an exclusive.

  Maybe this weekend wasn’t turning out so bad, after all.

  He waited until they were on the Santa Monica Freeway, McCallum at the wheel of her bureau sedan, Dodge in the passenger seat. Then he asked, "Care to fill me in?"

  She frowned and looked at him. He knew she was measuring him as a potential partner, trying to judge if he was someone she could count on. He also knew that she would have to trust him, because time was tight and she had no choice.

  "Can you keep a secret?" she asked.

  28

  At four o’clock they arrived at the Life Sciences Center. By then Tess had summarized the situation.

  "And you’re serious about this?" Dodge asked as they got out of her car, parked behind his.

  She found the question bizarre and somehow offensive. "Is there anything funny about it?"

  "It’s just a little hard to believe. I mean, no offense, but this is a fairly long chain of reasoning and some of the links look a little rusty."

  "Which links?"

  "Well, the chem lab connection, for one thing. A knife wound isn’t exactly an uncommon finding at the morgue. There are all kinds of reasons a kid might’ve been stabbed—drugs being the most obvious."

  "Fair enough. But look at it this way. Mobius disappears from the hotel sometime after midnight. The fire starts a few hours later, less than four miles away. Mobius uses a knife that leaves a three-millimeter wound channel. The victim dies as a result of an injury inflicted by the same kind of knife. A chemical agent is taken from the hotel room. The victim is working alone in a chemistry lab, the perfect place for analyzing unknown substances. Time line, location, weapon, even motive—it all fits. If there’s no connection, then it’s one hell of a coincidence."

  She expected him to put up further resistance, but he surprised her by nodding. "Okay, Special Agent. So what will he do now?"

  "He?"

  "Mobius."

  "How should I know?"

  "You seem to have guessed his tactics pretty well so far. Connecting him to the lab fire—that was sharp, Special Agent."

  "It was obvious."

  "Not to your colleagues, evidently. At least, I haven’t heard from this antiterrorist expert. What was his name again? Tennant?"

  "True. You haven’t, have you?"

  "Not a peep."

  "Which means I know something Tennant doesn’t know."

  "Sounds like leverage. Though I doubt that you need it. You bureau folk don’t play petty political games like us underpaid municipal workers."

  She smiled. "Of course not."

  The arson unit was gone, as were the campus security guards. All that protected the Life Sciences Center was a length of crime-scene tape around its perimeter, some hastily attached boards on the basement windows, and the lock on the door.

  Tess went to find a guard with a key. She returned with a man in tow just as Dodge was putting away his cell phone. "Called Winston," he said. "No dental X rays yet. But I’m betting the deceased is Scott Maple."

  "If he is, are you the one who’ll tell his parents?"

  "My partner will get to do the honors. He’s good at that kind of thing. He’s a compassionate guy."

  And you’re not, Tess reflected. She was glad Mr. and Mrs. Maple wouldn’t be hearing the news from Detective Dodge.

  The guard unlocked the door. Before entering, Tess examined the lock. "I’ll bet he got in this way."

  "Can he pick locks?" Dodge asked.

  She thought of the house in the Denver suburbs, the door swinging open under her hand.

  "Yes," she said with a catch in her voice. "Yes, he can do that."

  Dodge was looking at her strangely. She ignored him. Together they descended to the basement lab.

  The boarded-up windows shut out the daylight. Tess took out a flashlight, and Dodge did the same.

  "We should have boots," he said. "And gloves."

  "I have plastic evidence-handling gloves."

  "I meant heavy gloves to protect our hands from all this crap. And boots to keep our feet dry."

  But most of the water had drained off or been pumped out. The concrete floor was slick, but there was only a thin film of water, not enough to penetrate their shoes.

  The two flashlight beams explored the darkness, roving over heaps of debris and blackened wood and smashed, melted glass.

  "Where did they find him?" Tess asked. "Did they tell you?"

  "They didn’t have to tell us. We saw for ourselves. The body was never moved."

  "Firefighters didn’t carry it out?"

  "There was no point. It was a lost cause." He signaled with his flash. "Over there. That’s the spot."

  They approached the center of the room, moving carefully around sharp obstacles and sodden ashes.

  "He was partially protected by some of this insulation that fell from the ceiling," Dodge said. "Otherwise the remains would have been in even worse shape."

  Tess poked around for a minute or two, but the area had already been thoroughly picked over by the arson investigators. She had a th
ought.

  "Just because he died here doesn’t mean he and Mobius spent most of their time in this part of the lab. Mobius night have lured him or dragged him to the middle of the room, so he could start the fire where the body lay."

  Dodge shrugged. "Maybe. But if they were somewhere else in the lab, how are we going to know?"

  "Mobius wanted to identify an unknown substance. How do you do that?"

  Her question was rhetorical, but Dodge surprised her with an answer. "Mass spectrometer, maybe. Or a gas chromatograph." He smiled at her raised eyebrow. "I’ve spent a little time in the police lab."

  "You see anything here resembling that equipment?"

  Dodge beamed his flash into the far corners of the lab. "There’s a bunch of burned-out computers over there. Nowadays all this gear is hooked up to computers."

  "Worth a look." She doubted the arson unit had spent much time in that part of the room. There might be something to find.

  "I don’t mean to come across as either obstinate or slow-witted," Dodge said, "but what exactly is it we’re looking for?"

  "Anything that doesn’t belong here. Anything Mobius may have left behind."

  "Does he ordinarily f—uh, make mistakes like that?"

  "No. But I’m hoping he’s gotten careless."

  She produced two pairs of rubber gloves, handing one pair to Dodge. "Put these on. They’ll protect your hands a little."

  They worked in silence for a few minutes, each picking through a separate pile of rubble under the glare of a flashlight.

  "So tell me about Black Tiger."

  Tess was startled. "How’d you know about that?"

  He shrugged. "Things get around…."

  This was no answer, but evidently it was all she was going to get. "I don’t want to talk about it," she said.

  "An officer of the law who doesn’t like to tell war stories? It’s unheard-of. Come on, spill."

  "Well…" It seemed easier to tell the tale than to put up a fight about it. "I was stationed in Miami, new in the bureau, back in the early nineties. Every kind of bad guy was operating down there. We had animal smugglers—guys who would bring in endangered species from Latin America for sale to private collectors on the black market. Mercenaries selling war surplus stuff to revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries. Kidnappers who snatched tourists in Mexico and demanded ransom from their relatives. We had expatriate Cubans training in the Everglades for the next Bay of Pigs operation. You get the idea."

  "Sounds colorful."

  "It was, actually." She’d almost forgotten the excitement of those days. "I’d joined the bureau for adventure, and in Miami you get all the adventure you can stand."

  "So…the case."

  "Yes, well, in addition to the cast of characters I just described, we also had the drug trade. There were major interdiction efforts going on. DEA and Customs handled border control, but there was always plenty for the bureau to do. One of the major players we had our eye on was a guy called Black Tiger."

  "Scary moniker."

  She smiled, warming to her memories. "You know how he got it? He liked black tiger shrimp. No joke. He hung out at this sort of pseudo-Cajun place in South Beach, eating platefuls of the stuff. He was a tall, lanky guy with a gut like a bowling ball hanging out over his pants. He told me he worked out for two hours a day, but if he did, he wasn’t doing ab crunches, that’s for sure."

  "He told you?"

  She shrugged. "One of several conversations we had."

  "How’d that happen?"

  "I was part of a surveillance detail watching him in that Cajun dive. It was pretty routine. I was sitting alone at the bar keeping an eye on him in a mirror. I don’t know if I was too obvious or if he had some kind of sixth sense, but he seemed to realize I was looking at him. So he leaves his table and comes over to me, offers to buy me a drink. I play hard to get, mainly because I’m so flustered I don’t know what to say. But I think he liked me better for being stand-offish. He was used to having women fawn all over him. He saw me as a challenge."

  "Sounds like my kind of guy."

  She ignored him. "We talked. Afterward there was an emergency meeting of the squad. Big discussion. Do they let me go back to the restaurant and pursue the relationship, or do they take me off the case right now?"

  "You wanted to continue."

  "Damn straight, I did. This was a golden opportunity to get close to this guy, learn about his operation." And she had been young, eager. Another thing she’d nearly forgotten.

  "It’s not every day you have a chance to date a drug lord," Dodge said.

  "He wasn’t a drug lord. His end of the business was money laundering. He cleaned the cash for the cartels and took a hefty percentage of the proceeds."

  "Hence his ability to finance his shrimp habit."

  "He financed more than that. He had an estate on Key Biscayne, a house in Boca, a penthouse condo in South Beach. Limo, couple of sports cars, not to mention personal bodyguards and assistants, half the cops in Miami on his payroll…" She remembered that she was talking to a cop. "Uh, sorry."

  "No offense taken. I’ve heard there might even be a few corrupt cops in the LAPD."

  She finished her inventory of Black Tiger’s assets. "Onshore and offshore holding companies and shell companies. A porno movie production company. An orange grove. Some real estate near Walt Disney World. And a yacht."

  "This guy sounds like quite a catch. Why didn’t you marry him?"

  "I’m allergic to shrimp. Anyway, the upshot of our squad’s emergency meeting was that I would be allowed to reinitiate contact, but if it looked like I was getting in too deep, I would be pulled out."

  "What constitutes ‘too deep’?"

  "A, uh, bedroom situation. Or a threat to my safety. Of the two, I think the bedroom worried me more."

  "What were you trying to find out?"

  "His contacts in the drug trade. We knew he did business with the cartels, but we didn’t know who he was meeting or where or when. We had his phones bugged, his mail intercepted and opened, his homes under surveillance, his movements watched—but we never caught him with anybody who could be linked to drug trafficking."

  "Until you came along and busted him."

  "How’d you know?"

  "Nobody tells stories about cases that didn’t clear."

  She couldn’t argue with that. "Well, you’re right. I figured it out on our third date. You know what clued me in? At the shrimp restaurant he always looked at the menu."

  She waited for Dodge to catch on, but he said only, "I don’t get it."

  "He ordered the same thing every night—black tiger shrimp. So why read the menu?"

  "Because there’s more to it than the catch of the day?"

  She nodded. "The menu he got was a communication from the other bad guys, giving him account numbers and other instructions. Black Tiger might not have been much to look at, but he had a photographic memory. He would glance over the information and memorize it all. When he paid his bill, he wrote his answer. The restaurant’s owner was the middleman who passed the messages back and forth."

  "And you worked all this out just by dining with this gentleman?"

  "I’m very perceptive. Also I was strongly motivated to solve the case before things got hot and heavy."

  "Were you in on the collar?"

  "I was in on the kill."

  She looked off into the shadows in the far corner of the room. This was the part of the story she didn’t enjoy.

  "I couldn’t get away from him that night. He wanted to show me his latest toy—a plane he’d bought, a Cessna. He drove me to the airfield. I thought I had backup behind me. I knew they wouldn’t let him take me on the plane. Trouble was, while I was figuring him out, he’d figured me out. I don’t know how, but he’d made me. And he’d had his people create a traffic accident to block the road and cut off my pursuit. I was alone out there, and all of a sudden he wants me aboard the plane and he’s not so friendly anymore."
>
  "How many of them were there? I mean, I have to assume he hadn’t arranged a one-on-one encounter."

  "Three. Black Tiger, his driver, and the pilot."

  "You were carrying…?"

  "Sig Sauer nine in a thigh holster under my skirt. But no way could I get to it with all of them watching me."

  "Tight situation."

  "I just knew I couldn’t get on the plane. Do that, and I’m dead. I put up enough resistance so one of them tries to push me on board. That gives me an excuse to stumble and fall, and when I hit the tarmac I draw the nine-millimeter and roll under the plane and empty the clip at them."

  "A regular Jane Wayne," Dodge said.

  Tess wasn’t sure she appreciated the comment. "It was just instinct. And I can’t honestly say I knew what I was shooting at. I found out later they were all wearing vests, but I was low enough to catch them where they were vulnerable—knees, groins."

  "Ouch."

  "The driver and pilot went down wounded and basically gave up. Black Tiger had more fight in him. He has his piece out, and he’s trying to cap me under the plane, and I really think only the landing gear saved me—deflected the rounds or messed up his aim. Anyway, I…I got him with my last cartridge."

  "A kill shot?"

  "In the neck. Not intentional—I couldn’t even see the bastard. It was luck or divine providence or something."

  "You believe in that? Divine providence?"

  She shut her eyes, remembering Paul. "I think I used to."

  "Well, that’s a hell of a war story, Special Agent. I’m surprised the feebs—pardon me, I’m surprised the feds haven’t made you their poster child for recruitment."

  "They sort of did. For a while, at least. I’ve heard they still teach the case at the academy."

  He seemed to catch her tone of voice. "And you’re unhappy about that?"

  "It’s just…It all happened really fast. It was ten seconds, probably less. It shouldn’t be such a big thing. It shouldn’t—Hey, wait a minute."

  She had found something.