Authors: J. A. Kerley
I looked up from my memories into Vivian’s expectant eyes. The old lie was on my tongue:
A happy childhood
, I’d say, ending with the unfortunate revelation that my father had been lost in a plane crash when I was ten and my mother perished quietly from cancer.
But the old lies got stuck in my throat. “I, uh … that is—”
Morningstar giggled, thinking I was playing a game. “What? You’ve forgotten if you have brothers and sisters?”
I set aside my glass and measured out my words. “I have a brother, Vivian. He’s six years older than me and we’ve had some difficult times. I’m a little worried about him right now, but I’m hopeful things will work out.”
“What’s his name?”
Thomas … Eliot … Blake … William …
“Jeremy.”
Everything I’d said was factual, though ninety-nine per cent was missing. Still, it was the first time – outside of the aforementioned trio – that I’d admitted to a brother, much less spoken his name.
Morningstar held her wineglass in toast position. “To you and your brother, Carson. May everything work out between you two.”
I tapped her glass with mine.
“To us, then. Brothers.”
Morningstar and I spent the night at the Palace and rose as dawn painted the sky with pastel shades Degas would have envied. The day might have been perfect had not Donnie Ocampo been eluding capture at every turn. Morningstar had early meetings at the morgue, and I wanted to find something, anything, that would put me in Donnie Ocampo’s path. I dropped her at her office before nine and was racing to the Clark Center when my phone rang: Roy.
“I just got word, Carson,” he said. “Donnie’s left another one.”
I pulled into a parking spot, heart racing.
“Is it bad, Roy?”
“He’s, uh … Christ Jesus, Carson. The vic was being rushed to Baptist North, but MDPD intervened and the bus went to MD-Gen. I’ll meet you there.”
I was at the hospital in twenty minutes, my time from car to hospital wing about one minute, running the stairs and arriving at the room with tongue and shirt tail hanging. Roy was leaning the door frame and simply looked at me and blew out a breath. I went inside and saw the patient in the bed had the lower half of his face under thick gauze, tubes running into the padding. Costa was at the man’s side, pumping medicine into a shunt. He looked at me with sad eyes.
“He can’t talk to you, Detective Ryder. I mean that literally.”
“What happened, Doc?”
Costa swallowed hard. “He’s had his tongue cut out.”
I felt my breath leave my lungs. “How is he?”
“There was major loss of blood, but not life-threatening. The amputation was recent – in the last twelve hours – so infection hasn’t had time to set in. Other injuries included contusions on the knees and elbows. A large swelling on his forehead.”
“How about the drawing on his back?”
Costa shook his head. “It’s not there.”
“
What
?”
“His posterior is perfectly clear, unmarked.”
I blinked, unbelieving. Everything I had theorized about Donnie Ocampo told me he had to scrawl the figure. It was part of his inner mythology.
Did we have a copycat?
“You’ve run the rape kit?” I said. “Started the tox screens?”
“Rush on everything. Results within two hours.”
I pulled my sheet of missing men from my briefcase, though I was familiar with every missing man between the ages of sixteen and forty. Given the hair and eye color – and a floral tattoo on his right forearm – our victim was Jacob Eisen, twenty-eight, a worker at a local Amazon shipping center. He’d been reported missing by a roommate and was last seen at a bar just south of downtown. That much jived with Donnie’s previous captures.
I turned to Roy. “Where was he found?”
“Tossed out behind a strip mall in Lauderdale, exact time unknown.”
“In the city? Not out by the Glades?”
“In the concrete heart of Lauderdale.”
Another anomaly. The possibility of a copycat marauder grew larger. The media had carried stories about the abductions, but thanks to intentionally vague police reports and close-mouthed hospital employees, we’d managed to keep starker details from the newsies, knowing the perp would be dubbed Loco-Man or whatever and turned into a media sideshow. Idiot kids would go into fields looking for jimson weed, thinking they’d get a nice high. Dieffenbachia sales would spike city-wide. I’d once made a press-conference mistake of mentioning the brand of wood chipper used to shred a body, and the manufacturer called a month later to thank me, saying regional sales had risen thirty-seven per cent.
But the full truth would come from the rape kit. Only two people had Donnie’s DNA, and one of them was incapable of the crimes.
“How’d the victim get found?” I asked Roy.
“A delivery guy was pulling behind the buildings to drop off chemicals for a laundromat and nearly creams a naked guy walking in circles with dried blood running from his mouth to his toes.”
“How’d you find out so soon … Vince Delmara call?”
“No. It was Rod Figueroa.”
“Figueroa? What?”
“Eisen would still be on the Missings list, right?”
“Yep. But with the urgency I don’t see the street cops saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we call ol’ Rod in Missings and tell him he can pull one off the list?’”
“He must be keeping an eye out for similar crimes. Is it important?”
I waved it off. “What’s important is getting into Donnie’s head, Roy. Before even he doesn’t know what his next move is.”
Roy hustled outside, needing a cigar to calm his restless fingers. I called Gershwin and told him I’d handle the scene and to start scoping out Eisen’s digs and canvassing neighbors.
I flipped on the screamer and burned up I-95 to Lauderhill, cut east to Sunrise Boulevard, passing blocks of newer development to an older section of strip centers, car dealers, fast-food emporia. The strip mall was called Sunrise Commons and in the process of renovation, most stores empty with signs promising something new within weeks. There were several active businesses including a dry cleaners and a little pizza joint. As directed, I pulled around back where I saw a forensics unit mobile lab.
I saw Deb Clayton beside huge trash bins, directing techs taking scrapings from the pavement. I pulled to the scene tape and hustled to Deb, currently wiping her shades on the tails of a blouse the same pink as her crime-scene booties.
“Find anything?” I asked.
“Lots of spatter and footprints where he stepped in the blood. We can trace his path, which was basically a ten-foot circle. We’ll go through the damn trash,” she added, pointing at a big container marked GMSC. “But your boy hasn’t left anything at previous scenes, so I expect all we’ll get is stinky.” She nodded at the surrounding buildings. “Not quite rural here, Carson. From the backcountry to the back of a strip center … It’s like he did a one-eighty.”
“I’m afraid we might be seeing a copycat, Deb.”
“Because of the change in dumping venue?”
“And a couple other aspects that don’t jive with the previous attacks.”
I jogged to the front of the long building, passing a defunct bowling alley and two empty shops, ending at a strangely wide door with the letters GMSC painted on it in ornate letters
.
I stepped inside to the sound of Lady Gaga on a jukebox beside the door.
The outside sun was bright and my eyes had to adjust to diminished lighting. As objects resolved I saw less a tavern than a fraternal organization, like an Elks club. A small bar in a corner fronted a rack of liquor bottles and three beer taps. I turned to a wall of booths, but mostly it was tables and chairs. The chairs were big and wooden and sturdy and a few overstuffed lounge chairs were scattered about. A television above the bar was playing a silent Food Channel, a handsome and heavyset woman layering cheese and prosciutto and olives on to a slab of bread.
“Go, Contessa!” someone yelled. “Pile it on, baby.”
I turned to a man of four hundred or so pounds sitting in a lounge chair in a corner and thumping its arm with the butt of a bottle of beer. His remark generated applause and laughter from four other similarly large men playing cards at a nearby table. In all, I counted eleven men in attendance, nine of them morbidly obese, and two of normal size. Most were in their thirties, a couple guys nearing forty. Three were so large I wondered if they’d had to butter themselves to slip in the door, wide as it was.
Puzzled, I walked toward the bar where an obese, thirtyish man was stacking washed glasses in a rack, enough material in his Hawaiian shirt to cut placemats for a luau. Behind him were several framed eleven-by-seventeen photos of huge men holding loving cups or award ribbons. A banner behind a man so obese his features seemed to have sunken into his cheeks proclaimed
Chubby Champion, 2012 Southeastern Convergence
.
“Excuse me,” I said to the guy racking glasses. “Is this like a Weight Watchers meeting or something?”
He seemed to think my remark appropriate for the house. “Hey, everyone … the gentleman here wants to know if this is a Weight Watchers meeting.”
Laughter. Hoots and howls and slapped knees. One normal-sized guy pointed to a huge man and trilled, “Yes it is, hon. I’m watching
his
weight.” He blew the mammoth a kiss.
I sighed, pulled my badge and handed it to the barkeep. He stared between me and the badge, puzzled. “I just made you a detective for ten seconds,” I told him. “What do you detect in my expression?”
He looked into my face and frowned. “Uh, confusion?”
I plucked the badge from his fingers. “Very good, Sherlock. How about you help me out here?”
I left GMSC after discovering the place had only been open a half-hour, no one there when Eisen was dropped. The lab was my next destination, and I found Morningstar in the room holding the new DNA-analysis machine. It was a major advance in crime diagnostics, and I expected more.
“That’s it?” I said, looking at a stand-in for an office copier, just a big box with a read-out panel.
“What did you expect?” Vivian asked. “More chrome?”
“Here comes the report,” Gerri Haskins said. She was the tech trained on the device, sitting at a desk beside the machine, her hand on a sheet of paper as it rolled from a printer.
“And …?” I said, leaning behind Gerri like I was cribbing on a test.
“I don’t know if it’s what you want to hear, Carson,” she said. “But the match is loud and clear. It’s Ocampo DNA.”
I whispered some expletives to myself.
“What?” Viv asked.
“Patterns,” I said. “Patterns lead me inside minds. Donnie’s veered from two established patterns.”
“The new violence?”
“Violence was always inherent, just ramped up. But he’s stopped making the sign on the victim’s back, and he’s no longer dumping them in out-of-the-way locales.”
“Getting bolder … at least with the latter?”
“I have no idea. It’s all screwed up.”
I hightailed back to the hospital and found Eisen on a ventilator, Costa saying he was having difficulty breathing. Patrick White was there and Costa gave him instructions and went off to handle another case.
“I know you can’t tell me anything confidential, Detective,” White said when he’d finished checking tubes and wires, “but are you getting any closer to this crazy?”
“It’s a tough one, Patrick,” I admitted. “The guy seems invisible. We know what he looks like, we just can’t find him. You’re telling all your friends to watch out, right?”
“It’s my new mantra. Plus the pictures of the suspect are in most bars.”
“You never heard anything about how they got there, did you? The photos?”
We’d recently sent out the photos to the bars, but someone had gotten there before us in many cases, the photos already posted.
Patrick hung the stethoscope around his neck and shook his head. “They just appeared. The guy looks …”
“Yep. Like half of Miami. Plus it’s about a hundred per cent chance he saw the photos and gave himself a makeover.”
White finished his ministrations and left at a run. I took a final look at Jacob Eisen, wondering what his connection was to Donnie Ocampo. Or was it just a wrong place–wrong time scenario?
I heard racing footsteps and turned to see Lonnie Canseco run into the room. It surprised me, since he’d not had anything to do with the case.
“Tell me it’s not true,” Canseco said, staring in dismay at Eisen.
“He got his tongue removed, Lon.”
I saw Canseco’s hand ball into fists, his teeth clench in anger. “
Fuck!
” Canseco said through gritted teeth, his fist pounding the wall.
A nurse passing by stepped inside. “Is everything all right here?”
I assured her it was and nodded for Canseco to follow me out into the hall. He did, shooting backward glances at the victim.
“Why you here, Lonnie?”
Like Jeremy, Canseco liked looking sharp. He wore a summer-weight suit the color of ash, a shirt the blue of a Denver sky, a scarlet tie with a knot so perfectly triangular it could calibrate electron microscopes. With handsome, angular features and Latin coloration, he resembled the actor Jimmy Smits at age thirty-five.
“I know the kid,” Canseco said. “I do some counseling, a volunteer. I met Jake at a session.”
“Counseling?”
He looked down the hall and winced. “I hate hospitals, Carson. I know a laid-back bar a couple blocks away. I could use a drink.”
The bar was three blocks distant, the Brass Key, a quiet tavern with soft light and dark wood, a place where the barkeep wears a black vest over a starched white shirt and keeps his distance until you need something. We ordered, double Scotch neat backed with soda on ice for Canseco, a shot of bourbon with a beer back for me, then stood at the railed bar, the sole customers save for a quartet of suited sales-types at a back table. I waited until Canseco had a blast of the Scotch, then got into it.
“You said you met the vic at some counseling thing?”
“Young gay men, guys who’ve had a hard road, gotten in trouble. I try to divert them to a more productive lifestyle, like furthering their education and getting jobs or better jobs. It’s a big-brother kind of thing, and I do it a couple hours a week.” He gave me a look. “And yes … I’m gay.”