Miami Fire

by Rick Murcer

  “Fair enough. I guess it helps to be the boss over the BAU.”

  “I have some privileges,” said Josh, his face growing more somber. “The cyber folks are ready to move and open the site in ways I’ve never heard of when I give the ready. They’re waiting on us to see what we see first.”

  “We’re probably going to need that,” said Manny.

  “Will you answer a question before we do this? It could be important,” said Josh.

  “If I can,” said Manny.

  “What happened at the house, exactly? I liked Marie. She and her people were good cops.”

  That was a good question, wasn’t it? What had really happened there?

  In the rush of simply trying to stay alive, then his shooting of Tovant, and the crazy-ass aftermath of that nightmarish slaughter accompanied with getting the locals educated on what had happened in real-time, then receiving Sophie’s text . . . he hadn’t thought a lot about the whys.

  “Tovant certainly had a vicious past. After you sent us his name and we checked into his background, we knew that going in. We also assumed he was probably Valentino because of what the island cops told you. Hell, the timing was even right for him to be on the run after Valentino had left the warehouse and Sophie and I found Dean. We didn’t truly believe he would come back to his house. That didn’t fit with this man’s level of intelligence.

  “Everything had just sort of snapped into place, and we thought his arrogance had put him in deep trouble. We assumed we’d find an empty house and be able to go over it with a fine-tooth comb for leads, especially since there seemed to be no one around,” said Manny.

  “Whose idea was it to go in?” asked Josh.

  “Marie had the final say. We both thought it felt bad, but she went ahead anyway. That’s when the shooting started.”

  Manny exhaled, hoping the images and sounds of that would vanish. They didn’t. They never would.

  “The forensic people are going over the house now, but I don’t think it’ll do any good,” said Manny.

  “Why?” asked Belle.

  “Tovant isn’t Valentino, obviously. So that means Valentino was probably never in that house. And if he had been, he’s too smart to leave any traces. They’ll probably only find more evidence of Tovant’s violent nature.”

  “If that’s true, then what’s the connection between these two? The Saint Kitts people were sure it was him and that his father took care of cleaning up the mess of Cammy’s murder,” said Belle.

  “I don’t know. It’s like we were led down this path but not quite, if that makes sense.”

  “Not really, but I sort of get what you mean,” said Belle. “Things fit, but then they don’t.”

  “There seems to be only one way to find out and dig deeper. Open the link,” said Manny.

  They moved behind Belle and watched in silence as she typed in the HTTP address.

  Josh had his hand on the send button on his phone, ready to alert the two cyber agents when it was okay to climb into the site.

  She looked up at Manny, her big, dark eyes filled with anxiety.

  “Do it,” he whispered.

  She did as Josh sent the okay.

  The screen jumped to life revealing the devil in his most perverted of perversions. It was all Manny could do to keep his composure and try to do what profilers do.

  On the top of the webpage, in each corner, was a cluster of pink hearts pierced with red arrows. Between the hearts was the word VALENTINO in the same Algerian style of type he’d used to carve his name into his victim’s heads and chests.

  The site was running in real time, quartered off into equal sections.

  The top two panels revealed explicit images of the first two crime scenes, a new picture scrolling every few seconds in perfect sync with each other. The young couple was still bound to the tree, the photos, showing various body parts and the perfect circles carved in place.

  The second panel showed the same systematic display involving the Blankses, only about a five-second delay, allowing for the viewer to see the images for that long before the next one scrolled in.

  “My God,” whispered Belle.

  As horrific as that was, the show really began as the bottom two panels, which were previously dark, sprang to life revealing two more sets of victims.

  The one on the lower left began scrolling first but at a slower pace than the top two panels. Valentino wanted to make sure they were getting a good look at the new victims that law enforcement had yet to discover.

  Two African Americans, a man and a woman, were lying stretched out, hands over their heads, bound with duct tape, dressed in only their undergarments, on what appeared a large living room floor that had once been covered with white or cream-colored carpet. The blood from their injuries had turned most of it to a sickening scarlet.

  The second picture flashed, and Manny could see the gunshot wounds running down both sides of each body, but Valentino had been careful to not hit any main arteries or their hearts, as far as he could tell.

  The next picture revealed a close up of each of them. The distinctive white triangles covering parts of their upper bodies made for a horrific scene against their dark bodies. It was as if he’d used some chemical to bleach or burn them into existence. VALENTINO was once again carved or burned into their chests and foreheads . . . with a new twist.

  On both victims, just below Valentino’s name, rested what appeared to be Miami-Dade police badges.

  The sudden surge of sound startled him.

  “More eternal art to come. Be patient my lovelies. These six deserved to be immortalized as do the next two. I love them enough to give them that,” came Valentino’s voice through the computer.

  Then the fourth panel came to life, showing a row of triangles in rainbow-like colors, ending with more heart clusters running the full-length of that section.

  Pure evil. Manny’s heart skipped a beat. Then instead of fear, he felt that ever-increasing anger reappear. He’d kill Valentino with his bare hands if he could only touch him.

  Shut it down, Williams. No emotion. Shut it down, for now.

  He did.

  “Josh. Anything from our cyber people?”

  His boss had turned away and was already on the phone.

  Belle had shut the top of the laptop, but he could see her wheels turning.

  Good girl.

  “Listen. I need to know what’s going on,” said Josh. “No bullshit, just information I can use. Got it?”

  He kept the phone to his ear for a few more moments.

  “Damn it. Keep working,” he said. Then he hung up.

  “They can’t trace this, but are still trying. Apparently he’s using a proxy IP address program that bounces the source of the signal all over the world at four-second intervals. One second the source is in California, four seconds later, it’s in Iceland. You get the picture. Not to mention that the IP address can really only put us in the general vicinity of the source, so we can’t truly pinpoint the ass hat without getting lucky,” said Josh, shaking his head.

  “Great. What else?” asked Manny.

  Josh rubbed his face with both hands. “This link recognition protocol has been screwed up from the beginning. One of those cyber experts should have thought of this. Just for once, I’d like to be the dog here; I’m tired of being the fire hydrant. I don’t know how this shit works, and I wish someone would have warned us that this could happen.”

  “What could happen?” asked Manny.

  “It looks like when we accessed the link, we released the website into the general public by some Internet trigger program. Right about now, there are millions of people on the planet that are getting this site shipped into their email queues. Every one of those people have the potential to meet the Valentino family. Shit. I need a drink.”

  “So we can’t trace him, he’s killed again, we have no idea where he killed them, and the victims could be cops. On top of that, his victims are going to be famous in a way tha
t they’d never dreamed, plus he’s getting ready to do it again in, oh, about. . . .” said Manny looking at his watch, “five hours, if he’s sticking with his timetable and accelerating his killing by twelve-hour increments . . . and we can’t seem to find him.”

  “Throw in Dean fighting for his life and five dead cops and we’ve screwed the pooch like no other day I can remember. I don’t have a clue where to go next,” said Josh.

  Manny was ready to respond, but the thundering epiphany storming his brain wouldn’t allow it.

  Pulse racing, he thought about something Josh had said regarding family. Valentino had mentioned Tovant as family in his text, and he knew from experience that most people have more than one type of family. Work, friend, and play family often became more important than blood family.

  He considered what exactly family could mean to someone like Valentino versus someone liked Tovant as the second picture of the two young men came to mind.

  Closing his eyes, he drew on something he’d seen a long time ago in another case file. Could that be it? Could what he suspected be true?

  His whole professional life had depended on these revelation moments. Most of the time, he was right.

  “Belle, can you show me that picture of the two young men again?”

  She looked at him, recognizing the underlying excitement in his voice.

  “Yeah, that one’s right here. We didn’t close out of the webpage where Sophie found it.”

  The picture filled the screen again as Manny focused on two details that he’d missed. He wanted to slap his forehead. Maybe new cops, or lazy ones, would miss these things, but how could four seasoned detectives?

  Then again, he supposed he knew how. They had been worrying about their own people and not concentrating on their job. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to be.

  He’d dwell more on that later. He felt like they were back on the road to finding Valentino, so “personal needs” were once again placed on the back burner.

  “Belle. I need three things. We were interrupted after I asked if we could find out where that second picture came from and if we could ID the second kid in the picture.”

  “Yes, we were. And our heads went straight up our rectums when we got Valentino’s text,” said Belle.

  “Well said. Please send that picture to the lab in Quantico. I want them to run that through the new facial recognition software the Bureau just spent a ton of money on to see if they can find a match in the database. They’ll have to age him about ten years or so, but we might get lucky.”

  “Okay.”

  Belle saved the image to the desktop, opened up her secure government email account, and then sent it to the supervisor in charge of forensic imaging.

  “Do you think this kid is important here? Maybe even Valentino?” asked Josh.

  “I don’t know. It’s probably a long shot. But if we can ID him, maybe that will lead to another lead because he may know more about Tovant than we do,” said Manny.

  “That’s worth a shot,” said Belle. “What else?”

  Manny pointed to the top of the computer screen.

  “If you look at the very top right corner, you can see what looks like a partial image of an American flag.”

  Belle leaned closer to the screen, squinting.

  “Oh, hey I see it. Good eyes, Manny.”

  “We know the boat is from the US and you can see a row of registration numbers running along the bow. Can you blow up the center of that photo enough to see the boat’s registration numbers?”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty basic. There are a few programs that can bring photos like that into focus. Boats are registered by state, so it might take a while, but we’ll start with the Southern states and go from there. I’ll start on that in a minute. You said there were three things.”

  “Yes I did. This one is obvious, but we need to do it anyway.”

  “It seems to me that the Tovant family, with their business and social status, should have more than their fair share of pictures available on the web. Can you do a search to find what’s out there? According to the Saint Kitts cops, Eric was a single child. I want to see the happy family, if we can.”

  “Crap. That’s another one of those ‘well, duh’s.’”

  “Not necessarily,” said Josh. “Why would you care about that? I mean we have his picture right here.”

  “Just a hunch. These two look like friends a while. We don’t know how long. Life-long buddies? Just from high school? Bar-hopping friends? What? It will help establish the kind of friend this man is or was to Tovant and maybe lead to more information as well.”

  Josh stretched his neck one way, then the other, his eyes never leaving Manny’s face.

  “I know that tone in your voice, Williams. What are you really after here? You already know what Tovant looks like and we’re in the process of running down this other young man, if we can. This seems like repetitive busy work to me, so spill it.”

  “It’s a shot in the dark, okay? Back about nine years ago, when I was working a case in Lansing, I had to pass it off to Gavin to go to a seminar that our captain required all new detectives to attend. I’d gotten out of doing the seminar a couple times so I had no choice. So off to New York I went.”

  “Oh, I remember that one,” said Belle.

  Manny nodded. “It was the last thing I wanted to do. Anyway, I got assigned a case study that forced me to choose between potential perps who had become friends and were knocking off a liquor store. One of them then killed a store owner. Based on what we’d collected as evidence and some behavioral tendencies, we had to decide which of these punks would be a killer and which one probably couldn’t go that far.”

  “And?” asked Josh.

  “What we didn’t know was that they were screwing with the NYPD and had switched IDs to confuse the investigation.”

  “Switched IDs with each other?” asked Josh.

  “That’s what we thought. But the kid who had actually done the killing stole a third ID from one of his friends and somehow had fake credentials created to further remove himself from being a suspect.”

  “Shit. You think Eric Tovant isn’t really Eric Tovant?” asked Josh.

  “Good God,” said Belle.

  Before Manny could answer, Josh’s phone rang. He held up his hand for Manny to wait. After a few moments, Josh’s eyes grew wider and exhibited the beginnings of a smile. A full minute passed before Josh spoke again.

  “What? Really? That’s unbelievable. Text me the address; we’ll meet you there.”

  Josh hung up, but the wry smile grew.

  “That was the captain who took over for Marie. Never mind all of that other stuff we were going to do. It seems that Manny was headed down the right path. We’ve got the son of a bitch. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER-41

  “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Manny as they flew down the steps of the hospital.

  The three of them reached the first floor, Belle doing her best to keep up, when Josh stopped to address Manny.

  “We all know the saying that good police work is great, but a good lead solves cases.”

  “That’s right,” said Manny. “So?”

  “So Valentino has apparently done himself in. One of the people who saw his feed through the emails announcing the website also happened to be someone who recognized the lettering of the word VALENTINO on one of the victim’s foreheads.”

  “What?” asked Belle. “How?”

  “The caller happened to be a supervisor at a local advertising company, Chase Advertising, to be exact. He said he was going through an employee’s computer work files—an employee he thought strange and out there, by the way—looking for a completed template for an ad campaign. He stumbled across a personal file that had this very same Algerian version of the word VALENTINO displayed on a logo graphic. He called 911 to report it, and now we have him identified.”

  Manny frowned. “Sound’s great, but who is he?”

&nb
sp; “You’ll like this. His name is Benjamin Grimes. And guess where he spent his summers?”

  “Saint Kitts?” asked Belle.

  “She wins a Kewpie doll. It gets better. Apparently the Miami-Dade research folks found out that he spent time with the Tovant family, and they even paid for his education because his own family couldn’t afford it.”

  “That probably explains the picture of both of them together. How did they find that out?” asked Manny.

  Josh glanced at his phone, then looked up to Manny and Belle.

  “I didn’t ask and don’t care. We’ve got the text with his address. Let’s talk in the car. His house is about fifteen minutes away.”

  Once they were in the Bureau’s SUV, Manny driving, it occurred to him that he needed to see something else.

  “Josh, do we have a picture of Grimes?”

  “I’ll ask for one. But the locals are going to beat us there. We won’t need one.”

  “Just get it.”

  Manny turned onto 95 and gunned it, lights flashing from the roof of the white SUV.

  “Why do you need a picture?”

  “I want to know who we’re looking at, that’s all.”

  A few minutes later, as they were approaching their exit, Josh handed Manny his phone.

  “The JPEG is loading. Our boy will make an appearance shortly.”

  He glanced at the screen, then back to the road. It was taking too long to finally get a look at Valentino.

  Pushing the brakes, Manny hit the exit ramp and then pulled off at the bottom near the stop sign, Josh’s phone still in his hand.

  “What are you doing?” asked Josh impatiently.

  “I can’t drive and try to watch for this picture to make an app―”

  The screen lit up, interrupting Manny and subsequently framing Valentino.

  The image showed an ordinary young man with traces of sandy blond hair and what appeared to be a slight frame. It didn’t take facial recognition software to identify the young man in the photo. He was the second kid in the picture that Sophie had found of Tovant and Grimes.