Heat Wave, page 19
Delko shrugged. “Makes sense—he was in charge of the evidence room.”
“My point,” Caine said, “is that whether he’s our would-be mastermind or not, he’s negligent, and the buck will stop with him.”
From the doorway, Speedle said, “Bye-bye Washington, D.C., then.” He sauntered in and flopped onto the sofa next to Delko. “Break time, huh? H, I just got off the phone with Laura Parker.”
Calleigh and Delko looked at Speed as if he’d spoken Swahili.
“Joanna Burnett’s best friend,” Speed explained.
But Calleigh and Delko still had no idea what this was about, and Caine didn’t stop to fill them in, asking Speed, “What did she say?”
“She didn’t—she wants to talk to you, H. She doesn’t trust anybody else.”
Delko said to Speed, “Your reputation must precede you.”
“Cute,” Speed replied, then said to Caine, “So I took the liberty of setting up a meet.”
“Where and when?”
“Hutchinson’s convenience store, on Galloway—in half an hour.”
A knock at the open door drew their attention to DNA tech Toni Escobedo. She said to Caine, “The DNA you got at the Archer, in the hotel bathroom? It does not belong to either of the Santoyas.”
The other CSIs were astounded by this news, but Caine himself took it stoically; he would have liked to have been surprised, but not finding a pair of boots for either man in their house, or their car, had made her report likely.
Caine asked, “Any idea who it does belong to?”
“Not yet, Lieutenant. But it’s not in CODIS.”
The Combined DNA Index System was a repository for DNA, just as VICAP included violent offenders and AFIS gathered fingerprints.
“I’m doing a search of other databases,” Escobedo continued, “but that could take quite a while.”
“Stay at it,” he told her, knowing “quite a while” was a commodity they did not have.
She began to go, then hung back, saying, “Oh, one thing though—the DNA belongs to an African-American.”
Caine frowned thoughtfully. “Could that mean someone Cuban?”
“It could—not all Cubans are purely Hispanic; some are of African ancestry. I suppose the man could be Cuban, yes.”
Which counted in Mendoza and Las Culebras.
The group dispersed, and Caine went to meet with Laura Parker.
Hutchinson’s convenience store was less than a mile from HQ. Caine got two cups of coffee, paid the cashier, and took one of the booths along the window. Late afternoon on a Sunday, business was spotty, the row of booths all Caine’s.
And Laura Parker’s.
Not making eye contact with the cashier, the woman came quickly in and made a beeline for Caine’s booth; she was seated before he could stand and politely greet her.
Laura Parker was a petite, attractive blond in her late thirties, though her prettiness was given the test by no makeup, reddish-cast eyes, and a red nose—from crying, not drinking. She wore a denim jumpsuit with a red cotton shirt beneath.
“Mr. Caine,” she said.
He was on the local news often enough to be used to people he didn’t know recognizing him. “Mrs. Parker?”
The woman nodded.
“Thought you might like some coffee.”
“Thanks.”
But she didn’t touch it. In fact, neither of them touched their Styrofoam cups throughout their brief conversation.
“You were Joanna Burnett’s best friend?”
She nodded; despite her country club breeding, her manner was furtive, as if she were an escaped felon. “Since high school.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. Joanna spoke well of you, Mr. Caine.”
“Make it Horatio. And may I call you Laura?”
She swallowed. “Sure.”
“Why did you insist on meeting here? My office is nearby. If you’re nervous, a public place—”
“Is better than somewhere where I might run into Jeremy Burnett or one of his cohorts.”
Caine nodded. “I see. And why are you hesitant to run into Jeremy? I presume if you were Joanna’s best friend, you were friendly with him, too.”
“Too friendly…once upon a time.” She dug cigarettes out of a pocket of her jumpsuit. Lighted up, tremblingly. “You don’t mind?”
“No. Just relax. I’m here to listen, and to try to help.”
She breathed out smoke, dragon-style. “You have to understand, Mr. Caine…Horatio. Joanna and I…our friendship. Oh, Christ, I don’t even know where to start.”
“Beginning usually works.”
Looking out the window at the darkening street, she said, “My marriage broke up about three years ago. I was always envious of Joanna and Jeremy. For their perfect marriage. One night, at the club, I found myself alone with Jeremy outside, on the veranda, and I impulsively kissed him. I was a little drunk.”
Caine said nothing.
She let out a sigh of smoke. “I called him at work and apologized the next day. Told him how embarrassed I was, and…he told me he’d enjoyed it. That he’d always secretly had feelings for me, and…do I have to go on?”
“You had an affair with Jeremy.”
“Yes. Brief, torrid, tawdry, just what you’d expect. And of course, I lost Joanna, traded that cheap fucking fling for the best friend I ever had…. Lost her, anyway, until last month.”
“Why last month?”
Gesturing with the cigarette, making smoke trails, the woman said, “She called out of the blue, and I started to cry and apologize, and we ended up meeting for lunch. She told me that she and Jeremy were having trouble, and that the marriage was over. I said…was he…cheating again? And she said, no—she was.”
“Now she was having an affair.”
“That’s right. She’d long fantasized about getting ‘even.’ She said she did it impulsively…probably like I went after Jeremy that first night…but that it had developed into something serious. That she intended to tell Jeremy, and there’d be a divorce. They didn’t have any children, so it was strictly—But then last week, we had lunch again, and she said she’d had second thoughts. That Jeremy had been especially sweet of late, and she felt she’d fallen in love with him all over again.”
“And what about the man she was seeing?”
“I spoke to her the morning she died. She was meeting him at a motel, where they often went…but she was going to break it off.” She swallowed hard and pressed the heel of a fist to her forehead. “That very afternoon—the afternoon of the day she died!”
“It’s all right, Laura…stay calm. What else did she say?”
Nervously shrugging, the woman said, “That she was going to spill everything to her husband. She felt that if they could forgive each other…they’d both strayed, after all…that they could make a clean start.”
Caine’s mind quickly mounted a scenario: Could a jealous lover have attacked the Burnetts outside their home? Imitating the gang slaying of the day before to cover his tracks?
“Who was he, Laura? The man?”
“I don’t know. That much she kept from me. An understandable discretion. But I would assume someone close to Jeremy.”
“Why that assumption, Laura?”
“Well, remember, she started out only wanting to ‘get even’ with her husband. Jeremy had an affair with me…her best friend. So I’d say she chose one of his best friends. To settle the score.”
Caine thanked Laura Parker for her help and advised her to say nothing of this to anyone.
In the parking lot of the convenience store, Caine was already assembling the pieces….
The DNA of the man Laura had slept with the day she died—putting the “good-bye” in good-bye sex—identified her lover as an African-American.
Gabe Nickerson fit that description, and another: He was Jeremy’s best friend.
He was also a former DEA agent who’d been knowledgeable about the evidence lockup at the Federal Building.
He headed the Hummer in the direction of Nickerson’s house.
Six months (and a lifetime) ago, Caine had been to Nickerson’s house for an interagency celebration after a particularly big drug bust that Burnett and Nickerson had made against the Culebras.
Using his hands-free cell phone, Caine called Judge Javier Ojeda at home; Caine had cleared the judge when a prostitute had died in His Honor’s shower. So the judge kept his argument to a minimum when Caine asked for a search warrant for the home of Gabriel Nickerson.
Next, he called Alexx. “How fast can you and Toni get a DNA match if you’ve already got both samples handy?”
“Fast. Why?”
“I want you to test the DNA from Joanna Burnett’s sex partner against the sample from the Archer Hotel bathroom.”
“Will do.”
“Let me know soon as you know.”
His next call went to Speedle.
“Speed, get the crew and join me to execute the search warrant that you’ll find in my fax machine.”
“What’s the address?”
When Speedle found out whose house the warrant was for, he was astounded. “No, H! Gabe’s behind all this?”
“Joanna’s murder, at least. I think the rest, too.”
“Holy…. See you there.”
Caine hadn’t gone far, driving away from the setting sun, the sky a bruised purple and red in his rearview mirror, when a call came in for him.
It was Burnett.
“We’ve got Mendoza cornered in Little Havana.”
Caine’s hands tensed on the wheel. “Where?”
Burnett told him.
“Stay put, Jeremy. Gabe with you?”
“He’s right beside me.”
“Don’t do a thing until I get there—promise me!”
“I promise.”
“If not for my sake, Jeremy, then Joanna’s.”
“Horatio, for Pete’s sake. I promise!”
And Burnett was gone.
11
Die with Dignity
HORATIO CAINE BARRELED east on Northwest Twenty-fifth, siren howling, lights flashing red and blue against a sky whose darkness was almost complete, dusk finally giving up the ghost.
He tapped the brakes, turned right, and accelerated up the ramp onto the Palmetto Expressway south. Weaving through light Sunday evening traffic on SR826, Caine prayed he got to his destination before Burnett and Nickerson attacked Mendoza’s hideout; as a CSI, he was used to getting to the scene when the shooting was over, but this time his fervent hope was that it hadn’t started yet.
His call for black and whites to beat him to the scene was complicated by news of a running gun battle between the Faucones and the Mitus in Little Haiti, which appeared to have drawn every spare patrol car in the city.
“There’s a gang war going on, Lieutenant,” the dispatcher was good enough to remind him.
For just a second, he wished the National Guard were already here.
He radioed the crew to inform them where he was going and what he wanted them to do at Nickerson’s. Speedle told Caine that Detective Frank Tripp was already on his way to meet the CSI Unit at Nickerson’s.
“But I’ll get back ahold of him, H,” Speed said, “and reroute him to Little Havana. Sounds like you could use the backup.”
“Good.”
“H, Alexx is right here—wants to talk to you.”
Speed put her on.
“Horatio, I don’t know how you knew this…but the DNA from the Archer and Joanna’s lover are a match.”
“Tell Speed to get you something at Nickerson’s to run a further comparison.”
“You really want a bow tied on Gabe Nickerson.”
“More like cuffs—in the back.”
He thanked Alexx for the info, ended the call, then swore to himself, knowing that it would be only a matter of a very short time before Nickerson and Burnett acted—if they hadn’t already done so before they called him. Easy enough to ring Caine after the fact and pretend a shoot-out was imminent when it really was over….
He flew down the ramp off the expressway, ran the red at the bottom, and cranked the wheel hard left onto Tamiami Trail. Once he’d made the turn east, he cut the siren, leaving on the flashers. He wanted to get there fast, but he also didn’t wish to announce his arrival any sooner than necessary. Without backup, the element of surprise might be a nice thing to have on his side.
The traffic on Tamiami Trail was heavier than on the expressway, with four lanes of traffic crawling along. Some were families on their way to dinner, or churchgoers going to or from evening services, while others were just couples out cruising because the weather was finally nice, after several unseasonably hot, rainless days.
Moving at a snail’s pace that had him wondering why he even bothered with the flashers, Caine made his way eastward. Tamiami Trail gave way to Southwest Eighth Street, the same street but going under an alias, just as most of the streets in Miami did: seemed like every thoroughfare had at least two, if not three, names. SW 8th, Tamiami, became Calle Ocho in the heart of Little Havana.
As Caine passed Southwest Twenty-seventh Avenue, the tenor of the surrounding neighborhood changed. More and more signs were in Spanish, the stereos of cars blared salsa, not rap, the majority of passersby on the sidewalk were decidedly Hispanic. A hardworking neighborhood, this was—a place where people had fled oppression for the American dream. Caine liked the music and the food of Little Havana, but most of all, he liked the people. Every day they strove to get ahead, to make life better for themselves and their children.
They also spent every night battling the negative influence of Las Culebras and the drug culture brought in first by Johnny “The Slouch” Padillo, and then built upon by his successor, Antonio Mendoza.
Although Las Culebras had gained a significant foothold in the area, they hadn’t been able to completely take it over. Unlike in Little Haiti, where the late Andrew Chevalier had run everything with a velvet-gloved iron fist, Mendoza had met resistance from proactive groups in the Hispanic community—like the one Mrs. Ken LaRussa was involved in.
The address Burnett had given Caine was south of Calle Ocho, and when he finally got the chance, Caine turned right. Traffic was all but nonexistent now, as he filtered back into the residential neighborhoods that rested a few blocks from the bustle of the main drags. Where Calle Ocho was constantly under siege from traffic, only the people who lived in these quiet neighborhoods ventured back into the twisting trails of side streets.
A left, a right, then straight, and eventually another left had Caine travelling east again, this time near Shenandoah Park. He killed the flashers and, after half a block, as he neared his target, the lights too. As he eased down the street, he couldn’t help but wonder if Burnett had given him a bum address.
How easy for Burnett to send Caine on a wild-goose chase while the vengeance-seeking DEA agent did away with Mendoza. The terrible irony was: Burnett would be doing the bidding of his disloyal former partner, Nickerson, the man who—unbeknownst to Jeremy—had bedded and then murdered Burnett’s beloved Joanna.
A scenario had formed more or less instantly in Caine’s mind after hearing Laura Parker’s convenience-store confession.
Nickerson is secretly in league with Mendoza, feeding the ganglord confiscated dope from federal busts and weapons from the lockup in a gang-war takeover. Staying close to his ex-partner Jeremy—who is still an active DEA agent, and an obvious threat—Nickerson’s emotions get the best of him, and he finds himself embroiled in an extramarital affair with the still lovely Joanna.
When Joanna breaks it off, threatening to confess the affair to her husband, Nickerson uses the gang war as an excuse to stage a hit on Jeremy; both Jeremy and Joanna had been targets, but the Code Orange Kevlar had saved Nickerson’s partner.
If this was true, it put Jeremy in impending danger of Nickerson staging the DEA agent’s murder in the context of the Mendoza raid.
And—in perhaps the most ironic turn—the other person in danger right now was Antonio Mendoza himself: Nickerson could kill the Culebras leader or manipulate the grief-wracked Jeremy into doing it. Either way would cover Nickerson’s tracks and, at the same time, execute a perfect double cross of the gang leader.
Then, in the wake of the various gangs facing leaderless chaos, Nickerson would take over the illegal drug trade in Miami himself. Who better to set up a network of criminals to carry out his ambitious business plan than a man who’d been in Miami law enforcement for twenty years?
And as Alexx’s DNA news indicated, Nickerson himself had been in on the slaughter at the Archer, possibly with one or both of the now (late) Santoyas…whom Nickerson had later executed.
A complicating factor, however, was Jeremy’s phone call: Nickerson knew Caine was coming. Which meant the CSI was likely walking into a trap, an ambush in which both he and Jeremy would be made to look like victims of the gangbangers whose hideout had been raided.
He could wait for backup—Tripp would be there soon. But if he did, Jeremy might die….
He got to the correct block and saw Burnett’s car parked about halfway down on the left. Caine slid the Hummer in behind the vehicle. He slipped out and closed the door as quietly as possible; looking in Burnett’s car, he saw nothing or no one.
All seemed quiet. In fact, the neighborhood itself seemed gripped in an unearthly quiet—no sound of TVs or radios or even a squalling child. It was, as the old movie cliché went, Quiet…too quiet….
The house Burnett had given him the address for was two more doors up, on the other side of the street. Moving as silently as possible, he crept forward, nine-millimeter in hand, badge on a necklace (he was, after all, prowling a neighborhood with a gun at night), his eyes constantly searching for something out of place or a telltale movement.
Clouds covered the moon now, and the few stars had no sparkle. The weather, which just scant minutes ago had been fine, seemed to have shifted to suit the eerie calm; now the air was warm and moist, and Caine, as he edged ahead, felt like he was trying to breathe underwater.
The house was an old two-story clapboard. Most of those in this neighborhood had long since been torn down in favor of one-story stuccos that not only were easier to take care of but were also better for weathering the south Florida coastal storms.
