Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  Some bodies, of course, were never identified. That, however, was a rarity, and not something Alexx Woods was willing to concede in this case.

  “Just tell me who you are,” she encouraged the victim. “We all have secrets, honey. But you don’t need to keep them anymore. Not now.”

  The Mitsubishi Eclipse had been towed to the CSI garage, beneath the lab. Ryan processed the car, hoping to find some evidence of who met or carjacked Wendy Greenfield at the Quick Spree.

  The doors and trunk latch held latent friction ridge prints galore. Most were probably Wendy’s, some her husband’s, while others could easily have belonged to valets and bellmen and car wash employees, maybe even baggers at the supermarket and random people who brushed against the vehicle in parking lots.

  Because the car was white, he had dusted the likeliest areas with Sudan black powder. With the latent impressions made visible, he had held up his photographic scale and shot pictures of them. These photos would be uploaded digitally and compared to Wendy’s prints. Once those had been eliminated, the others would be run through fingerprint databases to see who they belonged to. Not everyone in the country had their prints in one of the various databases, but many, many people did, including everyone who had been booked by law enforcement, and AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, could compare 500,000 prints a second. The process could take time, but when he thought of fingerprint examiners in the old days flipping through individual paper cards and comparing whorls, arches, and loops with nothing but their eyes and maybe a magnifying glass, he was glad he lived now and not then.

  What he really wanted was to narrow the field. He knew the guy had been driving the car. In the video footage, it appeared that Wendy might have popped the door open for him, although their bodies were between the door and the camera so he couldn’t be sure. It was entirely possible that he had never touched the exterior handle. He had closed the door from the inside, however, so there should be impressions on the inner door.

  And he had driven the car out of screen and presumably all the way to where he—or someone—had murdered Wendy and abandoned her and her car. Which meant that unless he had been wearing invisible gloves, the wheel should hold prints. Ryan’s favorite way to expose them on that kind of plastic surface was cyanoacrylate fuming. Simple superglue. Japanese police, back in 1979, had accidentally found a print inside the lid of a superglue jar, and since the early eighties, law enforcement agencies all over the world had used cyanoacrylate fumes to reveal latent friction ridge impressions.

  In years past, Ryan would have had to dismantle the car, taking the steering wheel into the lab to fume it, or else erect a big tent over the vehicle and fume the whole thing. But he had a Vapor Wand, which, as the name implied, was practically magic as far as he was concerned.

  He got the Vapor Wand out and—staying outside the car door so he wouldn’t breathe in the fumes—prepared to spray. The wand was just a little bigger than a fountain pen, and consisted of a butane torch fitted with a brass cartridge casing that contained steel wool soaked with methyl cyanoacrylate.

  Ryan already had latex gloves on, of course. Now he added a protective face mask and goggles and reached into the car. When he lit the torch, the wand sprayed a fine mist of the fuming agent wherever he directed it. He fumed the wheel and the various dashboard controls, just to be on the safe side, then shut the wand off and backed away from the car. At a safe distance, he tugged the mask away and took a few deep breaths, letting the fresh air dry the sweat that had collected on his upper lip. In spite of the mask’s protection, the plasticlike odor of the fumes filled his nose and mouth.

  While he recovered from the hot work, the superglue went to work on the prints. The Vapor Wand only took about thirty seconds to reveal them, so he fitted the mask back into place and returned to the car with a portable ultraviolet light. A fluorescent dye had been added to the cyanoacrylate, and when he shone the light on the surfaces he had sprayed, prints glowed back at him, so distinct they might have been textbook illustrations instead of the real thing.

  Under the mask, sweating, cheeks itching, Ryan smiled.

  “Gotcha!”

  Some of the prints were surely Wendy’s, but if the killer had been the last person to drive the car, then he had found their first solid lead.

  One more thing he wanted to check out quickly. He had been surprised to open Wendy Greenfield’s trunk and find shotguns and ammunition. What he wanted to know is if Wendy had put them there. For these objects, which were slightly dusty from their ride in the trunk, he returned to powder, applying it with a magnetic wand that wasn’t actually a brush and so didn’t touch the surfaces he checked. Using a regular brush might disturb impressions that had been left in the existing dust. The powder he used turned the barely visible prints bright blue.

  He was no fingerprint expert, but there were only eight major patterns in prints, different types of arches, loops, and whorls. These patterns were composed of bifurcations, spurs, bridges, islands, and other features, but he wasn’t after courtroom-quality comparisons yet. He eyeballed the fumed prints from the steering wheel and the very distinct impressions he had found on one of the shell boxes. After going back and forth a few times, he was convinced that he had found the same prints in both places. He checked Wendy’s ten-card, but her prints didn’t match.

  Which meant—pending a more thorough comparison in the lab—the man who had driven her car had also loaded the weapons into the trunk.

  Definitely not a carjacking, then. But it appeared to be the precursor to some bigger criminal enterprise—they weren’t dressed for hunting, after all—and the men’s clothes in the bag would never have fit the guy in the video, which implied that there was a third person somehow involved.

  Ryan needed to document all the prints he’d found on film, then lift samples to preserve.

  That could wait a few minutes, though. The first thing he wanted to do was to call Horatio with his results. He pulled off the mask and goggles and reached for his phone.

  13

  ON THE ASSUMPTION that Wendell Asher was right about the identity of the bomber—the so-called Baby Boomer—Horatio had asked the Denver field office of the FBI to send over any materials it could pertaining to his previous crimes. He knew there would be filing cabinets full, but he also knew the Bureau would not share all of its information with a Miami cop. What he got were abstracts of some of the case files, pertinent information that had been scanned and saved digitally. The Bureau had been undergoing an extensive computer system upgrade since 9/11, and part of that effort involved making its information more easily shared with other agents and other agencies. The transfer of paper files to digital ones made that sharing possible.

  According to the data Horatio studied, since 2004 the Baby Boomer was suspected of engineering twenty-two bombings. Sixteen had been at clinics, the rest at the private residences of doctors or clinic staff. Nine had involved fatalities. The fatal incidents had been in Boulder, Reno, Henderson, Grant’s Pass, Spokane, Missoula, and Fresno. In addition to those, he had bombed sites in Oakland, Thousand Oaks, Tempe, Trinidad, Twin Falls, and finally Albuquerque. If he was in Miami now, it was the first time he had operated east of the Rocky Mountain West.

  Horatio didn’t like that. Bombers were precise, cautious people. They had to be, or they didn’t generally survive their initial experimentation with explosive devices. Many of them learned their craft in the military, where they were taught not to take unnecessary risks.

  Leaving what was obviously a comfort zone was a risky move. Unless there was some truly pressing reason—if, for instance, he knew how close Asher had come to him in Albuquerque—he wouldn’t have done it. Horatio wanted to understand this guy, but this inconsistency made understanding more difficult.

  He went back to his reading. As Asher had said, the Baby Boomer always used C-4, which meant he had a steady supply of it from somewhere. The FBI hadn’t been able to trace it to its origin, which probab
ly meant he got it from some overseas source. The taggants that Valera had mentioned, usually microscopic polymer particles, were added to domestic C-4 in order to identify the manufacturer and batch number in case it was used illegally. Some other countries used the same technology, but it was by no means universal. Finding C-4 without taggants didn’t identify the source, but it ruled out some of the possibilities. Much police work was that way: eliminate possibilities until you’re left with the truth.

  From the couple of unexploded devices that had been recovered (sometimes unexploded bombs were exploded by bomb squads, instead of being rendered safe in a less destructive fashion in order to be analyzed and kept as evidence), it appeared that the Baby Boomer habitually used the same type of timer to detonate his devices. He made it himself, by wiring a digital kitchen timer to a silicone-controlled rectifier, or SCR, to control the current, and connecting that to a nine-volt alkaline battery, then to a detonator. The kitchen timer could be set for any length of time up to several days, but when it beeped at the end of its countdown, a charge ran from the battery to the detonator, igniting the C-4. He used a variety of casings, usually small metal boxes but sometimes wood, plastic, or even briefcases, apparently willing to sacrifice consistency for convenience in that one instance.

  The few witnesses who had seen him—or thought they had—described the bomber as a Caucasian male in his thirties or early forties. Average height, weight, and build, which Horatio knew meant that nobody got a good enough look at him—or remembered in enough detail—to be really specific. His hair was dark brown or black. A profiler suggested that he attended church regularly, was outwardly sociable but had few close friends, if any, and probably came from a home with only one parent. Horatio had seen cases in which profilers were right on the money, and others where they might as well have lifted traits out of a textbook by flipping pages and stopping wherever their thumb landed, so he didn’t give a lot of credit to this sketchy outline.

  The truth seemed to be that no one knew much about the Baby Boomer, Wendell Asher included. The agent had a lot of notes but precious little solid information on the target of his years-long investigation.

  At a knock on his office door, Horatio looked up from the screen to see Frank Tripp standing there. “What’s up, Horatio?” he asked.

  “I’ve been going over some data on the so-called Baby Boomer, Frank. It’s all pretty vague.”

  “For a case that’s been going on for years, that’s not a good thing.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Got any idea what the problem is?”

  “Not so far. I don’t know if Asher is a bad investigator, or if this guy is really smart. Or both. He’s always a couple of steps ahead, it appears.”

  “I guess there are special issues with investigating bombing scenes,” Frank said, easing himself into a visitor’s chair. “I mean, you’d know that better’n anyone, right?”

  “There are,” Horatio agreed. “The blast itself can destroy much of the evidence. Usually we manage to salvage enough, though.”

  “You joined the bomb squad right after you came to Miami, didn’t you?”

  “I did. Al Humphreys brought me on board, trained me, taught me everything he knew. It was a different world then, Frank. We used bomb blankets and jerkus ropes—”

  “What ropes?”

  “Jerkus ropes,” Horatio repeated.

  “Sounds pretty low-tech.”

  “The lowest. You tie the rope around a suspected device or package and give it a tug—from a distance, sometimes we used to tie it to a car and step on the gas—and you see if it explodes. If it does, it was a bomb.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then it might still be a bomb. You can see the drawbacks.”

  “That’s puttin’ it lightly.”

  “A bomb blanket’s not much more high-tech. You drape it over the device. When the bomb detonates, the blanket’s fire-retardant webbing contains the frag. The top parachutes out to break the pressure wave, gas ports vent the gas, and the sides are weighted down to contain side splash.”

  “Far cry from robots, and what do you call those things?”

  “Now they use robots and remotely controlled devices called wheelbarrows, some of which carry cameras, sensors, and pigsticks, or water-powered disruptors—”

  “Yeah, those things. They’re impressive as hell.”

  “And they work well, which is key, while preserving enough of the bomb for us to analyze at the lab. The Andros unit our squad has now is a terrific one.”

  “You know me, Horatio. I don’t really understand anything higher tech than my gun and my gut, but I’m glad there are people on my side who do.”

  “We’ll get this guy, Frank. There’s always evidence. Sometimes it’s hard to find and harder to interpret, but we will get him.”

  “I know.” Frank rose, went to the door. “Gotta get back over to MDPD. I got a late meeting there.”

  “All right,” Horatio said. “And Frank? You’ve got one of the best guts in the business. I’m glad it’s on my side.”

  “That’s good to know, Ryan,” Horatio said. “Thank you.”

  He ended the call and tucked away his phone. He had walked with Frank to the elevator, and was on his way back to his office when he got Ryan’s call. He took it in the hallway, watching the quiet rush of activity around him through the see-through walls.

  Now that he was done, he started for his office again but saw Eric Delko walking toward him from the direction of the atrium. Horatio and Eric had been brothers-in-law for the brief time that Horatio had been married to Eric’s sister Marisol. Memmo Ferro, a sniper from the Mala Noche crime gang had put an end to the marriage shortly after their wedding—a tragedy from which Horatio hadn’t seen how he would ever recover, even though long, sleepless nights and terrible contemplation had brought him to a place from which he knew he could go on. The only lives that never knew heartbreak, Horatio had decided, were imaginary ones. If he had encountered more than his fair share, he could only slough some of it off by trying to help others through their own tragedies.

  He had tracked down Ferro almost immediately. But Ferro was just a triggerman following the orders of gang boss Antonio Riaz. Horatio managed to find Riaz as well, but the Mala Noche kingpin made a deal with the Feds and was deported instead of jailed.

  A joint crusade to Brazil to bring lasting justice to Riaz strengthened the bond between Horatio and Eric. At a crucial moment, when Riaz was about to end Eric’s life with a wicked blade, Horatio made like the cavalry and raced to the rescue.

  There had been few people he’d been so happy to kill.

  When he saw Eric now, he knew that something had changed between them. A connection had been forged that could not be completely broken; they would never go back to the way they had been before. He offered a warm smile, which Eric returned. “Got a celebrity out there waiting for you, H,” Eric said.

  “I was just out there,” Horatio said. “If it’s the ex-governor again, tell him—”

  “He just showed up,” Eric interrupted. “Think sports,”

  “Ahh. Sidney Greenfield?”

  “You got it.”

  “Thanks, Eric.” Horatio headed for the atrium. Three times in two days—they were getting to be best buddies. At least this time he hadn’t had to fight traffic on the causeway to see the golfer.

  “Mister Greenfield,” he said as he entered the big open space. Sidney sat leaning forward on the bench, hands clenched together and dangling between his knees, almost in the same spot as Nina Cullen had waited a short while before. The expression on his still unshaven face was one of profound loss. He looked up at Horatio’s approach but didn’t smile or bound from the bench the way Nina had. Instead, he forced himself to his feet, straining under the effort as though thousand-pound weights pressed down on his shoulders.

  “Caine,” Sidney said, tugging off his Callaway Golf ball cap and, on the third try, jamming it into the rear pocket of
his khaki pants. He glowered at Horatio, as if the anger he had shown at his house had returned. “You got a few minutes?”

  “Whatever time you need, sir,” Horatio said. A lab tech in her white coat passed through the atrium, and Sidney watched her intently until she was gone. “We can go someplace more private if you’d like.”

  “That might be good,” Sidney said.

  “Right this way.” Horatio led him to an interview room. Light from outside streamed in through big windows, washing down on the table. Horatio pulled out a chair for the golfer and took one opposite him. Sidney Greenfield sat heavily, with a weary sigh.

  Horatio waited. This was the other man’s show. He had initiated the conversation, so although Horatio was interested to hear what he had to say, he would let Sidney get around to it on his own time.

  It took a couple of false starts and some throat clearing before Sidney finally came out with it. “I—ah—I didn’t mean to intentionally mislead you, but I think I might have done just that. It was—I felt like it’s nobody’s business but mine, okay? But I thought about it all night, and more today after you came to the house, and I think it might be important information that could make a difference to your investigation.”

  “What is it?” Horatio asked.

  “Well—it’s a little sensitive, you know. Different people have different rules. The way they live their lives, the morality that guides them—we each have to figure out what works for us.”

  “Within certain parameters,” Horatio allowed.

  “Of course. I’m not talking about hurting other people, or violating their rights or anything. I’m talking about more—discreet behavior. Discreet and consensual. It’s not something I discuss with most people, because there’s—well, there’s a tendency to pass judgment.”

  “I don’t judge,” Horatio said. “It gets in the way of keeping an open mind.”