Dead Last (10 page)

“Then someone discovered what he was doing and he was arrested.”

“Social worker saw me playing out in the front yard one afternoon.”

“Rusty’s aunt defended him.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“That was Mickey. That’s what she did, took on the cases no one else wanted. From what I heard Mickey did a damn fine job. But the jury wasn’t buying it.”

“Guy still in jail?”

“Paroled, living in California last I knew. I haven’t wasted my time tracking the sad old man.”

She ran a finger across a red line that had been hidden by her bangs. The skin was puckered and inflamed like a bad rash.

“Had some of it lasered off last month,” she said. “All I could afford. It costs a hell of a lot more to get rid of the shit than it cost to put it there.”

“Seems to work that way with a lot of things.”

On the morning Thorn and Rusty headed out for their last fishing trip, she’d stood before that same mirror and had taken a long look at her shrunken face and groaned at the image. Thorn had tried to reassure Rusty that she was still a beautiful woman. A very beautiful woman. It was true, but his saying it gave her no consolation.

Since she’d died, Thorn had been avoiding that guest bathroom. But no matter how hard he tried, he kept butting into fresh memories of her tucked in every corner of the house. Echoes of her voice, wisps of her scent.

It dawned on him right then that all his fire building today might be a gradual buildup toward burning down this house. Obliterating the ghosts once and for all, Rusty’s and all the others.

“You see what it is? My tats.”

Buddha brought her face close to the mirror and Thorn leaned in beside her and squinted at her reflection.

“Jesus. Is that English?”

“It’s backward. Mirror image.”

“What is it? Why?”

“The old man wanted to be sure every time I looked in the mirror I’d have to deal with it. He thought females were vain and he was determined I wouldn’t be. That part worked. No mirrors in my house. Not a one.”

Thorn leaned closer to her reflection.

“I can’t make it out.”

“When I was a kid it was clearer. But as the years pass the skin stretches and it goes more and more out of focus.”

Thorn waited in silence.

“Ever heard of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths?”

“Not really.”

“First sermon Buddha gave, he did it at Benares right after he attained enlightenment. It’s all about suffering. The foundation of that entire religion.”

She pointed at her forehead, then moved her finger as she spoke.

“Karma and reincarnation. How deeds, good or bad, shape your next life. Right cheek is how desire causes all suffering. Wanting stuff, hungering for things, how yearning makes for problems. Left cheek is how we should abandon desire, and the chin, that’s about following the Noble Eightfold Path.

“The old man was all set to ink the whole damn Eightfold Path on the rest of my body but they caught him before he got that far, so I guess I’m lucky.”

She held his gaze in the mirror. Her eyes had cleared and the sadness had receded. In a moment of weakness, she’d wandered off into the past, into a morass of emotion that had almost swallowed her, and now she was climbing out of that dark pool, shrugging off its aftereffects. He could see her cop face resurfacing, the stubborn mouth, the jut of chin and lower lip.

“It pains me to admit it, but I need your help, Thorn.”

“I’m listening.”

“But right up front we got to get one thing clear between us.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not interested in crawling into your bed. Not now, not ever.”

Thorn willed away a smile.

“Understood.”

“Good.”

“You must’ve tried makeup. That didn’t cover it?”

“Oh, sure I can cover it over,” she said. “But it’s all still there.”

Thorn was silent.

“Just like I used to go by my initial, ‘B.’ People would call me that, but that didn’t feel right either. Same as the makeup. No matter how strange it is, my name is my name. My face is what it is. I can’t run from it.”

At that moment when she smiled, she struck him as utterly indomitable. A woman less than half his age who had fathomed depths of hurt that Thorn could not imagine.

“What can I do for you?”

“Wait here. I need to get something.”

She brushed past him and walked down the hall and out the front door. By the time she returned, Thorn had located a pair of blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt on a high shelf in his boyhood bedroom. The jeans were snug and the Caribbean Club shirt was musty and torn, but still an improvement over the towel.

He was making a pot of coffee when she came in the kitchen door with a brown paper sack.

She set it on the floor by the white-tiled island and brought out a Ziploc plastic bag and lay it on the countertop. An evidence bag that contained what looked like a piece of newsprint.

“Take a look. Tell me what you see. Take it out of the bag if you want. Handle it. It’s already been through forensics. Nothing helpful on it.”

He opened the plastic seal and took out the obituary that April Moss had written about Rusty Stabler. Someone had scissored the edges into a sawtooth pattern.

“I’ve already seen this. It was in the
Herald
a week and a half ago.”

“I found it lying on the bedside table next to Mickey Stabler’s body.”

Thorn read a few sentences and set the newsprint on the counter.

“So Michaela had an obituary of her niece. Doesn’t seem strange. Though the ragged edges, that’s a little odd.”

“We’ll get to the ragged edges,” Buddha said.

She dug in the paper sack again and came out with an electronic tablet. Sugarman had the same kind. He read books on it, sent e-mail, surfed the Web. He’d tried to interest Thorn in its marvels but the gizmo seemed silly. Why would you trust hundreds of books to the memory of some flimsy gadget that could be destroyed with a hard knock? Real books were solid. Part of their beauty was the way they endured the rough-and-tumble years, how their smell evolved, the changing texture of their pages as they aged. Like every organic thing, books matured and decayed, on roughly the same journey as the people who read them.

She brought the tablet to life and did some one-finger typing on its glass surface until she had the screen she wanted.

She handed it to Thorn.

A video was running, a movie or TV show, Thorn couldn’t tell. A person dressed in an iridescent blue bodysuit was sneaking up behind a man seated at an office desk. There was ominous music playing, violins, a cello, and scratchy percussions. It was nighttime. The guy was working late. He was hunched over paperwork, scribbling in the margins with a pen. The picture window across from the man showed a panoramic view of a city skyline twinkling against a black sky. The lights were gaudy, the blue, pink, and aquamarine skyscrapers of downtown Miami. But the office guy wasn’t looking at the view or he might’ve noticed the reflection of the intruder sneaking up behind him.

The man’s cell phone rang. As he reached to answer it, the blue man moved swiftly, looping a wire over the businessman’s head and clenching it tight around his throat. A garrote. The man thrashed, waved his arms, but it was over quick. When his head slumped to one side and blood began to darken his white collar, the blue killer released the wire. He left it around the man’s throat and stepped away.

He drew out a piece of paper from somewhere in his blue suit, then leaned around the dead man and lay the newsprint on the desk next to the man’s documents.

The camera moved in close to the news clipping.

Its edges were cut in the same sawtooth pattern as Rusty’s obituary.

Filling the screen, its headline came into focus for a second or two. A woman named Ethel Rosen from Homestead, Florida, had died and left a large and surprising sum of money to some charity.

The screen went dark.

Thorn set the electronic tablet down on the counter.

“Season one, episode two. A cable show on the Expo Channel. It’s called
Miami Ops
. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it.”

“Don’t own a TV,” he said. “Stuck in the Dark Ages.”

“Well, I’ve watched a couple of episodes. The female lead is an airhead. Whole thing’s silly and not all that suspenseful either.”

“Everybody’s a critic.”

She picked up the electronic tablet and slipped it back in her sack.

“So that’s Zentai? That suit?”

She said yes, that was Zentai.

“How’d you find out about this show?”

“Tracked it down on the Internet. Used a bunch of search terms. ‘Obituary.’ ‘Jagged edge.’ ‘Saw blade.’ Didn’t take but two minutes before
Miami Ops
popped up. I read the webpage, the reviews, and bingo.”

“Somebody’s copycatting a TV show.”

“That’s how it looks.”

“Why?”

“There have to be a why? Crazy people do crazy things.”

Thorn shook his head.

“In my long, sordid history, I’ve had the misfortune of running into a few psychos. Several qualified as full-blown crazy. Insane in the membrane. But they always have a why. What they do makes perfect sense to them.”

She nodded, not buying it entirely but taking it under consideration.

“Because Mickey defended cop killers, you don’t trust law enforcement, not even the FBI.”

“Oh, parts of the FBI I trust just fine. On the national level, they don’t give a hoot if Mickey Stabler defended cop killers. That’s a local issue. The Oklahoma state police weren’t fond of her. Agent in charge in the Dallas field office, Jerry Jeff Peters, he loathed Mickey. He was cheering when he found out she died, I’m sure of that. But national level, no. Quantico, no.”

Thorn watched her arrange herself on one of the kitchen stools as if she was settling in for a long stay.

“Familiar with ViCAP?”

Thorn shook his head.

“All your brushes with the law, I thought you might’ve run across it. Well, what it is, the FBI has a nationwide program to help small-town sheriffs like me. The Critical Incident Response Group at Quantico. They run ViCAP, which is short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

“After Michaela’s murder, I got permission to use their database. It’s where local crime reports across the country are filed and collated and analyzed. A cop like me out in the boonies, if I want to check if there’ve been similar cases anywhere in the U.S., I punch in a description of the crime I’m dealing with, I can even use specific search words, ‘obituary,’ ‘ragged edge,’ ‘spear,’ ‘Zentai,’ ‘
Iklwa
,’ any term you can think of, and the computer spits out comparable crimes in other jurisdictions.

“Of course, for it to spit out something, that something had to be entered in the first place, meaning the local law enforcement agency, the cops in New Orleans or Miami or wherever, number one they had to notice an obituary left behind at a murder scene; and number two, if they noticed it, they had to put it into their report as worthy of attention; then number three, somebody had to scan that report and enter it into the ViCAP database.

“So that’s where things break down. Understaffed, underfunded local law enforcement, cops getting lazy, cops overworked, cops not paying attention. The computer is fine. It doesn’t care if Michaela defended cop killers, the computer plays fair.”

Thorn said, “So this ViCAP database, it didn’t have anything.”

“Not a damn thing. Not Zentai, not ragged edge, not obituary.”

“Then maybe it’s not what you think. Maybe Mickey got her niece’s obituary off a newsstand.”

Buddha shook her head.

“No, sir, the nearest place Mickey could’ve found a copy of the Miami paper was Dallas or Oklahoma City, hours away. From Monday when the obituary appeared till Saturday when Mickey was murdered, Mickey was at home preparing for a case. I visited with her every single day. She read that Miami obituary same place I did. Online. And she didn’t leave her house except for groceries just once. No, sir, the killer left that behind. It’s his signature. A taunt. Right out of a crummy TV show.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“Damn sure.”

Thorn looked down at the place at the kitchen counter where he’d gravitated out of habit.

Over the years at that very spot, he’d prepared a thousand meals. Cut up hundreds of avocados and must’ve made a few tons of guacamole, as well as countless burritos and fish tacos, and lots of margaritas. For a second he flashed on all that wonderful food and drink, and the nights he and Rusty had wolfed down tortillas smothered in cheese and enchilada sauce, top-shelf tequila and Cointreau and lime juice. The giddy evenings dancing in the kitchen to music that one of them started humming. This room, this countertop, these walls had borne witness to some of Thorn’s best moments, some of his happiest hours with Rusty and Sugarman and others. And now this. This young woman with her tortured past, her spoiled face, and her bulldog resolve. The scorched smell of the bonfire pervading the room.

“I’m going up to Miami tomorrow, talk to the obituary writer.”

“Why?”

“She’s the logical next step.”

“What kind of logic is that?”

“April Moss has two boys,” Buddha said. “Both work on
Miami Ops.
One writes the show, the other’s an actor in it.”

Thorn touched the edge of Rusty’s obituary.

“Well, that’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.”

“Had the same thought. It’s that nexus again. The killer’s home-based in Miami. The murder weapon was bought there, the TV show is shot there, the newspaper is from there.”

“And you want me to be your tour guide, show you the big city?”

“You willing?”

“You strike me as a lone wolf, Sheriff Hilton.”

“I am.”

“Then why gum up the works with me?”

“Well, for one thing, I thought you might make excellent bait.”

“Bait?”

“Somebody’s got a strong interest in you, Thorn. I don’t know who or why. But I’d like to dangle you in front of as many people as I can, see whose eyes light up. Maybe somebody’ll even try to take a bite.”