Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (17 page)

“Wouldn’t he contact you directly, Frank, on your cell?”

“Yeah, probably he would. I was just double-checking.”

“But it worries you, him not calling. It’s been four days.”

“Five,” Frank said. “Going on six.”

“So why not call him?”

Frank waved Juan over. “Can’t take the chance. Where he is, his phone rings, it could blow the whole thing all to hell.”

TWENTY

AFTER JUAN SIGNED OFF ON
the hurricane windows, Sheffield showered, dressed, and drove his old Chevy Impala, his personal car, off the key, took back streets north through Brickell and Little Havana, jumped on the Palmetto Expressway, and went west out to Doral.

The Midwest District Station of the Miami-Dade Police Department was a hodgepodge of building styles, combining about five clashing architectural ideas into one sprawling complex. Part industrial park, part smoked-glass office tower, with a quirky sculpted concrete wall out front that sported whimsical cutout designs you’d expect at a modern-art museum. Like a committee slapped the place together, half of them believing law enforcement was serious business, the other half trying to attract the latest TV cop show to use the place as a trendy backdrop.

In the lobby he stopped at a kiosk, bought some heavily buttered Cuban toast and a paper thimble full of ninety-proof espresso, and by the time he was upstairs at Killibrew’s office he’d finished both and was ready to put on his flying cape and soar out the third-story window and explore the heavens.

But the crocodile video calmed him down.

Killibrew sat through the first screening, answering Frank’s questions, but adding nothing. Clearly put out to be wasting her time on something she’d already filed away.

She was a big woman. Fifty pounds overweight. Heavy makeup, lots of lipstick, either angry she had to explain herself to a federal agent, or else born angry. But Sheffield, still coasting on his night in the sack, didn’t let her crabby impatience rile him. He had his pace, his own way of working, polite but taking his sweet time no matter whom it annoyed.

After the initial viewing, he said, “First thing I’d like to know, why are these two biologists making a video at all? Is this routine? They do it every time they go out, or is this a special occasion?”

She didn’t know.

“You didn’t ask Cameron Prince?”

“Didn’t think it was relevant.”

“You ask his supervisor?”

“I didn’t think it was relevant, I still don’t.”

“Seems odd.”

“Not to me.” Arms crossed below her breasts, staring over his head. Enduring this.

“What happened to Levine’s severed arm?”

Killibrew’s eyes refocused on Frank.

“The arm Prince carried back to the boat. Levine’s arm.”

“The arm was lost in transit.”

“Lost?”

It was all in the file if he cared to read it. Every last detail, so he could save them both some time if he just read the file.

“How the hell did the arm get lost?”

“On the airboat ride back to the biology lab, Prince set the arm down on the deck, and in his haste to return, it bounced overboard. The water was choppy, the airboat was traveling at a high rate of speed.”

“Why’d he go back to the base? How come he didn’t try to find her? He had a radio, or a phone, right? He could’ve called for help, stayed out there. She could’ve still been alive.”

“He said he panicked and wasn’t thinking straight.”

Sheffield asked if her techs examined the deck for traces of blood from the severed arm.

“By the time we got out to Turkey Point there’d been a downpour. If there’d been blood, it was washed away.”

“You double-check with the Weather Service about this rain?”

“I did not.”

“So Prince tells you there’s a downpour, and you don’t have any other verification of that? You ask anyone else on the scene?”

“Why would he lie about rain?”

“You’re a homicide detective. Why do people lie to you?”

Her frown deepened. “There was no blood.”

“They luminoled it and found no trace of blood?”

“It rained.”

“The question I’m asking, did you or the technicians check?”

She shut her mouth, twisted her wedding ring around and around on her finger. Sheffield pitied the man who’d picked out that ring.

“So you didn’t check?”

“The ID techs saw no sign of blood. It rained. And the airboat was splashed with seawater from the ride back to the docks. Prince ran the video for us, walked us through the event. We questioned him for an hour. He was distraught, found it hard to focus, he was shivering. We returned to the scene, Prince guided us, and we searched for the body, spent all night, all morning, and into the afternoon searching that canal and the ones adjoining it, and we found nothing. There are carnivores in those canals, lots of them. It’s in the report.”

He and the detective watched the video a second time. When it was done, Killibrew went to powder her nose and Sheffield read the file. Minimal. Three pages long. A dashed-off, half-assed account.

Clearly she’d made up her mind early on, probably pissed she had to spend so much time on an airboat out in the sun, blowing up her hairdo, mosquitoes biting, Sheffield could only guess. But Killibrew’s first impression was that the death was an accident, and she wrote it up that way, start to finish. Croc versus human. Croc won. Video verification, trustworthy first-person eyewitness report.

The half dozen photos were of the airboat and the berms alongside the canal where the incident took place. Some broken brush close to the waterline where Prince claimed the croc dragged Levine into the cooling canal. Footprints in the mud, drag marks. Case closed. Twelve hours after the croc attack occurred, Killibrew pulled up stakes and released the scene. Once you release a scene, you never get it back.

When Killibrew returned, Sheffield was halfway through the video for the third time, at the point where Prince was slogging through the water and lifted up the arm. His face was strained. Maybe he was terrified or in shock. Maybe he had acting skills.

Sheffield clicked the remote and froze it. The arm.

“I don’t see any tool marks,” Sheffield said.

“The image is poor quality.”

“The wound is so neat it’s like the arm was chopped off with a cleaver, not bit off by a crocodile. You ever seen crocodile teeth? They’re all over the place, snaggly. There’d be tool marks.”

“If you say so.”

“What about that rubber bracelet?”

“What about it?”

“Camouflage. What does that stand for? Bracelets like that represent causes of one kind or another. Did you check out what camouflage means?”

“It’s a bracelet. It’s decoration.”

Sheffield sighed. He massaged his forehead. Ready to strangle her. “Did you show this video to an animal expert, an outside biologist?”

She shook her head.

“Did you drag the canals for remains or articles of clothing?”

“We did an extensive search. It’s in the report.”

“Before you released the scene, you put your scuba team in the water?”

“No.”

“You got a body missing in a canal and no one went in that water?”

“We felt it was too dangerous. We did an extensive sweep of the area and found nothing.”

“The scuba guys thought it was too dangerous? That’d be a first.”

“I deemed it too dangerous.”

“You found no articles of clothing?”

“No.”

“In the video Ms. Levine was wearing a long-sleeve shirt. But the severed arm is bare. What happened to the sleeve? Did you consider that?”

“Apparently it was lost in the struggle.”

“That arm could be off a mannequin for all you can tell from the video. It could be a fake. No tool marks, no shirtsleeve, no blood.”

“Agent Sheffield.” Killibrew stood up. “Are you familiar with clitoridectomies?”

“Say that again.”

“Mutilation of a woman’s genitals. The cutting away of the clitoris. In this case with a pair of scissors.”

“What the hell?”

“On the night of June the ninth, the crime scene I was working when I was dispatched to Turkey Point power plant was the seventh rape and genital mutilation in the last six months. The rapist’s first two victims died at the crime scene, so as a homicide detective I was assigned the case in January of this year and have been working all the subsequent rapes and mutilations. After the first two died, the other victims have managed to survive the injuries. Though none have been helpful with descriptions. Their attacker wears a mask, and as you can imagine, the trauma is horrendous. They have great difficulty reconstructing the events.”

“I’ve read about it. You’re the lead on that?”

“Yes, I am. With all the cutbacks, that’s how shorthanded we are, pulling me off a case of such magnitude, to investigate a crocodile mishap.”

“I see.”

“So if you think about it, Agent Sheffield, you might understand why I was not overjoyed to be removed from an active rape scene and sent to work on what was clearly an accidental death of a woman who put herself in harm’s way on a regular basis. If my mind wasn’t fully engaged on the effort of locating body parts, or the specific crocodile that attacked and dragged off Ms. Levine, or the whereabouts of articles of her clothing, then I beg your forgiveness. But my focus was elsewhere.”

She was almost out the door when Frank said, “Can you get somebody to make me a copy of the file, and a copy of this video, too? I’d like to enhance it, take a closer look.”

“Of course.”

“And one last thing.”

She waited at the door, staring past him at the far wall. Probably seeing those mutilated women wherever she looked. Sheffield sympathized and sure as hell didn’t want to get into a pissing contest, so he kept his voice neutral.

“You happen to remember the name of the person in charge of the power company’s search team? I didn’t see any mention of it in the report.”

“The head of Florida Power and Light’s security squad.”

“That would be Claude Sellers?”

“Yes, that’s right. Claude Sellers. A very unpleasant man.”

“Well, at least we agree on that.”

TWENTY-ONE

NICOLE WASN’T PICKING UP HER
cell. Her message wasn’t recorded in her own voice but was a female robot telling him to leave his name and number. Saying it with that condescending edge female robots were so good at.

He refused to talk to robots, even Nicole McIvey’s. So he hung up, then a few minutes later called again and hung up again, and ten minutes later did it all again, still got the robot.

By then he’d arrived in the valet parking lot of the Palace, one of Miami’s more glamorous assisted-living facilities, a block down from Miracle Mile in the Gables.

Last year Johnny Greening had retired from U.S. Fish and Wildlife after thirty-five years of undercover work, busting biker outlaws for selling endangered snakes and killer pit bulls to other outlaws, and once infiltrating a primate-smuggling operation that supplied orangutans to rock stars and wealthy perverts, and for a decade he’d worked the Everglades beat, which put Johnny up against a handful of hard-core poachers who’d survived a couple of centuries too long, living far away from the rule of law, in the middle of that river of grass, and had the battered faces and the dead-eye aim to prove it.

Johnny had taken his savings and bought himself a penthouse at the Palace, where he’d become the darling of dozens of well-endowed widows who vied ruthlessly for his attention.

The valet slipped Sheffield a claim check, frowned at Frank’s humble ride, then drove the Chevy off to a dark corner of the garage where it wouldn’t contaminate the Maseratis and BMWs. Sheffield passed through a lobby drenched in red velvet and gold brocade, walking past the white-marble concierge’s stand, across deep-pile Orientals lit by massive chandeliers that blazed as brightly as the souls of recently departed billionaires.

He stood at the bank of elevators, nodded hello to a sharp-eyed woman with a complicated stack of silver hair. She wore a skintight red tracksuit and strappy sandals and had impossible breasts.

“You in the market?” she said.

“Just visiting.”

She ducked her hand in her pocket and came out with a business card. “When you’re ready, give me a call. They’re going fast. I can still get you a sunset view for under two million, but that won’t last long.”

“Nothing ever does.”

Johnny Greening was waiting for him as the elevator doors opened in the foyer of his penthouse. He’d styled his white hair into a rigid flattop and had put on twenty pounds around the middle, but still looked fit enough to wrestle a ten-foot gator if called upon.

“Need your expertise, Johnny.”

“Having trouble with the ladies?”

“Doing fine with the ladies. It’s this.” Frank held up the DVD. “You got a disc player, right?”

“Have to eject
Debbie Does Dallas
, but, sure, let’s have a look.”

They went into Johnny’s playroom, tricked out with wet bar and blackout curtains. As if he’d been inspired by some Shanghai opium den, the room had no furniture, but the burgundy wall-to-wall carpet was covered with lush pillows of every shape and size. One wall was devoted to electronics. Flatscreen TV and six-foot speakers and a stereo system that had nearly as many dials and gauges and blinking lights as the control panel at the nuke plant.

Johnny ejected the disc from his DVD player, set it aside, and slid in the croc video. He took the remote over to a pillow the size of a kiddie pool and lounged back on it. Frank stayed on his feet, leaning against the wall.

“What is this we’re watching?”

“That’s what you’re going to tell me,” Frank said.

They viewed the video without comment, then Johnny replayed it. A big croc appears at the edge of the canal and climbs up the steep slope. Cameron Prince calls out a warning to Levine, and Leslie waves him off. It was cool, her wave said, no sweat. The big croc in the spotlight wanders a bit, then spots a hump of earth and climbs atop it, seems to listen for a few seconds, then lifts herself high on her stumpy legs and drops hard on her belly. The croc digs into the hump, discovers the eggs and freshly hatched crocs. Leslie Levine is smiling in the shadows as if she’s stoked by the scene unfolding in front of her.