Nobody Lives Forever (4 page)

The first twenty-four hours, the most crucial in a homicide investigation, led the detectives nowhere. Dead ends, blind alleyways—the lab found no prints and little physical evidence. Ballistics matched no other outstanding cases. Dusty volunteered to stay on and help work the Thorne case, though she would not officially rejoin Rick's team until the first, which was Sunday. “Appreciate it, but catch some rest while you can,” he told her. “By then we'll need somebody fresh. There's not much you could do now anyway. We've got nothing.”

Divers had spent the daylight hours since the murder plumbing the waters around the islands and the causeway, on the theory that the fleeing killer might have deep-sixed the gun. They found tin cans, junk and old tools.

A police chopper crew patrolling the bay spotted something else—another corpse. The find created a flurry of excitement. Hopes were that the killer had botched his getaway and drowned trying to swim from the murder scene, or that his car had plunged off the side of the bridge.

“We don't get that lucky,” Jim said glumly. “Things never come wrapped up that neatly.”

He was right. The uniforms who got there first radioed that the body, floating facedown in the mangroves at the edge of a small uninhabited island, appeared to have been submerged too long to be linked to the murder on San Remo.

Nonetheless, Barrish and Ransom boarded a police boat at the mouth of the Miami River. “Just what we need. I hate this.” Ransom looked pained. The twenty-five-foot patrol boat sliced through the water, a damp breeze lifting the thinning hair Jim had carefully combed to cover his bald spot. “If I wanted to go to sea, I'da joined the Coast Guard. I know I'm gonna be sick.”

“You think about it too much, Jim,” Rick shouted over the noise of the twin engines. “I've seen you go green just standing on the dock. Relax. Enjoy it. Look at that.” The late summer sunset was spectacular, the western sky and the mirrorlike water aflame with blood-scarlet color.

Jim shook his head and glared accusingly at the darkening eastern edge of the world, where the bay already gleamed silver. “It wuz the goddamn full moon,” he muttered. “Full moon. It happens every time.”

“I tell you Rick, twenty-seven years is enough. I shudda bailed out a long time ago. I don't know why I waited this long. My back is killing me from lifting too damn many dead bodies. The job is getting worse, not better. Always on call, the fucking hours, you don't eat right, you don't sleep right, you don't go to the bathroom right … The public doesn't give a shit. Now with all these damn Cubans…”

The swarthy young patrolman at the helm, a native of Camagüey Province, swerved smack into a swell, throwing Ransom off balance. The heavyset detective lurched across the deck and clung to a rail. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

The corpse floated facedown where the mangroves and the roots meet, awash in crystal-clear water over white sand. The mottled skin on his naked body looked gray. Several patrolmen stood by, along with a crime lab photographer. Ransom unfolded a polypropylene body bag. Rick stripped off shoes and socks, rolled up his trouser legs and stepped gingerly into the shallows for a better look. Bay water lapped gently around his ankles, cool and soothing. Wiggling his toes, he sighed, inhaling a deep breath. Then he sniffed again. The body did not have the usual unmistakable odor. It smelled more like an old septic tank.

Ransom lit a cheap cigar. He usually did at scenes where a body was no longer fresh. Rick always said it was difficult to discern which was worse, the stench of death or Jim's big stogie.

Rick and the young marine patrolman pulled on rubber gloves, dragged the dead man clear of the roots, counted to three and rolled him over. The body had obviously been in the water for some time, yet sea life had done little damage, even to the eyes and face. The usually voracious fish and crabs had found this corpse unappetizing for some reason.

Rick hunkered down to scrutinize the body, then looked up with a wry half smile. “We lucked out, Jimbo. There is a God, after all.”

“What the hell?” Ransom lumbered closer, aching back and queasy stomach forgotten. “Just what we don't need,” he mourned. “Another whodunit. We'll never get to go home.”

A fact of death is that the more sudden it comes, the longer it takes to sort out the facts and clean up the mess.

“What does that look like to you?” Rick asked. A half-inch hole gaped at the left of the man's navel, just below the ribs.

Jim stared in the fast-fading light. “Like about a .45-caliber.” He frowned at Rick's positive expression.

“Only if the killer screwed it in. Look closer.” The young Cuban cop stood openmouthed. Uniforms closed in around the body.

“Son of a bitch,” Ransom said squinting. “You're right.” The hole in the man's body was ringed by thread marks. “What do you wanna bet that it's that damn Morningdale Mortuary again?”

“This is no homicide. The guy's been embalmed,” Rick told the others, as he rocked back on his heels, elbows resting on his knees. He used a pencil as a pointer. “See here, no bullet made that hole, it was a trocar, an undertaker's tool. It's attached to a pump that sucks out the body fluids. Embalming solution is forced in. Then they plug it up. The plug is obviously missing.”

“But what's he doing out here, Sarge?” The young officer looked bewildered. “How come they didn't bury him?”

“They did,” Ransom said. “At sea. Probably … six, eight months ago. That damn Morningdale is still screwing up. Six months sitting in saltwater, on the bottom, the casket falls apart around him and he just pops up.”

“I'm surprised nobody spotted him before now,” Rick said. Shadows and reflections of the water dappled his tanned face. “They must have missed the Gulf Stream when they dropped him in, otherwise he would have gone north. He must have floated back in south of Fisher Island, between Stiltsville and the reefs and Soldier Key, completely across the bay.”

“Like a homin' pigeon,” Jim said, forming the words around the cigar still clenched between his teeth. “This guy's done some cruising.”

“Caskets,” Rick told the rookie, “are built to be put in the ground, that's the problem.” In a proper sea burial, the casket is weighted, holes drilled in the top and the lid secured with strapping iron. Tricky business, just uncommon enough to baffle the inexperienced help at some funeral homes.

On the way back to the dock, Rick entertained the young marine officer with the story of another Miami funeral home's maiden attempt at a sea burial. Mourners had sung a farewell hymn as the casket was slid over the side of their hired vessel into the Atlantic, a mile east of Government Cut. It had not sunk. The box had bobbed about on a choppy sea until the lid came off. Waves had wafted the body up and out. Wind and current had carried the corpse, dapper in a dark blue suit and a tie, into the lanes used by big cruise ships out of the port of Miami, and into the path of the
Song of Norway
. In response to a cry of “man overboard!” hundreds of Caribbean-bound tourists had rushed to the rails to watch the crew launch a lifeboat.

That evening the detectives interviewed a number of young Rob Thorne's shocked school chums, baseball teammates and a few tearful girls he had dated. Chances were remote that anything in young Thorne's life-style had led to his murder, but the investigators had nothing else and intended to leave no avenue unexplored. Rob Thorne was clean, or seemed to be. So was the Corley family. It had seemed depressingly clear from the start that the shooting had stemmed from a random encounter in the dark.

“Whatta we do now, bro?” Jim said, as they wearily compared notes back in the office that night. He tossed a half-eaten slice of pizza back into the box. “Christ, this stuff is lousy. You can't tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard begins. Why the hell do we order from them?”

“Because they deliver at three
A
.
M
., and they won't take any money from cops.” The low-pitched voice came from Detective Sergeant Rudy Dominguez in the next cubicle.

“They must be trying to kill us,” Jim grumbled.

“It must be bad if
you
won't eat it,” Rick said. “It looks like the only thing left for us to do is finish the paperwork, beat the bushes one more time, talk to all the snitches and then beg. I'll see the parents in the morning. I think they want to post a reward, and I won't discourage them. We can appeal to the public for information, dangle the reward money, sit by the phone and hope somebody drops a dime on us.”

“I sure as hell hope we come up with something, because if this one takes us years to solve, buddy boy, I ain't gonna be here. I ain't waiting around.” Jim worked the phones while Rick talked to a reporter from
The Morning News
. One of the unwritten rules of their partnership was that Rick was point man with the press.

Quotable, photogenic and personable, he felt at ease with reporters and rarely shot himself in the foot. They flocked around him at major crime scenes, usually ignoring Jim, who liked it that way. He often said that if the best reporter in town was on fire, he wouldn't piss on him, or her, to put it out.

His attitude stemmed from an unfortunate incident following the rescue of a housewife abducted from a shopping center parking lot. A reporter—female—had asked if the victim was injured. “Nope,” Jim had said. “She wasn't hurt. She just got raped.”

He was quoted. What had begun as a positive news story ended in a public relations disaster. A storm of outrage boiled up among local feminists. One group named Jim as the Male Chauvinist Pig of the Month. The chief was furious once somebody explained to him why the statement was offensive. He issued a written reprimand. Jim had been sentenced to three months of sensitivity training, on his own time. The entire experience had taught him one important lesson: Never trust a reporter. “Burn me once, it's your fault. Burn me twice, it's my fault”—that was his philosophy when it came to the media.

Hunched behind his desk in the glare of the electric-orange office partitions, his face settled slowly into a squinty-eyed scowl. Somebody in charge had decreed that bright international orange panels were de rigueur when the new ten-million-dollar police station was built. The panels offered a semblance of privacy to the hyper, the hysterical, the homicidal and the distraught as they were interviewed by detectives.

Jim believed that the blinding orange agitated half-crazed suspects and caused even docile witnesses to grow irritable and argumentative. The color made his head throb, especially when he was short on sleep. Peering through reading glasses, he riffled through his telephone calls. “Oh shit,” he said. The message in his hand was brief and to the point:
“I'm being poisoned again.”

The full moon brought them all out of the woodwork. Terrance McGee worked in the downtown public library and was periodically convinced he was being poisoned. Whenever he suffered a bellyache or an upset stomach, or thought that his coffee, soft drink or burger had a peculiar taste or that his urine was not the right color, he was sure that
they
were at it again. Who
they
were or why they wanted to kill him was never precisely clear. Sometimes he suspected coworkers, other times perfect strangers. Occasionally it was the CIA. Sometimes it was Castro's agents.

He was fortyish, never married and a pain in the ass. The overworked detectives had long ago agreed that they were the only people on earth with a real motive to kill McGee.

Hoping to defuse his fixation and wash him out of their hair, they had agreed to analyze the contents of a sugar bowl he swore had been poisoned by a mysterious someone who had slipped into his apartment undetected. The crime lab report had reached Jim's desk. He scanned it and dialed McGee's number. It rang four times, then someone carefully lifted the receiver but said nothing. Faint but rapid breathing could be heard at the other end of the line. “McGee! This is Detective Ransom, Miami Homicide.”

“Don't hang up, Detective! I'm here! I'm here! I didn't know who it was.”

“You don't find out unless you say hello,” Jim growled.

“There was another attempt this morning. It was in my…” The intensity in McGee's voice left him almost breathless.

“I've got news,” Jim interrupted.

“The lab report?”

“Sure thing.”

“Should we discuss it over the telephone?”

“I don't see why not. I have the results before me. That stuff
will
kill you, McGee. It was one hundred percent sugar granules. You got to lay off that sugar, it's bad stuff.”

“You mean they didn't find anything?” McGee was incredulous.

“
Nada
.”

“But how do you explain the chills, the sweats, the runs?”

“Maybe you were coming down with a bug, it's been going around. But read my lips, nobody wants to poison you. Get off that kick, and get a life.”

“But—”

“No buts,
nobody
wants to kill you. It should be a load off your mind. Now forget it.”

“Thank you, thank you, Detective.” McGee sounded unconvinced by the clean bill of health.

Jim hoped this would be the last they heard from him, but he was doubtful. The man's paranoia seemed cyclical. Sometimes he was quiet for months. When he did resurface, fearful and full of conspiracy theories, it seemed always to be when the detectives were at their busiest. “Why,” Jim would patiently ask, “would all these people go to all this trouble? Why would anybody care enough to break into
your
apartment and poison
your
sugar bowl? What makes
you
so special?”

Instead of seeing the logic, McGee's eyes would smolder with new intensity. “I have no idea, Detective, that's why I need your help, before it's too late.”