Dead Last (31 page)

“Him too. But, hey, no reason to fly under your real name. Coming up with false ID in South Florida, it’s like buying a pound of bacon.”

Fifteen minutes later they pulled into an industrial park two blocks south of the Opa-locka Airport. The place was full of businesses selling airplane parts, repair shops, import-export offices, storage depots, warehouses full of antique cars, and outfits that leased business jets. Bland storefronts doing big-time commerce.

“On the right, that shop in the back.”

Miami Humane Wildlife Removal
was stenciled over the door of a block building painted in an adobe brown. Out front was a green Ford pickup with orange tiger stripes running down the sides. Wire cages piled high in the bed of the truck, cables and nets.

Frank had called Matheson to schedule a meet, and the rat catcher was waiting for them in his office. Desktop bare, shelves empty as though he’d just moved in or was about to move out. The only sign of activity was a small laptop computer on a stand in one corner of the room, its screen saver running through a series of photographs of naked, big-breasted women.

On the walls he’d hung a few snapshots of his professional exploits, a series of color prints showing Jeff holding up an assortment of on-the-job creatures. The usual python pics. Monitor lizards, gators with their snouts duct-taped shut. Critters he’d no doubt removed from swimming pools and patios out in the western side of town in those sprawling neighborhoods chewing away at the Everglades. There was a feral pig, an indigo snake, a fox, several iguanas.

But the one Thorn was drawn to, the one he walked over to see before anyone said hello, was a black-and-white of Matheson standing in the middle of an empty warehouse circled by thousands and thousands of flying bats.

It looked as if he’d put the camera on a table and set the self-timer. The flash caught him in the midst of a thick swarm, bats zipping through his spread legs, dodging above and below his outstretched arms, skimming past his face, his ears. The membranes of their wings tickling inches from his nose. Must have been just after sunset because a few thousand more bats hadn’t awakened yet and were still hanging behind him in the rafters of that big empty space.

In the photo Jeff wore some kind of protective suit, but he’d taken off his hood for the photo. Given the fact that he was ankle deep in guano and standing in the middle of a whirlwind of sharp-toothed blind mammals that had a fair likelihood of being rabid, the look on his face was eerily unruffled. Like a symphony conductor waiting tolerantly for his rambunctious orchestra to finish warming up before he lifted his baton.

“I got a tribe of rats living at my place on the Key,” Frank said to Matheson. “They’re fine, I got no objections to them. Make little beds out of grass and seaweed tucked in the corners of the attic, come and go, it’s all cool. Only time I ever had a problem was a neighbor put out poison and all his rats came to my place to die. Crawled into the walls, under the floorboards, light fixtures, curled up and rotted. Smelled so bad I had to move out for two weeks, shut the place down for a month. I found a few carcasses, but there was no way to get rid of all of them.

“I called a guy like you, Jeff, a professional critter catcher. He wanted thirty-nine bucks a rat. Dead or alive. Thirty-nine bucks. I said no thanks and went and had a talk with my neighbor. Next time you put out rat poison, call me first, I told the guy. I’ll stand guard at my ventilation grills, send them back so they can die at your place. A person should take responsibility for the things he kills. It’s just common courtesy. Don’t you agree?”

“Okay, I confess,” Jeff said. He held out his hands for the cuffs. “I’m guilty, I did it. Just electrocute me now before I kill again.”

“Oh, come on,” said Frank, “that takes away all the fun. Give us a chance to prove it first.”

“The Zentai Killer,” Jeff said. “That’s who I am, right?”

“If you say so.” Frank moseyed around the office, taking a look at a few of the naked women, appearing and disappearing on the computer screen. Then coming over to stand by Thorn and look at the bat warehouse.

“None of them bumped you,” Thorn said. “The bats, not even a nick?”

“Whatever you say, Officer,” Jeff said. “I want to assist any way I can.”

“Man, this is one tricky customer.” Frank took his jacket off and hung it on the back of a chair. Letting Jeff get a look at his handgun, and sending the kid a message. Going to stay a while.

“You been taking rats out of the Moss house for months. Is that right?”

“Oh, stop the charade,” Jeff said. “You’re not here to talk about rats. I’ve still got three clients to see before my day is over. Some of us have to make an honest living. So let’s do this. What’ve you got on me?”

The words were petulant, but the tone was utterly disengaged. Jeff had lowered his hands and was sitting erect in the chair, forearms on the desk, hands clasped. The poise of a man who made his living lulling dangerous creatures into dropping their guard.

While Frank was checking out some of the photos, Thorn took a turn.

“How’re things working between you and Flynn Moss these days?”

Matheson’s head ticked a quarter inch to the right as if he’d caught the faint scratch of claws inside his walls. A move so subtle that if Thorn hadn’t been watching intently, he would have missed it. This guy had been doing his yoga and meditation and he’d found his still center a few inches below his navel. Or however the hell he managed to be so detached. But just a mention of Flynn’s name made him twitch.

“Flynn Moss and I are old friends.”

“Thorn?” Frank moved to his side, but Thorn went on.

“You a bike rider like Flynn?”

“I’m not part of that group. No, I’m not a bike rider.”

“And you and Sawyer? How you two get along?”

Jeff was ready for that one and didn’t flinch.

“I’m friendly with everyone in the Moss family—Garvey, April, Flynn, and Sawyer. All of them.”

“You ever use prosthetic makeup? You know, a latex mask from a mold of your face.”

“What the hell?” Frank put a hand on Thorn’s arm and squeezed. “What’re you doing?”

Matheson was chewing on something that hadn’t been there before. Moving his jaws with his lips tight like maybe his mouth was filling with spit.

“You’re their dad, aren’t you?” Matheson was smiling as if he reveled in trading blows with complete strangers. “You’re the father who never was.”

Frank stepped away from Thorn and looked back and forth between him and Matheson.

“You notice the resemblance, or someone clue you in?”

“Those boys desperately needed a father growing up. They needed someone to show them how to be real men.”

“Everybody needs a father,” Thorn said.

“Now it’s too late,” Jeff said. “Sawyer and Flynn are set in stone.”

Frank’s cell phone jingled and he pulled it out, gave Thorn a look to shut the fuck up, and stepped over to a corner of the room to take the call.

“I’m a professional killer,” Jeff said. “I’ve murdered more animals this month than you’ve seen in your entire life. An hour ago I was shaking duck eggs, destroying them before they were even hatched. Shaking them, not breaking them.”

“Must be a kick,” Thorn said.

“Condo full of geezers, gated community next to a golf course, the golf course ducks come over from the ponds and shit on the old folks’ sidewalks and their cars, it drives them crazy, a big nuisance, so they called me.

“I located the nests and I shook twenty-nine eggs this morning. I could’ve smashed them, sure, but when the ducks come back, find the broken eggs, they just build another nest and lay more. But if you shake the eggs, scramble the yolks, and put them back in the nest like you found them, the ducks’ll keep sitting on the damn things for another year and never realize anything’s wrong. That’s how stupid they are. Sitting on dead eggs.”

Jeff was wearing a rumpled shirt and dirty cargo shorts. The office had a damp, underground smell like the burrow of a mole.

“We were talking about prosthetic makeup. Flynn tells me you two used to play with his mom’s cosmetics?”

“He told you that?”

“Said she locked you out of her bedroom.”

“You sit on dead eggs, don’t you? You just sit and sit and sit, waiting for something to happen. Dumb as a duck. You think I’m going to answer a question like that? That’s how dumb you are. You just keep waiting, keep sitting on that egg, see if I ever answer it.”

“Maybe you just did.”

“Okay, copper, time’s up. You want to talk to me again, get a warrant. And bring backup. It’ll take more than you two to handle me.”

Frank clicked off the phone, nabbed his jacket off the chair, and took Thorn by the shirtsleeve and hauled him to the door.

Thorn shot Matheson a parting look, but the kid had sunk away into his boundless tranquility, arms resting on the desk, his imperturbable smile securely back in place.

Outside at the car, Frank put his coat on and looked at Thorn over the roof of the Taurus.

Behind Frank a great blue heron landed on the roof of an adjacent building and looked down at them. Four feet tall, six-foot wingspan. Great blues laid six or seven eggs per clutch; maybe half of them hatched. Not a bad ratio for a big bird living in the wild. The blue looked bereft up there, a long way from the watery plains where she hunted and made her home. Maybe she’d been living in somebody’s artificial lake and made the mistake of shitting on their car and they’d called a guy like Matheson to come rattle her eggs. Just because the bird was majestic didn’t give her a pass. Not around this town.

Frank followed Thorn’s line of sight and the heron lifted off. Back to its search for a swath of green.

“Scratch one off our list,” Frank said.

“Who? Matheson?”

“Miss Dollimore,” he said. “A few miles east of Boca Chita, out in the Atlantic, the young lady went over the side of their yacht. Gus and Sawyer were up on the flybridge at the time, didn’t notice. Claim they only realized she was missing when they were back at the marina. Some fisherman hauled her body out a half hour ago, called Marine Patrol.”

“Jumped?”

“Jumped, fell, or pushed,” Frank said. “Unless you can think of another way a thing like that might happen.”

TWENTY-FIVE

BACK IN THE CAR, FRANK
called Agent Rivlin, told her to start looking for a judge, get started on a search warrant. When he was finished with her, he was silent, waiting until the first red light to ask Thorn what the hell was going on back there at Matheson’s office. That whole thing with fathers and sons.

Thorn settled back in his seat and gave Frank the short version of his one-day fling with April Moss, his newly discovered sons, Sawyer and Flynn. Frank listened without comment, not looking over as Thorn finished.

He drove for a few blocks in silence, then said, “Which explains the baseball gloves.”

“I know it’s pathetic,” Thorn said.

“What was she, about twelve when this happened?”

“She was eighteen.”

“You just made it under the wire.”

“What can I say?”

“Try saying nothing for a while. How’s that strike you?”

Then Frank launched into a thirty-minute lecture during the rest of the drive from Matheson’s office to the Ocean Club on Brickell, where the Dollimores lived, a stern speech about everything Thorn had done wrong with Matheson, and how close Frank was to banishing him back to Key Largo, forbidding him to enter the Miami city limits ever again. Thorn had to admit, Sheffield had a point. His goddamn cannon had come loose again.

The only argument he might make on his own behalf, and he had the smarts not to try to make it, was that this was Thorn’s tried-and-true interview method. Forget the curveball, the knuckler, the change-up; forget nuance and trickery. Thorn’s approach: Surprise them with your best heat up the middle, test their reaction times. The absolute opposite of Frank’s control game.

Frank’s lecture worked. Thorn shut the hell up. Let the pro handle it. Frank took charge, spoke to the building manager, commandeered the tenth-floor rec room of the Ocean Club, three doors down from apartment 1047, the condo Dee Dee had been sharing with Sawyer. He spoke with the forensics team waiting outside Dee Dee’s condo for the search warrant to arrive. Then he came into the rec room and took Sawyer’s statement and took it again and then a couple of more times. All of it recorded on a little handheld silver jewel he produced from his jacket pocket.

From three o’clock to six, three hours straight, Thorn didn’t say a word. He watched and listened to Frank Sheffield debriefing Sawyer Moss, and he spent some time rewinding the day in his head, but mainly he watched Frank work, watched and listened to Sawyer responding.

Sheffield patiently tried to trip up Sawyer Moss. Thorn’s first real opportunity to meet this son was coming in this twisted moment. The kid wore a blue ventilated boating shirt and shorts and Sperry Top-Siders. Sunglasses hung from a cord around his neck. Face chapped from the afternoon’s trip across the bay. Blond hair a mess.

Three hours. Same questions, different phrasing, different order, different pacing, Sawyer with the same answers, slight variations, a word here and there, being patient with Frank, as though he knew this drill, was trying his best to cooperate, do his civic duty. Patient, reasonable, seemed like a good kid.

Gus, the grieving father, was upstairs in his penthouse covering the same ground with Frank’s team, Grace Rivlin and Robert Vasquez. They would compare stories later, see what fit, what didn’t. A routine that Thorn guessed hadn’t altered since the heyday of the inquisitions.

How anybody as relaxed and jocular as Frank could tolerate such plodding tedium was beyond Thorn. Sugarman was capable of it too. He’d seen Sugar plenty of times grind away at some doofus, playing Simon Says with him till, whoops, the doofus accidentally spilled the truth.

Going at it like some stubborn woodpecker tapping at the same spot for endless hours, probing for the weak fiber, working his way in, convinced there was something worth all his time and effort hiding back behind that hard shell.