Dead Last (12 page)

“Well, if you’re not interested in the bad boy,” Garvey said, “then I’m staking claim.”

As she lifted her purse and started to rise, April saw him coming. The man from Key Largo named Thorn.

She settled back into her chair. This was manageable. It had to be.

He was taller than she remembered, blonder and more wide shouldered. While he was on his way through the maze of wheelchairs, the white-haired gentleman in plaid pants reached up to pluck Thorn’s sleeve. Thorn stopped and the two shared a quick conversation that ended in a mutual laugh, then he came on, his eyes on April, a guileless look of familiarity as though the two of them had a long and chummy history.

When he was standing before the Moss women, he looked at Garvey.

“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m sorry if I’ve misread anything, but were you winking at me?”

“Oh, goody,” Garvey said. “Stand back, April, I saw him first.”

“So you
were
winking?”

“Is that a problem?” April’s tone surprised her, sounding more hostile than she intended.

Thorn shifted his gaze to her.

“No problem at all.” His voice was neutral but his eyes were not.

“My daughter is a newspaper reporter,” Garvey said. “It’s her job to be a hardass. Me, I’m used to it by now, but it puts normal people off.”

Thorn smiled at Garvey, then his eyes drifted back to April. Very blue, and in that dazzle of sunlight, turning even bluer.

Thorn turned to the odd-looking woman beside him and was about to introduce her when Gus Dollimore’s assistant, the first AD, clapped his hands and made a piercing two-finger whistle.

“Thank you, everyone. We need quiet please. Picture up. Get to your places. Very quiet on the set, please.”

The director of photography bent forward, slipped his head under a dark cloak shrouding the monitor’s screen from the sunlight.

“This time stay wide,” the DP called to the cameraman. “Open up a half stop. Okay, now open up another crack. And would you please get that young lady out of Billy’s sight line.”

The DP waved at one of the Floridian nurses who had positioned herself in the line of vision of an actor in the upcoming scene. A potential distraction once the scene got started, her eyes attracting his.

Dollimore called out, “Okay, we’re rolling. Let’s get this on the first try, what do you say? Very quiet please. Let’s hear a pin drop. Thank you, people. Cell phones off, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerries, Cranberries, and switch off those vibrators, boys and girls. Whatever you got, turn it off.”

*   *   *

The scene required eight takes. By then Thorn had memorized the lines of both actors. The gentleman who was playing the manager of the old-age home rendered his part flawlessly. But the young slender woman with short black hair managed to mangle her brief speech or botch the pronunciation of a word seven times in a row.

She was decked out in a painfully tight sleeveless dress that showed off her ballet dancer’s legs and a pair of biceps that she hadn’t gotten from lifting china teacups to her lips.

During one break, Buddha leaned close and whispered, “Dee Dee Dollimore, the airhead I mentioned.”

Finally, when the actress managed to speak her three lines without a hitch, something was wrong with the light. A cloud passed across the sun in the middle of the scene and the whole thing had to be reshot.

Thorn and Buddha stood together a couple of yards behind April and her mother. Twice April glanced back at him, and she kept shifting in her seat, as if she was considering a dash for the exit.

The director was a lean man in his fifties, with dark hair cut short. Between takes the guy bounced up from his chair, totally wired, talking nonstop to the actors, the cameramen, the guys holding the lights, the sound technicians, anybody and everybody, until the cameras were rolling again.

In the chair beside the director was a sandy-haired kid who sat placidly through all the screwups, rarely looking up from a script that lay open in his lap.

During one of the breaks, Buddha nodded at the relaxed young man and whispered in Thorn’s ear, “One of April’s twins. Sawyer.”

She’d brought along her electronic tablet and she tipped it so Thorn could view the screen. It showed a webpage for the TV show,
Miami Ops
, publicity shots of the cast and the director, whose name was Gus. She slid her finger along the screen and advanced the pages until she came to Sawyer, the show’s head writer. A handsome kid with stylishly scruffy hair, dark blue eyes, strong jaw, and a twinkle of mirth on his lips. Looked like a young Viking who hadn’t experienced battle yet.

“And his brother,” Buddha said. “Flynn. One of the leads.”

Again she slid her finger across the screen until another face appeared.

Clearly Sawyer’s twin. Almost perfectly identical. His hair was trimmed precisely and was a shade blonder than Sawyer’s. His face fuller by a fraction, but the real divergence was in the eyes. Flynn could pass for a fair-haired Viking too, but this kid was clearly a veteran of some battlefield or another. Whatever nasty shit he’d witnessed was lingering in the stern set of his brow, and in his jaw, which was clamped like a man bracing for some jolt he saw coming from a long way off.

When the shooting was finally done, the Floridian’s pink-coated staff emerged from the shadows of the building and began to wheel the old folks back inside. The film crew started buzzing around, breaking down the set.

Off to Thorn’s right, the old gentleman in plaid pants who had tugged on Thorn’s sleeve to mumble something about how damn hot it was rose up from his wheelchair, hopped forward, tilted his face to the sky, and began to howl like a deranged wolf.

The action in the courtyard ceased.

The old guy stumbled into the open grassy area and raised his palms to the sky as if to address the Almighty.

“All right, horndogs, turn your vibrators back on,” the old man called out in a croaky voice. “Whatever you got, turn it on, baby. Turn it on.”

He basked in the stunned silence for a moment, then he brought his hands to his face and began to peel away a rubbery film—the mask of wrinkles he’d been wearing.

Most of the crew laughed as Flynn Moss revealed his youthful face and swiveled around for the entire assembly to admire his prank.

Some of the Floridian staff applauded enthusiastically—oh those Hollywood cutups. Thorn watched as Sawyer shook his head at his brother’s stunt with a smile of grudging admiration, as though the young man had spent a lifetime being upstaged by his crowd-pleasing twin.

April was in a hurry to leave. She kissed her mother and came over to Thorn. Before she could say a word, Buddha stepped between them, taking charge.

“I need to speak to you, Ms. Moss, on an urgent police matter.”

April was almost Thorn’s height, with fair skin and thick chestnut hair. She wore a light blue sleeveless dress with faint yellow striping, a simple silver bracelet, and a necklace made of polished stones the size and color of olives. Her mind seemed to wander for a moment as her dark brown eyes remained fixed on her two boys, who were sharing a laugh out in the courtyard.

“You know Poblanos?” she said, sliding her gaze to Thorn.

“What is it?”

“Bar downtown. I can be there at five.”

“We’ll find it,” Thorn said.

April took a quick look at Buddha, gave her a sisterly smile, then left.

NINE

THORN DROVE BUDDHA’S RENTAL, A
flame-red Ford, east through Little Havana. The car’s dashboard clock said 3:20. An hour and a half to kill before Poblanos.

Buddha took out her electronic tablet and busied herself with it while Thorn struggled with the steering wheel. His right hand was so swollen and sore he had to use his left to steer.

“Where we going?” she said, without looking up.

“Key Biscayne.”

“Why?”

More finger tapping on the glass screen.

“Guy I know used to live out there. Want to see if he’s still around.”

“A social call?”

“He might be of help with our project.”

“Okay.”

“Last I knew he was the agent in charge of the Miami FBI field office.”

Buddha looked up and stared at him for a moment.

“Is there something going on between you and April Moss?”

Thorn hesitated a moment.

“Why do you ask?”

“Yeah, I thought there was.”

“What’d you see?”

“Something going on,” she said.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘going on.’ A long time ago we met briefly. Nothing serious. I don’t know if she even remembers.”

“She remembers,” Buddha said. “Oh, yes.”

“You’re one of those sharp-eyed cops.”

“I’m a woman.”

Thorn was silent.

“And you remembered
her
all right.”

“It’s a curse,” he said. “I remember all of them.”

“You keep a little black book?”

“I don’t need to.”

“Well, now,” Buddha said. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

“I’m sure there’s plenty.”

“You had carnal knowledge of her?”

Thorn looked over.

“That a joke?”

“Screw, then. Did you screw April Moss?”

“Why is that relevant?”

“I thought so.” Buddha shook her head. “One time or multiple?”

“Hey,” Thorn said. “We had a brief encounter. It meant nothing to her and it meant nothing to me. A recreational roll in the hay. That’s all. Never spoke to her again till today.”

“How long ago was it?”

“I don’t know. A long time.”

“How’d it happen?”

“You want all the dirt, huh? Some kind of voyeuristic thing going on?”

“What were the circumstances?”

Thorn sighed. It was useless to push her away. She kept coming.

“I was having a drink with some friends at a bayside bar in Islamorada. She came up, said hello, started flirting. I think her girlfriends put her up to it. A birthday dare, ladies’ night out. Miami girls slumming in the Keys.”

“
Her
birthday?”

“Jesus, what difference does it make?”

“You were her birthday present to herself. That’s how it sounds.”

“Maybe so. I never thought about it.”

“Which birthday, like twelve, thirteen?”

“Not funny.”

“I don’t know what the hell Rusty saw in you, Mr. Lothario.”

“I ask myself the same question.”

She looked at him for a few moments, then went back to her gadget, typing and waiting and typing some more. She stayed focused on it for ten minutes and only looked up when Thorn stopped to pay the toll at the Rickenbacker Causeway.

Going across the high bridge, he stayed in the slow lane, his usual survival tactic with the crazed Miami traffic. At the summit of the long span Buddha looked out at the blue sweep of Biscayne Bay, the yachts and fishing skiffs crisscrossing the still waters, then leaned forward to gaze north across the upper end of the bay toward downtown Miami, where dozens of office buildings and banks and grand hotels lined the shoreline like headstones in a graveyard for giants.

“You’re not in Starkville anymore.”

“It’s pretty,” she said.

“People seem to think so.”

“But I can’t imagine living here.”

“That’s two of us.”

“It’s too big, too fast. Too bright, too many things at once.”

“You’d fit right in, Buddha. Everybody’s from somewhere else. There’s only a few hundred people in this town who were born here. The rest just got off the plane from New Jersey last month. Or swam ashore.”

“Key Largo is so different?”

“Different, yeah. But it’s changing. We have our share of New Jersey.”

Her electronic tablet dinged and she broke away from the view and went back to the screen in her lap.

After a moment, she reached out and slapped the dashboard.

“All right!”

She pumped a celebratory fist.

“ViCAP,” she said. “A fresh hit.”

Thorn waited while Buddha typed on the pad for a minute.

“See, on the drive up from the Keys I expanded my list of search terms. It dawned on me the average cop wouldn’t know what the hell Zentai was. Word’s too exotic. He’s not going to use that in his report, so it wouldn’t wind up in ViCAP. I inputted more generic words, ‘Spider-Man suit,’ ‘bodysuit,’ ‘unitard,’ ‘catsuit.’”

“And one of those came up.”

“‘Bodysuit.’”

“In a homicide investigation?”

“A pedestrian stop in an Atlanta neighborhood three weeks ago on a Saturday night. No arrest made. Some person walking down the sidewalk in a black suit.”

“A pedestrian stop? What good is that?”

“It’s a step.”

“The cop get an ID?”

“No ID, not even a warning citation, just logged it into ViCAP. Whoever this cop was, he must have had a suspicion of something more serious, or he’s a major overachiever. I just sent back a query to the Atlanta PD about any unsolved homicides that occurred within a twenty-four-hour period of the stop. And I asked them to have the reporting officer contact me about the bodysuit incident.”

“One guy walking around in a bodysuit? That’s not much.”

“You always so negative?”

“It’s not much, Buddha.”

She stared down at her tablet.

“What were you burning last night in that bonfire?”

“Stuff I didn’t want anymore.”

“Like furniture and clothes, that kind of thing?”

“What’s your problem?”

“I’m trying to figure you out.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Why were you burning your things?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Go on, say it. How were you feeling?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a little lost.”

“And angry,” she said.

“That too.”

“Angry about losing Rusty.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m familiar with that sensation. Exactly how I felt with Mickey. Angry, sad, confused. But I didn’t set anything on fire.”

“I don’t know why I did it. When I figure it out, I’ll get back to you.”

“Seems childish, like a hissy fit. Something terrible happens, you’re like, hey, I think I’ll go burn up a bunch of my furniture and shit.”