Authors: J. A. Kerley
Call me, Jeremy,
I thought, one final time, adding
You thoughtless bastard.
The phone lay dead and I glanced at my watch; four minutes past midnight. I checked the beer bottle on the table beside my deck chair; empty. Both indicated it was time to totter to bed. I took another look at the moon and whistled. Mr Mix-up, my huge pooch, ran up from hunting crabs in the sandy backyard. I yawned and scratched his head and we headed inside.
As I latched the door my cell phone trilled the opening riff of Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom”. My heart paused mid-beat: Had I conjured up my wayward brother? I checked the screen and frowned – Roy McDermott, my boss at the Florida Center for Law Enforcement.
“Carson, it’s Roy,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
Roy always identified himself, as though I could forget any voice attached to a ceaselessly grinning jack-o’-lantern face topped by a hay-bright shock of unruly hair, an untamable cowlick floating above like antennae.
“I’m sitting on the deck and enjoying the moon, Roy,” I semi-lied. “What’s going on?”
“Viv Morningstar just called. She was looking for you, but couldn’t find your number.”
Dr Vivian Morningstar was the Chief Forensic Pathologist for Florida’s southern region. We’d worked together several times and I’d found her as attractive as she was professional. I’d made a few attempts at flirtation, but her eyes had told me I was dancing in the wrong ballroom.
“What does the Doc want, Roy?”
“She’d like you to meet her at MD-Gen first thing in the a.m. It involves a poisoning.”
MD-Gen was Miami-Dade General Hospital, Dade being the county. A hospital – with its emphasis on the living – seemed a bit far afield for the forensic pathologist.
“She doesn’t want me at the morgue?”
A chuckle. “It’s Viv, Carson. She basically ordered me to send you to MD-Gen.”
Vivian Morningstar on a case was like Patton on the march … all ahead full, damn the bombs and bureaucrats. Her staff revered her, but tempered their love with terror.
“And you told her …?” I said.
“Only that I’d pass the message on. Say hello to the moon for me.”
I awoke an hour before my 6.00 a.m. alarm and jumped through the shower, pulling on jeans and a blue Oxford shirt, grabbing a coral linen jacket to keep the shoulder-holstered Glock from startling citizens at stop lights.
I went beneath my home, stilted to ride above storm surges, and climbed into a fully outfitted Land Rover Defender originally confiscated in a drug bust. Colleagues called me
Sahib
and
Bwana,
but having the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country, I laughed it off.
I turned on to Highway 1. An hour and two coffee stops later I entered Miami-Dade General and elevatored to a room in the Intensive Care section. Doc Morningstar was leaning against the wall and studying reports, her dark and shoulder-length hair fallen forward. She was slender and athletic and appeared taller than her five ten, the effect of improbably long legs currently hidden under khaki slacks. Her blouse was a silky purple, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, her only ornamentation a pair of small enameled earrings, purple coneflowers to match the blouse.
Morningstar glanced up, brushed back the errant hair, and nodded, any potential smile damped by the patient centering the room, a young man, late teens to early twenties, blond, with sunken and lifeless eyes and flesh so pale as to seem blue. A mask covered his nose and mouth, so many tubes and hoses running to the mask it appeared a mechanical octopus was clinging to his face.
I gave the doc a
What’s-up?
look.
“Name’s Dale Kemp,” she said quietly. “Hikers found him three days ago near the Pahayokee overlook in the Glades. He’s been raped, semen found, but nothing in the database.”
DNA sampling used to take weeks, but recent technology made it a matter of hours with one of the new machines, and we’d recently added one to our arsenal. But if there was no match for the perp in the database, it was still a dead end.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
Morningstar set aside the reports. Her eyes were huge and the kind of hazel that seems pale one moment, dark the next.
“An overdose seemed indicated, but nothing showed. The attending physician, Dr Philip Costa, knew I had a sub-specialty in toxicology and called yesterday. I suggested a more complex series of tests, initially thinking scopolamine or atropine, and my preliminary tests found a massive quantity of
datura stramonium
in his blood, among other things.”
“Datur-strama … what?”
“You might know its plant source: Jimson weed.”
My mental Rolodex whirred. “Also called Loco weed?”
She nodded. “I also found robitin, a phytotoxin from
Robinia pseudocacia,
or black locust tree. When it’s ingested by animals, they become stupefied, unable to recognize their surroundings. They often die.”
“Jeee-sus,” I said.
“There’s probably more in this crazy cocktail, Ryder. But the datura and robinia seem the main components.”
“What’s the effect of the Loco weed?”
“In controlled quantities, datura has medicinal uses. Larger doses create delirium and fearful hallucinations. It can result in odd behavior, such as stripping off clothes, picking at oneself, staring into space. A person dosed with datura can look in a mirror and see a complete stranger. Or a cow. Or nothing at all.”
Hallucinations atop stupefaction. “Where was he last seen, anyone know?”
“He was ID’d via Missing Persons at Miami-Dade PD. Last sighting was at a Miami Beach bar. He didn’t come to work the next day.”
“When’d he disappear?”
“Ten days ago. There’s something else I wanted to show you. Take a look at his back.”
We gently rolled Dale Kemp over. I saw bruises and scratches and an odd pattern between his shoulder blades: a pair of coupled circles etched into the skin, as if a tenpenny nail had been drawn across his flesh hard enough to welt, but not break, the skin. Two vertical lines fell below, the tops of the lines touching the ovoids. A horizontal line fell between the verticals.
“A figure eight,” I said. “On top of some lines.”
“Or, looking from below …”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “A freaking infinity symbol.”
We rolled him back. I looked between the kid and the readings on the monitor. “He’ll always be like this?” I asked. “It’s permanent?”
“There aren’t a lot of field trials to draw from, as you’d expect.” She nodded at an array of prepared syringes on the bedside table. “The robinia inhibits protein synthesis, so we’ve concocted a treatment to enhance reactions. It also contains physostigmine, an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.”
“Uh …”
“Sorry. The first to reduce toxic effects of the black locust, the second helps reduce the hallucinations.”
I found it odd Morningstar used the word
we’re
and
us,
as if Kemp were her patient. The only course recommended for Morningstar’s standard “patients” was burial or cremation.
“Where could you get these plants, Doc?” I asked.
“Jimson weed grows wild across the country. Black locust grows in most states east of the Mississippi.”
I made a pouring motion. “What … someone just dumped twigs and leaves into a blender and made this stuff?”
“The active chemicals were likely extracted from the plant sources and concentrated. That would take a knowledge of chemistry. But probably basic.”
“As basic as jurisdictions?” I said, growing puzzled by Morningstar’s request that I be here. A rape, though horrific, was not reason to call me, the FCLE’s specialist in psychotics, sociopaths and other mental melt-downs.
“Jurisdictions?” she said.
“You said Kemp was found by Miami-Dade cops, was in their Missings file. Why did you call me, Doctor?”
Morningstar walked to the window and gazed down on the parking lot, forlorn in its dawn emptiness. Not only was I uncertain why I was here, I was also puzzled at her involvement. When she had solved the toxicology problem, her work was over, time to return to the dead. She seemed more like an attending physician than a pathologist.
Morningstar turned back to me. “I, uh … it’s not a typical case, is it, Detective? The combination of substances seems so calculated and cold that it feels … evil.”
Another anomaly
. Evil
was not a word normally used in the clinical halls of Morningstar’s pathology department. Had the bizarre methodology of the case unsettled the usually imperturbable pathologist?
“So you’d prefer the FCLE to investigate? Me in particular?”
“It’s your world, right, Detective? Who else but a psychopath might, uh …”
Words failed and she stared at the body motionless amidst the tubes and wires, his thoughts turned to nightmares and even the nightmares burned away, perhaps forever, by a combination of toxins you might find in your own backyard.
“Who else but a psychopath might turn common plants into Satan’s private date-rape drug?” I said.
Morningstar nodded. “I figured you’d have the right words.”
“You want to grab a case from Miami-Dade?” Roy McDermott said from behind his broad desk, patting down the straw-hued cowlick that immediately bounded back in defiance. “What? We don’t have enough cases of our own?” Outside his twenty-third-story window the Miami skyline was a study in muscular architecture. The FCLE was in the downtown Clark Center, and was the state’s top investigative agency, usually summoned when special expertise was needed. We stayed busy.
“Doc Morningstar thinks it’s the way to go.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, partner, but she’s a pathologist, not an investigative professional.”
“We can do it, right? Assert jurisdiction?”
Roy nodded reluctantly. “We’re state, they’re local. But it’s basically a missing-persons case that’ll probably get filed as a sex crime. I don’t see the reason, Carson. It’s not like we’re begging for work.”
My phone rang and I checked the caller: Morningstar. I made notes as she detailed her latest findings.
“That was the good Doc herself,” I said when we’d finished.
Roy clapped his hands in mock delight. “Goodie. Does she have any more cases to add to our list?”
“She has a newly isolated agent in the tox combo. Something called raphides. Given the plant-based nature of the other toxins, Morningstar thinks it came from dieffenbachia.”
“The houseplant? I used to have one in my office until it died. Probably had something to do with stubbing out cigars in the pot.”
“Dieffenbachia is also called dumb cane. Seems the raphides cause paralysis of the vocal cords.”
Roy spun to study the skyline. “So the perp drops this nastiness in a drink. The black locust makes the target head home with cramps and muscle weakness, the datura makes him hallucinate like Timothy Leary squared, and this last stuff …”
“Makes it impossible to call for help,” I said.
Roy turned back to his desk and picked up the phone.
“You’re tight with Vince Delmara, right?”
I nodded. Vince was a senior investigator with the Miami-Dade County Police Department. We’d worked together on my first case in Florida last year, and I’d found Delmara a first-rate detective, old school, the kind to visit a crime scene just to sniff the air. We’d hit it off from the git-go.
“Good,” Roy said. “Let Vince schmooze you through the transfer and it’ll go easy.”
“You think?”
He grinned. “Unless some honcho has a burr under his saddle, they’ll be delighted to pass the potato to us.”
My partner in most operations was Ziggy Gershwin. I gave him a call and was outside his Little Havana apartment minutes later, waiting until a slender man with coal-black hair pushed from the door, jamming a scarlet shirt into tan chinos, his cream jacket hanging across his shoulder, a rolled tortilla in his mouth like a cigar. An ancient woman was walking a tan puff of dog down the sidewalk and Gershwin’s cordovan boat shoes leapt over the bewildered canine, earning an icy glare from the woman. I filled him in as I drove, as much as I knew.
“
Oy caramba
, Big Ryde,” Gershwin said as he buttoned his cuffs. “That’s some crazy cocktail
.
”
A few months back Ziggy Gershwin would have been wearing threadbare jeans, a T-shirt advertising a beer brand, and orange skate shoes, but becoming an active agent in the FCLE had upped his fashion game. The product of a Jewish father and Cuban mother, his full name was Ignacio Ruben Manolo Gershwin, and he’d been Iggy as a child. But a teacher had started calling the hyperactive, darting kid Ziggy, and it stuck.
“Morningstar thinks Kemp received repeated and heavy doses of the tox mix, Zigs, maybe starting at a bar.”
“What, we’re doing legwork for Miami-Dade?”
“We’re appropriating the case. The Doc figures it’d take a psycho to sicken and weaken people, turn off their screams, then fill their head with hallucinations while he rapes them.”
“No matter how lovely Señorita Morningstar may be, isn’t she a pathologist and not a—”
“Heard it from Roy,” I said, cutting him off.
I called and found Vince at his desk in MD’s headquarters and said we’d be by in minutes. He had two words:
Bring coffee.
He meant real brew, not the stuff cooked up at cop houses across the land, desiccated brown crumbles boiled into a bitterness no sugar could blunt. We stopped at a bodega and filled my large Zogirushi with righteous espresso thunder and were at MD in minutes.
Vince Delmara was in a cluttered cubicle in the Homicide unit, his wingtips on his desk as he reviewed jai-alai scores in the
Miami Herald
. He looked up, saw us approaching, and folded the paper. Vince was medium height and slender and his dark complexion was marred with acne pocks, his black hair brushed straight back. His dark eyes were large and piercing and with his prize-sized proboscis Vince called to mind a thoughtful buzzard. He always dressed in dark suits, white shirts and neon-bright ties, capping the ensemble with a Dick Tracy-style fedora to enter the bright Miami sun, which he regarded with vampiric suspicion.