Miami Fire

by Rick Murcer

  So this was it? This was what they got for being good cops? For trying to stand up for what was good? For trying to make the world a safer place?

  Maybe Sophie was right. Maybe there was another life out there that would let them sleep at night and not be exposed to this kind of carnage. Was this life truly worth the price? And what if she lost Dean in this supposed noble arena? Was anything worth that?

  The fifth body in this death-hole room begged his attention again. He tilted his head and gave it to him.

  They had taken out Eric Tovant, and he wouldn’t harm another soul, small consolation for the families of these brave cops.

  With a great deal of effort, he pulled out his cell and dialed 911.

  After giving the dispatcher the address, he hung up. Manny patted the young cop on the shoulder, still sitting by his fallen partner. Then he walked over to Marie, reached down, and gently closed her eyes for the final time.

  CHAPTER-38

  Stepping through the hospital door, Manny didn’t wait for the elevator and hurried up the three flight of steps to the ICU floor where Sophie had texted him to come.

  His lack of love for technology was obvious, but in this instance, he was glad for it. He didn’t want to hear Sophie’s voice. The last thing he needed after leaving that house of death was another bout with his emotions.

  That was probably true with her after he had texted her first, telling her that Eric Tovant was dead, but that they had lost five cops ridding the world of Valentino.

  Turning the corner and then continuing to room 3012, Manny felt his heart racing, and not just because of news regarding Dean, which was plenty emotional enough. He was sapped. Wired out. He felt like a fish at the end of its struggle to free itself from the hook and return to the water.

  In all of his years as a cop, he’d never felt less control over his job, the unsubs, and above all, himself. Being strong, able to compartmentalize and concentrate on a killer’s traits and personality had been what he’d been made for, or at least he used to think so. Now that self-assured mindset was suffering a major toll here in Miami. Then again, breaking a petty crook’s ankle wasn’t exactly in line with who he was either.

  Forever, he would wonder if he should have guessed Eric Tovant’s next move. Yet he had fully agreed with Marie, if not by his words, then by his actions. Five cops were dead because of it.

  Five cops. Five cops chalked up to Valentino.

  He prayed it wouldn’t be six.

  Manny found the room and reached out and touched the numbers as if to confirm them by touch, not truly trusting his eyes. The wooden double-door was closed, hiding the room’s secrets from the outside world, from him.

  Taking a deep breath, he turned the handle and stepped through.

  Josh, Belle, and Sophie stood a few feet away from the man hooked to a billion wires and tubes on the bed. The smell of hospital disinfectant brushed his nose, the rhythmic actions of the ventilator pump the only sound in the room.

  Belle held Sophie’s hand while Josh stood so close to her that air would have trouble getting between them.

  Sophie turned to Manny and tilted her head, offering a thin smile. There were no tears, no countenance of anger, pain, or signs of a pending emotional explosion or meltdown. She was more in control than he, it seemed.

  “He’s not dead,” she said.

  “Thank God,” said Manny.

  He made no attempt to disguise his relief. His knees felt a little weak at the release of emotion, but a burden had been lifted for now.

  “Maybe. The doctors think if he makes it through the night that he’ll have a chance,” she said, still missing any real Sophie Lee emotion.

  “He’s tough and strong, he’ll make it,” said Josh.

  “He will,” said Belle.

  Sophie nodded then slowly shuffled to Dean’s side, bent and kissed him on the forehead, whispered something to him, kissed him again, and backed up to the other three.

  “Let’s go to the private waiting room,” said Sophie. “I can’t stay here and just watch whether he makes it or not. I have to get my mind off him or I’ll go insane. Besides, I found out a couple things about Eric Tovant you need to know.”

  “Are you sure? That can wait. He’s dead. Valentino won’t hurt anyone else,” said Manny.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I don’t care what the experts say, sitting here won’t help either one of us. Not this time. I told Dean that, and he gets it. I know he gets it. As far as Eric Tovant and Valentino being one and the same, you’ll have to decide that yourselves.”

  “What? Why?” asked Manny.

  “Follow me.”

  He fell in line behind her with Josh and Belle behind him.

  Manny had no idea what she was about to show them, but any sense of relief he’d felt moments ago had been obliterated. Yet, he wasn’t surprised. He suspected something was not quite right, didn’t he? But he was hoping against hope Eric Tovant’s death was the end of this case. He was about to find out.

  Sophie led them through the door to the room, stopping at the nurse’s desk to tell them she’d be in the waiting room. She then continued through two more sets of doors into a secluded room. On top of the small rectangular table were three stacks of papers in various states of disarray piled around the laptop Manny had given Sophie.

  She sat down in the chair as Josh, Belle, and Manny formed an arc facing her.

  “I was going to show this to Belle and Josh when they got back a couple of hours ago, but then you texted me at about the same time the doctors came out of the OR—”

  She bit her lip, then stuck it out in determination.

  “Anyway, I thought you were just giving me busy work to keep my mind off from shit, but I thought I’d check this stuff out anyway. Most of that cross-referencing junk, you know, the locations of the murders and all of that, didn’t lead to anything concrete until I finally got the profile on Eric Tovant.”

  She reached for a piece of paper with what Manny recognized as her handwriting.

  “This piece of work has been nothing but trouble since he was about twelve. He has a juvie record longer than my arm, for starters. And that’s just what I can find. Who knows what is still sealed away somewhere?

  “His dad kept bailing his ass out of trouble, but in the late summer of 1995, the year Belle’s friend was killed, daddy committed him to a private juvenile mental health facility in Gainesville.”

  “How long?” asked Manny.

  “Now that’s the golden question. It looks like he was there for three years because of school archives, but he has no official record of leaving the facility until the year 2000 when he turned eighteen.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Josh.

  “I didn’t either at first. It was confusing as hell because I found records where an Eric Tovant was enrolled in high school right here in Miami at age sixteen and graduated in the same year he was supposedly released from the institution.”

  “There could have been more than one Eric Tovant, right?’ asked Belle.

  “I checked that, and oddly enough, there were only two ever registered in any public record I could find. The first one would be about a hundred twenty years old today. The other would be around thirty-four.”

  “That’s our guy then,” said Josh.

  “Maybe. Valentino has serious art ability, as warped as it is, right? But the canvassing report Marie had her people do with the colleges and art schools gave us nothing regarding an Eric Tovant. He didn’t show up on the list of people who might have some interest in odd forms.

  “I also found out, with the help of Kristen from the Miami-Dade Research Department, that he does not show up as registered in any college in Florida or any other college in the country.”

  “Did you find anything at all?” asked Belle.

  “Yeah, maybe. His name came up associated with a bipolar/schizophrenia therapy group who had been making progress in treating their conditions about six years ago and then with some dum
bass, radical militia faction in Georgia. The only other thing I found with a public record was the house he owned. It looks like someone, probably daddy, paid cash for it in 2003. There was no job info on him either.”

  “From what Belle and I found out about the family, Eric was probably on some kind of trust fund income,” said Josh.

  “Makes sense. We found one savings account in his name with an eighty-thousand-dollar balance. That’s it, other than the two arrests for assault that he did a few days in jail for.”

  “What kind of assault?” asked Manny.

  “He pistol-whipped some gangbanger during a fight in a bar, and he beat the hell out of a professor in some park down in South Beach.”

  Manny ran his hand through his hair. He was trying to make sense of what Sophie had shared so far, and it was brewing too slowly to suit his needs. None of this fit with Eric Tovant and Valentino being the same man. But that didn’t mean they weren’t, or hadn’t been.

  Schizophrenia in rare sub-forms could account for the dead man’s behavior. God knew he’d seen that more than once. But that didn’t feel right here. There was something else going on. Then it came together for him.

  “Pictures? Did you find pictures of him?” asked Manny.

  She nodded. “I found one, other than his mug shot, and was looking for more when I got interrupted by another report coming into me. I’ll show you what I found in a second, but I have to tell you about the report first.”

  “Which report?” asked Belle.

  “The preliminary forensic information from the warehouse. There are two things that yell at me, at least that I see.”

  “Let’s hear it,” said Manny.

  “They found a lighter near the exit where he left the building and ran the prints against IAFIS. No match came up.”

  “How did they know that it belonged to the killer?” asked Josh.

  “Good question,” said Sophie, glancing at the door. “Luckily there were a couple smears of blood on the lighter and the word LOVER engraved on the bottom of it.”

  “So whoever owns that lighter is our killer?” asked Josh.

  “It looks like it. The blood the CSU collected at the warehouse matched the drops on the lighter, but the DNA results didn’t show up in CODIS.”

  “But it could still be Tovant,” said Belle.

  “It couldn’t, actually,” said Manny. “Unless there was the worst mix up of recordkeeping ever known to the FBI’s database.”

  “Why?” asked Belle.

  “He was arrested, twice. They would have had his fingerprints along with his DNA on file,” said Manny.

  “That makes no sense,” said Belle, her calm demeanor unraveling some. “The cops in Saint Kitts said it was Eric Tovant who killed Cammy, and Valentino’s MO is all over that murder.”

  “It is if the killer was actually Tovant.”

  “Pictures, Sophie?”

  She pulled her eyes away from the door and looked at Manny.

  “What? Oh yeah.”

  She hit the keys and then turned the laptop around.

  “Here is the first picture I found.”

  Manny looked it up and down. The face was a bit younger and his hair longer, but the image was a dead ringer for the mugshot of the man known as Eric Tovant. The murderer he’d shot in the head.

  “Okay. That’s him. That’s the man whose ass is now in the morgue,” said Manny.

  He caught the side glance from Josh, but didn’t care. He was glad that Tovant was in that drawer. His only regret was that he hadn’t got to him before he killed five cops.

  “Belle. Does this look like the boy you saw in Saint Kitts?”

  Exhaling, Belle stared at the face. She finally threw up her hands, exasperated.

  “I only saw those eyes because of that damn scarf. I don’t know. I mean this one looks crazy, with those wide peepers, but I just can’t say for sure. I only remember how crazy he didn’t look. So in control.”

  “Fair answer,” said Manny. “What else do you have?”

  “Hit the escape button. The next picture is the one I just found,” said Sophie.

  Manny tapped the button and a faded photograph of two young men, maybe in their early twenties, came into view.

  Tall palm trees framed the young men as they stood in white sand, the blue-green ocean in front of a large boat as backdrop. They were both smiling, arms around each other’s shoulders.

  The young man on the left had sandy hair, a slighter build, and stood shorter than the one on the left, who was obviously Tovant. Ten years or so younger, but there certainly was no denying that it was him in the image.

  “That’s him on the left,” said Josh.

  “It is,” said Manny.

  “They look like buds,” said Belle.

  “They do. So where does someone with Tovant’s problems find someone who he trusts enough to put his arm around? Paranoia is paranoia, and it would take a special bond for him to consent to a picture like this, in my opinion,” said Manny. “Sophie, what do you think?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Once again, Sophie was lost in her thoughts, more likely her fears, her eyes fixed on the door. Manny touched her hand to get her attention.

  “Go ahead, Sophie. Go be with Dean. We’ve got this,” said Manny.

  She hesitated, then shook her head.

  “It will rip me a new one watching whatever happens with him. God in heaven, I love him, but I ain’t watching him die on me. I can’t do that.”

  “If you change your mind, we get it, okay?” said Manny.

  He was doing his best to stay compartmentalized, but the walls were crumbling as the idea of what she was experiencing tugged at his heart.

  Sophie cleared her throat. “Like anything on this planet could stop me, if I wanted to do that.”

  “That’s true,” said Josh.

  Changing the subject, Manny pointed to the screen.

  “Do you know where this picture came from? Do we know who this other kid is? Can we find out? Someone had to post that picture from somewhere. Facebook? Twitter? Ancestry.com or maybe some family webpage?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Dean and Alex are better geeks than I am when it comes to going deep into stuff like that, but let me see. All I know for now is that it came from a place called PhotoPail, and the source isn’t always shown in the HTTP address or even on the display itself. Let me see if I can back into the source.”

  There was a sudden vibration in Manny’s pocket. Then three separate ring tones as Sophie, Josh, and Belle all were received inbound calls at the same time.

  His gut twisted. Even in this age of cell phones, he’d never heard all of them entertain a notification at the same time.

  Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he realized he’d been wrong. It wasn’t a call at all, but a text. Looking at the others, he saw that they had not received calls either. He read the text, expecting something, anything, far different than what he was about to read.

  Agents. I wanted you to be the first to see my work, my labor of love, if you will. I tried to be discreet at first, to let these magnificent people be the stars of their own show, but, as usual, you law enforcement types have now made that an impossibility, insulting me in the process. The world has a right to see these people at their finest hour, and I’m going to make sure that happens.

  Of course, the public will get to meet the creator of this eternal work as well, something that I resisted at first, but I realized, in the end, it would be impossible for Valentino to stay in the shadows. Touch the link below if you want to see what I’ve done to those who deserve an eternity of recognition before I release it to the masses. You’ll have three minutes.

  Manny scrolled further, not quite believing what he was seeing.

  Oh, by the way, I see you’ve killed Eric. Too bad. He was a bit erratic and maybe you did him a favor. He’ll receive a certain amount of fame for what he did and how he lived. That’s all we can ask. Still, he was family, and you didn’t
have the right to take away family. Only I can do that. We will discuss that when the time comes, Agent Williams.

  Enjoy the creations. I do.

  Valentino.

  The stunned silence was finally broken when Sophie stood and handed her phone to Manny.

  “You know what? I can’t do this right now. I’d rather be with Dean, even if he dies in my lap than to see what’s on that link and then try to figure out why Tovant isn’t Valentino.”

  CHAPTER-39

  “The government? My wife? And why aren’t you rotting your big ass away with some new boyfriend in a federal prison? This is the last time I ask before I do something stupid: what the hell is going on here?” asked Alex. “And I want the freaking truth. How can you be a spy or some shit and I never knew?”

  Barb stood, bent toward him, placed her hand on his chest, and then spoke into his ear.

  “If you’ll be quiet, we’ll explain the rest, okay?”

  Licking his lips, Alex decided that she was right on that part. He needed to shut up and listen. Then, when he awoke from this dream, the drugs fully worn off, he’d be back in the room at Walter Reed.

  The idea that he’d been married to this woman for a dozen years and never had a clue she was living some kind of double life was insane. Yet, here they were, maybe. Drugs. It had to be pain medication.

  “First ting, mon. I can see what you be tinkin’. You not be dreamin’ or under da influence of narcotics. Dis is all real, so get dat notion from yer mind.”

  So much for the dream idea.

  “Dis is complicated, so I’ll try to make it simple.”

  “It would help if you drop that dumbass accent. I’ve heard it come and go, and right now I’d like it to go,” said Alex.

  “I’ll do my best, but it is in der when I don’t think about it.”

  “Better.”

  “All right, mon,” said Braxton smiling.

  “Funny.”

  “Seven years ago, der was a special outfit formed to oversee three other establishments. The top cats in each organization, DEA, CIA, and FBI, wanted more impartial accountability and it made sense to do dat. The idea wasn’t to interfere, but to address situations that seemed like they were becoming out of control.”