Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Lot of you guys around today.”

  “I’m with the Miami-Dade Crime Lab,” Eric said.

  “You talked to another officer about a carjacking that took place in the parking lot today?”

  “I didn’t see shit,” the guy said. “Which is what I told the cop.”

  “I understand that. But there’s a video surveillance camera over the doors, facing the parking lot, in addition to the”—Eric scoped the open store, spotting one behind the counter recording anyone who approached it, and another facing toward the door from above what must have been the entrance to a storage space—“the two in here.”

  “Yeah, we got cameras. What about it?”

  “I’m going to need those tapes.”

  The clerk pinched his upper lip, then released it and rubbed it as if he had hurt himself. “Got a warrant?”

  “I can get one, if you want to play hardball.”

  “I don’t care one way or the other, but my boss’ll want to know I asked. He’s a bastard for rules.”

  “Tell him you asked. If he has a problem, tell him that if I had to come back with a warrant I’d be angry because my time was wasted, and I’d make him come into the lab to be questioned. You’re saving him a lot of time and effort.”

  The guy cracked a gap-toothed grin. “I’ll be sure to let him know.” He stepped off the stool and crouched down behind the counter. Eric leaned over to make sure he was reaching for tapes and not a weapon. There was a single black-and-white monitor parked on a low shelf beside three stacked VCRs. “Might as well give me all three tapes that cover the time the carjacking happened.”

  “They hold six hours each,” the clerk said. “So they’re all the ones that are still in there now.”

  “I’ll take them.”

  The clerk muttered a curse and ejected the tapes. Eric could see their slipcases from where he stood, but the clerk didn’t bother putting them in, just rose and set the tapes on the counter.

  “Do you know where the car was parked?” Eric said. “Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t see shit. Cop was here before said it was parked in the last slot before the corner, in front.” He pointed to the western side of the building, behind his position at the counter. It made sense to Eric—from where he stood he could see that parking space, but the clerk would have to lean far forward and peer past a rack of maps and a window poster to get a view of it. “Far as I know, that’s where it was.”

  “You don’t know if the woman whose car it was bought anything?” Eric asked. He had a pretty good idea what the answer would be but had to ask.

  “I don’t know who she was or what she looked like, so how would I know?”

  “I figured.” The tapes would tell him, anyway. The quality would be terrible, no doubt, but Dan Cooper, the A/V tech at the lab, could coax something from them if anything was there to be found.

  He carried the tapes outside and set them on the sidewalk with his kit, in front of the parking space the clerk had indicated. The space was empty at the moment. When he had arrived with Horatio, there had been an old VW bus parked there. Nothing like a crime scene that had been wide open and heavily trafficked for what could have been hours since the crime. This would be a game of exclusion—checking every cigarette butt and wad of gum and Snickers wrapper and determining that whoever had left them there had not been connected to the carjacking and murder, in the nearly futile hope that one of them might be connected after all. It would be tedious, grueling work.

  With any luck, evidence from the murder scene would pan out quickly, so he wouldn’t have to put himself through the entire process.

  Putting off starting wouldn’t help it go any faster, though.

  And there was always the possibility that H would want all of it anyway—dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s.

  Eric blew out a long sigh and got started.

  A few facts were essential to any close understanding of Horatio Caine. Although he was not a man who dwelled on his own life’s history, who spent much time examining himself, in the wake of the murder of his wife Marisol—Eric Delko’s sister—and his killing of those responsible, Horatio had spent many long, sleepless nights trying to grasp how he had reached that stage of his life, and where it could go from there.

  The facts were these: His mother had been a fan of Horatio Alger, the nineteenth-century American author whose novels included many well-known “rags-to-riches” stories. Alger’s persistent theme was that anyone could succeed at any task through hard work and determination, and by that success would become a useful and productive citizen. She had named her son after the author and had instilled in him, as a boy, those same basic tenets.

  Another fact was that Horatio Caine’s father had been an abusive man who had beaten his sons and finally murdered Horatio’s mother. Horatio had, in turn, killed his father. Oedipal, perhaps, but to Horatio it was not about wanting to possess a woman who had already died, but about simple, tragic justice.

  His mother’s murder had twisted the rags-to-riches part of Horatio’s own story toward a different goal. Where he had once intended to become financially successful, as his mother had hoped, instead he chose a path virtually guaranteed not to provide an abundance of material wealth. He would become a cop, and he would devote his life to bringing to justice those who preyed on the innocent. His brother Ray made the same decision, for some of the same reasons.

  As supervisor of the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Crime Lab, Horatio did fine financially, although the job would never make him rich. But through the years, first in New York as a beat cop and then a detective, then in Miami, where he began in homicide, switched to the bomb squad, and finally moved to the crime lab, he had put away plenty of bad guys. He suspected that his mother would have been pleased with his midstream course correction.

  These things crossed his mind as he drove the MacArthur Causeway to Hibiscus Island. One of three small, exclusive islands north of the Causeway in Biscayne Bay, which had provided homes over the years to a variety of celebrities including Gloria Estefan, Damon Runyon, and Al Capone, Hibiscus was where golfer Sidney Greenfield had chosen to spend his real estate dollars, and where Horatio had to go to tell Sidney that his wife had been killed.

  The only more difficult task was when he had to inform someone of a child’s death. People who killed or abused children were the lowest of the low, and sometimes Horatio could barely stand to look at them.

  He had never fathered a child, so he didn’t have the same terrible, personal experience with it that he did the murder of a wife. That, he had felt, and not so long ago. He had suffered intensely and he had mourned. He was trying to get past it, to move on, but he still felt her loss every day.

  The best he’d be able to tell Sidney Greenfield was that he had survived it, and Sidney would too.

  But survival would not be easy. It never was.

  This would be Horatio’s second notification of the day—first a son, now a wife—and thinking about that made Horatio feel very weary indeed.

  Weary, but determined.

  Sidney Greenfield’s home was a sprawling Tuscan villa-style mansion that backed up against the bay. The front yard, if that term could be applied to such a vast tract of land, was green and rolling, and a couple of short practice holes had been carved from one section. Tall palms swayed and the leaves of spreading oaks rustled in a welcome breeze that snapped the flags of the golf greens’ pins. The house itself was ocher with red tile roofs; contrasted with the green grass and the blue sky and water, it was a picture that might have made a home-and-garden magazine editor weep with joy.

  Maybe it had been a pleasant place earlier in the day, but it didn’t look that way to Horatio now. Now it was just one more dead victim’s former home.

  He parked the Hummer on a sweeping paved driveway, removed his sunglasses, and tucked them into his shirt. Before he made it to the massive carved front door, a man came around from the side of the hou
se with a big pair of garden shears in his hands. A gardener, Horatio thought for a moment, but then he recognized the seemingly casual saunter that nonetheless quickly ate up the yards of a golf course, the trim physique, the way a ball cap fit snugly onto a head that seemed just a little too big for its body. Sidney Greenfield in the flesh, and doing his own yard work.

  Horatio waited at the foot of the front steps, hands on his hips, as Sidney approached. When he came nearer Horatio was able to make out short, straw-colored hair, deeply tanned skin, and a winning smile that had graced magazine covers and sports reports for years.

  “Mister Greenfield,” he said as the golfer approached. “I’m Lieutenant Horatio Caine of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab.”

  Those words stopped Sidney in his tracks as surely as if Horatio had smacked him with a mallet. The smile faded. “Yes…?”

  “I’m very sorry to inform you that your wife has been killed, Mister Greenfield.”

  The shears fell from the golfer’s gloved hands, clattering onto the driveway. His face seemed to lose all structural integrity; lips quivering, jaw going slack, eyes filling with tears. His shoulders slumped, and in the space of seconds he seemed to have aged twenty years. “Wendy?” he asked. “But she—I just saw her…”

  “When did you see her last, Mister Greenfield? It might help us.”

  “Around ten, I guess. Ten-thirty. She was going shopping.”

  With two shotguns in the trunk, Horatio thought. Interesting shopping trip.

  “Do you know who she planned to go shopping with?”

  Sidney shook his head. “She has plenty of friends who like to go out with her. I think she buys things for them, you know. She’s very generous with her money, and—”

  “Her money?”

  “Our money, whatever. I don’t mind. She grew up with nothing, and if she wants to share with friends who haven’t been as fortunate as we have, that’s not a problem at all.”

  “That’s very admirable,” Horatio said. “It would be helpful if I could get a list of those friends.”

  Sidney looked away from Horatio, blinking back his sorrow, then turned his head back. He seemed to have become a different person, angry and defensive, scowling at Horatio. “How do you know it’s her? Are you sure? If you’ve made some kind of mistake, I’ll have your badge, buddy.”

  “I’d like you to identify her, Mister Greenfield, if you can. But she’s a fairly public figure, and we know what she looks like. We’ve got her purse and her identification, and she was found in a Mitsubishi Eclipse that is registered to her. We’re certain that your wife is the victim.”

  “I just don’t see how it’s possible.”

  “Like I said, if you’d like to come in and see her, that would help us too.”

  “I—I’ll try to fit it into my schedule.”

  Horatio couldn’t think of many activities more important than making a positive identification of a dead wife’s remains, but he understood that Sidney was still processing the news, in shock and off balance. “Just let me know,” he said. “About her friends?”

  “I—I can probably put something together.” Sidney sniffed, ran the back of his leather glove across his nose. He might have been two different people, one shocked and saddened, the other furious at the messenger who had brought him the news.

  “Do you know of anyone who might want to hurt her, Mister Greenfield? Or to hurt you, through her?”

  “I play golf,” Sidney said. “It’s a good living, but it’s not the kind of thing that attracts mortal enemies. Rivals, sure, but they want to slaughter me on the course, not for real.”

  “The gentleman’s game.”

  “It used to be. I think it still is in a lot of ways. I mean, you don’t see professional golfers going into the crowd and beating up on fans, or arrested for carrying guns at nightclubs, beating up spouses, all of that. Maybe we’re too middle class, or too bland, or something, but we just don’t tend to be a violent bunch.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything middle class about the way Sidney Greenfield lived, but Horatio decided not to press him on that point. The man’s eyes were filling up again, tears running down his cheeks, and he kept balling his hands into fists, then relaxing them, like he wanted to hit something but didn’t know what or even why.

  “What happened to Wendy?” he asked after a minute. “Did she suffer much?”

  “I’m told that it was very quick,” Horatio said.

  “She probably didn’t feel anything at all.” A white lie, but a justifiable one. She no doubt felt outright terror from the time the carjacker first entered her vehicle, and even more when he moved to cut her throat. The actual moment of her death, though, was probably painless—shock would have dulled the physical sensation of the knife’s blade, and she would have died before it wore off.

  “Do you have her killer?”

  “Not yet, sir. But we will.”

  “I guess not, or you wouldn’t be asking me about enemies.” Sidney’s voice quavered as he spoke, despite his efforts to hold himself together.

  Horatio wanted to get away, to let the man begin to grieve in peace.

  He took his business card from his pocket and stepped forward, offering it. “Mister Greenfield, I’m very sorry for your loss. Believe me when I tell you that I know exactly how you feel. I’ve been through it myself. If you need anything from me, or if you just need to talk, you can reach me at the numbers on this card.”

  Sidney took the card and pocketed it without looking at it. Horatio could have handed him a 1962 Roger Maris baseball card, for all the attention he paid it.

  That’s okay, Horatio thought. When he needs it, he’ll have it.

  He had a feeling Sidney would be needing it soon. His grief seemed absolutely genuine, as did his surprise.

  Horatio filed that away in his mental evidence locker. You always had to look at the spouse when a married person was murdered. However solid a marriage seemed from the outside, there were interior stresses that could fracture it with little warning and few visible signs.

  In this case—unless Sidney Greenfield was a hell of an actor in addition to being a tremendous golfer—the husband was taken completely off guard. Horatio believed that he had not killed his wife, or arranged for her death, and he had truly expected her to come home from her expedition with an armload of shopping bags.

  As he drove away, Horatio knew that Sidney would keep expecting her to show up any time, and that it would be a long while before he truly accepted the fact that she would never pass through their front door again. He knew that from hard experience, and the memory of that sensation made his gut churn.

  He also knew that the only thing he could do to quiet his gut was to find whoever had killed Wendy Greenfield—and Silvio Castaneda, the day’s other victim—and bring the law’s full wrath down on them.

  Marisol would have wanted nothing less.

  8

  WHOEVER HAD FIRST established how much paperwork police departments had to generate had been a bureaucrat or possibly a lawyer, Horatio speculated, but not a cop.

  He understood the reasoning behind it. To get convictions meant keeping precise, accurate records of every aspect of an investigation. Defense attorneys would—rightfully—attack any gaps or shortcomings in those records. And as supervisor of the lab, Horatio had to read everybody else’s reports in addition to generating his own, to make sure he had all the bits and pieces of every case straight. The CSI team was like his family, and as head of the household he had the ultimate responsibility for everyone else’s work.

  But handling all those records meant spending hours in his office that might otherwise have been spent out on the street, actually solving crimes instead of merely documenting them. Tonight he sat at his desk working through what seemed like hundreds of sheets of paper. He was lost in them when a knock on his door brought him back into the world.

  “Horatio?”

  He looked up and saw Alexx standing in his doorway, tentative, he
r fingers clutching the jamb. They’d known each other for a long time and she was comfortable with him, but she didn’t like to interrupt when he was involved in a task. “Yes, Alexx?” He smiled and waved her toward a guest chair. “You’re working late.”

  “So are you,” she replied, remaining standing. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m finished with the post on Wendy Greenfield.”

  “Any surprises? The COD looked pretty straightforward on that one.”

  “Her cause of death was the slit throat, no question about that. But there was still a surprise, at least to me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, her tox screen came back clear. She’s a clean-living woman. She hasn’t always been—her liver was not in the best shape, for one thing. But there were no signs of recent drug abuse or excessive alcohol use. The big surprise was in her hCG beta test.”

  Horatio knew she meant human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, a peptide hormone produced in pregnancy to maintain progesterone production. It was the hormone that home pregnancy tests checked for. “She was pregnant?”

  “That’s right. Somewhere just over twelve or thirteen weeks, I’d say. Her husband didn’t tell you that?” He caught a faint accusatory tone in her voice, as if she thought he’d been holding out on her.

  “No, Alexx, he didn’t. Which means,” he said, “that Sidney Greenfield was not as forthcoming as I thought. He definitely seemed surprised, but not too surprised to remember something that significant.”

  “Pregnancy doesn’t seem like something that would slip your mind,” Alexx said.

  “No, it doesn’t. It’s not impossible, of course. People in shock can forget their own names.”