Authors: J. A. Kerley
“Uh, excuse me, Nurse …” Roy said.
“It’s OK, sir,” the guy said. “I’m cleared.”
The exact facts of the case were being tightly managed, the suggestion being druggings with rohypnol – more common, unfortunately. We were keeping the ingredients of this particular cocktail under wraps for three reasons: keeping secret a fact only the perp knew, legal reasons there; avoiding panic when the press dubbed the altered drinks
Devil’s Cocktails
or
Loco-tinis
or whatever; and avoiding nutbags wandering the woods with bad intentions and a botanical field guide.
Roy had outlined the situation with the hospital administration and the nurses were chosen for competence and ability to keep a secret. Plus MD-Gen was where ill or injured criminals were sent, so the staff were used to cops taking over rooms. It was, after all, Miami.
The nurse did nurse things, writing numbers from the monitors on the chart, checking the fluid drips and wires, listening through the steth. He popped the protective tip from one of the syringes loaded with the anti-robinia preparation and injected the victim. Roy stood and approached the nurse.
“You look familiar. Your name is …?”
“Patrick White. We met once before, Mr McDermott. Last fall when, uh, Mister Green was here. I was one of his nurses.”
Mister Green was Sergio Talarico, a narcotics smuggler who’d suffered a heart attack while in solitary confinement. He’d been rushed to MD-Gen where he’d had a triple bypass and seven weeks of convalescence, all without attracting the notice of his enemies, who wanted him dead so they could usurp his territories.
Roy grinned and pumped the guy’s hand. “I remember now. Past midnight and the floor’s goddamn security cameras blew a fuse or whatever, went black. Everyone freaked, thinking Talarico’s enemies were coming down the halls with AKs. All the other staffers disappeared out the exits.” Roy turned to me. “It was just this guy and two cops hunkered in Talarico’s room, not knowing what was going on.”
“Why’d you stay?” I asked White.
He winked and made a syringe-plunging motion with his fingers. “No one messes with a Patrick White patient, sir. I am one bad-ass dude with a hypodermic needle.”
I chuckled despite the grim surroundings. The guy not only had cojones, he had a sense of humor. “You been here long, Mr White?” I asked as he turned to drop the used syringe into a receptacle on the wall.
“Trained here, work here. Now I’m going for my Nurse Practitioner license here.”
The three of us wished White well as he blew out the door to his next patient, our eyes returning to the man on the bed, Brian Caswell, AKA Brianna Cass. No one spoke a word as I approached, put my hands on the bed rails, and leaned low.
“Where have you been, Brian? What did you see?”
All I heard back was the hiss of oxygen into nostrils.
Checking Caswell’s digs took us to the cheap side of Lauderdale, the upstairs of a two-story on a dead-end street. The lower apartment was unoccupied and the landlord’s name was Tom Elmont, a solid guy in his forties with an outdoorsman’s tan and a Marlins cap over a balding head.
“He’s a good kid, Brian is,” Elmont allowed as he led us up the steps. “People judge them too hard. Think they’re sick.”
“Judge who too hard, Mr Elmont?” I asked.
“Kids that dress up in ladies’ clothes. Brian explained how it’s like a talent show.”
He stopped outside Caswell’s door. “I used to be a hardcore metalhead back in the day,” Elmont continued. “Metallica, Def Lep, Sabbath, Kiss. One day I thought about all that stuff they were wearing … net hose, high-heel boots past their knees, ratted-out hair, black leather
corsets
for cryin’ out loud … and started laughing. I was a tough, super-ass-masculine young buck and here I was listening to music by guys that dressed like hookers.”
I couldn’t stop the chuckle. I turned. “Thanks, Mr Elmont. We’ll take it from here.”
“Sure. I just wanted you to know Brian is a good tenant, the best. He’s a gentle kid, maybe a little mixed up. But everything’s been mixed up since Alice Cooper.”
Gershwin pushed the door open without using the key. “Check this, Big Ryde.”
The lockset was broken, the splinters facing inward, like when you slam a door with your shoulder to get past. It was a cheap lock and wouldn’t have taken much. And with no downstairs tenant, noise wasn’t a factor.
“Forced entry,” I said, following Gershwin into the apartment. The air was suffused with the scent of sandalwood.
It was like walking into a vintage clothing store: racks of wigs, glitzy sequined gowns, feather boas, black leather undergarments, mostly
faux
. But it was a messy store, two racks on their sides, garments strewn across a battered sofa and the floor. A wooden chair was tipped over in a corner. The sandalwood came from the incense burner on the floor, spent sticks and sand spilling out and whisked with scuff marks.
While Gershwin scoped out the living room, I checked the kitchen, small and orderly, foodstuffs and spices stacked neatly in the cabinets. The provisions in the fridge were minimal, luncheon meat and veggies, a couple TV dinners in the freezer beside a bottle of Stoli. I checked the bedroom, a double bed beneath framed photos of Caswell in various stages of fancy dress or undress, vamping for the camera. A bedside table held a few gay porn mags, nothing freaky, at least compared to some stuff I’d seen.
The bedroom echoed the kitchen in its order. Books in a neat row on a shelf, his daily clothing arranged by color in the closet. Socks, underwear, tees, sweats … all tucked precisely in their drawers. I returned to the living room.
“Everything else this messed up?” Gershwin asked, twirling a blonde wig on his finger.
I shook my head. “Probably happened when the hallucinations started. Or Brian put up a fight. I’ll tell Elmont to hang around until scene techs can get here.”
We crossed town to see the person who’d called in the missing report on Caswell, Mitchell Peyton, a friend who had gotten worried when Caswell didn’t meet him for lunch the following day. He’d called Caswell two dozen times – Caswell a phone junkie who always answered – then notified police that something was awry.
Peyton lived in a forties-vintage apartment complex in North Miami, seedy in a gentle way, peeling paint, a palm tumbled over in the courtyard. But the architecture was classic and bright flowers bloomed along the walkways, recalling a Hollywood idol on a downhill track, but still able to put on airs.
Peyton was in his late thirties, pudgy and losing hair and affecting a maroon beret when he opened the door in floppy jeans and a wrinkled Aloha shirt. When we ID’d ourselves he shot a look toward an ashtray in the living room. I saw an unlit joint waiting the match, and he saw me see it.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Lots of people roll their own, Mr Peyton. Cigarette tobacco, right?”
“Uh, sure. Exactly. Let me just clean things up and you can come in.”
Gershwin and I diplomatically turned away and when Peyton said, “Come on in,” saw that the doob had disappeared. We entered, but declined sitting, instead leaning against the wall in a neat living room decorated with vintage movie posters:
Lost Horizon
,
The Wizard of Oz
,
Gone with the Wind
.
“You called in a missing report on Brian Caswell?”
“He’s been found? He’s all right?”
I laid out enough to paint an impressionistic picture, the scene without a lot of detail, leaving the door open for a hopeful recovery.
“When did you last see Brian?” I asked.
Peyton needed a glass of white wine to smooth out the news. “After his show at the Metro, a place on Mountrain Street. He was like, sitting at a table and receiving people, getting props for his show. Brianna burns up the stage.”
“People ever buy Brian drinks?”
“Always,” the beret bobbed. “It’s a way to show appreciation.”
“What’s Brianna’s act like?” I asked.
“He does Garland to Gaga, but his comic persona is Ivana Tramp, y’know, like from Trump. He’s triple bitchy, put-downs part of the act. If someone hoots at him while he’s performing, he might say, ‘Girl, why are you here buying
drinks
? Save that money for
dermabrasion
.’ It’s all in fun. I’ve got a few videos of his act if you want to see.”
My heart quickened. “From that night?”
“A couple years ago, back when Brian was developing the act.”
No help and there wasn’t much to go on in Peyton’s account of the night. Caswell had been surrounded by well-wishers and drink-buyers and he’d tottered home around one a.m.
“Brian was feeling crappy and went home. He was afraid he was getting a cold and he had a show to do the next night. He’s a trouper.”
Morningstar said symptoms could appear within fifteen minutes following a dosing, including dizziness, dry mouth, increased heart rate, flushing and a sense of general weakness … similar to the onset of a cold or flu. The effects ramped up until the victim was incapacitated.
We left Peyton to his buzz and were wondering where to go next when my phone went off: Roy. The excitement was back in his voice.
“I’m back at HQ,” he trumpeted. ‘We just got a hit on the DNA. A name. It’s over!”
We were three steps out of the elevator when Roy was in front of us, waving a report in our faces, his grin stretching from earlobe to earlobe.
“He’s nailed to the wall,” he said, snicking the page with a fingernail. “The positive on the DNA.”
“Did it just arrive?” I asked. With no former hits, the only possible way to get a match was for the perp’s chromo-map to have just entered the system, meaning he’d been arrested somewhere.
“Nope. It’s been around for twenty-six months.”
I stared. “What? How?”
Roy put a cautionary finger to his lips and motioned us to follow him to his office. We entered and he closed his door, not a typical move for Roy.
“I had a meeting with Homeland Security yesterday, the usual trading of notes. I was telling Major Rayles about the case, that we’d had no hits from the national d-base. He said he’d have our results run through Home-Sec’s database which, it seems, is more extensive than ours.”
“More extensive how?”
“We’ll get there. The main thing is, we got a solid positive on one Gary Ocampo. Right here in Miami.”
“Particulars?”
“This Ocampo is thirty. No record. I had a couple pool dicks do some fast digging. Seems Ocampo owns a small shop, Gary’s Fantasy World, selling comic books and video games. He’s the owner of the building and resides upstairs.”
I considered the information. “No priors, Roy? A bit odd.”
“Every rapist starts somewhere, right?”
I pulled my jacket from the hanger and headed toward the door. “I’ll take a team and go fetch Mr Ocampo. Can’t argue with the genetics.”
“Hold on, Carson,” Roy said. “It’s not quite that easy. Ocampo was part of a health study at the University of Florida about three years back. The DNA was taken then, consensual, part of the study.”
I gave him a
so-what?
look.
He said, “Those folks at HS toss a wide net, chromosomally speaking. Sometimes the net lands in a gray area.”
“You’re saying a smart lawyer might argue though the DNA sampling was consensual, its introduction into a nationwide database wasn’t?”
Roy nodded. “I just got off the phone with the state Attorney General, wanted to know if we could bust this SOB. They promised an answer within a couple hours.”
I checked my watch. We could afford to wait if it meant the difference between a clean bust and giving some shyster ammunition to muddy a case.
“I think Gershwin and I will do some shopping until the decision comes down,” I said.
“Lemme guess,” Roy grinned. “Comic books?”
The locale was strip malls and free-standing shops, a laundromat on the corner, a pizzeria across the street. A light breeze coaxed tree-line palms into a green hula against a cerulean sky. Down the block was a fortune teller, a second-hand clothier, a storefront tacquería, a muffler shop and a uniform store. The little shops were there because the transitional nature of the street – straddling between slums and gentrification – meant low rents, but the street was a four-lane thoroughfare in and out of downtown, with ample traffic to attract customers.
Centering the block was Gary’s Fantasy World, the brightest structure on the street, freshly painted and as white as snow. A broad front window beamed with neon signage pulsing
New and Vintage Comics
and
Video Games
and
Collectors Welcome.
There were two upstairs windows, both with closed curtains.
Lonnie Canseco, a senior colleague, was a block behind. He’d assembled a unit of two more FCLE dicks and alerted Miami-Dade, who’d provided four patrol cars with two-man teams. Also, as a precaution, a SWAT unit was a block away. We could have gone with a major-league assault, but it was my call, and I preferred surgical strikes to carpet bombing. If that failed, I was fine with Bombs Away.
I radioed Canseco to pull down the alley behind Ocampo’s shop in case the guy bolted out the back. My phone rang, Roy. “You’re clear, bud,” he said. “The AG says it’s fine. Nail the fucker, but be careful, right?”
Gary’s Fantasy World reminded me of an old-school record store, except the wooden bins held glassine-sleeved comic books instead of vinyl albums. Hand-lettered signs hung above bins, denoting
Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four
and so forth. A far wall held video games. Two glass counters in the rear held more comics. I took it they were the crème de la crème, priced from two hundred and fifty to over two thousand dollars.
“Two grand for a freakin’ comic?” Gershwin whispered.
I heard a rustle and spun to see a young male enter from a door behind the counter, early twenties, skinny as a rail, with the bleached pallor that comes from junk food and avoidance of sunlight. There was a single tattoo inside his right arm: Spider-Man in lavish color. Per current trend he affected a knit woolen hat of thick yarn, black, pulled almost to his eyebrows. Unwashed brown hair poured several inches from the hat, ending in jagged spikes.