Dead Last (22 page)

Thorn was welcome to any of the castoffs. She’d been too busy lately to cart them to Goodwill.

Now freshly showered, Thorn tried on a pair of blue jeans with ragged knees, and found them a perfect fit. He chose a dark green polo shirt with a crocodile on the breast, then checked himself out in the closet mirror, and shook his head. He looked closer to a preppie than he’d ever been. On his forehead, the lump had receded and was changing from blue to a moldy green. The swelling in his hand had also subsided and he could almost make a fist.

Out of curiosity he slipped on a pair of discarded boat shoes, the pricier version of the brand he’d lived in for most of his adult life. The shoes were maybe a half size larger than his usual fit, but felt a hell of lot more comfortable than the ones he’d been wearing the last few years.

Stashed beside a simple wood desk, he found a black nylon computer bag. Thorn emptied it of the yellow legal pads and documents and slender laptop computer, and refilled it with Buddha’s electronic tablet, the evidence bag, and her service revolver. Only two rounds left in the cylinder. He tucked her phone in his pocket.

Last night after April left him, he’d smuggled the loot up to the apartment, and now he carried it all back down to the car and locked the black computer bag in the trunk.

The neighborhood was quiet. Boxley, the Doberman he’d been introduced to the night before, trotted over to see if Thorn had acquired any new crotch smells since their last encounter. After satisfying himself with the state of Thorn’s privates, he wandered back to the front gate and lay down to stare out at a trio of gray squirrels that were chasing one another up and down the trunk of an oak tree.

Like many houses of its era, April’s home was masonry vernacular, a blocky two-story with parapets and arcades and a shady porch on three sides. The garage apartment was a separate structure that echoed the main house. This was one of the dwellings built by second-generation settlers in Miami. Approaching a century old, they had been designed and constructed by laymen from plans probably drawn up at kitchen tables. Sturdy and rectangular, yet somehow graceful.

As Thorn was headed toward the kitchen door, Jeff, the guy from Poblanos, appeared, squirming out of a crawl space hatch in the concrete apron of the house. He pushed himself out the small trapdoor, then bent back to the opening and dragged out a white garbage bag. He shut the grillwork behind him and latched it.

He saw Thorn and walked over. No greeting.

He untied the red drawstring and gave Thorn a look. A half-dozen large wooden traps, each with a fat brown rat smashed in the spring-loaded guillotine.

“You get an early start,” Thorn said.

“It’s rat season,” Jeff said.

“It’s always rat season,” said Thorn.

“Which makes this rat season.”

He smiled and cinched the bag shut and carried it to a pedestrian gate, let himself out, and walked across the street to a dark green pickup truck with orange tiger stripes running down its sides. He slung the bag of rats into the bed, started the truck, and rolled slowly away.

The house was still, no lights upstairs or down. April had given Thorn a key in case he got up early and wanted coffee.

Coffee, however, was not what he had in mind. He let himself in and cut through the kitchen, then went down the hallway that split the house in half. Parlor, dining room, and a maid’s room on one side, April’s home office and a sewing room on the other. Three bedrooms and two baths upstairs, the one zone he hadn’t yet seen. Last night April had confined the house tour to the downstairs only.

The walls were thick and solid with high ceilings and dark exposed beams. Ceiling fans were quietly at work in every room. The house had no air-conditioning, but the interior spaces were as cool as a spring-fed grotto. It had the solid, sound-absorbing feel Thorn had found in other Miami houses of its vintage. There were fewer and fewer of them remaining as the years went by and more citizens of the city grew so fabulously rich they could afford to level the historic homes and replace them with estates twice their size and half their elegance.

More family photos were mounted on the hallway walls. The boys at five or six with Garvey, their grandmother, who’d been a lively brunette with a pinup-girl body. A series of snapshots taken in Manhattan and on some Ivy League campus showed April in various flannel shirts and jeans, grunge but not grungy, a young mother, hand in hand with Flynn and Sawyer in Central Park and at the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and inside what looked like an efficiency apartment. If April wasn’t attending the boys, Garvey was.

Moving past the photos, Thorn heard someone stirring upstairs, a toilet flush, the creak of the pine floors. He picked up the pace, slipping down the hall and through the library with its floor-to-ceiling shelves covering one wall, chock-full with hardbacks, leather-bounds, high school yearbooks, a host of ancient paperbacks, and two different sets of encyclopedias.

He passed through the open door into the sewing room, where each of the walls was hung with a quilt. A red and yellow starburst on one, flowers and colorful vines and hummingbirds and vases of flowers on the others. An antique Singer sat between the two windows and a tall case stood close by, its every shelf piled high with folded fabric.

He started his search with the small sewing stand next to the Singer, going through the drawers from top to bottom. Pawing through bobbins and thread and packages of needles, thimbles, safety pins, buttons, and pincushions and cloth tape measure.

In another cabinet beside the shelves of fabric, he located a collection of scissors. There had to be at least twenty in various sizes. At the front of the second drawer was a pair of pinking shears.

He reached out, then caught himself in time and drew his hand away.

On a sewing machine table Thorn found a dark blue swatch of cloth the size of a handkerchief and used that to pick up the shears by the blade. He looked around for a piece of paper to cut, but found nothing suitable.

Footsteps sounded on the creaky stairway. For a second Thorn bobbled the pinking shears but caught them before they clattered onto the table. Using the blue cloth, he slipped them into the back pocket of his jeans and covered their exposed grips with the tail of his polo shirt.

He stepped into the library and was pretending to scan the titles on a high shelf when April appeared in the doorway.

She was wearing brown shin-length chinos and a simple white blouse with short sleeves. Leather sandals and a thin silver necklace. Her hair was loose, held off her face with two tortoiseshell clips. Thorn was no expert, but he didn’t believe the flush in her cheeks was rouge.

“You a reader, Thorn?”

“I like a nautical adventure now and then. A good mystery.”

“Not the girlie-girlie highbrow stuff?”

“In a pinch I’ll read anything. Even highbrow.”

“When the boys were young, I read to them every night because that’s supposed to instill a love of books. But turns out Flynn is dyslexic, and Sawyer only read what was required in school. Now he’d rather write than read. So there’s another myth down in flames.”

“How does Flynn learn his parts?”

“Someone reads him the scripts aloud and he memorizes his lines. He memorizes everyone’s lines. Has incredible recall.”

“Compensation,” Thorn said.

“Yeah, we’re very big on compensating in the Moss household.”

She waved a hand in front of her face to disown what she’d just said.

“I need my coffee.”

Thorn seconded that.

He followed her to the kitchen and she made some strong Sumatran stuff whose aroma alone was enough to rev his heart.

She asked him what he liked for breakfast and he told her whatever she was having was fine. So it was scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon and whole wheat toast with apple butter, and a bowl of mixed fruit with shredded coconut.

“Haven’t had ambrosia since I was ten years old.”

While she made breakfast he stared out the back window into a wide lawn that ran down to the river.

She set a plate before him and took the chair opposite.

“How’s your head feel?”

“Like there’s two of them.”

“Do you need a doctor? I have a good GP, he’s a friend. I’m sure he could squeeze you in.”

“It’s Saturday.”

“If it’s bothering you, I could call him; I know he’d see you.”

“Thanks. I should be okay as long as no one slams a door on my head.”

Without appetite, he picked up his fork and started with the Canadian bacon, cutting one of the disks in half and folding it into this mouth. Chewy and perfect. He tried the eggs and they were better than scrambled eggs had a right to be. His taste buds seemed to be waking from a long sleep.

“I can’t imagine what you endured last night. That whole thing. Witnessing what you did, the killer assaulting you, murdering your friend right in front of you. That’s what you were talking about at the bar, isn’t it? The baseball bat in my obituary of Joe Camarillo. You knew something like that was going to happen.”

Thorn set his fork down.

“Yes, that’s what we were talking about.”

“Jesus God. Something I wrote caused that.”

“It didn’t cause it. It may have guided the asshole, but there’s no reason to feel guilty, April. None of this is your fault.”

“Oh, really? You wouldn’t feel guilty if you were in my place?”

“You wrote an obituary. It’s your job. You do it very well. Some guy comes along and finds a word here and a word there and takes those words and uses them to go kill somebody, that has nothing to do with you.”

“I wish I could look at it that way.”

April tasted another bite of her eggs, then set her fork down and pushed her plate away. She stared out the back window at the Siamese cat that was now sitting very still on the porch rail beneath an active birdfeeder.

“There’s five satellite trucks parked down the street. All the networks, two cable news crews. Last night they parked right out front, but they were disturbing the neighbors, so I made a fuss until they moved down to a park on the corner. I’m going to have to face them again. There’s no way to avoid it. Ben Silver, the publisher at the paper, called twice already to tell me to be less hostile on camera. He’s thinking about our circulation. This could be a major coup. He’s standing by the phone, waiting for another call from the killer. He wants to bond with the guy, get a dialogue going.”

“Better him than you.”

“Fortunately the Zentai Killer called them, not me. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in me personally. Just what I write.”

“Is that what they’ve named him? The Zentai Killer?”

She nodded.

“Pretty lame.”

Thorn finished his breakfast in silence. April kept her focus on the Siamese. Sitting so still he might have been a plaster cat.

When he’d finished, he carried his plate to the sink and rinsed it.

She started to rise, but Thorn told her to sit still, he’d do this.

He scraped her leftovers into the trash, and washed her plate and silverware, then he scrubbed the pans and dried them and set them in the rack. When everything was put away, he came back to the table and sat across from her.

“You any good with cell phones?”

“Cell phones?”

“I have an e-mail with a video attached. I don’t know how to open it.”

He dug out Buddha’s phone and slid it across the table to her.

“You don’t know how to operate your phone?”

“It’s the sheriff’s.”

She gave him an uncertain look, then dug into the phone, worked with the device for a while, and asked, “Who’s the e-mail from?”

“A guy named Ben Hardison. He’s a cop in Atlanta.”

She went back to the phone, tapping and sliding her finger across the screen until she had it.

“Okay. You want me to run the video?”

He got up and stood behind her.

“Ready.”

She tapped an icon and a video began to play. Headlights were shining on someone in a black Zentai suit standing on a sidewalk. The person was holding a small paper sack. One of the cop’s beefy shoulders blocked part of the view. Even in the flare of the headlights the exact shape of the person’s body was indistinct. Taller than average, thin, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. But beyond that he could tell nothing for sure.

Then Hardison must have instructed the person to remove the hood.

Thorn squinted and leaned forward as the black mask came off. A hand came up in front of the face, blocking the glare of the car’s headlights.

“Is that…?” April said.

“Can you run it back, see that part again?”

April replayed the last few seconds, watching the Zentai person remove the hood a second time. Short hair, hard cheekbones. Heavily made-up eyes.

“Dee Dee Dollimore?” April said.

“One more time,” Thorn said.

A third time they watched the hood come off and both bent close to the image. The grainy black-and-white picture was poorly focused. The woman held the hood in one hand and shielded her eyes with the other.

“No, that’s not her. This face is fuller.”

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t know. It’s so blurry, she’s wearing so much makeup. When was this taken? Where?”

“Three weeks ago, Atlanta.”

“Why would Dee Dee be on the street in Atlanta in that suit?”

“I don’t know,” Thorn said. “But I’m damn well going to find out.”

EIGHTEEN

THORN TOOK HIS SEAT ACROSS
from April.

The ruddiness in her cheeks had crept down her throat and a faint gloss shone on her upper lip. A single bead of sweat sparkled at her hairline. The room temperature couldn’t be more than seventy, so her high color wasn’t caused by heat. At another time, in another circumstance Thorn might be idiot enough to take credit for April’s flush. But not here, not now. There was something else overheating her, something well below the surface.

“Do you have a piece of old newsprint handy?”

“Newsprint?”

“I want to try an experiment.”