Hell (3 page)

‘Maybe it's just someone's lunch,' Monique suggested.

Lucien stood up, eased the lid off the container.

‘
Merde!
'

Violently, he threw the box away from himself, and its contents fell into the water right in front of Monique.

Who began to scream.

Edouard Lazar leapt to his feet, and all the other people in and around the Round Pool came to see what she was screaming at.

And in another second, she was not the only one.

Only the one plastic container this time, Sam and Martinez noted, but otherwise the packaging and contents seemed, at least superficially, identical, though the MO this time around had been far bolder, the intent clearly to shock more publicly. Not like the first, tied up to a private property.

The Beckets' property.

The same evidence of savagery in both cases. Another human heart.

A second unknown victim, waiting to be found.

And this time, a Miami Beach case.

The Lazar children were traumatized, but being well cared for by their parents, who had permitted their gentle and brief questioning, though with neither of them witness to any crime, their evidence was plainly limited to discovery.

On the plus side, there was plenty of CCTV around the security-conscious resort, and management and personnel were horrified, cooperative and highly efficient, keen to assist the police and anxious to have the Round Pool reopened and returned to normality as swiftly as possible.

A good chance, therefore, the detectives figured as they went through the security camera recordings, that they would at least see the moment when the dinghy had been placed into the pool. They anticipated a disguise, and almost certainly someone in no way directly connected to the perpetrator, someone paid to undertake the task.

‘Shit,' Martinez said.

Neither of them had anticipated what they saw.

A young child, probably aged no more than five or six, all covered up by a too-long, hooded toweling robe, making immediate or even future identification impossible, making it hard even to be certain if the small person clutching the yellow dinghy was male or female.

‘Could be – ' Martinez hesitated – ‘what do we say these days – a little person?'

‘It's a child,' Sam said. ‘Look at the walk, the movements.'

‘I don't know,' his partner said. ‘Remember that creepy movie, where Donald Sutherland thought it was a kid in a raincoat.'

Sam shook his head. ‘This is a child.'

And only a small and unsatisfactory part of the story, because when the dinghy had splashed down in the Round Pool, it had been
empty
, and the hooded child had turned around and walked, through a throng of resort guests, along one of the paved pathways away from the pool area – and had disappeared from view.

‘Someone waiting, maybe, to take off the robe,' Sam said. ‘Make the kid even more unrecognizable.'

Ten minutes further into the recordings, they watched a game taking place in the pool between a dozen or so youngsters horsing around, boisterous enough to send a few would-be quieter swimmers for cover.

When the game was over, the scarlet box was in the dinghy.

They watched it over and over.

‘Nothing,' Sam said.

Not so much as a hint of who had placed it there.

Nor any trace of the hooded child after he or she had left the area.

Their best hope of an ID would come when the footage had been enhanced and examined more thoroughly, but by then that child would almost certainly be long gone and less easy to trace. It was not hard for casual visitors to come and go, either to eat at one of the restaurants or at the deli or café, or just to check the place out. And if the child was a legitimate guest who had, perhaps, been asked to carry the dinghy as, say, part of a game, and if they did manage to ID the kid, his or her parents would probably raise objections to any kind of interrogation, and anyway, the child might not know the identity of, or even be able to describe, the person who'd given them the goddamned thing.

Still, Crime Scene and the ME and his team were on the case, and resort staff were being asked to view the recordings in the vain hope that someone might recognize the robed child.

So far, no evidence had been found of violence in any bedroom or suite or anyplace else in the resort that had been made accessible to the police.

And a second human heart was on its way to Elliot Sanders's office.

SIX

April 19

T
oday was the anniversary of Sampson Becket's death.

Sam's first beloved son, born to him and his first wife, Althea, more than twenty-one years ago, their marriage a painful casualty of the accident that had robbed them of their beautiful boy.

That loss eighteen years ago this day. The memories of the anguish never really fading, only the ability to keep them at bay growing stronger with time.

Most years, Sam went up to Sarasota on the anniversary, laid Sampson's favorite colored seashells on his grave, sang him a lullaby or two in his baritone voice. Sometimes he went alone, sometimes with Grace; a couple of times his dad had come along, and twice Saul, and some day Sam planned to take Joshua, but this year he had his father's wedding to prepare for, and David had asked if he minded the date being so close to the anniversary, and Sam had told him he could not be happier.

No visit to Sarasota this year. Too much to be done.

Life going on.

And a killer to catch.

With so much to do and with an excited two-year-old to contend with, Grace had scheduled no appointments for the whole week leading up to the wedding. Cathy would be at JWU until the day before, but Saul had been more than pulling his weight and, despite all Grace's protestations, the bride herself had been unstoppable.

‘I'll stop one day before and not a minute sooner,' Mildred had told David and Grace a month ago. ‘And if anyone tries to keep me from helping with my own wedding, I'll call the whole thing off, and then see how
you
– ' this last to David – ‘like that.'

‘It might be easier than being married to a cantankerous woman,' he said.

‘You think you've seen cantankerous?' Mildred countered. ‘You try getting me to put my feet up again when I've important things to do, and you'll know what cantankerous really means.'

But though the transformation of the lanai was taking shape and the wedding outfits were hanging under covers in various walk-in closets, and the preparations for the luncheon could not be tackled much before Wednesday and the morning itself, Grace was still glad she'd kept her calendar free.

Come this cool, wet Monday morning, however – and Grace hoped to heaven it would not be like this on Thursday – when Sara Mankowitz telephoned and Grace heard the awful strain in her voice, she knew that if she refused to see Pete, Sara's son, she'd have no peace of mind for the rest of the day.

‘I'm desperate,' Sara had said.

Not a hysterical woman, for the most part, besides which – though Grace would not have admitted it to anyone else – some patients were just a little more special than others.

Ten-year-old Pete Mankowitz was a sweet-natured boy who suffered from panic disorder and had lately been developing signs of agoraphobia and, in general, worrying hell out of his mom, whose husband had walked out three years ago.

Working in cooperation with the family doctor, Grace had used relaxation techniques and cognitive therapy, but it was beginning to seem that they might soon have to resort to drug therapy. Sara was understandably resistant, given that some of the safest medications sometimes aggravated depression and, even when they did not, tolerance could occur in the long term. But with Pete often absent from school, and increasingly unable to interact socially . . .

For today, a house call.

‘You could kill two birds,' Mildred suggested. ‘Have lunch with your sister.'

The bride-to-be working today, no one daring to challenge her, and she had a good point, since Claudia's new house on Key Biscayne was little more than a mile from Pete's.

‘There isn't really time for that,' Grace said.

‘So make time,' Mildred told her. ‘I'll pick up Joshua.'

‘You're getting married in three days,' Grace said.

‘I don't need reminding,' Mildred said.

‘But you must have so much to do,' Grace said.

Mildred's smile was beatific. ‘I guess some of us are just better at time management than others.'

Same deal as with the first heart.

No reported thefts of bodies from anyplace. No reported mutilations of cadavers from hospitals or similar facilities.

Neither heart had come from long-term laboratory storage, and in any case the ME had swiftly ruled out any possibility that the organs had been intended for transplant because the removal technique had, to say the least, been unskilled.

‘Not performed by any surgeon this side of hell,' Sanders had told Sam.

No bodies brought in with organs missing.

No DNA matches.

But something real bad was happening in and around Miami Beach.

Worse to come, Sam was way too certain.

Pete Mankowitz, with his tow-colored hair and frantic hazel eyes, had been about as bad as Grace had ever seen him when she'd arrived at the one-storey house near Crandon Park.

Full-blown panic attack, textbook style. Except this was no book; this was a living, breathing, suffering boy, and though Grace had managed, finally, to calm him down with techniques she had taught him over time, she had wondered at the severity of the attack.

‘What triggered this, do you know?' she asked his mother, once the youngster was finally resting in his bedroom.

‘I don't have a clue.' Sara, a pretty brunette in her early thirties, sat on the edge of one of her gray leather armchairs, exhausted. ‘We'd been talking about going out for a burger with a friend this evening, but he seemed OK with that, and Pete knows if he starts feeling bad, we can get takeout or just come straight home.'

‘Is this your new friend?' Grace asked.

‘Charles Duggan, yes.'

She'd met him a couple of months back, had mentioned him to Grace because she liked the man, but had been trying keep the relationship low-key in case it upset her son, though Pete had expressed no concerns.

‘Have you noticed any worsening of Pete's problems when Mr Duggan's around, or when he knows he might be coming around?'

‘Not especially,' Sara said. ‘Or not until today.' Her expression grew more desolate. ‘I'll have to stop seeing Charlie, won't I?'

‘Not if he's a good man.' Grace smiled. ‘They're hard enough to come by, Lord knows.' She paused. ‘But with a boy as sensitive as Pete, you may have to tread extra carefully.'

‘I thought I had been.' Sara was fighting back tears again, had been weeping when Grace had arrived. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Don't be, Sara.' Grace was gentle. ‘This is so hard on you. The last thing I want is to deprive you of any kind of comfort.'

Sara shook her head again. ‘It's no comfort if it makes Pete unhappier.'

‘We don't know if it has anything to do with your friendship. The chances are today's attack had nothing to do with your plans for the evening.'

‘I've called Charlie,' Sara said. ‘We're taking a rain check.'

‘Probably just as well,' Grace said. ‘At least for tonight.'

Daniel Brownley, Claudia's architect husband, had named their new house Névé because he loved snow-covered mountains almost as much as he loved the ocean, and in the midst of designing its soaring lines of solar glass and white steel, he'd thought of the word for the snow at the summit of a glacier, and no one had been able to dissuade him.

Névé's beauty was a little stark for his wife's personal tastes, but Daniel had returned to Florida purely for her sake, and Claudia thought she might have lived in a hovel if it made Dan happy.

Névé was certainly no hovel, but it was extraordinary. The house overlooked the ocean in the Village of Key Biscayne, and the materials Daniel had used were designed to adapt to weather shifts – a tough call in South Florida. When it was sunny and hot, the huge expanses of smart glass darkened and cooled to comfortable levels; when storm clouds and thunderheads gathered over Biscayne Bay, their dramatic displays were reflected by equally ‘smart' wallcoverings.

Grace liked the house more with each visit. Like Claudia, she had initially found its high-ceilinged open spaces and white tiled floors daunting – not to mention its state-of-the-art security system, with a siren loud enough to wake all the dead of Miami. Time, however, was softening her opinion, and whenever she stepped outside on to the terraces Daniel had created on both levels of the house, she realized that her brother-in-law had somehow managed to create an environment wholly in keeping with the island.

Today, Claudia, delighted by her unexpected visit, had rustled up a lunch of crab cakes and salad, which they were eating in one of the surprising, comfortable nooks, some large enough for the whole family, some designed for one or two, all on the ocean side of the house; this one a cozy corner with a sleek bio-fireplace that would make it perfect for relaxing come winter.

‘Now I feel guilty,' Grace said.

‘Whatever for?' Claudia asked.

‘I turned down patients this week so I could organize the wedding, and now Mildred's taking care of Joshua, and here I am living the life of Riley.'

‘A shrink should know better than to ruin simple pleasures with guilt.'

‘Point taken,' Grace said.

She looked through the glass wall at the rain-soaked terrace and smooth Brazilian hardwood deck, looked past the swimming pool toward the gate in the security-alarmed white fence that led on to public, sandy, palm-planted grassland, the beach and bay beyond, and felt they might almost have been back on Islamorada in the Keys, where Claudia had been so happy before Daniel's work-motivated move to Seattle and the rocky personal times that had lain ahead.