Heat Wave Page 5

  “Racial?”

  “Naw. Again, it’s business rivalry—he doesn’t trust ’em.”

  Frowning in thought, Caine asked, “What about Peter Shakespeare and the Trenches?”

  Burnett began to nod. “Ruthless enough, no doubt. I just don’t know if Shakespeare wants the hassle he knows hitting Wallace will cause whoever did it.”

  Caine shifted in the booth; he sighed. “Okay, Jeremy. You keep telling me who might not have done it.”

  “We’re left with Manny Calisto and the Mitus. Calisto never liked Venici…and he liked Wallace even less.”

  Eyes narrowed, Caine asked, “Why Calisto?”

  Burnett’s gaze was steady. “Wallace thought of himself as the top dog. But Calisto’s self-image is as a middleman—after all, it’s Calisto’s people back home in Colombia who were manufacturing the coke. With Wallace gone, and Calisto moving in on other rackets, suddenly Calisto’s self-image improves.”

  “New top dog,” Caine said.

  “That would be my guess. Informed guess.”

  The waitress stopped by to refresh their coffee cups.

  Caine had a thoughtul sip and asked, parceling out the words, “No one knows more about these gangs than you do, Jeremy.”

  “Arguably so.”

  “Tell me, then. Does hitting Wallace lead to a gang war?”

  “Worthy of Code Orange?” Burnett asked wryly, then he shrugged. “I suppose it will depend on who hit Wallace and what the other gangs think they can, and should, do about it. In a weird way, Horatio, this is politics—banana republic–style, and I’m not talking about apparel.”

  “Who gains from a gang war?”

  Burnett grunted a hollow laugh. “Hell—Wallace’s own people might start it, figuring they’ve got nothing else to lose.”

  Caine considered that briefly. Then, locking eyes with his old friend, he said, “Thanks, Jeremy. Let’s hope the evidence points us toward one faction. Then maybe we can cut this off before it gets out of hand.”

  “I sure as hell hope so. And if there’s anything I can do to help, you let me know.”

  “Thanks, Jeremy. You know I will.”

  The DEA agent’s eyes tightened and he leaned forward. “Listen—something else you should know.”

  “Always willing to learn, Jeremy.”

  “Last night, Matthers was already talking task force. Us throwing in with Miami-Dade.”

  Caine winced.

  Burnett held up a hand. “I know…I know. Every time there’s a task force formed on a case like this, the feds take over. I have no interest in that happening.”

  “Well, that’s nice to hear, Jeremy…but why?”

  Burnett’s smile was sly. “I happen to know how good you and your people are, Horatio. I relish having you turned loose on this. Which is why I’m going to recommend against the task force.”

  Nodding, Caine said, “I think that’s wise. I think we can accomplish more, working this from our own ends…but sharing.”

  Burnett nodded. “Keeping each other in the loop.”

  “I’ll show you mine,” Caine said, arching an eyebrow, “if you show me yours.”

  Burnett grinned, and the two men shook hands over the remains of their Lobito’s breakfast.

  Caine left the meeting with the Damocles sword of an impending gang war still hanging over him, but he felt better knowing that Burnett would help him if he needed it. With Burnett as a resource—and no one in south Florida knew more about the gangs and their activities than the DEA agent—Caine might get a leg up on this investigation.

  Maybe a full-scale war was still avoidable….

  But the Lobito’s breakfast, grinding in his stomach, seemed to disagree.

  If the mauve walls of the crime lab were meant to be soothing, they weren’t having that effect on Calleigh Duquesne.

  Truth be told, she was unaware of her surroundings, lost in her work, neither angry nor stressed, though her frown of concentration might make the casual observer think otherwise.

  Perched on a chair in front of her computer, her white lab coat as spotless as when she’d put it on, her long blond hair tied back in a loose ponytail, Calleigh was trying to match the shell casings from the Wallace murder scene to AK-47 casings in NIBIN, the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network.

  Created in 1997 and overseen by the ATF, NIBIN had numerous success stories to its credit, including one due to Calleigh herself. The CSI Unit’s firearms expert had tied a gun in the murder of hotel executive Thomas Lessor in Miami to a fifteen-year-old unsolved New Jersey homicide. That discovery had been the first step in bringing down the retired hit team that (the late) Peter Venici had imported from up north.

  Now, here she was again, hoping to hit pay dirt with the ATF database….

  She had plenty of shell casings to enter—over fifty gathered from the block of the shooting, plus the handful Eric Delko had brought up from the sewer. After that she would start working on the bullets recovered from the bodies of the dead and wounded, and other slugs caught in the walls of the Archer Hotel, as well as a few strays gathered from the next hotel south, and finally, one from the purse of a woman dining at the Archer whose bag had been on the floor next to her chair.

  All of that had to be done before she could even begin to address the thirty-two caliber Valor revolver that Eric had liberated from its hiding place in the sewer. That gun was now with Eric for fingerprinting.

  She hadn’t heard the door open, but she sensed something and looked up to see Caine standing there.

  “How’re you doing?” he asked with a small, patient smile that managed to convey so much: an apology for interrupting; pride in her work; and innate curiosity.

  Favoring him with a small, less complex smile, she said, “Let’s just say it’s going to be a looong shift.”

  His eyebrows rose. “But we’re making progress, right?”

  “Slowly.”

  “Keep at it.”

  And he smiled again.

  Her, too.

  Leaving Calleigh to her work, Horatio Caine moved on to the autopsy lab, domain of Alexx Woods, a slender, African-American coroner with high cheekbones, dark eyes, full lips, and a depth of compassion matched only by her IQ.

  The mother of two, Alexx had an affinity for working with the dead that fascinated Caine. Somehow, she seemed to almost commune with them. Right now she was bent over the corpse of crime boss Kurt Wallace, who lay on his back nude except for the flimsy white sheet covering him modestly.

  “What a horrible thing they did to you,” she whispered to the body on the cold metal slab before her. “But you won’t have to hurt anymore. Those days are behind you now. Just need your help to find the bad people who did this….”

  Caine marveled at how gently she spoke to the dead, even a ruthless sociopath like Wallace.

  Here Caine and his CSIs were, investigating the murder of a man no doubt responsible for dozens of deaths himself, from knocking off rival mobsters to making it possible for drug addicts to die of overdoses when they weren’t out stealing and killing for drug money.

  But Caine made no judgments about the dead; now, the living…that was a whole different deal.

  “Don’t hide in the shadows, Horatio,” Alexx said musically, glancing back at him with a smile. “You can come and go as you please…unlike my charges.”

  The walls here were white, the lighting fluorescent and harsh, with another large, round work light over the stainless steel autopsy table. To the right was the long row of cupboards and cabinets where Alexx kept the tools and supplies of her trade.

  Along the left wall, stainless steel vaults, two doors high and six wide, held the bodies of the recently deceased; after the massacre at the Archer, there were few vacancies at Alexx’s hotel. Above the vaults was a glass-enclosed viewing area complete with computer access, files, and a plasma screen monitor that allowed onlookers to watch an autopsy in detail.

  Caine settled in next to Alexx. “I
just didn’t want to interrupt your conversation.”

  A smile tickled Alexx’s lips. “It’s not nice to eavesdrop.”

  “What does Mr. Wallace have to say?”

  “Well,” she said, glancing down at the pale corpse, “unless I miss my guess, Mr. Wallace has learned his lesson.”

  Caine’s eyebrows went up and down. “Yes, I would say he finally got a dose of what he’s been handing out to his competitors the last few years. But just for the record, Alexx—cause of death?”

  Alexx lifted the sheet so Caine could see the trio of dark holes in Wallace’s upper torso—a jagged line of unconnected dots.

  To the corpse she said, “You got hit by three bullets, didn’t you, sweetie?”

  Caine asked, “Do we know in what order?”

  Pointing to a wound near the dead man’s left shoulder, she said, “First entered the left shoulder, nicked the subclavian vein and went on through.” Rolling the body slightly, she exposed the back. “Exiting through his left trapezius muscle.”

  “I see it,” Caine said.

  “The second—the one that killed him—entered through the chest, lacerated the left pulmonary artery, ending up lodged against his spine.”

  Caine nodded. “What about the last one?”

  She turned Wallace the other way so they could see both entry and exit wounds on the right side. “Entered through the right pectoral, blew through the middle lobe of the right lung, then exited through the Teres major.”

  The coroner eased the body back to its resting position.

  Hands on hips, Caine asked, “Any of the other victims done?”

  She shook her head. “I knew Wallace was your priority, so I started on him first.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Her smile had a pixie tinge, though melancholy was in there, too. “Doesn’t freak you out, does it, Horatio? My little conversations with my clients?”

  “Not,” Caine said, “as long as I don’t hear them answer you.”

  She laughed silently, and Caine gave her a supportive nod; they both knew she had a long line of autopsies ahead of her.

  Speedle was next on the supervisor’s list, and Caine found the young CSI in the lab working on identifying the paint that Caine himself had lifted from the parked car.

  As usual, rock music by some band Caine didn’t recognize played from Speed’s boom box. The music was loud but not too loud; personally, Caine liked to work in silence, but Speed didn’t like things too quiet.

  Whatever worked.

  “Anything yet?” Caine asked.

  Out of habit, Speedle turned down the music before he answered his boss. “Going through mass spec and the GC right now. I’ll know precisely what it is soon; then I’ll be able to match it.”

  The gas chromatograph, or GC, was used to break down samples into the various compounds that made them up; the mass spectrometer then bombarded the compounds with electrons that divided the compounds into ions. Next in line, the mass analyzer sorted the samples on a mass-to-charge ratio, producing the mass spectra that could be used to identify the nature of the sample when compared to the library of knowns.

  “Soon as I know, you’ll know, H.”

  “All I ask, Speed.”

  Caine found Delko in the fingerprint lab. A large double room with mauve walls matching Calleigh’s firearms lab, the tables and counters were covered with various kinds of equipment, chemicals, and computer gear. Delko was at the far end, hovering over a large Plexiglas cube—the Super Glue fuming tank.

  “Any luck with the pistol you found?”

  Delko’s shrug was noncommittal. “It was down there for a while. Pretty dirty. Not much chance of a fingerprint lasting, but we gotta try.”

  “Good job finding that weapon.”

  “Thanks, H.”

  Caine stepped in closer and looked at the gun within the Plexiglas cube. First introduced in Japan in 1977, the Super Glue technique was a lucky development courtesy of Fuseo Matsumur, a trace evidence examiner with the National Police Agency, who was using the adhesive to mount hairs on a microscope slide when he noticed that the glue made his latent prints on the slide stand out.

  The concept was actually fairly simple. The object to be tested—in this case, the Valor revolver—was placed inside the cube; then Super Glue fumes were pumped into the cube, where they would bond with perspiration residue on the latent prints. What Fuseo Matsumur had discovered by accident nearly thirty years ago was now an integral part of crime scene investigation internationally.

  “I look forward to what you come up with,” Caine said.

  “Me, too,” Delko said.

  Caine headed back to his office, thinking that Eric was really starting to fit in—at first, the young man had seemed insecure. While Caine was not stingy with kudos, he did not believe in overdoing it—praise should mean something. What he tried to do was be “hands on” without getting in his people’s way, which was why he checked in on them frequently—enough so that they weren’t nervous when they didn’t have results for him.

  Lab work took time; he knew that. Patience was one of the qualities that helped Caine excel at his job. On the other hand, the mayor, the chief, and the public would not be so patient, not when innocent lives had been lost.

  Caine knew they needed to get a handle on this case as soon as possible. Miami was a tourist town, and tourists didn’t relish travelling to war zones. To Caine such matters were secondary at best, but he knew his superiors would not agree; pressure from upstairs would be coming soon.

  He would do his best to keep the heat off his people.

  Joanna Burnett studied her reflection in her dressing table mirror.

  The inventory did not displease her: dark hair to her shoulders, accented by a few blond highlights; full, nicely shaped eyebrows over large wide-set brown eyes free of noticeable crow’s-feet (thank you very much); a narrow, rather patrician nose that her husband Jeremy called (to this day) “cute”; a wide mouth with lips that thickened just fine with the right application of lipstick; high cheekbones a model might envy; and a youthful, pink complexion (even in Miami, she stayed away from too much sun).

  She was worried about her weight, but everyone said she carried it well; at one-hundred forty pounds on her five-eight frame she had curves that might not have been in fashion but seemed to please the other sex.

  All in all, not bad for thirty-two.

  She looked healthy, she told herself, and happy—or at least she soon would be happy, when she got this terrible thing off her conscience.

  The problems all dated back to her thirtieth birthday, which had caused her so much anxiety that she’d thought Jeremy might actually leave her. She’d driven him crazy—driven him away—with her thirty-is-the-end-of-the-world nonsense that he’d had a fling with one of her best friends (who was thirty-five!). The usual recriminations and screaming matches had ensued, but they’d weathered that rough patch, like everything else.

  That had been his fault, or mostly his. This time, the fault was all hers—resenting his long hours at work, and ultimately trying to get even with him. Well, now they were even—she’d had her fling, stupidly, so goddamn ill-advisedly, but she had broken it off, finally, this afternoon.

  And she had determined she would tell Jeremy. Tonight. And she prayed he would forgive her as she had once forgiven him.

  It had taken a while to come to this conclusion—at first, she had herself convinced that she needn’t tell him. That she could live with it. That what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. But what if he found out? He was a detective, after all!

  And then night after night of tossing and turning, being unable to sleep; well, last night she’d slept soundly, having come to the decision. She couldn’t live with the lie. She would end it. And she would tell Jeremy. He would understand.

  She hoped they could be together forever. Grow old together, like both their parents had. Finally have that family they’d always talked about…

  She g
ave the mirror a brave smile. They would work everything out—they always had before. She still loved him. He was the only man she’d ever truly loved, and she believed things could be set right.

  Already he’d sensed the change in her. Hadn’t he asked her to get all dressed up to go out tonight? When was the last time that had happened? The dress she’d chosen for the evening was a special favorite of Jeremy’s. White chiffon with pink, orange, blue, and green pastel swirls, the midcalf dress had a flouncy skirt and a halter top that showed off her bust-line…another particular favorite of her husband’s.

  She lifted a spray bottle of perfume from the dressing table, spritzed her neck, her wrists, and, finally, just a hint at the bottom of the V of the low-cut dress. His call today asking her to be ready so he could take her out when he got home sounded like the old Jeremy, the man she’d fallen for back at Duke University, the man who had been ready to save not just her but the whole damn world as well.

  She hadn’t even minded getting the second call to tell her he was going to be late because things were heating up at work—that drive-by shooting in Miami Beach that was all over the TV.

  Yes, she should still get dolled up (his phrase), and yes, they were still going out to dinner. After that, she could decide whether they would go on to a late movie or simply come straight back home to be together.

  Should she tell him over dinner? In public? Or at home? Doubt whispered in her mind: Why tell him at all? He loves you. You love him. Why borrow trouble?

  But they’d built the marriage on honesty. She would tell him. She would find a way. Tonight…

  She heard his car pull in, the car door slam, the front door open, then close, followed by Jeremy’s voice at the bottom of the stairs. “Jo, hon—you ready?”

  Smiling at the mirror one last time—yes, she was holding up pretty well for thirty-two—Joanna grabbed her purse and bounced down the stairs to meet her husband.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  Their familiar greeting.

  “Hey, you,” he said fondly.

  “How was your day?”

  “Brutal and long,” he said, then he got a good gander at her as she fell into his arms. “Whoa! Look at you….”