Dead Last (16 page)

“Crazy business,” Thorn said.

“Brutal business,” said April.

She shifted in her seat, eyeing the door and her path of escape.

But Buddha wasn’t finished.

“Do you know if the killer gets caught this season?”

“I have no idea. Why would that matter?”

“It might be helpful to know.”

“I don’t see how.”

“My point, Ms. Moss. If I knew how these TV cops caught the killer, it might give me something to work with.”

“It’s TV. It’s fake. It’s all made up. You’re not going to learn anything about good police work from watching that show.”

“I know it’s fake,” she said. “But the killer doesn’t seem to.”

April touched a fingertip to the base of her wineglass and gave Buddha a searching look. Eyes wandering over the sheriff’s face as if noticing for the first time the strange markings.

“Tattoos,” Buddha said. “My father put them on when I was a toddler.”

“My god.”

“In case you were thinking that since I had all these tats on my face, I wasn’t a professional. Someone who couldn’t tell fake from real.”

Thorn watched April register that. Two tough women sorting it out.

April studied Buddha for several seconds, and said, “Do you have anything else I can help you with?”

No longer patronizing this young woman from Oklahoma with the ridiculous haircut and the damaged face.

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve got a few more questions. Can I get you another glass of wine?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Well, okay, we’re interested in any obituaries that might have appeared under your byline this past Monday. Were there any?”

“Why?”

“Just a long shot. Maybe our subject is on a schedule. Reads an obituary on Monday, acts on it a few days later.”

April took a long breath.

“So did you have one Monday?”

April nodded.

“Who died?”

“Major league baseball player. Joe Camarillo. He played for the Boston Red Sox, hit the winning home run in the last game of the World Series a few years ago. He went to Gables High, so there’s a local connection.”

“Died young?”

“Heart attack. He was forty-seven.”

“I don’t suppose you have a copy of the obit.”

“I don’t carry them around with me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But you keep files at work, right? Everything you’ve written.”

“At home I have a complete file. I work from there most of the time.”

Buddha leaned down and drew the electronic tablet from her purse, and went through the glass-tapping exercise.

“Now what?” April said.

“I think she’s going online, looking up the obit of the baseball player. She’s very computer savvy.”

Thorn watched Buddha move through different screens, until she arrived at her destination and began to read.

April finished the last sip of her wine and waved at her waitress friend, and drew a squiggle in the air.

Buddha looked up from her electronic gizmo and took a breath.

“What is it?” Thorn said.

Buddha shook her head. Couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“What?”

“A bat.”

“With wings and sharp teeth?”

“A baseball bat,” Buddha said.

“Jesus.”

“But the paragraphs three and six, that’s just articles and conjunctions. I don’t know what we do with that.”

“A goddamn baseball bat.”

“Thorn,” April said. “What are you all talking about?”

Before he could respond, April’s phone rang. She dug it out of her purse, checked the caller ID.

“I have to take this. It’s work.”

Thorn pushed the red baskets back to the center of the table. He’d finished every scrap and there was a five-pound lump in his gut. His lips were sticky and were beginning to pucker from all the sodium. But he wasn’t hungry anymore. He might never be hungry again.

April said hello, listened for a few seconds, then turned her eyes to the table. After a moment more, she scooted her chair back a half foot and turned her back on them.

“So we’re staying in Miami tonight?”

“This time of day it’s two hours of hell getting back to Key Largo.”

“You need to use my phone?” Buddha asked Thorn.

“Why would I?”

“Call someone, tell them you’re not coming home tonight.”

“Nobody to call.”

Buddha nodded.

“Me either.”

April came to her feet, standing stiff, the phone pressed to her ear.

“I’ll be right there,” she said. “Ten minutes.”

She snapped the phone shut, and Buddha stood up.

“What happened?” Buddha stepped closer.

April opened her mouth, then caught herself and shut it. Thorn would not have believed it possible, but April Moss’s face was even whiter than it was a moment earlier.

She sidestepped Buddha and hurried for the exit, Buddha trailing, Thorn bringing up the rear.

A few feet before the door, Jeff, the guy with the shaved head and ratty jeans, stepped away from the bar and blocked their path.

“Is there a problem, Ms. Moss?”

With a cold, dry hand the lanky guy took hold of Thorn’s forearm, a pincer grip. Thorn’s hand tingled. The guy smiled at Thorn without malice, his body relaxed like one who’d handled much tougher badasses than Thorn.

“There’s no problem, Jeff.”

The man nodded respectfully and with the airy grace of a kung fu master ceasing combat, he released Thorn’s arm and drew his hand away.

April slipped past and fled Poblanos with Thorn and Buddha trying to keep pace. She didn’t say another word, just crossed the street, got into her blue Mini Cooper, and squealed away.

TWELVE

AT SEVEN THORN AND THE
young sheriff had dinner at Perricone’s restaurant, a rustic Italian bistro with lots of outdoor seating. A little pricey, but it was a short drive from their riverside bungalow at the Waterway Lodge, and Thorn had pleasant memories of the place. A few years back he and Rusty had eaten a celebratory meal there after a day at the Miami boat show. Rusty had been aglow with Christmas morning excitement after placing an order for a Hewes Redfisher—the first brand-new boat she’d ever bought.

It was on that same skiff,
Happy Daze II,
two weeks ago, that Rusty took her final voyage.

Thorn ordered a bowl of mixed greens. Oil and balsamic vinaigrette, doing penance for his lard intake. Buddha had a Caesar salad with the veal parmigiana, which she claimed several times was the best meal she’d ever tasted.

After fumbling his fork a couple of times, he switched to his left hand.

“I’m sorry,” Buddha said. “Your fingers are blue.”

“I’ll live. But next time, try aiming an inch higher.”

“Were you going to shoot me?”

“I was trying to get your attention.”

“You know the rule. Never aim a gun unless you mean to fire.”

“You were right, Buddha, I was wrong. I got what I deserved.”

“I’m sorry. This time yesterday I didn’t know you. I had a different idea in my head. Somebody a little gaga.”

“Don’t be so quick to revise that view.”

Between courses she got out her electronic tablet and showed him the Monday obituary of Joe Camarillo, the baseball star from Miami. And she was right. The bat was in the ninth paragraph but the other crucial words were ‘the’ and ‘of.’ The closest nouns were “book” and “history” and “blue collar.” If the killer was being guided to his victim by the third word in every third paragraph, neither Buddha or Thorn could guess how he would decide where to go and whom to kill.

“We must’ve read the code wrong. Or maybe it changes week to week.”

She shook her head in frustration.

“It was too damn easy. I was worried about that.”

“We’ll find out tomorrow,” he said. “When the victim turns up.”

“That’s cold, Thorn. Somebody’s going to die. Some innocent person.”

“First, we’re not absolutely sure of that. And second, we’ve spent an hour noodling over this and don’t have a clue. You could call Sheffield, give him a chance at cracking it. Have him hand it off to a cryptologist.”

“I feel helpless,” Buddha said. “Somebody’s marked for death. Somebody’s going to get bludgeoned with a baseball bat.”

The waiter was standing there with the check.

“Bludgeoned with a baseball bat?” the young man said.

“We were joking,” said Thorn.

“That’s a relief. I thought you didn’t like your dinner.”

The young waiter wasn’t smiling as he set the check down warily and backed away. Thorn raised his empty hands to show the kid he was unarmed.

Working on the front lines of commerce in Miami could be risky. The truce that kept chance encounters from erupting into bloodshed was fragile. You didn’t joke about violence in public places, just as you didn’t kid about bombs at airport security checkpoints. The new gun-friendly law was called Stand Your Ground. Florida’s citizens had the state’s permission to use deadly force against anyone they considered a threat to their safety. With so many people standing their ground, Miami had become a hair-trigger society. Determining which threats qualified as worthy of lethal response was the new survival skill. The rule was “Be nice or die.” In fact, be very nice, or very quick on the draw.

By 10:15 they were back at the Waterway Lodge.

Their bungalow was a separate building set off a hundred paces from the main inn. It backed up to the river and had a small patio, tile roof, and Bahama shutters, and maybe twenty years earlier it had been charming. Now it was flaking paint, the shrubbery was withered, and broken lawn furniture and palm fronds lay at the bottom of the empty swimming pool.

The Miami River was no longer a real river, and hadn’t been for over a century. It was nothing but a dredged trench with a few doglegs, but mainly it was carved straight as a ruler out of the limestone; the ancient overhanging oaks had been stripped away, the rocky rapids dynamited to help drain the Everglades, and to allow the big ships deeper penetration into the city. Its stagnant waters had a sour industrial smell, like solvents blended with kitchen garbage and engine oil. There’d been talk for years about cleaning the river, but such talk always seemed to die out for fear that disturbing the toxins that coated the bottom might send them downriver and wind up poisoning a chunk of Biscayne Bay.

Split into a duplex, their bungalow had a common wall separating the two bedrooms, but there was no connecting door. Buddha made absolutely sure of that when they were checking in. The innkeeper, an elderly gentleman, kept smirking at Thorn as though he knew the lack of an adjoining door wouldn’t keep these lovebirds apart.

Their rooms were small and stuffed with marble-topped dressing tables and four-poster beds and lacy curtains with framed needlepoint on the walls. Not exactly Thorn’s style, but Buddha seemed pleased.

She said she needed to write up her notes, edit her questions for tomorrow’s interviews, and she was going to puzzle on the baseball player’s obituary some more. Thorn had spotted a riverside bar a few blocks east and told her he was going to have a nightcap. He wanted to stretch his legs. They’d rendezvous at seven
A.M.
, track down breakfast somewhere.

At the East Coast Fish House he took a table outside with a view of several Haitian freighters docked nearby. The rusty boats were stacked high with bicycles and mattresses, washing machines, bathtubs, and cargo containers that no doubt held an assortment of American castoffs. A short voyage from Miami, all that second-hand junk would soon become somebody else’s luxuries.

Inside the bar an overhead television was playing a Marlins game and the pool table was busy. There were a few suits and ties mingling with the dockhands and off-duty patrolmen and late-shift workers who just couldn’t bear to drive home yet. The bar had a nautical theme. Hawsers and portholes and posters advertizing tropical cruises were mounted on the walls. The place reminded Thorn that there were, in fact, still vestiges of the old, funky Miami hanging on. Relics of that carefree tourist town that once survived off snow globes, toy alligators, and goofy wish-you-were-here postcards, a place he remembered fondly. Somehow a few spots like this bar had retained the screwy charm of a half-century earlier, before waves of refugees turned the city into an overheated international stew of factions and cultures and militant exiles, many of whom liked to claim credit for turning that sleepy town into the dynamic city Miami was today.

Thorn would gladly have the snow globes back.

It was after eleven when he finished his nightcap, and he was waiting to pay his bill at the register while the bartender served two matriarchs at the far end when a black man in a bus driver’s uniform came huffing through the door.

“You see it?” he called down to the bartender.

“See what?”

“Where’s the channel changer?”

“Where it always is,” the bartender said, popping open two more beers.

The bus driver went halfway down the bar, leaned across and snatched the remote, and aimed it at the set.

April Moss was standing in front of a two-story coral rock house, looking grim but composed under harsh TV lights. A tall, agitated male reporter was jabbing a microphone inches from her lips.

“It’s a police matter,” April was saying. “You’ll need to speak to them.”

“Is it true the killer contacted you? You spoke to him directly?”

“No, it’s not. He called the paper, not me. And that’s all I’m saying at this time. No more questions.”

“Sources tell us your obituaries in the
Herald
are provoking this madman to murder. How does that feel, being a killer’s inspiration?”

April slowly turned her face to the man and gave him a withering glare.

Some of the bar patrons whooped at the reporter’s chastened face.

“Bite his nuts off, April,” one of the cops called out.

After April turned and walked away, the reporter repeated the highlights of his interview, then tossed it back to the anchors.

“What’s going on?” the bartender asked the bus driver.

“Some guy in a suit—you know, like Spider-Man only it’s all black, that kind of suit, stretchy, all-over thing—he’s running around murdering people. He says he’s done four already and he’s just getting warmed up.”