Dead Last (35 page)

“Vibram FiveFingers shoe,” Roediger said. “It’s a crock of snake oil. Does more damage than good. It’s a podiatrist’s dream shoe.”

“Fairly obvious why our perp needs one,” Frank said, “running around barefoot, that’s a problem, rip up his suit, hurt his feet, so he gets himself a pair of these FiveFingers jobs. But how does that change the forensics? A shoe like that, it should be more revealing. It’s got a sole you can work with, plus it’s a replica of his foot shape.”

“All true. However, I use two distinct programs, two different biometric modalities, each with separate and unique protocols. One applies to ordinary shoes, hundreds of shoe types and sole patterns linked to brand-name products; the other program works with bare feet. I’m not set up to deal with this hybrid footwear. My coding would have to be completely rewritten to account for all the variables in this particular type of shoe. I simply can’t provide real scientific analysis of such a shoe without doing further research and study.”

“What, like hours or days?”

“Always in a hurry, Agent Sheffield. Always skimming.”

“How long?”

“A month,” Roediger said. “Maybe two. I need to…”

But Frank had turned away and was stalking out of the lab.

Thorn caught up with him in the parking lot, Frank on his cell.

“Well, fine, I get it, Rivlin. It’s Sunday, you’re having people over, how nice. Tell you what, just turn the burners on low for two minutes, get on your goddamn laptop, and look through the inventory online. Call me back either way. If it’s there, if it’s not there, I want to know. Yeah, Vibram FiveFingers.” He spelled “Vibram,” then hung up.

“She was having brunch with her future in-laws.”

“What inventory?’

“Dee Dee’s condo. My people took the place apart, made a list of the contents. Ms. Dollimore had fifteen different dildos, Rivlin remembered that much, but she couldn’t recall if there were barefoot running shoes. We find those, there’s blood traces, we’re home free.”

“Now what?”

“See my video guru. You think Roediger’s a character, just wait.”

On the way out Old Cutler Road, Thorn tried April’s home number again and got no answer. It was close to eleven. Even a long breakfast should be done by now. Maybe they were grocery shopping, taking a Sunday drive. It was odd that Thorn hadn’t seen or heard her leave this morning. He’d been up, windows open. Probably when he was showering. Yeah, he told himself. When he was showering.

Frank got out his cell, speed-dialed Agent Vasquez, had him pull up the cell number for April Moss. He held on while Vasquez worked on it, then spoke the number aloud for Thorn to dial.

No answer. No voice mail.

“That’s odd,” Frank said.

“Maybe she shut her phone off, all those news guys hounding her.”

“Maybe it’s that,” Frank said.

Thorn said, yeah, it had to be that. But he had a feeling. He watched the road curving through the cloister of shade, giant oaks and banyans lining the historic two-lane, mansions on both sides, golden blazes of sunlight spattering the asphalt before them. Runners on the bike trail, walkers, strollers. Out early to beat the coming heat.

The premonition was taking root, becoming a bright twinge in his chest. Like the one he’d had two nights ago while running from the riverside bar back to the bungalow, fighting back the panic, telling himself it was all fine, Buddha wasn’t in danger.

A bright ache in his chest just like that one. Only more so.

TWENTY-EIGHT

FOR YOU THIS IS HIGHLY
unusual. It is daylight and you are wearing ordinary clothes, walking down an ordinary sidewalk, past newsmen gathered around their trucks. Men and women with television faces and television hair, talking in their television voices.

No one notices you. You might as well be wearing the black suit, stealing through the shadows, vaporous, intangible. That is your new power, the gift to go away, to stand unseen, to walk like dark through dark, like a vacant wind across a treeless plain.

You no longer require the suit. You have learned to disappear while standing in full view. An actor’s trick, vanishing into your part. It is more beautiful and liberating than the suit. So natural, so effortless. Camouflaged by normalcy.

That thought gives you an electric tingle. You have doubled yourself. The two halves of you have fused into a being more powerful than either of their separate selves, as when two chemical compounds synthesize to form a new and infinitely more complex creation.

On the TV news you saw they had shifted locations, and simple curiosity drew you here. You halt at the edge of the crowd and watch a woman speaking into the cameras. Behind her are the white towers of the Ocean Club, and its sister condos. The news reporters abandoned the Moss residence in Spring Garden and set up their cameras here. Their story has shifted again, this time from the obituary writer to the television show.

For which you are grateful.

You stand on the edge of the crowd in your cloak of normalcy and watch the woman speak into the cluster of microphones. She is short and thick with curly black hair; she gives her name, spelling it, then spelling it a second time. Lisa Mankowski, special agent in charge, Miami field office.

A change.

A new pursuer.

You watch her answering questions. After a minute listening, you decide the other one, Sheffield, would be more challenging. This woman does not worry you.

You drift back to the parking lot, back to your car. There is still more to do. When the obituary appears tomorrow, you will follow its directives as you have followed the others. You will plan, you will execute.

Then you will cease.

You will erase from your mind all that you have done and all that has been done to you, and you will ease back to live among them with this new invisibility; you will take love and give love, speak and be spoken to, you will do everything exactly as they do. Like the traveler who has completed a great journey to the highest peaks and most dangerous canyons on the planet, but has kept his exploits secret, so that when he returns there is no fanfare, and no one even notices he’s been away.

*   *   *

Once they got past the front gate security and were driving down the central boulevard of the lavish neighborhood of Coral Seas, Sheffield started ticking off the names of the owners of the estates on either side of the road. Sprawling grounds with manor houses that grew larger and more ostentatious as they drove. Car dealers, pro athletes, hotshot lawyers, surgeons to the stars. Thorn was silent. If any of these people ever wanted to build a bonfire and simplify their lives, they’d have to hire a dozen workers just to empty their garages.

“You don’t recognize a single one of those names, do you?”

“Are they big shots?”

“Sometimes I forget you live under a rock at the back of a cave.”

“A cave at the bottom of the sea.”

“You never come up for air? Watch a little TV, indulge in the pop culture. Not ever? Hum along to the song of the day.”

“Been indulging all week,” he said. “That should last me a while.”

Frank pulled into a long drive and stopped at the second layer of security, a massive wrought-iron gate. He buzzed the call button and spoke his name. At the end of the lane behind a wall of fishtail palms, Thorn could make out an English Tudor castle with a dozen turrets and a tower with cannon emplacements and two spires.

The gate rolled open and Sheffield bumped over the brick drive.

“Lydia owns Zenon Security. You never heard of that either, I’m sure, because not many people have. That’s how they like it. Started out as an alarm company. Now they supply private security contractors to the government.”

“Mercenaries,” Thorn said.

“Word of warning, Thorn. Don’t use that word inside these gates. You’ll never be seen again.”

“How do you know these people?”

“Long story.”

“Never mind.”

“I dated Lydia Zhee in college, the Tallahassee years. We stayed in touch. She started off in computers, migrated to security. We see each other now and then, go for a sail. A drink, like that.”

“Why all these independent contractors? There isn’t a lab in Virginia where all the smart guys do this kind of work?”

“Oh, I must’ve forgotten to tell you.”

Thorn waited, hearing a different tone in Frank’s voice. Deflated.

“Mankowski paid me a call last night at the Silver Sands, rousted me from a good sleep. She’s decided she needs to take charge of the investigation. I am hereby out of the loop. The whole Zentai Killer show became too juicy for her to ignore. The TV time, it’s jet fuel for her career.”

“You’re going to let that happen?”

“She mentioned the magic words. My pension. If she knew what you and I have been up to, the lady could put a turd in my file that would never go away. I’d spend my golden years spit-shining urinals at the bus station.”

“So you’re done with this? You’re walking away?”

“Does it look like I’m walking away? We’re here, aren’t we? We saw Roediger. I’m working the Vibram foot thing with Rivlin. Long as we stay below the radar, it’ll be fine. Let Mankowski have all the TV time she wants. More power to her. We’ll keep working the street.”

Sheffield got out of the car and Thorn stayed put. He said he wanted to keep trying April’s number. While Frank was inside the Tudor castle, Thorn alternated between her cell and her home. Hitting redial, redial. Running down Buddha’s battery with repeated attempts. Nothing and more nothing.

Behind the Tudor house, he noticed a Bertram fifty-footer idling down the canal, somebody rich and famous heading out to sea to play. It seemed to take a lot of goodies to keep these people amused.

Thorn rang April’s numbers again. No answer. It was close to three
P.M.
Three hours till her deadline.

He called her a few dozen times more before Frank came striding back to the car.

“Lydia says to tell you you’re cute,” he said, getting behind the wheel. He nodded at the limb of an oak tree. “Don’t bother looking for it, but it’s there, video cam so small, you could inhale one and not know it.”

Thorn kept looking but saw only the tiny oak leaves and heavy branches.

“Lydia says if you’d like to go sailing some day, she’s got a Speedo with your name on it.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“The lady was helpful.”

Thorn waited.

“That Sports Craze video, she blew up that single frame where the perp is glancing at the camera, cleaned it up best she could, but it’s no good. All she can say is it looks like eye shadow and lipstick, long lashes. Maybe a woman, or somebody trying hard to look like a woman.”

“And Atlanta?”

“Now that’s different. Image is actually much worse, so Lydia couldn’t do anything with the face. That hand blocking the eyes, that was a crafty move. Nothing conclusive there.”

Frank started the car and pulled through the horseshoe drive. The big steel exit gates swung open and Frank turned onto the main thoroughfare.

“And how is this helpful?”

“Well, she pulled up images of all five of our suspects; all the
Miami Ops
people have photo spreads, the usual publicity bullshit. She found Matheson’s picture somewhere out in cyberspace. So she lines them up side by side, gets them all roughly in proportion to each other, and what do you know? We got five people, different ages, different sexes, they’re all slender, roughly the same height and weight within ten, fifteen pounds of each other, and an inch or two, same slim hips. Dee Dee being fairly flat-chested, that’s not a giveaway either. So you got five people who could be standing there in that skintight suit on that Atlanta street.”

Thorn waited. Frank was having fun, milking this.

“You know, a guy like me, by this age in life, I’ve been with my share of women. Without trying, I’ve made a fairly extensive study of the female body, and yet, I learned some things today I never knew.”

“Sorry I missed it.”

“Differences between men and women, anatomical differences, like how a woman’s tailbone tips more strongly toward the back and tapers toward its lower end more than a man’s. And how men’s hip sockets are closer together. Male hip sockets face forward and a woman’s angle to the side. Makes childbirth easier, and sex of course. Women are open, men are closed, in an anatomical sense.”

“You’re sounding like Roediger.”

“You don’t think this is interesting?”

“Just get there, okay. I’m tired of all these shaggy dogs.”

“Why?”

“I want to nail this asshole and be finished.”

“You homesick?”

“Damn right I am.”

“Yeah, yeah, I understand that. But Thorn, please tell me you’re not one of those guys skips to the end of the story to find how it turns out. No, man. You got to savor the baby steps along the way. Otherwise, where’s the pleasure?”

“Women are open, men are closed.”

“Exactly,” Frank said. “As I said, with this person standing out on the street at night in a black skintight suit, far as Lydia is concerned, that’s as good as having a straight shot of her face. The way Lydia looks at it, you want to know the subject’s gender, first place you check is the ischium.”

“The ischium.”

“Yes, sir. It’s all about the tilt of the pelvis, my man. The axis of a woman’s pelvis tips toward the front of the ischium. A man’s divides into more balanced halves. It affects how you stand, how you sit, move around. It’s like an anatomical marker.”

“This computer expert, I take it, she’s more than that.”

“Right you are. Her company, it’s not just mercenaries. Lately they branched out into running the training for the fine folks who fly our military drones. These people are sitting in bunkers out in Colorado, ten thousand miles from the battlefield, got a joystick in their hands, deciding who to blow up, who to let go. It happens sometimes, after they sort out all the intel, their decision comes down to a piece of real-time video.

“And that’s when sometimes they need to know the difference between a man and a woman. How they walk, how they stand, how they shift their weight. Apparently it’s all got a signature. Though most of the people they’re looking at are wearing robes and veils, not bodysuits. So, turns out, this was a piece of cake for Lydia, reading the ischium.”