Predator (43 page)

    
“And I’m not sure we know that,” she says.

Chapter 47

    
Reba watches Marino watching the pretty scientist set her paintbrush on a sheet of clean, white paper and open the wagon’s driver’s door, his eyes wandering all over her.

    
He stands very close to the pretty scientist as she removes foil packets of superglue from inside the wagon and drops them into an orange biohazard trash can. They are shoulder to shoulder, bent over, looking inside the front, then the back, one side of the wagon, then the other, saying things to each other that Reba can’t hear. The pretty scientist laughs at something he says and Reba feels awful.

    
“I don’t see anything on the glass,” he says loudly, straightening up.

    
“Me either.”

    
He squats and looks again at the inside of the door, the one behind the driver’s seat. He takes his time as if noticing something.

    
“Come here,” he says to the pretty scientist as if Reba isn’t here.

    
They are standing so close they couldn’t fit a piece of that white paper between them.

    
“Bingo,” Marino says. “The metal part here that inserts into the buckle.”

    
“A partial.” The pretty scientist looks. “I see some ridge detail.”

    
They don’t find any other prints, partial or otherwise, not even smudges, and Marino wonders out loud if the interior of the car has been wiped down.

    
He doesn’t move out of Reba’s way as she tries to get close. It’s her case. She has a right to see what they’re talking about. It’s her case, not his. No matter what he thinks of her or says, she’s the detective and it’s her damn case.

    
“Excuse me.” She says it with authority she doesn’t feel. “How about giving me some room.” Then, to the pretty scientist, “What did you find on the carpets?”

    
“Relatively clean, just a little bit of dirt, kind of the way they look when you shake them out or use a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t have good suction. Maybe blood, but we’ll have to see.”

    
“Then maybe this station wagon was used and returned to the house.” Reba talks boldly, and Marino gets that hard look on his face again, that same hard, distant look he had in Hooters. “And it didn’t go through any tollbooths after the people disappeared.”

    
“What are you talking about?” Marino finally looks at her.

    
“We checked out the SunPass but doesn’t necessarily mean much.” She has information, too. “There’s a lot of roads without tollbooths. Maybe it was driven where there aren’t tolls.”

    
“That’s a big maybe,” he says, not looking at her again.

    
“Nothing wrong with maybes,” she replies.

    
“See how that goes over in court,” he says, and he’s not going to look at her. “Using maybes. You say maybe and the defense attorney eats you for lunch.”

    
“Nothing wrong with what-ifs, either,” she says. “You know, like what if someone or even more than one person abducted these people in this wagon and then later returned it to the driveway, unlocked and partially on the grass? That would be pretty smart, now wouldn’t it? If anyone saw the wagon drive away from the house, they weren’t going to think it was abnormal. Wouldn’t think it abnormal if they saw it drive back, either. And I bet no one saw anything because it was dark.”

    
“I want the trace analyzed right away and the fingerprint run through AFIS.” Marino tries to reassert his dominance by sounding like an even bigger bully.

    
“Sure thing,” the pretty scientist says sarcastically. “I’ll be right back with my magic box.”

    
“I’m curious,” Reba says to her. “Is it true Lucy’s got bulletproof Humvees, speedboats and a hot-air balloon in that other hangar over there?”

    
The pretty scientist laughs, snatches off her gloves, drops them into the trash. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

    
“Just some jerk,” she says.

    
At seven thirty that night, all the lights are turned off inside Daggie Simister’s house and the porch light is off.

    
Lucy holds the cable release, ready.

    
“Go,” she says, and Lex begins to mist the front porch with luminol.

    
They couldn’t do it earlier. They had to wait until after dark. Footprints glow and fade again, this time more strongly. Lucy takes pictures, then quits.

    
“What’s wrong?” Lex asks.

    
“I have a funny feeling,” Lucy says. “Let me have the spray bottle.”

    
Lex hands it to her.

    
“What’s the most common false positive we get with luminol?” Lucy asks.

    
“Bleach.”

    
“Try again.”

    
“Copper.”

    
Lucy starts spraying in wide sweeps over the yard, walking and spraying and the grass glows bluish-green, glowing and fading like an eerie luminescent ocean everywhere the luminol touches. She’s never seen anything like it.

    
“Fungicide is the only thing that makes sense,” she says. “Copper sprays. What they use on citrus trees to prevent canker. Course, it doesn’t work all that well. Witness her blighted trees with their pretty red stripes painted around them,” Lucy says.

    
“Someone walks across her yard and tracks it into the house,” Lex replies. “Someone like a citrus inspector.”

    
“We’ve got to find out who that was,” Lucy says.

Chapter 48

    
Marino hates the trendy restaurants of South Beach and never parks his Harley anywhere near the lesser bikes, mostly Japanese crotch rockets, that always line the boardwalk at this hour. He cruises slowly and loudly along Ocean Drive, glad his pipes annoy all the cool customers drinking their flavored martinis and wine at their little candlelit outdoor tables.

    
He stops inches away from the back bumper of a red Lamborghini, pulls in the clutch and rolls the throttle, giving the engine enough gas to remind everybody he’s here. The Lamborghini inches forward and Marino inches forward, almost touching the back bumper, and rolls the throttle again, and the Lamborghini inches ahead and Marino does the same. His Harley roars like a mechanical lion, and a bare arm flies out the Lamborghini’s open window and a middle finger with a long, red nail flips up.

    
He smiles as he gooses the throttle again and threads between cars, stopping beside the Lamborghini, peers in at the olive-skinned woman behind the steel-alloy wheel. She looks maybe twenty, is dressed in a denim vest and shorts and not much else. The woman next to her is homely but makes up for it by wearing what looks like a stretchy black Ace bandage around her breasts, and shorts that barely cover what matters.

    
“How do you type or do housework with those nails?” Marino asks the driver over the roaring and throbbing of big, powerful engines, and he splays his huge hands like cat claws to make his point about her long, red nails, acrylic extenders or whatever they’re called.

    
Her pretty, snooty face stares up at the light, probably desperate for it to turn green so she can blast away from the redneck in black, and she says, “Get away from my car, motherfucker.”

    
She says it in a heavy Hispanic accent.

    
“Now that ain’t no way for a lady to talk,” Marino replies. “You just hurt my feelings.”

    
“Go fuck yourself.”

    
“How about I buy you two babes a drink? After that, we’ll go dancing.”

    
“Leave us the fuck alone,” the driver says.

    
“I call police!” the one in the black Ace bandage threatens.

    
He tips his helmet, the one with the bullet hole decals, and rockets ahead of them as the light turns green. He is around the corner on 14th Street before the Lamborghini is even out of first gear, and parks by a meter in front of Tattoo’s By Lou and Scooter City, cuts the engine and dismounts his warrior seat. He locks the bike and crosses the street to the oldest bar in South Beach, the only bar he frequents in these parts, Mac’s Club Deuce, or what the local clientele simply call Deuce, not to be confused with his Harley Deuce. A two-Deuce night is what he says when he rides his Deuce to Deuce, a dark hole with a black-and-white checkered floor, a pool table and a neon nude over the bar.

    
Rosie starts pouring him a Budweiser draft. He doesn’t have to ask.

    
“You expecting company?” She slides the tall, foaming glass across the old oak bar.

    
“You don’t know her. You don’t know nobody tonight,” he gives her the script.

    
“Ohhhhh-kay.” She measures vodka in a water glass for some old guy sitting by himself on a nearby stool. “I don’t know anyone in here, least not the two of you. That’s fine. Maybe I don’t want to know you.”

    
“Don’t break my heart,” Marino says. “How ‘bout putting some lime in it.” He pushes the beer back to her.

    
“Well aren’t we fancy tonight.” She drops in a few slices. “That how you like it?”

    
“It’s really good.”

    
“Didn’t ask if it was good. Asked if that’s how you like it.”

    
As usual, the usual locals ignore them. The usuals are slouched on stools on the other side of the bar, glazed as they stare at a baseball game they’re not following on the big TV. He doesn’t know their names, but they don’t need names. There’s the fat guy with the goatee, the really fat woman who’s always complaining and her boyfriend, who is a third her size and looks like a ferret with yellow teeth. Marino wonders how the hell they fuck and imagines a jockey-sized cowboy flopping like a fish on a bucking bull. All of them smoke. On a two-Deuce night, Marino usually lights up a few, doesn’t think about Dr. Self. Whatever goes on in here stays in here.

    
He carries his beer with lime to the pool table and picks out a stick from the mismatched collection propped in a corner. He racks the balls and stalks around the table, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, chalking his stick. He squints at ferret, watching him get up from his stool and carry his beer to the men’s room. He always does that, afraid someone will swipe his drink. Marino’s eyes take in everything and everyone.

    
A scrawny, homeless-looking man with a scraggly beard, a ponytail, dark, ill-fitting Goodwill clothes, a filthy Miami Dolphins cap and weird pink-tinted glasses walks unsteadily into the bar and pulls up a chair near the door, stuffs a washcloth into the back pocket of his dark, baggy pants. A kid outside on the sidewalk is shaking a broken parking meter that just ate his money.

    
Marino smacks two solids into side pockets, squinting through cigarette smoke.

    
“That’s right. You keep knocking your balls in the hole,” Rosie calls out to him, pouring another beer. “Where you been anyway?”

    
She is sexy in a hard-ridden way, a little thing nobody in his right mind dares to mess with, no matter how drunk he is. Marino once saw her break a three-hundred-pounder’s wrist with a beer bottle when he wouldn’t stop grabbing at her ass.