Dead Last (28 page)

“That’s right, Tarzan. It’s an elaborate con job.”

“But why? What’s the point?”

“Hey, it’s a freaking TV show, man. There’s supposed to be a point?”

Thorn looked over at Garvey’s portrait, her earthy smile.

“So the killer’s a psycho. Doing whatever he feels. It’s all random.”

“The killer is Dee Dee’s twin sister, Valerie. That’s revealed in the show coming up this Thursday. She’s got all the twisted genes in the family. You even watch the show?”

“I’ve seen about thirty seconds.”

“Maybe you should sit down and take a look so you’ll know what the hell you’re asking questions about.”

“A twin sister is the killer.”

“That’s right.”

“Bad twin versus good twin.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the issue between them?”

Flynn shook his head.

“Got me.”

“Bad twin trying to create her own identity? Be free? That the idea?”

“Hey, that’s beyond my pay grade, pal. Ask Sawyer, he writes the shit. I’m just a humble reciter of words. A player upon the stage, a mere mummer dancing to another’s tune.”

“How’s that feel, your brother pulling your strings? Putting words in your mouth, turning you into whoever he wants.”

“I’m an actor. I’m used to it.”

“But this is your brother.”

Flynn stared at him and didn’t reply.

“What tune were you dancing to last night around eleven?”

Flynn stood up and marched over to the window and looked out.

“‘What tune were you dancing to last night around eleven?’” He parroted Thorn’s tone and cadence precisely. “Where were you between the hours of eleven and twelve o’clock? Where indeed? Where was I? Let’s see, was that me, Flynn Moss, sprinting down the Miami boulevards in a black Zentai suit carrying a baseball bat? Oh, no, oh, no. Did I just incriminate myself? Did I buy a one-way ticket to the rock pile, the slammer, the pokey?”

He pivoted back to Thorn and stabbed a finger at him.

“Listen up, Daddy-o, if you and I are going to work together, you’re going to have to give me better material to come back on. Instead of this worn-out crap, right out of Cornball 101. It’s stale, hombre, past its sell-by date.”

“You always try this hard? Or does this bullshit come natural?”

Flynn raised his hands slowly and chopped the side of one into the palm of the other like a movie clacker.

“And cut.”

“Hold on, tiger. We’re just getting to know each other.”

“We’re done here,” he said.
“Finito.”

His exit from the room had the same light-footed crispness Thorn had witnessed in the video when the therapist circled in too close to some painful truth.

TWENTY-TWO

SHEFFIELD SHOWED UP JUST AFTER
two, knocking on the screen door. April and Garvey were in the maid’s room. Thorn could hear them quarrelling as he let Frank into the house.

Thorn handed him the pinking shears in the plastic bag.

“These are the scissors the killer used to cut out the obituaries.”

“And how the hell do you know that?”

Thorn explained about the ding in the blade, the corresponding notch in Rusty’s obituary.

“Okay, that works,” Sheffield said. “Sheriff Hilton was one smart lady.”

“She was.”

“The fucker called in, gave the paper names and dates.”

“I saw it on TV,” Thorn said.

“Doing our work for us.”

“Cranking up the volume,” Thorn said.

“My guys had that already, except for the teenage kid in Lauderdale. African American. Alvin Jaspers. Gangbanger, rap star wannabe. Murder weapon left behind. A .357 Colt. No prints. All of them jibe with the obituaries. Paragraphs three, six, nine, three words in.”

“That the full update?”

“Oh, no. This morning I sent a couple of my junior G-men over for a little surprise visit to the Ocean Club where everybody’s living, Sawyer and Flynn and Dee Dee and Gus, and they sat down and picked their brains for a few hours. They questioned some of the crew too just to keep our four primes from squirming too much. Got the whole skinny. ‘Where were you last night?’ ‘Where were you last Thursday night,’ you know, closing time at Sports Craze. Took prints for everybody.”

“And?”

“Fill you in while we drive. We got to move, time’s a-wasting.”

“We need to talk to April first.”

“About what?”

“Doing an obituary for Monday.”

Frank looked back outside at the three news trucks parked on the street.

“What? Give the killer his next assignment?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Set a trap. Select a target, choose his weapon for him.”

“It could work.”

Frank shook his head.

“No way. He can’t be that dumb. He’d know we were setting him up.”

“Maybe not.”

“He’s copying the TV show, for christsakes, basing what he does on whatever system the show uses. He knows we know that. He’ll see it coming a mile off.”

Thorn flexed his right fist, then his left, the limberness coming back.

“There’s no code in
Miami Ops,
Frank. The obits are just a red herring. TV cops studying the obits to figure out how they led to the victims, but that’s all a ruse. The killer’s playing with the cops, picking his victims at random. The obits aren’t a blueprint to anything.”

“Who told you that?”

“Flynn.”

“But our guy has a code. Three down, three in.”

“Yeah. He’s using different rules.”

“Rules he came up with on his own. Not from the show.”

Frank kept staring out the window.

“And we know his code, but he doesn’t know we know.”

“If we have an edge, that’s it.”

Frank stooped forward and fluttered his arms like a swimmer loosening up on the blocks.

“I don’t like it. Even if he fell for it, there’s too many variables. We lead him somewhere, he makes our surveillance, gets spooked, he bolts. We never see him again. Or worse, he slips past, somebody dies, it’s on us.”

“It could work, Frank.”

“No, thanks. I’m staying old school. Track the fuckhead down, catch him napping in his spider hole.”

“Look,” Thorn said, “there’s not much time. It’s got to be a Monday obituary. That’s the one he acts on. If April’s willing, she has to write the thing tomorrow. It’s got to be real, a real person who died. The asshole could check that out. If he realized it’s a fake, it falls apart. April has to tweak the writing, get the words we want in the slots we want them.”

“No way. Not acceptable. Drop it.”

“Hear me out, Frank. Say she does the obituary, it appears Monday. We know the guy’s not going to act on it till Saturday. That gives us a week to catch him. We do the shoe-leather drill, get all the forensics back, you have fingerprints to work with, blow up the videos, the other things on your list. That’s probably going to be enough right there. If somehow we can’t nail the guy in a week, this gives us a fall-back plan.

“Get April to write it in a way that puts nobody at risk. Lure the asshole to the place of our choosing, nobody’s there except us.”

Frank walked into the parlor, looked around, buying a minute. Sunlight was glazing the wooden surfaces, putting a golden frost on the coffee table, the chairs, the bookcases. Sheffield prowled the room, his fingertips drifting across the back of the chair where Flynn had sat. Stopping for a moment to look at Garvey’s portrait. That pretty lass with the naughty twinkle.

From ten feet away, Frank said, “Go see if she’ll do it.”

“It’ll work, Frank.”

“No, it won’t. It’ll turn into another giant clusterfuck. Like everything you touch, Thorn. It’s your special gift.”

“Better than no gift at all.”

“All right, all right. Go talk to her.”

Thorn walked into the dining room, calling out April’s name. She appeared at the door of the maid’s room, where Garvey was staying. He motioned for her to step close. Leave Garvey out of it.

At a bay window in the parlor, he explained his idea.

She listened without comment, staring out the window at the satellite trucks, at the flock of ibis, at Boxley lying in the shade. Thorn made his case as cleanly as possible. No emotion, no pressure. Write a real obit, but insert three words at the crucial spots; third, sixth, ninth paragraph, three words in. Where, who, and what weapon. When he was finished explaining, she shifted her eyes to his face, ten seconds becoming thirty, an awkward half minute. Then she turned away and walked back to Garvey’s room and shut the door.

Frank was in the foyer, phone to his ear, when Thorn returned. He clicked off and tucked the phone inside his blue jacket.

“Well? What’d she say?”

Thorn pinched the front of his polo shirt and fluttered it to cool himself.

“She’s going to think about it.”

TWENTY-THREE

NINETY-TWO DEGREES AT TWO IN
the afternoon. A sheer blue summer sky, glassy waters. In his white yachting trousers, white tunic, canvas slip-ons, and captain’s hat with gold stars, Gus Dollimore was at the helm of
Pretty Boy,
a Hatteras GT he’d been leasing since
Miami Ops
premiered. Sixty-two feet, ninety thousand pounds, 1,900-horsepower twin diesels. A superindulgence. He’d used it in the last few months to entertain local celebrities, politicos, visiting studio guys, a couple of rock legends living on the beach, a pro tennis star, some Heat players, the new Dolphins QB. They’d partied, traded business cards. Gus never heard from them again.

You had to be delusional to think you’d catch anybody’s attention in Miami with fancy cars and boats. Like whispering in a South Beach night club and expecting to be heard. Nobody in this town was impressed by anything. They’d seen better. Always something glitzier, bigger, faster, louder. But Gus kept trying, convinced this was a piece of the success puzzle. Glam it up.

Gus was hauling ass, taking them beyond the lighthouse at Boca Chita, twelve miles south of Key Biscayne, heading out to deep water. Up on plane, making forty knots with the full race diesels running smooth.

Midsummer party boats filled the bay, the sandbars jammed with boozed-up kids and loud music. But as they pushed farther into the open ocean, things thinned out. Only a handful of vessels scattered to their south and east.

Dee Dee was below in the salon, downing shots of Bacardi to keep her stomach calm—still jittery from the FBI grilling.

Gus drew back the throttle levers and the yacht settled to a gradual halt, its huge wake catching up, wallowing the ship for a few seconds.

“What’re we doing, Gus?”

“It’s Dee Dee,” he said.

“What about her?”

Gus had dialed back the bluster. Talking so low, Sawyer had to step close, his shoulder brushing Dollimore’s.

“You’re going to have to grit your teeth on this. It’ll be painful. More for you than me, but it’s going to hurt us both.”

Gus scanned the surrounding waters. A few go-fast boats ripping up the quiet sea a mile away, a trawler heading out, and two freighters a few miles away in the shipping lanes.

Gus nudged the throttles, got
Pretty Boy
idling forward.

“You don’t look good, son. What’re you, still spooked from going one on one with a federal agent?”

“Damn right I’m spooked.”

“I can see why,” Gus said. “You got some ’splaining to do, boy.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Dallas, for starters. You give them your bullshit story, Danson stood you up?”

“I told them the truth. Danson made an appointment, didn’t show.”

“They ask you about Atlanta? Atlanta on the tenth. Weekend that guy got his throat sliced. An obit on the table beside him.”

Sawyer stepped back.

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Gus said, “I remember now. I got it marked on my calendar. That was the weekend you were scouting locations on the Gulf Coast. I’m sure you got ways to verify you were in Sanibel.”

“That was your doing, Gus. You sent me on that trip.”

“Bullshit. Don’t drag me into this. When they get around to asking, I got to give them the truth. You got a wild hair, thought we should shoot some locales outside Miami, break the pattern. I wasn’t hot about it, but I suggested some places. You rejected mine, picked the west coast, decided to do a spin through Sanibel or Marco Island, search out some fresh backdrops.

“Hey, I may not be Fellini, but I’m thorough as shit. I write it all down. Where everybody is, what they’re doing. That’s the show runner in me, pal. Got to keep track whether we’re all rowing together or somebody’s going off in some counterproductive direction.

“So it’s all down in living color. I can PowerPoint it if I need to. Shoot it up on the screen. Every hour of every day, whether you’re on the clock or off. I’m compulsive, what can I say? It’s a disorder, but hey, if I didn’t have such a raging goddamn case of OCD, keep such obsessive records of my cast and crew’s comings and goings, I might be a suspect myself.”

Gus’s grimace softened into a half smile. A little lift of one eyebrow.

“Don’t worry, Gus. I got credit card receipts for the hotel, gas, food. I was in Captiva, stayed at the ’Tween Waters Inn, two nights. I can prove it.”

“Receipts? So what? Smart kid like you, you could check in to some motel, make a show, talk to the clerk so he remembers you, then sneak back to your car, drive to Atlanta. Avoid the whole airplane thing. How hard is that?”

“It didn’t happen.”

“Whatever you say, kid. Really, I’m hoping it’s true. I’m sure as shit hoping I’m not up here on the flybridge rubbing elbows with the fucking Son of Sam.”

Gus turned his eyes onto the blue-green sea stretching out toward the straight line of the horizon.

“This morning, that little meeting with the Feds, that was a warm-up drill. Minute the news vultures get a whiff, grab your cock and hold on. Like hey, what about those other killings around South Florida, they’d be a snap for a guy like you, wide-open schedule, coming and going whenever you feel. In forty minutes you could whip up to Fort Lauderdale, smack the teenager, hell, do it on the way home after work, who’s going to know?