The Death File Read online

  She passed the ornate wooden door, open, nodding at the pair of forensics techs checking the knob for latents. The room was large and sun-bright and through a side window she saw cops checking for footprints in the sand and pebbles.

  “Back here, Tasha.”

  Novarro turned to see Agustín Sanches, a tech from the coroner’s department, enter from a room to the rear. Sanches was a friend, late thirties, moderate height, his cooking hobby displayed in a touch of pudge at his belt. His naturally black hair was tinted with just enough red that it could be noted under sunlight. He was one of the very few openly gay people in the department.

  “Bad, Augie?” Novarro asked, meaning level of violence.

  “Not butchery, but certainly not pleasant.”

  Sanches handed her paper booties and she followed him to a marble-tiled solarium off the living area where a woman’s body sprawled on the floor, looking like she was running, upper leg extended, lower one bent back. She wore a threadbare sweatshirt and blue runner’s shorts. The body lay in a dark pool of dried blood, and Novarro gingerly circled it until she discovered the neck cut from ear to ear. Novarro winced: she could see into the windpipe. Drawers had been pulled from cabinets and emptied on the floor, a jewelry box there as well. Flies buzzed throughout the room.

  “Dr Leslie Meridien,” Sanches said quietly. “Forty-four, psychologist. Unmarried. This is her home and office.”

  Novarro batted away a fly and continued to circle the body, leaning close while jotting in a notepad. She pulled the victim’s sleeve up two inches, frowned, and made another notation.

  “Blood’s dry, Augie. No rigor. Got a TOD estimate?”

  “I’m a tech, Tash, not my place to—”

  “C’mon … give.”

  “She’s been dead two days, give or take.”

  That made the death on Friday night or Saturday. “How’d she get discovered?”

  “It’s cleaning day and the Mexican housekeeper let herself in like always,” a different voice answered. “Felicia Juarez ain’t having a good Monday.”

  Novarro looked up to see Sergeant Merle Castle in the doorway, thirty-five, close-cropped brown hair and dark eyes with lashes so thick they could have been ads for Maybelline. Six feet and then some, with iron-pumper biceps crowding the short sleeves of the beige uniform shirt of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and ankle-high boots polished to a mirror gloss. Beside him was Burton Claypool, an officer with the Phoenix PD, and buddy of Castle.

  “Little out of your new jurisdiction, Sergeant Castle?” Novarro said. “If I remember correctly, you left the Phoenix PD two months back.”

  A smile. “I was on Baseline Road when the call came through, got here five minutes before PPD. It’s all Maricopa County, right?”

  “That means you’ll take the case and the paperwork?”

  “Funny as always, Tasha.” Castle clapped Claypool on his back. “Plus I wanted to say howdy to my old buddies.”

  “Gracias for the assist, Merle, but the City of Phoenix PD is here now.” Novarro shifted her eyes to Claypool. “Where’s Ms Juarez now, Officer?”

  Burton Claypool was twenty-seven, medium height, but with a chest and shoulders that seemed to expand an inch a month. He’d started out with a normal physique eighteen months ago, but like several younger male recruits in the South Mountain Precinct, Claypool consciously or subconsciously emulated Castle: his cockiness, his Western swagger, and his physique, not cartoonish, but impressive.

  “Juarez got freaked out by the body, Detective,” Claypool said, standing straighter. “I got the name of one of her niños and he came by and got her.”

  Niño meant child, a youngster, generally. “How old was the kid? Novarro asked.

  Claypool frowned. “I dunno. Thirty or so.”

  Another something Claypool had subconsciously or otherwise taken from Castle: an Anglocentric worldview. Novarro saw Sanches study the Claypool-Castle duo, roll his eyes, and return to cataloguing his findings.

  “You couldn’t have someone drive the poor woman home, Officer Claypool?”

  “She lives in Gilbert, a half hour there and back. We’re short on manpower, Detective.”

  She pulled out her notebook and began writing her initial thoughts.

  “Want my take?” said a voice at her shoulder: Castle.

  “Thanks for stopping by, Merle, but I’ve got it from here.”

  A grin. “So when everyone’s gone, we’re back to first names, Tash?”

  A waggle-finger wave. “So long, Sergeant Castle. Have a nice day.”

  “Some assholes broke in and got surprised by the owner,” Castle said anyway. “It’s a shithole neighborhood. Put a big expensive house on the hillside and every low-life that drives by starts salivating at what’s inside: TVs, computers, jewelry, cash.”

  “It’s a mixed neighborhood, Sergeant. Rich, poor, everything in between.”

  Castle nodded toward the body. “If that lady lived in Scottsdale she’d be alive right now.”

  “You were here first … what was the entry point?”

  “No break-in that anyone found yet. A door got left unlocked. People get careless.”

  Novarro crossed the room. She’d seen a sign out front advising of a security system, which meant a control panel. Novarro found it in the closet nearest the door. The green power supply light was on.

  “Was the system armed when you arrived, Sergeant?”

  “Turned off by Sanchez. She has a card key.”

  “What else appears missing?”

  “There’s an empty space on the vic’s desk where a computer was. Desk drawers open, emptied.”

  Novarro pointed across the room. “Yet right there sits a Sony Bravia … what? Fifty-inch flat-screen TV? About a grand, right?”

  Castle shrugged. “The perp or perps killed the vic and started bagging up shit, but got spooked by something. A cop siren maybe, heading to some other problem in your, uh …” a hint of grin, “mixed neighborhood.”

  “Must have been a real scare, Sergeant Castle,” Novarro said, leaning against the wall and giving Castle an indulgent look. “The doc’s wearing a Movado watch, five-six hundred bills or so. Would have taken two seconds to pop off and pocket.”

  Castle jammed his hands into his pant pockets and scanned the ceiling for several seconds. “OK, so fuck my idea. What’s yours, Three-Point?”

  The name froze Novarro, but only for a split second. She studied the body on the floor before walking to the sliding glass door and tugging with a gloved finger. “There’s an old Tohono O’odham Indian saying, Merle,” she said. “‘O’nota’y’tanga olemano.’”

  Castle rolled his eyes. “Meaning?”

  Novarro stared at a black vulture circling against a blue sky. Somehow the bastards always knew.

  “I’ll get there when I get there.”

  3

  The nameplate on my door said, Carson Ryder, Investigative Consultant, Senior Status. The title was an invention of my boss at the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. Being a “consultant” got me out of the stultifying barrage of administrative meetings and other make-work tasks associated with any bureaucracy, even one headed by the bureaucrat-averse Roy McDermott. “Senior status” pretty much allowed me to do whatever I wished, as long as the end result was a better, safer Florida.

  On my first day, Roy had said, “I don’t really care what my people do, Carson. All I ask is that it stay within legal bounds and lets me stamp ‘Case Closed’ on a shitload of files.”

  So far, I hadn’t let him down.

  Outside my twenty-third story window lay the jagged and glittering skyline of Miami, the gemlike turquoise blue of Biscayne Bay in the distance. I was unable to appreciate the beauty, sitting at my desk and filling out reports, grumbling that for all my status bought me, I still had to do paperwork just like a beat cop in Mobile, Alabama, which is how I started.

  My phone rang – mobile, not landline – telling me I probably knew the caller,
which I did: Vince Delmara, a top homicide detective with the Miami-Dade County PD. We had been friends since my first case for the FCLE, almost three years ago. Vince was old-school, the best aspects at least, believing that experience, hunches, and shoe leather were what solved cases.

  And sometimes just plain dumb luck.

  “Question, Carson …” Vince said, jumping right in. “You still seeing that shrink in Miami Beach … Dr Angela Bowers?”

  I threw my pencil to the desk and leaned back. “What you talking about, Vince?”

  “You see a lot of crazy bullshit,” Vince said sotto voce, like sharing a secret. “It’s all right to visit a therapist. Anyway, I ain’t gonna tell no one.”

  “Right now, I’m thinking I’m not the one needs a shrink, bud.”

  A sigh. “You’re really not seeing a psychologist, are you, Carson?”

  “I think I scare them. You got a point here, Vince?”

  “I got a problem. You busy, or can you meet up?”

  Five minutes later I slipped on a blue linen sport jacket to cover the shoulder rig, dusted eraser rubber from my blue jeans, and headed out, hoping paperwork faeries slipped in to finish my drudgery.

  The offices of the Florida Center for Law Enforcement were on floors twenty-two and twenty-three of Miami’s towering downtown Clark Center, the upper location for administrators and top investigators, the lower floor for mid-echelon investigators and support staff. On the way to the elevator I stuck my head into a small office being painted and prepped by a maintenance staffer: dropcloths on half the floor, a ladder, a couple cans of paint.

  A painter was crouched in a corner and painting the floor molding.

  “The guy who was here …?” I said.

  The painter frowned. “He left. Said I was whistling out of tune.”

  I continued to a conference room and looked through the glass window to see fellow investigator, Lonnie Canseco, meeting with a pair of forensics accountants from the Tallahassee office. Cold: Not what I was looking for. Onward to a smaller conference room, this one with an FCLE operations manual on the round table, the empty pushed-back chair hung with a purple blazer, size 44 long.

  Getting warmer.

  I jogged back to the painting-in-progress office, checked for a gray canvas bag beside the desk. Not there, which meant I was warmer still. I took the back staircase to the floor below and pushed through a metal door, entering another door to the rear and smelling sweat and body heat. Angling past a partition I looked across a white-tiled expanse to see the black expanse of Harry Nautilus, pulling on his pants beside a naked white guy.

  Hot. I turned to the nude guy, Larry Vincente. “How long was it, Larry?”

  Vincente grinned from earlobe to earlobe. “Almost nine.”

  I shot a thumbs-up as Vincente shut off the shower nozzle and stepped to a rack to grab a towel. Like most pool investigators Vincente spent about a dozen hours a day working cases and the FCLE’s small gym was a place to grab a quick, stress-reducing workout: a half-dozen strength machines, plus stationary bikes and treadmills. Vincente tried to get in six treadmill miles a day, but today had managed nearly nine – either a slow day or a fast run.

  “Let’s boogie, amigo,” I said to Harry, now dressed and cramming sweaty shorts and tee into the gray gym bag. “It’s time to meet Vince Delmara.”

  Harry splashed on a palmful of 4711 cologne, light and floral and antithetical to the wet heat of a South Florida summer. “Delmara? The Miami detective who’s afraid of the sun.”

  I made a biting gesture. “It’s the vampire in him.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  Ten minutes later we were racing toward Coral Gables in my moss-green Range Rover Defender. Fully equipped for a safari, it rode hard, ate gas, had a manual transmission prone to sticking, and the AC wasn’t quite up to the Miami heat, but if a case ever took me to the African veldt, I was ready.

  “You say this thing belonged to a drug lord?” Harry yelled above the siren as we blew down I-95.

  “Confiscated. I found it in the motor pool.”

  “When you gonna paint it with a roller?”

  Harry was referring to my former ride back in Mobile, a battered pickup I’d repainted gray with ship paint and a roller. He knew because three years ago he was my partner at the Mobile, Alabama, PD; the man who’d convinced me to join the force when I was living on my mother’s slim inheritance and wondering what to do with a psychology degree gained by interviewing every imprisoned maniac in the South.

  We’d been the Harry and Carson Show for over a decade and last year a truly odd quirk of Fate had brought us together again, him on a case from Mobile, me on one in Florida. The cases converged and became one. After we’d closed it, Roy offered Harry a position with the FCLE. Harry finished out his time with the Mobile PD and had made the move just two weeks ago.

  “I’m keeping the green,” I said. “It’s such a cheerful color.”

  Coral Gables is about six miles from downtown and we made the trip in five minutes. We pulled into the palm-canopied drive, seeing two MDPD cruisers plus a command vehicle, and vans from the ME’s office and scene techs.

  “Here we go, Cars,” Harry said. “My first Miami crime scene.”

  We strung our IDs around our necks and entered the home, a celebration of pastels: yellows, blues, corals; an uplifting color scheme and très Miami. Vince Delmara, whose spirits didn’t appear lifted, was conversing with a scene tech on the corner, the three-inch bill of Vince’s black fedora projecting past his nose, but not by much. Vince wore a cobalt suit and white shirt, his only concession to color a lavender silk tie. Harry and I went over for introductions.

  They shook hands as Vince’s major-league beak probed the air around Harry. “Jeee-sus, something smells great.”

  “I shaved and showered before we left HQ,” Harry said.

  “You set a high bar,” Vince said. “I try to remember to wash my hands after pissing.”

  Vince led us into the house, a flurry of activity, scene techs dusting for latents, vacuuming the carpet, studying doors and windows for signs of entry.

  “Who’s the vic?” I asked as we followed Vince to the side of the house. A young tech, Darla Brady, followed with a plastic evidence bag in her hand.

  “Bowers, Angela. Psychologist. All we know.”

  “Cause?” I asked.

  “A slashed throat. She bled out in seconds.” He paused. “It looks like a single cut, Carson. Through the carotid and jugular on both sides. No hesitation.”

  A tingle of ice ran down my spine. We saw a lot of knife wounds, most ragged horrors that indicated frenzied slashing. This seemed a professional-style hit: the victim held tight while a razor-sharp blade did its ghastly work. No hesitation, no qualms, nothing but a single and probably practiced move.

  We entered the room and I saw a woman in her early fifties, her face a rictus of fear, a dark echo of her final moments. A lake of blood pooled beneath her lifeless body. Harry knelt beside the sprawled form.

  “Like Vince said, one deep cut from ear to ear.”

  “Take a look at her face, Carson,” Vince asked. “Look familiar?”

  “Vince, she’s not my shrink. Or anything else.”

  “You’re sure you never saw her before?”

  “I wish I wasn’t seeing her now.”

  “Bring it, Brady,” Vince said, waggling his fingers in the gimme motion. The tech jogged over with the evidence bag and I saw a 5 x 7 index card inside.

  “We found this in the vic’s top-right desk drawer,” Vince said. “On top of everything else there. Position tell you anything?”

  “She kept the card within reach. Says it’s probably important.”

  “Show the card, Brady.”

  The tech held it out to me at eye level. Printed on the card in heavy black marker was my name. After it were three question marks. I held it up to Harry.

  CARSON RYDER???

  “Why am I not surprised?” he said.

/>   We returned to the department to stare at a copy of the card found in Dr Bowers’s desk drawer. I’d tacked it to a bulletin board in a conference room.

  “To me,” I said, “a single question mark suggests a question about an unknown, like ‘Who is this guy?’ Multiple question marks seem to suggest a weighing process, like, ‘Is he the one?’ or ‘Should I contact him?’”

  Harry pondered the ceiling. “I’d like to hear you try that one on a witness stand, but I like it. Of course, the woman might have simply had a jones for question marks.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough, I expect. Vince will put nails in the killer’s coffin. He’s an ace.”

  Harry frowned. “You’re not going to take a case that, uh, has your name written all over it?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I want,” I sighed. “I’m excluded.”

  “Peripheral involvement,” Harry said, seeing the problem: I was a facet of the case.

  I nodded. “No way I could be the lead investigator on the Bowers case.”

  Harry stood and went to the window, studying the Miami skyline. “OK, say Vince Delmara led the investigation. If you had thoughts on the case, could you present them to Vince?”

  I nodded. “It’d be nuts not to be able to drizzle ideas to Vince. I’m simply restricted from any major role.”

  “And you want to follow this thing. From up close?”

  “A dead woman I never met had my name in her desk. I’d like to know why.”

  He turned from the window. “So what happens if I take the Bowers case as lead? My very first FCLE case. You could follow me around like a little doggie and drizzle all over the place.”

  I gave it a half-minute of consideration. “That actually makes sense. And doesn’t break a single rule.”

  “Maybe not, Carson. But let’s try it anyway.”

  4

  Detective Tasha Novarro pulled into the lot of a three-story redbrick building in an industrial park where Phoenix abutted Tempe. Emblazoned across the top story was a chrome-bright sign proclaiming DataSĀF. Beside it was an amoeba shape with squiggly lines running horizontally through it, probably representing a cloud. Novarro had combed through Meridien’s financial records, finding receipts from DataSĀF and figured Meridien, like many concerned with security or just fast and easy data storage, sent her files to a data-storage firm.