Cut and Run (6 page)

“Is that all?”

“I can also tell you that there were no prints on it—not even smudged ones.”

“That's odd.”

“Not if your vic never touched it. You didn't find it on the body, right?”

Calleigh frowned. “No. It was stuck in a pocket of the balloon's basket.”

“Then unless the vic wore gloves to handle his own suicide note, I very much doubt that he actually wrote it.”

“But someone with access to the balloon and his printer probably did. Thanks, Cynthia.”

“Any time.”

 

“What we have here,” Calleigh told Horatio, “is a good old-fashioned locked-room mystery.”

They were in the break room, going over the case. Horatio smiled and took a sip of his coffee. “Right. A man goes up in a balloon, alive and alone. He comes down dead, shot at close range. So what rules out suicide?”

“The note, for one. QD says that though it came from Breakwash's printer, it had no fingerprints on it at all.”

“And no signature. Suspicious, but not definitive.”

“Joel Greer could have shot him in the basket. Or there could have been two people in the balloon and one jumped out after shooting Breakwash—though I don't know how they would have kept from being seen.”

Horatio leaned back and rested an elbow on the top of his chair. “Either way, Joel Greer would have to be lying. And it's likely he had access to the vic's printer, as well. Motive?”

Calleigh shrugged. “An affair with the wife? He's young and cute, she's stuck in a marriage with someone addicted to get-rich-quick schemes. They could have planned it together.”

“He tested negative for gunshot residue, but he had enough time to wash his hands…what we need is something to tie him to the weapon.”

Calleigh sighed. “Which we don't have. Guess I'm pulling on my hip waders.”

“Don't book an airboat just yet. Talk to Alexx first and see what the bullet tells you.”

Calleigh gave him a bright smile. “I always do…”

Doctor Alexx Woods handed Calleigh a small, deformed piece of metal with a pair of tweezers. Calleigh took it carefully with a gloved hand.

“That's what killed him,” said Alexx. “Went in straight along the optic canal and through the chiasmatic groove, bounced off the back of the skull, and lodged in the parietal lobe.”

Calleigh examined the bullet closely. “Looks like a twenty-two. Anything bigger probably would have punched right through.”

“I can't believe anyone would shoot themselves in the eye while over the Everglades; it's such a beautiful place.” Alexx shook her head. “Maybe that's why he did it. He wanted the last thing he saw to be something magnificent.”

“Or maybe someone else did,” said Calleigh. “This may not be a suicide.”

Alexx frowned. “Well, it looked like one to me,” she said. “So I followed protocol and swabbed his hands for GSR. His right was positive.”

Calleigh considered it. “Doesn't mean he shot himself, though—just that he fired a gun.”

“I suppose,” said Alexx. “But if he was up in a balloon, what was he shooting
at
?”

“Good question,” Calleigh admitted. “Anything else I should know about?”

“He was in good health for his age, and I didn't find any other suspicious bruises or marks. Tox screen isn't back yet.”

“Thanks, Alexx. Let me know when it comes in, all right?”

“Sure thing, sweetie.”

 

When Calleigh's cell phone rang, she hoped it was good news; so far, her theory that Timothy Breakwash had been murdered was getting weaker with every fact she uncovered. “CSI Duquesne.”

“Uh, hello? I was told you were investigating that balloon that crashed?”

“That's correct.”

“I, uh, saw it.”

“The crash?”

“No. I was watching the balloon with my telescope while it was over the Everglades. Then it got lower and I couldn't see it anymore.”

“Can I get your name, sir?”

“Sure. It's, uh, Sebastian. Sebastian Mundy.”

“How long were you watching the balloon for, Mister Mundy?”

“Uh, from about seven
A.M
. I saw it go up.”

Calleigh paused. “Mister Mundy, did you see any movement from the pilot of the balloon during the flight?”

“Well, I couldn't tell what he was doing—he was too far away.”

“I understand that. But did you see him
moving
?”

“Sure. He was wearing a dark jacket, so I could see him against the sky when he went from one side of the basket to the other. No details, though.”

“Mister Mundy, I'm going to need to get an official statement from you. Can we meet?”

“Uh, sure. I'm at home—can you come here?”

“Just give me the address.”

She jotted it down. “Thank you very much, Mister Mundy—this is important information. I'll be there in about half an hour, all right?”

“Yeah, okay.”

She disconnected and shook her head. If someone had seen Breakwash alive while the balloon was aloft, that just about put the last nail in the coffin of her murder theory.
Well, there's always the zeppelin pirates,
she thought.
They'd have to be
invisible,
of course, but hey
—
I understand the new zeppelin stealth technology is scalable.

Even the bullet wasn't helping—a phone call to Randilyn Breakwash had confirmed that her husband did own a .22, but she couldn't locate it. If Joel Greer owned the same kind of gun, she couldn't find any record of it.

She sighed. It was beginning to look as if the case, despite its exotic trappings, was no more than that of a disillusioned dreamer who'd decided on an unusual setting to kill himself. Maybe the note was part of that—a last attempt to gain a little notoriety by leaving behind a cryptic, mysterious message.

She stopped in at Horatio's office on her way out. “H? I'm going out to interview a witness.” She gave him a quick rundown on what Sebastian Mundy had told her.

“Good,” said Horatio. “Give me the details when you get back.”

 

Sebastian Mundy turned out to be a tall, lanky teenager, with short, spiky black hair and rimless glasses. He answered the door dressed in sandals, shorts, and a baggy T-shirt in blue-and-orange Desert Storm camo patterns.

“I'm CSI Calleigh Duquesne,” she said, showing her badge.

“Uh, hi,” he said. “C'mon in.”

He led her into the living room and then stood there, looking awkward and nervous. Calleigh glanced around; middle-class neighborhood, middle-class house, middle-class furniture. “So,” she said, “you saw the balloon take off?”

“Not exactly. I saw it sticking up over the trees—I guess it was still on the ground then, but I couldn't really tell. Then it started rising, and I could see the whole thing. I mean, I couldn't see the bottom part before.”

“The basket.”

“Yeah.” He shuffled from foot to foot. “I was kinda bored, so I watched it for a while. Couldn't see much, but I didn't have anything else to do.” He glanced at his feet, then up again.

“And you're sure you could see someone in the basket? Someone moving around?”

“Uh, yeah. Like I said.”

“Could there have possibly been more than one person aboard?”

“Yeah, uh, no. I mean, unless they were crouched down or something. I didn't see anyone else, I know that.”

“How long did you watch for?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes. Then I got bored and went downstairs to watch TV.”

“Okay. Can I see where you were watching from?”

“Sure. It's up in my room. Uh, it's a little messy.”

Calleigh smiled. “That's all right. I don't arrest people for being messy.”

Sebastian's room was at the top of the stairs. Its single window faced west, with a small telescope on a tripod set up beside it. Calleigh went over and checked the sight line, confirming that the flight path of the balloon would have been visible.

She straightened up and asked, “Did you see anything fall out of or approach the basket?”

He looked at her with a confused expression. “You mean like a bird or something?”

“Anything at all.”

“No. I didn't see anything like that.”

She sighed. “Thank you. Let's go downstairs so I can write up a formal statement and you can sign it, okay?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

Calleigh glanced out the window. A young woman was just leaving from the neighboring house, locking the door behind her. “You mind if I ask you one more question?”

“Go ahead.”

“It's the middle of summer vacation. Why were you up so early?”

He reddened. “No reason.”

“Uh-huh. Some people get up early to work out—you know, go jogging or do yoga?”

His blush deepened toward crimson. “I guess.”

“I had a telescope when I was a kid. You know the most important thing I learned from it?”

He shook his head.

“That to do good science, it's important to have good tools—and use them properly. Right?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Let's go fill out that report.”

A teenage Peeping Tom,
she thought as they headed back downstairs.
Not so much an invisible sky pirate as an unseen privacy invader. Well, it's in the ballpark, anyway…

W
OLFE SURVEYED THE RUINS
of the yacht's buffet and shook his head. “Looks like they were just getting ready to eat when the attack happened. What a mess.”

Delko grinned and opened his kit. “What, you're complaining about a little spilled food? You'd prefer decomposing body parts?”

“That comes with the job. This just seems…unnecessary.”

“I don't think they were too concerned with proper etiquette.”

“Quite the spread, though. This is a few steps beyond macaroni salad—lobster, foie gras, enough champagne to drown a sheik.”

“And enough bullets to…kill a camel.”

Wolfe gave Delko a skeptical look. “That would be
one,
wouldn't it?”

Delko shrugged. “Hey, it was the best I could do. A herd of camels? A really, really
tough
camel? All I know is, I see a whole lot of casings and a whole lot of holes.”

“What do you want to take, casings or bodies?”

“I'll do the bodies, if that's all right.”

“Yeah, sure.”

They worked their way through the boat slowly and methodically, putting down numbered markers beside blood pools or bullets and snapping pictures, examining each body and how it was placed, bagging evidence as they went.

“Take a look at this,” said Delko, holding up a large handgun. “It's a Russian Makarov—third one I've found, all on the guys in suits.”

“Eastern European owner, Russian weapons—you think Dragoslav is Red Mafiya?”

“Could be. The other crew seems Cubano—they could be part of one of the larger gangs but not flying their colors. Seem to favor machine pistols.”

“You know what's missing, right?” Wolfe asked.

“Two things.”

“Exactly. Two things. Whatever the pirates were after—”

“—and the boat they took it away with.”

Wolfe shook his head. “Hang on. What makes you think they found it?”

“Well, neither one's here.”

“No, but in a gunfight like this all sorts of things could have happened. The boat could have been sunk, or left adrift. Maybe the pirates didn't have a chance to grab whatever it is they came for.”

“Or whoever?” Delko suggested. “The motive might have been kidnapping—or even straight-out assassination.”

Wolfe sighed. “Yeah, we really don't know enough yet. And I get the feeling Dragoslav and his locker-room pals aren't going to be too forthcoming.”

“Dragoslav, no. Maybe we can lean on one of the working girls, though.”

Wolfe snorted. “With what? We can't charge them with anything, and if Dragoslav really is Red Mafiya, they're going to know enough to keep their mouths shut.”

“How about the guy that drove the boat into the dock? Last I heard, they said he was going to make it.”

“Depends on how loyal he is, I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Delko. “And to whom.”

 

Horatio Caine had realized long ago that the city of Miami and the Florida Everglades were inextricably linked. Despite the glittering skyscrapers, despite the limousines and SUVs and sports cars, despite all the beautiful people and the opulent places they frequented, at its heart Miami was a swamp. It had a very specific ecology: it had predators and prey, it had diurnal and nocturnal schedules, it had environments that nurtured some creatures and were deadly to others. Sometimes, tracking a killer through Miami's terrain felt more like big-game hunting than detective work.

Some game,
Horatio thought to himself,
is bigger than others. And some is much, much smaller.

“Pfiesteria piscicida,”
CSI tech Laura Lamas said. She was a dark-haired, exotic-looking woman with African-American, Cherokee, Italian, and Irish blood; Horatio had gone to her for help in analyzing Timothy Breakwash's professional work. “Also known,” she said, handing Horatio a photograph, “as the cell from hell.”

Horatio studied the picture. It showed an oval spheroid with a curly belt around its middle, reminding him more than anything of a cartoon hamburger with lettuce sticking out between the buns. “This is what Breakwash was researching?”

“According to the files on his computer, yes. When it was originally discovered in 1991, this organism was called an ambush attack dinoflagellate. It's a nasty little critter—
piscicida
means fish-killer.” Lamas handed him some more photos. “This is the same organism—and so is this…and this…and this.”

Horatio looked through them quickly. “These all look very different.”

Lamas nodded.
“Pfiesteria
has a very complex life cycle—twenty-four different unicellular stages. Not only that, but in some of the stages it appears to be a plant, and in others it's an animal.”

“So what makes it so dangerous?”

“Crap.”

“Excuse me?”

She smiled. “Sorry. Fish crap, to be exact. When the cell is in the presence of a large amount of fish excrement—a condition usually found in shallow, warm waters like a river estuary—it feeds and reproduces rapidly. This is called a bloom. When a bloom occurs, the cells transform into their animal-like, mobile state, and release a toxin. The toxin causes open, bleeding ulcerations in fish, and the
Pfiesteria
feed on the skin and blood that slough off. Once the fish actually die, the
Pfiesteria
transform again, into a kind of amoeba that feeds on rotting flesh.”

“The cell from hell, indeed,” Horatio murmured.

“It's also extremely hard to detect—the bloom process, from start to finish, only takes a few hours. And the initial organism bears a strong resemblance to other, more passive organisms—the only way to ID it for sure is to strip the outer coating off and study it under an electron microscope.”

“So it's a master of disguise, a ruthless killer, and a consumer of rotting flesh.”

“More or less.”

Horatio handed the photographs back. “Has this organism shown up in Florida?”

“Not yet. It's been reported in nearby states, though: Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland. It's caused massive die-offs in fish populations and a fair amount of worry about possible effects on humans.”

“So news of
Pfiesteria
's presence in local waters would be big news.”

Lamas nodded. “Definitely. If Breakwash found evidence the organism had shown up here, he would have been sitting on a huge story.”

“Or,” said Horatio, “a ticking bomb.”

 

Once Wolfe and Delko were finished with the inside of the boat, they inspected the outside. “I've got paint transfer right here,” said Delko, pointing to a blue slash about two feet above the yacht's waterline.

“Could be from the pirates' boat—or should that be ship? Pirates always have a ship, right?”

“Knock off the skull-and-crossbones stuff, huh?” Delko smiled. “This is serious.”

“Okay, okay. Yeah, that looks like it's at the right height.”

“So we're looking for a blue boat,” said Delko, scraping a sample into a vial, “or a boat with blue trim.”

“Which might be on the bottom of the bay.”

“Or halfway to the Bahamas by now.” Delko shrugged. “We'll see what turns up.”

Wolfe studied the ship's chrome railing. “I've got two sets of deep scratches here, about two feet apart. And some kind of tool marks—looks like something might have been clamped on.”

“Could have been some kind of grappling device, keep the ships together.”

A large white panel pulled into the marina's parking lot. “That'll be my truck,” said Delko, waving them over.

“You're really going to move a two-ton fish from a wrecked boat into the back of a truck? This I have to see.”

Delko's smile turned into a grin. “Oh, you'll do more than see. You're going to help—this is a four-man job, at least.”

Wolfe stared at him incredulously. “But—this is a brand-new jacket.”

“Well, after today it'll definitely be broken in. Did I happen to mention that the skin of a sunfish is as rough as a shark's?”

“No. No, you didn't.”

“Don't worry about it. They have a thick layer of mucus over their entire body that pretty much protects you from the sandpapery stuff underneath.”

“Lovely,” Wolfe said under his breath.

 

Laura Lamas had restricted her analysis to the computer files labeled as work; Horatio himself had gone through the rest, looking at Breakwash's address book, email folders, and personal files. He hadn't found anything terribly incriminating, but it had given him a sense of Timothy Breakwash, of the kind of man he was.

Horatio used to think that searching someone's house from top to bottom was the biggest intrusion of privacy an investigation demanded, but sifting through a few hard drives had changed his opinion. Computers had gone from being a glorified file cabinet to something approaching a second brain, storing ever larger amounts of information. But it wasn't the amount of information that Horatio found intriguing; it was the quality. Once, something had to be truly important to write it down. Now, a few clicks of a mouse button and you had a permanent link to a vast amount of data on virtually any subject, which meant the most trivial of minutiae or the most ephemeral curiosity could be recorded forever; the whim made concrete.

Timothy Breakwash had been a bookmark junkie, recording the URL of almost any site that caught his fancy. Scuba diving, live theater, sock puppets, horticulture, dog breeding, Scottish history; the man's interests seemed as broad-ranging and indefinable as the Everglades themselves. There were sites on ballooning, of course, and environmental science—but these were scattered among web pages concerned with treasure hunting or Miami history or sixteenth-century art.

The private files were even more revealing. Breakwash had written up details for over a dozen money-making schemes, ranging from a plan to sell hermit crabs as pets to a grandiose idea involving generating electricity from tiny water wheels installed in every drainpipe and eavestrough in Miami.

That last idea seemed to typify not just Breakwash's thinking, but the thinking of every get-rich-quick dreamer who found his way to Miami. Seen through the right eyes, it was a place of endless potential; a sunny and fertile ground to plant your magic beans and watch the beanstalk grow. And sometimes, that's exactly what happened—Miami had been built by dreamers like that, had been transformed more than once. It was a city that periodically fell into decay, consumed by its own decadence and popularity, then bloomed again. It was an orchid in a swamp, as dependent on the forces that could destroy it as on the ones that nurtured it; a city of storms and sunlight, of decay and rebirth.

Timothy Breakwash had sought the sun, and found the storm.

And now,
Horatio thought,
all that's left of his aspirations are these files. Sketches of a life dreamed but not lived. Hopes and desires, in PDF format.

It was a profile he'd seen before, a common element in a volatile mix. Con men, thieves, and killers were the other elements, drawn as inevitably toward opportunity as the dreamers. The dreamers thought they could spin straw into gold, and the predators were always there waiting to take it away from them. That's how it looked on the surface—but like any ecosystem, it was far more complex underneath. Predators could become prey. Horatio had seen a picture of a large Burmese python someone had released into the Everglades, where it had become a meal for a medium-size gator. What made the picture memorable was that while the gator was busy eating the snake, the python had managed to swallow half the gator.

Dreams unrealized lead to frustration, desperation, and sometimes violence. The most dangerous man is one with nothing to lose…and when a man loses his dreams, nothing is what's usually left.

He wondered about Randilyn Breakwash. It took a special kind of person to stick with a dreamer; most couldn't handle the endless cycle of promise and disappointment, of a life of anticipation that was never rewarded. The couples that made it, Horatio had found, were the ones that had some sort of stability to keep them going—either financial, spiritual, or emotional.

Everybody needs an anchor. What was Randilyn Breakwash's? They didn't seem to have children, she didn't strike me as being especially religious
—
could it be she simply loved him that much?

He had no ready answer, and her husband's computer files had provided no clue—not to that question, anyway. But they had yielded a potential suspect: Sylvester Perrone. Perrone was the CEO of Sweetbright Aquaculture, a company that marketed seafood, and according to Timothy Breakwash's files he and Perrone had met several times in the last two weeks at one of Sweetbright's fish farms. There were no notations for any of the meetings, beyond the fact that they were business-related.